Although not yet an astronaut, I have drawn and written about them. Curiosity about space travel started early on. As a child I was a big fan of the exploits of handsome ‘pilot of the future’ Dan Dare in the Eagle comic, invented by artist Frank Hampson.
I had ambitions to travel, preferably into space. My grandmother had a radio she hardly ever used, under a table in her dimly-lit drawing room. I was about seven when I discovered it, and being extremely small for my age, could easily slide under the table, transforming its dark and dusty underbelly into a cabin of possibilities. 
By turning one of its knobs, the radio would gently began to hum. A faint golden glow suffused the dial, illuminating the words Prague, Vienna, Moscow, Lille, Vatican City. By twisting another grooved knob, a quivering needle on the dial veered jerkily through space and time. 
When pressing my face into the coarse and dusty fabric covering the radio’s speaker, I was able to listen to the soft babble of mysterious languages, and felt an impatient curiosity to visit these remote locations full of strangers. Might they belong to far away planets?
Later I listened to episodes of ’Journey into Space’ on another equally impressive radio. It may have been something glamorous like a Tesla Talisman or a Sonara Sonorette, although my grandmother’s was probably something large though more prosaic like a 1950s Bush for instance, perhaps a DAC90.
In 2006 I met Alan Bean, Apollo 12 astronaut, when he briefly visited North London’s Roundhouse. Titled ‘First Artist of Another World’ Bean’s paintings are of his lunar experiences, sometimes incorporating moon dust in his work, or using impressions of his original Moon boots to add texture to them. Although he was only the fourth person to walk on the Moon, he told me, he was the first to eat spaghetti while there.
In 2019 a Cambridge friend invited me to a small Christmas Eve celebration, at the house of Martin Rees, then Astronomer Royal. It was a gathering of academics, friendly enough although one of them, an anthropologist wearing a complicated woven hat, looked carefully at me and said: ‘You’re not one of us, are you?’ I had a copy of the ‘Comic Strip History of Space’ with me, a children’s book I’d illustrated some years before, and encouraged by my friend, rather cheekily showed it to Martin. At the time I didn’t know that not only was Martin the Astronomer Royal but an astrophysicist, cosmologist and a founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk amongst other things.
Martin was charmingly enthusiastic about the book, which I signed and gave to him. He emailed me later to say he’d lent the book to a very young rocket designing neighbour. Whilst chatting at his Christmas party, we discussed the possibility of future space travel and discovered our shared childhood admiration for Dan Dare, his crew and their adventures exploring the galaxies, although neither Martin nor I were fans of the idea of space colonialism.
See travel features for newspapers and magazines on my website