Merano Dialogues 2025:
Around the world, or rather, around space in eight days. It was 31 July 1982 and Franco Malerba with the Shuttle Atlantis mission became the first Italian astronaut in history to venture beyond planet Earth. Record after record (‘AstroSamantha’ Cristoforetti was the first Italian astronaut in the crews of the European Space Agency and the first European woman commander of the International Space Station), and with the astronauts also ‘towards infinity and beyond’ Paolo Nespoli, Roberto Vittori, Luca Parmitano, Maurizio Cheli and Umberto Guidoni, space has become a field of research, strategy and excellence for Italy. On the sixtieth anniversary of the launch into orbit of Italy's first satellite, the San Marco 1, by Luigi Broglio, in Federico Guiglia's interview with Paolo Teofilatto, Professor of Flight Mechanics and long-time dean of the School of Aerospace Engineering at La Sapienza University in Rome, the great challenge of the present between the Moon and Mars will be told. And what the results for mankind are of space flights, what the risks are, what the new frontier is.
