Why is Thomas Pesquet famous?

Born in 1978 in Rouen, Thomas Pesquet trained in aerospace engineering, worked on satellite operations and autonomy at CNES, then became an airline pilot at Air France. In 2009, the European Space Agency selected him as part of a class of six astronauts, the first in more than a decade. A long wait followed, routine in this profession: training in Russia, the United States, and Japan, scuba dives, learning spacecraft systems, before being assigned to a flight.

His Proxima mission began in November 2016: launch aboard a Soyuz, six months aboard the International Space Station, two spacewalks with Shane Kimbrough, return in June 2017. In April 2021 he flew again for the Alpha mission, this time aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon, becoming its first European passenger. Another six-month rotation followed, punctuated by spacewalks to install solar panels on the station's truss. In the autumn of 2021 he took command of the station, something no Frenchman had done before him.

His fame does not rest solely on this flight record, however. Pesquet photographed the Earth almost daily from the Cupola and published his images with commentary, showed how astronauts sleep, eat, and run in weightlessness, and explained scientific experiments in clear, unpretentious language. He turned it into a continuous narrative, followed by an audience well beyond space circles, giving the European programme a visibility that agency press releases never achieve. It is this dual skill, technical and narrative, that explains his particular place in French spaceflight, alongside Jean-Loup Chrétien and Claudie Haigneré.