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....

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