Radio 4’s Guide to a DIY spacewalk

Tim Peake’s space walk finished a bit early because some water accumulated in the other astronaut’s helmet. Here’s our guide to staging your own space walk at home, complete with an early termination.

Tim Peake and Tim Kopra’s mission was to manage cables and replace a failed sequential shunt unit.

Your task is to put the Christmas lights back in the loft.

This will need two of you for safety. One of you can be Major Peake, and the other one Tim Kopra, depending on who can do the best American accent. If you decide to use different names, that’s fine, but you will both have to have the same first names as each other for maximum confusion. Sorry, but we don't make the rules. Oh, actually, we do. Anyway, on with the preparations:

1. Wrap each other in duvets and attach pillows to each other’s arms; hold in place with elastic bands.
2. Wear a saucepan (nonstick) on your head to replicate the weight of a space helmet, and baseball gloves or several pairs of woolly mittens on hands.
3. Use a snorkel to give the full asthmatic Darth Vader feel.
4. Communicate with each other using only very slow thumbs-up signals and say “Sounds good, Tim”, a lot.
5. Find the battered cardboard box in which you stuffed the Christmas lights and the fairy on New Year’s Eve. Struggle to pick it up. Wait for Other Tim to point accusingly into the box and frown to indicate disapproval that the lights were not untangled before being shoved into box. Push Other Tim over. Laugh as Other Tim struggles to get back up again.
6. Amble slowly up and down the landing trying to find the ascent walkway grab lever (the hook for the loft ladder).
7. Locate. Beam triumphantly and give traditional slow thumbs-up and grin.
8. Pull down ascent walkway using ascent walkway grab lever. Slow motion makes this tricky but once the tipping point has been reached you can leave the rest to gravity (unlike the real Tims) and it should slide down smartly, knocking you on the top of your saucepan.
9. Ascend the walkway. This is the moment to talk grandly about giant steps for mankind etc. but in space no-one can hear you chuntering on, particularly through a snorkel mouthpiece.
10. Gesticulate to Other Tim to ask for the box to be passed up. Other Tim has gone downstairs to make a cup of space tea.
11. Descend the walkway muttering about Other Tim. Pick up box and using one hand to hold on, ascend the walkway, wishing you had a safety tether reel like the real Tims.
12. Reach docking station (loft). Push open door, shouting “failure is not an option” (this is what Apollo 13 Flight Director Gene Kranz is supposed to have said but he actually didn’t)
13. Mouse runs over glove. Scream, let go of box and grab rail. Fall down ascent walkway.
14. Houston, we have a problem.