From the vantage point of the International Space Station, a French astronaut has offered a grounded reckoning with one of spaceflight's most humbling truths: ambition and readiness are not the same thing. Europe's effort to build its own spacesuit — to free itself from dependence on Russian and American technology for the perilous act of stepping outside a spacecraft — is real and progressing, but the astronaut's assessment makes clear that the distance between a promising prototype and a life-sustaining tool remains vast. In the long arc of human spaceflight, this moment is less a setback th