Málaga student experiences weightlessness in Spanish space agency program

Lucía Torres was seventeen when she floated through the cabin of an Airbus A310, her hair suspended around her head like a halo, her body obeying no law but the physics of free fall. She had won a place in Spain's first-ever 'Astronaut for a Day' program, a government initiative designed to pull young people toward careers in science and engineering by letting them taste, however briefly, what it feels like to leave the earth behind.

Nearly four hundred students applied. Thirty were chosen—twenty-five high school seniors and five university undergraduates—after passing academic tests, medical exams, and interviews. Lucía, a second-year student in technological studies at Novaschool Añoreta in Málaga, was among them. The week before her flight, she and the other selected students lived at the General Air and Space Academy in San Javier, Murcia, a military installation that turned out to be far less forbidding than she expected. The officers and instructors were warm, she recalls. They made the teenagers feel like part of something larger than themselves.

The days began early. There was physical training alongside academy cadets, then lectures on how the Spanish Space Agency—created just three years earlier—fits into European space projects. Scientists and engineers explained how a space mission is born, how it takes years to move from concept to launch, how different organizations have to align their work like gears in a machine. Lucía, who loves engineering and aeronautics, found herself especially moved by a visit to flight simulators and training aircraft. When she climbed into a Pilatus plane, she felt like a child again, marveling at how things work.

But the moment that stayed with her most vividly was meeting the two Spanish astronauts from the European Space Agency: Pablo Álvarez and Sara García. They told the students that in recent years they had lived ten different lives. That phrase crystallized something for Lucía about what it means to dedicate yourself to space. "They make everything seem possible," she said. She wants to study mechanical engineering next year, here in Málaga, and that conversation with them felt like permission.

The night before the parabolic flight, she barely slept. The next morning, she and the other students boarded the Novespace A310, a French aircraft designed specifically to create weightlessness. The plane climbs steeply, then falls in a controlled arc—a maneuver called a parabola. For twenty to twenty-five seconds during each arc, the aircraft and everyone inside it fall together, and gravity vanishes. The plane completed sixteen of these maneuvers that day. Thirteen created zero gravity. Three simulated the gravity of Mars, where Lucía and her classmates did one-handed push-ups and felt, briefly, invincible.

During the zero-gravity parabolas, the students performed experiments: they floated from one end of the cabin to the other, formed human chains, watched water droplets turn into perfect spheres suspended in air. They walked on the ceiling. The only way to know which way was up was to look for the lights. With just a finger's push, Lucía could propel herself across the entire cabin. She remembers one image with absolute clarity: a circle of teenagers floating slowly around Sara García and Pablo Álvarez, their hair drifting, their bodies weightless, rotating together in the middle of the cabin like planets in their own small system.

After the flight, the thirty students received diplomas naming them Space Ambassadors of the Spanish Space Agency. They will spend the next year visiting schools, talking to other young people about what they experienced, trying to kindle the same spark that was lit in them. Lucía, who loves speaking in public, said the prospect fills her with joy. She returned home this week, still processing what happened. She had watched videos of parabolic flights before, thought she knew what to expect. But knowing and experiencing are not the same thing. "If you live it with enthusiasm," she said, "it stays with you forever."