United Kingdom to support Human Space Flight

The Sunday Times newspaper reports that the UK will in future be supporting human space flight

Government policy has been that the UK should only support robotic exploration of space. Although the UK pays about £180m into the European Space Agency (ESA) each year, it has, until now, stipulated that it is not to be used for human space-flight programmes.

The change in policy takes place after the announcement that ESA have selected a UK citizen, Tim Peake, to be trained as an ESA astronaut.

The first UK astronaut Helen Sharman, Amateur Radio callsign GB1MIR, travelled to the Mir space station on a Soviet rocket in 1991 as part of the privately funded Juno project.

Read the Sunday Times article 'It’s blast-off Britain as ban on space flight ends' at

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/
science/article6719149.ece