Britain's first official astronaut to blast off for space station The UK can now take its rightful place and join in with important microgravity research work on the ISS, win industrial contracts for future human space flight projects and forge new links via ESA with NASA, Russia and hopefully China and one-day perhaps India in space. With exciting potential mission opportunities coming up for exploration across the Solar System to asteroids, the Moon, Mars and beyond for the future , many young people will be inspired by Tim and his achievement. This will really help boost the UK's technical employment potential for jobs and industry. Human space flight is a win-win initiative for the UK. Major Peake, who served for 18 years in the British Army including terms in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan, beat more than 8,000 other hopefuls to be selected for ESA in 2009 along with five other colleagues from across Europe. The appointment marked a change in British government policy as the cost of putting a man into space - about £18 million - had previously been considered too expensive. Since then, he has undergone a rigorous 14-month training programme that has included visits to Nasa's astronaut base in Houston, the Russian astronaut training centre in Star City outside Moscow, Tsukuba Space Centre in Japan, and a two week survival course in Sardinia. To see how they coped with stress, mock emergencies were created such as an astronaut falling unconscious during a spacewalk. To improve their Russian language skills, the astronauts spent a month lodging with families in St Petersburg. Major Peake completed his training in November 2010 and has since been waiting to be assigned a space flight. He recently insisted that the long wait had all been part of the journey. "It doesn't get frustrating at all," he told the BBC. There's just so much going on, so much diversity, and there's brilliant training all along the way. He has expressed a desire to become the first Briton to walk on the moon. It emerged last year that he was one of a team of astronauts who were being trained to land on an asteroid to explore its surface, search for minerals and even learn how they might be able to destroy it should one pose a threat to the Earth. Major Peake, who graduated from Sandhurst, 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. He taught trainees fly Apache helicopters before graduating from the Empire Test Pilot School at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire and conducting special forces operations. He retired from the army in 2009 and joined Augusta Westland as a senior helicopter test pilot. The first Briton in space was Sheffield-born chemist Helen Sharman. She had to secure private funding to fly to the Mir space station on a Russian Soyuz craft in 1991. Three British-born astronauts have flown into space under an American flag: Michael Foale, Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick.