Tim Peake

Major Timothy "Tim" Nigel Peake (born 7 April 1972) is a British author, Army Air Corps officer and European Space Agency astronaut.

He is the first British ESA astronaut, the second astronaut to bear a flag of the United Kingdom patch (following Helen Sharman), the sixth person born in the United Kingdom to go on board the International Space Station, and the seventh UK-born person in space.

Peake was born in Chichester, Sussex, on April 7, 1972.

He grew up in Westbourne, West Sussex.

He studied at the Chichester High School for Boys, leaving in 1990 to attend the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Upon graduation from Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Peake received a short-service commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps on 8 August 1992.

He served as a platoon commander with the Royal Green Jackets, and was promoted to lieutenant on 8 August 1994.

Peake became a qualified helicopter pilot in 1994 and a qualified helicopter instructor in 1998, graduating from CFS(H) at the Defence Helicopter Flying School at RAF Shawbury in Shropshire.

On 9 July 1997, he transferred to a regular commission, receiving a promotion to captain on 20 August.

Promoted to Major on 31 July 2004, he graduated from the Empire Test Pilots School in Wiltshire the following year, and was awarded the Westland's Trophy for best rotary wing student.

He then served on Rotary Wing Test and Evaluation Squadron (RWTES) at MOD Boscombe Down completing trials on Apache helicopters.

Peake completed a BSc (Hons) in Flight Dynamics and Evaluation at the University of Portsmouth the following year.

Peake left the army in 2009 after 17 years of service and over 3,000 flying hours to his credit, becoming a test pilot with AgustaWestland.

Peake was selected to join the European Space Agency astronaut corps in 2009, flew to the ISS in 2015/16, and retired from active service in 2023.

Peake beat over 8,000 other applicants for one of the six places on the ESA's new astronaut training programme.

The selection process included taking academic tests, fitness assessments and several interviews.

Peake moved to Cologne with his family for the ESA training.

Peake was the first British or UK-born person to fly into space without a private contract (as did Helen Sharman, Mark Shuttleworth, and Richard Garriott) and/or foreign citizenship (held by astronauts Michael Foale, Gregory H. Johnson, Piers Sellers, Nicholas Patrick, Shuttleworth, and Garriott).

He began the ESA's intensive astronaut basic training course in September 2009 and graduated on 22 November 2010.

As part of his extensive astronaut training in 2011, Peake and five other astronauts joined an international mission, living in and exploring cave systems in Sardinia.

This ESA CAVES mission enabled them to study how humans react to living in extreme conditions with complete isolation from the outside world.

This expedition gave the team an idea of what they could expect and how they would cope in the confined space of the ISS.

On 16 April 2012, NASA announced that Peake would serve as an aquanaut aboard the Aquarius underwater laboratory during the NEEMO 16 undersea exploration mission, scheduled to begin on 11 June 2012 and last twelve days.

The NEEMO 16 crew successfully "splashed down" at 11:05 am on 11 June.

On the morning of 12 June, Peake and his crewmates officially became aquanauts, having spent over 24 hours underwater.

The crew safely returned to the surface on 22 June.

During Expedition 44 Peake served as a backup astronaut for Soyuz TMA-17M spaceflight.

Peake was launched to the space station (ISS), on 15 December 2015, for Expeditions 46 and 47.

He launched successfully at 11:03 GMT from Baikonur Cosmodrome on board Soyuz TMA-19M.

The official website dedicated to his mission is principia.org.uk.

During the launch, as per tradition, each cosmonaut was allowed three songs to be played to them.

Peake chose Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now", U2's "Beautiful Day" and Coldplay's "A Sky Full of Stars".

During docking, the Kurs docking navigation system failed, and a manual docking was performed by Yuri Malenchenko who was alongside Peake and Tim Kopra.

This delayed docking with the ISS by 10 minutes.

The Soyuz finally docked with the ISS at 17:33 GMT.

Peake received messages of support from the Queen and Elton John, after the successful docking.

His first meal at the ISS was a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea.

Peake supported a spacewalk by two American astronauts on 21 December 2015.

A new year's message by Peake was broadcast by the BBC to celebrate 2016.

He participated in the first spacewalk outside the ISS by a British astronaut on 15 January 2016.