That Gaby Roslin Podcast: Reasons To Be Joyful - Tim Peake

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Astronaut Tim Peake joins Gaby for a natter about space ice cream, amongst other things...Tim has some amazing stories from his time in space, and has seen so much over his lifetime and career. He's also full of joy. We hope you enjoy the chat! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim Pig is not just an astronaut. He's an aquanaut. And honestly, Ed looked to me and what? There's an expression in my very odd world where we say we do a deep dive on somebody to learn a lot about. Well, little did I know. I think you really are a superhero. Not at all. Not if you are.

No, you are. What do your kids think? So you've got two boys. Do they know what you've done and what you've done? and what you've seen. When we were training for the mission, it was interesting because I had taken them to work with me, and I thought that's the best way to help them to prepare for what was coming.

And in Houston, we had all these mock-ups of the whole international space station. The Sawyer simulator was there, showed them where I'd be eating my meals, where I'd be sleeping, this is the hatch for spacewalking, these kind of things. And so that helped them become more familiar with where I'd be and what I'd be doing. So that helped. But I don't think it was until. the launch day that they truly understood that is actually, you know, that's me heading up to

space. Going to live in space. That's a lovely way of looking at it. I don't quite understand it as just as a layperson. You lived in space. I mean, it's, do you, do you ever think back and think, what? Oh, here's some tea. Let's get real, I love that.

Tim, you've got your cup of tea now. Yes, thank you, Gabby. Astronaut, Aquanaut, Tim Peek. a cup of tea, did you have cup of teas up in space? I did. Yeah, I didn't expect to. I wasn't really sure what we would get in terms of hot drinks. But NASA said, well, you're allowed three hot drinks a day. What would you like? I said, oh, two teas and a coffee, thanks. I said, what tea do you like any particular one? And so I said, well, actually, I like Builders Tea. And, you know, Yorkshire Red Label is my favourite.

And they said, well, okay, we'll get in touch and we'll get them tested and we'll get them bagged up. and that will be your tea. And sure enough. Tested? Yeah, they have to test them, make sure they're appropriate and I don't know what exact testing they go through, make sure that they're not going to do any harm and that they're compatible with Space Station packaging

and all the rest of it. And there I was when you arrived on the space station, the foil packets for my tea. But the thing is, of course, it's got creamer in it, no milk. And so it's not quite the same. And you put hot water into this foil pouch and you drink it through a straw. So as soon as you put the hot water in it,

it's way too hot to drink. You have to leave it a while and it's not too bad at the beginning. But then by the end, you're sucking on the tea back and it's lukewarm. So it's not quite the same experience you might have down here on earth. So you don't, you can't drink anything because the fluid, the liquid would fly around. Yeah, you've got no cups and you know, you're not having cups and sauce. You can't hold anything. Everything's Velcro to the wall and liquid would fly around. So we drink things with straws and they've got like a clamp at the top of the straws and that just stops any liquid coming at the top of them.

What is it like in space? There's a question. Yeah, there's a question. It's the most surreal experience I've ever had. I actually, I love it being in space. Not everybody does, as in, you know, you're in a hostile environment. You know that you're a certain element of risk. But it's absolutely beautiful.

The earth is just stunning by day and by night. And then space is just awesome. I mean, the vastness of it. And by daytime, it's completely black. and then by night time all the stars come out and you see the Milky Way rising, you see the aurora, you see thunderstorms over the planet, and all the time you're floating around.

And that in itself is just so much fun. It takes a bit of a while to get used to it like any sport really. But as you get used to it, you can fling yourself around the space station flying about in waitlessness and it's just a huge amount of fun. I know it's a crazy thing to say, but when you're telling these stories, and obviously you do because you're back on tour again,

doing talks to everybody, when you tell these stories, do you feel as if you're talking about somebody else? Because does it feel slightly unreal? Because when you talk about it, I believe you, because I know you're not a liar, and I've seen the pictures. But it feels sort of unbelievable. It is a completely different environment.

