Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Oct. 23, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:34:22

Edition 765 - Chris Hadfield And Tim Peake

Two brand new interviews and both done within the last week - featuring Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and the UK's Tim Peake - Both highly revealing conversations with hugely interesting people - a must hear if you've ever wondered what it's like to be a space veteran. An exclusive for this show.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Well, I can tell you it's pouring with rain, blowing a gale outside here.
	The United Kingdom has been gripped by storms within the last few days.
	And hopefully they're going to pass, but my thoughts are definitely with those people who've been flooded out or stormed out of their homes.
	A lot of travel disruption, too, as I record these words.
	Now, as you know, there won't be any shows for the next 10 or 12 days.
	So what I want to do during that period is leave you with something very special.
	And I'm doing this in a bit of a rush, so I hope I don't sound too rushed.
	Two interviews, back-to-back, with very special and important people.
	One, the astronaut Chris Hadfield, who's got a brand new fiction book out that is called The Defector.
	It's got tons of detail in it.
	And we have a talk about space and the book and life and everything in that conversation.
	And that'll be followed by The Thick End of an Hour with the British astronaut Tim Peake, who has also got a book out.
	It is essentially the story of space exploration.
	So two conversations on this edition of The Unexplained.
	I'm going to run them just exactly as they were recorded back to back.
	First of all, Chris Hadfield, and then after that, Tim Peake.
	Thank you very much for all of your communications.
	I wish you well in everything that you do, and I will be seeing you soon here.
	But I want to leave you with this conversation with two very special people, two astronauts, two wonderful guys, Chris Hadfield from Canada and the United Kingdom's Tim Peake.
	We're going to start with Chris Hadfield.
	He visited the Mir Russian space station.
	He's done a lot of time on the International Space Station, including commanding a mission.
	Absolutely steeped in space, but now a very, very successful writer, not only a writer on space matters and a man who educates on those things, but also fiction works, including his last one, The Apollo Murders, and a brand new one called The Defector.
	So we're going to talk with him and ask him a lot of questions I didn't ask him last time about his life.
	He's always interesting.
	He's visiting London at the moment, so we're going to catch up with him here.
	So we'll talk with him about life and space, and we'll also talk about the new book, which is packed with amazing detail that only a great observer could actually get and harness for a book, I would say.
	So Chris Hadfield is the guest.
	If you want to visit my website, find out what's going on with me, theunexplained.tv is it.
	And my Facebook page is the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	Now we leap across London to a studio secreted somewhere in the West End.
	And let's hook up with Chris Hadfield visiting London.
	Chris, it's really nice to speak with you.
	Thank you very much for coming on the show.
	I know you have been busy.
	Yeah, well, busy is how you get stuff done, and it's a pleasure to talk with you again, Howard.
	Thank you.
	No, well, you know, it's lovely to hear your voice again.
	It's about two years since we last spoke.
	If this is okay with you, I want to do this as a conversation in two parts, two halves.
	Part one is about you, and I promise not to ask you all the questions I asked you last time.
	And part two, of course, is about the new book, which a lot of people are talking about.
	Does that work for you?
	Sure, sure.
	I look forward to both parts.
	I understand that you're in London for like a flying visit here, I think of three or four days.
	Do you get a chance, apart from promoting the book and doing interviews with people like me, do you get a chance to do much?
	Well, I had a drive across from London to Cheltenham, almost to the Severn and back.
	And you know what the days are like when it's a beautiful blue sky day and the autumn is just starting to change the color of the trees, but there are still all the flowers bursting out and the mornings are crisp and clear.
	And I mean, it is as beautiful a place in the world as exists.
	And so I had the great privilege of doing that this week as well.
	So yeah, I'm always busy doing with the things that are on my agenda, but I think it's really important to stop and notice just how magnificent the world can be at the same time.
	And I try and do that every chance I get.
	You know, you can make notes when you're doing interviews, conversations with people, but quite often I don't use them.
	I just sort of go from what the person says to me.
	And you've just said something really interesting to me about the things that you observed.
	Right.
	And I know that you're a thinking man, and I know that you have a life beyond what you do.
	But do you think that going into space and observing this little planet of ours with all its multifarious problems, do you think that actually helps you to appreciate things like the things you've just described?
	Oh, immensely.
	I think it's one of the great outputs and benefits of increased travel, whether it's just two-dimensional travel around the planet or as we get into the third dimensions with airplanes and then now with spaceships, to truly get an understanding and a sense of where we live and the variety of it.
	But also something that maybe we don't see too often on the surface is the global commonality of the human experience.
	If you go around the world in 92 minutes, I mean, what did you do in the last hour and a half?
	If you think about the fact that you could have circumnavigated the world in the last hour and a half and the slap in the face of just how similar life is for all of us around the planet, we magnify and exaggerate our differences.
	The other thing I think that has been extremely instructional for me in having circled the world so many thousands of times is you get an intuitive sense of the age of the planet, of the toughness of the rock itself that's beneath our feet, of the inextinguishable power of life itself that's been on the planet uninterrupted for three and a half billion years.
	And to me, it puts our own lives both into context in a tiny way, in that we're just part of a long, long continuum, but also it almost magnifies it in that we are the ones that are here and alive now and responsible for our own decision making and trying to understand how all this stuff fits together.
	So when you're floating weightless by the window of a spaceship and you're trying not to let your nose bump the glass and leave a little oily mark on the prospex there, that's what you're thinking about is the magnificence and the uniqueness and the beauty of this planet and the life on it that kind of suggests that and civilian space travel is becoming a thing we know that it is but for those who could afford it that kind of suggests that more of us should do it because you get things into context and into perspective when you can
	embrace a couple of continents with the span of your hand.
	Yeah, and it's not all, you know, puppies and birthday cakes.
	If you listen to William Shatner, the actor who, you know, was famously on Star Trek, he went for one of those short tourist rides on one of these new tourist spaceships.
	He was only in space for a few minutes, but, and he's in his early 90s, I know him as a person as well, and I was both amazed but also delighted to see just how much it affected his thinking.
	And if you listen to the sort of the unexpected soliloquy that he gave minutes after he landed back on Earth of how it shifted his appreciation and perspective of the, he thought he understood the world.
	He's a grizzled old actor, but to see the uniqueness of it and the fact that it's surrounded by almost an unimaginably huge endlessness of the empty vacuum of the blackness of space itself, it really, I think, improved his appreciation and his sense of responsibility towards life itself.
	And so that, I think, is an important part of travel, including space travel.
	It moved him to tears.
	When I watched it, it moved me to tears.
	And I was very disappointed with Jeff Bezos for trying to kind of interrupt.
	And in the end, Mr. Shatner got his flow.
	But it affected him like that.
	Did it ever affect you like that?
	Oh, perpetually.
	If there was gravity, your jaw would drop.
	I mean, it takes your breath away constantly.
	And, you know, the first time you go around the world, it's overwhelming.
	You can just see so much and so far.
	It's beyond your ability to readily grasp.
	And in fact, when I thought about it, I realized all I was seeing was what I was ready to see.
	All I could see were the touchstones of familiarity.
	I would look at this vast smorgasbord of a kaleidoscope of the world, and I would sort of inevitably seek the things that I already knew, because otherwise I was incapable of interpreting it.
	But when you go around another hundred times or five hundred or a thousand, then it shifts you, and you start to actually, for the first time, truly get to appreciate the interconnected magnificence of this place that we live.
	And that then stays with you forever.
	And now when I drive from London to Cheltenham and back, I don't just see it directly of what's in front of my eyes, but it has perpetually got all those harmonies of how I've seen the whole world together and this one place amongst it.
	And I think that perspective, especially when we have, you know, the worst of our behaviors, I think that perspective is a really important one.
	There are resonances of that that we'll come to when we talk about the book.
	Over the left shoulder, my left shoulder behind me, is the CD version, the audio book of your astronaut's guide to life in space, right?
	Which is a few years old now.
	And again, here comes another question I wasn't expecting to ask you, but I listened to that.
	I've listened to that a few times.
	Since doing that, and since recording that and writing that, has your perspective and has the procedure of going into space changed markedly?
	No.
	Yeah, I think it's a tremendous privilege to have worked hard at things your whole life.
	And then when you get to a certain level of responsibility and where you've concluded some things about the world and about your own abilities and limitations, it's actually lovely to try and summarize those in a cogent way for other people to understand.
	You know, sort of almost like a legacy project for yourself.
	You know, if I tried to clearly write down what I think is important in life and what matters and how I found my own ways to succeed, that is what an astronaut's guide to life on Earth is.
	And amazingly, it's been translated, I think, into 27 different languages.
	There are universities that use the astronaut's guide as the astronaut's guide as the primary reader for all of their first year students.
	Sam Houston State, they actually built their first year curriculum of the university around that book.
	So it's lovely to know that the ideas that allowed me to succeed and fly spaceships and see the world that I've seen it, those fundamental ideas are of value to other people.
	And so it really, it helped me clarify my own thinking.
	And I've only built upon that since.
	I don't think the fundamental ideas have changed, but I think it's a worthwhile exercise for anybody to go through.
	It's to try and really codify the things that are most important to them in their lives and then try and build upon them.
	And of course, it is an astronaut's guide to life on Earth.
	I think I said in space, but you know, very, very useful volume for those of us who are trying to navigate our way through life here, even if we're never going to get to go up there, I think.
