Tim Peake

Timothy Peake was born on 7 April 1972 in Chichester, West Sussex, and came to spaceflight as a military aviator. Commissioned into the British Army Air Corps in the early 1990s, he trained as a helicopter pilot and rose to become a test pilot, flying the Apache attack helicopter and qualifying at the Empire Test Pilots' School, with thousands of flight hours across many aircraft types over his career. He also earned a degree in flight dynamics and evaluation from the University of Portsmouth. In 2009 he was chosen as one of six new members of the European Astronaut Corps, and — inspired by Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space — he would go on to make history as the first British astronaut to fly under the ESA banner.

Peake has flown one long-duration mission to the International Space Station: the Principia mission, named after Newton's masterwork. He launched on 15 December 2015 aboard Soyuz TMA-19M to join Expedition 46/47, and spent 186 days in orbit before returning to Earth on 18 June 2016. It was a densely packed flight. On 15 January 2016 he became the first Briton to conduct a spacewalk in an ESA capacity, venturing outside the station to help replace a faulty unit on its solar-power system. He took part in a heavy program of experiments for ESA and its partners, and in a feat that captured public imagination, he ran the 2016 London Marathon strapped to the station's treadmill in microgravity, finishing in about three and a half hours as the event unfolded on the ground far below.

Though he has logged just a single flight — 186 days, roughly 4,400 hours in space — Peake became a national figure in the United Kingdom and one of the most effective science communicators of his generation. He remains a member of the European Astronaut Corps and has poured his energy into education and outreach, writing several books — including Hello, is this planet Earth?, the reader-questions volume Ask an Astronaut, his autobiography Limitless, and the history Space: The Human Story — and campaigning to inspire young people toward science and engineering careers. Appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George for services to space research and education, he stands as the astronaut who made human spaceflight feel tangibly British, and who continues to use that visibility to draw the next generation toward the stars.