Astronauts inspire young Turkish audience at TEKNOFEST

IZMIR, Türkiye

Talking to a group of young Turkish audience at TEKNOFEST 2023, Türkiye's premier technology and aerospace event, American and Italian astronauts joined by a Russian cosmonaut on Wednesday shared their experiences of being in space and the challenges they faced during missions.

Stephanie Wilson of the US, Paolo Nespoli of Italy, and Denis Matveev of Russia spoke about how to become an astronaut.

When asked what inspired her to become an astronaut, Wilson said that when she was 13 years old, she had the chance to interview an astronomer. “I was fascinated by the night sky. And from there I continued to study science.”

“I studied engineering in college. And when I had the chance, I applied to the astronaut program to become an astronaut,” she added.

For his part, Paolo Nespoli explained the training he had to become an astronaut. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut, but primarily I wanted to be an engineer.”

“So, I got a university degree in aerospace engineering, and then I applied to the astronaut corps.”

“Once selected, it was not simple. I had to go through training for being able to fly on the space shuttle or the Soyuz, Russia spacecraft, to the space station and that took around five years of training,” he explained.

Russia’s Matveev told the crowd that he returned from space about a year ago.

The crew that substituted his team, he said, is now returning to the earth. “Now they're flying in the atmosphere, preparing for their landing.”

After spending an American record-breaking 371 days in space, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin made a safe, parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan, according to NASA’s website.

“The main goal of our operation is to initialize European Robotic Arm, which is called ERA,” he explained. “That's why we performed a pretty big number of ERA spacewalks … and ERA was successfully initialized.”

Challenges during missions

When asked about any unexpected experience or challenge during their missions, Wilson said: “Paolo and I flew together on the space shuttle. And during that mission, we had an unexpected event with a solar array.”

“Part of building the International Space Station requires reconfiguring the systems for the space station,” she explained. “When we were working with the electrical system, the solar arrays, relocating them and extending them, there was a structural failure, which required a special spacewalk and robotics to repair and that was something that was not expected.”

“But our training and our procedures carried us through and we were able to successfully repair the solar array,” she added.

Matveev recalled an event when his fellow Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev had to stop his spacewalk due to a battery power failure on his spacesuit. Matveev said that he had to wait for one hour and 30 minutes until NASA’s mission control center “decided what to do with me.”

“I was just hanging out … one hour and 30 minutes doing nothing and observing our beautiful planet,” he added.

The third edition of TEKNOFEST 2023 kicked off on Wednesday. The five-day festival at Izmir's Cigli Airport features competitions, air shows, exhibitions, and workshops.

Anadolu has been among TEKNOFEST's media shareholders as a global communications partner of the event since the first edition.