INTERVIEW FEATURE“Weightlessness is the best
thing ever. It’s awe and freedom.
Movements are with no e ort,
no physical constraints. It’s an
amazing experience”
when they are away from the home port of
terrestrial gravity, which I think might have
some implication.HOW WOULD YOU OVERCOME THAT?
Hopefully with some good training. Indeed, I’m
not expecting to see this sort of impairment in
astronauts: as I say, they undergo substantial
training before going to outer space. I’m thinking
more of a commercial space flight; we’ve bought
the ticket, then we want to go on the plane. We
really don’t want two years or four years of
training before going on our vacation. This
scenario requires good training programmes to
ensure that potential space travellers are able to
make optimal decisions if needed.
IT SEEMS TO BE MOVING FASTER THAN THE
SCIENCE IS MOVING. IS THAT RIGHT?
It looks so. I think we have achieved amazing
results in the past years regarding technical
improvements in space exploration. But we also
need to put some effort into understanding how
we can improve human performance. I’m not
pessimistic; I’ll just say there’s an issue and we
need to solve it.
SO, WHAT’S NEXT?
This is a challenging field, but it’s so open to the
‘what’s next’ question: there are so many aspects
that we can potentially investigate. We are
currently looking at how altered gravity affects
risk-taking and social interactions. But we are
also doing some research on low-level sensory
processing, and we have just finalised a research
study on whether pain perception is influenced
by altered gravity.PAIN CAN BE AFFECTED BY GRAVITY?
This is not yet published, as we have just finished
it, but yes, altered gravity seems to make people
feel less pain, a sort of analgesic effect.IF YOU WERE OFFERED A TICKET ON A
COMMERCIAL SPACEFLIGHT RIGHT NOW,
WOULD YOU GO?
Absolutely yes! Of course I would go.IF YOU HAD THE CHOICE TO GO ANYWHERE IN
SPACE, WHERE WOULD YOU GO?
The Moon.YOU SAID THAT SO QUICKLY, YOU ALREADY
KNEW YOUR ANSWER. WHY THE MOON?
I always feel emotional when I see the videos of
the Moon landing. I’m too young to have seen it
live, unfortunately, but I think it was always
impressive for me to see that footage.
We spot the Moon from Earth almost every
night. Can you imagine how beautiful it might be
seeing our planet, Earth, from there? It will give
us an awareness of how beautiful, yet delicate
and fragile, our Blue Marble is.DO YOU THINK WE’LL EVER BE ABLE TO
COLONISE SPACE? THAT WE’LL EVER BE ABLE
TO LIVE OUTSIDE OF EARTH?
Possibly. Our brain is fantastic at adaptation.
Think about on Earth, where people have
managed to live in a lot of challenging
environments; in the desert, on the peak of a
mountain. Space is the ultimate frontier. It is not
going to be easy, much harder than what we see
in science fiction movies, but yes. Why not?DISCOVERMORE
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Elisa Raffaella Ferrè.