Just 25 years ago, Helen Sharman became the first British astronaut ever to be sent into space. Stylist finds out more about the woman being left out of the history books

When astronaut Tim Peake blasted into orbit in December listening to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now, schools assembled their pupils to watch the launch, entire TV programmes following his progress were broadcast, #BritInSpace went viral on Twitter and the UK Space Agency released a press release heralding ‘the first Briton in space’. But there was a slight problem. Peake wasn’t the first Briton in space. That honour actually goes to a quietly spoken woman from South Yorkshire who, at the age of 27, faced public praise and misogyny in equal measure as she blasted into space exactly 25 years ago today (18 May), inspiring a generation as she went. Her name is Helen Sharman, and, hashtag or not, she was the first Briton in space.

Sharman, now 52 and an industrial chemist, boarded the Soviet Soyuz TM-12 space capsule on 18 May 1991 and spent eight days on the Russian space station Mir as part of Project Juno – a joint collaboration between the Soviet Union and a group of British companies. While Peake is the first British man to travel into space as a European astronaut and the first to live aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Sharman was inarguably the first Briton ever to travel into space.

In the wake of Peake’s successful launch, there was an outcry over how easily Sharman’s groundbreaking trip has been forgotten. One astrophysics PhD student tweeted: “There’s definitely something sexist about the claim Tim Peake is the first #BritInSpace”. Despite generally shunning the limelight, Sharman herself admits that the press release was “ill-advised and plainly wrong” when talking exclusively to Stylist, but attributes it to the enthusiasm of “wanting to make headlines and talking about being the first, the best, the biggest”, rather than it being a feminist issue.

In fact, Sharman was hailed a national hero after her trip – successive Prime Ministers invited her to Number 10, a star was engraved on the pavement in her hometown of Sheffield in her honour, and she wrote a book, Seize The Moment, describing her experiences.

Pride and prejudice

Yet, there was a flipside to Sharman’s fame. Despite a rigorous selection process – she beat 13,000 other candidates – she was denigrated as a mere ‘lottery winner’ because the initial application process for the trip was open to all. Sharman was working as a chocolate researcher for a confectionary company when she heard a radio advert that said: “Astronaut wanted. No experience required.” She then spent 18 gruelling months at the Cosmonaut Training Centre in Russia, aka Star City. “I had never considered space travel as a career because British people didn’t go into space so I had never thought that it was possible,” she explains now. “But everything about it appealed – the need to learn a language, the science and technology, the fact that it was practical work as well as theory.”

By the time Sharman’s mission finally set off, John Major was Prime Minister, Cher was at Number 1 in the singles charts and Tim Berners-Lee had just announced that he had invented something he called the World Wide Web. And although she was the only woman on Project Juno, she says she was never patronised by the other cosmonauts. “The only concession they made to me as a woman was the urine contraption they put on the end of the toilet in space. There’s a different shape for women, but it was a nuisance to change and I had got used to peeing into narrow necked bottles during training so I just used the men’s funnel.” She was also let off the Russian tradition that cosmonauts pee on the back tyre of the coach that takes them to their rocket – a habit begun by the first man in space Yuri Gagarin – so she didn’t have to take her space suit off in the minutes before blast-off.

It’s a far cry from the home comforts Peake tweets images of from the ISS today, he can take selfies in space and has his own iPod playlist. The only music Sharman heard came from a battered old tape recorder. “Before I went up, I made some cassettes to listen to with a bit of jazz and a few light classics,” she says. She was also frequently plunged into darkness because of electrical problems – a world away from Peake presenting Adele with a Brit award via video link.

Space food was radically different then too, with none of the Heston Blumenthal-created ‘multi-sensory, gravity-defying’ bacon sandwiches or Christmas pudding enjoyed by Peake. “We had basic rations,” says Sharman. “It was all very Russian – cabbage soup and borscht in a packet, meat and potatoes in a tin, fish in tomato sauce and rye bread. Nothing fun. We smuggled up an orange because two people had been up there for six months without fresh food – we thought it would be a real treat for them to have fruit. But it was semi-secret and not on any of the official documents.”

Contact with planet Earth was extremely limited, too. “Tim can use Twitter and email to communicate with his family and friends, he can pick up the GPS phone and call back to Earth. We didn’t have any of that,” she recounts. “It was completely different but there are pros and cons to that. We had some peace and quiet. When we were around the other side of Earth, even Mission Control couldn’t contact us. It was wonderfully silent.”

Stylist meets Helen Sharman, the pioneering female astronaut left out of the history books