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| Boldly going.... |
Guess what’s on display at the Science + Media Museum in Bradford? It’s the final parachute and the small (savagely-burned) Soyuz capsule that brought Tim Peake back to Earth in June 2016 after his six month mission to the International Space Station. The capsule is remarkable – it looks ancient, it looks small, it contained three crew members! You can take a selfie in an astronaut suit and (book to) experience a Virtual Reality descent to Earth wearing goggles, guided by Major Peake. The display has already been to London and will be going to York, Manchester, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. If you can’t make it to Bradford (between now and November 19th), then try and catch it elsewhere. It didn’t take long to see everything in the display but it filled up my imagination for many days.
"The smells of Earth are just so strong"
Tim Peake’s mission covered a distance of over 100 million kilometres and orbited Earth around 3,000 times. The pictures he sent back for publication were incredible and made a mockery of the ephemeral political intricacies of the human race. Asked how he felt after landing, Maj Peake said: "Truly elated, the smells of Earth are just so strong, just so good to be back on Earth. I'll look forward to seeing the family."
Into the stars
I’m still on a breathing space break from writing my YA trilogy after finishing Book One Draft One but, if I haven’t mentioned it before, I’ll reveal that it’s set on another planet – over a thousand years into the future when Earth has had to be abandoned. I feel confident that I’m writing speculative fiction rather than fantasy because the Tim Peake/Soyuz display and follow up research convinces me that humans could survive on a number of planets in the universe. If we rechannelled the money we spent on arms and weapons of mass destruction to the exploration of outer space we would soon be giving our future destinations names. Maybe one could be called Rhenium like the planet in my book…
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