Meloni meets astronaut Parmitano: 'Proud and curious for Artemis III'

“We are very proud and very curious.” Thus Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni addressed Luca Parmitano, the ESA astronaut designated by NASA as pilot of the Artemis III mission, during their meeting at Palazzo Chigi in the morning.

Accompanied by his wife, as seen in the images released by Palazzo Chigi, before receiving the Tricolor of the Republic from the Prime Minister to take into space ("Few like her deserve it", she told him), Parmitano told her some details of the mission, destined to pave the way for the return of human beings to lunar soil. "It's a unique mission of its kind, it's a bit like what happened with Apollo 9, which however was the ninth mission. For us it's the third, the second with the crew, and it's the first ever in which we're going to experiment with some of the systems indispensable for the Moon - he underlined -. It's a 100% experimentation and testing mission. Initially it will see one of the lenders in orbit, after which we'll leave. We'll go and do some reunifications, or manoeuvres orbotali, also in manual mode: we will bring the spaceship to go close to the lender, rejoin the lender, allow the passage of the spaceships from one spaceship to another, after which we will detach ourselves, we will fly around the lender to analyze that everything went well and we will move away".

Parmitano explained that "the first lender will be destroyed in the atmosphere, another will launch and we will redo the same maneuvers but with different procedures, because the two lenders are very different, which we are designing from scratch with the ground crew. An extremely complex mission - he added - because, while the first, Artemis II, which landed recently and was very successful, involved a single spaceship, with a relatively simple mission profile, we have three spaceships, three control centers, three crews of ground that must all work together in a coordinated manner for the outcome of our maneuvers and our mission. By Monday I will probably be double-strapped to the seat of the spaceship to learn everything bolt by bolt."