This morning, but it was night in Florida, Samantha Cristoforetti is back in Space. Departure from Cape Canaveral, destination the International Space Station, where he will remain about five months.
The spacecraft was brought up there by a rocket from SpaceX, the company Elon Musk founded twenty years ago. But today we are not talking about him. Let’s talk about her: @astrosamantha, as he calls himself on Twitter since in 2011 it debuted on this social network. It was July and she was in Star City, near Moscow, where there is the preparation center for cosmonauts named after Yuri Gagarin and she was posting the photos she took with her smartphone on Flickrto give an idea of how much time has passed.
She was not the first astronaut to open a social profile and her first tweet from Space was not the first ever (primacy that goes to TJ Creamer, January 22, 2010, “Hello Twitterverse”; while Mike Massimino on May 13, 2009 sent a mail which was then posted on his Twitter profile, “I’m feeling great”). But @astrosamantha with her sober and never cold style immediately became the first space influencer (she is about to pass the milestone of one million followers). At the time on Twitter she started a diary in English 500 days before the departure of the Futura missiontranslated Italian, French and Spanish, and then taking us up there with her on the Space Station.
This time it adds up TikTok, where @astrosamantha becomes “the one who is going to a place where no tiktoker has ever gone before”. Here Cristoforetti can express herself with videos, in which she speaks to us directly, introducing herself, with irony, a bit like Spider Man did in a comic that she evidently knows: “Your friendly neighborhood Spider Man”, said that; “Your friendly astronaut”, your astronaut friend.
For TikTok, which continues to be the most downloaded app in the world, it’s a beautiful operation. But it is also for us: it brings us closer to space, it talks to the kids, who are the main users of TikTok; remind them that humans have made several disasters, like the last war, but we are also capable of making people live in a station that orbits the Earth. We can do wonderful things, @astrosamantha tells us.