After many years of friendship, an Agreement was formalized between Michael López-Alegría and zero2infinity. The former NASA astronaut will advise the company in both technical and business matters.
Michael López-Alegría is a Spanish-American astronaut who flew to space four times and performed ten spacewalks. After retiring from NASA in 2012, he became President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation in Washington, DC. His expertise in both American and Russian space programs will be an important asset in establishing human space travel in Europe. López-Alegría will put his years of experience and extensive knowledge in the field of commercial spaceflight to the service of zero2infinity, supporting its objectives and dreams of sustainable, near-space access for scientists, passengers and payloads.
One of the main objectives of zero2infinity’s project “bloon”, a manned high-altitude balloon, is to give the overview effect to the people flying it. During a Google hangout organized by zero2infinity on March 5th, 2012 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYnVGVvz05o), about this emotional shift in perspective that is known as the “overview effect,” Lopez-Alegria said: “The Earth is covered by the atmosphere, which is analogous to the skin of an apple, that is pretty thin. Even in a balloon flight, you’d be outside this boundary just about; you’d be able to perceive what that’s like, and that just in itself, with the curvature and the blackness of the sky, will give a very strong sense of the bigger picture”.
