Top News

A Belfast-born astrophysicist could make history by being the first Briton to walk on the surface of the . Rosemary Coogan answered a call from the European Space Agency (ESA), which was looking for new recruits to go into space, and was chosen from a pool of over 22,000 people.

Coogan said she wanted to get "hands-on" with contributing to scientific research from space and could leave Earth by the end of the decade. ESA aims to have Coogan at the (ISS) by 2030, following in the footsteps of British astronauts Helen Sharman, who visited the Soviet Union's Mir Space Station in 1991, and Major Tim Peake, who boarded the ISS in 2015. In preparation for space, Coogan has spent the last six months training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where there are life-sized mock-ups which simulate space. The facility holds one of the largest pools in the world, NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, which plunges to a depth of 12m (40ft) and holds a life-sized replica of the ISS within.

Here, conditions can be simulated which are as close to weightlessness as can be experienced on Earth.

Coogan told : "It's very physically intense - and it's very psychologically intense."

Her training will expose her to every aspect of life aboard the space station, including how to use the onboard toilet in zero gravity.

She had long dreamed of being an astronaut, but did not know if it would become reality.

"At the careers day at school, you don't tend to meet astronauts," she said. "You don't get to meet people who've done it, you don't really get to hear their stories.

With an expected space career of 35 years, Coogan may get the chance to walk on the moon as NASA plans a return to the lunar surface with its Artemis programme. The project comes more than 50 years after the Apollo astronauts first arrived on the moon in 1969.

On the prospect, she said: "It's incredibly exciting that we, as humanity, are going back to the Moon, and of course, any way that I could be a part of that, I would be absolutely delighted. I think it's absolutely thrilling."

Coogan completed her undergraduate studies at Durham University in 2013 with a degree in Physics, before going to achieve two master's degrees from the institution, where she conducted research on gamma-ray emission from black holes.

In 2019, she attained a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Sussex, during her study for which she spent one year as a visiting scientist in Paris and travelled to a Hawaiian observatory as a visiting astronomer.

After being selected as an astronaut candidate in November 2022, she commenced a one-year basic training programme in April 2023.

Last year, she achieved astronaut certification with the ESA and is now eligible to go on "spaceflight assignments".