I think I've done lots of diving. I love diving. That's why I said you're an aqued horse as well. Yeah. When you submerse yourself underwater, you enter this new realm, and you kind of think, oh, we don't really belong here. But it's in this wonderful, surrounded by marine life. and popping down there for a while.

And it's a bit like in space, you realize that you don't quite belong. And you've gone through this violent launch experience to get you there. Is it violent? Really violent. In what way? Just terms of energy and power. I remember it being mind-boggling after about five minutes, just thinking, how much longer can this go on for? I mean, you're feeling four Gs of acceleration.

So put it into layman's terms. You say it's violent. In what way? What's happening to you when that's happening? So physically you're feeling the acceleration, the G force, as you lift off the launch pad. To begin with, you're hearing the noise, you're feeling the vibration of the rocket and all the energy that's being expended. And in the initial stages, you're pointing up at the sky. You're just getting as much altitude as quickly as possible.

But then for the last four or five minutes, the rocket's actually horizontal. You're in space and now you need speed. So you're pointing horizontally, just trying to get up to 25 times the speed. sound. And at some point, if you've ever been on a roller coaster and thought, okay, I'm not sure I should have sat on this. I mean, you're there just thinking, this is crazy. This is absolutely ridiculous. The speed is overwhelming. And so that comes to an abrupt haul, to violent haul. When the engine cuts out, you go from 4Gs to 0G in a fraction of a second. And then it's beautiful and quiet and you float up out of your seat and look out the window and there's earth. And it's like

you've entered this realm, a different realm. And it's quite remarkable. Why did you want to do this? I mean, because I've, like I said, I've done a deep dive and I've learned that you spent an incredible amount of time underwater, but in one go. And you, you're an adventurer. But was it something as a true? You know, I think everybody always says, oh, I want to be an astronaut, or I want to be a fireman, oh, I want to be an actress, whatever it is. Was it something? Did you just think, I want to be up there? I felt I wanted to be up there flying, definitely, from a young age. And I went through a phase of enjoying space and thinking, wow, you know, aren't astronauts cool.

Wouldn't it be great to do that? But it was never serious. And when I was seriously thinking about my career from kind of 13 onwards, it was all about flying. I joined the cadets at school. I'd had a trip in a glider and thought, wow, if I can fly for a living, that's what I want to do. And we didn't have anybody who was a British astronaut to look up to. And it wasn't until 1991 when Helen Sharman first flew, then we had somebody. And that was a one-off commercial mission.

So it wasn't like it was, okay, now we can all join the space agency and become astronauts. So even that was a one-off. And so I don't think anybody in the UK really grew up thinking they could be astronauts like they were in America or in Russia when they've been doing this since the late 50s. early 60s. So when the European Space Agency had the selection process in 2008, it was a huge surprise that they said, hey, this is open to all ESA member states, and that includes the UK. You can apply. But it's very different flying an airplane or flying a helicopter to going into space. Yes. And I think from that point of view, as my flying career had progressed, I'd become an instructor pilot, then I became a test pilot. And

As a test pilot, I was working much more with industry and pushing aircrafts their limits. We were using new technology and a lot of the new technology comes from the space industry. So I was much closer to the space industry than I had been before. So I think it was really quite incremental. My career was jumping through these hurdles to get to what was in the right time, the right place, right qualifications to be an astronaut. But also you were an aquanaut. So you spend a vast amount of time underwater in one go.

Why? Well, this was a NASA mission called Nemo, and we were using the underwater environment because it's a bit like weightlessness. Things are neutrally buoyant. So it's not the same as weightlessness, but it's as close as we can get to without leaving the planet. And we were testing out things like an asteroid mission.

