Do I really have what it takes to go into orbit with Tim Peake?
Tom Ough is put through basic space training by the British astronaut, and leaves walking on air...
Iknow Tim Peake is just being nice. But, if it isn’t working! He and I have spent an hour and a half together at the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne so that he, a veteran of six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS), can teach me, an idiot who flew to the wrong German city and had to catch an emergency inter-city train to reach the centre on time, how to be an astronaut.
After testing me on six essential skills, Peake delivers his verdict. Would he like to go to space with me? “I’d love to, yeah!” he says. “I think it would be an awful lot of fun.”
If only we were in space already, so that no one could hear me squeal.
Of course, Major Peake, to give the former Air Corps officer his military title, went through a slightly stiffer selection process to be chosen from more than 8,400 candidates for one of six places in 2009.
Having retired from an 18-year military career, the Afghanistan veteran moved his wife and son (they now have two) to Cologne, where he and his five classmates underwent 14 months’ basic astronaut training: including scientific, engineering and medical skills, orbital mechanics, space law and how to speak Russian.
Another two years of advanced training saw them learn how to spacewalk and mimic space station conditions by living in a cramped underwater laboratory.
Eventually, on December 15 2015, Peake became the seventh Briton in space, the second Tim (beaten by Nasa’s Tim Kopra) and, by his estimation, the first ginger.
During his 185 days in orbit, he took part in more than 250 scientific experiments, ran the London Marathon on the ISS’S treadmill, reached 1.6million schoolchildren with his outreach programme, and conducted a successful spacewalk, before returning to Earth on June 18 2016 to continue life at the EAC.
He’s been working on a side project, too: a book written in conjunction with the European Space Agency, called The Astronaut Selection Test: Do You Have What It Takes for Space?. I’d come to the EAC – a nondescript, factory-like building near Cologne Airport – to find out.
The big giveaways are inside: display cabinets full of spacesuits, a 10ft ISS replica and a capsule that’s just begging to be leapt inside of.
Peake takes me to a hangar that contains a swimming pool in which trainees simulate weightlessness. My first task is seemingly more mundane: doing a jigsaw in space gloves.
“It’s very difficult for us to manage our tools and equipment outside the space station, and learning how to grip is really important,” Peake says. I suddenly have the fine motor skills of a hippo. Too kind to dwell on my failures, Peake puts me in a large, heavy harness that resembles the tool-bearing parts of a space suit. As if going for a spacewalk, he has me practise clipping myself (still wearing space gloves) on to the metal wire that would keep me tied to the space station. I amuse myself, if not Peake, by pretending to float away.
I beg him to show me the big white ISS module. Peake takes me inside one of the capsules and the bunk beds. There’s no spare surface without some kind of storage or wiring beneath it.
Then some mental tests, strings of numbers that I have to repeat backwards, before I use a simulator to dock an incoming craft to the Space Station with the help of a robotic arm.
He praises my memory and coordination, but we both know there’s a little more to his years of intensive training. And even that can only take you so far. “It cannot prepare you for the exhilaration of a rocket launch,” he says, “or the thrill, the excitement, the anticipation of the spacewalk.”
What they ultimately look for, he says, is people they’d like to go to space with: “That’s the main thing – that you know someone can be trusted and that they’re somebody you can have fun with.”
I know he’s being generous, but I’m still thrilled at his suggestion that I’d make the grade. Time to learn Russian.