1. Russian space lizards return to Earth
2. Briton picked for five-month mission on International Space Station in 2015
3. Tim Peake’s space station mission could put a rocket under Britain’s economy

1. Russian space lizards return to Earth
2. Tim Peake to become first official British astronaut to visit International Space Station – video
3. Should we send animals into space? | Poll

UK space businesses set sights on £1bn orders as Major Tim becomes first British astronaut chosen to visit ISS

There is the urge to explore the endless heavens, there are the mysteries of the starry cosmos to solve, but above all there is the faltering economy to revive.

Of all the reasons nations give for sending their citizens into space, making money has always mattered. For British ministers, high hopes now rest on Tim Peake, the UK's first official astronaut, to inspire the next generation and boost further an industry that has defied gravity throughout the financial doldrums.

Major Peake, a former helicopter test pilot, was selected on Monday for a six-month mission to the International Space Station. The 41-year-old from Chichester, who joined the European Space Agency's astronaut corps in 2009, will blast off on board a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur cosmodrome in November 2015.

"I'm absolutely delighted by the decision," Peake told reporters at a press conference in London. "It really is a tremendous privilege to be assigned to a long-duration mission to the ISS."

Britain's space industry is a rare success story, and one that ministers see as crucial to the rebalancing of the UK economy. Since 2007, it has grown more than 8% and now employs nearly 30,000 people. The rise of the industry has prompted the government to boost its funding for the European Space Agency (ESA) in the hope of even greater returns. Britain now contributes £240m a year to the ESA, from which it expects to make £1bn in orders for British businesses.

For the next two and a half years, Peake will train as a flight engineer for the six-month mission, during which he will carry out scientific experiments in Europe's Columbus module, and be eligible for spacewalks. The experiments will investigate how life in space affects human physiology, research that could help understand the ageing process on Earth. For every month in orbit, astronauts lose 1% to 2% of their bone mass, and without exercise, their muscles weaken dramatically.

Peake is the fourth of six astronauts who graduated from the European Astronaut Corps in 2010 to be assigned a mission to the International Space Station. He will fly to the station with two other crew, and join three already on board.

The last mission to the space station saw the rise to fame of Commander Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to take charge of the ISS, and the first man in space wholly to embrace social media, photography and guitar-playing. His cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity, complete with microgravity guitar spins, went viral.

Asked whether he intended to follow in Hadfield's footsteps, Peake said he would tweet, but perhaps not repeat the Canadian's virtuoso performances. "I do play the guitar, but very badly, and I wouldn't impose my singing on anybody," he said.

Hinting at what might be to come, Peake confessed that a friend had offered to teach him the didgeridoo.

He has trained on the US and Russian equipment he will use on board the space station, and practised for spacewalks in a huge swimming pool used to recreate some of the conditions in orbit. To prepare for life aboard, Peake spent a week in Sardinia living underground and another 12 days in an underwater laboratory off the coast of Florida.

Peake, who has a wife and two sons, aged four and a half and 18 months, said he expected to move his family to Houston, where Nasa's astronaut training centre is based. "Tim represents the very best of British. He will become a powerful role model for the young people we need to bolster this country's science and engineering workforce," said David Willetts, the science minister. "Not only will we have the first UK astronaut for over two decades, but Tim Peake will be the first ever Briton to carry out ground-breaking research on the International Space Station," he added. David Cameron said: "I am sure he will do us proud, and I hope that he will inspire the next generation to pursue exciting careers in science and engineering."

In 1989, Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space when she flew to the Mir space station. As she had secured private funding she was not considered an official British astronaut. Three other British-born astronauts – Michael Foale, Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick – have also flown into space, but under the American flag.

"Whereas even just a decade ago, space was considered a 'nice-to-have' activity, today space has become critically important to the UK economy, our wellbeing and security," said Sir Martin Sweeting, chair of Surrey Satellite Technology, a world-leading manufacture of small satellites.

"The UK has a very active and very successful space industry that needs the very best engineers, scientists and technicians to maintain its position in a competitive world," he added. "A UK astronaut will, undoubtedly, act as an inspiration and role model for young people, but the visible commitment by the UK to space that it represents will also strengthen the position of UK industry amongst our European partners and send a clear message to the international community that Britain is open for space business."

