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A Rotarian astronaut lives her out-of-this-world dreams
Samantha Cristoforetti longed for space travel since she was a kid. Now, she’s sharing the cosmic awe with her fellow earthlings.
by Diana Schoberg
In some ways it’s just like any other Rotary meeting.
Dozens of members of the Rotary Club of Köln am Rhein gather on a pleasant Monday evening at one of the famous Kranhäus office buildings, architectural gems shaped like upside down L’s over the Rhine River with the towers of Cologne Cathedral visible in the distance. The night’s speaker, an out-of-this-world member of the club, is scheduled to give the Rotarians a virtual tour of her workplace. The Wi-Fi connection on her end is finicky, and they wait eagerly.
At last, she appears, and that’s when this meeting takes a decidedly different turn. Because Samantha Cristoforetti, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, is floating.
Cristoforetti is four months into her second stint on the space station, a research vessel about the size of a six-bedroom house that orbits the Earth every 90 minutes. Her hair set loose from the confines of gravity in a way that would make an ’80s metal rocker jealous, she takes questions and wows club members with the cosmic views. “Most of the time I try to take meetings from the cupola, because then you can show people the Earth from the windows,” she says in an interview with Rotary magazine.
Cristoforetti brought the Köln am Rhein Rotary club banner to the International Space Station.
Image credit: European Space Agency/NASA, Samantha Cristoforetti
