Aujourd'hui le soleil se lève seize fois

Autobiographical account by Patrick Baudry, the second Frenchman in space, as told to journalist Benoît Fraisse. The first part retraces his African childhood, his training as a fighter and then test pilot, and his selection as a CNES astronaut in 1980. The second part recounts his training at Star City (USSR) and in Houston, the cancelled 51-E mission, and his eight-day flight aboard Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-51-G, June 1985), during which he ran French biomedical experiments. Six technical appendices describe the shuttle's flight phases, Franco-American space cooperation, the flight chronology, the Hermès spaceplane and the Ariane 5 launcher.