Major Luca Parmitano of the Air Force at a conference at the University: At the event, titled “UniCT calls AstroLuca …”, the students of the Catanese faculty were present; hours earlier they had literally taken over the entire University for a place in the front row. In the classroom, not only the Catanese students but also their professors and a significant number of personnel from the Air Force’s 41st Anti-Submarine Squadron of Sigonella were present, led by their Commander, Colonel Pilot Vincenzo Sicuso. “This is a really packed room, full of young people who represent not only the future of our university but also of our Earth … Luca Parmitano is a concrete example – indeed, he came from Catania – of how one can be of this land but to fly very high and pursue one’s dreams along a difficult path, but if this is done with the right emotional drive, those dreams are achieved …’. These are the words with which the pro-Rector of the University of Catania, Professoress Alessandra Gentile, opens the evening that sees the Catania astronaut as the guest.
Before leaving the field to Major Parmitano, Colonel Sicuso, in the capacity of delegate of the Armed Forces, brought greetings from the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General of the Air Force Pasquale Preziosa, to the professors and university students of the faculty. He continued by saying that “… Luca Parmitano is someone who challenged himself by nurturing a dream, blending it with passion and professional preparation, adding the ingredient of ethics and humility; without the passion for what you do, you can prepare as much as you want, but the goal will always elude you… we are the resource, the men; you young people are the future; I invite everyone to think that we can all achieve it. Our starting point was the Air Force that believed in and invested in us men;… you are all Italy… believe in us strongly as Luca did.” Accompanied by a long standing ovation, Major Parmitano took the floor. Grateful for the tribute and the kind words expressed for him, the astronaut began by introducing the greetings from the Italian and European Space Agencies. He passionately recounted his dream come true, the 166-day journey into space from May to November 2013, the “Expedition 36/37”, using an explanatory video about the activities and scientific experiments carried out during the mission. With his own words, Parmitano immediately captivated the audience: “Being able to talk to you today is a privilege because you – as Col. Sicuso already said – are the future. Now I am talking to you about three words and I ask you to remember them well. Science: which is an absolute value. Technology: which continuously makes us evolve. Exploration: in fact the first two combined, which means seeking the limits with all our will to try to overcome them.’ It’s simply what I did to reach space together with the other astronauts.” At the end of the monologue, the audience began to ask numerous questions. Parmitano asked that the last question be asked by a military officer from his own Armed Forces: the Air Force that allowed him to achieve such great successes, the most recent of which was being named “Ambassador” for the next semester of the Italian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The evening continued with the unique account of the experience of three young people from Enna (Fabio Leone, Paolo Capasso and Antonella Barbera), the team of “Sicilian Space Program”, and of their ironic experiment thanks to which – with a probe balloon filled with helium gas – they sent a cone into the boundaries of space. They received the Astronaut’s compliments for the curious project that nevertheless brought a Sicilian cone to an altitude of 30,000 meters. At the end of the long evening and before the final photo shoot, realizing that their passion and enthusiasm had won over many present, Major Luca Parmitano addressed the young university students: “...our home is like the future; however, it does not belong to us; it is in our hands…” The “Volare” mission, the first long-duration mission of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), began on the night of May 28, 2013, when the Russian Soyuz 35 spacecraft left the runway of the Baikonur cosmodrome with the crew of the ISS Expedition 36/37 on board: in addition to Luca Parmitano, an ESA astronaut and pilot of the Air Force, on Soyuz 35 were also present the Russian commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, from ROSCOSMOS, and the American Karen Nyberg, from NASA. The mission ended after 166 days in orbit: Luca Parmitano, Karen Nyberg and Fyodor Yurchikin landed on the night between November 10 and 11, 2013, always aboard the Soyuz 35 capsule, in the steppes of Kazakhstan. The “fly-by-wire” mission was assigned to ASI by NASA and stems from a bilateral Memorandum of Understanding between NASA and ASI, under which ASI provided the US space agency with three pressurized residential modules (MPLM – Multi Purpose Pressurized Module) and the PMM (Permanent Multi Purpose Module) for the ISS. During his stay in the International Space Station, Luca Parmitano was involved in many scientific experiments by the ISS Partners, in particular those of ESA and ASI. The Catania native Luca Parmitano, a 1976 graduate of the Air Force, is an experimental pilot with an excellent record of over 2,000 hours of flight experience, qualifications on more than 20 types of military aircraft and helicopters, and experience with over 40 different types of aircraft. He has been part of the European Space Agency’s Astronaut Corps since May 2009. In September 2010 he was assigned as Flight Engineer to ASI’s first long-duration mission to the International Space Station (ISS), identified as ’Expedition 36/37“. His participation confirms the leading role that Italy has in the space sector and, in particular, in the research activity aboard the ISS. Parmitano is the sixth Italian astronaut to go into space and the fourth to set foot on the ISS. With ”Volare“, Italy has achieved important milestones: for the first time an Italian astronaut performed Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) and arrived on the ISS in a few hours.
