Project Juno

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Project Juno was a private British space programme, which selected Helen Sharman to be the first Briton in space.

As Britain then had no space programme, a private consortium was formed and intended to raise money to pay the USSR for a flight on a Soyuz rocket to the Mir space station. The USSR had recently flown Toyohiro Akiyama, a Japanese journalist, under a similar arrangement.

A call for applicants was publicized in the UK (one ad read "Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary"[1]), leading to 13,000 applications. Juno selected four candidates to train in the USSR:

Gordon Brooks (Royal Navy physician, then 33)
Major Timothy Mace (Army Air Corps, 33)
Clive Smith (Kingston Polytechnic lecturer, 27)
Helen Sharman (food technologist, 26)

Eventually Mace and Sharman were the two finalists, and Sharman was chosen for the flight with Mace as her backup.

The cost of the flight was to be funded by various innovative schemes, including sponsoring by private British companies and a lottery system. Corporate sponsors included British Aerospace, Memorex, and Interflora, and television rights were sold to ITV.

Ultimately Juno failed to raise the entire sum, and Russia considered canceling the mission. It is believed that Mikhail Gorbachev directed the mission to proceed at Soviet cost. Several of the ambitious microgravity experiments that were planned were eliminated in favor of experiments designed by British schools that could be done with existing equipment aboard Mir.

Sharman was launched aboard Soyuz TM-12 on 18 May 1991, and returned aboard Soyuz TM-11 on 26 May 1991.

Both Sharman and Mace were candidates but not selected in the 1992 and 1998 European Space Agency selection rounds for its astronaut corps. Although Mace did not fly in space, he married the daughter of a cosmonaut. In later life he was the helicopter pilot for President of South Africa Nelson Mandela.[2]