‘Space is hard, it’s not for the faint of heart’

Nasa’s British head of science talks to Peter Stanford about life on Mars, this week’s failed mission to the Moon and bringing up two children after the death of her husband

‘I liken it to a FedEx delivery. We pay for the ride on the spacecraft and the lander’

‘He told me daddy was still asleep, that he couldn’t wake him, and that he was hungry’

Nasa’s head of science, the first Briton to hold this senior post since the US government’s space agency was founded 65 years ago, has just heard that the Peregrine lunar lander, launched on Monday with great fanfare as the first stage of a new push to return humans to the moon after half a century, has developed an “anomaly” which has caused it to lose power. As a space veteran, Fox, 55, knows enough to conclude that the mission, which is partly backed by Nasa, is doomed to failure long before official confirmation comes days later, blaming a fuel leak that drained the spacecraft of power.

Head of science is one of the top jobs at Nasa and comes with responsibility for a £5.5billion budget and oversight of more than 100 missions and research programmes. They range from robotic hunts for past life on Mars, to a study group with the US military on UFOs, and the exploration of distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope.

“Today is a very sad day,” she reflects. Fox has had no sleep, after being up all night watching the launch. She is still sporting her official Nasa jacket with its logo, but for once she wasn’t in her usual position with her team at the Nasa Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida as Peregrine headed off into space.

She had a hip replacement just before Christmas and is recuperating at home in Washington DC. She followed the event from her bed on two phones, propped up with a bank of pillows. “Don’t be surprised if I stand up and start to walk around,” she warns me. “I am not supposed to sit for very long.”

Despite her fatigue, the indefatigable Fox still manages to find something to celebrate in what has clearly been a bad night for space exploration.

(Nasa later announced that its first Artemis mission to send humans to the moon has been put back a year to 2026 as a result of the Peregrine failure.)

“Everything with the Vulcan [launch] rocket behaved beautifully. First attempt. No delay.” And the separation of the rocket and Peregrine spacecraft once outside the Earth’s orbit also went smoothly, she adds.

“But unfortunately after an hour there was an anomaly. We will figure out the root cause and help the next one not to have that anomaly again.”

From her viewpoint, the failure of one mission turns thoughts to how to make the next attempt a success, with a logic that Star Trek’s Mr Spock would admire. “We are looking,” she assures me, “at a sustained lunar presence.”

For Fox, while logic is at the heart of every launch, such events are also full of heightened emotions.

Her very first happened when she was just eight months old. It was 1969 and her father, Eric, by day an engineer at Vauxhall but a huge space enthusiast, held his infant daughter in his arms in front of the television at the family home in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, to see Neil Armstrong take “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the Moon.

Does the thrill of it ever wane?

“If you are there and watching it in person with everyone around you as I usually am, it is emotional every single time. Even watching it from my bed, I was immensely proud to be associated with it.”

Every step towards re-establishing a human presence on the Moon, she believes, is one step closer to even bigger goals. “There is no better place than the Moon to go to understand the solar system, but my favourite [thing about it] is that it is a stepping stone to Mars.”

And the emotion she experiences is the same “whether it’s your [Nasa] mission, or someone else’s mission carrying your payload, or even a foreign partner’s mission, Nasa is associated with. It is awe-inspiring. There is always that sense of community in the space business. Because it is hard, we celebrate one another’s successes and we lament one another’s challenges.”

The Peregrine mission was not Nasa’s own. The Vulcan rocket was made by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed and Boeing, and the Peregrine spacecraft by another aerospace company, Astrobotic, the first of three US companies scheduled to send a lander to the Moon this year under a new private-public partnership with Nasa. Under this arrangement the US space agency bought, for £5million, capacity on the lander for five of its instruments designed to study the lunar surface and environment in preparation for sending its own astronauts up there as part of the Artemis project.

Such involvement with the private sector makes what is being hailed as a “new golden age of space exploration” – of which the Peregrine spacecraft was a symbol – radically different from the first golden age of the taxpayer-funded Nasa Apollo programmes in the 1960s and 1970s.

“We were riding along,” explains Fox. “I liken it to a FedEx delivery. We pay for the ride on the spacecraft and the lander.” It is a vivid image. She has a way with words and a winning laugh that has made her a sought-after figure in the media, including as a guest editor for Radio 4’s Today programme last month as part of its Christmas line-up.

