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

"The Moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars." – Arthur C. Clarke Spaceflight has always been a roll of the dice. Despite all the safety checks and the dress rehearsals, space is still the harshest of environments for humans to live in. And just getting there is fraught with danger, not least of all the launch – all those combustible liquids coming together in a calibrated explosion. Like the blue touch paper and retire to a safe distance of about two miles, an

Remembering Jim Lovell (1928-2025) A personal reflection Jim in front of the Apollo 10 Command Module at the Science Museum, London....

by Mark Stewart Still from The Company of Wolves Courtesy of The Cannon Group “One beast and one beast only howls in the woods by night.” The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter By way of preamble: The windblown pamphlet finds its way to the punters feet as he walks down Exhibition Row, with no particular destination in mind. He bends to retrieve the piece of literary driftwood, if such it is, his curiosity piqued. He knows the world to be a random place and he