posted 01-08-2020 06:55 PM               

This followup to the author's earlier book, called In the Footsteps of Columbus, picks up where the other ends, reporting in painstaking detail, almost hour by hour, the daily activities of the ESA astronauts who have visited the International Space Station over its second decade and how they have lived on board, repaired instruments and parts of the shuttle, helped construct the space laboratory and performed valuable scientific experiments.

The earlier book covered the period from 2001 to 2012, detailing 18 missions from Umberto Guidoni's STS-100 mission in 2001 to Andre Kuiper's Promisse mission in 2012. This edition adds Luca Parmitano's Volare mission in 2013 and concludes with Alexander Gerst's mission, the second expedition commanded by an ESA astronaut, in 2018. The text covers all of the "class of 2009" astronauts as well as Parmitano and Gerst, Samantha Christoforetti of Italy, Andreas Mogensen of Denmark, Timothy Peake, the UK's first ESA astronaut, and Thomas Pesquet of France. Extensive use of color photographs from NASA and ESA depict the experiments carried out, the phases of the ISS construction and the daily routine of the astronauts in space highlights the crucial European work on human spaceflight.

Although this book, based on space agency reports, covers a shorter period 69 years) and fewer missions (8 missions), in reality it nearly doubles the coverage of actual mission time in space (approximately 1,000 days). Overall, this material encompasses over 2,000 days in space and 26 missions.

• Paperback: 390 pages
  
• Springer (July 10, 2020)
  
• ISBN-10: 303030325X
  
• ISBN-13: 978-3030303259