In 1993, at 17 years old, Luca Parmitano left Catania, Sicily, for a year of study in Mission Viejo, California.
His host father in Mission Viejo was a military man, an F-18 navigator, who often took him to air shows. It was there, watching aircraft with a family that wasn’t his own, that a teenage Parmitano first understood what he wanted to do when he grew up. He has since called it, simply, “the beginning of my aeronautical journey.”
The experience never left his résumé, and it never left his sense of who he was. When the European Space Agency considered him for selection to become the pilot for NASA’s Artemis III mission, the international grounding from that year abroad became, in his words, “an ace up his sleeve”.
Parmitano describes his AFS experience as one that made him more independent, more resourceful, and more willing to draw on inner resources he didn’t yet know he had. Facing problems far from home, as a teenager, taught him there is always a solution.
He believes the impact of the AFS experience lands hardest in adolescence, when a person is still, as he puts it, “in a phase of transformation, in a phase of growth and maturation.” His advice to today’s Intercultura students is direct: don’t be afraid of your emotions, don’t be afraid to do what you love, and stay curious about the world.
That openness followed him into orbit. Space exploration, he has said, is an international effort that asks people to set differences aside for a shared goal — not so different from AFS’s mission and vision. Looking down at Earth from space, the word that came to him was harmony. There are no borders up there, he says, “except those created by us men.”
Carrying Intercultura into space
During his first mission, Parmitano made a point of representing Intercultura (AFS Italy) and the intercultural exchange experience. He wore an Intercultura t-shirt aboard the spacecraft and connected from space to greet 500 exchange students on the ground.
In 2015, for AFS’s centennial celebrations in Catania, he’d promised volunteers a video message. He showed up in person instead — surprising the same volunteers who had selected him for his own exchange decades earlier, embracing them, and telling the students gathered: “Intercultura changed my life. Kids, never give up.”
Wanting to return part of what the experience had given him, Parmitano donated the royalties from his first book, “Volare. 166 giorni con @astroluca,” to establish the “Luca Parmitano – Volare” scholarship for Sicilian students in financial need.
The scholarship has already changed lives. Anthony Sigona, 16, from Vittoria, won the first award and spent a year in China, becoming an experience he says taught him to manage anxiety and find patience, and one that led him to medical school in Padua. Erika Maurici, from Paternò, won a later round of the scholarship, also spent her year in China, and now studies Chinese at the University of Siena. Parmitano awarded her scholarship over a video call, having awarded Sigona’s in person in Catania.
Royalties from his newest book, “Camminare tra le stelle” (“Walking Among the Stars”), will fund the next round of scholarships — carrying forward what he describes as a mission to change the world one person at a time.
Today, Parmitano has been named pilot of NASA’s Artemis III mission — the first European ever assigned to an Artemis crew.
From a host family’s driveway in Mission Viejo to the edge of the Moon, the throughline hasn’t changed. As Parmitano told a room of students in Catania: “Intercultura changed my life. Kids, never give up.”