Everywhere in the sky, despite not expecting it, there are testimonies of Italian excellence in technology: with the first mission of the new Artemis program directed towards the Moon or with the first experiment of planetary protection in history, 12 million kilometers above our heads; with the images of the collision between NASA’s Dart probe, and the asteroid Dimorphos, but also in the solar sails, thin as butterfly wings, of the Alpha nanosatellite, launched by the Vega C rocket last July, Italian technology has long excelled: suffice to say that, between April 12, 1981 and July 21, 2011, the Space Shuttle was the protagonist of 135 missions. Italy was involved 62 times, including the last one: during the Sts-135, the International Space Station was hooked up by the NASA shuttle to the multipurpose logistics module "Raphael", which was designed by the Italian Space Agency and made by the then Alenia Space, now known as Thales Alenia Space. Among astronauts, satellites, high-quality components, scientific experiments, orbiting habitats and launchers - just like the Vega C rocket, largely built by Avio in Colleferro - Italian excellence is expressed on the entire space chain, which is a merit common to few, very few countries. Added to this is the skills development since 1964, five years before Neil Armstrong's small, gigantic step on the Moon: at the time, Italy, was the third country (after the Soviet Union and the United States) to create and ship with its own personnel an object beyond the atmosphere, the glorious satellite San Marco 1. Of course, it would be imprudent to speak of Italy as a space power. However, the fact remains that Italian space capability stands out among the best. This is evidenced not only by the companies in the sector, which are often leaders in their segment, from Thales Alenia Space (manufacturing) to Telespazio (management of telecommunications and satellite services), but also companies born in areas apparently unaware of extraterrestrial evolutions. There are also small and medium-sized enterprises capable of responding to the new space-based or space-oriented paradigms: there are those who build solar sails to push probes of a kilogram six thousand kilometers away from the Earth (the NPC Spacemind of Imola), those who, starting from a youthful passion for astronomy, today produce complex optomechanical instruments for agencies around the world (Star Workshop of Sarcedo), those who develop artificial intelligence for the autonomy of the probes, or those who cook and package delicacies capable of resisting months before being consumed by astronauts in orbit (the Tiberino 1888 of Bari, or the Turin-based Altec).
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