When Facebook Sages Lecture Astronauts on How Space Works

Spoiler: the guy with 366 days in orbit might just know more than your cousin’s WhatsApp group

Let me tell you something funny.

A man spent 366 days floating above your head ]. He logged 33 hours of spacewalks, repaired the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer with cooling lines nobody had ever cut in orbit before , commanded the International Space Station, and on June 9, 2026, NASA announced him as the pilot of Artemis III . His name is Luca Parmitano.

And somewhere in a poorly lit kitchen in the Italian provinces, a guy with crumbs on his t-shirt is typing — caps lock proudly engaged — that Parmitano is “a clown.”

I’m Gerd, writing to you from Rimini, and I want to say upfront: at FreeAstroScience, we love simplifying complex science for everyone. That’s our job. But today I’m not here to simplify. Today I’m here to laugh. Politely. Sarcastically. With the warm affection one reserves for the truly committed amateur.

The Curriculum Showdown Nobody Asked For

Let’s lay the cards on the table, shall we?

In the left corner: an Italian Air Force Colonel, test pilot trained at EPNER in France, qualified on more than 20 types of military aircraft, with over 2,000 flight hours. Holder of a master’s in political sciences from Naples Federico II, plus another in experimental flight test engineering from ISAE in Toulouse. Decorated with the Silver Medal of Aeronautic Valor for landing a damaged AMX after a bird strike . He even has an asteroid named after him — 37627 Lucaparmitano — because regular honours weren’t enough.

In the right corner: a bloke who watched three YouTube videos at 1.5x speed and once read half a Telegram post.

The match is, as they say in Rimini, un filo squilibrato. A tad uneven.

“I Did My Own Research”

Ah, the war cry of our age.

Research, apparently, now consists of scrolling reels at 2 a.m. while eating leftover pizza. Meanwhile, Parmitano — the actual researcher — was busy partnering with a 15-year-old mentee named Abigail Harrison to share his Expedition 36 mission with young people online. Imagine that: an astronaut who teaches instead of lectures.

He even DJ’d a set from the ISS for a music festival in Ibiza on 13 August 2019 — the first DJ in space. Your conspiracy uncle has never DJ’d anything except family arguments at Christmas dinner.

The smell of espresso fills my desk as I write this, and I keep wondering: where does the confidence come from? Not the curiosity. Curiosity is beautiful, it’s the engine of every scientist I admire. I mean the arrogance. The chest-puffed certainty of explaining orbital mechanics to a man who has, you know, been in orbit.

A Small, Inconvenient Detail About Mockery

Here’s where I have to be honest with you, even though it ruins my fun.

Researchers who study disinformation warn that mocking conspiracy theorists often backfires. Sharing the absurdity, even sarcastically, spreads the absurdity . The information ecosystem doesn’t care about your intentions — every retweet, every snarky reply, pings the message to new audiences and gives bad-faith actors more fuel. Memes that ridicule beliefs can even reinforce the very “us vs them” frame that conspiracy thinking thrives on.

So yes, I’m being sarcastic in this article. I’m aware of the irony. But sarcasm aimed at the behaviour, not the human being underneath it, is — I think — still fair game. People who deny reality have feelings and reasons too . They were taught somewhere that distrust equals intelligence. They weren’t born this way.

The frustration is real, though. And it deserves a name.

The Real Problem Isn’t Ignorance

Ignorance is fixable. I was ignorant of orbital mechanics until I studied astronomy in Bologna. I was ignorant of quantum field theory until Milan. Ignorance is just a starting point — every astronomer, every physicist, every kid with a telescope began there.

What’s not fixable with a textbook is arrogance dressed up as scepticism.

True scepticism asks questions and follows evidence. Fake scepticism rejects evidence the moment it contradicts a feeling. True scepticism would look at Parmitano’s six EVAs totalling 33 hours and 9 minutes and say, “Wow, tell me more about how cooling lines work in vacuum.” Fake scepticism looks at the same data and says, “Bro, the Moon is a hologram.”

One of these positions builds James Webb telescopes. The other builds Facebook comment threads.

What Parmitano’s Life Actually Teaches Us

Here’s the thing the Awakened Ones miss when they sneer at scientists: Parmitano’s career is the opposite of a shortcut. He didn’t wake up one morning a colonel. He spent years in the 13th Squadron at Amendola flying AMX jets, then qualified as a test pilot in 2007, then was selected by ESA in 2009, then trained as a “cavenaut” in 2014, then as an aquanaut commanding NEEMO 20 in 2015, then PANGAEA in 2016. Decade after decade. Discipline after discipline.

That’s the boring secret of every “elite” he’s accused of belonging to. They studied. They worked. They failed. They tried again.

Even his second spacewalk in 2013 — the one where his helmet started filling with water and he nearly drowned in orbit — didn’t push him out of the field. He came back. He led Expedition 61. He fixed the AMS. Never give up isn’t a poster slogan; it’s a job description.

A Quiet Word, From One Wheelchair to a Keyboard

I’ve spent my life around people who thought my body meant my mind didn’t count. I learned early that credentials matter — not as trophies, but as evidence that you’ve put in the hours when nobody was clapping.

When someone with zero training sneers at a man who almost drowned inside a spacesuit while repairing humanity’s instruments above the atmosphere, what they’re really saying is: I refuse to admit anyone has worked harder than me.

That’s not awakening. That’s a nap with extra steps.

Looking Up, Not Down

Artemis III is coming. Parmitano will fly as pilot alongside Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas . Italy may, for the first time, have a citizen heading toward the Moon’s neighbourhood — a real one, made of regolith and silence, not the cardboard one your conspiracy uncle is convinced exists in a Hollywood basement.

While he trains, the Awakened Ones will keep typing. That’s fine. The universe is generous enough to hold both kinds of people.

But when those bootprints appear on lunar dust in the next few years, I’ll remember this article. And I’ll raise an espresso here in Rimini to the man who earned his place — and a quiet, almost-affectionate smirk to the brigade who’ll insist, against all photons, that it never happened.

Keep looking up. The view is better from there.

— Gerd, FreeAstroScience