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Press cutting: Rocket man

6 January 2007

Kevin Fong [UCL Centre for Aviation, Space & Extreme Environment Medicine] has wanted to be an astronaut since he saw a US-Soviet mission on TV in 1975.

Now… there are signs his campaign to put Brits in space could take off. …

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. …

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. …

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. …

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. …

Fong was in his final year at UCL Medical School (he already had a degree in astrophysics) when he landed a month placement at Nasa's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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. …

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. …

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 UCL. …

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." …

"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?" …

Alok Jha, 'The Guardian'