	Now, this is a question.
	Yeah, I constantly have people stop me and say, which is just an enormous compliment.
	Someone will stop me in the street and say, hey, you don't know me at all, but I read an astronaut's guide and it really helped me in how I deal with life.
	And then they leave me.
	And it is so heartwarming because it's a tremendous amount of work to write a book like that.
	And so it's very gratifying and reinforcing to hear that from strangers and to know that some of those ideas have been helpful.
	Chris, we said this last time, I'm sure you've heard all the questions from every angle and every perspective, some of them wacky, some of them very down to earth.
	This one you'll have heard a million times.
	i've got to ask it why why do we go to space when we know that space is vast our understanding of it is changing all the time but it's it's almost too vast to ever fully understand?
	So why start a jigsaw that you know you can never complete?
	Well, very few people still live in the same room where they were born, but we have that choice or the same house that their parents brought them to when they were an infant.
	Most people are born with lots of rock capacity, but no experience and a need for an education.
	And as your capabilities increase and your ability to understand things increases, then you seek out a deeper understanding of the world around us.
	And so you go to school and maybe you travel to the neighboring towns and then neighboring countries.
	And depending where your interests lie, you might even see a significant part of the world.
	And we draw this arbitrary line between the world and space.
	Of course, like you did with the title of the book, the world is in space.
	Like there is any line between the two of them is arbitrary.
	And if we truly want to understand the world, then you can't just look at the world.
	It's like if you want to understand human health, you can't just look at one human body.
	You need to look at many in order to understand what is the normal pattern?
	What are the vagaries that are possible?
	What is variety like?
	Why is Mars?
	And why is Venus?
	Why are the two of them so different from the Earth?
	What happened?
	And what is the future of our planet?
	And what is the past of our planet?
	And none of those are going to be possible for us to make better decisions collectively if we just stay in the very small realms of the place of our birth.
	So I think exploration is, I mean, we learn to walk far before we learn to talk.
	And evolution has recognized the imperative of direct exploration for us to develop as human beings.
	And so I think we just continue that our whole lives.
	And as our inventions get better, we just explore further and further, where the James Webb Telescope, as a set of transplanted eyes for us, is seeing light from almost right at the very start of the known universe, from almost 14 billion years ago.
	And to me, as we try and do better and better as a species, that part of it is absolutely necessary.
	The JWST is an amazing thing.
	It's delivering us a whole range of gifts seemingly every week.
	Do you think the JWST will ever find really identifiable, jump out of your seat, signs of life somewhere?
	Well, what I really hope is some alien craft drives up to the James Webb telescope when we get a close-up, but I don't think that's going to happen.
	But what the James Webb saw, that telescope, quite recently, not only, obviously, can it see the things that are nearby, but it's looking at planets that are orbiting other stars.
	And we used to just be able to detect that those planets existed.
	But because of the incredible size and resolution of this new telescope, we can actually measure what's in the atmosphere of planets that are orbiting other stars, unbelievably long distances away.
	And when we analyze it, this one we saw recently, it has methane in the atmosphere and some of those other trace gases that are a relatively strong indicator of the type of atmosphere where there might be life.
	Now, whether we'll be able to find it definitively, I'm not sure what that would constitute.
	I think we're going to have to find like fossils on Mars or when we go to Europa and we look at the vast oceans of that moon, if we can find some sort of basic fundamental, even if it's single cellular life, that will definitively and irreversibly answer the question of whether we're alone or not.
	But with each one of these discoveries, including the awareness we're getting from the Hubble telescope and now the James Webb telescope, I think it only convinces me more and more that we must not be the only life in the universe.
	And I think we really need to use the best of our inventions to try and find out the definitive answer to that question.
	I agree with you there.
	And I think we're going to get the answer to that question maybe in both our lifetimes.
	I'd like to think we might.
	The difficulty with it is, and I wonder if professionally you've ever had to address that or help people to address that question.
	If we discovered that there is life, even if it is less than complex organisms, maybe it might be fully formed beings.
	Who knows?
	If there is life out there to be found and we find it, how do we broach that subject with the people in order to stop them freaking out?
	Well, we recently have gone to some of the furthest extremes of the Earth itself, like right down to the bottom of the deepest ocean at the end of the Marianas Trench in the Challenger Deep.
	And when the few research subs that have been down to the bottom there, incredibly deep, you know, seven miles below the surface of the ocean and perpetually, absolutely dark and just above freezing.
	And yet when you turn on your lights down there, there's life.
	And you could quite understandably interpret it as pretty alien life to our own.
	Or if you looked at an octopus, where if you film an octopus while it's asleep, you can see that they change their color of their skin while they're asleep, which would be pretty strong indication that octopus are dreaming.
	And even if you go on Twitter and you look at all of the examples of animals who seem much less intelligent than us, but doing intelligent things, I recently watched a parrot that was using an iPad and it was scrolling through to find good videos of parrots that it could watch.
	And that's a parrot with the brain the size of a pea.
	You know, I think we have a lot of introspection to do as to the capability of the sort of seemingly alien life that's around us.
	And I think we're becoming More mature in our thinking.
	I think we're slightly less impressed with ourselves than we were 100 years ago and putting ourselves into context.
	But there's also a great responsibility to the level of intellect that we do have because it allows us to do so many different things that other species cannot.
	And that sense both of responsibility to explore and understand, but then also responsibility to think about the long term and manage our own choices.
	To me, all of those are part of the same question.
	We're talking with astronaut Chris Hadfield, a Canadian in space.
	Do you mind me referring to you as a Canadian in space?
	No, that's fine.
	Not in space at all.
	In London right now, but you know what I'm saying?
	Are there many Canadian?
	You know, here comes one of those dumb questions that I'm sure a lot of the others will ask you, and I wasn't going to.
	But are there many Canadians in the Canadian space program?
	Is Canada a major spacefaring nation?
	Well, we were the third nation on Earth in space after the Soviet Union was Sputnik and then the Americans.
	We built a research satellite that launched in 1962 that was looking at the northern lights and the ionosphere.
	And so we haven't been the country building the huge rockets, but we have been trying to take advantage of our capability to use space.
	And because Canada is such a huge country, we led the world in telecommunications so that the people in Vancouver could watch the hockey game in Toronto all at the same time.
	And we build some of the best space robotics, like the big Canadarm that's on the International Space Station.
	And there have been several Canadians flying space.
	Actually, Howard, there's a spaceship going to the moon probably early in 2025 with people on board.
	It's part of the Artemis program.
	It's going to have three Americans and a Canadian.
	And that will be the first time in human history that anyone has ever left Earth orbit except an American.
	No other country has ever done that.
	And just because of Canada's long and relatively modest history in space travel, a guy named Jeremy Hansen, a kid from Elsa Craig, Ontario, is going to leave Earth orbit and go to the moon within a year and a half.
	So yeah, Canada keeps fairly quiet about it, but I'm extremely proud of what Canada's done in space.
	Do you find that America sometimes takes the credit for stuff that actually Canada is doing?
	Maybe you can't answer that.
	I don't know.
	Of course they do.
	But I lived in the United States for 26 years.
	I served in the military on exchange with the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy.
	And then I was a member, as a Canadian, I was a member of the NASA Astronaut Corps for 21 years.
	So I have tremendous respect for what America and the United States has done.
	Their capabilities in so many areas lead the world.
	But they're an imperfect state, just like every country.
	And I would far rather live in Canada.
	I think we take better care of our people.
	I think there's a different ethos that is much more compatible with my views of the world.
	But I also recognize that Canada does not lead the world in so many different areas.
	So I'm lucky enough to be able to sort of balance the two.
	Well, I've got to say that within the next two weeks, I shall be visiting a couple of places, only briefly in Canada.
	And I've always wanted to go to Canada because I used to listen to the CBC radio on shortwave and, you know, the world, what was it, the world tonight and as it happens.
	And I always used to think, I want to go to that place because they sound like such nice and interesting people.
	So I'm going to be visiting, among other places, Halifax quite soon.
	So I'm really looking forward to that.
	And, you know, who knows?
	I might get to talk about the Canadian Space Programme.
	Sorry.
	When you get to Halifax, definitely walk the length of the wharf and then climb up to the citadel and have a look across.
	It is one of the most beautiful natural harbors in the world.
	And definitely go to some of the pubs and sing the music along with the local people.
	You're going to have a great time in Halifax.
	Geez, well, I'm passing through that Canadian city for one day.
	I'll be going to other places, but I'll try and do all those things.
	Sorry for getting sidetracked into my travel plans.
	Now, back to space, okay, and I promise I will get to the book in a moment.
	A lot of people are saying, and I understand why they say it, that actually we don't have to spend the money that we're spending on sending people and preparing people to go through the rigors of space travel and to perhaps get to Mars one day, because artificial intelligence can do all of that for us.
	What do you think?
	I think it's always going to be a combination of the two.
	We need inventions and computers and machinery in order to enable us to do almost all of our travel.
	If we had to do everything on foot, then we wouldn't see very much during our lives.
	And I mean, it's a bit of a specious argument as well.
	I mean, there is absolutely zero reason to go to, I don't know, the Taj Mahal.
	Why would you, or why would anyone ever go to, I don't know, any of the sites around the world?
	Maybe you're going to go to see Niagara Falls.
