Rocket man

Kevin Fong has wanted to be an astronaut since he saw a US-Soviet mission on TV in 1975. Now, he tells Alok Jha, there are signs his campaign to put Brits in space could take off
Dr Kevin Fong

Kevin Fong's earliest memory is of waking up in the middle of the night and sitting in front of a flickering television screen. The pictures he saw were coming live from hundreds of miles above the Earth - an American Apollo module had docked with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft - and, through the grainy black and white images, he could just make out flags floating between the two spacecraft.

It was 1975 and, in a slight thaw in the cold war, the superpowers had collaborated in space for the first time. He might not have understood the significance of the pictures he saw, but the spacemen made a strong impression on the five-year-old. "Hand on heart, that is what drove the entirety of my interest in science, all the way up to doing astrophysics at university," Fong says.

More than 20 years after seeing those floating flags he was floating too, inside a plane used by Nasa to give astronauts a taste of zero gravity. The vomit comet, as the Boeing 707 is affectionately known, flies as if it is a 10,000ft-high rollercoaster ride. After reaching a height of 25,000ft, the pilot throttles to full power for a 20-second, 45-degree climb up to 35,000ft, after which the engines are abruptly switched off and the plane begins to free-fall back to Earth. For the next 20 seconds, gravity inside the cabin seems to disappear.

He has told that story countless times, but even a decade later and sitting on terra firma in a cold office in University College Hospital in London, where he works as an anaesthetist, Fong finds it difficult to come up with the words to describe the sensation the time he felt gravity disappear. "All those dreams you have of flying, and you wake up disappointed that it's not true, suddenly they're real."

Those flights helped convince him he had found his calling. He was determined do the training for real and become an astronaut. There was only one problem: he was British.

The British government doesn't do astronauts - a position crafted in the 1960s with the cancellation of rocket programmes such as Blue Streak and honed by successive governments claiming sending people into space is too expensive. Helen Sharman, technically the only Briton who has been in space, flew as part of the privately funded Juno mission. The remaining three British-born astronauts - Michael Foale, Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick - all became American citizens before joining Nasa's astronaut corps and flying in the space shuttle.

But the British resolve could be weakening. Next week, the British National Space Centre, the closest thing the UK has to a space agency, will detail plans for a review of space policy. And only two months into his new job as science minister, Malcolm Wicks hinted this week at a possible reversal in the policy not to fund an astronaut programme.

The steps might not sound like much but, for a community of scientists that has seen little movement in more than 50 years, the events of the last few weeks have had the effect of an earthquake. "This is our best and only chance - if we kill it here, we'll never do it," says Fong.

There are other stars in alignment. The Commons science and technology committee plans a policy review and early indications are that human spaceflight will play a big part in discussions. And last year, a report by independent scientists commissioned by the Royal Astronomical Society concluded there was a good case for sending people into space.

Fong was in his final year at medical school (he already had a degree in astrophysics) when he landed a month placement at Nasa's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He was awestruck. "You walk through the gates there and it's like Disney World for adults. We used to sit around in the evenings around pizza boxes saying, what a tragedy it would be if we walked out of here in a month's time and never came back."

His brief trip to Nasa got him so fired up that, when it was finishing, he called the BNSC to find out what Britain had to offer budding astronauts. "At the time there was nothing in this country," he remembers. "To realise that you genuinely can't do these things even if you're as good as you can be at your field is a bit upsetting. The temptation to shift country is massive." He faced a tough choice: admit defeat or give up his British passport and emigrate to the US.

Never one prone to settle for the most sensible option, Fong decided on a different strategy - to stay at home and think how to get Britain into space. Canvassing scientists, he began the task of building up a case for a new British space programme.

Thus began a one-man mission for the creation of a human spaceflight programme. He ran and advised numerous scientific committees and wrote papers and articles pushing the case for space. He even set up a space medicine course, the first of its kind in the UK, for undergraduate medics at University College London. And most of it happened during snatched moments between gruelling shifts as a trainee hospital doctor.

He found a like mind in Ian Crawford, director of the UCL-Birkbeck Centre for Planetary Science and Astrobiology. Together, they began fleshing out what a UK programme might look like.

Cost had always been cited as a big stumbling block. Launch costs shoot up when people are involved - Nasa's human spaceflight missions suck $6bn every year from the federal budget. Joining the European Space Agency's (Esa) proposed Aurora programme, which includes plans to send people to the moon and Mars, would come with an annual price tag of £150m for Britain.

Fong has an alternative. "The big thing that I've pushed over the years is to get away from the idea that, to get a British space programme with British astronauts, you need to rock up to one agency or another with a couple of briefcases with hundreds of millions of pounds. We need to do something strategic and at lower cost to evaluate the relative costs and benefits."

He says bilateral agreement with a foreign space agency to train and fly two British astronauts over the next 10 years is a better idea. At an estimated cost of £100m, it would cost a fraction of a full Nasa or Esa subscription.

Many of the UK's space scientists already benefit from agreements to share the results from Nasa exploration satellites, for instance, in return for instruments or technical help. Nasa's administrator, Mike Griffin, visited the UK last year and, in meetings with government officials, all but extended an invitation for Britain to join plans to explore the moon and Mars. It was a remarkable gesture, given Nasa rarely asks for help from other countries.

Fong's ideas go beyond basic science. A UK astronaut could become an important role model for children, he argues, helping to reverse the terminal decline in science at schools and universities.

After Yang Lee Wei became China's first astronaut in 2004, Fong was invited to give a lecture on why countries should send people into space at the Beijing School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The audience sat rapt, despite waiting for a line-by-line translation. "You got a sense that there was a feverish desire to embrace science and engineering by these kids because they wanted to be the next Yang Lee Wei. Russia have had that with Yuri Gagarin, America had that in the Apollo era. The UK has never used that chip."

In an ironic twist to Fong's decade-long campaign, he is due to leave the country just as his cause finally gains momentum in Britain. He will spend the next six months in Houston, working out with Nasa scientists the effects on humans of long-term space exploration, part of a research programme looking at ways of creating artificial gravity on long trips to Mars.

He has an ulterior motive - to sound out Nasa on how Britain could best plug into their astronaut programme. His goal is to deliver a detailed blueprint for a practical British space programme by the end of the year. "If someone gave you £100m tomorrow, how would you interface two British astronauts with the programmes that exist? What science would they do? How would they be trained? I would like to deliver a blueprint for how we could do it."

That blueprint will be Fong's testament to a desire ignited when he first saw those floating flags more than 30 years ago, a desire that still burns brightly today. "If we had an astronaut programme in this country, I would be the first to put my hand up for it. I've spent my entire career pushing this - it's something I would love to see and, if it was me, I would have to pinch myself every day. How many people can say, when I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut and then actually be an astronaut?"


The government cut off any chance of sending Britons into space in the decade Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong escaped the Earth's atmosphere. Blue Streak, a rocket programme that would have been a precursor to giving Britain its own launch capability, was cancelled in the 1960s. UK scientists did get involved indirectly in the US Apollo missions but there was no chance a Briton would fly to the moon.

Since the 1960s, British space scientists have worked with Nasa and with the European Space Agency on robotic exploration missions. Britain now has a healthy satellite-building industry.

In 1991, Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space through the Juno programme, funded by the Russian space agency and a consortium of British companies.

In 2002, the government set up the microgravity review panel to consider starting research in space but made no mention of an astronaut programme. Two years later, a Royal Astronomical Society report put the scientific case for funding British astronauts.

UK-born Michael Foale first flew on the space shuttle in 1993. To fly with Nasa, he had to obtain US citizenship, as did Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick, for flights this year.

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