Andy Thomas describes being a cosmonaut, 2008

Transcript of sound recording

The flight was preceded by me living in Russia for one year, basically training to become a cosmonaut. As you can imagine, in my wildest dreams I never thought I'd become an astronaut, let alone a cosmonaut. But I did the training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre outside of Moscow, learned the Russian spacecraft systems and did a lot of immersion in Russian language training because all the operations on board the spacecraft were carried out in Russian.

And that was a really interesting experience to go through, that whole training process and live in Russia with Russian cosmonauts and train to become a cosmonaut. But all the classes I took in Russia on the spacecraft systems were in Russian. I didn't have an interpreter, so most of the language exposure that I got was technical exchanges, discussing spacecraft systems and how systems were working and things like that, so I knew the words and the terminology for the spacecraft systems.

The big challenge was to try and have sort of social 'banter' if you like, when we would have meals together and things like that, just have light conversation, and I would find many times there were things that I would have liked to have ... wanted to say ... but I just didn't know what the words were to do it. And so that was the big challenge of living on the space station with two cosmonauts who didn't speak English and I had to study the language quite hard to get to the point where we could communicate at kind of the social level that you need when you're living in fairly close quarters with two cosmonauts. But it was really a great challenge, an intellectual challenge, a physical challenge and one of the great experiences of my life.