Tim Peake: ISS

Tim Peake is the person your teachers told you about. if you just try a bit harder you could do anything you set your mind to. Most of us with his skill set would have stopped at flying helicopters, they are complicated enough. Not Tim though.

Unless you have $55,000,000 going spare, this episode of Your Place Or mine is somewhat hypothetical. Visiting the third brightest object in the sky is a rare opportunity for the select few, opposed to a casual weekend in Benidorm. Being selected means you not only have to be incredibly fit, but also fiercely intelligent, be a problem solver, multilingual with skills in engineering, medicine and astrophysics. What is even more controversial is that despite an astronaut being the most competitive profession off the planet, candidates are primarily selected for their ability to work as a team.

Tim is so charmingly affable he barely seems real. You can see how living in a confined space with him for months on end wouldn’t actually be that bad. He even is still makes with Chris Hadfield, and I don’t care how lovely that man is either, were I on the space station that guitar would have been smashed, week two at the latest.

I don’t know if the sheer danger of the ever falling, constantly missing death tube in space really comes across in this episode, but from what I gathered, on the way up is terrifying and the journey home will make you wish you hadn’t made it up in the first place.

Listen to Your Place Or Mine on Radio 4 at 10am on Saturdays or anytime you please on BBC SOUNDS.