	Everything, every picture that you are ever going to take, there's already a picture on the internet that is better than the picture you took.
	And everything you need to know is there, already written.
	But it's the personal experience, the human experience.
	That's the only one that matters.
	It is absolutely irrelevant what an artificial intelligence thinks.
	What matters is people and the human experience.
	And what does this mean for us?
	I mean, we can send a thermometer anywhere and it'll tell the temperature better than we tell the temperature, but the thermometer doesn't care.
	And the thermometer has no like no soul and no emotions about it.
	And so it needs to be both.
	And we need to figure out, obviously, whenever we come up with a new invention, whether it's harnessing fire or sharp objects or the printing press or nuclear weapons or all of the double-edged swords that we've invented, how can we regulate ourselves and harness these things so that they enhance and optimize the quality of life for as many people as possible in a sustainable way.
	I think that is the balance we need to draw and not somehow think we're replacing ourselves.
	This came out of our last conversation very notably.
	You express yourself so fluidly and so clearly, so it almost makes this question relating to your book and your books redundant.
	But I'll ask it anyway.
	What is it that makes a man who's an astronaut want to write?
	It is the richest experience that I can imagine to be bodily hurled off the surface of the world and then see things that a very tiny number of human eyes have ever seen and to be given the privilege of an extended period, half a year of seeing our planet from almost a completely new, unique perspective.
	And so when you come thundering back to Earth after all of that, the question is, what do you do with that experience?
	And to me, especially having been a public servant for my whole life, I think if I just kind of went back to my cabin in Northern Canada and never talked about it again, I would be letting down the side.
	I would be squandering the rarity and the purpose of the experience.
	And so that's why I've spoken in a thousand schools and I teach at university and I run a big technology incubator and I write music and sing music about it.
	I did a master class about it.
	I speak all over the world.
	I help businesses with leadership and team building exercises and I write books about it.
	To me, it is all part of trying to allow other people to benefit as much as I possibly can from the rarity of the experiences that I've personally had.
	Your last book, The Apollo Murders, which we talked about, did incredibly well and people are still talking about that.
	This book, which I've only had for 36 hours, so I haven't read every comma and full stop in it, but I can appreciate good writing when I see it, having trained in journalism and been a journalist all my life.
	This is good.
	This is The Defector, Let the Hunt Begin.
	So one general question about those two books.
	You seem to be entranced and really interested in intrigue and spying and espionage and double dealing and all those sorts of things.
	And yet the background that you come from, which is exploring space, is incredibly organized.
	And in order for it to work, then the whole team needs to know everything about everything.
	Those two seem to me to conflict somewhat.
	How come you're so interested in those things?
	Well, I think it's important to be interested in more than one thing.
	I mean, you know, we're people.
	Specialization is for insects, right?
	We're multifaceted.
	And so I wrote three nonfiction books, and I did my absolute best to pass on all of those ideas in as clear a way as I could.
	But the type of book that I've always loved reading is one that transports me away from the farm that I grew up on, where I'm reading the book and like I suddenly realize, shoot, I missed my stop.
	I was reading this book and it took me away from the confines and the limitations of my day-to-day life.
	And so I set myself the challenge within the experiences that I've had as a fighter pilot, test pilot, astronaut, of seeing if I could write the type of book that has always thrilled and interested and transported me.
	And so when I set out the task of writing The Apollo Murders, that was my intention.
	And I'm just so delighted.
	You're right.
	I think it's in 15 languages, that book, and it's being made into an eight-part television series.
	But I always intended to write more than one in the series.
	And so I wrote The Defector, and it has the same main characters.
	It is, again, historical thriller fiction, you know, spies and lies.
	And what else somebody wrote?
	Mock speed mayhem.
	Anyway, that's what one of the people who loved the book wrote about it.
	But I want people to learn about history.
	I want them to learn about spaceflight and aerospace, but I want them to do it in a way that is so alluring and engrossing that they don't even realize they're learning about it, but in fact, they're just being transported by it.
	Because those are the books that I've always loved.
	And that's what I've put into the defector.
	And as you say, it's getting tremendous first reviews, which is really gratifying for me.
	It is.
	And I've got the hard copy there in my right hand and in my left hand, I've got the summary.
	The summary says, it's Israel late 1973.
	Now, that has all kinds of resonances today.
	It's the Yonkippo war starting.
	And a state-of-the-art Soviet MiG fighter is racing at breakneck speed over the arid scrublands below and promptly disappears.
	NASA flight controller, former U.S. Navy test pilot Kaz Zamekis, watches the scene from the ground and is quickly pulled into a dizzying high-stakes game of spies, lies, and a possible high-level defection that plays out across three continents.
	It's a pretty damn good summary, that.
	Yeah.
	Did you write that?
	Very good staff.
	No, in fact, I think that was the fellow who originally convinced me that I might have the ability to write fiction is a guy named John Butler, who works with Quercus.
	And he'd edited some of my earlier nonfiction books.
	And based on my writing, he thought, I think you could write fiction as well.
	And so he was instrumental in writing some of those breathless summaries of the book, which are good because you have to choose which book you're going to buy.
	And I think there are a million books a year published.
	So it's good to have something that tempts you to buy it.
	But my experience has been that from the many people that have read my books, that people have found them worthwhile.
	And I work far harder than perhaps it may seem, immense amounts of research to make sure a book like The Defector is absolutely as true to life so that you learn the history that gets us to where we are today, but you also learn about what just might have possibly been with the twisted and kind of breakneck plot that threads its way through all of those things that actually happened.
	And it's crammed with detail.
	That's the great thing about it.
	And that's what everybody says about you.
	You've experienced a lot and you put in a lot of detail.
	Is it more, would you say, than a defection story?
	Oh, very much so.
	The defection is, you'll see when you make it through the whole book, the defection is a key part of the story, but it's why did the defection happen and what isn't being told and what isn't what it seems.
	That's where the real crux of the story lies.
	And I'm in the research phase for the third book in the series now.
	And that process by which I dig way deep into the history, I learn all of the technology involved at the time.
	I compare it to my own experiences.
	And then I start weaving the thread of the story.
	And that is the part that keeps you turning pages.
	You know, is, gosh, I didn't know the story.
	I didn't know this was going to happen.
	And I know it's time to go to sleep, but I've just got to find out what happened in the next chapter.
	You know, that's the type of book that I've always enjoyed reading.
	And that's the type of book that I've tried to create with a defector.
	I like your description of this MiG fighter being taken to the U.S. It appears at Groom Lake Air Base, which is an interesting place for a whole variety of reasons, including those who look at and believe in and study ufology.
	It's painted up in American colors, and you describe the relish with which this thing is explored and looked at.
	Yeah, it happens at Area 51, and that's a real place.
	And obviously, I know a lot more about it than I did before I started researching the defector, and I've spent time there at the nuclear test range.
	Do you know more than you can tell me?
	Sorry, I interrupted there, but do you know more about Area 51 than you can say?
	Got to ask.
	Well, I never was based in Area 51.
	So, no, I think I could tell you everything that I know, but I did a lot of research about it that didn't make it into the book.
	It's a fascinating place.
	It's got an amazing history.
	And it is a place where the U.S. Air Force and the CIA have done a lot of developmental work over the last 60 years.
	But those places exist.
	Similar places exist in the U.K. and obviously in the Soviet Union.
	And it's where a lot of the cutting-edge technology is developed.
	And things are done that are valuable enough that they need to be kept secret.
	You don't want to squander the inventions that you've come up with.
	So correct.
	Inevitably, though, if you had a defector bring a Soviet top-line fighter to the West, they went to Area 51.
	That's a truism.
	They flew a whole squadron of Soviet fighters at Area 51 in the 60s and 70s.
	That's where they evaluated them and then figured out the tactics and then use what they learned from that in order to better the tactics and capabilities of the American airplanes that had to fight against them.
	So all of that is true, and it provides the framework then for the reality of the book, The Defector.
	Now I've got a timer timing me down, telling me I've got just over four minutes here and there's so much to say.
	Area 51 is very close to Las Vegas, Las Vegas being the home for many years of the man whose name I have borne all my life, Howard Hughes.
	How does he come into this?
	Howard Hughes, a mercurial, brilliant business leader and inventor.
	And he obviously, there was Hughes aircraft and all the work that he did.
	But he also worked closely with the CIA.
	And for example, there was one project where they were looking for minerals at the bottom of the ocean.
	But what they were really doing was looking to tap into some of the undersea transmission cables.
	And the whole thing was sort of a sleight of hand operation.
	In addition to the real research and exploration that was going on, there was also a clandestine part of it.
	And so when I wrote The Defector in the 70s, Howard Hughes bought this property just to the west of Las Vegas.
	And it was kind of a weird purchase and it didn't make sense with the other things that he was doing, but it happened and it's still there right now.
	And so when I realized that, that he had this track record of clandestine work and that for some unfathomable reason, he bought this ranch just west of Las Vegas.
	I thought that provides an opening for a mystery writer like me.
	And so I set part of the story there.
	And when you read it, you'll see what happens at your namesake's ranch just west of Las Vegas.
	There's so much detail and so many characters from history here.
	And as we said at the moment, everything is so unstable in the Middle East with the situation in Israel and Gaza.
	And so, you know, it is so interesting.
	And you couldn't have known when you were writing this that it would have such ramifications and repercussions now.
	I'm just going to go to page 52.
