In his new book, journalist and author Marc Dana tells the story of a young girl who dreamed big, worked hard, and went on to become the second French woman in space in 25 years.
Astronaut Sophie Adenot is part of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission that currently circles 400 km above the Earth, and it is easy to wonder if she reflects on her extraordinary path that took her from her native Burgundy to outer space. All thanks to her quiet audacity from an early age: while other teenagers plastered the walls of their rooms with pop stars, she stuck up posters of rockets, dreamed big despite self-doubt, doggedly pursued her ambition to get an education in aeronautics and space science, underwent gruelling military flight training, and willed herself from a seat on helicopter test flights to one on the ISS.
Photo © Natja Igney
In his biography Sophie Adenot, de la Terre aux étoiles (Éditions du Rocher, February 2026), French author and journalist Marc Dana captures the essence of the second French woman astronaut, not as a list of qualifications, but to show the inner drive of a woman who turned early stargazing into a SpaceX launch pad.
If someone is well placed to chronicle Sophie Adenot’s career, it is Marc Dana, who writes from the centre of the French space world. A France Télévisions grand reporter specialised in space and aviation, he has spent decades alongside the pilots, engineers, and agency chiefs who shape missions like Crew-12, small wonder, as his own father is an ESA engineer and Ariane 1–5 pioneer. He followed Sophie’s story for years. He uses his storytelling talent to make indispensable technical jargon palatable and accessible to a wide audience as the narrative slowly unfolds from an intimate life story to the history of space travel. Meticulously researched, it draws on exclusive interviews and unpublished archives, organised into 14 chapters that follow Adenot’s inner journey as much as her outer one, her doubts, her mentors, and the mental discipline she built through years of high-stakes military flying.
Femmes de science – Claudie Haigneré; via Wikimedia Commons, link; by Pierre-Yves Beaudouin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
The preface was written by Claudie Haigneré (pictured above), a poignant choice. She was the first French woman in space, participating in several missions between 1996 and 2001. And it was watching Haigneré lift off for Mir on the family television in 1996 that lit the fuse for the then 14-year-old Sophie Adenot. Little did she know then that 30 years later, she would become the second French woman to follow in her predecessor’s footsteps. The ambition was never the problem, as Adenot has said herself, what took years was the self-confidence to believe that each audacious next step was genuinely available to her.
The career path of an ISS astronaut is not for the faint of heart: in Sophie’s case, it meant earning her way up to the rank of colonel in the French Air Force, two deployments in Afghanistan, a first ESA rejection in 2008, and a determination to go deeper into technical aviation rather than away from it. In 2018, she became the first woman in French military history to qualify as a helicopter test pilot. She applied to ESA again in 2021, one of 22,500 candidates, and was one of five selected. And finally, 25 years after Claudie Haigneré, Sophie became the second French woman to go to space.
Amid France’s elite aerospace circles, her story probes a stark truth: exceptional women must often clear twice the hurdles to touch the same stars. In comparison, Thomas Pesquet, France’s most celebrated astronaut, flew to the ISS in 2016 and commanded it in 2021; his career before ESA was built in commercial aviation, a less arduous route. Without diminishing Pesquet’s accomplishments in any way, Sophie’s thorny road says as much about her excellence and persistence as it says about how slowly elite technical fields have opened to women in France.
Courtesy Sophie Adenot on Instagram
But, as Dana shows, Sophie Adenot is anything but a geek. The affable 43-year-old may have her head in the clouds, literally speaking, but she remains firmly rooted on terra firma. Her upbringing in a middle-class family instilled solid values in her. She is married to a fellow aerospace engineer and is the mother of a son who is now close to her own age when she discovered the opportunities space could hold. Multilingual, an outdoor enthusiast, and a yoga teacher, she is much more the “young, friendly neighbour next door” than the cold-nosed scientist.
When describing what she most looks forward to on her return, she talks about smell, rain-soaked soil, ocean salt, things that filtered station air cannot replicate. She has also recorded sounds of birds singing, footsteps crunching on snow, and flowing streams to remind her of Earth during the mission.
Photo via NASA HQ PHOTO on Flickr; licenced under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
She does pull her weight in space, though, serving as crew specialist for both Columbus, the European laboratory module, and Kibo, the Japanese science module, contributing to around 200 experiments covering human physiology, climate research, and technology for future Moon and Mars missions, including research on microgravity’s effects on memory and testing an AI-assisted ultrasound system allowing astronauts to perform their own medical diagnoses. Her planned nine-month stay on the ISS is set to be the longest for any European astronaut.
Haigneré has long spoken of her responsibility towards the women who come after her, framing it as a question she asks herself: not what kind of Earth we will leave to our children, but what kind of children we will leave to the Earth. Of the eleven French people who have reached space, nine have been men and two have been women, a generation apart. Being part of such a small community as astronauts means being suspended in a strange place between the past and the future, the known and the unknown, the crew and the self. And above all it means serving as a role model. Her preface expresses her respect for Sophie’s fearlessness:
Dear Sophie,
Writing these words, I feel a singular joy, that of a former astronaut who sees, thirty years later, another European woman launching into space, carried by the same inner fire, the same drive, but also a light that is uniquely yours. This emotion is no doubt that of transmission, but also that of a new momentum resolutely turned towards the future. You are both an heir and a trailblazer. You are part of a lineage, but you extend it with grace and determination. You are free. You repeat nothing: you invent your own path with generosity and boldness. Your journey is as impressive as it is inspiring…”
— Claudie Haigneré
Dana’s book is one of those small gems that at first glance seems to address a niche audience, until we realise that we all carry a little bit of Sophie Adenot in us. We all dreamed the impossible dream at some time, we were all kids who believed in our superpowers, we all doubted our abilities at one time or another… it is just that some of us are more willing to push past apparent limits and reach heights that inspire a whole new generation, like Claudie did for Sophie, like Sophie will do for another kid. The choice is always ours. Ad Astra!
Sophie Adenot, de la Terre aux étoiles, le destin hors norme d’une astronaute française, by Marc Dana, preface by Claudie Haigneré. Éditions du Rocher, February 2026. 304 pages, €19.90
Sophie Adenot by Sebastiaan ter Burg from Utrecht, The Netherlands – link, licenced under CC BY 2.0, link
PHOTO CREDITS
- Lead image Hugo Dana (cropped)
- All other images as credited
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