French astronaut Pesquet calls for European space independence

Washington (AFP) June 7, 2022

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet on Tuesday urged Europe to seize the momentum created by its newfound diplomatic unity and "start moving now" to develop its own human spaceflight capacity. The charismatic engineer and pilot, 44, recently completed his second deployment to the International Space Station on the NASA-SpaceX Crew-2 mission, and has arguably the highest profile among the Europea