&lt;p>President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola exchanges with the astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, the first European woman to be the Commander of the International Space Station. She intervenes from the ISS, the large spacecraft in orbit around Earth. This transcript is a result of an automatic process. Please check against delivery.&lt;/p>

Strasbourg

METSOLA, Roberta (EPP, MT, EP President)

European space industry (T)

president's agenda

EU space programme 2021-2027 (T)

CRISTOFORETTI, Samantha

Video call between Roberta METSOLA, EP President and astronaut Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the International Space Station

Soundbite (English), ESA Moderator Hello, Samantha, and really great to hear you today. We're very honoured to have Mrs.. So about the Metsola, the President of the European Parliament with us on this call, the European Commission President, Mrs. von der LEYEN just gave a very important speech on the State of the Union and she really outlined that we are in a crisis and Europe has to act together in order to really come out of this crisis stronger.

Soundbite (English), ESA Moderator And space, of course, is one vehicle is one element to get out of this crisis stronger. In times of crisis, you need innovation. And that is what we are offering here in space. So I'm really looking forward to this discussion of Mrs. Metsola, and I am sure she has many, many questions and many topics to discuss with you. So welcome here to Samantha.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS Hello, Madam President. It's it's such an honour to welcome you here on board of the International Space Station and through you and the European Parliament as elected representatives of all of Europeans, I feel like today I have an opportunity to welcome every European man, woman and child on the International Space Station. So thank you for this privilege and this opportunity.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President Congratulations very much, Samantha, on becoming the first female European commander of the International Space Station. And I love the flag that you are standing in front of me.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS Thank you. Yes. It's a it's a privilege and an honour to be able to display the European flag here today. And this particular flag will fly back home with me in a few weeks when the mission is over. And so I will be very honoured if there will be an opportunity to hand it over to you as president of the European Parliament.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President Well the honour would be all mine. I would very much like to meet with you in person when you come back, but perhaps a little bit of questions. A lot of people will see this conversation and I, I really want to know what does it feel like to be in your position today? What are your duties? If I can think of so many young people, they dream of becoming, you know, footballers, famous actors, musicians. But becoming an ISIS commander must be mind blowing. So how did this happen? When did you think this would be possible and how did you manage something so amazing?

