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Tuesday, 8 October, 2002, 10:36 GMT 11:36 UK
Brit takes US route into orbit
Piers Sellers has got into space the only way a Briton can: by changing his nationality. He has become a US citizen.
He is riding on the Atlantis space shuttle with the Stars and Stripes on his shoulder - not the Union Flag. The UK Government believes human spaceflight is a waste of time and money, and will not support any manned programme, even through the European Space Agency of which it is a member. Birthday surprise The Blair administration briefly toyed with the idea of sending a Brit into orbit when it came to power in 1997. It was drawn to the potential publicity spin-offs but eventually ran shy of putting funds behind the project.
This policy, endorsed by successive governments, has left Dr Sellers, and Michael Foale before him, with little choice but to get hold of a US passport. Sellers, who was born in Crowborough in Sussex, was inspired to become an astronaut by Yuri Gagarin. The Russian's pioneering journey into orbit occurred a day after Seller's sixth birthday. Flashing light "My dad told me all about it," he said in a recent Nasa interview. "And, I thought it was just a continuation of my birthday. This was, you know, somehow connected. It wasn't the case, as it turned out.
"So, he showed how Yuri Gagarin would be seeing the sunlight for a little while, travelling all the way over the Earth, and then flashing back into the dark and coming back - night, day, night, day. "I thought this was fascinating to me. I couldn't imagine anything better." Wonderful opportunity Shortly after finishing his doctorate research in biometeorology Sellers went to the US space agency's (Nasa) Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to work on climate computer models.
That was rectified in 1991 when he became naturalised; acceptance on the astronaut training programme followed five years later. Now he has his chance - and a wonderful opportunity to make his mark. 'Hard-working Brit' Dr Sellers is due to attempt three spacewalks during the STS-112 mission, and hopes to beat the record for a single spacewalk of eight hours and 56 minutes set by Americans James Voss and Susan Helms in 2000. Piers Sellers' wife Mandy said that her husband had reached this point through "sheer determination and hard work". She said: "When I met him as a student he had the model of Apollo on the wall, and I used to think: 'Yeah, that won't ever happen' - and I think he thought the same. "Piers is not interested in becoming famous; he is just a hard-working Brit who had to become an American to go into space."
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