‘Is This Planet Earth?’: Astronaut Aboard The ISS Dials Wrong Number

While the state of the art technology on the space station should make it fairly straightforward to phone home, former army pilot Tim Peake hit a couple of snags with his “this is Major Tim to ground control” routine.

Talk about crossed wires, but at least this gave us a bit of early cheer.

(CNN) – Earth to astronaut Tim Peake: Check the phone number before you dial. Otherwise the person you reach is likely to think you’re some kind of nut case.

He then tweeted an apology saying it was not a prank, just a wrong number.

The British astronaut from Chichester, West Sussex arrived at ISS after blasting off from Kazakhstan on Tuesday 15 December.

He is spending six months conducting scientific experiments on the station.

Kelly and Kornienko are on the first joint U.S.-Russian one-year mission at the space station.

Just a mistake that could happen to anyone 250 miles from Earth.

And don’t worry if you missed it on Christmas Eve – from southern England it’ll appear in the West at about 4.24pm and remain visible for six minutes before disappearing below the south-eastern horizon on Christmas Day.

A five-month campaign to get Peake to take a Stoke City flag into space proved successful when the rocket man launched into the sky earlier this month.

“So we’ll be able to see a different object flying over the rooftops on Christmas Day.” he added.