Space travel: Mr. Le Gall, President of the French Space agency has a message for you! [fr]

As we approach Thomas Pesquet’s journey on board of Space X’s spacecraft Crew Dragon 2, the CNES’ President discusses 60 years of Spatial cooperation. The launch is right at the corner on Thursday 22nd, 2021, 6:11 AM (ET). Objective: the International Space Station (ISS) from Cape Canaveral (FL).

The French Astronaut Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency (ESA) being the 1st European astronaut to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) from the American soil on board SpaceX’s spacecraft, Mr. Jean-Yves Le Gall wanted to highlight the outstanding French and American cooperation in space in this short video:

CNES, France’s National Space Agency, signed its first accord with NASA in 1961!
Since then, many bilateral and multilateral agreements have been signed between these major actors of the space sector. Besides the ISS, another telling illustration of the common benefits of space cooperation is the recent landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars with the French instrument Supercam which is, according to Mr. Le Gall and the scientific community, “one of the finest and most recent examples of what our Nations can achieve together through cooperation and mutual trust”.

And finally, for the space curious out there who wish to follow the launch preparation phase more closely, consult the CNES site dedicated to Mission Alpha here: missionalpha.cnes.fr. You will be able to follow the take-off of Thomas Pesquet live!