This Monday, January 17 in Day-to-day, Thomas Pesquet remembered having built his first space shuttle from cardboard when he was a child. At the age of 3, he was already dreaming of space.
On the night of Monday November 8 to Tuesday November 9, 2021, Thomas Pesquet returned to earth after a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station for NASA. A second trip to the ISS that he documented every day on Instagram, sharing with his subscribers his daily life in weightlessness and superb photos of our planet seen from above. Far from the stars, the French astronaut therefore resumed his terrestrial habits. But that doesn’t mean he’s finished with space! It may even fly to the moon soon.
A first cardboard space shuttle
It must be said that the conquest of space is for Thomas Pesquet a childhood dream, literally. Outstanding guest of Day-to-day on TMC this Monday, January 17, the astronaut remembered having built his first space shuttle from cardboard when he was a child. He was then 3-4 years old and had put a lot of attention to detail. While a black and white photo of the scientist when he was little is displayed on the screen, the latter explains as follows: “What we see in wickerwork is a kind of steering wheel. It’s the steering wheel of the shuttle. It’s driven, there was no touch screen at the time. And we see, it there is a kind of bar that goes from one side to the other, on which the steering wheel was installed. It was technology anyway at the time.
“The dream was already there”
At 3 years old, Anne Mottet’s companion was already dreaming of flying into space. And, despite his very young age, the little boy was apparently full of resource and imagination. Amazed, Yann Barthès then asks him which spatial regions this shuttle was exploring. “She was going to planets a lot that I think didn’t really exist. There were rings, like rings of Saturn, but it was a bit of a mix,” he replies. Before concluding : “At the time, I still wasn’t very sure about the scientific discourse. Fortunately, I’ve improved a bit since then, but at the time, it was very vague. But the dream was already there.” And this dream led Thomas Pesquet from a cardboard shuttle to the ISS.
The very first space shuttle @Thom_astro was not really a concentrate of technology ?#Day-to-day pic.twitter.com/8aCtWiCTG3
— Daily (@Qofficiel) January 17, 2022