Celebrating Helen Sharman’s record breaking spaceflight and the Soyuz TM-12 mission which launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on 18 May 1991. Helen spent eight days in space, six of them onboard the Mir Space Station. I remember waiting for it to get dark – the Spring Equinox had been and gone and the light had started to linger in the sky well into the evening – and then going out to stand under the stars, hoping I could see the space station as a moving point of lumines

Remembering the flight of Alan Shepard in Freedom 7 on 5 May 1961 Portrait of Alan Shepard courtesy of Jackie Burns: https://1-jackie-burns.pixels.com/ It took guts to walk out to the waiting rocket – still in those days an experimental vehicle with an unproven lineage – not knowing if he was coming back. Did he think of all the similar machines that had detonated on the launch pad? Those very public failures captured by the news crews. All the “Kaputniks” and the “Flopni

Image courtesy of Jackie Burns. https://bsky.app/profile/artistburns.bsky.social “He called us all into space.” Neil Armstrong on Yuri Gagarin What did it mean to be the first? Not to walk on the Moon, that wouldn’t come for another eight years, but to fly in space? And was such a thing even possible? Such thoughts seemed entirely reasonable back then, with the metronome of Sputnik 1 still ticking in the collective consciousness of a world dazed by the audacity of the Russi