Astronaut candidate doctor wants to see Portugal further in the space sector
After returning from Hamburg, where he was one of 23,500 candidates for physical and cognitive benefits to become an astronaut, the Porto physician, Pedro Caetano, tells Agência Lusa that the difference between Portugal and other European countries such as Spain, Italy or Germany became clear. the chances of success in a demanding selection process.
The 34-year-old doctor makes a comparison with the Olympic Games, where more investment means better preparation and better results.
“I felt, quite honestly, a bit of an amateur among professionals because my colleagues [de outros países] they prepared differently, they had the time and they are people, who, due to the history and ‘background’ of their sectors in the space sector, countries that already have astronauts and investment in the space sector that provided them with excellent conditions to move forward ” , he said.
Pedro Caetano claims to be in the competition “more for the route than the relevant one of being an astronaut”.
“For me, being there and taking these exams and realizing what is needed is my goal. It wasn’t discouraging, but we have to think it’s forward and medium / long term. It’s not that we’re left out, for sure there are very successful Portuguese in the race for one of the few astronaut places in the European Space Agency”, he defended.
For this, Portugal should “already start thinking about the next decade”, taking advantage of the fact that there has been a Portuguese Space Agency since 2017 to understand how to help “future candidates, who are currently in college, or taking the their master’s or doctorate degrees and that in ten years’ time they may be good candidates “in the various specialties required.
In Hamburg, Pedro Caetano was included in a group of ten candidates and considers the experience “spectacular, with immense sharing among all”.
“You could see that we think we know how to do this or that with our curriculum, but that there are always people who are even more qualified and have better conditions. In this case, you could also see that the level of investment in the countries is very different “he reinforced.
Before leaving, he had already passed through Pedro Caetano a good part of the 321 Portuguese who are in the race for space.
As head of the aeronautical medicine unit at Hospital CUF do Porto, where he performs “medical assessment and certification of pilots, on-board personnel and air transport drivers”, he was also responsible for giving Portuguese candidates a medical certificate to ensure that they were able to move on to the next stage of the competition.
That was where the idea of also being a candidate arose, he said, taking advantage of his specialization in an area that is not practiced in Portugal: aerospace medicine, for which he was trained in 2014 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, in the American state of Texas and in 2019, no ESA’s European astronaut training center in Cologne, Germany.
“Every year I go to colleges and explain what aerospace medicine is, because it’s a very different area from regular medicine. It’s like seeing medicine in reverse, because we think of traditional medicine in terms of people with morbidities, but here we see people who they are in excellent physical condition and are placed in the most adverse and extreme environment that exists,” they point out.
In the competition that the European agency opened in 2021, the first since 2010 and a year later than expected because of the covid-19 pandemic, a more recent phase will select around five percent of candidates for the next stage.
As for the tests, candidates are obliged not to reveal too much about concrete aspects.
“These are cognitive, math, physics, logic, memorization tests, which require quick answers, thoughts and decisions. Basically, they go through a lot of visual and auditory memory, to see if a person responds correctly and a lot quick to complex problems,” he says.
“There were races that went very well for me and I was happy with how I completed it, others went less well but that’s normal. It’s very difficult for someone to be amazing in all of them, around 12”, he recognizes.
The aim is also to create a good dynamic between groups of candidates, since being an astronaut also requires social resources, coexistence and teamwork.
“Someone who is in an area more than physics, or even mechanical engineering or aerospace may have some advantages in some tests, there are some that are almost flight simulation, with instruments such as altimeters, speedometers in which pilots will be more comfortable”, added.
“Unfortunately, the tests didn’t focus much on the medical part, so I didn’t have much of an advantage over my colleagues,” he admitted.
Saying that he is waiting for January “with all the patience, without great ‘stress’ or anxiety”, Pedro Caetano says he is available to contribute, with his specialized training, so that “in the future, Portugal will have a more distributed and more ‘ in the middle’ of what it has now, in which it is a peripheral country”.