	I've got two minutes here counting down, I see.
	And I'm going to quote from the book.
	In the adjoining room, seated in chairs side by side, Golda Mair and Moisha Diane watched the interrogation through mirrored glass.
	The men's voices sounded distorted coming through the wall-mounted speaker.
	So even though both politicians had been raised by Russian-speaking parents, they found the conversation somewhat hard to understand, but the exact words didn't matter.
	They were listening primarily to get a feel for the Russian pilot's emotions and authenticity.
	Says an awful lot in just a few sentences, Chris.
	The whole book is written like that.
	And, you know, I'm going to enjoy getting through all of it when I've got a bit of time.
	Maybe when I'm traveling to Canada, that would be appropriate.
	I think I'm going to take it in my travel bag.
	I hope you do.
	But I thank you very much for being part of this and for giving me your time.
	You're always so interesting to talk with, not only about the writing and your career, but it seems to me that the whole business of communicating with people is very important to you, isn't it?
	It is.
	I mean, it's important to have your own life and to pursue the things That you dream of and to turn yourself into as close to the dreams of yourself as you can.
	But it's all kind of selfish and for naught if you don't share it with other people, if you don't think about how some of those ideas might be of interest or even maybe of use to other people.
	So, yeah, sharing the joys and the pitfalls and the experiences that I've had is a big part of my life.
	And I really hope that you get some of it in your travels when you read the newest book.
	Chris Hatfield, thank you very much.
	Tell me one thing if you can do this in 10 seconds.
	I'm being counted down in seconds now.
	You did basic training in Moose Jaw, a place I've heard about on the radio from Canada for years.
	What's Moose Jaw like in Saskatchewan?
	It's a small town on the prairie.
	It's where my grandmother was born.
	And it has quite a nefarious past.
	There are tunnels under Moose Jaw.
	It was a smuggling site during Prohibition.
	It's quite an interesting town, but it's in the middle of the prairie, so it's also a great place to learn to fly jets.
	And it's got a great name, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
	Absolutely.
	And the temperature can get down to minus 17 in the winter, I understand.
	Chris Hadfield, listen, enjoy London while you're here.
	And I'm hoping that we can talk again.
	Thank you so much.
	Pleasure to talk with you, Howard.
	Be well.
	Okay, let's leap across London right now.
	Really excited to be speaking for the first time for me with Tim Peake.
	Tim, thank you so much for doing this.
	Hello, Howard.
	No, it's great to be talking to you today.
	How are you?
	Because I know that you're doing like a whirlwind tour promoting the new book.
	Yeah, very well.
	It's been a busy year with doing a Channel 5 TV show and writing a non-fiction book and doing a live tour in March as well.
	So I think I'm ready for a break now.
	The one thing that happens to you, I was talking, here I am name-dropping, but I was talking to Chris Hadfield yesterday, who I guess you probably know, who is also an author and is an astronaut, Canadian guy.
	And, you know, we were kind of talking about the crossover from person who does space exploration to celebrity.
	Now, you've had to go on that journey.
	What's it been like and how is it?
	Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting one.
	I was talking with Chris as well that we both were at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on Sunday and just kind of comparing notes and stories of where we've, you know, our journey since leaving the International Space Station.
	But, I mean, these days when you're recruited as an astronaut, it's changed a little bit from the Mercury era and the space race.
	And I think that was something interesting researching the book and looking at how things have changed and morphed because we are expected to be ambassadors for space.
	So you're expected to be able to communicate, engage with people, tell people what we're doing in space and why we're doing it.
	And so those kind of skill sets are now looked for by the space agencies when they recruit astronauts.
	Yep, they are.
	And I suspect those skill sets, and we'll get into this in a bit, have changed enormously.
	You know, the original people, they were all guys.
	They were, as you were, they were all test pilots.
	Absolutely.
	And I think that boiled down to NASA going for optimal efficiency.
	There was a real space race.
	I mean, space was a new pioneering environment that nobody had ever flown into.
	Every mission was a test mission.
	And the Soviets were pipping the Americans at the post on every one, with Sputnik onto Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova, all these Alexey Leonov, the first spacewalk, all these firsts.
	And NASA, when they were selecting their astronauts, you know, didn't perhaps have the luxury of opening the pool to absolutely everybody.
	And when you've already got a small community of fast jet test pilots who clearly had the necessary skills to attempt to fly a rocket, that seemed like the most efficient and the easiest way of recruiting the initial draft of astronauts.
	Of course, that ended up ruling out women because there were no women, no female military test pilots back in the late 50s, early 60s, and really not being the most diverse group of individuals.
	But, you know, they had what they call the right stuff.
	Now, this conversation, I should have done this at the top, really.
	I wanted to do in three segments, if that's okay, because the people who are listening to this now are the real diehard space fans.
	They are the people who are going to buy this book that you've got at the moment, which will get into Tim Peak's Space, The Human Story.
	Great title for a book and great picture on the front.
	So I was going to do section one, you, section two, the book, section three.
	I've got a boatload of questions from listeners.
	Some of them are funny.
	Some of them are very serious.
	Some of them are kind of about aliens and stuff like that.
	So we'll get through those.
	Does that work for you?
	That works for me, yes.
	All right.
	First bits about you, really.
	Are all astronauts?
	We talked about Chris Hadfield there.
	Are you all a big family?
	You know, when people work together on soap operas and stuff, the public think that you all hang out together.
	You know, you live in the same house sort of thing.
	Is it a great pink family with the camaraderie?
	It is a big family.
	And actually, on occasions, we do all hang out together at the same house.
	When we were training in Star City, just outside Moscow, you're often there for months at a time.
	And, you know, it's nice to have this social environment.
	So there are a few cottages that NASA actually had built there where the NASA astronauts stay.
	The ESA astronauts are nearby in a separate accommodation.
	But we all kind of get together in the evenings and we share the cooking.
	We have a joint meal.
	We enjoy conversations and a bottle of wine together at the end of the day, watch movies at the weekend.
	So it is really a family.
	We live together.
	And then also part of that family environment is your family support.
	You know, our partners are all socializing.
	And that's really important.
	When you go away on a six-month mission, you want to know that your family is being looked after and they have that strong sort of support.
	So it's a very close-knit community.
	Now, isn't that interesting?
	I wasn't going to ask you about this.
	I'd never thought about it.
	But all those movies that we see, like, for example, Apollo 13, all of the wives and families were very close.
	They supported each other through crises and worries and all the fears of that mission, which was fraught with issues and they managed to get back to Earth.
	So it's like that for all missions, is it?
	Yes, it tends to be.
	Certainly with when we moved over to Houston and we spent four years living there and that was in the build-up to the mission, so the build-up to launching in 2015.
	And it is like a, I mean, there's still lots of military personnel within that NASA environment.
	And I had previously done a tour with the US Army in Texas flying Apache helicopters.
	And so we were used to that kind of family support network that the US military is exceptional at.
	And I think NASA had embraced that.
	So as soon as you arrive in Houston at the Johnson Space Center, you feel like you're arriving into this family community.
	And that is really quite comforting because there is that support network should you or your family need it.
	I guess there's an awful lot of unspoken stuff between you then.
	I mean, between yourselves as astronauts.
	You all know that you're risking your lives.
	You all know that you're doing a great big thing.
	You know, in my life, I can only think about the big things that you have to do when you're broadcasting.
	And those of us who are broadcasters, we know that some big things, I mean, this does not equate to space at all.
	But sometimes you have to face something that's absolutely terrifying that would require probably in many circumstances a change of trousers.
	Nobody ever talks about it because, you know, you're all from the same family.
	You're all cut from the same cloth.
	Yes, that's right.
	We all go through the same training.
	We all help each other out.
	But you're right.
	We don't really talk about the risks involved because I think everybody's gone through that mental process themselves.
	Everybody's dealt with their own fears.
	And the training is something that helps to allay those fears because that's what gives us the confidence in our abilities to actually have options in case things go wrong.
	But it's not something we kind of dwell on too much.
	Everybody understands it and accepts it.
	I have a wonderful sister called Beryl, who's going to be very embarrassed that I've mentioned her name in this conversation.
	That's one of the reasons I did it, to be honest.
	But when I was five years of age, my big sister walked me to school, and I remember this day clearly.
	And she seemed to be a million miles tall, and I was holding her hand.
	And she said to me, what do you want to do when you grow up?
	And guess what I said?
	An astronaut, right?
	And she said to me, if you want to do that, you've got to get your A-levels.
	And I said, what are A-levels?
	But you have to have a lot.
	I mean, I never became an astronaut, as you might have noticed.
	What do you have to have?
	What did you have to become an astronaut?
	Well, I did have A-levels, but Errol might be a bit disappointed in me because my A-level grades were C, D, and E, and an E. Now, my wife keeps telling me that the E didn't count, but I think an E does count.
	It had to count.
	I've got a B, C and two E's.
	Don't tell anybody.
	So I'm not advocating that that is the route to take because I have never stopped studying, learning, and working extremely hard ever since leaving school.
	And I kind of did it the hard way.
	I got a degree when I was 33.
	And before going to test pilot school, I had to have a few months' worth of evening tuition to get my maths up to degree level mathematics so I could even go on the test pilot course to begin with.
	So I've never kind of stopped having a textbook next to my bed since leaving school.
	But everybody learns at different times in their life.
