Astronaut Tim Peake: ‘Coming home was a harsh transition. Gravity sucks!’

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.

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