Titans of Science: Helen Sharman - part 1
PodcastsThe Naked ScientistsTitans of Science: Helen Sharman - part 1Chris Smith chats with the first Briton to ever go to space05 September 2023Today's guest is Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space. Our. . .
PodcastsThe Naked ScientistsTitans of Science: Helen Sharman - part 1Chris Smith chats with the first Briton to ever go to space05 September 2023Today's guest is Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space. Our conversation ranges from her early beginnings working in a chocolate factory - Mars, would you believe - to her run in with the then leader of the Soviet Union. . . Helen Sharman: how to get a job as an astronautHelen SharmanChris - Helen Sharman was born in Sheffield on the 30th of May, 1963. She's wincing. She was not only the first British person in space, she was the first Western European woman to go there. She was also the first woman to visit the Mir Space Station. She attended Grenoside Junior and Infant School, then Jordanthorpe comprehensive in Sheffield. She got a BSC degree in chemistry at the University of Sheffield in 1984. And then started a PhD at Birkbeck in London, looking at why certain rare earth elements produce a kind of blue light, but was then seduced by space and departed without finishing her PhD. She responded to a radio advertisement asking for applications to be the first British space Explorer. And Helen Charman was selected for the mission ahead of nearly 13,000 other applicants. She became the first British astronaut on the 18th of May, 1991. She published her autobiography, 'Seize the Moment' in 1993. And in 1997 published a children's book, the Space Place. And she has presented radio and television programs, including for BBC Schools. And she encourages youngsters to pursue careers in science. And we are sitting in the delightful surroundings alongside the river Cam in Cambridge, and you've come to tell me about your career. Helen. Take us back then to the early years. Were you always destined to fly in space? I mean, how did this get started?Helen - Oh goodness. As a child I would never have imagined going to space. I was brought up to basically keep my head down, do normal stuff. We don't do anything particularly exciting, particularly different in our family or in our school. You know, we went to a very normal school in the north of Sheffield. Then we moved house to the south of Sheffield. But still it was all very, nobody from my school had ever done anything like that. And anyway, Britain didn't have a space agency, let alone a human space flight program. So no, going into space, it wasn't even a pipe dream, it just wasn't, right? It just wasn't possible. And I only chose to study sciences because I was keeping my options open. I fancied the idea of manufacturing, although my family didn't know anything about manufacturing. You know, they were teachers, they were nurses, nothing to do with manufacturing. And so I didn't really know what you had to do to be in manufacturing. I just kind of liked the idea that we could convert stuff into other stuff that could be quite useful. . So off I went to university to study chemistry. I mean, honestly, it could have been any science or engineering and you know, I just chose chemistry because it was kind of a middle of the roadie kind of science. And if I fancy going biological later, I could. If I fancy going physical, I could. And that's how my science career started, just to keep my options open. And then towards the end of the degree, looking for what job to do. And it was in those days, pre-internet. Can we ever imagine those days now? But yes, pre-internet, when you used to go along to the university careers office and hunt through files and files of paper application forms. And I think I found every application form that said they wanted a graduate chemist and applied because I didn't know what there was out there. And I got a choice of jobs. I think I had six, eight jobs, something like that, in the end to choose from. So really great opportunities and ended up in the electronics industry making display screens. And that was where I started my part-time PhD. So yeah, it's kind of always done on a part-time basis. And then after a few years making display screens, I loved that but it was time to move on. And then I moved to the confectionery industry. I worked for Mars confectionery, actually. Chris - It's appropriate that a space woman worked for Mars. Helen - As soon as the newspapers found out, you know, 'a girl from Mars goes to the stars', 'Helen blasts off from one Milky Way' and there were puns on galaxies. Oh, you can just imagine. Worse and worse. But yeah, I was enjoying my job. I worked on ice cream, chocolate, you know, loads of science of course. And at school I could never have imagined using science in the electronics industry, but also to make chocolate. You know you just make chocolate, don't you? But you know, the science and the engineering, the technology required to make confectionery at scale at a cost that is reasonable so people can afford to buy it. And, all of that was just fascinating. I loved it. Chris - Were you doing the chocolate bar job then when you saw the ad to become an astronaut?Helen - Yes. I was actually just driving home from work one evening. I could say I was driving home from Mars, but that's a bit of pushing the pun a bit too far. . but not driving home from work, listening to the radio and again, pre-internet. So how