Helen had arrived at Star City with her fellow candidate, Tim Mace, but only one of them would be going to space at the end of their training, while the other would be an emergency back up. She also completed parachute training, as part of emergency preparation for her return to Earth, and weightlessness training in an aeroplane. Helen SharmanĪs well as learning to speak Russian, Helen’s training involved studying astro-navigation, ballistics and electronics, before moving onto simulators for the more practical aspects of life on the space station. Helen in space with Mission Commander Anatole Artsebarsky. Almost nobody there spoke any English, including her Russian language teacher, who greeted her with, “Bonjour!” she tells me, laughing. It was 1989 when Helen arrived at Star City in Russia to begin her 18 month course, having had just four days to pack up her home, leave her job and move countries. “It wasn't until much later on that it started to really sink in, this was reality,” she says. The final two who were chosen to join the astronaut training programme in Russia were announced live on TV, and Helen found herself walking across the stage in a daze as her name was called. These included being placed into a centrifuge machine, which spun to replicate the G-force that would be experienced in space. Gradually, the number of candidates was whittled down to just two, through a series of medical, psychological and physical tests. “But, by the time I got home from work, I realised that if I didn't put myself forward, nobody would.”ġ3,000 other Britons also applied, and Helen was astounded to be invited as one of 250 for an initial screening day. “I thought, I'm a young woman working in a chocolate factory, why would they choose me?” she says. "I'm a young woman working in a chocolate factory, why would they choose me?”ĭespite her excitement, Helen nearly didn’t apply. I remember just sitting there going, wow, what an amazing opportunity.” “I'd got my chemistry education, I'd got some experience working in teams, I loved foreign languages, and learning Russian was going to be part of the training. It said, ‘Astronaut wanted, no experience necessary,’” she recalls. “I came across an announcement for this mission that had been created specially to put the first British person in space. When Helen was 26 years old, she was driving home from her job as a chemist making chocolate for Mars Confectionery, when she heard a radio advert which changed her life (and British history) forever. “It could have almost been any science to be quite honest, I wasn't very adventurous,” she tells me, something I find hard to believe of the person who would become Britain’s first astronaut. "Astronaut wanted, no experience necessary."Ī lover of many subjects, Helen wasn’t sure what she wanted to do when she left school, but decided to study chemistry as she thought it would give her a range of job options. I can still hear the warm undertones of a subtle Sheffield accent as she chats to me, despite her time living in Southern England (and, briefly, in space). Helen’s face is framed by her cropped, reddish-brown hair and the turtle neck of a green cable knit jumper. Helen laughs and confirms she is, and I realise the white background is actually a set of wardrobes at her home in West London. For just a fraction of a second, I feel like I’ve tuned into mission control, and am only half joking when I ask if she’s speaking to me from Earth. On my screen appears the head and shoulders of a woman on a brilliant white background, wearing a headset, complete with a microphone and a pair of clear-rimmed glasses I momentarily mistake for goggles. When my video call with Helen first connects, I do a slight double take. She was in space for a total of eight days, six of which were spent living on a space station conducting a range of experiments. Helen Sharman became the first British person to go into space in 1991, as part of a collaboration with the Soviet space programme. “My commander was saying, ‘Well, what does it look like?’ because he'd not been in space before, but I just kept going, ‘Oh, wow!’ It took a while for it to sink in.” “I just kept going, oh, wow,” she tells me over video call, now firmly back on solid ground. She recalls seeing the curve of our home planet and how blue it looked against the black space above it. Helen was strapped inside a Soyuz rocket somewhere over the Pacific Ocean when she caught her first view of Earth from space.
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