Veteran Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli is set to return to space for a third time in 2017, the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on Thursday.
The Army officer will be 60 when he starts a mission on the International Space Station (ISS) in May 2017.
It will make the 58-year-old Milan native the first Italian to do a second six-month stint in space, after his stay on the ISS from December 2010 to May 2011.
"I'm honoured and proud to return to orbit with the Italian flag," Nespoli told a news conference. Nespoli did a degree in mechanical engineering in Florence and then studied aerospace engineering in New York.
He was selected from eight other Italian candidates to join the ESA's astronaut corps in 1989.
But he did not make his first space trip until 2007, when he was part of the Space Shuttle mission which delivered the Italian-built Node 2 module to the ISS.
He became the first Italian to do a six-month stint in space during the 2010-2011 MagISStra mission. At the end of that mission, there were two Italians in space at the same time thanks to fellow astronaut Roberto Vittori's arrival on the ISS. Nespoli used humour on Thursday to suggest that he believes in life exists outside of earth. "I believe in the extraterrestrials (because) I was in orbit with five others," he quipped, referring to his previous missions. He said that he was also encouraged by last week's announcement of the discovery of Earth's "twin" planet, Kepler 452B, adding this demonstrated the value of believing that nothing is impossible. "I've never seen (such) other planets, but that isn't to say they don't exist," said Nespoli. "The problem is finding them.
"If we look at the past, every time something was considered an impossible task, someone has woken up and found a way to do it," said Nespoli. "I always say this, so that kids can dream of doing things that seem to be impossible". Italians, and much of the world, closely followed the space adventures of the most recent Italian astronaut on the ISS, Samantha Cristoforetti. She returned on June 11 after seven months in space, where she became something of a celebrity with her Twitter posts about life on the space station and her experiments.
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