did we find out about jobs? Well, they were in the newspapers, they were in journals and sometimes they were advertised on the radio and, hey presto, there on my car, radio was 'astronaut wanted. No experience necessary. ' And my ears pricked up and it described this amazing opportunity. They wanted somebody from Britain to go to the Soviet Union and train with the cosmonauts and do experiments on board the Mir space station. And I just applied for the job. Like you applied for any other job really?Chris - What did you have to send in?Helen - You had to, first of all, phone in. There was some sort of call centre and they asked some very basic conversations, questions about, did you have some languages? They wanted us to have some manual dexterity and to still have a practical job. So they were asking questions about what I did for my job and when they ascertained that I was a reasonable candidate, then they sent me an application form and that was the standard few pages where you have to fill in the questions but actually then you have that blank page at the end, 'why you should choose me. ' And you know, I was so certain that they'd never choose me. I never photocopied that application form. So to this day, I don't know what I wrote about that. Chris - You can't remember what you wrote?Helen - I don't know Chris - You must've written something good. Helen - I must've been truthful. I do remember thinking I could big myself up here, but then they'll find me out, won't they? And I don't know what they're looking for. I really didn't know. So throughout the application and then the psychological tests and everything, I decided that I couldn't sort of second guess everything. I would just enjoy the process. I would be as honest and open as I could and just sort of learn as much as I could from just being part of it. Chris - What happened next? Did a letter drop through the letterbox? Is that what happened?Helen - So they may well have telephoned me and left a message on my home answer machine because it was even pre-mobile days. You know, it's just quite incredible to think how we used to communicate then. And that would be when I would've been asked to go for the first part, medical, psychological tests. And then gradually they whittled us down so that there were 16 of us going to be whizzed around in a room in a centrifuge to look at how we could cope with the acceleration G-force during launch and so on. And some of the more space flight specific medicals, motion sickness for instance. And they didn't want us to be motion sick, so they try to choose people who are not generally motion sick on earth. So there were those sorts of tests. And yeah, gradually then there were four of us left. We went off to a Moscow hospital for two weeks. And then I remember it being one awful evening, live national TV where it was announced which two of us were actually going to be going to Russia and doing the training and which two would remain in Britain as sort of backups. But two of us. So, you know, I didn't know was I going into space or was I going to be the backup? And of course I always assumed I would be the backup. You know, the guy who was the army pilot. Blonde hair, blue eyes, , he was bound to fly. The woman from the chocolate factory, she'd be the backup, wouldn't she? This is the trouble with coming from that kind of the idea that it would never be me and lacking confidence as a youngster. It took me a long time to get over that, that imposter syndrome I think took a while to get over. Helen Sharman: chatting with Mikhail GorbachevHelen SharmanChris - How was this going down with the chocolate factory?Helen - They were very good actually at Mars. They were delighted. They got loads of free publicity out of it, of course. And they did offer me a job at the end of it. But I did have to resign from my job at Mars in order to go full-time. You know, I was basically living in Star City, this military base, Northeastern Moscow,. completely different lifestyle. So it is really fascinating, for that alone. Because I've always loved languages and exploring different cultures. For me the training was always going to be as exciting as going into space really. I applied to do the training. If I'm honest, I didn't know anything about space flight, but I could imagine learning to speak Russian fluently. I'd never had that opportunity in my life before. I could imagine living in a different country, you know, but I could never have imagined a Soviet military base, barbed wire around concrete walls on the perimeters, soldiers with guns at the entrances to all the buildings. But what a fascinating place to be, become part of and to make friends in and to understand how they operated, how they engineered thing s like teamwork. Completely different to the culture that I had come from in 1980s Britain where everything was so commercial and here was a country that was really into the long term, completely different environment and loved it. Chris - I was doing my run up to my GCSEs when all this was happening to you. And we should give people some context, it was around the time this was happening to you that the Berlin War was going to come down. So there was this thawing of relations between the west and the Soviet Union as it was then. So you were very much part of that, that was a pretty special time because people were becoming a lot closer. There was more of this collaboration, wasn't there?Helen - That's absolutely right. So the Berlin Wall had just