To go on board the International Space Station, you cannot take what you want with you, space and weight are very limited. But even worse, you mustn’t arrive there with something you didn’t want. Like the coronavirus.
To take no risk, either of delaying the mission because he would have caught the Covid just before leaving, or of carrying the coronavirus in his body at the risk of contaminating the rest of the occupants of the station, the Frenchman Thomas Pesquet confessed this Tuesday morning on BFM TV having had… 49 PCR tests before leaving. “In a few months”, he moderates, but all the same. And to Bruce Toussaint who asked him if he was vaccinated, he replied that of course, “it’s mandatory” for any passenger on the ISS. If there is thus still a place without Covid, it is space. “For the moment”, specifies the astronaut. Who also reiterated his wish to do everything to one day walk on the Moon.