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS Well, I think what's truly amazing is to be up here in space and and be able to serve first and foremost as a crew member of the International Space Station. And it was my dream since I was a small child to one day be able to fly to space. I was inspired by but many things I think from, you know, marvelling at the beauty and mystery of the night sky to amazing teachers from elementary school on who really transmitted to me a passion for for a discovery, for exploration, for for adventure books. I read TV shows and then drawing out in school a passion for science technology.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS So I eventually became an engineer by education. And then I decided to serve in in the Italian military. I was trained as a combat pilot for a few years. And then. But 13 years ago, I had this amazing opportunity of joining Isa as part of the European Astronaut Corps. And I had 1 first mission a few years ago. And on this second mission, I will have the privilege for a short time to serve as commander of the space station, which really just means doing my best to enable the amazing team that we have here on orbit to perform at their best, you know, taking care of the well-being of the team, ensure a smooth communication with the ground.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS And in case of not being in situations or emergencies, making sure that I coordinate in such, you know, an efficient and effective response on on behalf of all of our team here on orbit, but most importantly, really looking of working well together with the extended team that we have all around the world, including our Columbus control centre in Europe in Munich.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President Well, I can tell you that if I was a young girl looking at you today, I think you would inspire me to at least dream of of embarking on on this amazing path that you embarked on from a young girl, if I can say. And until today that you are at such an amazing place with such an amazing example to give to young girls around the world.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President If we can be a little bit more detail, like what is the most promising or exciting project that you are currently developing at the at the International Space Station? I know that there is a variety of research projects, including on medicine, materials, physics or biology undertaken on the ISIS. Perhaps you could describe the ones that were most exciting or memorable to you.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS Yes, absolutely. You're absolutely right. Madam President, we have the in amazing laboratory up here in space where we take advantage of this very unique condition of microgravity, which is really weightlessness, you know? Just like, you know, I'm floating here. Everything floats. We can switch off the effects of gravity as long as we are up here in space.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS And so there's a number of phenomena that happen in but in life sciences, in biological systems, you know, we study your own body, we study animal models, we study plants, cell tissues, tissue culture, cell cultures, and also in the physical phenomena. And actually, I would be you know, it's always hard to say this is my favourite experiment or this is the most exciting one. I don't want to do that. But maybe just the ones I've worked on recently were mostly in the physical domain.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS So one of the things to study up here is the stability and behaviour of foams and emotions that is very different in microgravity and allows us to really get to an understanding of the physics involved there and that is incredibly useful in the medicine industry, food industry and in general, the chemical industry materials I think you mentioned are also very important. It's, you know, you have an opportunity by switching up gravity to get a deep understanding of the physical phenomena involved, for example, in metal melts. But also I'm very fascinated by the technological development.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS ISIS is a stepping stone to go further and they continue to explore the solar system. And so it's also important to continue to develop technologies and mature technologies that enable that. For example, just recently I had an opportunity to work with the ISA. I need a tool which is a very compact technology, to automatically analyse the composition of the air, to make sure that we do not have, for example, any toxic substances in the air.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President Well, I think that that's that sounds amazing. And, you know, I'm standing here actually, I'm sitting here again. No, no lack of gravity here. I'm sitting very much firmly in my chair in the European Parliament. Behind me is the plenary. So which is where all the members of the European Parliament gather together. But we don't talk enough about space, we don't talk about enough about behavioural aspects.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President I would like to see more members of the European Parliament that have a STEM educational background and more women in science and technology. I see that there's a big lack or a big gap between what we as politicians do and the decisions that we need to take and the impact of such decisions on the research, on the discoveries that you make, but also on the awareness of what, how, how our behaviour here on Earth should change, should be more educated, should be understood as having such an impact even on your or on what you see.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President So perhaps a question is why, what role can your activities I mean, here I would like advice that you would give me and my colleagues, for example, increasing our understanding of space around the earth to help us understand and tackle our most pressing challenges, like like climate change. You know, it's a word we use all the time, but we like to use it in a big format and not in how we can change our life, how our laws can, can, can, if not reverse, slow down to catastrophic climate change we have seen and are seeing on Earth.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS Yes, absolutely. I think that we we are transitioning or probably that transition has happened already to a perception of space as something separate like a separate domain to something that just permeates our societies, our economies, our industries, our ways of living together and our ability to tackle big global challenges from, you know, geopolitical crisis to a climate change to food security. Everything nowadays, every solution is enabled.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS In general, I would say probably by technology and scientific understanding, but specifically by space infrastructures. And so making sure that we continue to develop that infrastructure, that we continue to develop and improve the ability to exploit that infrastructure, to deliver information, data and services for the benefits of all our citizens, and making sure, of course, that we can maintain that infrastructure safe. All of that, I think, has become strategically important. And so I absolutely agree with you. I think it's very important for our leaders, elected officials, decision makers to have a deep understanding of the potential of space.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President And, you know, now, when I tell my children tonight that I have spoken to you, I'm sure they're going to ask you this question, and I'm sure they're going to want me to have asked you this, so I'm going to do it. And if you can explain a little bit what your day looks like, you know, what your your your day to day challenges. I could see while you were preparing this conversation, I could see you trying to hold, make sure the bottle of water is held and not flying around behind you.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President What are the biggest challenges you have? And then if you have free time, how do you spend it? And how many people do you interact with and do you do you call home often? And how is it? I guess technology has allowed this to become easier than for members of the of the ISIS in previous years. But but I think still there are challenges. If you can just lay it down to how I would explain it to my to my children.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS Yes, absolutely. So we have pretty busy work days which start around 7.30 in the morning. Like in many offices, we start with a meeting, except that our meeting occurs on space to ground radio and it occurs via satellite communication so that we are able to talk for a few minutes with all the control centres around the world who are responsible for the operations on the International Space Station.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS And and then we all go off to our tasks for the day. Like, for example, today I have spent actually all of my morning working on a experiment. Most likely I will not be just walking on my own on that experiment. I will be talking to people on the ground who are either the developer of the experiments or in any way are experts on that experiment. So that can guide me through it if there's any issue we can troubleshoot together.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS So although we we look like we're very isolated up here in space, we are actually in very, very close connexion with this enormous extended team of researchers and scientists and engineers and flight controllers all over the world. And so the day then goes by pretty quickly, around 730 in the evening. We have been another one of those conferences of those meetings on space ground to wrap up the day. We do have throughout the day also two and a half hours of mandatory workouts, physical activity.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS We have a machine that allows us to do weightlifting in weightlessness, which I know sounds like an easy win, but it's actually a pretty intense workout because the machine does create the resistance. We need to make sure we train our muscles and also keep our bones strong. Otherwise, in space, because of the weightlessness, we would experience some kind of very accelerated osteoporosis, which obviously we do not want.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS And in terms of the free time. Yes, absolutely. I called my my family on most days. And as you hinted, our technology really allows us to to feel to feel connected and maintain that presence also in our in our family lives.

