'From the mundane to the sublime in a second': Samantha Cristoforetti on life in spaceEllie Violet Bramley Tue 25 Aug 2020 14.53 BST
Caffeine high … Cristoforetti enjoys her first drink from the ISSpresso machine. Photograph: Nasa(...) Coming back is, she says, the hardest part. “The six months after, when you’re still wrapping up the mission … you’re back but you’re not done.” While she writes of feeling at home even as she is about to take off, the “undeniable risk of a sudden and violent death tonight” looming, what she refers to as “ordinary life” is clearly the scary part: “The fact you have to grocery shop, sit in traffic, all those things that you just don’t have up there, cook your food – it’s not just a packet where you add some water and it’s ready.”
Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut by Samantha Cristoforetti is published on 27 August by Allen Lane.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/25/samantha-cristoforetti-international-space-station-italian-astronaut