	And people find different ways to relate to things.
	And flying enabled me to relate to maths and physics in a way I could really understand.
	And perhaps I didn't grasp that when I was 17 years old.
	So yes, A-levels, if I was talking to young people today, I would say that if you want to be selected as an astronaut, the space agencies do look for science and mathematics or medicine or computer to technology.
	These kind of STEM-based backgrounds are important.
	Also, it's quite important is a second language.
	If you do speak another language, that's a real benefit because it's a very international environment and it's not just English that's spoken, clearly.
	So that's a benefit too.
	You had to learn Russian.
	That's right.
	At the grand old age of 37, I was told, okay, you might have had a C at GCSE French, but now we need you to be intermediate mid-level Russian.
	So crack on.
	But I found that very, very challenging.
	But I flew on the Soyuz to the International Space Station.
	So when we fly on the Soyuz, everything is in Russian.
	There's no Russian spoken, sorry, there's no English spoken inside the spacecraft.
	And all of our communication with Moscow mission control is in Russian too.
	So you have to be pretty fluent in certainly in technical Russian.
	Does it ever go wrong though?
	Because I only know one word, Strasvucha, which I probably can't even pronounce properly.
	I think that means hello.
	If you're trying to say, I'd want that nut replaced on that flange there by that particular pressure gradient switch, if you're trying to do that in Russian, isn't there room for problems?
	Well, there is, but that's where the training kicks in.
	And actually, if you're following a procedure and you've done this in training, even if the language does present some hurdles, generally speaking, you can get around it and you can understand what's going on.
	And you've got other crewmates there to help you.
	But I do remember one relatively stressful morning where I was trying to get two Russian cosmonauts, my colleagues, back in off a spacewalk.
	And when that happens, three crew members have to go and sit in their Soyuz spacecraft and ban down the hatches because of the way that the space station is orientated.
	So I had two Russians out on a spacewalk.
	I was the only person on the inside of the space station that could help them.
	And having to manage the Russian airlock and suddenly having one of those moments where my language skills were letting me down and thinking, Tim, this is not the time to cock it up.
	So yeah, thankfully, again, I managed to kind of remember my training and get them back inside safely.
	Everything I did in my life, I did late.
	And it's nice to see that with a lot of these things that you've done, you were a late starter, like the degree at 33 and learning Russian at 37 and all of those things.
	I've got a lot of time for that because that's my story, too.
	But you did military service, nearly 20 years, 18 years of military service.
	You trained at Sandhurst, which only produces the world's best.
	And then you decided to become an astronaut.
	What was it about?
	Well, I'm presuming that you then decided.
	Maybe it was a desire you had from when you were three years of age.
	I shouldn't have been presumptuous there.
	But you did 20 years in the military before you decided to make a change.
	Yes, well, part of that was because that was my passion was flying.
	And as a young boy and going to air shows in my teenage years, that was what I was fixated with.
	And I joined the cadet school.
	I had my first gliding trip at 13.
	And ever since I sat in that cockpit, I thought this is where I want to spend as much time as possible.
	If I can have a successful flying career, I'll be very happy.
	And I was very fortunate to pass the medical tests and the kind of accept aptitude test to get accepted into the Army Air Corps.
	And then I just enjoyed the most phenomenal career in the British Army and became an instructor pilot, became a test pilot because I didn't want to go up the traditional promotion, you know, the traditional career path, which meant coming away from the cockpit and doing effectively more administrative jobs in order to go up that career path.
	So I was struggling to stay in the cockpit and becoming an instructor, becoming a test pilot, really carving out this niche career path where I could focus on being a professional pilot was what I was loving doing.
	And all throughout that time, there were no British astronauts.
	We had had Helen Sharman fly in 91 to the Mir space station, but it was a one-off commercial mission.
	So we didn't have an ESA, a human spaceflight program that the UK was part of.
	So we didn't have the option of joining the Corps of becoming an astronaut.
	So it wasn't until 2008, when ESA opened up the doors to all their member states, that suddenly everybody in the UK who was at the right age with the right qualifications thought, wow, this is incredible.
	You know, we can apply to be astronauts now.
	Yes, you know, you were a standard bearer.
	You are a standard bearer for an awful lot of people, I think, because being the first in something, being a trailblazer, it's always an important place to be, but it puts a lot of responsibility on you, doesn't it?
	It does.
	But what I'm really delighted about today is I can go round to schools and colleges and I can talk to young people and actually say, you know, well, the European Space Agency has just selected another three British astronauts last year.
	Do you want to be an astronaut?
	Because here's the career path you can have.
	And I just think that that's fantastic today, that we have that door that is open to young people.
	They can aspire to that.
	And it's not just about being an astronaut, obviously.
	There's so many interesting, exciting jobs in the space industry.
	But if that's somebody's dream, then there is a real possibility that there is a career path for them to take now.
	I think if I've got the maths right, and I was never very good at that, they'd never put me in space.
	You did a total of about six months solidly in space.
	That's right.
	Yeah, 186 days.
	So almost exactly six months.
	And crass question, yes, in some ways, but everybody will ask you it.
	What is that like?
	When you're there for a duration, you know, when you're there for, I don't know, you probably were on some of them a couple of months up there.
	How do you adjust to it?
	Yeah, it's interesting because I really enjoyed that having that length of time in space.
	And I think there are, you know, spaceflight changes everybody's perspective, whether you're up there, I think, for 10 days or 10 months.
	And it's an amazing kind of shift in perspective.
	They've even given it this name, the overview effect, this cognitive shift in perspective.
	And I think it's a bit different for everybody who experiences.
	Some people have an almost spiritual or religious feeling from it.
	But whatever your expectations, you're going to have this incredibly powerful emotion of looking back on Earth from space.
	And so spending a long period of time up on the space station, it gives you that extra time to just reflect and to really absorb your environment and to have those moments where you might have, you've got the luxury of spending two hours on a Sunday afternoon just watching the world go by, quite literally.
	And that's something that, for example, the shuttle pilots didn't have on a 10-day shuttle mission.
	You were jam-packed from dawn to dusk with work to do.
	And don't get me wrong, we had a busy tour.
	We worked long days, but in six months, you do have time to relax and enjoy and absorb your position.
	And I think for the Apollo astronauts, they may not have had that long, but they had the extra distance.
	And again, seeing Earth from that much further away, 400,000 kilometers away, not just 400 kilometers away, that would have had a really big impact as well.
	I remember watching, I think it was your first spacewalk, you did a spacewalk, and the mission controller saying your name, right?
	And I just thought, of all the things that they said to you, and the pictures looked amazing, when they said your name, I wonder how that felt.
	And I wonder if it hit you.
	Oh my God, this is what I'm doing.
	And isn't this fab?
	When the guy said your name.
	The thing that hit me was what Scott Kelly said.
	And I was in the airlock with Tim Copra, and we had one of the most packed airlocks ever.
	We had so much equipment we had to take out with us.
	There was no room to move.
	There were cables and ties everywhere.
	It was quite stressful.
	Tim was getting the hatch open and we were trying to get out and get sorted.
	And it's one of the most dangerous parts of a spacewalk because it can all go really badly wrong very quickly, very early on, and if you get into a tangled mess in the airlock.
	And so my mind was racing and concentrating on what was about to happen and what we were doing.
	And Scott Kelly peered through the hatch, and he was our ISS commander at the time.
	And he said, Tim, he said, that Union flag has explored all over Earth and now it's about to explore the vacuum of space.
	And it just shook me.
	It kind of like took me out of my sort of professional mindset and gave me that moment to think what I was doing.
	It's like, wow.
	And then I was kind of lowering myself out of the hatch and out of the space station.
	So there was that moment, that kind of wow moment where I kind of realized what it meant.
	And again, there is no comparison with what you've done.
	But I remember once when I was young and stupid, I volunteered to climb a 120-foot industrial chimney.
	I think it was 140-foot industrial chimney in Nottingham for the BBC, taking a heavy tape recorder with me.
	And there was no safety harness.
	You know, you see Fred Dibner and people like that.
	No safe, nothing like that.
	But I could so easily have Slipped and died, but as I say, I was young and stupid, and I didn't think about that.
	And I'm wondering when you're walking in space, and there is no comparison really, but that's only the comparison I can make from my little life.
	I'm presuming that there isn't time to think of, oh my god, if I came on tethered, if the spacesuit burst, if my visor fogged up, which has happened, it could be disastrous.
	I'm guessing that you're getting on with the job.
	Yes, but you are, but interestingly, you are thinking about all those things.
	And actually, I think it's a good comparison about the climbing up the chimneys and the Frenchman experiences because there is that element of risk and it's palpable.
	And you actually feel vertigo occasionally.
	I mean, you are high up and your brain's telling you if you let go, you'll fall.
	And you have to kind of remember that you won't if you do let go.
	But you actually are thinking about all those things because you're constantly trying to prevent them from happening.
	So you're regulating your body temperature.
	You don't want to sweat.
	If you sweat, a salty bit of teardrop is going to get into your eye and then that's going to make it worse and you can't rub your eye.
	This happened happened to Chris Hadfield actually and he ended up spending about 30 minutes of his spacewalk trying to clear his eyes of this stinging water in his eyes.
	So you're constantly thinking about that.
	You're thinking about putting the tethers down at the right point, not forgetting to put the tether down before letting go.
