MAJOR TIM PEAKE
The European Space Agency astronaut speaks to How It Works about his time on the International Space Station, life in the universe and careers in space
“It could be catastrophic if it hit the space station. It could destroy it”
As a test pilot in the British Army Air Corps, Major Tim Peake’s service was star-studded. Anyone would have excused him if he had rested on his laurels when he retired in 2009, but it was only then that his career took off – literally. He became the first British person to visit the ISS in 2015 after being selected for the ESA’S astronaut training program. He was the first British person to perform a spacewalk outside the ISS, and was the first man to run a marathon in space – on a treadmill, of course.
What was your first thought as you left Earth’s atmosphere?
The first thought - I guess it’s kind of relief, that you made it safely. Not that we expected it to go wrong, but actually there are many delays and problems. The first thought as you make it into orbit is a look between the crew members to think ‘yes, we’re here. We made it’. And then it’s a look outside the window. Absolutely phenomenal, that view of Earth from space. And certainly as a rookie astronaut looking at it for the first time is amazing. The sense of speed is unbelievable during third stage, as the rocket is getting you up to 27,500 kilometres [17,088 miles] per hour – ten times the speed of a bullet. And you don’t notice that the first couple of stages in launch are all about power acceleration. It’s about 9 million horsepower, doing four gs of acceleration, so eight minutes and 48 seconds is a long launch period. But the latter stage is just about acceleration getting knocked off orbital velocity. So when you take that first look outside the window, you can’t believe how fast you’re covering the planet’s surface.
Were you able to see London’s M25 motorway from space?
What’s interesting is nighttime. You see all of the lights of human habitation, so yes, you see the M25 at night, but you don’t see it in the daytime. It’s startling, the difference between day and night. In daytime it’s incredibly hard to see any signs of human habitation as you look at planet Earth. If you’re passing by, it might escape you that there’s any human life down there at all. But at night it’s so obvious to see.
What was the coolest experiment you carried out in space?
There are loads of really cool experiments. We’re looking at metal alloys, which are really cool. We also did some combustion experiments.
Normally we don’t like to set fire to things in space, but we were actually looking at how a flame propagates in a weightless environment. This is looking at combustion techniques which could help our efficiency of combustion engines down on Earth, so that was a really exciting experiment. Another one we used was using the air lock to actually reduce the pressure, looking at airway inflammation. This is something that’s going to help asthma sufferers back down here on Earth. And we had to go to quite a low pressure in the airlock. That was actually the first time we’d used the airlock as an experiment.
Why did Luca Parmitano’s spacesuit fill up with water?
That’s a question that we pondered for a long time. It’s a serious incident, so the suit had to be sent back down to Earth, where it was stripped down and analysed. It was a component separator that had failed, where we carry a lot of water in the spacesuit that’s used for our cooling system. Interestingly, we don’t have any heaters. A lot of the thermal extremes on a spacewalk are quite remarkable. You go from 150 degrees Celsius in the Sun to -150 degrees Celsius in the shade – you can have one arm working in the shade and one arm working in the Sun – and your suit’s having to deal with that temperature differential, so we carry a lot of water. Water is designed to keep us cool, and our body heat is the only thing that generates the heat to keep us warm. That water system goes into a block that’s exposed to the vacuum, freezes and forms an ice block. And that ice block there is how the water then runs across the ice bath and keeps us cool. That water-cooling system should never get into the ventilation system. But there’s a part there that removes the moisture from the air that we’re breathing out, and that broke. Basically, water from the cooling system was being pumped directly into the ventilation system, and the ventilation system’s exit point is to the back of the head, so it was coming straight into the helmet. Now the maintenance is done much more routinely and much more regularly.
Is there anything you’ve learned from travelling in space about what humankind is doing to the planet?
Interestingly, when you go to space over a six-month period, it’s hard for us to see any long-term impacts of climate change. But when you see the photographs that we’ve been taking over 20 years from the space station, you can see clear evidence of the impact that we’re having. You can see evidence of climate change in terms of the volume of ice in the Antarctic, and the Arctic as well. You can see mass areas of deforestation, and you can see glacial retreat. And what we do see on the space station routinely, when we fly over very populated areas, is large amounts of smog and atmospheric pollution. On the southern part of the Himalayas, for example, it’s a completely brown slate of smog. On the Tibetan side it’s crystal clear; it’s a very stark illustration of what impact humans are having.
The other thing I think really strikes you as an astronaut is when you see every sunrise and sunset – we get 16 of them a day, plenty of sunrises and sunsets. There are a few moments where you can see the curvature of the Earth, and you see how thin the atmosphere is. It’s about 16 kilometres [9.9 miles] thick, so it’s tiny. And that’s what really brings it home, thinking wow, you know, that’s what makes it different to Mars and Venus. It’s just that thin layer of gas that protects all life on the planet.
When you see wildfires in Canada or California, you see how the smoke was spread over the entire continent of North America, or you see a sandstorm in the Sahara and see it spread out from France and Portugal to the UK, it again highlights just how thin that atmosphere is. Our pollution, whether it’s natural in terms of forest fires or sandstorms, or whether it’s human-made, it doesn’t have much room to move, it has to spread out. We’re all breathing the same air, and I think that’s the biggest impact on you that you have as an astronaut.
Do you see space travel going electric?
Absolutely. There’s all sorts of different methodologies being investigated. Ion thrusters, for example, we’re looking at that as a slow but steady form of acceleration for a mission on a spacecraft. We’re looking at solar sail technology as well, and even laser-based technologies – using lasers to actually assist with rocket thrust. We’re looking at all sorts of different technologies as to how you can minimise the amount of carbon required to get objects into space.
Rockets take up a huge amount of energy, but if we can do it from a single stage to launch – something like the way Reaction Engines are trying to build this SABRE engine – the entire spacecraft will be able to land with no jettisons, a complete single-station launch, which will be an absolute game changer. So yes, the space industry is working towards that.
How much does orbital waste impact space mission?
It’s becoming a lot more frequent. We have this thing called a debris avoidance manoeuvre, and we used to have to do a debris avoidance manoeuvre about once or twice a year five years ago. Now we’re doing it five or six times a year because
“If you’re passing by, it might escape you that there’s any human life down there at all. But at night it’s obvious to see”
On 16 July 2013, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano was on a routine spacewalk outside the ISS when his helmet began to fill with water. Approximately 1.5 litres of the stuff floated in under microgravity from a faulty cooling system in his suit, filling his eyes, nose and ears. The spacewalk was aborted, and Luca was brought back inside the ISS just in time. He later described it as being like “a goldfish inside a fish bowl”. The crew’s training kicked in and disaster was averted, but it caused quite a stir down on Earth as NASA looked into the precise cause of the fault and how to remedy it.