He’s the best-known Briton ever to have boldly gone into space: the first to board the International Space Station, the first to carry out a space walk. Major Tim Peake even ran a marathon while in orbit. So why do I wince every time I hear his name?
When I was growing up, shortly after the Apollo moon landing, the portentous language of that mission – ‘The Eagle has landed’, ‘One small step’ etc – had permeated global consciousness. So when space travel was depicted in popular culture, in music and film, it was often with the atmosphere of an existential psychodrama – in Space Odyssey (Kubrick), Space Oddity (Bowie), ‘Rocket Man’ (Elton). Even extraterrestrial animals had this haunted ‘It’s lonely out in space’ quality, as in the Swedish bildungsroman My Life as a Dog (1985), which hung on Laika the Soviet dog alone in doomed orbit.
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