{"id":286,"date":"2020-10-14T15:01:41","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T15:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/?p=286"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:37:30","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:37:30","slug":"suzie-imber-live-in-conversation-with-tim-peake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/2020\/10\/14\/suzie-imber-live-in-conversation-with-tim-peake\/","title":{"rendered":"Suzie Imber live in Conversation with Tim Peake"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Leicester’s Dr. Suzie Imber hosted a live conversation with UK Astronaut Tim Peake, from the Science Museum on October 15th.<\/em><\/strong> In this blog post she explains what it was like to speak with an astronaut<\/em><\/strong>.

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On 15th<\/sup> October, I was nervously walking to the Science Museum in London, in the rain.\u00a0 I had been invited by Tim Peake to launch his autobiography, via a session called \u2018Tim Peake in conversation with Suzie Imber\u2019,<\/em> and I was vaguely terrified.\u00a0 I\u2019ve done media work in the past, from the BBC Astronauts series that started it all, to live BBC news interviews broadcast across the world, but this felt different.\u00a0 One hour, thousands of viewers, just Tim and I chatting about his life.\u00a0 The complexity here was that it wasn\u2019t an interview where I could write down a list of questions and ask them in order, it was a chat, where my job was to steer the conversation in interesting directions to allow Tim to tell some of the incredible tales from his book.\u00a0 Added complexity: with University term starting just a couple of weeks earlier, and all the chaos that brought, I\u2019d only finished the (465 page) book the night before.\u00a0 BUT, it is a brilliant book, full of hilarious anecdotes, showing Tim\u2019s real character and not the serious portrayal we often get of military figures, or astronauts.

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I was allowed one guest so I took my brilliant friend Dallas Campbell, who was making ridiculous suggestions during that walk (\u2018make him do live astronaut challenges!\u2019), and trying to make me feel more at ease.\u00a0 We had an hour to chat with Tim and his wonderful wife Rebecca before the event started, so we discussed my suggested order of topics.\u00a0 I was giving Tim hints about the kind of story I might ask him to discuss (\u2018Maybe I\u2019ll ask you about your most hair-raising time as a test pilot, and you can tell me about that time in Arizona\u2026\u2019) and I remember him laughing and saying \u2018I\u2019m a guy, you\u2019re going to have to lay it out a bit more clearly than that!\u2019

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Then we were on the stage, in front of the very Soyuz capsule that brought Tim back to Earth again, and the director was counting 5, 4, 3, 2\u2026(they never say 1).\u00a0 Thankfully my nerves vanished at that moment, it was just me and my friend Tim having a chat, and we filled the hour with ease.\u00a0 He told his most incredible stories, and time passed faster than I could have imagined.\u00a0 His story is insane \u2013 a helicopter pilot in the military, rising up to becoming a helicopter instructor, and then a test pilot, before being selected for the ESA astronaut programme and going to the International Space Station.\u00a0 After 45 minutes we were scheduled to take questions from the audience, which flew onto an iPad I was trying to casually look at.\u00a0 There seemed to be lots about cocktails, which I didn\u2019t understand, but it turned out that earlier that day Tim had tweeted a video of him throwing bottles around in the Science Museum. I had forgotten that extra skill – he had perfected the art of energetic and enthusiastic cocktail-making during his youth!\u00a0 Is there anything this guy can\u2019t do?

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Celebrating the launch of his memoir Limitless, Tim talked about his six-month mission on board the ISS and describe what life in space is really like\u2014from sounds and smells to views and vulnerability. He also told the story of his path to becoming the first Briton in space for nearly 20 years, telling tales of his time training in the British army, and as an Apache helicopter pilot and flight instructor deployed to Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan.
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Leicester’s Dr. Suzie Imber hosted a live conversation with UK Astronaut Tim Peake, from the Science Museum on October 15th. In this blog post she explains what it was like to speak with an astronaut. On 15th October, I was nervously walking to the Science Museum in London, in the rain.\u00a0 I had been invited […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":256,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-outreach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/256"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":507,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions\/507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/physicsastronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}