Britain’s contribution to space travel – Teddy bear astronauts
By Dave Parrack
The UK hasn’t exactly been a main player in the quest for humans to become a space-going species. But that could be about to change thanks to some adventurous souls who recently traveled 30km above the ground. There’s one problem however, they weren’t human but teddy bears.
Humans have been a space going race for almost 50 years now, with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to orbit around the Earth in 1961. America then took over, and reached the moon in July, 1969. China then became the third nation to achieve manned spaceflight in 2003, although NASA still oversees most space missions.
Britain does have a hand in space travel, belonging to the European Space Agency and contributing several astronauts in recent years. But Michael Foale, Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick all had to be made US citizens in order to do so, thanks to the British government banning human spaceflight for the Queen’s subjects.
According to BBC News, Cambridge University’s space-flight club is trying to change all of this. In preparation for an attempt to launch a rocket into space for less than £1,000, the inventive team of students recently launched the world’s first teddy-only space flight with a little help from local schoolchildren.
Ed Moore, from Cambridge University Spaceflight, explained:
The most important thing we think we can do is to try to encourage children to get involved in science and engineering, and the best way of doing that we thought would be with the kind of engineering project we would have loved to have done ourselves at their age.
Four teddy bears were used in the mission, all of which were dressed in special spacesuits to protect them from the extremely cold temperatures of -60C at 30km above earth. The bears were launched along with tracking equipment and cameras from Churchill College in Cambridge. The flight into the stratosphere lasted over two hours before the bears were safely collected from their landing zone near Ipswich.
This may seem a trivial and silly experiment to those Americans, Russians, or Chinese people reading. But us Brits don’t have a history of space travel, meaning we have to grab onto any successful example of it happening above our little part of the world.
It does of course have bigger implications. Not only did this bear-space flight teach the youngsters taking part all about the technical aspects involved, it could lead to cheap space travel in the future. Although I don’t think I’ll be volunteering to be the first man to follow the bears up anytime soon.
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December 8th, 2008
The article says “the British government banning human spaceflight for the Queen’s subjects”
- I don’t believe this is true.
I know that the Thatcher government in 1986 decided not to fund or be involved in human space exploration and that POLICY has continued to this day.
However, I don’t believe a LAW has been passed which bans British citizens from space flight or being involved in human space exploration programs.
Various non US citizens have travelled into space due to govermental arrangements with NASA. eg Canada, Israel.
Of course the British government does not have such an arrangement.
Other non US citizens, without foreign goverment involvement, have been employed by NASA.
However in order to join the NASA astronaut training program US citizenship is required.
Of the three British astronauts named one was born with dual citizenship, one was working for NASA and became a US citizen in order to become an astronaut, the third had become a US citizen whilst working in the US prior to joining NASA.
Incidentally, Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space aboard a Soyuz flight in 1991 after winning a competition.
It seems no British law prevented her accepting her prize trip to the Mir space station and I don’t think she had to become a Russian citizen !