Thomas Pesquet's life is so well documented that everything seems to have been said. Except, perhaps, for his private life, which he has kept to himself since the beginning. With the release of his autobiography My Life Without Gravity, which comes out this Wednesday, October 18, we learn more, particularly about his childhood, his parents, and his partner Anne Mottet, an engineer by profession. The man with two space stays distills different moments and conversations from his intimacy, and recounts, among other things, the fears and doubts of his mother and his partner, throughout his journey as an astronaut.
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Fighter jets and the NBA
Thomas Pesquet made his first trip into space in 2016, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the ISS (International Space Station) where he will stay for six months. He returned to the ISS in 2021 as part of a second mission, this time with a take-off on the American side. In My Life Without Gravity, it is first surprising to learn that being an astronaut was not quite the dream of the young Thomas Pesquet. His passions as a child and teenager were summed up in two things: fighter jets and basketball (we read that he faced a certain Tony Parker in departmental competition...). For years, he said that to the question "What do you want to do when you grow up?" he has long and invariably answered: "Fighter pilot."
Mother Wolf
Of his childhood, Thomas Pesquet recounts the "modest and particularly harmonious" environment, the family culture of the "good grade" (his father is a maths and physics teacher, his mother a teacher), the closeness with his brother, Baptiste, with whom he replayed NBA games until he knew them by heart, and his special bond with his mother, "extremely protective". "How could she not be: one summer when she was staying with an uncle in the south of France, her little brother died at the age of twelve while climbing a tightrope, tragic accident," he writes over the pages, adding that when his father was absent and he was still a baby, she wedged, against the door of his children's room, a mattress she slept on - "let someone break into the house and you'd literally have to run over their body!" It's easy to imagine how she felt when she found out that her son was going to go into space. A reaction that Thomas Pesquet chronicles with tenderness and humour.
His lifelong love
The astronaut could have passed over in silence, or simply mentioned his love story with Anne Mottet, whom he met at the end of his final year of high school - "she arrives in our big courtyard in Dieppe where she doesn't know anyone and this brunette with a short hair (who I find hot) doesn't take long to impress me." He then recounts the ups and downs of the lives of the two young students who, thanks to their ambitions, move away and find each other again. They ended up meeting again permanently in Toulouse, where she was hired at INRA (the National Institute for Agricultural Research); He was then at the CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales), which he soon left to become an airline pilot. Over the course of the chapters, he recounts the ups and downs of their relationship, torn by his extreme choices. The passage about his first departure from Baikonur is particularly moving. Just like the one where he recounts the days following his return to Earth in 2017, and the deep distress of his partner. "Supposedly, we lived all this in joy and good humor, but what do you think? Every one of us was thinking about it: the moment when everything was going to explode!" she told him. "Do you understand that it's not a thing that makes you happy: to see you go on a fire? It's a dangerous adventure!" adds Anne Mottet. "You need to hear, Thomas... This story, for me, has a name: it's called trauma," she says, insisting she couldn't go through that again. Which she finally had to do, no doubt in spite of herself, when he left the SpaceX capsule in 2021.