Luca Parmitano

Luca Salvo Parmitano was born on 27 September 1976 in Paterno, on the flanks of Mount Etna in Sicily, and grew up drawn to flight. He graduated from the Italian Air Force Academy in Pozzuoli in 2000 and became a fighter pilot, flying the AMX ground-attack jet. In 2007 the Air Force selected him for test-pilot training, and he qualified as an experimental test pilot at EPNER, the French test-pilot school at Istres. A colonel and accomplished aviator who is also a keen scuba diver and skydiver, Parmitano was chosen in May 2009 as one of the six members of the European Space Agency's new astronaut class, the first fresh ESA intake in more than a decade.

Parmitano's first spaceflight, the Volare mission, launched aboard a Soyuz from Baikonur on 28 May 2013 for a stint on Expeditions 36 and 37 that ran roughly 166 days. It made him the first of his ESA class to fly and, at the time, one of the youngest people to visit the International Space Station. The mission is best remembered for EVA-23 on 16 July 2013, when water from his suit's cooling loop unexpectedly leaked into his helmet during a spacewalk. As the fluid pooled around his face and threatened to blind and drown him, the excursion was cut short after little more than an hour and a half, and Parmitano groped his way back to the airlock. The near-fatal incident triggered a formal NASA mishap investigation that reshaped spacewalk safety procedures, from absorbent helmet pads to snorkel-like breathing tubes. He returned for a second long-duration flight, the Beyond mission, launching aboard Soyuz MS-13 on 20 July 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of the first Moon landing. Serving as flight engineer on Expedition 60 and then taking over as commander of Expedition 61, he led the crew through a demanding series of four spacewalks to repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, adding roughly 25 and a half hours outside the station. Those brought his career EVA tally to six spacewalks totaling more than 33 hours. Across his two flights, which lasted about 166 and 201 days, he has spent some 367 days in space.

Parmitano's command of Expedition 61 made him the first Italian and the third European ever to command the International Space Station, a milestone for his country's growing role in human spaceflight. His candor about the EVA-23 emergency, later distilled into his often-quoted view that space is hard but worth it, turned a brush with death into a lasting contribution to crew safety that will protect spacewalkers for decades. Decorated as an Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic and with NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal, he remains an active member of the European Astronaut Corps, an advocate for returning humans beyond low Earth orbit toward the Moon and Mars, and a widely followed public voice for European exploration.