Our particular mission was simulating a 12-day mission to an asteroid to land on there. How are we going to navigate? This is mind blowing, Tim. And yes, we were living in this habitat 30 meters down on the ocean floor. And twice a day we'd be going out with this kind of Jacques Cousteau diving equipment, these, you know, with umbilical cords back to the habitat, simulating a spacewalk and working out, if this was an asteroid, you know,

how are we going to hang on to it, how are we going to tether ourselves, how can we collect scientific samples? and all the time communicating back to the coast, which we had a mission control centre, and they introduced a 90-second communication delay because if you're going to an asteroid, you're going to be so far away, you're not going to have instant comms. And that in itself was a challenge,

trying to communicate for 12 days with that time delay, becomes very, very difficult. How explain that bit? Well, you just can't have a conversation. I mean, you pose a question, and, you know, you're having to wait 180, 80 seconds before your question arrives, they think of the answer and send it back. Oh, you mean an immediate delay?

Yeah, yeah. So you end up just text messaging really. It's like a text stream we found out worked best. But in emergency situations, that becomes really critical, really difficult. So we were kind of testing out ways as to how we can communicate with mission control better when we go on these long duration missions. And Mars, which, you know, Mars is not that far away in terms of time. Do you think it will happen?

I think it will happen in the next 15 to 20. years. Wow. Yeah. And you've got up to 20 minutes of time delay with a Mars mission. So the crew are very much by themselves. Why do you think it's important that we go to Mars? Obviously, I know people talk to you a lot about the environmental impact of going into space. And you have some great answers about that. Yeah. I mean, gosh, there's a lot there to unpack in terms of why. I think for me, the Y comes down to three things. It comes down to science. It comes down to inspiration and exploration. So science is amazing and we are just really scratching the surface. The space station's been occupied for about 20 years now. But in the early days, a lot of that was just building it.

And then it was government-funded research, which tends to be fundamental science. So it's the basics. And it's really hard to know, you know, when something ends up in your iPhone, that actually that was because it was an experiment that was done on the space shuttle in 1984. and it's taken this long to filter down. Really? Yeah, things like cameras, camera technology and miniaturization of electronic components and stuff. But what we're doing now is the space station's becoming more commercial

and it's a much faster turnaround. So commercial companies are sponsoring payloads and now the science is very immediate. So a pharma company might grow a protein crystal on board like motor neurone disease or Parkinson's Huntington's, bring it back down to Earth. analyze it and come up with a drug that can combat that protein crystal. And we're now just seeing the potential for scientific research in microgravity. Basically, it's because you haven't got gravity

so you don't have sedimentation, you don't have fracturing, anything that's really small or fragile that you want to build here on Earth, very hard to do. If you want to print out a human organ using bioink and a 3D printer, for example, which we are doing here on Earth, very, very difficult. You need some sort of scaffolding structure and it collapses on itself and it's hard to do. In space you can grow or print perfect 3D structures, which initially might be very, very fragile. Obviously, when they're complete, they've got rigidity, they've got strength. So you can potentially print out a human heart in space

and fly it back down for the patient on it. So this is the kind of thing. It's really exciting and we're only just scratching the surface of the potential for what we can do in space. So that's the science part. There's loads that I could talk about on the science. Then there's the exploration part. And I get this then becomes a little bit more selfish, I guess, as a species. This is where it's case of us always having this innate desire to explore what's beyond the next mountain, the forest, the coast, whatever.

And going to the moon, learning more about why the moon is like the earth and how that can teach us things going to Mars. was there once life on Mars, are there other valuable resources in the solar system that we can help, you know, reduce the burden on planet Earth with the resources that we need for electrification of our cars or potential fuels for future fusion reactors and things like this? So, you know, there's a real desire to explore for both the passion of knowing, you know, finding out what's beyond the horizon and also what it might teach us. And then the inspiration thing is, is to, you know, space is something that's inspired people. for years. I think everybody at some point looks up to the stars and just thinks, that's what we came from, isn't it? You know, we're all part of the universe and I wonder what's out there. Do you feel differently about the Earth now from seeing it as you did?

