After a year of preparation, engineer Pablo Álvarez (León, 35 years old) will become tomorrow the first Spanish astronaut in 31 years, and the only one who for now will be able to achieve the dream of going to the Moon.
The European Space Agency (ESA) celebrates the graduation of its new class of astronauts in Cologne (Germany) on Monday. The five chosen will receive their long-awaited identification patch on which the wings will already be displayed, symbolizing that they are part of the body and that they can be assigned a mission. And 12 reserves remain pending mission, including the Spanish molecular biologist Sara García. The Government links this milestone to the increase in its contribution to the ESA up to 300 million euros annually between 2023 and 2027.
Naturalist Josef Aschbacher, president of the agency, will decide in May which of the five new astronauts will be the first to travel to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2026. The rest will be assigned to subsequent missions until 2030, the expected retirement year of the orbital base. From that date on, and if they have a long career – Álvarez aspires to serve “25 or 30 years” – it is likely that they will also reach the Moon, although one of the seven veteran astronauts from the class of 2009 will go first. , with more flight experience. In this teleconference interview, the brand new astronaut tells what his year of training has been like and what you need to have to be able to travel to space.
Ask. Have you learned to stitch wounds?
Answer. Yes of course. Also cosmology, astrophysics, orbital mechanics, engineering, fluid mechanics, psychology, biology, ISS systems, space law, ESA and EU structure.
Q. Astronauts are given grades, can they also fail?
R. Yes. There are exams, there are grades and depending on what you get in some things you may be chosen for an activity or not. In the end there are very critical issues, such as extravehicular activities [caminatas espaciales] or handle the robotic arm, in which you have to make sure that the risk is minimal, and then the evaluations are quite serious. Just this last week I had a robotic arm exam, and we also had the general exam of the entire year.
Q. Do you feel like an astronaut yet?
R. Yes. It is a year that changes you. I feel prepared for anything that comes, even a space mission. And I know that now I have many more tools to overcome those challenges.
Q. What has been the hardest?
R. Maybe all the trips and the hours you have to put in. Because you can't do many of the activities here, in Colonia. We have been to Italy, Holland, the North Sea, Houston, doing survival training in the Pyrenees, several months in Germany learning Russian. Perhaps the most difficult thing is to combine your private life and your work. But I have been able to go to Spain for Christmas and Easter. And we generally have weekends free.
Q. What does it feel like when they put you in the centrifuge?
R. What you do is simulate the launch and re-entry of a space mission. You sit down, the capsule closes and it's as if you were in the rocket. There is a countdown, and when you reach zero, the feeling is that you have all the thrust of a rocket at your back. Accelerate super fast and you feel like you are going forward at full speed. It's hard for you to breathe, you notice that everything is crushed. If an arm normally weighs eight kilos, then at six times the Earth's gravity it weighs 48. It is very difficult to move. You stay like this for about 15 minutes. When you decelerate, your vestibular system does not understand very well what is happening and the sensation is that you are doing a lot of forward flips. It impresses, especially because it is very strong and lasts a long time.
Q. They also left you in the Aran Valley in the middle of winter.
R. Yes, they told us to each make a shelter, make sure there was no one within 100 meters and to sleep there. It is a curious experience to sleep alone at 10 degrees below zero, at 2,000 meters above sea level, with all the snow, with all the noises of the night. We were lucky and you could see the stars; It was beautiful. And then the rest of the days we were training other things like making fire, managing humidity, hypothermia or dealing with a fracture or sprain. They put us in fictitious emergency situations all the time, maybe you had to rescue someone or look for a colleague who had gotten lost by following their tracks in the snow. They put us in a lake when it was 4 degrees below zero outside. It is about simulating emergency situations and developing your leadership skills or following the leader in that situation.
Q. Have you felt afraid?
R. Not at the moment, but I'm not worried about it either. I'm going to get on a 70-meter-high Falcon rocket; a device that is going to send me off the planet. I am going to orbit at 28,000 kilometers per hour, to circle the Earth every hour and a half, to live six months in microgravity in a place where what separates you from outer space is three millimeters of aluminum. I'm going to go out into outer space with the spacesuit, which is nothing more than a human-shaped ship so you can operate everything. Imagine the feeling of going out and seeing the immensity of the universe on one side, the Earth on the other. And then you go back to that 28,000 kilometers per hour, you brake, you see the plasma in the window during reentry, and you fall in the middle of the ocean waiting for a ship to come rescue you. I think it would be very human to be afraid at some point.
Q. There is an idea that to be an astronaut you have to be superhuman, but the majority of astronauts, including Pedro Duque, their predecessor and current president of Hispasat, say that in reality what is needed is to be “supernormal.”
R. Totally true. The hardest thing of all is the variety of things you have to be good at, from underwater activities to more theoretical things to very operational parts of how you react in emergency situations. This job has so many aspects that we are not looking for super geniuses in anything, but rather people who you can leave in any situation and who know how to get ahead. This has been confirmed to us by the psychologists, who will follow us before, during and after the mission. They are not looking for a genius in mathematics or physics, but for all-rounders. The first day of training they told us: you don't stand out in anything, but you don't have any obvious weaknesses either.
Q. How are you going to feel when you graduate?
R. I imagine that he is very happy. But something that astronauts have is that we always look forward. I think that on the 23rd I will be thinking, well, what now?
Pedro Duque: “The most important virtue of the astronaut, patience”
The only two Spaniards who have traveled to space are the Hispanic-American Michael López-Alegría, who was an astronaut for NASA and is now an astronaut for the company Axiom, and Pedro Duque, who graduated in 1993 and traveled to space twice, in 1998. and 2003. A few days before the interview with Álvarez, Duque answered EL PAÍS's questions. “Being an astronaut is not like in the movies,” explained Duque, who after going to space was a director, minister of science and currently president of Hispasat. “It may have been epic in the golden age of Gagarin, Leonov, John Glenn, but it is an image of the past. There is very little physically. Really what they need is supernormal people who know how to fix things and make decisions, so there are a lot of psychological tests. The issue of the centrifuge is not so much to see your resistance as to check that you do not have a medical problem that prevents you from going to space.” Any advice for Álvarez? “Now,” he says, “the astronaut's most important virtue is patience, because you have to wait for the mission and not let yourself get carried away by fatigue. I was lucky and it took me five years to be assigned a mission,” he acknowledges.
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