THAT’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
talent (coupled with the brain of a particle physicist) make someone a potential astronaut?
‘The teamwork element is important,’ she says. ‘You can have the most brilliant brain but being an astronaut is about working in a team. Trust is a big issue.’
The oldest candidate in the programme is Hannah Shields, a 52-year-old dentist who has somehow managed to combine her medical career with a second ‘job’ of being an explorer.
In 2007, Hannah became the first woman from Northern Ireland to climb Everest. She also represents Ireland in the triathlon, the duathlon and in ultra-distance running, which is any race longer than a 26-mile marathon.
She is also the only dentist to have polar bears on her CV, being a world authority on surviving polar bear attacks. She has even taught survival skills to Bear Grylls.
‘It’s mad, isn’t it?’ she concedes. ‘But I’ve always loved to get out there and do stuff — run, climb mountains, explore.’
While some of the other candidates had always harboured ambitions to be astronauts, it’s not something that Hannah had previously considered.
‘But when I saw the advert I thought, “Why not?”.’
SHE puts her own thirst for achievement and adventure down to a time in her late 20s when she was in hospital in a critical condition, struck down by an illness that was never identified.
‘My organs just started to shut down, one by one,’ she recalls. ‘I still don’t know why. I was in hospital for six months and it took a few years to fully recover. At the time it was terrifying, but when I was able to walk again, nothing was going to hold me back. Nothing.’
Historically, astronauts have tended to come from a military background. The first high-profile astronauts were test pilots, used to dangerous missions and possessing the ability to make life or death decisions in a split second.
Times have changed, though. When they do recruit (which is rare — the European Space Agency hasn’t advertised for recruits since 2009), the space agencies openly ask for more varied backgrounds. Applications from women are not only welcomed but sought out.
Obviously, there are certain nonnegotiables when it comes to getting on an astronaut training programme. Candidates must not have vertigo, faint at the sight of blood (they have to take their own, which rules out anyone with an aversion to needles), and they need to demonstrate that they have a brilliant brain (a PhD in science or maths is a huge help).
Flight training is still a bonus. Fighter pilots will be more warmly embraced than those who got a series of flying lessons for their 18th birthday. Oddly enough, the one prerequisite people think you must have — 20/20 vision — is no longer essential. Vision corrected by surgery is now acceptable.
The dozen candidates on the BBC show have to undergo 60 challenges, and the process weeds out the weaker links as it goes along. Tests include everything from flying a helicopter to being
submerged underwater, to learning Russian. Physical strength is tested, as is psychological aptitude.
Over six weeks, the candidates have remarkable access to astronaut training facilities around the world, including the state-of-theart German Space Centre, a secret facility in Sweden and the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
By the latter stages, the candidates are able to take part in floatation exercises, re-creating space conditions on Earth.
But first they have to get to that stage — and there are some surprising evictions from the process. Several candidates score terribly at a seemingly easy task that involves repeating back a series of numbers — but backwards, and while stepping up and down on a bench — testing their mental capacity while deprived of oxygen.
Hannah says that the task she found most difficult was having to squeeze herself into a small pod (this task is designed to weed out contestants who have problems with small places or feelings of claustrophobia, a no-no for budding astronauts).
‘I found that one really difficult. I was once caught in an avalanche, and since then have had issues with feeling that I can’t escape from somewhere,’ she says. ‘It was all so intense. We were rigged up to monitors: my heart rate must have been off the scale.’
Kerry says the helicopter task — which should have been a doddle for her, as a pilot — was surprisingly stressful. ‘They are very different disciplines, but there was this expectation that I would be good at it because of my job. I very much felt that.’
THEn there was the task that involved driving the ‘Mars Rover’ — a space car which goes so slowly that a real fear is the battery running out before you complete a task. Merritt admits to struggling with this one. ‘You are talking to someone who failed her driving test three times,’ she admits.
It’s not just physical tests they are subjected to either. Psychologist Dr Iya Whitely interviews the candidates to look for facial microexpressions that could reveal who would be best-suited to long-term missions in space.
‘What was quite unsettling was that none of us had any idea what they were looking for,’ says Merritt. ‘There was no way to prepare for any of this; and even while you were being tested, you didn’t necessarily know if you were doing well or not.’
We won’t spoil the surprise and reveal how far any of these candidates get in the process, but could any of them become astronauts for real?
The TV process provides no quick entry, but some say that those already-bursting CVs will be further enhanced by even taking part in the programme. Since filming stopped, Merritt — who now plans to apply to nASA — says she has signed up for flying lessons, with a view to getting her pilot’s licence.
She has also started to learn Russian, and has signed up as a volunteer fire-fighter.
One thing is for sure — her CV is certainly heading into orbit. Whether she follows suit, pirouetting as she goes, is anyone’s guess.