by Sue Nelson
‘Because I was the first British astronaut, the legacy of that means that Britain has been on the map of human spaceflight ever since I flew in 1991,’ said Sharman, during an interview with me in 2016 at Imperial College, London, where she worked in the chemistry department. ‘Wherever I go in the world, I represent the United Kingdom. I’ll always be that first British astronaut. It’s great that I got to go into space, and it sends a very strong signal to girls and women in Britain.’
It was not surprising during the 1960s, considering the traditional expectations of women’s roles, that reporters often referenced Valentina Tereshkova with a comment on her appearance. But thirty years after Tereshkova, Sharman found that little had changed when it came to press interviews.
‘Some of those questions were about the clothes I wore in space. Somebody asked me where I had bought my underwear, or the face cream I used in space,’ Sharman told me.
‘There was one article in a newspaper titled “Barbarella Come Back” and the whole thing was “Isn’t it terrible that Helen went into space but she didn’t even wear any make-up. She wasn’t prepared to show herself at her best in front of the cameras.” Come on, guys,’ Sharman said. ‘It’s like going on a really tough camping trip going to the Mir space station. The International Space Station is a relative luxury. It’s sweaty and sticky and,’ she chuckled, ‘with 180 grams of luggage, who’s going to take a lipstick?’
Unfortunately there was one aspect of her stay in space that Sharman regretted to this day. It related to an item of clothing she was asked to take on-board while she was training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Kazakhstan.
‘Alexey Leonov, the first spacewalker, was my boss in Star City. He’s always got a joke up his sleeve somewhere. There was a tradition that, when astronauts arrived at the space station, they share a dinner and you take up something to dress for dinner. The men often take ties that float nicely in front of them,’ she said.
Perhaps because Sharman was to become the first woman on board Mir, Leonov – whom she speaks of extremely fondly – decided to do something special for her. ‘Alexey had taken it upon himself while we were doing two weeks’ quarantine in Kazakhstan to go off to a local dressmaker – totally unknown to me – and he chose some pink material.’ Sharman laughed at the memory. ‘It’s not really my colour.’
Leonov then designed what she referred to as ‘a short blouson frilly combination thing … a pink frilly frou-frou outfit.’ Having seen the offending dress, I understood why she found it so difficult to describe. It resembled an awful 1980s voluminous, marshmallow-style wedding dress with ruches, frills and a bow at the top of the neckline. Wally would have hated it. Funnily enough, Wally was the only other person I had ever heard use the word ‘frou-frou’ in conversation.
‘I was given this by Alexey Leonov. My boss,’ said Sharman. ‘I couldn’t really say, “Thanks, but I hate it”. The idea was that I’d secretly put it on inside my spacesuit and then, for my first dinner, I would put the dress on and surprise them.’
The surprise worked, and Sharman described continuing the tradition of dressing up for dinner with the cosmonauts as ‘a bit of fun’. The downside came later, on her return to Earth. ‘Sadly, that’s one of the images that is perpetuated over and over again. Is that because the world wants to see its women dressed up in pink frills?’
Sharman’s moment of invisibility arrived over two decades later, in 2015, when ESA’s first British astronaut, Tim Peake, was assigned his flight on-board the International Space Station. Suddenly, Sharman – who had flown the flag for Britain in 1991 – read a number of press reports incorrectly stating that Peake would be the first British astronaut. She blamed the media at first, assuming that journalists had not got their facts straight, and partly blamed herself for having taken a few years out of the public limelight.
Unfortunately, the mistake had originated from the UK Space Agency. ‘The UK Space Agency put out press releases when Tim Peake was newly flight assigned that he was going to be the first British astronaut,’ said Sharman. ‘I saw it. That was not just shocking to me, but just blatantly wrong. It was the UK Space Agency who actually tried to rewrite history, tried to write me out.’
