here’s something surreal about talking to someone who’s been to space. Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti might be at home in Cologne while I’m Zooming her from London – but there’s still an awareness: those eyes have seen what only a handful of people will ever see. Those hands have been without gravity travelling at 28,000 kilometres an hour. Loved ones gave Cristoforetti trinkets to take to the space station, where she spent 200 days between November 2014 and June 2015. The way she sees it, the rationale is that not many things have ever been to space and “you’re going to see a picture of it floating in front of Earth – it’s a symbolic meaning, added value”. Aware of the distance space travel can create between astronauts and earthlings, in Cristoforetti’s new book, Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut, she worries about the impact that having been to space might have on her life – “as if it weren’t already hard enough, even without the traps of celebrity, to lead a centred, virtuous life”. The idea of minor celebrity is, she concedes, against a neat backdrop of filing cabinets, “a bit scary, yes. People look at you in a different way. It’s less natural and so I find it difficult nowadays to find relationships I feel are authentic.” But life in space is also full of the humdrum. On weekends, Cristoforetti would hoover. She would still need haircuts and enjoy the throaty singing of Italian crooner Paolo Conte. Episodes of Battlestar Galactica would be used as a distraction from time spent running, harnessed to a treadmill. Her book is full of these quotidian quirks. Even the years spent in training are shown in all their pedestrian glory: the Harry Potter audiobooks listened to in Russian for language practice (she still has “a small, but enviable vocabulary of Russian magical terms”), the fretting over the best face moisturiser to take, and her out of office: “I’ll be off the planet for a while, back in May 2015. Unfortunately I won’t read your message.” But unlike on Earth, in space “you go from the total mundane to the sublime in the split of a second,” she says. Chores are interrupted by the sight of an aurora borealis and unfulfilling showers – there is no running water – are set against a backdrop of the “Earth gliding past the large windows”. Her time on the space station was saturated with awe: views of Earth take in 2,000 kilometres in all directions, dawns see the world tinted blue and red, cyclones wreaking havoc below appear as pictures of “quiet strength” from above. Whenever Cristoforetti could, she used to take in views of the Namibian desert, the indigo and emerald Caribbean and uninhabited atolls, and she describes how her eyes were “saturated with sublime beauty, steeped in the splendour of the stars”. The 43-year-old astronaut, who was formerly in the Italian air force, is often asked what impact these sights have had. While the book is full of illuminating observations from what she calls the “cosmic perspective”, “I resist this expectation people have sometimes that you go to space and come back with a new view of life.” In lieu of great epiphanies, Cristoforetti says, “you may catch a glimpse of insight”, plus it “intensifies your sensibility to things that you’re probably very sensible to anyway”. I do, however, ask if it gave her any insight into the current rub between internationalism and nationalism – so much of the book is an exercise in cooperation between scientists in the US and Russia, and she writes of the paradox of feeling connected to Europe when she is floating above the Earth in its entirety. Especially given that, as she puts it, from space differences of “culture, history, habit, material conditions” shrink down to details when compared to the “underlying substance, that kernel of human nature made up of feeling hot and cold, being hungry and thirsty, experiencing joy, pain, fear, wonder and ecstasy”. “When I was up there especially, more than I do now,” she says, “I felt this connection with humanity as a whole.” But, she adds, “that did not prevent me from realising, recognising, honouring that I do come from somewhere.” Equally, she never regarded these two perspectives as being in conflict. “I think that there is a lack of mutual trust between these two sets of people, those who are more international, maybe more urban in lifestyle, and then people who are more tied to local customs, traditions, language … It’s not such a dramatic conflict that we have to make it some kind of civil war … I hope that we move past this moment,” she says. Much was made of the fact that Cristoforetti is a woman – the first female Italian astronaut in space. For the public, she says, “it is a huge deal, especially for young girls and women”. Speaking to her, I remember the excitement of the first British astronaut Helen Sharman visiting my school. No doubt many children will remember Cristoforetti visiting theirs. Ninety per cent of astronauts have been men. There has even been a Barbie crafted in Cristoforetti’s likeness, a bid to encourage more girls to explore a future in science. But Cristoforetti is understandably reluctant to let her gender become too much of the focus. While in the book she concedes that “I have probably experienced discrimination that was subtle enough to have been ambiguous”, she says that pulling on the EMU suits used for spacewalking, which are not designed for the average-sized woman, was the only time she had encountered an obstacle “clearly linked to my being a woman”. There are other instances, but Cristoforetti obviously doesn’t see them as barriers. In one exchange a journalist asks her “in all apparent seriousness how it felt to be going into space with two such attractive men, whose strong shoulders I could lean on”. “That was laughing material for a long time,” she says, laughing again. There are upsides, namely the community who meet and party at ladies’ astronaut night, which she tells me is, beyond the guest list, no different from your average party – “just getting together with some finger food and drinks and chat”. She sought advice from veterans on the best bra to wear in orbit (a bra camisole for daily activities) as well as how best to approach peeing in space. Not a single female colleague had found the special funnel designed for women to be better than the regular version. Astronauts’ lives are full of firsts, opportunities to experience new feelings or do hitherto unperformed tasks – Cristoforetti was the first person to make an espresso in space, for instance. But the most noteworthy of those new feelings is, surely, weightlessness. This experience of feeling “completely unknown sensations”, she says, is part of what those who become astronauts are seeking. Does she miss it? “I do, yeah. I miss that feeling of lightness.” But the feeling she is speaking of seems to go further than a physical lightness. “I really enjoyed life up there. It’s a very simple, fulfilling life, with a lot of purpose in everything that you do.” Her days on the space station were peppered with scientific experiments, taking saliva or blood samples so that scientists back on earth could learn about the impact of x or y on humans. It’s a setup that makes life in space unavoidably meaningful. 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.