Thomas Pesquet is also a plumber in the space – Europe1

An astronaut must have talents plumber : the crew that has just arrived in the international space Station (ISS) has already had to fix the toilet broken on the second day”, said Wednesday an astronaut French Thomas Pesquet.

“We have used our quota of bad luck”. “It was a little on the tile,” admitted the astronaut who was holding his first press conference since the module european science of the ISS back on the site of the european space Agency (ESA). While holding with one hand on the ceiling because of the weightlessness, he played the other hand with a large ball representing the Earth. “At the same time, I tell myself that this happens at the beginning of the mission”, that”we have used our quota of bad luck and that now it should work until the end,” said benjamin of the european corps of astronauts.

“everyone feels super good.” Russian Oleg Novitsky, the American Peggy Whitson and Thomas Pesquet were joined in the night from Saturday to Sunday, the ISS, 400 km altitude, after a flight of two days aboard a Soyuz, launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They have found an American and two Russians, arrived in mid-October. “Everyone feels super good,” said Thomas Pesquet. We adapted very quickly. We have not been sick at all,” he said. “I am super happy to be here”.

“I sleep like a baby.” “Finally, to work in weightlessness, it is hyper-natural,” said the astronaut, whose mission is to last six months. As of Monday, “we have started to work well”. “We must be careful not to let escape the tools”, he noted. Thomas Pesquet has already tested the system of water treatment. And he has also carried out an experiment with surfaces and self-cleaning innovative, to which bacteria do not adhere. It has spread a little everywhere in the cabin. Thomas Pesquet indicates that he sleeps “very well”, “like a baby”. “It is super nice. We sleep in floating. We are retained just at the wall of our small individual cabins, with a sleeping bag hooked to the wall”.

It can make an internet telephone call to his family almost every day. On the weekend, he can have a video conference with them. “It’s like being on a business trip, this is just an absolutely amazing business trip of six months,” he estimated. Thomas Pesquet must, in particular, lead fifty of scientific experiments on behalf of ESA and Cnes.