The UK Space Agency made a hasty correction. ‘The next time I saw a press release it called Tim the ‘first official astronaut’. She found that wording equally problematic. ‘It was nothing to do with Tim. The UK Space Agency decided my mission wasn’t official.’ Sharman was rightly indignant. ‘Did I slip someone a fiver so I could do a quick hitchhike into space?’
The UK Space Agency was again mortified by its mistake. ‘I don’t think they were actually trying to demean me, or even my mission. They would have just rather my mission hadn’t happened,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit of an embarrassment. Not because of being a woman but because it wasn’t UK-funded, and they wanted the UK government-funded astronaut to be the first.’
It was a historical issue to some extent. The UK Space Agency didn’t exist when Sharman became the first British astronaut, in 1991. Between 1985 and 2010, the British National Space Centre (BNSC) coordinated all of Britain’s civil space activities. More specifically, BNSC didn’t ‘do’ human spaceflight – that was part of their policy – and so naturally it didn’t contribute any money towards the International Space Station either. It was only after the formation of the UK Space Agency in 2010 that this policy changed. These changes paved the way for Britain to have its first ESA astronaut.
Sharman didn’t think her gender affected that way of thinking, but conceded that it was responsible for the unintentional rewrite. ‘If it was a man, it wouldn’t have been allowed to happen.’
She also appreciated that when it came to a story the media liked to talk in superlatives. The ‘biggest’, the ‘best’, the ‘first’ captured headlines. This was something that Wally had mastered. She knew what journalists liked and, because of the numerous ‘firsts’ in her career, could provide any number of them. But, quite rightly, Sharman had objected to the demotion of her achievement.
‘Tim’s the first UK government-funded astronaut. He’s the first British ESA astronaut. We were always going to love what he’s doing, as he’s a great guy, but it was just so wrong to write me out of history. In Britain we are still not used to women doing things before men,’ she said. ‘We would like to think we are. Legislation says that women should be paid for doing the same job. Are we paid the same in practice everywhere? Of course not.’
Sharman conceded that things were getting better. ‘Many good organisations are trying to improve things. Many have equal rights and equal opportunities. We’ve come an awful long way,’ she said, ‘but still, when people hear that I’ve flown to space now, in 2016, people still ask me who was the first person. You were the first woman; who was the first person? It’s often assumed a man must have flown before me. Loads of people out there are getting a very false picture of women’s input, and we need to correct that.’
The upside of the controversy for Sharman was that she received a lot of public and private support sympathising with her about the media treatment, praising her dignity and admiring her achievement. It also reminded a new generation of people that Britain’s first astronaut was a woman. At the end of 2017, the British government announced that Sharman was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in the New Year’s honours list.
Tim Peake was also one of Sharman’s supporters and, before his launch, corrected any journalist publicly if they mistakenly called him the first British astronaut. When Peake flew into space in December 2015, he took with him Road to the Stars by Yuri Gagarin. The book belonged to Sharman. It was the perfect link between the first and second British astronauts in space. A few months after his launch, I was at a school in North London for Peake’s first live televised link-up from space. Students and members of the media were on hand to ask questions. One reporter referred to him as Britain’s first astronaut. Peake put the man righ
t.
Sharman’s experience with Leonov could be viewed as a joke gone wrong that was simply intended to uphold a tradition on-board the Russian space station, which had never before entertained women. But the Soviet space agency, to be fair, did not have a good track record when it came to women. Tereshkova, the first woman to have flown in space, in 1963, never flew again, and it took almost twenty years before another woman followed in her footsteps. Or should that be spacesuit.
Svetlana Savitskaya, the second Russian woman to fly into space, on 19 August 1982, was an aeronautical engineer and, like Wally, a pilot. Before the first American woman went into space ten months later, not one but two Russian women had got there first. If you were being cynical, the second extremely public pipping to the post was not a coincidence. The Soviet space agency knew that NASA finally had women astronauts and that Sally Ride and others were preparing for missions. After a nineteen-year gap of all male cosmonauts, they too had brought women back into the space programme. Surprise, surprise, then, that one of theirs, Savitskaya, flew before Ride, and also became the first woman to fly on a space station, the Salyut-7.
