Samantha Cristoforetti

Samantha Cristoforetti is an Italian European Space Agency astronaut, Italian Air Force pilot and engineer. She is the first Italian woman in space.

On November 23, 2014, Soyuz TMA-15M carrying Cristoforetti and two other astronauts launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. It successfully docked at the International Space Station roughly six hours later.

Cristoforetti was born in Milan in 1977. She spent her childhood in Malè, in Val di Sole, Trentino, Italy. When she was 18, she took a US foreign exchange program and attended Space Camp. She studied in Bolzano and Trento and graduated from the Technical University of Munich with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. She studied at the École nationale supérieure de l'aéronautique et de l'espace in Toulouse, France, and at the Mendeleev Russian University of Chemistry and Technology in Moscow, Russia.

She also graduated in Aeronautics Sciences at the Italian Accademia Aeronautica in Pozzuoli, becoming one of the first women to be a lieutenant and fighter pilot in the Italian Air Force. She is the second Space Camp alumnus in orbit.

On July 3, 2012, the European Space Agency announced that Cristoforetti was set for a long-duration mission to the ISS in 2014.

Cristoforetti is a polyglot, fluent in Italian, English, German, French and Russian.