Congratulations Timothy Peake on being Britain's first ESA astronaut. But several media outlets as per usual have got things slightly wrong, so let's gets the correction out there.
The Daily Telegraph for example says "Meet the first astronaut to fly to space under the British flag". Errr not quite.
I know what they're trying to distinguish between, the several British-born astronauts who have all been US citizens, and an actual British citizen, but it seems they're forgetting Helen Sharman, who is a British citizen, and flew under the British flag.
She went up to Mir in May 1991 onboard Soyuz TM-12 and performed medical and agricultural research. As part of the Juno co-operation agreement between the Soviet Union and a number of British companies, unfortunately it had to be in partnership with private companies as the Tories had prevented any money being used for manned spaceflight in the mid 80s. Despite fears of the mission being cancelled after the private companies failed to come up with the money to pay for the seat, some people namely those evil commies in the Soviet government understood how freakin' awesome spaceflight is and so made up the shortfall themselves, allowing the mission to go ahead.
And before anyone says then it was under the Soviet flag, here's the mission insignia clearly showing the British flag, and having English writing on it.
You might think people would spend 10 seconds doing a bit of research before writing their misleading headlines, but apparently not.