1. Tim Peake to become first official British astronaut to visit International Space Station – video
2. Briton picked for five-month mission on International Space Station in 2015
3. UK’s first official astronaut Tim Peake ‘absolutely delighted’ to get ISS mission

1. Russian space lizards return to Earth
2. Major Tim Peake stole my space age daydream | Suzanne Moore

From early missed opportunities to its belated involvement, Britain has never been a contender in the space race

There were always two British space communities. One consisted of visionaries and hard-headed realists who knew what should be done and why it had to happen. The other community, of non-dreamers for the most part, had political power, scientific authority and access to the Treasury.

So in February 1945, while the German V2 missiles were still ascending to the edge of space and then dropping faster than the speed of sound on London, a radar instructor called Flight-Lieutenant Arthur C Clarke pointed out in a letter to Wireless World that a rocket that could reach a speed of 8km a second would continue parallel to the Earth's surface in a closed loop: it would become an artificial satellite.

He was quite right, but the Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and his engineers chose the US forces to surrender to, on the reasonable guess that Americans were more likely to listen to the same argument.

The Americans did, but only after the Russians became the trailblazers in space travel. British authorities stubbornly refused to listen to their own home-grown visionaries, and in 1956, the then Astronomer Royal, Richard van der Riet Woolley, told Time magazine that talk of space travel was "utter bilge". Sputnik 1 began orbiting the planet in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin climbed into Vostok 1 and made history with one Earth orbit in April 1961. The British then stood by and watched the US launch Telstar, the world's first communications satellite: a dream machine also proposed and described in October 1945 by Arthur C Clarke.

By that time, the US had begun to take the idea of manned space flight seriously and launched the Apollo programme that culminated in 12 pairs of space boots, three lunar rovers and two golf balls on the moon. The British launched just four rockets between 1969 and 1971. On the last flight, Black Arrow put a British satellite called Prospero into space. The Ministry of Defence then cancelled the programme because it was too expensive. Thereafter, successive British governments refused to take part in any manned flight programmes hosted by the US or the European space agencies, on the grounds that it would be a doubtful return for the money. What, one distinguished witness once asked a parliamentary committee, would be the value of sending two astronauts and a sandwich into space?

So a nation that, from HG Wells to Arthur C Clarke, had pioneered the vision of human space flight, deliberately chose to stay firmly rooted to the ground: so firmly rooted that, when the Russians, in the last days of the Soviet Union, actually offered Britain an adventure aboard their orbiting space station Mir, the government declined to support the project and the cost of the journey depended on public subscription.

In the end, the Russians took the Sheffield-born chemist Helen Sharman (at the time, she worked on the properties of chocolate for Mars Incorporated) aboard Mir in 1991, after 18 months of training in Star City. News media patriotically reported on the journeys into space of two "British" astronauts, Michael Foale and Piers Sellers. They were both born in Britain, but went into orbit as trained Nasa astronauts.

It was not until the 21st century that British governments began to appreciate that there might be some point in joining the greatest adventure of the 20th century, and more serious debate began; it ended with British commitment to the European manned space flight programme. There was no UK Space Agency at all until 2010, and Major Tim Peake will fly as a member of the European astronaut corps aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle, to an International Space Station to which Britain has never contributed funds.

The arguments for not sending humans into space were and still are perfectly serious: robots and increasingly sophisticated instruments can do most things with greater sureness and for longer periods, and there are some things humans cannot do at all. The expense of human space flight is enormous and the risk of failure colossal. The journey is hazardous, the environment is lethal, the outcome is uncertain and there is no guarantee of any reward.

But that, of course, would have been an argument for not sending Columbus across the Atlantic; Captain Cook and Joseph Banks to the Pacific, or Fitzroy and Darwin aboard the Beagle to the Galapagos, or Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Sea of Tranquility.

Tim Radford was science editor of the Guardian until 2005.

1. Tim Peake to become first official British astronaut to visit International Space Station – video

1. UK’s first official astronaut Tim Peake ‘absolutely delighted’ to get ISS mission
2. Briton picked for five-month mission on International Space Station in 2015

Britain's first official astronaut will beat me into space. But the light of long dead stars will continue to guide our fantasies

It's so unfair. Rather like a talentless X-Factor inmate, I still don't properly understand why I am not being sent into space but someone called Major Tim Peake is. OK, he may have graduated from the European Space Agency, be fit, smart, capable and able to drive a helicopter but has he really been freaking out in a moonage dream for years? I very much doubt it.

