And now, it’s a movie theater, too.
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This is the picture astronaut Tim Kopra took of Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain the last time he visited the global space station.
The astronaut arrived safely at the ISS at 5.33pm GMT yesterday, following a six-and-a-half-hour flight and a hard docking process that involved Peake’s colleague, Commander Yuri Malenchenko, taking manual control of the Soyuz rocket.
A statement read: “We hope that Major Peake’s work on the Space Station will serve as an inspiration to a new generation of scientists and engineers”.
Zero gravity was reached by the Soyuz spacecraft after nine minutes of travel.
Huge Bunnymen fan, Kopra, made history today alongside the British astronaut Tim Peake who became the first official United Kingdom astronaut.
Major Peake, the first Briton to join the crew of the International Space Station (ISS), will take off at 11.03am United Kingdom time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
British Prime Minister David Cameron wished Peake good luck in a video message in which he said that he would follow the space mission with “admiration and wonder”.
“Tim has trained for six years, so he will know the spacecraft and the space station inside out”.
Speaking about the launch, his wife Rebecca said: “Wasn’t it an incredible sight?”
The docking process was slightly delayed as the Soyuz commander, Malenchenko, aborted the automatic procedure and manually guided the spacecraft towards the station.
For 15 years, humans have been living continuously aboard the station to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on the Earth that also will enable long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space.
Major Peake is employed by the European Space Agency (Esa) and sports a Union flag on his sleeve.
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All the pre-launch rituals were observed: the signing of the hotel door by each crew member, the watery blessings of a Russian Orthodox priest, and the contemplative micturition on a rear wheel of the astronauts’ coach – a Russian tradition that started with Yuri Gargarin, the first man in space. “I had the biggest smile on my face”.
