How not to die in space: A day in astronaut Sara García’s training

The job offer was brutal. It required being locked up for months in a claustrophobic enclosure with no possibility of escape, with only purified urine from other people to drink and with the obligation to act as a human guinea pig in invasive experiments. The risk of death was high. One in 35 workers died beforehand in the attempt. Despite all this, almost 23,000 applicants with astonishing CVs applied, of whom only 17 passed the inflexible tests to become an astronaut for the European Space Agency (ESA) and join “the greatest adventure in humanity”: a trip to the International Space Station with a view to future manned missions to the Moon. The Spaniard Sara García, 35, is one of the chosen few. On October 28, she began her training with one basic objective: to learn how not to die.

It’s 7 a.m. and García energetically welcomes two journalists from EL PAÍS to her temporary home, located near the imposing cathedral of Cologne, Germany. On a windowsill in the house are several balls of wool, from which she has just crocheted a small capybara. García fixes a quick coffee and heads in a borrowed car to the European Astronaut Centre, where she will receive training for six months, spread out until 2026.

French instructor Hervé Stevenin is waiting for García at the foot of one of the world’s largest swimming pools, 10 metres deep and containing almost four million liters of water. Here, novice astronauts learn to float among replicas of the modules of the International Space Station. Stevenin recalls the terrifying experience of Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano during a real spacewalk on 16 July, 2013. After half an hour, he realized that something was terribly wrong. “I feel like there’s a lot of water behind my head,” Parmitano warned as he orbited the Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour, attached to the outside of the space station. A liquid leak quickly began to fill his helmet, covering his ears, eyes, and even his nose. Unable to hear, with barely any vision and on the verge of dying of asphyxiation, the Italian returned calmly to the airlock using his memory, just in time to survive.

Stevenin, a legendary astronaut instructor, stresses the goal of the training. “You have to expose yourself to very difficult, uncomfortable activities. You have to get used to being uncomfortable. Let the discomfort become your comfort. So when you find yourself in a situation like Luca’s, other people would panic, but you will feel comfortable,” he says. “The whole training of an astronaut consists of this: pushing the limits of the comfort zone and always being one step ahead, thinking about what you will do if something happens.”

García’s training will be intense. In the second week of December, she will travel to a secret location in the Spanish Pyrenees to learn how to survive in the snow, along with four other rookie astronauts: Germany’s Amelie Schoenenwald, France’s Arnaud Prost, Italy’s Andrea Patassa and Czech Republic’s Aleš Svoboda. The five will build igloos, master fire, and practice rescues in extreme conditions, including in icy waters, to be prepared in case their ship suffers a re-entry accident and lands in a remote and hostile location.

García has been a hero in Spain since the ESA announced two years ago that she had been chosen for the new class of astronauts, along with fellow Spaniard Pablo Álvarez. Both were born in the city of León, 17 days apart, but they did not know each other. García says that since then, they have felt an incredible connection, to the point of saying the same phrases at the same time, like twins. Álvarez is one of the five career astronauts, so he will most certainly embark for a six-month mission on the International Space Station before 2030.

García, on the other hand, is one of the 12 astronauts on reserve. She hopes that the Spanish Ministry of Science will finance a private mission of a couple of weeks to the space station, as Sweden and Poland have already done with two of her colleagues. The American company Axiom Space, whose chief astronaut is the Madrid-born Michael López-Alegría, is offering these trips for around $50 million. If there is political will, García could fly from the end of 2026.

It’s Tuesday, 9:30 a.m., and García walks into the gym at the European Astronaut Centre, called Cosmos Gym. On one wall hang two shirtless photographs of actors Bruce Lee and Arnold Schwarzenegger, plus a drawing of Popeye showing off his iconic anchor tattoo on his forearm. García’s tattooed arms feature a bionic astronaut and an atom. The Spaniard exercises intensely five days a week, plus a sixth “quiet” day, during which she can limit herself to walking 20 kilometers. Every day she runs on the treadmill, deadlifts, practices vertical jumps, exercises with kettlebells, does squats, throws medicine balls, and boxes.

Sergi Vaquer, chief medical officer at the European Space Agency, is monitoring García’s condition. “Astronauts have to be in good physical shape to be able to carry out their tasks in space. And they must be free of illness. We are looking to have an astronaut who is healthy overall, a state of well-being in all these areas, including mental health,” says Vaquer, 42, who is from Barcelona.