Two years later, Savitskaya became the first woman to fly a second space mission and, on 25 July 1984, was the first woman to do a spacewalk when she spent three-and-a-half hours performing a number of electrical welding experiments on the space station’s outer hull during her eight-day mission on board Salyut-7.
The New York Times’s correspondent in Moscow reported on 28 August for the following day’s edition that the Salyut-7 flight engineer, Valentin Lebedev, had welcomed Savitskaya on board with the words: ‘We’ve got an apron ready.’ Lebedev had then added: ‘It’s as if you’ve come home. Of course, we have a kitchen for you; that’ll be where you work.’
The journalist also reported that the government daily newspaper Izvestia had listed some unusual attributes in the astronaut’s biography. ‘There are few women like Svetlana,’ it said. ‘She is charming and soft, a hospitable hostess and likes to make patterns and sew her own clothes when she has time to spare.’
The similarities between the reports on Tereshkova, Savitskaya and the Mercury 13’s achievements were striking. Yet Wally’s experience in 2000, doing a week of cosmonaut training in Moscow, had felt much more modern and unisex. ‘They had one room, and the guys took off their clothes over here to get checked out and the girls were over here,’ she said, pointing to either side of an imaginary room. ‘There was no sex discrimination. Men were getting changed over there and I was getting changed over here. It was no big deal for me. As long as they gave me all the tests they needed.’
Wally was unconcerned, especially as the tests were nowhere near as numerous or difficult as those devised by Dr Lovelace. She got to do a parabolic weightlessness flight, after practising in a swimming pool beforehand, and also did centrifuge tests. ‘I excelled in these as being an acrobatic pilot I could pull 6Gs.’ By 2015, Russia appeared to be making progress on the sexism front, with an eight-day single-sex experiment to simulate a flight to the Moon and back. The mission, called Moon-2015, consisted of six women, all of whom were qualified in medicine, psychology or biophysics. The experiment consisted of living and performing scientific experiments in a spacecraft mock-up at Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems. It was the first study of its kind with women.
One of the science directors, Sergei Ponomarev, told the Guardian newspaper: ‘It will be interesting to see how well they get on with each other, and how well they are able to perform tasks. We believe women might not only be no worse than men at performing certain tasks in space, but actually better.’
Unfortunately, during a press conference before the study took place, the Institute’s director, Igor Ushakov, gave the women some advice: ‘I’d like to wish you a lack of conflicts, even though they say that in one kitchen, two housewives find it hard to live together.’
Reporters also asked the women how they would cope without make-up. Some things never changed. Anna Kussmaul, one of the participants, responded to a question about their hair with wonderful sarcasm. ‘I don’t know how we’ll survive without shampoo,’ she said, ‘because even in this situation, we really want to stay looking pretty’.
The four women who spent thirty days together in a laboratory a year later, as part of NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) IX programme simulating a mission to a near-Earth asteroid fared better. But the public undermining of women’s abilities persists to this day.
It must have been even worse for the Mercury 13. Pilot Jerrie Cobb, the first woman to pass the tests, gave several press interviews at the time of the hearings. One TV journalist asked her: ‘Why does a pretty girl like you want to become an astronaut?’
Did Wally ever feel bitter that the Mercury 13 women weren’t taken seriously?
‘Bitter? No. Not at all. I’m not that kind of a person. I’m not negative. I’m always positive. Why would I feel bitter? I’ve had nothing but great things happen.’
She was definitely positive. Glasses were always half full. Certain facts were rounded up, not down. Her response to the programme’s cancellation was to ‘throw it a fish’. She often used this expression. It was from the Taos Indians, she said, and meant ‘to not look back’.
Sat in the sunshine on a park bench, with the Eiffel Tower ahead, Wally recalled staying in a campsite four or five miles south of Paris fifty years ago, making friends, and going to museums and the Louvre. In a way, Wally’s travels to Europe and beyond during her mid-twenties had been a positive form of escape from America when all avenues to becoming an astronaut had been officially closed after the 1963 hearings.