fallen a few days before I arrived in Star City to do my training. But no, it was very much a reaching out, really my mission was part of it in a way. So Gorbachev then president of the Soviet Union was reaching out to some western countries and had asked his space agency, the Soviet Space Agency to reach out to some western countries to send one of their, say, an astronaut into space on a Soviet space mission. Very much a sort of a repeat of the early 1980s into Cosmos, Syria, when a lot of the Soviet friendly countries had astronauts going into space with the Soviets. Now this was the time for the western countries and Gorbachev very much wanted that to be part of his glasnost, really. His openness. Chris - Did you meet him?Helen - I didn't meet him in person, but I did have a telephone conversation with him from space. Yeah, I arrived on the space station. Bit of a problem docking, but we just got in there and did our bear hugs and greeted the two cosmonauts that had been up there already for six months. And then mission control says, oh by the way, we have somebody who would like to speak to you. Helen, he's going to speak to you first. This is President Gorbachev. I think, 'oh my goodness, if you had only warned me, I would've thought of something very erudite in Russian to have said to the president of the country that's sending me into space. ' But I mean, all I could think of was saying something like an honour that you've called us. Thank you very much, and how wonderful it is that we can do this international collaboration and of course the laws of physics and science work the same in both countries, so isn't it great? And it was all about sort of making a bit light of the situation in a way. And that's all he wanted. He had a lovely chat. I mean I've subsequently seen the transcript of it and it was just to mark the fact that this was a British space mission. He did it for no other reason. He didn't need to say anything, but he was all 'oh ho ho ho, I think my dinner will be much better in the Kremlin than yours will be on the Space station. ' . 'I'm certainly much more comfortable, I'm sure, but so nice to see that you've got there. What are you going to be doing this evening then?' Just general chat. It was, you know, such an honour and yeah, a delight. So, never met the man, but I feel like I have ,Chris - We're getting slightly ahead of ourselves because we've already gone into space. But talking of talking back to Earth, you ended up chatting with a bunch of school kids because didn't you end up on Blue Peter and that kind of thing? You did an amateur radio chat with some school children in the UK when you were up there, didn't you?Helen - I don't think I ever actually got onto Blue Peter. Would've obviously said yes straight away. But, I did an experiment. The Radio Society of Great Britain had set me up with an amateur radio call sign. So I was able to contact British schools through the Radio Society of Great Britain and they'd set up sort of lessons where students could understand about orbits and work on contacting the space station. So I did speak directly with some school children through amateur radio. So yeah, a great honour. And I did Newsround and some other TV interviews. Chris - I'm sure I saw coverage of this. I mean it was huge when it happened to you it was huge. It was all over the kids' media. It definitely was inspirational for the young people. What else did they teach you, obviously apart from Russian, before you were able to go aloft? What was the training? What did it comprise?Helen - They'd split it up into a theoretical stage where we started out on real sort of basics. Um, so, you know, I mentioned ballistics and astral navigation, but we would talk about the electrical communication systems onboard the space station, the life support systems, some space flight medicine for instance. So it gradually got a little bit more practically oriented, but it did start very theoretical. But yeah, they gradually sort of built it up. We then do some simulator work. For me the best it's always our practicals. So I like the stuff in the simulator. I love all the emergency training. So we had to get rescued from the Black Sea to simulate how we would be rescued and to work of course with the divers and the other rescue crew. So they were doing their practising as well, their training on us as trainee cosmonauts. So that's how it works, you know. And the best bit actually, I think all cosmonauts agree, the best bit is the weightless training where you get a few seconds, usually just just over 20 seconds at a time, in the vomit comet. The Americans have named it thus, for obvious reasons. So it flies a series of parabolic loops and as the pilot lets the aircraft just fly down one side of the parabola as it plummets to earth, because you are falling inside the falling aircraft just for that few seconds of being in free fall, you feel weightless. And of course after 23 seconds or so, the pilot has to make the aircraft pull out of this loop because otherwise you'll hit the ground. And then you can do another loop and another and another. And yes, it's those series of 20 odd seconds at a time, which is how we can practise moving around feeling weightless. Yeah, the, the best bit of all the training. It's not, of course your body doesn't react in the same way 'cause you don't get to feel weightless for very long stretches at a time, but it gives you a good idea how to be safe and how to move around the space station.