“You don’t need a wheelchair in zero gravity”

An 11-year-old wheelchair-bound Russian girl wrote a letter to the cosmonauts on the ISS saying she dreams of finding herself in zero gravity because then she wouldn’t need a wheelchair.

Dana Novikova, from a small town near Moscow, put the message into a mailbox the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos opened in the Space Exploration Museum.The school girl wrote that she only has excellent marks, learns English and also practices playing a synthesizer. “I have known for a long time that there are cosmonauts in space and that the first one was Yury Gagarin,” she said in the letter.Her dream has always been “to get acquainted with a real cosmonaut”. And it has already come true – she met retired cosmonaut Aleksandr Lazutkin, who is now the deputy director of the Space Exploration Museum. He gave her presents and showed her around the museum.