Project Juno

Project Juno was a private British space programme which selected Helen Sharman to be the first Briton in space.

As the United Kingdom did not have a human spaceflight programme (until Tim Peake's ESA mission in 2015), a private consortium was formed to raise money to pay the Soviet Union for a seat on a Soyuz mission to the Mir space station. The Soviet Union had recently flown Toyohiro Akiyama, a Japanese journalist, under a similar arrangement.

A call for applicants was publicized in the UK (one ad read "Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary"), leading to 13,000 applications. Juno selected four candidates to train in the Soviet Union:

Eventually Mace and Sharman were selected to continue full time training at Star City. After learning Russian and familiarising themselves with the science programme, Smith and Brooks were employed to teach the other two how to perform the experiments and then to conduct them in a life sized mock up of Mir for live media during the mission.