by Bénédicte Salvetat Rey

When she was growing up, Sophie Adenot plastered her childhood bedroom with posters of rockets launching from Cape Canaveral.

On Friday, she blasted off from that very launchpad, fulfilling her childhood dream and becoming just the second French woman to fly to space.

Adenot is one of four astronauts now heading towards the International Space Station to replace a crew that was evacuated last month because of an unidentified medical issue.

For the next eight months, the 43-year-old helicopter test pilot will conduct scientific experiments on the football field-sized station 400 kilometres (250 miles) above Earth.

Adenot has been dreaming of this moment since 1996, when she watched on television as France's first woman astronaut Claudie Haignere blasted off towards the Mir space station.

"I was 14 years old and it was a revelation," Adenot recently told a press conference.

"At that moment, I told myself: one day, that will be me." 

Haignere told AFP that Adenot is both her "heir" and a "pioneer" in her own right.

"Sophie is a born astronaut," Haignere added.

After two days of delays, Adenot, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway as well as Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on Friday.

They are scheduled to arrive at the ISS on Saturday, where they will relieve a skeleton crew of three astronauts.

Afghanistan rescue missions

As a teenager growing up in central France, Adenot cut space photos out of magazines and stuck them above her desk.

They were a source of motivation when she was studying maths, "which seemed so far removed from the space adventure I dreamt of", Adenot recently told a podcast.

She would go on to study at prestigious universities including MIT, and work at European aerospace giant Airbus as a helicopter cockpit designer.

Adenot credits her grandfather, a mechanic in France's air force, for giving her a love of "taking things apart and fixing them".

As a helicopter pilot, she completed two tours in Afghanistan, specialising in search and rescue missions.

Adenot then became France's first woman helicopter test pilot in 2018.

"I love adventure, the unknown, facing improbable situations and seeing how we overcome them -- whether as a team or alone," she said.

But while logging 3,000 flight hours and 120 combat missions, Adenot never stopped dreaming of space.

She first applied to be a European Space Agency astronaut in 2008 when she was just 25 -- but was rejected.

However in 2022 she was selected out of 22,000 candidates, and embarked on three years of intense training to get ready for Friday's launch.

It has been a "tsunami" that has completely changed her life, the mother of a teenager has said.

Another member of the ESA's 2022 astronaut class, Belgium's Raphael Liegeois, told AFP he felt "raw emotion" watching Adenot lift off.

Given her military background, Adenot "keeps her cool in all circumstances", Liegeois said.  

But she also has an artistic side, he added, pointing to a "beautiful" poem Adenot posted on Instagram this week.

"I hope she can use this sensitivity to share her experience of the flight," he said.

Michelin-starred cuisine

Adenot will be busy on board the orbiting scientific lab, participating in more than 200 experiments. 

Research will include microgravity's effect on the human body, including measuring how her time in orbit impacts her memory.

She will also test a system that uses artificial intelligence and augmented reality to allow astronauts to carry out their own medical ultrasounds.

But it will not be all work. 

French chef Anne-Sophie Pic, who has 10 Michelin stars, has prepared a menu for Adenot that includes lobster bisque and foie gras.

Adenot will also enjoy some of this vacuum-packed haute-cuisine on her 44th birthday on July 5.

She has also recorded the sounds of birds singing, footsteps crunching on snow and flowing streams to remind her of life back on that blue planet she can see out of the window.