Other voices, though, have raised concern about corporate involvement. The International Astronomical Union will be meeting with UN officials this month to air its worries about a potential clash between scientific and business values that could lead to the Moon’s resources being depleted and damaged.

The involvement of maverick figures in the race to the final frontier – such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (whose Blue Origin is building a moon lander for Nasa) and the unpredictable

Elon Musk and his SpaceX operation – suggests to some that the egos of billionaires are being put before the best interests of humanity.

Fox doesn’t flinch. “We are very excited by it,” she says of Nasa’s involvement with corporate providers. There is, she insists, a compelling logic behind this shift. This launch was part of our Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme (CLPS) which is allowing new space companies to come into the space business. It is diversifying and adding new players.”

The idea is to use commercial know-how “to deliver more science and more technology payloads to the moon surface or interlunar orbit”. More, in the sense of more than

Nasa can pay for on its own.

Since its heyday in the mid-1960s when Nasa accounted for 4 per cent of all US federal funding, the organisation’s budget has steadily dropped and has been just 0.5 per cent of federal funding for the past decade or so, amid growing public questioning about spending priorities in an age of austerity.

Is it anticipated that public funding of Nasa will fall further as private providers sign up? “The [federal]

Nasa funding is staying,” Fox replies firmly, “but we are able to do a lot more with it by enthusing and using these partnerships with the commercial sector. We want to get technology demonstrated ahead of sending up astronauts.”

Both Bezos and Musk have talked openly about their ambitions to colonise the Moon and other planets as an alternative to an Earth suffering the impact of climate change, and to do it before the Chinese, but Fox sounds a note of caution. “Colonise is too strong a word. We are looking at a research base from where we can do a lot of really great science.”

So what excites her about reaching further into space? “We have a mission we are working on implementing that will use the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope to look not just at a rocky planet that happens to be orbiting a star [as Earth orbits the sun] but looking to see if it has an atmosphere that has the ability to sustain some form of life.”

With hindsight, after that very early introduction to space exploration as a babe-in-arms, it feels almost fated that Fox would end up working at Nasa, but the reality, she recalls, was very different. As a small child, her dad did read her space stories at bedtime and did say, “imagine working at Nasa”.

But she adds: “What he never said was, ‘it must be wonderful to work for Nasa, you should go and do that’. It was just this sense of wonder because I never thought Nasa was an option for someone like me.”

It was more like a father-daughter shared hobby. “When I was 15, my dad went on a business trip to America and went to Kennedy Space Center to get me a Nasa hat.”

She still has it. “It was my most prized possession for a long time.”

They would also watch the original

Star Trek episodes together. “I am definitely Team Star Trek, not Team Star Wars like my [16-year-old] son. I always loved Lieutenant Uhura [played by Nichelle Nichols]. She always had the answer.” (Some of Nichols’ ashes were on the Peregrine spacecraft, bound for a final resting place on the Moon but now will float around in space forever.)

The family were not well-off. Fox was an only child and her mother, Doreen, worked in a bank. Her parents found the money to send her to an independent secondary school in Letchworth, where she excelled at all sciences, but physics in particular. “Because it was all-girls, I didn’t experience the idea that girls did one thing and boys did another.”

There were, though, some comments she remembers from that time. “Several of my parents’ friends did think me going to read physics at university was strange. They would say things like, ‘really?’ or ‘isn’t that unusual?’”

Undeterred, in 1986 she went to Imperial College, London. “I knew early on that I wanted to do a PhD. I wanted to research something that was mine. I wanted to find out things and be the one who discovered things.”

It is becoming clear that if Fox wants something, she always gives it her best shot. After doing a master’s at the University of Surrey, where she was one of only four women on a 200-strong programme, she did indeed return to Imperial to do her

PhD – on solar substorms, which are brief disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field that cause energy to be injected into the upper atmosphere.

Soon after that was completed in 1995, a 27-year-old Fox was giving an academic lecture in Alaska when she was approached by a senior scientist from Nasa who asked if she would consider applying to do post-doctoral work there. “I was literally, ‘can I do that? I can do that!’ It had never occurred to me until that moment that it was a thing I could do.”

