Tim Peake: ‘I orbited the earth 2,720 times’
I’m not a huge fan of heights, which sounds strange for an astronaut. My most terrifying moment was doing a parachute jump. That first leap of faith out of the aircraft at 14,000ft was far more terrifying than going into space.
Sandhurst is not posh at all. It’s a completely level playing field, everybody is treated the same… and that’s abysmally! The first few weeks is all about breaking you and then they rebuild you into the mould they want you to be. It was an incredibly positive experience for me.
I’m a very ordinary person who has been through some extraordinary training. I forget things, I’m clumsy and I’ve pressed a few wrong buttons in my time. A friend used to drive me to work and every day I would walk into her kitchen and step in the cat bowl, no matter where she put it.
I orbited the Earth 2,720 times. What strikes you most is how vast the Pacific is. If ever people said: “Where are you now?” and I didn’t know, I’d just say, “the Pacific” and 9 out of 10 times we were. There are parts of the orbit where the entire planet beneath you is blue.
What goes through your mind on a space walk is this incredible feeling of detachedness: you’re floating inside a space suit, in a weightless environment and looking through a thin visor at space or down at the planet.
From space the southern ice fields of Patagonia are absolutely stunning. It’s now on my bucket list to go there. And also the volcanoes of Kamchatka, an incredibly remote but very beautiful looking landscape in eastern Russia.
Towards the end of my mission I used to have strange dreams that I was back on Earth but floating around. My body was so used to weightlessness but my mind still wanted to dream back on Earth so it put the two together.
Coming back down to Earth is much harder than going into space. Going up, you’ve got lots of adrenalin, you’re fresh, you’re fit, you’re ready to go. But coming back into Earth’s gravity is very punishing on the body. You feel nausea, dizziness, vertigo and your balance is shot to pieces. You have to learn how to walk again. For three or four days I just wanted to sit in a chair.
I’m a strong believer that there is life elsewhere in the universe. There are moons around Saturn and Jupiter that have icy crusts and liquid oceans beneath them so we might find single-celled microbiological life forms, either past or present, in our own solar system. We may well be very be close to finding previous signs of life on Mars within the next few years. And, of course, single-cell life forms can always develop into more complex life forms.
All world leaders should have to go into space, at least theoretically. You get a real sense of how fragile our ecosystem is, how frighteningly thin our atmosphere is, the huge areas of pollution and deforestation across continents. When we look up we see lovely blue skies, but when you’re out in space, it’s not warm and welcoming – it’s a vast, black abyss of nothingness and you suddenly realise how vulnerable and isolated we are on this small rocky planet and that we do need to look after our home.
I’d love to go to Mars, but I have two small boys who need a dad around, so jumping on a rocket for a three-year mission wouldn’t be my primary choice right now.
When I look up at the night sky, I’m always looking out for the space station. I miss it hugely.
To order a copy of Ask an Astronaut: My Guide to Life in Space by Tim Peake (Century, £20) for £17, go tobookshop.theguardian.com
I’d love to go to Mars, but I have two small boys who need a dad around, so a three-year mission would be tricky