Helen Sharman: The First Briton in Space

Abstract

Credit: ESA

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Credit: ESA

Commemorative cover of mission Soyus TM-12, signed by Helen Sharman (from the collection of Umberto Cavallaro)

Helen Sharman was the first Briton to fly in space, and the first European, first non-Russian, and first non-American woman. She was also the first to break the gender barrier on the Soviet Mir space station and the first non-Soviet woman to visit a space station ever, as well as the last foreign visitor of the Soviet era, since the Soviet Union disintegrated shortly after her return to Earth.

For the record, it must be added that she made the UK the first of only three nations up to that date to have had a woman as its first astronaut . (Helen has since been joined by Iran’s Anousheh Ansari in 2006 and by South Korea’s Yi So-yeon in 2008.)

Recently, feminists flared up when Tim Peake (first British man to travel into space as a European astronaut as well as the first to live aboard the International Space Station (ISS)) was mistakenly called “the first Briton in space.”Helen doesn’t like to be classified as “the first space tourist”: “I was there on a commercial mission, I was paid to do it as a job, doing experiments on someone else’s programme.”

Helen Patricia “Lenochka” Sharman was born in a hospital in Sheffield, England, on May 30, 1963, the daughter of a college lecturer father and a nurse mother, and she lived with her family in Grenoside, a suburb of the industrial town of Sheffield, where she received much of her early education. In her autobiography, Seize the Moment, she described her upbringing as “decidedly unremarkable.” At school, she was good at French and German, and loved science. She also played the piano.

Helen graduated in Chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 1984. She was hired as an engineer for the General Electric Company Plc in London. “Even though the salary on offer was the lowest,” she says in her autobiography, “the work they were offering was varied” and her role encompassed solving production problems, organizing schedules, and doing research on and development of cathode ray tube components. Her employer eventually offered her the opportunity to further her studies with a part-time Ph.D. to explore the luminescence of rare-Earth ions in crystals and, in 1985, Helen enrolled at Birkbeck College in London. In 1987, while still studying at Birkbeck, she began working as a research technologist for MARS—an American global manufacturer of confectionery and other food products that was planning new ice-cream products:

“The company wanted to make a new and delicious ice cream and I was to be part of the team that scaled up production from a few bars in the laboratory to tons of ice cream every day in the factory.”

Once she had completed this project, Helen worked in the Chocolate Department, “investigating the properties of chocolate and using different ingredients and machinery to make chocolate more quickly, more cheaply, and with the same flavor.” She found the work fascinating, not least for the fact that it enabled her to incorporate many facets of everyday life into her work.

One evening in June 1989, the 26-year-old Helen, while sitting in a traffic jam heading back from MARS in Slough, Berkshire, to her flat in Surbiton, south-west London, casually heard a radio announcement: “Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary.” In her autobiography, she describes in hindsight the events of that evening as “the crucial, pivotal moment in my life.” A career path that she had never considered possible was fairly straightforward.

The advertisement was looking for astronaut volunteers under the project “Juno,” a private British space program, since a national space program did not exist. No experience was required. The only requirements were British citizenship, age between 21 and 40 years, formal scientific training, proven ability to learn a foreign language, and a good standard of physical fitness.

In fact, the plan of Project Juno was to send a British astronaut to the Mir space station, under a cooperative arrangement between the Soviet Union (which was seeking to cement relations with Britain as part of President Mikhail Gorbachev ’s policy of glasnost and to raise hard currency) and a consortium of private British sponsors led by Antequera, Ltd. Soviet promotional operations had already succeeded in selling a ticket for space to Japan, Cuba, Austria, Syria, Afghanistan, Mongolia, and many more.

