Four years after leaving orbit, and with a second mission on the horizon, how is life on Earth for the first Briton to walk in space?
• Read an exclusive extract from Limitless, Tim Peake’s autobiography
When the astronaut Tim Peake was living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) back in 2016 – he was the first Briton ever to do so – he got into the habit of taking his toothbrush to the enormous observatory windows, so he could clean his teeth while enjoying a view of the planet that stretched 1,000 miles in every direction. He could see all of Europe at a glance. Whole oceans. As Peake writes in a new autobiography, out this month, he would be idly scrubbing his choppers and suddenly “catch sight of the wind-sculpted sands of the Sahara, a gently smoking Siberian volcano, the lights of a thousand night-fishing boats glimmering in the Gulf of Thailand”.
He now lives in a peaceful village not far from Guildford in Surrey, and when I visit him at home, I ask him about the quality of the scenery when he brushes his teeth, these days. He shows me a bathroom-window view of the back garden. Washing line. Decking. Trampoline. “Not quite the same,” he agrees.
