Mr. Clervoy left our lonely planet three times- twice on the Atlantis shuttle, and once on Discovery- and still cannot get used to our (boring?) ordinary gravity. So he became an entrepreneur. He foundedNovespace, a French company specialized in weightless flights on its very own Airbus A300 (watch the amazing video here). And he loves floating on it.

 

You might think he always wanted to be an astronaut. But in 1969, when he watched Man walk on the moon, he told his teacher he found his dreamjob and he remembers her innocently replying 'son, being an astronaut, by the time you'll be grown up, won't be a career anymore, it will be a regular weekend pastime. You need to get yourself a real job'. 

 

 

Ok, going to the moon for upcoming Valentine's Day may not be totally possible (some 5 space tourists paid a $20 million ticket to reach the International Space Station), but her vision at least had the credit of being ambitious. 

 

And today, 50 years later, Clervoy is doing everything possible to get more and more men and women into space. 

 

His advice on innovation? "We astronauts sometimes feel like we need to connect with common usages, such as social networking. Our ESA (the European NASA) astronauts now tweet during their flight. What's even more interesting is that we don't only look for innovation; space agencies need to predict up to 20 years ahead future innovating uses in order to launch our programs, especially in the TelCo sector. We pre-innovate". 

Think you could tweet from a cooler place? The challenge is yours.