Britain's first astronaut: The Helen Sharman interview

Helen Sharman (Credit: GARY DOAK / Alamy Stock Photo)

Sophie Church

@sophiealichurch

Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut, thundered up to space in 1991 as part of Project Juno – a joint Soviet-British mission designed to improve the relationship between the countries. The launch followed months of training in Moscow, where she learned to speak Russian, trained in advanced mechanics and got to know her fellow cosmonauts (as astronauts are known in Russia). 

Sharman was just 27, and the Soviet Union was in the final throws of the Cold War. While the British government was reluctant to spend public money on the country’s first human spaceflight, Sharman says then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher were “fairly close buddies who definitely wanted this space mission to happen”. Through a mixture of diplomatic will and private investment, Sharman travelled into space. 

Jump at warp speed to 2024, and the Russia-UK relationship has changed somewhat, but perhaps not as may be expected. “The top line is: no, there is no direct collaboration with the Russians now, neither directly from the UK nor through our work with the European Space Agency,” she says. “So there are ways round – I’m not saying that they’re necessarily right, and I don’t understand the full details of what’s going on – but I’m sure all ties are not completely cut.”

I think it would be nice for more people to understand that my mission was first

Friendships between astronauts and cosmonauts remain robust, and Sharman still speaks to friends she made years ago. “Everybody’s being very careful about what they say. I’m sure emails are monitored for some of my contacts there, and they have to be very careful.”

The Russians have recently been reducing investment in space exploration, says Sharman. But the prospect of a space industry dominated by America may push old allies to collaborate. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we could get back to another relationship with [Russia],” she says. “I’m sure there will be an incentive to pull the Russians in at some point, once the Ukraine situation has been resolved.”

There are pros and cons to collaborating in space, Sharman says. “If you can afford it, it’s much easier to say, ‘you know what, I’m just going to do it all on my own, because I can make the decisions, I don’t need to worry about all this international diplomacy, and if somebody else strikes a war, it’s not going to affect me’.”

But in the UK, we simply don’t have the financial resources to step out alone. “We’re not as big as NASA, so we’re not going to go to the moon on our own,” she says frankly. “We have to decide what elements we want to have for Britain, and what elements are better done in collaboration with others. Even the European Space Agency isn’t going to the moon on its own.”

But that is far from saying the UK cannot contend on the world stage. “In terms of pure commercial, can we compete? I’m sure we can, and we do in some satellites. We’ve got a fairly healthy satellite manufacturing base at Surrey Satellite Technology, for instance.”

However, our drive to monetise space – the space economy was valued at $469bn in 2022 – has drawbacks, mostly in the rubbish that is left behind. “It’s not so much the tourism, but the commercial side of spaceflight. So whether or not it’s a human going into space actually doesn’t really matter. The fact is that it’s a spacecraft that’s leaving debris behind,” she says. 

The consequences of space littering are painful to consider. Sharman paints the potential picture of matter colliding at high speeds in space and knocking out swathes of satellites. Our electricity grid, financial payments, transport infrastructure, all grind to a halt. Food production and distribution stall. Water systems fail. 

“It’s really important that we have sustainability in space,” she explains. “And again, I think that’s something that isn’t properly being addressed. It’s not got much public debate going on about it. And we need to elevate that because it’s something that we’ve all come to rely on – our everyday lives depend on space.”

While UK rubbish amounts to a minority of the debris orbiting above our heads, no company or country is currently responsible for cleaning up its mess – “that’s the problem”, says Sharman. 

We could demand, for instance, that when launching into space, the final rocket stage must return to Earth. “We could at least have that as an international agreement, but that’s not being pursued as I understand it.” After all, the cheaper option is to leave it in space, she says.

But rules and regulations extend beyond sustainability – and towards how space actors behave in space. Take Elon Musk, whose SpaceX satellite was on a collision course with a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite in 2019. “He completely ignored the communications from the European Space Agency, and ESA had to actively move their spacecraft to avoid potential collision from one of these small Starlink satellites that Elon Musk owns… and that was costly in many different ways. So there should be more rules and regs about who has to move, and for what reason.” 

For all its challenges, Sharman is predominately positive about our vibrant space economy – where smaller, dynamic companies are as important as billionaire heavyweights Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.

“It’s good that there’s lots of little ones, because that’s how you get an industry starting up – this is the way it typically works. And sometimes they coalesce and we get bigger companies out of these, and then other ones start up. And the little ones are more agile and so on. And that’s wonderful. It’s all part of our economy.”

Sharman has devoted her life to communicating the benefits of science, but from the outside, her historic role in space has been marked by misconceptions. She is frequently dubbed the “First British Woman in Space” – factually correct, yes, but also missing the point. “We don’t talk about Tim Peake as being the first British man in space,” she says. “I think it’s in many respects frustrating that gender is such a big deal.”

Sharman has also been bannered under “history’s forgotten people” online. Elsewhere, it’s been claimed she has been “written out of history” by those incorrectly labelling Peake as the first British astronaut. Does she think that’s true?

“I think it’s partially true,” she says. “And it’s not Tim Peake’s fault at all. But when he was preparing to go into space, the UK Space Agency issued press releases saying he was the first British astronaut. And my mission happened before the internet as we know it now… but yes, I think it would be nice for more people to understand that my mission was first.”

So, as the first British astronaut, does she still think space exploration is for the benefit of humanity?

“I wrote a book after my spaceflight,” she says. “[Science fiction writer] Arthur C. Clarke wrote the foreword. As part of that foreword, he said: ‘Every organism is constantly pushing out its boundaries. When we cease to explore, we start to die.’ And I think that’s absolutely true. We’ve always pushed out and pushed out and pushed out – whether it’s our knowledge, whether it’s our physical environment, whether it’s how far we can see, by building bigger and better telescopes. And it’s that curiosity and that desire to find out more that drives our existence in the end.” 

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