The selection process for the 17 astronauts was merciless. Of the 23,000 candidates, the ESA made an initial selection, inviting only 1,400 candidates to an 11-hour session of stressful memory and intelligence exercises, such as trying to remember a series of 30 numbers and recite them backwards. Only 400 people made it to the third phase, with tough psychological tests in which they were expected to lose their nerves. A hundred candidates passed the demanding final medical exams, for which they had to spend five days in a hospital and any minor health problem meant expulsion. Only 50 made it to the interviews with the agency’s directors and, of these, 25 were questioned in person by the director general himself, the Austrian Josef Aschbacher. After 18 months of tests, 17 were left, including the two thirty-somethings from León.

Today, García has a checkup with Vaquer. The ESA chief medical officer emphasizes that astronauts must also learn basic medical notions in order to save the lives of their colleagues on the International Space Station, a kind of six-room house that orbits the Earth at an altitude of some 400 kilometres. “One of the most critical situations we could encounter in space is a cardiorespiratory arrest. We have never had it and I hope it never happens, but we must be prepared,” says Vaquer.

“It’s fun, because in space CPR maneuvers don’t work the same as on Earth. If you press someone’s chest, they float backwards,” says the doctor. García and her colleagues will have to learn to resuscitate a colleague’s heart by placing their feet on the ceiling, in planes that make parabolic flights to recreate the state of weightlessness. They will also learn to draw blood, to put catheters in the urethra, to perform ultrasounds. They will even visit hospitals to see gruesome injuries. “The first time you see a broken bone should not be in space. If it happens, you should have seen it before, so it doesn’t shock you as much. Sometimes we have gone to open heart surgery, simply to see what a body with a serious injury is like,” explains the doctor.

García studied biotechnology at the University of León and works at the National Cancer Research Center in Madrid, looking for therapies for lung and pancreatic cancer. In October she asked for a two-month leave of absence to begin her training, so she is a national hero, but she currently does not earn any money. The European Space Agency pays more than €6,000 a month to new career astronauts, but not to reserves. Álvarez, who finished his ESA training in April and is now completing his training at NASA in Houston, has left his friend from León the keys to his house and car in Cologne, to make her life easier.

A statue of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin — who made history in 1961 for a single, 108-minute space flight, the first step in human exploration of space — presides over the entrance to the European Astronaut Centre. In the foyer, a rock collected by the crew of the Apollo 16 mission in 1972 from the Descartes Highlands, a plateau on the Moon, is on display. García walks with ease through this labyrinthine complex, until she reaches a full-scale replica of the Columbus module, the European scientific laboratory connected to the International Space Station. She has just been given her flight suit and is wearing it for the photo shoot. Once seated inside the model, García lets her imagination run wild.

“During the astronaut selection process, I was with my husband at a rock concert. It started to get dark and the Moon came out. I remember looking at that image and saying: can you imagine that at some point I could be there watching this concert from the other perspective?” she recalls. There, at a concert by Californian singer Phoebe Bridgers in the Madrid summer, she felt chills. “Shortly after, they selected me and that possibility, which was completely crazy and far-fetched, began to materialize as a reality. I love to think that it could happen. I am privileged to have that opportunity, which may never happen, but now it is on the table,” she says.

On November 16, 2022, a week before the European Space Agency presented its 17 new astronauts, humanity took the first step towards returning to the surface of the Moon, after half a century of absence. The Artemis I mission, unmanned and led by NASA, took off from the Kennedy Space Center to rehearse the expedition in which the American agency intends to have an astronaut set foot on the lunar south pole in September 2026. The goal now is to go to the Moon to stay, with the construction from 2028 of the Gateway space station, which will orbit the satellite and act as a springboard for manned missions to the lunar surface. This experience will serve to plan a human expedition to Mars from 2040.

García has an app on her cell phone that tells her where the International Space Station is at any given moment. When the sky is clear, she looks up and searches for it in the firmament. García has read Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut, written by her Italian colleague Samantha Cristoforetti, who felt like “a shooting star” when her capsule turned into a fireball on re-entry to Earth a decade ago, after 200 days in space. “Imagining yourself coming back from a space mission, passing through the atmosphere and the ship becoming completely incandescent with you inside, but surviving thanks to technology and landing again on your planet, after having done research, having fulfilled dreams, objectives, seems fascinating to me,” García reflects. “If that is what that shooting star represents, I certainly dream of being one too.”

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