Yeah, definitely, definitely. You see how precarious it looks. I hesitate to use the word fragile because the earth's been through a lot. You know, it's been through ice ages. It's been through extinction events. been through calamities and there'll be calamities to come and, you know, one day the sun will explode and an earth will die. But when you look at it against the vast blackness of space right now, you just see how isolated we are. I mean, this is a little spaceship earth here and it's

a big black universe out there and, you know, there's nothing for a long, long way. So I think that gives you a huge amount of respect for the planet. I love that you use that word because I do feel that maybe many people don't respect the planet enough. And hearing you say it like that, it puts it into a completely different perspective. Yes, yeah, we've got to look after it. I mean, we're the fragile ones. We're a complex, large organism. We're going to be the first to go.

You know, we need to look after the planet and it will look after us. A five-year-old asked me to ask you this. So I'm doing it. So this is for you, Tom. are we really the only people in the world, which I think he means past the world? Yeah. Because I said that I was, Mason, he said, we cannot be the only people in the world because if you look past the world, there's definitely more people.

Yeah, yeah. I'm a firm believer. I know many, many serious scientists, astrophysicists, cosmologists, who are firm believers as well. Just statistically. I mean, look at the images coming back from the James Webb Space Telescope. They're just unbelievable when we look at other galaxies around. There's about 200 billion stars in our own Milky Way around about. And we think maybe up to one or two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

It's mind-boggling, mind-boggling. And then you think about in our own solar system, there's abundant water, carbon-based molecules, you know, carbon compounds that we know are floating around. We capture them outside on the space station and analyse them. So the seeds of life are everywhere, water is everywhere, stars are everywhere, and planets orbiting stars in what we call the Goldilocks zone, the habitable zone where liquid water could exist. They seem to be everywhere as well. We've only really looked in our tiny little neighbourhood so far. We found 5,000 planets already. And some of these stars burn a lot, lot longer than our sun will burn.

And of course, if you've got time, you've got more time for life to evolve. and potentially that life to become much more sophisticated. So I think life is abundant throughout the universe. I suppose because of what we've been fed through literature and then following on through films and television, that we've all been led to use the word aliens. And I think that's what little children then imagine. And many adults.

But it's not, that is probably the wrong word. You're saying that there is life out there. Yeah, and you're right. Hollywood's not done us any favoured in that respect. We all think of, you know, little green people running around. And who knows what they might be, what different life forms are. You only have to look on this planet. Look at the octopus, how incredibly intelligent that is. And how when you follow the tree of life back, you know, how early humans and the octopus split apart. And yet they've both developed into intelligent creatures that have clearly. emotions and sensitivities. And you think that's on planet's Earth. What might life have done on another planet? I think that, you know, there's a difference between single-celled organisms, bacteria, which are probably far more abundant in the universe. Making that leap to complex, multicellular life is going to be more rare. But I absolutely think it's happened in, you know, hundreds of thousands of places, if not millions of places. So when you talk about this,

I get the feeling that you are still wide-eyed about what you've been through. Do you miss it up there? I do miss it, yes, yeah. No, I think I'm lucky that, you know, I flew to space in an era that we have video cameras, photographs. You really did do it. And I can enjoy looking back at that as well. But I do miss it, absolutely. I think all my friends miss it as well who flown to space.

Everybody would like the opportunity to go again. What do you miss? I think it's a mixture of things that, I mean, the professional element of being in an environment where you're just allowed to be focused on your job to such a high degree with no distractions. No one calls you, no one emails you, all you're doing is being the best that you possibly can be and everyone's helping you to do that. I mean, there's nowhere on earth where you're working in an environment like that. The fact that every day you're touching experiments that might be people's life's work and really feeling like, you know, really feeling like, you know, you're contributing something back to society. So there's that element, and then there's the element of, well,

just go to the cupola window and spend a couple of hours on a Sunday looking down on earth. There's that element that you miss as well. Was it quite emotional being up there? At times, yes, yeah. You've got plenty of time to allow yourself to become really detached and, you know, isolated. But I never felt it in an unpleasant way. I felt it as a sense of calm, of kind of serenity, you know, having that time to reflect. I guess it's a bit like if you go on a holiday and you get that sense of just getting away from it all.