Although the UK had become the third country in the world (after the USSR and the US) to launch a satellite when, on April 26, 1962, it put into orbit Ariel 1, constructed in the US by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on behalf of the British Empire, and launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral, its aspirations in space exploration almost exclusively focused upon unmanned research, with particular emphasis upon Earth observation, and there has not been government policy to create a British astronaut corps. Since the 1980s, despite the setting-up of the British National Space Centre (BNSC), the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher virtually gutted any chance of a human space program. Four military Britons were training with NASA before the Challenger accident. By the time NASA was flying Shuttles again, Britain had decided not to participate.

Helen recounts:

“Immediately that small dream that I had had when I was younger, … that maybe—just maybe—space travel was possible. Suddenly that was there in front of me. What would it be like to sit on top on a rocket and wait for that launch? What would it be like for me, as a chemist, to be able to grow crystals, crystals that you cannot grow on Earth? But probably best of all, what was it going to be like floating about feeling weightless, and for those reasons, very selfish reasons, when I got home that night I applied for that job of astronaut .”

After applying by telephone and a short interview, Helen received a long application form which she completed and posted, becoming one of over 13,000 applicants for that job. Rigorous physiological and medical tests followed, after which only 22 candidates made the cut through the selection process; and three of these were women. A final medical review produced the final four, who were then “sequestered” for 2 weeks in a Russian hospital, where medical tests were performed. Helen and her backup, British Army Major Timothy Mace , then underwent 18 months of grueling training in Soviet Russia at the Juri Gagarin Center in Star City, 30 kilometers north-east of Moscow, where Soviet cosmonauts used to train, enduring challenges such as the centrifuge (to experience G-forces) and hydro tank (for spacewalk training). Helen was measured in 54 different places to ensure the suit fitted perfectly. “That’s the only suit I have ever had that was made to measure,” Helen jokes.

Once it was announced that she could fly, the press started to call her the “Girl of Mars.” Although quite tiresome, the sobriquet was thought out as a means of helping to sell the project to the public at large. At the time, Soviets requested US$12 million (£7.5 million) to cover the expenses of the Soyuz taxi and 1 week on the space station. The government of Margaret Thatcher , who had ended Britain’s manned space program in 1986, refused to contribute towards the cost and made it clear that the funding would have to be raised by private finance. Antequera, Ltd—headed by Gregory Pattie, a member of the British Parliament and a former space minister—was responsible for the selection and started to raise the funds needed: US$12 million to pay Energia for the fly to Mir and another US$8 million to cover the expenses of 18 months of training. However, only one of the 500 British companies connected with the Aerospace industry bought a share: British Aerospace. Memorex and Interflora eventually joined the pool of corporate sponsors and ITV bought the television rights, but the consortium as a whole failed to raise the entire sum. At one point, rumors spread that the British astronaut was selected by lottery. What actually happened was that, given the difficulty in finding a commercial sponsor, a lottery was invented to try (indeed without much success) to raise funds: only a paltry US$1.7 million was generated. Helen and Mace had been training in Star City for over a year when they learned that their contact in London had left, as Antequera had not been able to raise sufficient funds. It looked as if the enterprise would be cancelled. Indeed, there were many problems.

Besides financial problems, there was the Soviet reluctance that had started to surface since Antequera had announced that the two finalists were Helen Sharman and Timothy Mace , the military pilot and a member of the national team of British skydivers. It seemed clear to almost everyone that some “technical” Soviet circles were not very happy to send to Mir a woman—perhaps out of fear that their own female cosmonauts who had been trained, but had never flown and were grounded in Star City, would complain. Reportedly, Mikhail Gorbarchev personally stepped in to save the day in the interests of international co-operation. The Soviets arranged for the Moscow Narodny Bank—a British commercial bank subsidized by the Soviet state—to take over the program.

On May 18, 1991, at the age of 27, the cosmonaut researcher Helen Sharman , accompanied to the launch pad by Alexei Leonov—then deputy Director of the Cosmonaut Training Center in charge of crew training, who offered her a number of “unofficial” items to carry aboard Mir—lifted off aboard Soyuz TM-12, thus gaining a place in both space and history. She lifted off from Baikonur—from which, 30 years earlier, Gagarin and Tereskova had left—accompanied by two Soviet cosmonauts : the commander Anatoly Artsebarsky and flight engineer Sergey Krikalev.

