The first British person in space
bbc.com
bbc.com
OK, to be fair, the US simply didn't have any crewed space launches between 1975 and 1981, that probably goes a long way to explaining this disparity. But still, once they started taking foreign citizens with them, I would have thought that Britain would be among the first on that list. Between 1984 and 1985 there were a Canadian, a Saudi, someone from the Netherlands and a Mexican, and then there was a long pause until 1992, presumably because of the Challenger disaster.
And you present a false choice. No matter what it does, the NHS can only ever have a relatively minor impact on the health of UK citizens. In terms of lifespan — and more importantly healthspan — it's less significant than lifestyle factors: exercise, diet, substance abuse, sleep hygiene, violence, toxin exposure, etc.
For comparison, the US government spends something like $5,500 per year per person on health care, and doesn't come even remotely close to covering the entire population with that spending.
However the notion that we have a binary choice between American style healthcare where you pay through the nose and the NHS where you wait for years is a false one. It would be better to study continental Europe and Japan maybe.
I just tried to Google it and their AI responded with "The NHS and social care account for roughly half (49%) of all day-to-day public service spending controlled by the Westminster government.", linking me to a report from the The King's Fund [1].
But on reading that report, it seems to say only that 49.5% is the cost of staffing the NHS from its own budget, which it states as £205 billion in 2024/25 - that's more like 20% of the year's public spending [2]. Which seems more in line with what I had assumed.
[1] https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-c...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-sta... (Diagram in section 2.2) [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42572110
Day-to-day is the routine, required cost of running the state, without long term infrastructure spending.
Has a new memo gone out? Have we moved on from AI to ultracapitalism as the c-suite talking point?
Without the loss of Challenger, a Briton would have flown in space on the shuttle in the 1980s. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon_(satellite)>
that's generally how alliances work, out of necessity...
https://parks.canada.ca/culture/designation/evenement-event/...
"Woman from Mars goes to space!"
EDIT: looks like this is one of the most well-known headlines that was never actually used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Foot#%22Foot_Heads_Arm...
It is sold out...
Our media is full of arts students and engineers are the people who come to fix your boiler. When technology is talked about, its only really impressive if it comes from somewhere else and sits in their hand.
I'm from one of the other (forgotten) colonies so my perspective is partially from the inside and partially outside. and I think people in the UK care so much about preserving the abundant (and often rather ugly) past that they don't leave any room for the future. Satellites and spaceships and science and technology are horrible things that intrude and change life and change has often not been pleasant.
Conversely those that do want change have sometimes taken such a high and mighty approach that the things they did were entirely for themselves and proving some point rather than about creating a place that is wonderful to live in - hence the worship of the past.
Anyhow I do know about Helen Sharman and so do all the space enthusiasts generally but people here don't even know we have a satellite manufacturing industry that's quite successful and very sophisticated.
I think the problem with things like satellites and technology in general is more to do with the ruling class being declinist, unambitious, and plain incompetent. We will be spending more on HS2 than NASA spent on Artemis, and HS2 is not even achieving anything close to its original aims. That is just one example.
> people here don't even know we have a satellite manufacturing industry that's quite successful and very sophisticated.
That is true. Again there is a reluctance of celebrate successes.
I am also also from a former colony BTW.
I know we don’t fawn over astronauts here, but I’m not sure what additional “respect” or “adulation” you’d expect? She may not be a household name now, but she certainly was at the time.
That said, she had an OBE, so has been recognised.
She has had book tours, and has appeared on Brian Cox vehicles and the Sky at Night on numerous occasions.
Why isn't she well commemorated then?
* Personality? It obviously took personal toughness and resolve to get where she did. So that's moot. But she's never gone down the Chris Hadfield and Buzz Aldrin routes.
* Declining relations with Russia. Deffo a possibility. That and the fact that the UK media is very US-centric.
* The shine had gone off human space travel by the early nineties. Probes like Voyager etc were delivering the more exciting news. Her mission was fairly routine from what I remember.
There have been very few space travellers from the UK since. No Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish at all. It's worth pointing out that both Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin had big parades and tours in Scotland back in the day. Armstrong went to his ancestral Langholm and got the freedom of the town. Gagarin toured mining communities to great excitement. There is even a Gagarin Way in a town in Fife long after the mines have gone.
If we're talking about commemoration, then maybe she could have had a role in the London Olympics or various Commonwealth Games. Seems odd.
Back in the seventies and eighties, there was definitely a pro-Soviet element in play as well as a pro-American one. It was often low key, but you could see it in the BBC sometimes, and definitely in the Labour Party. Yuri Gagarin did a successful tour of the UK which has been largely forgotten about, including visiting mining towns etc. Even someone as right wing as Patrick Moore was friendly with people from both the eastern and western space programmes, and helped the USSR with lunar mapping
"I want to be a space astronaut, go to outer space and discover things that have never been discovered!"
"Look, you're British, so scale it down a bit, all right?"
But NASA does that all the time. They recently claimed to perform the first flight and sound transmissions from another planet. The Soviet Venera missions had already done this during the 1980s from Venus. NASA performed the first powered flight on Mars.
The distinction is Cold War propaganda that has never made any sense to me. We have two English words to describe the same thing, but one is only used if the act was done or facilitated by Russia?
I've yet to see a discussion that doesn't have a major subthread on an apparently unrelated subject. This is the Internet's vacation spot for "Well, ackshually" interjections.
Per the unwritten guidelines, each thread must also contain at least one reference to Musk, AI, or Tim Cook.