HAT’S WHAT YOU CALL A ... HIGH FLIER!
Meet Britain’s most accomplished (and terrifying) women — all battling each other for the chance to be an astronaut
YOU know that feeling when you’re in a room of high-achievers and you become painfully aware that your 100-metre swimming certificate won’t do much to impress? Kerry Bennett says she does. The 33-year-old admits to having felt a little faint when she met some of the other candidates who’d volunteered to take part in a new BBC television show and realised, to her horror, that she was marooned in a room of the highest achieving people on the planet.
‘Well, there was the academic stuff to begin with,’ she says. ‘Most of them had PhDs.
‘Then the other bits and pieces started to come out. The quantum physicist also turned out to be a professional ballet dancer. Another had climbed every mountain over a certain height in South America. One person was a member of the British bobsleigh team.
‘They were all quite brilliant, and no one was good at just one thing but an amazing range of things. I did feel pretty inadequate.’ As you would. Let’s put it in context, though. Kerry is no slouch in the achievement stakes herself, with a Masters in Geophysics — which means she’s an expert in earthquakes and volcanoes. She’s also a pilot in the RAF — one of only three women in a squadron of 60.
In a few weeks’ time she will fly 300 troops to the Falklands, refuelling mid-air en route. There’s an unexpected hint of glamour in the job, too. She once flew Daniel Craig — Mr James Bond himself — into Camp Bastion, Afghanistan.
Then there are the things that Kerry, who lives in Andover, does for ‘fun’. These actually need to be teased out of her.
At first she admits she can ‘ski a bit’, but on interrogation reveals that she’s actually a skier who can race down the slopes at 80mph without breaking sweat. She can sail a little, too. Translation? She once took part in a 5,000-mile race from Uruguay to Antigua.
Oh, she also ‘ does a bit of running’. This means that she once ran the London Marathon, achieving her best ever marathon time when her daughter was just nine months old. To any woman who has ever had a baby, this alone makes Kerry something of a Superwoman.
How does she do it? She blames her parents. ‘My Dad used to send me a birthday card every year saying things like “Take risks”. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly high achiever, though. There is always someone who has done more.’
Kerry and her fellow superwomen are the female candidates on a rather jaw- dropping new BBC2 show which aims to recruit ‘ordinary’ souls and put them through the selection process for astronaut training, subjecting them to the sort of scrutiny NASA or the European Space Agency subject their wannabe spacemen and women to.
The producers have gone looking for the highest achievers they can find for this TV first. And their search was by no means in vain.
By the end of episode one, which goes out on Sunday and is fronted by astronaut Chris Hadfield, it becomes clear why most of us scrubbed the childish dream of becoming an astronaut off our ambitions list by the time we reached nine or ten.
It’s simply too difficult. If anything, this series reinforces the idea that it might be easier to become a superhero.
WE WATCH as they are sent spinning to G- force levels, locked in a tiny plastic pod for hours on end, and submerged in water, in full kit, to push them to every conceivable physical and psychological level.
So who are the ‘ordinary’ people the BBC has recruited? It quickly becomes clear that they are anything but ordinary.
The six Alpha males in the series include a nuclear engineer, a specialist in meteorites, a mountaineer and one of Britain’s top cancer surgeons.
And frankly, on paper, the women sound less like real people and more like fantastical creatures out of a Jeffrey Archer novel.
Take Merritt Moore, 29, who is currently at Oxford putting the finishing touches to her PhD in quantum physics.
She has spent the past decade scaling the ladder to academic greatness (she also completed a stint at Harvard), but her academic career has gone hand-in-hand with one in dance. A professional ballet dancer, Merritt has worked with English National Ballet, Boston Ballet and Ballet Zurich.
So how does she align her two, seemingly incompatible, worlds?
‘With difficulty,’ she says. ‘I grew up with everyone telling me that I would have to choose between them. But I said “Why?” I always wanted to do both.
‘If anything, I need both. If I haven’t danced for a while, my physics work suffers.’
Oddly, her diverse talents make her a dream candidate for the BBC show — and, perhaps, for one day becoming an astronaut for real. ‘The ballet definitely helped with all the physical stuff,’ she says. ‘Wrapping myself into a ball and getting into an enclosed container was no problem to me.
‘And while the disciplines might seem very different, astronauts, like dancers, have to be strong, be aware of how their body works and moves, and be flexible, too.’
Are the psychological skills transferable? She believes they are. ‘Dance is about tenacity, about dedication, about not giving up. Live performance is unpredictable. You’re constantly having to find solutions when things go wrong.’
And does she think of herself as a superhuman high-achiever?
‘Absolutely not. I’ve had to work very hard for everything. What I have is grit.’
Jackie Bell, 28, from Liverpool, also has a CV that at first glance seems utterly bizarre. Jackie was the first member of her family to go to university. Once she had gained her BA in Mathematics (first class, of course), she went on to do a Masters in Mathematic Sciences, and now has a PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics.
She is also — brace yourselves — a champion cheerleader. How?
‘The cheerleading was deliberate,’ she laughs. ‘I was looking for a club to get involved with at university and I was very aware that I was in a male dominated industry, so I wanted to do something that was a bit more girly.
‘I saw an ad for the cheerleading team and thought, “Bingo!”.’
She has since travelled all over Europe competing, and has stern words for anyone who thinks cheerleading is no more than prancing around with pom-poms.
‘At the level we do it, it is a sport,’ she says. ‘It’s incredibly physical and you have to be really strong and fit to lift the other girls up and hold them.’
But how does a cheerleading
RAF pilot who’s also a ski whizz