Thomas Pesquet: "I would love to go to the moon"

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet alongside Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti in Chambord on May 2, 2019Yoan VALAT

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet would like to "go to the moon because it's really another world", he said at the Paris Air Show.

"The international space station is already a bit of a different world but it's still close, the moon is crazy, there's no life, it's completely different," he said. told AFP on the sidelines of a press briefing by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The United States has the ambition to send Americans again – including a woman for the first time – to the Moon as early as 2024, and plans to mount a mini-space station around our natural satellite.

In a second time, from 2028, the Americans envisage a "durable" installation. For this the station around the Moon will be called to grow and open to international partners, as is the case for the current International Space Station (ISS).

The European Space Agency (ESA), which provides the service module of the Orion capsule that will bring astronauts into orbit around the moon, hopes that a European astronaut will go to the moon in this second phase.

A member of the European Astronaut Corps, Thomas Pesquet, 41, spent nearly six months in the ISS between November 2016 and December 2017.

ESA Director General Jan Wörner confirmed that he had proposed that Thomas Pesquet fly back to the ISS in 2020/2021.

"The scientific program remains to be defined," said Thomas Pesquet. The takeoff could be on an American rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida, while for his first flight, Thomas Pesquet was co-pilot of the Russian rocket Soyuz.

"We are in a transition phase," Soyuz being in recent years the only way to access the ISS, he said.