How many times has Thomas Pesquet been to space?

Selected by ESA in 2009, Thomas Pesquet waited seven years for his assignment. His first mission, Proxima, began on 17 November 2016 with a launch aboard a Soyuz from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, alongside a Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut. He joined Expeditions 50 and 51 on the International Space Station and returned to Earth on 2 June 2017, landing by capsule in the Kazakh steppe.

That stay included two spacewalks and a dense scientific programme, dominated by human physiology and materials science experiments entrusted to the European agency.

The second departure took place on 23 April 2021, this time aboard a Crew Dragon capsule launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission, named Alpha, ended with a splashdown on 9 November 2021. It included further spacewalks, in particular to install new deployable solar arrays meant to boost the station's power output.

A standout moment of this second stay: Thomas Pesquet took command of the International Space Station for part of Expedition 65, a role no French astronaut had held before him.

The comparison between the two missions also tells the story of a technological shift. Between 2016 and 2021, American access to low Earth orbit moved from the Russian Soyuz, then the only way to reach the station after the Space Shuttle's retirement, to commercial capsules. Thomas Pesquet is one of the few astronauts to have flown on both systems, with very different piloting philosophies: controls and dials inherited from a long lineage on one side, touchscreens and heavy automation on the other.