Libby Jackson spent her childhood dreaming of space.

“If I could tell my younger self what I’m doing now, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible,” she says over a phone call, discussing her selection as Stylist’s first ever Woman of the Week.

“In 2015 I found myself in the Science Museum with over 3,000 screaming children watching Tim Peake go into space. I realised I was standing next to Helen Sharman [the first British astronaut and woman to visit the Mir space station in 1991], and it dawned on me I had found myself at the heart of this world I had dreamed of [as a child].”

Jackson is not just at the heart of the UK space industry: she’s also a vital cog in the machinery that keeps astronauts exploring the wilderness above us. As the Human Spaceflight and Microgravity Programme Manager at the UK Space Agency, she ranks as one of the leading space flight experts in the country, and is responsible for overseeing scientists carrying out experiments on earth and in interplanetary waters up on the International Space Station.

It’s a role Jackson has been working towards since the age of 17, when she applied for work experience at NASA. It was a long shot, but – to her surprise – it landed. She soon found herself sitting in mission control at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.

Nearly 20 years later, she’s a rare female leader in the upper echelons of a field suffering from an intense gender imbalance. Recent research revealed that women only make up 21% of the workforce in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) industries.

Meet the woman who keeps astronauts safe in space