When it was confirmed that Helen would fly, Artsebarsky—who had counted on flying with the famous British pilot, Tim Mace —was unable to hide his disappointment, although he later declared that Helen’s performance during the mission was impeccable.

At their arrival to Mir, Helen was honored by Viktor Afanayev and Musa Manarov, who invited her to enter the station first and greeted her with the traditional bread and salt that Russian used to welcome a new guest, and then offered her a bedroom to herself.

With the demise of much British commercial participation in the mission, the British element of the Project Juno mission was Sharman herself. “The mission was purely commercial,” Helen explained, “but having said that the funding was not readily available so a deal was done with the Soviets that I would do their experiments in return for a seat on their flight.” Rather than being a representative of a Soviet–capitalist partnership, as anticipated, she became a guest of the Soviets and her experiment program was almost exclusively designed by the Soviets, with a primary emphasis upon the life sciences: she operated 17 Soviet biotechnological, medical, and technical experiments. She also wore electrodes to track her heart rate, monitored her mental co-ordination and reaction speed, and took blood samples from the tips of her fingers 12 times a day. Additionally, Sharman took air samples throughout Mir to assess the prevalence of dust in the station: dust and crumbs floated everywhere, causing frequent sneezing and also disturbing sleep. She brought back paper filters with samples to be studied on Earth. Helen also had carried on board half of the 125,000 pansy seeds given to her by Suttons, a British company providing quality seeds, and placed them in the Kvant-2 airlock , the portion of the station least shielded from cosmic radiation. She then brought them back to Earth and distributed a sample of seeds flown in space and one of those left behind to British schoolchildren, in order for them to sprout the seeds and check whether the space exposure had affected the growth of the seeds.

From Mir, Helen also participated in a televised advert for Interflora by “ordering” flowers for delivery to her mother: the first order ever received from outer space! “Just imagine how Helen’s mum must have felt when we delivered them into her arms!” advertised Interflora on its website.

Finally, a significant portion of Helen’s time was devoted to photography of the UK and watching at the Blue Planet from space. She told The Independent:

“It’s something no astronaut ever gets tired of doing. You get this constantly changing image of the Earth spinning below. You get these fabulous views and you get time to think about that.”

After eight days on Mir, Helen returned to Earth in the Soyuz TM-11 descent module, with fellow cosmonauts Viktor Afanayev and Musa Manarov on May 26, 1991. The “soft” landing of Soyuz took place in a very windy day that caused the capsule to laterally collide during the impact with the ground and to roll several times before stopping. In the end, everything worked out and Helen only reported a few bruises to her face due to an impact with the built-in microphone in the helmet.

Following her flight in 1991, Helen became a TV presenter and a public speaker on space and science, hoping to inspire a new generation of men and women into joining the fields of science. A brilliant ambassador for science and keen advocate of human space travel, she pointed out that Britain was alone among the major industrialized nations in not having a human space program:

“We need to be pushing our human boundaries. We were a sea-faring nation and that exploration made us the country that we have become. The fact that we’ve stopped human space exploration has become a real problem. It has stopped us from being proud of being part of this international community.”

Many people may think that Britain has a manned program because there have been a handful of astronauts over that past three decades with joint US citizenship who have flown on the Shuttle. However, they have all done it under the American flag:

“I am sure this has led the public to believe that we as a country have had quite a long interest in human space flight as a nation, and we haven’t. I think that is something that the Government has been very happy to allow us to continue to think.”

Helen never returned to space, but was a shortlisted candidate for the European Space Agency (ESA ) in 1992, when she applied with other two British candidates. She unsuccessfully tried again in 1998. She eventually reconnected with science as Group Leader of the Surface and Nanoanalysis Group at the National Physical Laboratory. In 2015, she joined Imperial College London as Operations Manager in the Chemistry Department.