Ground Control to Major Tim

The UK's first ever astronaut

When Major Timothy Peake was announced as Britain's first official astronaut in Paris on May 20th, he'd only known about it himself for 48 hours. “I was stunned and in shock,” he says.

While four Britons have flown in space before, one joined a Russian mission and the other three took U.S. citizenship to fly with NASA. Peake was among the European Space Agency’s newest six European recruits, chosen to train as astronauts from thousands in a rigorous selection process. And Peake is flying the flag for the UK, which has never before had a national ambassador in space: Michael Foale, probably the most recognisable British astronaut, went up only with joint U.S. citizenship.

To call Peake grounded would surely be an inappropriate term for a budding astronaut, but he is certainly taking the new-found media attention in his stride, with a remarkable ability to juggle his current job as an army test pilot, his family (he has a wife and six month old son), and plans for his upcoming training.

Training may be the wrong word. In truth, what the ESA will put him through, lasting three and a half years, makes that of even the most fanatical endurance athlete rather tame in comparison. “We’ll go through 18-month ‘basic astronaut training’,” explains Tim. It seems safe to assume that ignorance is bliss in terms of the particulars, and indeed details are, so far, rather vague: “I’m not 100% sure what it will entail – I think a number of things. We have to become fluent in Russian at some point as it's the second international language on the space station after English. We’ll also have to become experts on the space station itself – the various laboratories and life support systems.”

It seems like an impressive hybrid of a linguistic Masters degree and engineering professorship condensed into a time frame at which most people would balk. And the list doesn't end there. Peake guesses they might throw some hardcore physics in there too: “There’ll be some academic training – navigation, orbital mechanics”. But he seems grateful for ESA’s inflated definition of ‘basic’, hoping that it will prove a bit of a safety blanket in the deep unknown.

“Basically, you’re a little bit on your own when you’re up there. There’s an awful lot of support from ground control, but to be prepared – like on an aircraft – you have to know the space station extremely well in order to deal with the unexpected. I don’t think anything can fully prepare you, but the training is so in depth, you’re as ready as you can be.” At the mention of the aircraft I bring our discussion back down to earth – kind of. Tim currently serves as an army test pilot – the training of which he expects will prove helpful: “As a test pilot you manage risk constantly, you’re trained to approach problems. You’re taught ‘crew resource management’ – which is basically teamwork in an aviation environment – which I think will prove enormously helpful.”

On debating the renewed interest in space – what with the highly publicised plans to send man back to the moon, and perhaps to Mars – Peake's passion for the subject is demonstrable in his already extensive expertise. “The Apollo missions were completed in ’72, and there was a lack of funding or political will to immediately take that further with human exploration... efforts were focused on the International Space Station,” he says. “And something which doesn’t get much media attention – there’s been an enormous amount of robotic activity.”

All this seems far away from the concept of human space travel; far away from Branson’s Virgin Galactic visions, but Tim explains that these prolonged, ongoing efforts, have paved the way for the more foreseeable future, the future which becomes tangible to the imagination, and above all the future which will see man in space once again. Rather than a world of robots and machines, space has become once again become human – the ultimate in exploration.

“All that’s been going on has gradually gained in momentum. The interest now is because things are in a time frame that people can imagine and grasp: 2020 to the moon, 2030 a manned Mars mission... People are thinking ‘that’s not too far away now’. If we’re talking about the next century, people just switch off.”

So might Peake be involved in the missions he mentions? “There’s a possibility that one of the European astronauts could be involved in one of the next moon landings – that’s definitely within my time frame,” he says. “Man to Mars is probably outside my career – I’ll probably be retiring. But I’ll hopefully see the space station through to the end of its life in 2020/5 – there are likely to be many valuable missions yet to be done in the station, something I’ll be primarily training for.”

Is the prospect, now that it's sinking in, provoking any doubts? “Absolutely none from the professional point of view”, says Peake without hesitation. “I’m just working through the logistics of getting the family sorted and moved to Cologne and settled in so I can start training. But no, no doubts, I’m thoroughly looking forward to the prospect of getting into space.

“I’ve been reading astronaut biographies”, says Peake, “and as much as you train and train, they all say that nothing can prepare you for the feeling of weightlessness, and the prospect of actually looking back at the earth.” And with that, he rushes off to an impromptu plane landing – just an average day for the Major.