The Girl from Mars

Chris Hallam looks back to when Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space

- Chris Hallam

It should be a famous date in British history but somehow it isn’t. So what exactly did happen on Saturday 18 May 1991? Was this the date the National Lottery began? Or was it the day Sir Tim Berners-Lee switched on the World Wide Web for the very first time? Did Margaret Thatcher resign? Did the Channel Tunnel open?

The answer to all these questions is “no”. For 18 May 1991 was the day 27-year-old Helen Sharman became the very first Briton to travel into space. Sharman’s eight-day space mission occurred just over 30 years after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human to go into space in April 1961. Gagarin, like Sharman, was 27 at the time.

Of all the 117 billion people who have ever lived, only just over 600 have travelled into space. Of this number, only seven have been British or UKborn while only Major Tim Peake, who went into space in 2015 and 2016, and Sharman have held full UK citizenship.

Helen Sharman, who celebrated her 60 birthday on 30 May, remains indisputably the first British person, the first Western European woman and the first privately funded woman to go into space. She was also the first woman to visit the Mir space station and was the first ever British cosmonaut. She had been selected from a total of 13,000 applicants to take part in Project Juno. But how exactly did all this come about?