PORTRAIT – The French soldier will join the new promotion of astronauts at the European Space Agency.
Lieutenant-Colonel Sophie Adenot, 40, is an explorer at heart. Throughout her career as an engineer, the soldier has never ceased to aspire to discover new things, to test new technologies, to go beyond the limits of the possible. “Space was a little girl’s dream“. A dream that seemed unattainable to her, which she builtbrick by brickas she puts it. She first learned science, became an engineer, then an Air Force pilot.
Today comes the culmination: she has been chosen as an astronaut at the European Space Agency (ESA). This Wednesday, November 23, the list of the new promotion of astronauts was published. Among the nearly 23,000 candidates, only five people were selected: the Briton Rosemary Coogan, 31, scientist at CNES (the National Center for Space Studies), the French Sophie Adenot, the Spaniard Pablo Álvarez Fernández, the Belgian Raphaël Liégeois, biomedical engineer, and the Swiss…