	And so whilst it's not incapacitating you, you're not doing that from a point of fear or, oh my God, if I don't do this, but it's a point of focus and concentration and just making sure everything you do is absolutely perfect.
	You can't afford to slice your glove on a sharp piece of metal or something like that.
	What a horrible thought that would be.
	Let's get on to the book then, Tim.
	And the book is Tim Peake's Space, the Human Story.
	Great title, great cover photograph that we'll get into.
	What is it about astronauts, Chris Hadfield the same, that makes them want to write books?
	I think it's a passion about what we do.
	And I think that's important.
	Everybody, every astronaut is passionate about what they do.
	You wouldn't go through the training and the selection, let alone the actual mission, unless you are completely dedicated to what you're doing.
	And so we love talking about space.
	We love what's happening in space and we like communicating about that too.
	So I think it's important to try and raise the public awareness of what we're doing.
	There's a really exciting new era of space exploration.
	We're on the cusp of returning to the surface of the moon again after 60 years.
	So this is really exciting.
	And I think that's partly why we enjoy communicating about it.
	And that was partly the inspiration for writing the book.
	As a thing, as a thing to do, do you find the discipline and the way that you have to phrase for books, all of the things that are different from just kind of writing somebody a letter?
	Do you find that a challenge or does it all come easily?
	No, I think the different books have different challenges.
	I've really enjoyed the kids' fiction books, The Swarm Rising and Swarm Enemy, because you can just have so much fun.
	And I was working with Steve Cole on those books.
	And we wanted to ground everything in close to scientific fact, but let's stretch that 50, 100 years in the future so we can have a bit of fun with it.
	But we wanted to try and make sure everything was reasonably plausible.
	But kids' fiction, you can have a lot of fun.
	Adult non-fiction, like this book, you can have fun.
	And we wanted to have humor.
	And when I was talking to my editor about how we were going to pick the stories that we wanted to tell and structure the book, I wanted it to be something that was warm and enjoyable and humorous.
	But you've also, you're writing an adult non-fiction book.
	It's got to be factually correct.
	And there's a much greater pressure on you to get the book right.
	All of these things that you do and you've done, they depend on people.
	If the quality of people isn't there, if you don't all act and move right and think right, it's not going to happen and there could be a disaster.
	So I'm presuming that's why the word human is in that title, because yes, it's great technology, but at the end of the day, the experience and the execution is about people.
	Exactly.
	And I think that's what people warm to.
	That's what people want to hear about is the human experience.
	We can watch a Mars rover on the surface drilling samples and we can get excited about samples coming back from asteroids.
	And that is fascinating.
	It's incredible that we've landed on the surface of Titan, one of Saturn's moons.
	All of these robotic missions are phenomenal, but we get so much more when it's actually something that humans have done and humans have witnessed and experienced.
	And I think that's what people relate to.
	And also, there's this element of the behind the scenes, the kind of lifting up the curtain a little bit on human spaceflight.
	It's not all perfect, far from it.
	You know, there are lots of mistakes have been made.
	There's been crews that haven't performed as well as you would have hoped them to.
	There's all the fun stuff that goes on behind the curtains of preparing for a mission and actually executing a mission.
	So there's these kind of insights and snippets of the human element and the fact that astronauts are not superheroes.
	We read the right stuff and you kind of put the Mercury 7 on a pedestal and think, oh my gosh, amazing individuals.
	And they were.
	And I'm not trying to take any of that away.
	But also, there is a human side to everybody.
	We're ordinary people who are lucky enough to be doing an extraordinary job.
	You mentioned something that I don't hear interviewers talk about.
	So I just want to go there, if I can.
	You said that some crews don't quite maybe perform the way that they should.
	They don't deliver quite.
	I mean, I'm sure they all, more than deliver, but some don't.
	When they come back to Earth, do they get, I'm trying to find a nice word for bollocking, but do they get reinstruction?
	Oh, absolutely.
	When you get back, there are lots and lots of debriefs about the mission.
	Absolutely.
	And nobody dwells on mistakes that have been made, but we want to learn and we want to improve.
	So if a mistake has been made, then we want to understand why, because if one astronaut has made that mistake, then the chances are another astronaut can easily make the same mistake.
	So we want to prevent it from happening.
	So the debriefs that we get all the way through training And through mission execution, they're fairly robust, it's no holds bar.
	And there is this kind of element, there are some crews that do exceptionally well.
	I remember when Peggy Whitson was on board the International Space Station and she was commanding, and they were just knocking out the science.
	I mean, the number of experiments and hours of scientific work they were producing each week was phenomenal.
	And I mean, there are elements that go into that.
	Perhaps they weren't preparing for so many spacewalks or they didn't have cargo vehicles with unpacking, unpacking the rest of it.
	But there was still an element there of that crew performing extremely well.
	And sometimes you get crews where there's just a little bit of magic.
	And sometimes you get crews where it goes the other way.
	And I wrote about the Skylab mission, the Skylab 3, where it was reported as almost a mutiny with the crews saying we can't be expected to work 16-hour days for three months on a stretch.
	This is ridiculous.
	And needing time off and needing the schedule to be relaxed.
	And I think the expectation was that that crew would work equally as hard as the previous crew.
	And that was obviously, they were finding that a struggle to keep up with the pace.
	And then there's the element of humor and fun, for example, with John Young, who took up his corned beef sandwich on the Gemini mission.
	And I think Wally Shearer had bought it down at Cape Canaveral from Wolfie's sandwich bar.
	And he produced this corned beef sandwich in space in front of Gus Grissom.
	And it was all a bit of fun at the time.
	And it was a bit of a nod towards how bad space food was during those early days.
	But clearly, NASA did not have a sense of humor about that.
	And that ended up in definitely a disciplinary event.
	Boy.
	And if you get a disciplinary, if you're told off for a breach of protocol or whatever it might be, are you then not likely to be sent up again?
	It really depends on whose nose you've put out of joint, I think, and what the circumstances were.
	That didn't happen with John Young, clearly.
	He went on to fly the shuttle for the first flight with Bob Crippen.
	So it wasn't something that had a serious impact on his career.
	But yeah, there have been crews that haven't flown since coming back down to land.
	And who knows, maybe that was due to their performance.
	I think it's interesting with NASA, there is a much stronger degree of competition, I think, amongst the astronauts than perhaps we feel in the European Space Agency, because our flight assignments in the European Space Agency tend to be linked more with national priorities, so politics and funding, really, to put it bluntly.
	Whereas within NASA, it's direct competition amongst your crewmates.
	And so I think that brings it into a sharper focus.
	And sometimes, I think, Tim, that's a good thing, isn't it?
	Because if you look at, for example, the Apollo 11 crew, they were selected because they were different.
	And at the end of the day, a piece of great thinking by Buzz Aldrin was very important to that mission.
	But, you know, they all had their advantages.
	But they selected those people because their personalities were so very different.
	Yes, and I think that was amazing.
	I mean, clearly an incredibly talented and capable crew who were perfect for the mission.
	But what was interesting is that they didn't really socialize.
	You know, they were absolutely professionally very friendly and they got on.
	You wouldn't want to spend that long in a spacecraft with somebody you didn't get on with.
	But it wasn't as if they were spending all of their time outside of work together and socializing together.
	They were all quite private people, really.
	And it was the mission that brought them together.
	So it was that difference in character and that difference in personality that actually, I think, in some respects helped that mission to go so well.
	When you're on the ISS and you're working as a team for a long period, you did six months in space.
	You spent long periods on the International Space Station.
	Are there ever periods...
	Maybe you do too.
	I've watched it so many times.
	Now, all right, that's science fiction.
	But there's still people.
	Do you have arguments and disagreements at times or do you always can it?
	There are, you can, sometimes you can feel just the tension rising a little bit.
	We do an awful lot of training, clearly, to make sure that we know how to deconflict these kind of scenarios.
	We spend seven days living down a cave under very stressful conditions as a crew.
	I spent 12 days underwater in the Aquarius habitat.
	And this is where you can really learn how to manage those kind of situations where you might feel yourself becoming tired, grumpy, irritable.
	Maybe it's stress or fatigue or hunger or whatever it might be.
	And on board the space station, if there are tensions, then we're all so well trained that we tend to be able to talk about it amongst ourselves in a very candid manner.
	And if you don't feel that that's the right thing to do, you can actually just take yourself away to your crew quarter.
	There is space to go and have some private time away.
	And so it is an important aspect.
	You don't want there to be any sort of difficult conflict.
	And when I arrived on board the space station, Scott Kelly was the commander.
	We came into a space station that was just running flawlessly.
	I mean, Scott had been up there eight months and the place was immaculate and everything was smooth.
	His interaction with mission control was smooth.
	And we just accepted this incredible environment to work in.
	And when Scott left and when we had a new crew come up, it was actually quite a difficult transition during that period because a new crew arrived.
	Jeff Williams was there and he was on his third long duration mission.
	So he had certain expectations as how the space station was before and how it might be a good way of going back to some of those setups and systems that he remembered.
	And it's a case of having to gel back together.
	Not to say there's any difficulty or tension, but there are times where you have to just kind of readjust and work together as a crew.
	So we work on methods to do that.
	We've all heard stories and seen the odd video of people having fun, which fun has to be part of life.
	This is the human story of space.
	Do people mess about a bit up there?
	Yes, we do.
	And I think that's pretty natural.