The first Brit in space was the privately funded Helen Sharman, the chemist who flew to the Mir space station on a Russian Soyuz craft in 1991.

She, like Peake, was eminently qualified, sensible, scientific and trained up but I bet they had not left school at 16 and when asked by the headmistress, "What, girl, do you think you are going to do with your life?," replied nonchalantly, "Probably be an astronaut, Miss". And neither of them could, I bet, rival the scrapbook I made during the moon landings. In my free time. Obsession doesn't cover it. I lived it and was extremely worried about the "moon germs", the quarantine and everything. In my 11-year-old handwriting after Neil Armstrong's great leap speech I wrote "that, that was greatest moment in the history of man, that the world has ever known". I meant it. And, as you know, I have been given to understatement ever since.

Why was I so compelled by space? Well, I lived in Ipswich and my family treated me like an alien anyway. I did not belong there, but to the stars above. You could say I was a space cadet, any amateur shrink would connect the vastness of outer space with the claustrophobia of a dysfunctional childhood. It's not that easy. Space is exciting and sexy. And if you can't see that, then don't look up, curtail your imagination. Stay earthbound.

Sure, the money could be spent on other more important things and it is difficult to understand the one-way mission to Mars that almost 80,000 people have signed up for as little more than long-haul Dignitas. The militarisation and the petty nationalism do somewhat sour the exploration of the universe but they cannot dull its shine. The light of long dead stars guides our fantasies still and mine is a fantasy.

The reality is I hate flying. I also don't want to be an inch away from death all the time but as Sun Ra said Space is the Place. Indeed my one useful function would be choosing what to sing. Commander Chris Hadfield has set the bar high by singing David Bowie's Space Oddity from the International Space Station, but I can help Major Peake with a suggestion. For Britain, Mambo Sun by T.Rex, for America, the B52s' There Is a Moon in the Sky (called the Moon).

See, I could've been a contender. I could float about, eating pills and dried spinach, tweeting and singing:

"Satellite's gone up to the skies / Things like that drive me out of my mind / I watched it for a little while / I love to watch things on TV (Mm-mm-mm-mm)

(Bum, bum, bum) / Satellite of love / (Bum, bum, bum) / Satellite of love / (Bum, bum, bum) / Satellite of love / Satellite of love."

Instead, I will just to have to do it here on Earth. Bum, bum, bum.

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Former army helicopter pilot will blast off on Soyuz rocket from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in 2015

Britain's first official astronaut has spoken of his delight at being selected for a lengthy mission aboard the International Space Station.

Major Tim Peake, a former army helicopter pilot, will blast off on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in November 2015.

For the next two and a half years, Peake, 41, will train as a flight engineer for the six-month mission during which he will carry out scientific experiments and be eligible for spacewalks.

"I'm absolutely delighted by the decision," Peake told reporters at a press conference in London on Monday. "It really is a tremendous privilege to be assigned to a long-duration mission to the ISS."

Peake is the fourth of six astronauts who graduated from the European Astronaut Corps in 2009 to be assigned a mission to the International Space Station. He will fly to the station with two other crew, and join three who will already be aboard the ISS.

The last mission to the space station saw the rise to fame of Commander Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to take charge of the ISS, and the first man in space to wholly embrace social media, photography and guitar-playing. His cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity, complete with microgravity guitar spins, went viral.

Asked whether he intended to follow in Hadfield's footsteps, Peake said he would tweet, but perhaps not repeat the Canadian's virtuoso performances. "I do play the guitar, but very badly, and I wouldn't impose my singing on anybody," he said.

Hinting at what might be to come, Peake confessed that a friend had offered to teach him the didgeridoo, though any personal effects astronauts wish to take on a mission must fit into a container the size of a shoebox.

Peake joined the European Space Agency's astronaut corps in 2009, a year in which more than 8,000 people applied to the agency.

He has trained on the US and Russian equipment he will use on board the space station, and practised for spacewalks in a huge swimming pool used to mimic some of the conditions in orbit.

To prepare for life on board the space station, Peake spent a week in Sardinia living underground. He spent another 12 days in an underwater laboratory off the coast of Florida.

Peake, who has a wife and two sons, aged four and a half and 18 months, said he expected to move his family to Houston, where Nasa's astronaut training centre is based.

