And since Italy was involved in the space station as well as signed an agreement with NASA. And when the possibility to enter the 1996 Mission Specialist class.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight.
I think the crux of the matter was that if we were going to become partners in, for example, the International Space Station, we had to gain the respect of a country like the United States and particularly its space organization, NASA.
It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission.
There was a space program before there was integrated circuits.
There weren't any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.
So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight.
There were about six years when there was not one American who went into space. We shouldn't do that again.
Space in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but it's investments in space.
So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not.
In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.