Samantha Cristoforetti is a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut of Italian nationality. Between November 2014 and June 2015 she spent 199 days on board the International Space Station as a Flight Engineer for Expedition 42 and 43. During ASI's Futura Mission, Cristoforetti conducted experiments in the Station's laboratories. She is a Captain in the Italian Air Force.
Cristoforetti is the author of Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut.
At the Guardian she tagged ten books that seem truest to the extraordinary experience of learning to be an extraterrestrial human being. One title on the list:
Packing for Mars by Mary RoachRead about the other entries on the list.
If there is a Q&A session, I know that this question will be asked: how do you pee in space? This entertaining, at times hilarious book is an account of the author’s quest to understand this and many other challenges of functioning as a human being in space. While she makes no effort to hide a preference for the less palatable, sometimes disgusting, anecdotes going back to the early days of human spaceflight, and the work predates the more mature conditions of the International Space Station that I am personally familiar with, this is a fun and informative book.
Packing for Mars is among Christopher Wanjek's best books about our space future and Becky Chambers's five non-fiction books that will put you in an astronaut's boots.
--Marshal Zeringue
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