source: BBC

It’s 35 years since the first British person went into space. Helen Sharman was a 27-year-old food scientist when she stumbled upon a job ad to be part of an Anglo-Soviet commercial venture, Project Juno. Sharman told BBC News in 1991: “All along the selection process, I never really believed that it could be me.”

One of the lesser-known moments to take place during the Cold War space race involved the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. On his way to the launchpad in 1961, just before he became the first man in outer space, he asked to stop the bus and took a last-minute toilet break.

It grew into a tradition that all cosmonauts flying from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan repeat just before take-off, as recounted by Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut, in her 1993 autobiography. “This was one tradition they would not expect me to join in,” she writes.

Yet the food scientist from Sheffield was treading in the footsteps of cosmonauts when she launched into space aboard the Soviet Soyuz TM-12 space capsule on 18 May 1991. She was to spend eight days on the Mir space station, making British history – with the help of a Soviet space programme. At the time the British government wasn’t involved in space exploration, so paying for a spot on a flight was the only way to get there.

And she was only there because of an advert. “One pleasant evening at the end of June 1989, I was driving home from the Mars factory in Slough, listening to the car radio,” she writes in her memoir. “While I sat in a traffic jam, I flicked through the radio stations trying to find something to listen to.”

It wasn’t the most auspicious of moments – but as she goes on to recount, her attention was caught by an ad on one of the channels she tuned into: “Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary.”

Sharman had stumbled upon the recruitment slogan for a project that marked the thawing of Cold War relations. The Juno mission was a commercial venture to send a Briton to Mir funded by a private consortium – with a Soviet space crew.

“I know, with hindsight, that the minute or so I spent listening to this advertisement is the crucial, pivotal moment in my life,” she writes. “After it, nothing from my old life could ever quite be the same.”