	You know, there's a lot of us have military backgrounds, but even those who don't, there's a great sense of humor amongst the core and military banter kind of spills over as well.
	Practical jokes seem to be something that I don't know, astronauts seem to enjoy quite a lot of.
	And I think it's a way of releasing the tension.
	Whenever you're working in a high-performance environment, you're under a lot of stress and pressure for long periods of time, then those lighter moments are important.
	And also those kind of calls back home, that connection with Earth is important too.
	But there's plenty of time to have some fun.
	There's even a little toy box on board the space station.
	And I had no idea about this toy box.
	It's not something they teach you in training.
	And one day I wanted an Alka-Seltzer tablet because I was doing a schools thing and I wanted to show what happens when you pop an Alka-Seltzer into a bubble of water in space.
	And it's incredible.
	The bubble of water just grows and grows and grows as the gas expands the bubble.
	And I didn't have any.
	I run out and Scott Kelly just said, oh, go to the toy box.
	There'll be plenty in there.
	What do you mean, a toy box?
	So he showed me the secret location of the space station toy box.
	And as I opened this thing, there was a football, a basketball.
	There were four Nerf guns in there.
	Who has brought up four Nerf guns to the International Space Station?
	So, yeah, we sometimes have a bit of fun up there.
	Quoting from the book, you say, when I arrived at the ISS, it was in its 15th operational year, and though much about its environment remained rudimentary, faintly hospital-like, it was a long way from the crowded and damp-smelling jumble of Russia's Mir.
	So like you said, it was organized by the time you got there.
	But there must have been, but, well, there's another assumption.
	Never make assumptions, Howard.
	I'm assuming there might have been times when you felt fear.
	I can't imagine that you can be off Earth like that, even if it is organized, without times when you think, oh my God, it's going to go seriously pear-shaped here.
	Yeah, there were a couple of moments where suddenly the adrenaline got up.
	And the first one of those was just getting to the space station.
	We had a docking that didn't go very well.
	We were 70 meters away from the space station and the automatic docking aborted because one of the thruster sensors had failed.
	And Yuri had to take manual control.
	And that was an extremely difficult manual docking because we subsequently had a computer failure.
	So the screens went dead.
	So now Yuri is having to look through a small periscope to find the space station and manually dock us without any help from Tim Copra or myself because we had no access to the screens.
	And the space station was going from day to night, very difficult lighting conditions, blinding sunlight coming through the periscope.
	And it ended up being a near collision.
	So there was definitely elevated heart rates going on there.
	And when I looked across and saw Yuri's hand shaking slightly on the controllers, I thought, well, if he's on his sixth mission to space and he's not comfortable with this scenario, then I probably shouldn't be comfortable either.
	So that was difficult.
	And then on the spacewalk, Tim Copra's helmet started taking water on board.
	So we had to terminate the spacewalk and get him back inside in a hurry.
	So these are circumstances where the adrenaline gets up and your training really kicks in.
	I think the important thing is to manage it so that it doesn't become fear.
	I actually think that that's what our training teaches us is to how to use the adrenaline to actually improve your decision making, to make your focus sharper, clearer, crisper, your communication skills better, and to take that energy into it and use it positively.
	But yeah, I mean, certainly, I think if you look back and saw our heart rate monitors, I think all three of us were probably notched up a little bit.
	I bet.
	I'll get to listener questions in the next segment, but just last question about the book.
	great front cover, Bruce McCandless, spacewalking, wearing a backpack, not tethered.
	That must be the most, I don't think you did.
	I think you were always tethered.
	But that must be the single most terrifying experience, because presumably, if the thing packs up and you go drifting off, you are dead.
	Yeah, I think so.
	As a test pilot, I look at that in awe and admiration of the trust in your equipment and the courage to leave the sanctuary of the space shuttle bay and go out a few hundred meters away and control this jetpack essentially that nobody has ever flown in space before.
	And you think, wow, what an incredible experience.
	And the feeling of isolation and remoteness.
	I know just when you're on the space station and we had to go to the very furthest edge.
	So I was able to kind of clip on and just push myself off into space.
	So I was away from the space station by about six feet.
	And six feet felt like an awfully long way.
	I can just imagine.
	Because, you know, you just, you're not looking at the space station.
	You turn the way and there's just the big old universe behind you.
	And then down there is Earth.
	And it feels very remote and very isolated.
	So I can only imagine what 200, 300 meters must have felt like to Bruce McAndlis on a jetpack with no tethers whatsoever.
	Boy, I think we can only imagine that feeling, but I suppose the excitement of it all is the biggest aspect of it.
	Okay, thank you for talking about the book, Tim.
	We're talking with Tim Peake.
	He has a new book out.
	It is called Tim Peake's Space, The Human Story.
	And you've been hearing the many human aspects of it, I think, here.
	We'll talk some more.
	We'll ask your questions of Tim Peak in just a moment.
	I've got a bunch of questions for you, Tim, and I know that you've been taking questions since you started doing the promotion from this book.
	So you may have heard some of these.
	However, let's get into them.
	Richard asks, why has there only ever been a handful of British astronauts who've been in space?
	We talked about this kind of, but why have we had so few?
	Well, I think it comes down to the decisions of politicians over the years.
	We had, in the early days, we had the Black Arrow project, and we were quite actively involved in those early stages of rocketry and getting into space.
	But then we went through years where we decided that we wouldn't contribute to human spaceflight.
	We would focus on other technologies and other areas, but not human spaceflight.
	So that's why the door was essentially closed to anybody unless you went over and got a US nationality, as several British-born astronauts did, Nick Patrick, Mike Fole, Piers Sellers, for example, or Helen Sharma with a kind of one-off mission that came along on a commercial basis as almost a sort of competition.
	But that's why I think it was groundbreaking when ESA did change their mind in 2008 and opened up the doors to all the member states.
	And now, of course, we can be part of that program.
	Andrew Lound, who you might have met, I don't know, he's our space expert on here.
	He's absolutely steeped in all things space.
	He asks a question for you.
	And he says, Major Peak, which physiological changes affected you the most while in Zero G and are you still monitored?
	The physiological change affects you most.
	Gosh, that's a good one.
	I think on the kind of short term, it's the muscular changes.
	I mean, you do lose bone density.
	I think my grace was about 11% loss of bone density around the femoral neck.
	So that's quite a big chunk of bone density to lose.
	11%.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But you don't feel that.
	And you're aware that when you come back to Earth, you have to be cautious for the first six months.
	You do rehabilitation.
	You build yourself back up again.
	But you don't notice the bone density issue.
	What you do notice is the muscular, I wouldn't say loss, because I left at 70 kilograms and I came back at 70 kilograms, but I lost five kilograms early on in the mission.
	And then I managed to put it back on again.
	And I put it back on in weird places because you're losing muscle mass from all the small core muscles, your lower back, your stabilizing muscles.
	These are the muscles we can't really exercise in space.
	But we do have a weight training device.
	It's called A-RED.
	It uses vacuum cylinders in place of weights for obvious reasons.
	But we can exercise our major muscle groups.
	So we kind of, you know, we work out and we try and put this muscle back on again.
	And when you come back to Earth and you look at yourself in the mirror, and it's quite a weird, you know, you've got overdeveloped major muscle groups and nothing in between.
	And so I think that's probably the most stark physiological change that we notice.
	Mark, Ben and Steve is in Helsinki listening to this, Finland.
	All of them ask roughly the same question that I know that you will have been asked probably 20 times already.
	So here comes a variant on that question.
	When you were on the ISS, did you see anything that you cannot explain, i.e.
	a UAP, strange lights, an alien, whatever?
	So, well, when you're in space, you do see occasionally things that are unusual.
	I mean, you see meteors coming in underneath the space station, entering Earth's atmosphere.
	Most of what we see can be explained.
	You see the beautiful aurora.
	You see all sorts of lightning flashes on Earth, these kind of things.
	There was only one occasion in the daytime where I saw bright lights.
	And normally in the daytime, you don't see any bright lights in space.
	Space is completely black in the daytime because the sun blocks out any stars.
	The sun overpowers the light from any stars.
	So space is completely black.
	And if you do see a light, it's normally an object that is close.
	It's a visiting cargo vehicle or a crew changeover with a Sawyers approaching or something like that.
	So there was one morning where I did see a light in the daytime.
	Don't know what it was.
	But I mean, I don't kind of dwell on that or put any credence behind it.
	When it comes to things like UAPs and potential aliens and stuff, I take a very scientific background.
	I think it's right that we should be studying it.
	It's right that we should be asking questions.
	And I don't think we should give credence to eyewitness accounts.
	We should let science lead it.
	And we've got, the interesting thing about UAPs right now is we've got enough sightings of objects which are being backed up by things like infrared cameras, by radar, by sonar, that we can actually start to make scientific analysis of just what these objects are doing, the kind of speeds they're doing, the directional changes, the acceleration rates, both in water, out of water.
	I don't think we need to be relying on eyewitness accounts.
	As soon as you start talking about eyewitness accounts, then you open yourself up to conspiracy theories and human subjectivity.
	I don't know whether you have a view on this.
	This comes from me, but we heard David Grush and those two military pilots, Fraver and the other gentleman, talking about things that they encountered, the so-called Tic-Tac UFOs, things that appear to be within our baby wick that we can't explain.
	They go too fast, they maneuver too quickly, some of them come out of the ocean.
