When I log into Zoom a few minutes early for my interview with Tim Peake, Britain’s favourite astronaut is already here. He’s serene and cheerful, with a kind, patient face. “Hello!” he greets me. “How are you?” I’m reminded of a scene in The Crown where Prince Philip meets Neil Armstrong and turns up his nose at his perceived lack of gravitas. Of course, it is simply because the Duke of Edinburgh is unable to recognise the very quality Armstrong possesses and he doesn’t: humility.
After a career in the Army Air Corps, Peake beat more than 8,000 applicants to join the European Space Agency’s new astronaut training programme in 2009. “The most important skills for an astronaut to have are adaptability, flexibility and resilience,” he says today.
We’re meeting ahead of his keynote speech at this week’s Space-Comm, a conference at London’s ExCel that brings together leaders in the industry, and where Peake, 52, will set out his vision for the future of space travel, as he aims to become the first Briton to fly to space twice. Nine years ago, he became the first British astronaut to perform a spacewalk. In 2023, he stood down from the astronaut corps, only to come out of retirement after the European Space Agency (ESA) struck a deal with Axiom, a Texan space infrastructure company, last year.
The deal will allow him to return to the International Space Station (ISS) with the first ever all-British mission.
Peake’s co-passengers are reported to be paralympian John McFall — the world’s first disabled astronaut — as well as astronomer Rosemary Coogan and industrial chemist Meganne Christian. When pressed for confirmation, Peake says he cannot provide this yet — a fact that seems to frustrate him. As of yet, there is no date set for their launch.
Waiting for Godot
Standing by for space is a Beckettian task. “People spend their entire lives training,” Peake explains, “and you often get just one chance.” His 2016 trip lasted six months — three shy of the headline-making journey taken last year by the American astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. The two flew to the ISS aboard a Boeing spacecraft that had to be returned to Earth early due to faultiness. A different spacecraft, operated by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, is due to pick them up this month.
Donald Trump managed to spin the story into a tale of abandonment by the Biden administration — but Peake says the astronauts’ on-board experience would have been the opposite. “They were never really stranded,” he says. “There was always a plan to bring them back.” It’s absurd to think of an astronaut as resenting time in space — like a chef resenting time in the kitchen. “An astronaut’s worst fear,” Peake says, “is for a mission to be scrapped.”
Peake lives in west Sussex with his wife and two sons, 16 and 13. His office there is home to multiple awards and certificates, including a Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal. But it’s not what he’s achieved that gets him most excited – rather, it’s what’s still to come.
Peake is especially hyped about space’s wider research prospects. “We can grow stuff there that we simply can’t grow on Earth,” he tells me, “like protein crystals or silicon wafers.” The former can reduce the cost of pharmaceutical drug development; the latter is a semiconductor essential for building microchips.
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s all happening now, Peake says, with more extraordinary changes to come. Already, 3D printing technology in space can create tissues and organs with greater ease than the same technology on Earth, using orbital weightlessness to grow structures in three dimensions. This holds great promise for medical science, Peake says.
Many are looking to cash in on what’s been termed the second space race. The ISS — where research is government-funded — now faces growing competition from commercial space stations that will be operated by startups like SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.
This comes at a precarious time for international relations. The vibe on board the ISS — which boasts separate American and Russian wings — has historically been chummy and collegiate; yet Peake acknowledges it’s been going through a “very difficult phase” since the start of the Ukraine war. “There have been moments where the Space Station is used for political reasons,” he says. “You know, flags taken on board and crew being used for PR purposes.”
To the moon and beyond
But there are also reasons to be optimistic. Space — an area in which America is still globally dominant — is perhaps the one element of the Biden inheritance to which Trump hasn’t taken the chainsaw. Quite the opposite. “Nasa has seen much bigger changes,” Peake says – as when Barack Obama scrapped George W. Bush’s Constellation Program and replaced it with the Asteroid Redirect Mission; or when Trump scrapped that and replaced it with the Artemis Program in 2017.
The agency’s current objective is unflinching: to fly back to the moon to test the equipment being developed for missions to Mars. The Artemis programme counts SpaceX among its primary contractors, yet Musk has made it publicly known that he thinks going to the moon is a “waste of time”. His preference would be to shoot straight for the Red Planet. Peake pays this little heed. “He is not going to forget his responsibilities,” he says, “and his company’s obligations to provide a lunar landing system for the Artemis programme before anything else.”
Peake is a big picture guy, but he’s also matter-of-fact. For someone with such a rosy outlook on space and our role within the cosmos, he doesn’t seem to get bogged down in sentimentalities. I ask him what he’ll miss most about Earth when he leaves it again. “Nature,” he answers. “It’s what I missed most the first time.”
Tim Peake will speak at Space-Comm on 12 March. His own tour, Astronauts: The Quest to Explore Space, is on in September