Peake was selected as an astronaut shortly before the British government stepped up its yearly contribution to the European Space Agency. Britain now funds the agency with £240m a year, making the UK the third largest contributor.

David Willetts, the science minister, said Peake's mission would inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, and boost the UK space industry, which already employs 30,000 people, and has grown at a rate of around 8% a year, even through the financial crisis.

"Not only will we have the first UK astronaut for over two decades, but Tim Peake will be the first ever Briton to carry out ground-breaking research on the International Space Station." In 1989, Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space when she flew to the Mir space station.

1. Briton picked for five-month mission on International Space Station in 2015

Mice and lizards to undergo tests in Moscow after a month in orbit, in study into effects of weightlessness on cell structure

A Russian capsule carrying mice and lizards has returned to Earth after spending a month in space.

Scientists say the experiment is intended to test the effects of weightlessness and other factors of space flight on cell structure.

Russian state television showed the capsule and some of its inhabitants after it landed safely in a planted field near Orenburg on Sunday. The report said not all of the animals survived the flight.

Vladimir Sychov, deputy director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, said it was the first time that animals had spent so much time in space on their own. The mice and lizards are to be flown back to Moscow to undergo a series of tests at the institute.

Tim Peake's selection seen as major boost for UK industry and an inspiration to young people

Britain's first official astronaut, Major Tim Peake, has been selected to fly on a five-month mission on the International Space Station in 2015, it is believed. The go-ahead for the flight will be seen as a major boost for the UK's space industry. Peake graduated as a European Space Agency astronaut more than two years ago and has been waiting for a space mission since then.

It was feared the former army helicopter pilot might be given a short-duration mission because the UK only makes modest contributions to Esa's manned space programme. Major contributors such as France, Germany and Italy were expected to have priority.

However, the Observer has learned that 41-year-old Peake has been assigned a lengthy stay in orbit in 2015. He will be blasted into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan in November that year and flown to the space station where he will stay for five months. He will be able to take part in spacewalks and other complex scientific activities.

UK space officials, who have refused to reveal any information about Peake's forthcoming mission, are expected to confirm details of his flight at a press conference on Monday at the Science Museum in London.

The news of Peake's mission was welcomed by Nick Spall, of the British Interplanetary Society, which has been campaigning for years for the government to change past policy and allow the UK to have official astronauts. "At last this has come about with a flight slot to the International Space Station (ISS) for Tim Peake," he said.

"The UK can now join in with important microgravity research work on the space station, win industrial contracts for future human spaceflight projects and forge new links with Nasa, Russia and hopefully China – and one day India – in space. Many young people will be inspired by Tim. It will also help boost the UK's technical employment potential for jobs and industry."

Peake, who is married with two sons, is considered to be Britain's first official astronaut because in the past those UK citizens who have flown in space have either been privately funded for their missions – such as Helen Sharman who flew on a Russian rocket in 1991 – or have taken out American citizenship, such as Nick Foale and Piers Sellers, who have both flown on the US space shuttle.

By contrast, Peake was picked to be one of six new Esa astronauts who were selected, in 2009, from several thousand candidates. During their 14-month training programme, the six travelled to Nasa's astronaut base in Houston, to the Russian astronaut training centre in Star City outside Moscow, to Tsukuba Space Centre in Japan, and spent two weeks on a survival course in Sardinia. To improve their Russian language skills, the astronauts spent a month lodging with families in St Petersburg. To see how the astronauts coped with stress, the training staff created mock emergencies, including one scenario where an astronaut fell unconscious during a spacewalk.

Peake completed his training in November 2010 and been waiting to be assigned a spaceflight. However, he has denied that the wait was causing problems. "No, it doesn't get frustrating at all – there's just so much going on, so much diversity, and there's brilliant training all along the way," he told the BBC a few weeks ago.

A graduate from Sandhurst, Peake received a commission with the Army Air Corps in 1992 and served as a platoon commander with the Royal Green Jackets in Northern Ireland. He gained his wings in 1994 after completing the army pilots' course. Following a posting to the US, he returned to Britain in 2002 to instruct trainees in flying Apache helicopters. He went on to graduate from the prestigious Empire Test Pilot School at Boscombe Down and conduct special forces operations.

He retired from the army in 2009 and joined Augusta Westland as a senior helicopter test pilot. He has flown more than 30 different aircraft.