	What are your thoughts on those things?
	Do you believe that there might be something visiting us, something that breaks through our atmosphere, maybe travels interdimensionally, so we can't see it all the time, but it is here?
	Because we are being told, certainly in that July 26th hearing in Washington, that there's a lot of stuff that we know about and that is being kept secret.
	Well, I'm not sure how much is being kept secret.
	I think it's interesting that the authorities, certainly the DOD and the US government and NASA, have said, you know, UAPs exist.
	Yes, there are unknown aerial phenomena happening, and that's why it's being taken seriously, and that's why funds are being allocated to study this at various governmental organizations.
	And that's why we need to take the scientific approach to what are these objects doing.
	And I think the eyewitness accounts are fascinating, don't get me wrong, but I think that there's a danger if we start relying on just eyewitness accounts, that we go back to the old days of UFOs and alien abductions.
	And then we lack, you actually end up damaging the program because it starts to lack credibility, because it's not backed up by hard scientific evidence.
	And now that we're starting to get hard scientific evidence, let's lead with that and let that lead our investigation.
	I don't think we need to necessarily right now think about, well, what is it and jump to the are these aliens, You know, is it some technology that some state has developed that seems to be far greater than the technologies that we think we should be developing right now?
	There are all sorts of potential possibilities as to what these objects are or where they've come from.
	And I think rather than speculating about that, let's do this from a scientific view of starting off as what do we know?
	What do we see?
	What are they doing?
	Before we ask the question of where have they come from.
	If you had ever seen anything, and I appreciate what you say, and any of your colleagues had ever seen anything that they couldn't explain, is there a protocol that says that you cannot go to the press and talk about it?
	In other words, is it all kept secret?
	If anybody sees something that they think might be a spaceship, might be an alien floating in space, your colleagues and yourself, are you bound by any kind of directive?
	No, absolutely not.
	There is nothing in our terms and agreements as astronauts on the space station in not reporting this in a public manner.
	In fact, we don't even have a lesson as what to do if we do see something.
	You know, you are free to report anything and you're expected to report anything and everything.
	It's important that we do.
	So there is no element of secrecy or classification involved in anything that we might see.
	And I have to say that's the same as a military pilot as well.
	I mean, some of the best information that we're getting right now, as you just mentioned there, Howard, is coming from military pilots, in particular the US Navy, because they actively instigated a reporting system that allowed crews to report this confidentially if they wished, because there is a stigma attached to it.
	Nobody wants to be the person who comes back from a mission and says, I saw a UFO.
	And so by having a confidential system of reporting, actually, you realize that the numbers of incidents that are out there are increasing because people feel like they can speak about it.
	But no, we are not under any sort of agreement where we don't talk about these things.
	Chris, listener with a K, I think that answers your question too.
	Enigma asks, what do you think, and I don't know whether this is within your scope, but what do you think are the difficulties in building a space station in orbit around the moon?
	I mean, there's a plan to do that.
	How tough will that be?
	It's a case of getting there, but then we know how to do that.
	And we've had a successful Artemis 1 mission last year that investigated the kind of orbits that we want to go into, this near-rectilinear halo orbit, the NRHO.
	It's a very different orbit from what the Apollo astronauts used when they were landing in kind of equatorial regions of the surface of the moon.
	We want to go and land at the south pole of the moon.
	So we need to turn that orbit on its side 90 degrees in order to be able to land at the surface of the moon.
	So there's some very clever maths going on there and some very clever orbital dynamics to get us into that new orbit.
	So there are challenges there, but actually in terms of building a space station around the moon, then other than the amount of fuel that you need to get there and increasing the size of your rockets to do that, it's no different really than assembling the International Space Station.
	You really are still close enough to the sun to be able to harness solar power for all of your energy needs.
	And it's a very modular approach to building that space station, similar to the modular approach that we've used with the ISS.
	Neil asks, going off at a tangent here, but an interesting one, do you have dreams?
	I don't know how you do sleep up there, but do you have dreams when you're in space?
	You do.
	I mean, I don't remember my dreams.
	I keep saying I don't have dreams, but everybody has dreams.
	It's whether you remember them or not.
	I don't tend to remember my dreams much, but I remember a couple of dreams and they were a bit mixed up.
	I remember, you know, one time I was kind of remember being in a library back on Earth on the ground and not being able to reach a book high up and realizing that I could just push off from the ground and float up and choose this book and my brain trying to work out, are you in weightlessness or are you not in weightlessness?
	Come on, make your mind up.
	What are you doing here?
	And these kind of strange scenarios.
	I remember Scott Kelly, he used to have lots of dreams.
	He wrote them down in a dream diary.
	And he'd been up after about six months up there.
	All his dreams were about weightlessness and space.
	And then when he came back down to Earth again, it took a while for them to kind of change back.
	So yes, I mean, your subconscious is kind of unpacking your day-to-day business when you dream.
	And so it's only natural that it's going to be perhaps a bit confused by the environment that you're in.
	I know that you've been asked this question once today, and I know very well the person who asked it of you.
	I've been asked it through Chris McMurray, one of my listeners, to ask you this question too.
	So he goes with this one.
	He's sort of talking about propulsion through the power of flatulence, moving yourself through the ISS essentially by farting.
	Do you have any thoughts on that, Timpeak?
	Well, it comes down to physics at the end of the day, doesn't it?
	You've got a thrust, and if you have an exhaust velocity from a gas, then you are going to have an equal and opposite reaction as per good old Sir Isaac Newton.
	And so you are going to be able to propel yourself, but you need to do the math there.
	I mean, there's a lot of exhaust velocity required from a small orifice in order to propel a 80 kilogram person through space.
	So I wouldn't like to even imagine the site kind of the length and the ferocity that that fart would have to be.
	Tricia asks, I don't know whether you, I mean, it's all in, I mean, you've been very gracious about answering these questions.
	See if you can do this one.
	Tricia asks, do you believe, as some people do, that we might be living in a matrix and it's a simulation?
	Oh, that's a lovely question.
	It's really interesting.
	Do you know, as a scientist, I just keep my mind open.
	There is so much we don't know about the universe.
	I mean, probably 95%, we call it dark energy and dark matter.
	We think about 5% of everything that we see in the universe is the matter around us.
	So it would be foolish to jump to any conclusions.
	I like to keep all options open.
	And what's remarkable is the more that we learn at the quantum level, then the stranger the universe becomes.
	I mean, quantum physics itself is incredibly weird, and nobody fully understands what's going on there.
	But it's almost like the quantum world is leaving us without the answers that we need.
	It's leaving a place for free will.
	It's leaving this uncertainty, the sort of wave-particle duality.
	And collapsing the wave function in quantum physics is a little bit like how we fly simulators in a way.
	As a military pilot, I would fly and actually test lots of simulators.
	And if you're not looking at something in a simulator, then your graphics card won't bother drawing it.
	You know, everybody knows that it's the graphics that take up a huge amount of processing power on a computer.
	So if you're not looking somewhere, then why bother drawing the graphics?
	And to a degree, the universe kind of works a little bit like that on the wave-particle duality at the quantum level.
	If nobody's observing it, then the universe doesn't make up its mind as to whether it's going to be a wave or a particle.
	It's only when it's observed that you collapse the function and it has to decide what it's going to be.
	So, you know, gosh, that sounds a little bit like how we fly our simulator.
	I love it.
	Watt, I'm going to pick as the last one.
	Sorry if I haven't been able to get your question in.
	Just a quick one at the end here then.
	Laurie asks, when we see people on the ISS playing with droplets of water and bubbles and stuff like that, isn't that dangerous?
	Couldn't one of those droplets of water hit some kind of fuse-packed panel of electronics and blow the thing up?
	Yeah, I think we have to find the balance there between having a bit of fun on the space station and doing these outreach programs and not actually creating too much of a mess.
	So we do take a lot of care to mop up all that water and we have towels around.
	Generally speaking, you don't want to have open, open water.
	So if we're doing that, we will let the mission control center know we're doing an outreach program.
	We're going to have water in a certain module.
	We make sure there's no high power demand going on in that module at the time.
	And we just take extra care.
	Tim Peake, what a pleasure to speak to a man who's got the same sort of A-level grades that I got.
	And look what you did.
	Thank you so much.
	You've been so good.
	I know that you're doing a million Zillian interviews with everybody, including a few people I know.
	So to give me all this time was very, very kind of you.
	We've got to promote the book here.
	Very, very important.
	Love the book.
	It's called Tim Peake Space the Human Story.
	And I think it's on pre-order now, isn't it?
	That's right.
	Yes, yeah.
	All good outlets.
	Available now.
	Tim Peake, thank you very much.
	We can say, actually, that you're actually sitting in a hotel room.
	You're staying at a place when in my days at Capitol Radio, they used to put me up in.
	And, you know, I'm sure they're looking after you very nicely, Tim.
	I'm looking out over Leicester Square, which is fantastic.
	Love it.
	Thank you, Howard.
	Enjoy.
	Tim, thank you so much.
	Take care.
	Thank you.
	Bye-bye.
	Bye-bye.
	Thank you.
	Bye-bye.
	The remarkable Tim Peake and before that, the equally remarkable Chris Hadfield.
	And I'm grateful to them for giving me their time.
	That's it.
	I'll see you in about 12 days or thereabouts.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

▲