European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Tim Peake, who is bound for the International Space Station (ISS) this December, said that he is well prepared as his launch date approaches.
Speaking with children from a primary school in London in a live link to NASA's Johnson space center in Houston, Texas, UK's first official astronaut said that he is now in the final phase of training, which he described as rigorous and involved retaining large quantities of information.
Peake is already in the final six months prior to the Dec. 15 launch. He said that the training now focuses on the essentials of the Soyuz spacecraft and emergency trainings as well as on scientific payloads that need to be on the ISS.
The former British Army helicopter pilot, who thinks that the flight will be beneficial to his country and the British industry, is set to fly to the orbiting station on a Russian Soyuz rocket. The spacecraft will be launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Peake, who was selected to become the first Briton astronaut for ESA via a route backed by the UK government, spoke to children attending Queen's Park Primary School in West London for an event organized as part of Esero, a UK Space agency program designed to use space to help improve science education.
"This is a step forward in that it's the UK government supporting human spaceflight," Peake said. "What that means is that UK industry, UK education and the UK scientific community can now embrace human spaceflight. That means taking part in scientific research that's being conducted not only on the International Space Station, but within the other European Space Agency human spaceflight programs."
Peake likewise said that among the most challenging tasks that wait for him at the ISS involves the toilet. He said that ensuring that the toilet is usable will take up a lot of his time at the station during his five-month long mission.
"The most training we have is not how to use it but how to fix it. It's been up there for 15 years now," Peake said. "So it might not seem like a very glamorous task for an astronaut but we do spend an awful lot of time fixing the loo."
The astronaut also said that another major challenge for him was to learn how to speak Russian.