It was, she says, “a ground-changing moment”. And the girl from Hitchin got the job. “My dad was very, very happy.”

Initially she was based at the Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington DC. “At the beginning, I had imposter syndrome. I’d think: ‘someone is going to realise I shouldn’t be here’.” She remembers driving in through the gate every day and seeing the Nasa logo and telling herself, I work at Nasa. “That still happens every morning when I walk through the turnstiles at Nasa HQ.”

In the workplace, she is in a minority twice over: firstly as one of “a few” British scientists working there; and, secondly and initially at least, as a woman. Yet she rejects talk of her breaking the glass ceiling. “I was always just being me. I loved science. I really loved physics.”

She must have faced discrimination? “There were definitely times. Someone would say, ‘can one of you clever lads tell me the answer?’ and I would think, ‘that’s not me then’.”

Overall, though, she says it hasn’t been a big issue. “I know I keep saying space is hard, but it is, and that means there is not a lot of time for messing around. Our approach is, this is the problem, let’s all focus on the solution.”

In the mid-2000s, Fox was in Sweden with a group of other scientists studying the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, when she met her husband, John Sigwarth, a fellow scientist, also working at Nasa. They fell in love. “We were,” she recalls, “unashamedly a pair of nerds.”

But tragedy struck on December 13 2010. She was away in San Francisco for work, leaving John at home to look after their two small children, James, then three, and Darcy, 13 months. An instinct that she couldn’t explain told her to ring home. There was no reply.

She waited anxiously until the next morning to try again, but no matter how many times she called, it rang out. Eventually, her son picked up.

“We had taught him well not to answer the phone. He told me daddy was still asleep, that he couldn’t wake him, and that he was hungry for breakfast.”

Staying on the line with James to reassure him, she also used a separate phone to call the emergency services, and then persuaded her son to open the front door to a stranger. “I told him the policeman would get the breakfast cereal down for him from the shelf.”

John’s dead body was in the bedroom. He had suffered an aortic aneurysm.

“You can often think bad stuff happens to other people, and then it happens to you. I had every emotion known to man at that time – hurt, anger, I was angry at the world. You either give up or you keep walking and I kept walking. I couldn’t fall apart because I had two little kids who needed me.”

In the years since, Fox has risen through the ranks at Nasa while bringing up two small, traumatised children alone, always worrying that she wasn’t doing either role as well as she might. “I feel I do 80 per cent in each area, but recently I have come to see that that means I am operating at 160 per cent. So I am not failing everywhere. I am killing it. You have to have that attitude.”

Fox’s children, James and Darcy, now 16 and 13, have grown up in a world where space exploration is the norm, she says. As a single parent, she would take them with her to work events. She credits those friends and colleagues who surrounded her with love and practical care for enabling her and her children to survive the tragedy of her husband’s death.

“An awful lot of people stepped up and said we are not going to let this family fail. They took my car to the garage. One came over and cooked me meals every Tuesday. I’d say I don’t need anything because I’m not good at asking for help, but she just kept coming, making dinner, giving the kids a bath, putting them to bed, giving me a little bit of space.”

Among the ranks were her parents who came over from the UK and took up temporary residence in Washington. Her mother is still around, but her father died last October – seeing his daughter achieve what had once seemed to them both an implausible dream of working at Nasa.

“I got through my grief with the Parker Solar Probe. It is my favourite mission. I love all the missions we have, but that one is really personal.”

Started in 2009, when John was still alive, it finally launched in 2018 with the objective of making observations of the outer corona of the sun.

John’s name was included on an engraved plate attached to the probe.

“I was so excited when it launched. I was whooping and 15 minutes later, I was sobbing uncontrollably. I was speechless, which is unusual for me. It was just that release of adrenaline and release of everything.”

Not everyone shares her boundless enthusiasm for space exploration. What, I ask, would she say to those questioning the benefits of the billions being spent?

“I can talk forever of all of the benefits that come from space exploration. If you enjoy walking on air with your Nike shoes, that’s from space suits. Memory foam mattresses came from the Apollo programme – custommade plastic foam used to cushion the Apollo craft and astronauts inside on re-entry. The cameras on your cellphone, they were developed for space.”

She is clearly on a roll and has a long list to get through, but she also needs some sleep. Tomorrow, she has the task of getting plans back on track to send people to the Moon - and beyond.