Kashmiri Pandit
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In exactly two weeks time, at 11.02 on Tuesday, 15 December 2015, Tim Peake will be fired into space at 27,600 kilometres an hour to become Britain's first astronaut in space in more than 20 years.
Later that month, it is hoped that Peake will call Earth to complete one of his first public engagements: speaking via live video chat to Kevin Fong, as part of this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures.
Fong, 44, a flying doctor and expert in space medicine, will be following in the footsteps of Carl Sagan and David Attenborough as he delivers Britain's most prestigious public science lectures, but he would much rather be in Peake's place on board the International Space Station.
"If you offered me a ticket now I'd pack my bags and go in a heartbeat," Fong told WIRED.
The Christmas lectures were first organised by Michael Faraday in 1825 with the aim of introducing a younger people to topics in science. This year's lectures have been planned to celebrate Peake's achievement -- but if things had been different Fong himself could have been the man up in space.
In 2008, the consultant in anaesthesia at University College London Hospitals, who is also a doctor with the Kent, Surrey and Sussex air ambulance trust, joined over 8,000 people and applied to the European Space Agency (ESA) programme to become an astronaut.
Paul Wilkinson
He made it as far as the second round, held in 2009 in Hamburg, after the first cut had taken out all but 800 of the applicants.
"They threw you into a pilot aptitude training centres, and you just played video games for about a day: online quizzes and online questionnaires and a bunch of quite technical video games. I thought, 'Video games: my not so wasted childhood comes good in the end'," Fong explained.
Unfortunately, Fong didn't get any further in the process.
"I wasn't that surprised. Between tests you were hanging round coffee bars with the rest of the candidates and you realised that there was an extremely high calibre of applications. Although I really, really wanted to succeed, I very much doubted that I would," he continued.
It was the end of a childhood dream first ignited at the age of four, when Fong's parents woke him up one night to watch a 1975 TV broadcast of a US Apollo module docking with a Soviet spacecraft. "I was hugely deflated when they sent me the letter saying you haven't got through to the next round, but not surprised and in a way almost relieved. I thought, well, you’ve wanted to be an astronaut for thirty years now, best you try and do something else."
For his Christmas lectures, Fong will follow the journey of an astronaut, breaking down the launch second-by-second, before going on to describe a day on board the space station.
The three-part series, which will be broadcast on BBC4 over three evenings in December, will conclude by describing the steps necessary to venture further into space, where the absence of gravity and the bombardment of radiation make it vanishingly impossible for humans to sustain themselves.
Weightlessness causes muscles and bones to atrophy, blood to thin, circulation to fail and hand-eye coordination to diminish. Radiation, which is normally filtered out the Earth's magnetosphere, tears through DNA molecules, causing cancer and other diseases.
"The further you look, the deeper it goes, and that just get worse the longer you spend," said Fong.
To make it to Mars, we will either have to drastically cut the length of the mission or find a way to manufacture gravity in space, most likely by spinning a spaceship in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Either you sprint or you spin," said Fong. "You sprint and you spin and you've probably got a working solution for a lot of things. I’d like to hope that’s what coming down the line."
Inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers to solve these challenges is the task Fong has set himself in his lectures. "I wanted to communicate the excitement I always felt about the adventure of human space exploration. I do want them to feel that within the limits of human imagination anything is possible," he said.
Later that month, it is hoped that Peake will call Earth to complete one of his first public engagements: speaking via live video chat to Kevin Fong, as part of this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures.
Fong, 44, a flying doctor and expert in space medicine, will be following in the footsteps of Carl Sagan and David Attenborough as he delivers Britain's most prestigious public science lectures, but he would much rather be in Peake's place on board the International Space Station.
"If you offered me a ticket now I'd pack my bags and go in a heartbeat," Fong told WIRED.
The Christmas lectures were first organised by Michael Faraday in 1825 with the aim of introducing a younger people to topics in science. This year's lectures have been planned to celebrate Peake's achievement -- but if things had been different Fong himself could have been the man up in space.
In 2008, the consultant in anaesthesia at University College London Hospitals, who is also a doctor with the Kent, Surrey and Sussex air ambulance trust, joined over 8,000 people and applied to the European Space Agency (ESA) programme to become an astronaut.
Paul Wilkinson
He made it as far as the second round, held in 2009 in Hamburg, after the first cut had taken out all but 800 of the applicants.
"They threw you into a pilot aptitude training centres, and you just played video games for about a day: online quizzes and online questionnaires and a bunch of quite technical video games. I thought, 'Video games: my not so wasted childhood comes good in the end'," Fong explained.
Unfortunately, Fong didn't get any further in the process.
"I wasn't that surprised. Between tests you were hanging round coffee bars with the rest of the candidates and you realised that there was an extremely high calibre of applications. Although I really, really wanted to succeed, I very much doubted that I would," he continued.
It was the end of a childhood dream first ignited at the age of four, when Fong's parents woke him up one night to watch a 1975 TV broadcast of a US Apollo module docking with a Soviet spacecraft. "I was hugely deflated when they sent me the letter saying you haven't got through to the next round, but not surprised and in a way almost relieved. I thought, well, you’ve wanted to be an astronaut for thirty years now, best you try and do something else."
For his Christmas lectures, Fong will follow the journey of an astronaut, breaking down the launch second-by-second, before going on to describe a day on board the space station.
The three-part series, which will be broadcast on BBC4 over three evenings in December, will conclude by describing the steps necessary to venture further into space, where the absence of gravity and the bombardment of radiation make it vanishingly impossible for humans to sustain themselves.
Weightlessness causes muscles and bones to atrophy, blood to thin, circulation to fail and hand-eye coordination to diminish. Radiation, which is normally filtered out the Earth's magnetosphere, tears through DNA molecules, causing cancer and other diseases.
"The further you look, the deeper it goes, and that just get worse the longer you spend," said Fong.
To make it to Mars, we will either have to drastically cut the length of the mission or find a way to manufacture gravity in space, most likely by spinning a spaceship in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Either you sprint or you spin," said Fong. "You sprint and you spin and you've probably got a working solution for a lot of things. I’d like to hope that’s what coming down the line."
Inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers to solve these challenges is the task Fong has set himself in his lectures. "I wanted to communicate the excitement I always felt about the adventure of human space exploration. I do want them to feel that within the limits of human imagination anything is possible," he said.
