23rd June is National Women in Engineering Day #NWED2016 and to celebrate this occasion, we are publishing some blogs to highlight the contribution Women have made to Science & Engineering. This blog is about Helen Sharman who was the first British astronaut and is officially also a cosmonaut, as her space mission to the Russian MIR space station was a joint venture with the Soviet Union.
Helen spent 7 days, 21 hours and 13 minutes in space and at the age of 27 she was one of the youngest people to go into space.
Her mission to MIR began when she responded to a UK radio advert in 1989 ‘Astronaut wanted – no experience required”. The advert as you can imagine proved popular and a total of 13,000 applicants were received. Following various rigorous selection processes, Helen was selected to become the first Briton in space. She flew up to MIR on a Soyuz spacecraft and arrived on 18 May 1991 returning on the 26 May 1991. Her 18 months of training was undertaken at the Star City base in Russia and the launch took 8 minutes and 50 seconds
During her time on MIR, Helen’s tasks included medical and agricultural tests, photographing the British Isles and participating in an amateur radio link with British schoolchildren.
Recently, Helen has been involved in running a research group at the National Physical Laboratory. In 2013, she became the Technical Manager for Kingston University’s Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing where she oversees their teaching and research activity. Helen is also a patron of the Spacelink Learning Foundation, a charity which uses space to inspire pupils to study science, technology, engineering and maths.
Source Women into Science & Engineering