SOUNDBITE (English), Roberta METSOLA, EP President Well, thanks for that. It sounds like a very busy day that you have every day and that you can really need teamwork also to be able to to to spread it out towards one day. I think we were we're running sort of shortly out of time. But perhaps one question that has that has been put to me to ask you, it's about debris in this space. So while there are about 2000 active satellites orbiting the Earth at the moment, there are also around 3000 dead ones monitoring space.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS And there are also around 34,000 pieces of space junk bigger than ten centimetres in size and millions of smaller pieces that could nonetheless, let's say, prove disastrous if they hit something. Are you working in any way on the issue of space debris and have you experienced yourself dangers that space debris pose to the ISIS and all other functioning satellites?

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS Yes. Well, first of all, I would like to say this is a topic on which Issa works hard and intensively with the space safety programme and the space debris office here on ISIS. Yes, we come in contact quite frequently with the with the issue. In fact, just yesterday, the flight controllers on the ground were tracking what we call a conjunction, which means a piece of space debris that is big enough to be monitored from the ground.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS And you know that there's assets of situational awareness where those pieces of debris get tracked and if there is even a remote chance that that piece of debris might come in contact with the space station, then the flight controllers plan an avoidance manoeuvre. So we took and basically we move out of the way. But the the quantity, the increasing quantity of space debris in low-Earth orbit, of course, makes those potential conjunctions a lot more frequent than they used to be.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS And it's also becomes more complicated to plan those debris avoidance manoeuvres because you might move out of the way, but you also have to make sure that when you move, you don't get into another potential conjunction. So your degrees of freedom there become more constraints. So just to finish the story, the debris avoidance and so the conjunction clear to that piece of debris in the end did not pose a threat.

SOUNDBITE (English) Samantha CRISTOFORETTI, next Commander of the ISS But it's certainly something that comes up fairly often. But yeah, but in terms of what do we do at the European Space Agency would actually love to hear what the director general, Ash Parker, would like to offer on this topic.

Soundbite (English), ESA Moderator No, thanks, Samantha. In fact, we are doing a lot this, as you say, the European Parliament in Strasbourg is actually not too far away from our centre. We just opened a new space safety centre in Darmstadt, which is in Germany, but really dealing with a space safety, space traffic management, space debris issues which we are experiencing.

Soundbite (English), ESA Moderator So what we do is of course monitoring the state but also telling our satellites, commanding our satellites then to fly avoidance manoeuvres. In fact, we are doing this now much more often than we used to do in the past. Today, we do it about once a week, every ten days. We used to do it every couple of months. So this also shows how much debris there is. So just the most recent ASAT test which happened at the end of last year caused a huge amount of debris where Matthias Muller, our astronaut, had to take shelter in the in the capsule and the space station had to fly these orbit manoeuvres to to avoid it.

Soundbite (English), ESA Moderator So, yes, this is a huge issue. And also that we need regulation. We need international regulation, but also we need technology where we can address the issues. For example, we develop a new satellite that literally grabs an upper stage of the rocket and takes it out of of the orbit in order to just get rid of one piece is a bit like a vacuum cleaner or garbage collection, if you wish, in space.

Soundbite (English), ESA Moderator And this is something that that we are really developing but of course in a large scale and this really reminds us that out there in space we are, of course depending on each other. It's not only Europe that has to take care of its assets. It's really a global effort and that we have international mechanisms that do that, the United Nations and other bodies.

Soundbite (English), ESA Moderator So, yes, so this is a big task and we are quite active actually at European level. We have a so-called a zero debris policy which I am installing now with my member states where we would like to have just like on ground, but we have carbon neutrality, we would like to have space debris neutrality by 2030 up in space. That means one objective means an object out. And this is of course, a big task and we are leaders in.