Sheffield astronaut Helen Sharman OBE recalls vivid memory of Apollo 11 moon landings
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Born in Grenoside, she told how she gazed up at the stars from her back garden while her father described the significance of commander Neil Armstrong and module pilot Buzz Aldrin’s momentous achievement taking humanity’s first steps on the lunar surface.
She would herself go on to become the first Briton in space and first woman to visit the Mir Space Station in May 1991.
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Hide AdThe 56-year-old spoke to ITV News as the world prepares to mark 50 years since the Apollo 11 moon landings, which took place on July 20, 1969.
She told how at first the significance of the moment was a little lost on her as a six-year-old girl but later felt ‘in awe’ of what the astronauts did as she grew older.
She said: “My father was trying to impress upon me how important this whole thing was and he took me down the garden at the time and you could actually see the moon and he was saying ‘Don’t you understand there are people now walking on the moon?’
“My sister had recently learned how to walk and I didn’t think that was a terribly amazing thing to do, so for me i related it all to walking.
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Hide Ad“But of course it was subsequently really when I started to learn much more about the technology and the engineering and the daredevil stuff that they were doing to fly around the back of the moon and to land on the surface when they really didn’t know what was there.”
Working as a chemist, her trip into space was made possible by a private programme called Project Juno, and paid for jointly by the USSR and a consortium of British companies.
She told how her first concern was simply not to mess up.
“I was so desperate to do it right, to do a good job, because I felt this responsibility that people were looking at me and I did not want the first Brit to mess up.”
She described zero-gravity as this “wonderful, relaxing floating sensation” and the awe-inspiring view as “a fabulous, fabulous thing”, adding: “Nobody gets tired of looking at the Earth.”
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Hide AdAsked if we will see a first Briton on the moon or even Mars in our lifetime, she said: “I think we will. Britain is deciding relatively recently to get back into funding human space flight again and we are part of the European Space Agency and the space flight programme so there is a chance.”
She would “love to go back” to space and revealed she occasionally has a recurring dream about “looking out at the Earth spinning below.”