Samantha Cristoforetti holds the record for longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut – but you may know her for another bit of history.
She is the first person to make a TikTok video on board the International Space Station (ISS). Cristoforetti has become a star on the social-media site, where her videos have had millions of views. Italy’s first female astronaut is using her second space mission to help TikTok reach the final frontier.
Cristoforetti first travelled to space in 2014, spending 199 days on board the ISS – then the record for the longest mission in space by a woman, although that has since been broken by Peggy Whitson, in 2017, and subsequently Christina Koch, in 2019.
The European Space Agency astronaut returned in April 2022 and has been doing so in front of a growing crowd. One particular video, made in memory of Douglas Adams, author of the seminal sci-fi series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has picked up more than 17 million views on TikTok.
In the video, Cristoforetti shows viewers how a wet towel behaves in weightlessness, while declaring she is “a hoopy frood who always knows where her towel is” – a well-known quote among Hitchhikers fans.
The Italian has been making these jokes since she first went into space. Her initial mission was Nasa’s 42nd expedition to the ISS. No prizes for guessing the theme, but you may be impressed by the official poster she tweeted.
Space is big. Really big.
Cristoforetti is currently part of the ISS’s Minerva mission – named after the Roman goddess of wisdom and arts, in honor of “the sophisticated craftsmanship of the men and women all over the world who make human spaceflight possible”.
She is part of a crew of four who set off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 27 April in a SpaceX Dragon capsule. They are the fourth crew to travel to the ISS in a SpaceX vehicle.
At the time of writing, her TikTok video detailing the process from launching to settling in at the ISS has received 1.2m views.
Cristoforetti believes that within the next decade more people will be travelling beyond Earth’s atmosphere. “I’m confident that we will also see space agencies setting their eyes on beyond low earth-orbit targets, specifically smaller spaces, such as the moon surface,” she said.
She said “it takes so much good luck” to become an astronaut, and she believes all astronauts are “incredibly grateful and cognizant of that privilege”.