Engineer, helicopter pilot and now astronaut: who is Sophie Adenot, this former Isae-Supaero student?

The European Space Agency (ESA) now has five new recruits in its ranks, including a Frenchwoman, Sophie Adenot. She is the second French woman to become an astronaut, after Claudie Haigneré who carried out two missions in space in 1996 and 2001. Selected in 2022 from 22,500 applicants, these five astronaut candidates began their basic training in April 2023 at the Center European Union of Astronauts in Cologne, Germany.

For a year, they completed a training program covering essential skills, such as spacecraft systems, spacewalks, flight engineering, robotics and life support systems, as well as training in survival and medicine. With their diploma in hand, they will now move on to mission-specific training phases, paving the way for future missions to the International Space Station (ISS). Sophie Adenot will go to Houston to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

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Studies in Toulouse and 3,000 hours of helicopter flight under the clock

Born in Burgundy in 1982, Sophie Adenot gets her passion for aeronautics and space from her grandfather, a mechanic in the Air Force. She began her engineering studies at ISAE-Supaero in Toulouse in the specialty “flight dynamics of spacecraft and aircraft”. She continued with a “Master of Science” at the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

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Her professional career began at Airbus Helicopters as an engineer in the design office. She worked there for a year during which she designed helicopter cockpits. She joined the Air Force. After obtaining her helicopter pilot’s license, Sophie Adenot carried out search and rescue and then presidential transport missions for fifteen years.

In 2019, she became the first female helicopter test pilot in France. She has more than 3,000 flight hours on 22 types of helicopters. An experienced parachutist, Sophie is also a light aircraft and glider pilot. She speaks four foreign languages: German, Spanish, Russian and of course English, essential for her future space missions.