I am guessing most people here have heard of Neil Armstrong? We all remember Tim Peake. But I did not know until very recently that another somewhat revolutionary astronaut came from where I live, Sheffield, and she is a woman.

‘Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary’, said the radio advertisement that 25-year-old Helen Sharman heard whilst commuting home from work in 1989. Two years later, she became the first British person to go to space.

Whilst astronaut Tim Peake was showered in attention for his ‘record breaking’ mission to the International Space Station, including a Blue Peter competition to design a mission patch - 20 years previously, Helen had also received similar levels of praise, becoming a kind of overnight celebrity - so why has her mission to boldly go where no one has gone before (from Britain at least) been largely forgotten?

Sharman was born in Grenoside in Sheffield, about 5 miles from where I live, and attended Grenoside Junior School. In 1984 she obtained a BSc degree in Chemistry at the University of Sheffield. She later worked as a chemist for the confectionary company, Mars, and helped to develop the flavours for their chocolate bars, leading to the UK press labelling her as ‘The Girl from Mars’.

The mission itself was known as ‘Project Juno’. It was a privately funded mission with the aim of strengthening the relationship between the UK and the Soviet Union near the end of the Cold War. Now, Sharman was not simply picked out of respondents of the radio advert like one of those TV lotteries, she went through a rigorous selection process that considered her scientific and academic achievements as well as her ability to learn a foreign language. During this process, she beat nearly 13,000 other applicants (most of whom were men).

Helen spent 18 months in intensive flight training in Moscow before the 8-day expedition in 1991 where she became the first woman to enter the Mir space station. Today, out of the 656 individuals who have flown to space (584 of whom were men), she is the 6th youngest.

You would think that with all these achievements, Sharman would at least be widely recognised throughout Sheffield, and it’s true she has a star on the ‘Sheffield Walk of Fame’ (which, although it is an honour, is definitely not as glamorous as the Hollywood Walk of Fame!) but most of her recognition comes from being the name of house teams in Girls schools. Lack of recognition for pioneering women is far from unusual - fewer than a quarter of statues across the country honour women, and you might have noticed that in London there are more statues of animals than women. Sheffield isn’t different in this regard, it has many buildings and statues named after various people, that I’m sure only our history teachers have heard of. So where is Helen Sharman’s statue?

Of course, something like a statue can’t be simply a performative gesture and on its own will not bring about gender equality. But in the words of Marian Wright Edelman ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’, and I think that throughout history we have so many examples of women like Helen Sharman who have achieved amazing things, we just haven’t seen them. But a good start would be to recognise the achievements of women like Helen Sharman, and we should be starting that in Sheffield.

The sad reason that Sharman has been often overlooked is that she chose to retreat from fame to focus on her own scientific research - she had wanted to be known for the scientific work that she was doing, not the endless media cycle that undermined her academic achievements because she was a woman. Even whilst on the space station, she was publicly criticised for not wearing enough makeup and asked more questions about her clothes rather than her experiments. By the time she had resumed life on Earth and Tim Peake’s publicly funded, ‘official’, British trip was underway, many passed her off as a mere ‘space tourist’.

Sadly, this happens a lot, when I was researching Sharman online and in my local area, I found many other examples of women who had been overlooked by history - in fact, another ‘record broken’ by Tim Peake was the running of a marathon in space, but actually the first marathon run in space was by another woman, Sunita Williams, nine years before. (I know I have said a lot about Tim Peake and believe me I am sure he is a great guy, but I am just saying - the women did it first.)

Now, some adults in the room may even remember Sharman, but to me and people my age this is history, and we have a responsibility to make sure it is not forgotten. So, as we face this mission, ultimately, we should not let women like Helen Sharman be overlooked when they are such an inspiration to women in male-dominated professions. Instead, we should celebrate her achievements, especially in Sheffield, and encourage the future generations of ‘Girls from Mars’ on their voyages to strange new worlds.
 

Photograph: Dr Helen Sharman (Credit: Anne-Katrin Purkiss, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International)