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. Peake beat over 8,000 other applicants for one of the six places on the ESA's new astronaut training programme. The selection process included taking academic tests, fitness assessments and several interviews. Peake moved to Cologne with his family for the ESA training. Peake was the first British or UK-born person to fly into space without a private contract (as did
Helen Sharman,
Mark Shuttleworth, and
Richard Garriott) and/or foreign citizenship (held by astronauts
Michael Foale,
Gregory H. Johnson,
Piers Sellers,
Nicholas Patrick, Shuttleworth, and Garriott). As part of his extensive astronaut training in 2011, Peake and five other astronauts joined an international mission, living in and exploring cave systems in Sardinia. This
ESA CAVES mission enabled them to study how humans react to living in extreme conditions with complete isolation from the outside world. This expedition gave the team an idea of what they could expect and how they would cope in the confined space of the ISS. 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. The NEEMO 16 crew successfully "splashed down" at 11:05 am on 11 June. On the morning of 12 June, Peake and his crewmates officially became aquanauts, having spent over 24 hours underwater. The crew safely returned to the surface on 22 June. During
Expedition 44 Peake served as a backup astronaut for
Soyuz TMA-17M spaceflight.
Expedition 46/47 Peake was launched to the space station (ISS), on 15 December 2015, for Expeditions
46 and
47. He launched successfully at 11:03 GMT from
Baikonur Cosmodrome on board
Soyuz TMA-19M. The official website dedicated to his mission is principia.org.uk. During the launch, as per tradition, each cosmonaut was allowed three songs to be played to them. Peake chose
Queen's "
Don't Stop Me Now",
U2's "
Beautiful Day" and
Coldplay's "
A Sky Full of Stars". '' module During docking, the
Kurs docking navigation system failed, and a manual docking was performed by
Yuri Malenchenko who was alongside Peake and
Tim Kopra. This delayed docking with the ISS by 10 minutes. The Soyuz finally docked with the ISS at 17:33 GMT. Peake received messages of support from the
Queen and
Elton John, after the successful docking. His first meal at the ISS was a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea. A new year's message by Peake was broadcast by the BBC to celebrate 2016. Peake supported a spacewalk by two American astronauts on 21 December 2015. He participated in the first spacewalk outside the
ISS by a British astronaut on 15 January 2016. The purpose of the spacewalk was to replace a faulty
sequential shunt unit on the station's solar arrays. In February 2016, Peake presented
Adele with a Global Success award at the
Brit Awards in London. On 24 April 2016, Peake ran the
2016 London Marathon from the ISS treadmill. Peake became the first man to run the marathon from space and the second person to run a marathon from space, after
Sunita Williams, who ran the 2007
Boston Marathon from the ISS. Peake was appointed a
Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to space research and scientific education. At a special meeting of the Chichester City Council on 17 February 2016, it was agreed unanimously to confer the Freedom of the City upon Peake with the appropriate ceremony after his return later in 2016. 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. The spacecraft landed on the Kazakh steppe in
Kazakhstan almost southwest of the major city of
Karaganda, landing at 09.15 UTC. Peake had completed approximately 3,000 orbits of the Earth and had covered a distance of 125 million kilometres (78 million miles). ==Nobel Peace Prize advocacy==