Yeah, but there's a beach or a ski slope. It's a bit different than being in space. But it's the same feeling. It's that kind of ability to just unwind and detach yourself. Oh, incredible. Yeah. So you're quite good at meditating and mindfulness and everything now, do you think? I don't do meditation in my mind. I like running and I think that's where I get my meditations. You were running up there. We all watched. you doing that as well? You did the marathon? Yes. Yeah. I've always found that is the place. I never like running to music. I rarely even wear a watch when I run. I don't wear a heart rate monitor.

I'm not interested in mileage and performance and timing. For me, running is about headspace. It's about getting into the rhythm and just enjoying that time to allow your mind to wander. How did the whole becoming a, I hate the word, I'm just going to use it once, celebrity off the back of it. And it's a very odd status that you suddenly found yourself in that, you know, I said to the family, oh, I'm going to speak to Tim Peek tomorrow.

And they just look, what? And it's different than when I say I'm talking to an actor or whatever. But that celebrity status and that wonder that you put out there, do you enjoy it? I get the feeling that you sort of do, enjoy it all for the right reasons, not for the wrong reasons? I mean, I enjoy what I do and I enjoy talking about what I've done and I love it when other people have the similar passion. So from

that point of view, yes, I do. And I think I'm quite lucky that, you know, space is something that can really capture emotions and people's desire to know more about it and passion. So it's not a bad thing to be involved in. I think if you're, you know, if you're known for being a politician, you're probably going to be having a harder time of it. People who come up to me because they might recognize me, they generally, it's a positive experience. They want to speak to me about space and are very respectful. So I haven't had to experience the downsides of being a known person, really.

I like to think that what I'm doing is helping to promote science and tech and STEM and kids and inspiration and good messaging as much as possible. So what would you say to the child that wants to go and. into space that it is possible. Completely, yes. Yeah, and it's going to become more possible in the future. We're going to see more people fly into space with easier access to space, more space stations going up there and, you know, a new program at the moment going back to the moon and a plan to go to Mars.

So what's happening in the space industry right now is phenomenal, really is rapidly expanding. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot when in the papers and on television and everywhere when everybody talks about very wealthy, certain, very wealthy gentlemen who put their money into space exploration, how do you feel about all of that? Are they doing it for the same reasons as you want to see? I mean, like you said, that you might be able to save people's lives and what's a difference you're going to make?

There's all sorts of things happening. And part of the excitement of space is the fact that commercial companies, is getting involved. So that's very disruptive. It means the cost of getting space is plummeting, which means you can do more and you can carry involved. So it's a good thing? In some respects, it can be a really good thing. And some things that we thought with science fiction are going to be reality in five years time. Because, you know, Elon Musk, SpaceX, Starship, which is coming up for its third launch very soon, when that's a success, it could be as cheap as $200 to get a kilogram to space. I used to be $57,000 on a space shuttle in 2011. So in a short space of time,

that's what we're talking about. And starship can carry 100 to 200 tons to low Earth orbit. Now you can start talking about manufacturing factories in space and solar farms in space, for example, that can beam down energy. Solar farm, I like factories doing, factories in space. Well, manufacturing the things that we can't manufacture on Earth or, you know, potentially server farms, which here on Earth, they're using vast amount of energy. They're using vast amounts of water to keep them cool. And as artificial intelligence becomes more prolific, we're going to need more processors, more server farms, more computing processing power. Well, potentially, you can put all that in space where you've got permanent access to clean limits energy from the sun. You've got

easy access to get rid of the heat out into the universe with very little impact on planet Earth. And so, you know, We need to get smarter. And so space will help us to do things that will help to protect the planet. But then we need to look after space. That's the flip side of the coin. We need to make sure we're all regulated, make sure that we're not polluting space, make sure that we're having a minimal impact on the climate in terms of getting to space and getting back.

