It’s a common dream for kids to want to grow up to be an astronaut. The allure of the stars has a hefty pull, and while 99% of us filter those dreams into watching the real-life manned missions or distil those ambitions into our respective fandoms, there’s always a small part of us what wonders “Did we have the right stuff?”
Well wonder no more as Tim Peake, the British astronaut who spent 186 days in space, much of it aboard the International Space Station, along with the European Space Agency bring us this brain buster of a book. Designed to test your cognitive skills, which in such circumstances would be invaluable, the book includes real puzzles and training exercises conducted by the ESA, and believe us, looking at this book for the first time will give any reader a whole new appreciation for the skill sets required to slip the earthly bonds and strike out into the unknown.
For example, a random book opening to page 182 looks at the process of decision making, and what order to compile your choices. Start with the Facts, look at the Options, evaluate the Risks, make a Decision, Execute it and Check the outcome. That’s known in astronaut circles as FORDEC, and it’s a pretty useful guideline for making decisions in the real world.
Page 129 is a great example of the wider knowledge dropped into the book. Here you’re asked to organise the top 10 highest grossing films of all time into the correct order, after ranking the 10 most commonly used words (and there are 2.1 billion of them) into the order of most commonly used (BTW the answer is “the”). You’ll learn plenty about space and what it takes to be an astronaut, but you’ll also sharpen up your broader knowledge.
A central page of colour images gives us an insight into neutral buoyancy training, where trainees can submerge under the ocean and take 17 hours to decompress. A spacewalk takes between six to eight hours and concentration and stamina is key, so a trip to the neutral buoyancy lab in Houston, Texas is required. There, a full-scale replica of the ISS is held underwater in the largest indoor pool in the US. Who knew? Centrifuge training, zero-G, personality tests, pattern recognition, non-verbal communication. There’s a lot of information crammed in, and while it could have easily been a dry quiz book released under the guise of being an insight into the process of exploration, this is a lot more engrossing than you could reasonably expect.
For anyone interested in the space race and the imminent journey to Mars, here’s the perfect stocking filler.
THE ASTRONAUT SELECTION TEST BOOK / AUTHOR: TIM PEAKE / PUBLISHER: CENTURY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
