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many others, Mace, who had been told that he would be back-up. During training they’d worked together; Mace helping Sharman with the theory of flight and Sharman helping Mace with the science. Now, while she was elated, he would be downhearted. “He must have expected to have been chosen, so it was probably harder for him [than it would have been for me],” she says. On May 18, 1991, Sharman boarded the spacecraft with fellow cosmonauts Anatoly Artebartsky and Sergei Krikalyov at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union. Her parents and her sister looked on from a viewing platform a few hundred metres away from the rocket, her mother’s eyes fixed on a small television monitor showing an image being captured by a camera inside the spacecraft – an image of her daughter. Eventually the image “fizzled and went black”. “At that point my mum stood up suddenly and threw her arms around the nearest person she could find, who happened to be a Russian general with all these medals on his chest,” says Sharman, smiling. “He was saying, ‘There, there, I have a daughter, too’. My mum hadn’t travelled very much and was very heartened by the friendliness and normality of people from a country she was probably quite scared of when she was younger, with the Cold War and everything.” It was only once the spacecraft had left the Earth’s atmosphere, and the payload fairing, which had obscured the windows during the launch, had been jettisoned, allowing the light to stream in through the windows, that Sharman herself began to take it all in. “That was the first time we could get a glimpse of the earth,” she says. “That’s when you really know you’re up there.” Our main course arrives. Slivers of soft salty beef balanced by the earthiness of a beetroot terrine and given a mustard kick by a horseradish sauce, and a deliciously garlicky poussin chargrilled to perfection. The sides of roast buckwheat groats and crunchy surowka salad ensure that both of us would have trouble squeezing into a space suit for a good few hours. The highlight of Sharman’s eight days on the Mir space station was speaking to the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who radioed up from mission control. “It was a lovely thing,” she says. “He didn’t call up to every crew. I think it was [because of] the special relationship he wanted to build with Britain.” Sharman first encountered life in the public eye before she went to space, and she didn’t like the “false, giggly excitement” that was “peddled” by the agency hired to “drum up excitement” about the mission and turn her and Mace into minor celebrities, or the fact that the newspaper columnists who lined up to interview her were only interested in speaking about her clothes. Sharman refused to discuss the topic. Despite the casual sexism she has encountered, Sharman has never made a big deal of being a woman. “It never mattered to me what gender I am,” she says. “I’ve just got on with it.” Following her return to Earth, Sharman embarked on a tour of British schools – organised with the help of the then Prime Minister, John Major – during which she talked to schoolchildren about her time in space and shared her love of science. The tour
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turned into almost a decade of public speaking, in schools, in universities and on the radio and television. She wrote two books: an autobiography, Seize The Moment (1993), and a children’s book, The Space Place (1997), but she couldn’t remain in the limelight forever. “I just needed to move on,” she says, sipping her mint tea, which arrived along with an espresso for me. “I needed to do something different. I also wanted to live a quiet and private life.” Sharman went so quiet that when the UK Space Agency announced that Tim Peake would travel to the International Space Station on Soyuz TMA-19M in 2015 it decided to write her out of history, declaring Peake the first British astronaut. When I mention this, Sharman isn’t angry, she has every right to be, she’s just surprised. “I don’t know if they thought people would just totally forget about my mission or what,” she says. Thankfully, the UK Space Agency issued another press release correcting the error, meaning Dr Helen Sharman’s place in the history books is secure.
The Bill 1 x kopytka dumplings (US$4.45) 1 x smoked eel (US$10.80) 1 x poussin (US$21) 1 x salt beef (US$21.60) 1 x buckwheat groats (US$4.45) 1 x surowka (US$4.45) 2 x mineral water (US$8.90) 1 x double espresso (US$3.30) 1 x mint tea (US$2.80)
Total: US$81.75
For more on the universe and space exploration, check out Discovery Science for shows like Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, NASA’s Unexplained Files and How the Universe Works. Channel 1261 on ice Digital Widescreen.
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