So there's a lot of people working on that as well, making it as clean and sustainable as possible. Apologies now for asking you the question that I know everybody asks you, but do you feel differently about your life and about life on earth and you as a soul and as a being, do you feel differently about it all now? I do, yes. You know, going to space shifts your perspective in that respect. But it's something that I've kind of been thinking and moving towards all my life as well

in terms of, I've always asked myself the big questions. And I'm always wondering, even today, I was thinking, isn't it crazy? I mean, I wrote a book, The Cosmic Diary of Our Incredible Universe, and it was aimed at kind of 9 to 12-year-olds. But actually, I've had so many adults say. This is brilliant. It's a brilliant book. It kind of just focuses on, you know,

it's taken 13.8 billion years for the universe to create us. And as far as we know, flaws and all, the human species is the most complex, intelligent species in the universe until we find otherwise.

So let's respect for a minute what the universe has created in us. And we need to appreciate that and protect it. So I think we do need to look after ourselves. We do need to think what is a universe without life? It's pretty meaningless, really. It's just a lot of matter doing physics and not much else. So consciousness, life, love, hate, all these emotions, the

things that we have as humans, we need to protect that. And so I do think of life differently. I see us as having had this journey. We are the consciousness of the universe. And spiritually, whether it's, I'm not going into the religious side, I'm just talking spiritually. it must be very profound suddenly feeling that deep in your soul, feeling those things. Spiritually, it must be extraordinary. Yes, and some people do have a religious experience. If you had a predisposition to be a religious person beforehand, then it's going to probably strengthen that feeling of faith.

But it is a spiritual experience, even if you're not a religious person. And it is very thought-provoking to be there as a human floating in a space suit, looking down on the cradle of life as we know it. It does kind of give you some thoughts about how did we get here and where are we going. It's interesting. I remember when you were doing all the lives into all the different TV shows, whether it was Blue Peter or, you know, you did so many chats when you were up there. And every child wanted to know about going to the loo.

I just, one of those things, and when I was looking and I was looking at all video footage and the interviews, and everybody wanted to talk about the music that you'd chosen, which fantastic choice. music and how you go to the loo. And I love that that's how kids think. Not what does it look like from space? How do you go to the loo? It's always the basics, isn't it? But it's so important. It's just so lovely that they still want to know that. Do they still ask you that? Do kids always ask you that still? They do still ask you. But what I found hilarious when I was researching for the tour and telling these incredible stories of astronauts throughout history, I didn't know

something. And that's the Al Shepard, he was the first American to fly to space. He was obviously beaten by Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard never made it into orbit. It was a suborbital trajectory. But when he was sat on top of the Mercury Redstone rocket, there were a few problems and delays that they weren't anticipating. So they didn't think he was going to be sat in that rocket for so long before launching to space. And he said to Mission Control, listen, I'm going to have to relieve myself. What's the plan? And people looked at themselves. We haven't thought about this. So when a kid says, how'd you go to the fluid space? Do you know what, NASA didn't even think of that before poor old Al Shepard had to relieve himself there and then in his

spacesuit before foraging up into space. So it's important. You know, the bodily functions are important and we've learned a lot over the years. So now we just have to switch on a fan and that airflow kind of takes care of everything. It keeps everything clear. Well, I'm very pleased you shared that. I like the fact that Ed is nodding behind you, who works on this. He's nodding. I hope that's not how you go to the loo here, no, on Earth. Or maybe it is. Maybe it is. But the other thing that children were asking you as well, young people were asking you, was about food and all of those things. And I remember when I was a child, there was the space ice cream. Everybody who thought, this is really cool, space ice cream. And we were told that that's what the people

who'd gone onto the moon, that's what they'd eaten. And there's all of that. It's sort of, it's the simple wonders. And I love the way that kids look at space and look at all of that. I know. I know. It is incredible. I hate to burst people's bubbles, but the space ice cream thing,

they flew it once on the space shuttle. And it tasted so dreadful. The astronaut said, never fly that to space again. But I think they'd bought so much of it. that NASA decided to flog it in the museum, and it did really well. And so they just kept on selling it. And so everyone thinks that we have this dehydrated, horrible cardboard ice cream. But no, no, it's not on board now.

