Tim Peake On Life Aboard The International Space Station: Drinking Recycled Urine And More

British astronaut Tim Peake reportedly gave an insight on life aboard the International Space Station (ISS), during a recent talk held at the Glasgow Science Centre in Scotland, UK. The ex-crew member of ISS's Expedition 46 to 47, who had a six month stint aboard the space laboratory, spoke at length about his experiences. The event was held to inspire people, particularly children, develop their interest in science.

Peake revealed that his choice of songs during flight takeoff was Coldplay's A Sky Full of Stars, U2's Beautiful Day and Queen's Don't Stop Me Now, which helped him calm down before being launched into space. As per tradition, each astronaut is allowed three songs of choice to be played to them in preparation of the takeoff.

The astronaut also said that 85% of the astronauts' urine is recycled; meaning everyone on the ISS has to drink recycled urine. "Yesterday's pee is this morning's coffee basically, but actually it tastes absolutely fine," said Tim Peake. "The drinking water on the space station tastes great but it does go through a fairly rapid recycling process."

The European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut is also the first from UK to go on a spacewalk, an experience that he describes as one of his life's most memorable moments that was akin to dangling down over a black abyss. Furthermore, while answering one of the audience questions, Peake said if he were to have separated from the space station during the spacewalk due to a cable snapping, then he would have floated for months in space before his entry back into the orbit would have burned him up.

Tim Peake also shared an interesting thought about future human missions to Mars. According to the astronaut, there is hope that humans will one day be able to explore the Red Planet based on the observations that his body has already returned to normal, barring the bone density which could take a year more, and that the conditions of astronauts who had been onboard for nine months were amazing.

Incidentally, space travel takes a toll on the human body by ageing the cardiovascular system by 20 years, as well as weakening muscles, worsening eyesight, accelerating skin ageing and decreasing bone density. However, according to Peake it showed "that we can deal with long duration space flight and that as humans we can adapt well to space and that we are not going to have any problem adapting to longer missions like Mars."