Major Timothy Nigel Peake CMG (born 7 April 1972) is a retired British European Space Agency astronaut, Army Air Corps officer and author.

[7] Upon graduation from Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Peake received a short-service commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps on 8 August 1992.

[8] He served during rotary training holding as a platoon commander with the Royal Green Jackets,[9] and was promoted to lieutenant on 8 August 1994.

Promoted to major on 31 July 2004,[14] he graduated from the Empire Test Pilots School in Wiltshire the following year, and was awarded the Westland's Trophy for best rotary wing student.

He then served on Rotary Wing Test and Evaluation Squadron (RWTES) at MOD Boscombe Down completing trials on Apache helicopters.

[16][17] Peake was selected to join the European Space Agency astronaut corps in 2009, flew to the ISS in 2015/16, and retired from active service in 2023.

[20] Peake was the first British or UK-born person to fly into space without a private contract (as did Helen Sharman,[21] Mark Shuttleworth, and Richard Garriott) and/or foreign citizenship (held by astronauts Michael Foale, Gregory H. Johnson, Piers Sellers, Nicholas Patrick,[22] Shuttleworth, and Garriott).

This ESA CAVES[23] mission enabled them to study how humans react to living in extreme conditions with complete isolation from the outside world.

[24] On 16 April 2012, NASA announced that Peake would serve as an aquanaut aboard the Aquarius underwater laboratory during the NEEMO 16 undersea exploration mission, scheduled to begin on 11 June 2012 and last twelve days.

[46] On 18 June 2016, Peake returned to Earth from the ISS aboard the descent module of the Soyuz spacecraft that had taken him to the space station in December 2015.

Peake noted that with increasing constraints on space programs around the world, collaborative initiatives such as ISS will be necessary for future endeavours.

In October 2016, at the National Space Centre, Tim Peake received an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Leicester.