Wally had bought a VW camper van in 1965 and arranged for it to be delivered in Brussels. ‘Mother sewed a thousand-dollar bill in my underwear,’ she said. ‘Father gave me cashier’s cheques.’
She arrived with her friend, Ann Cooper, armed with an outgoing nature and a Fodor’s travel book. ‘I’ll show you the map of my travels. I have three different ones: Europe, Middle East and Africa. Where I stopped every night I put the date. It’s a great conversation piece. I have all my passports,’ she said excitedly, ‘and when they ran out they would just attach another page and it would get stamped. I have great passports. They’ll have to go to a museum one day.’
Wally wrote to her parents regularly as she travelled from country to country, fifty-nine in total she said, for over two years between 1965 and 1967. During this time, she was either alone, with her friend, or with a small poodle called Toot. Some of the people she stayed with were artists with connections to the artistic community in Taos, New Mexico. Others were associated with the military. She stayed at the homes of her parents’ contacts, at campsites, or slept in the van on the road. Despite the thousand-dollar bill safety net and cashier cheques, she was on a budget. If the showers were too expensive at campsites on the coast, Wally said she would ‘go into the ocean to get a bath’. It was a liberating experience. ‘My parents didn’t give it a thought. Here I am, twenty-something years old, and I’m overseas by myself. It was great. I could do anything.’
The Taos News, her parents’ local newspaper in New Mexico, printed a piece on her travels on 15 December 1966. Headed ‘Mary Wallace Funk Sends Letter as Christmas Greetings to Taos’, it referred to a letter Wally had posted from Cape Town, South Africa.
While in Morocco she visited bazaars in Marrakesh, and spent three months on the coast in Agadir. She saw Roman ruins in Italy, travelled through Angola, and rode an ostrich in South Africa. She was staying for a few months in Cape Town, as she had a job teaching flying.
The camper van was sold when she couldn’t get it out of Kenya, and another one acquired. Wally collected a new and now iconic Volkswagen Mini Mansion II camper van at the factory in Hanover, Germany. ‘Then I toured some more, took it on a ship and sailed to New York.’
Again, the Taos News published her plans, this time on 12 October 1967, from a letter written on-board the Kovacic, a Yugoslavian frei
ghter in Genoa, Italy, waiting to return home. By then Wally, Cooper and Toot had driven up through the east coast of Africa through Europe, and were threatened with jail at the Tanzanian border. While in Uganda, they ‘did have an unfortunate situation in Kampala of having our front and side windows smashed completely out while we were in the camper. Fortunately we could get away, as our lives were in danger.’
Since Wally had always said there had never been any trouble on her travels, this came as a surprise later when I read it. But it was clear that it had been what most people would consider the trip of a lifetime. ‘Two-and-a-half years of travel have slipped by too fast, but I feel we have collected a wealth of knowledge and gone through all types of experiences,’ Wally wrote. ‘I feel the best gain from your dollar is to travel and see the struggle of the world, and also to witness the well-meant but often misplaced American aid.’
She finished her travelogue with a patriotic flourish. ‘The American who never ventures abroad fails to experience the gratification of being an American. In all of our travels, the grandest sight to behold is the glory of the flying American flag!’
As she reminisced about her travels from half a century ago, Wally’s attention was constantly distracted upwards to the sky and any air traffic. There were planes too on the back of her shirt and the belt she wore, which was tipped with leather but primarily made of canvas. Multi-coloured aircraft circled her waist. This was her obsession. Her life. She pointed out the contrails of different aircraft. ‘Military traffic leaves more contrails than airlines. It’s the different way the air goes over the wings, the heat and the cooling process which mixes with the atmosphere, and that’s what leaves the white line. That must have been a heavy jet.’ I wasn’t sure of the science but, not in the mood for a dispute after such a good morning, I took her word for it.