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French astronaut returns safely to Earth

Having orbited the earth more than 3,000 times over the course of 119 days - and played a saxophone solo in space - Thomas Pesquet will now undergo medical tests to see how his body has coped.

Published: 9 November 2021 10:30 CET
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet attends a 2018 conference dressed in European Space Agency uniform
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet has returned to Earth. He now holds the European record for the most time spent spacewalking. (Photo by Martin BUREAU / AFP)

Frenchman Thomas Pesquet, has made it back to Earth, landing in a SpaceX capsule with three other astronauts off the coast of Florida. They had been working on the International Space Station. 

A household name in France, Pesquet is perhaps best known for his saxophone rendition of the French national anthem, performed aboard the ISS, to mark the closing of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the handover to Paris. 

WATCH: Thomas Pesquet plays the final bars of La Marseillaise in space

It was Pesquet’s second space mission – he now holds the European record for the most cumulative time spent spacewalking.

Along with two Americans and one Japanese astronaut, Pesquet landed in the Gulf of Mexico at at 22:33 US Eastern Time (0333 GMT Tuesday), marking the end of the “Crew-2” mission. Four huge parachutes and a heat shield enabled their survival. 

Their mission was to conduct hundreds of experiments and help upgrade the station’s solar panels. Pesquet officially served at the ISS commander. 

He tweeted a message before beginning his journey back to Earth: “I am proud to have represented France once again in space! Next time, the moon?”

They boarded their Dragon, dubbed “Endeavour”, and undocked from the ISS at 2:05 pm (1905 GMT), NASA announced.

Endeavour then looped around the ISS for around an hour-and-a-half to take photographs, the first such mission since a Russian Soyuz spaceship performed a similar manoeuvre in 2018.

The Dragon, which flew mostly autonomously, has a small circular window at the top of its forward hatch through which the astronauts can point their cameras.

Their activities have included documenting the planet’s surface to record human-caused changes and natural events, growing Hatch chili peppers and studying worms to better understand human health changes in space.

Crew-2’s departure was delayed a day by high winds. 

Bad weather and what NASA called a “minor medical issue” have also pushed back the launch of the next set of astronauts, on the Crew-3 mission, which is now set to launch Wednesday.

Until then, the ISS will be inhabited by only three astronauts — two Russians and one American.

SpaceX began providing astronauts a taxi service to the ISS in 2020, ending nine years of US reliance on Russian rockets for the journey following the end of the Space Shuttle program.

Broken toilet

The crew also faced a final challenge on their journey home – they had to wear diapers after a problem was detected with the capsule’s waste management system, forcing it to remain offline.

They had no access to a toilet from the time the hatch closed at 12:40 pm until after splashdown – around 10 hours.

“Of course that’s sub-optimal, but we’re prepared to manage,” NASA astronaut Megan McArthur said at a press conference ahead of the departure.

“Space flight is full of lots of little challenges, this is just one more that we’ll encounter and take care of in our mission.”

A SpaceX all-tourist crew encountered a similar waste-related problem during a September flight, which triggered an alarm system. 

NASA later said a tube had come unglued, sending urine to the capsule’s fan system instead of a storage tank.

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TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

Published: 16 May 2023 08:29 CEST
France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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