I love that. So, Tim, doing the tour that you're doing, and you've done books, you've done kids' books, you've done adult books, doing the tour that you're doing now, do you know what people want now? I mean, obviously, you've done this interview probably 10,000 times, if not more. Do you know, like you said, you were now investigating the other astronauts who came before you? I remember meeting one on The Big Breakfast Buzz Aldrin. Oh, wow. Wow. It was quite well.

He's quite a character, yes. Yeah. But do you know, are you able to feed people what they want now? This tour must be amazing. Just watching you on stage, telling you. I could spend, sorry, apologies to your family. I think I want you to come and move in because I have so many questions.

We haven't got time with this podcast. I hope so. I mean, I really enjoyed doing my journey to space tour and really getting a feel for what the audience liked. And I also really enjoyed kind of sharing that story. So this, I thought, well, that's just my story. I mean, I've got more stories, but I've also, you know, there are so many other stories, the other 6909 people

who've made it to Earth orbit. And there are some incredible stories there, right, from the early days to, you know, the four friends I've got who are preparing to fly to the moon. Are you jealous of them? Everyone's jealous. Yeah. Yeah, there's no point denying it, you know. But it's going to be great.

It really is. And they're amazing people and they're going to do us proud. And so can't wait for that mission next year to that's going to be a bit like Apollo 8 orbiting the moon. And then the next year after that, so 26, we'll be seeing boots on the moon again. Will you, will you not want to go? Oh, I do, yeah. Oh, you do? No, absolutely.

But will you go? Will you go onto the moon? I doubt that's going to happen in my career timeframe for me. Oh. As in, there might be a chance of going back to the space station. I'm currently working with Axiom Space, an American company and the UK Space Agency. We're trying to put together an all-Uk mission. Oh, I didn't know you were going back?

Well, the crew's not been announced, so it might not be, and I can't get too excited just yet. Okay, but I can't. I'm excited for you. It's hard not to get excited. Yeah. And it's a commercially sponsored mission, which would be really exciting for Brits and be great for our science community, great for engineering and tech and outreach. So if we can pull this off, it'll be amazing. Oh, well, good luck with that.

I didn't know you were going to be doing that, but good luck. I think from your smile, it's a big possibility. But enjoy the tour on Earth first before you go back into space. And do you think you might go on to my mind? Mars, would you be one of the people that went to Mars? That's an interesting question. So at the moment, I'm not sure it will happen again in my career timeframe. Right now, I wouldn't do it because I've got a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old.

And it's a three-year mission. And that's not the time right now to be away. But once they've left home, once they're doing their thing and enjoying themselves, then why not? So it's interesting, actually. And I was thinking to myself, I wonder if, you know, what the potential could be, what the age limits could be. And there are four people on board the space station right now who are older than me. And one of the NASA astronauts who's about to fly, Don Petit, who's a great guy, is an amazing scientist, a brain the size of the universe. And he's, I think he's 68 and he's going back for a six-month

tour to the space. So, you know. Will you live longer than all of us now? No, probably not. But do you not live longer in space? Well, it gets a bit complicated. Einstein's theory of special relativity and general relativity. So because you travel faster, time slows down a little bit. But because you're in a lower gravity environment, time speeds up a little bit. So they pretty much cancel themselves out.

But special relativity wins by about 0.07 seconds. So I'm 0.07 seconds younger than when I left before I flew. So relative to some. somebody here on earth is about that. So nothing significant, I'm afraid. I'm sorry. To me, that's significant. Timpeak, you are just completely a joy. So thank you for joining me. Thank you, Gabby. It's been great.