In the aftermath of this press conference, seeing I was from 91av,
a reader asked why the magazine had not been covering the mission in more
than a cursory and, at times, derogatory way. Wasn’t the trip important
for British science and for Britain?

His frustration seemed to sum up the whole bittersweet experience of
Juno. The first Britain in space yes, but paid for by the Soviets, with
the humiliating consequence of not being able to do any British science
– apart from three experiments for schools. Sharman had spent her week in
space doing science for the Soviet Union, which for a British audience,
lacks the same appeal. At least it seemed to lack it for the media, which
in Sharman’s words ‘made a light-hearted event of the whole thing’. But
even so, there must have been some benefits, some spin-offs for British
science and technology other than having learnt why it failed. I decided
to investigate.

My investigation nearly came to an early end. Initial inquiries to British
Aerospace, the National Space Centre and academic space departments received
a resounding answer of ‘Very little’ to the question of what the mission
had achieved for science and industry.

Sharman had been more optimistic, talking in terms of raised awareness,
international collaboration and scientific contacts made in the Soviet Union:
‘They have some superb equipment over there, and some of the science they
are doing is innovative and up-to-the-minute. It would be extremely useful
to impart that knowledge to some of the people in Britain, which I can now
do through the contacts I made.’

And yet if I had just spent a week in space after training for 18 hard
months, I would be optimistic and positive about the whole thing, too. And
when Heinz Wolff, originally in charge of the Juno science programme, answered
the same question with, ‘Well, in real terms, not very much’, there didn’t
seem any point in going on. If he couldn’t justify it, nobody could.

But then he went on: ‘While the raised profile of manned space research
achieved in Britain by the Juno mission is most unlikely to influence government
science policy, or industry, it will, by capturing the attention of thousands
of school children, influence their education and encourage them to study
science subjects to a higher level.’ The multimillion-pound Juno budget
seemed to require some greater justification.

Two hours later I wasn’t so sure, and the list of Juno benefits had
grown considerably. Having heard the reasons why it failed, the mission
didn’t seem such a failure either, or a metaphor for a demise of the British
space industry or a futility of microgravity research, as has been suggested.

Throughout her training and flight Sharman had been the focus of a sustained
interest from children. They sent tens of thousands of letters, poems and
drawings about the mission to her at Star City, the Soviet space establishment
on the edge of Moscow. She has said she wants to keep this interest going,
through education. Quite how, she has not yet worked out, but she will visit
schools and use her unique position to pass on the space message.

The three British experiments that Juno did eventually carry were devised
by teachers and pupils. Rodney Buckland of the Space School negotiated them
onto the mission when it was clear that insufficient money had been gathered
by industrial or government sponsorship to fund the British microgravity
programme set up by Wolff.

Sharman talked to pupils at several schools on amateur radio as the
Mir station passed over Britain, took vast numbers of photographs of Earth
for a remote sensing project looking at pollution in major estuaries of
the world and left 250 000 pansy seeds on Mir, to be brought back to Earth
in five months’ time. They will be distributed among 10 000 schools, germinated,
and compared with seeds which stayed on Earth to see if five months’ exposure
to cosmic rays affects their germination – an experiment that Sharman believes
will be particularly useful for younger children. The amateur radio project
at Harrogate Ladies College attracted older pupils and triggered a seven-fold
increase in the usual number of prospective amateur radio enthusiasts for
next term’s course.

‘If Juno does nothing more than encourage another couple of hundred
people to want to study science and engineering, then the ten million or
so pounds will have been money well spent,’ said Wolff. But to do this the
interest in space sparked by Juno will have to be maintained.

Wolff hopes Sharman will find a way to associate herself with the Space
School, an educational charity already in the business of firing imaginations.
The Prime Minister, John Major, promised Sharman that the Department of
Education and Science will collate her information and photographs into
school pamphlets for space science.

The more science and engineering graduates in Britain who understand
the importance of space research, said Wolff, the greater the likelihood
that one day we will have a healthy space industry. And for Wolff, a healthy
space industry is a self-propagator of science and engineering graduates
– vital if industry is to be boosted by the suitably trained and creative
people necessary to develop the next generation of products.

Wolff believes that if the Juno mission had gone in the best possible
way and had all the experiments flown and obtained significant results,
it would have been possible to demonstrate that people can do worthwhile
science without it costing a fortune. ‘We would have killed the myth that
doing space science is extremely expensive,’ he said.

When it was clear that Juno was failing to attract sufficient high-paying
sponsors, instead of reducing the science programme, the Moscow Narodny
Bank and Energiya, the Soviet space organisation, removed it all together.
The British astronaut was no longer able to do British science, and sponsors
could no longer be offered anything for their money, so they pulled out.

‘With hindsight,’ said Wolff, ‘the Soviet authorities might now wonder
if it might not have been politically to their advantage to have allowed
a few of the British experiments. It would have set a precedent and produced
some results . . . then it is much more likely to happen again in the future.
If Helen was going anyway, it couldn’t have cost much more to have let her
do British experiments.’ If this had been the case, the media would have
kept more of a focus on the science, Sharman would have had more of substance
to talk about. We would have found out more interesting facts than, ‘No,
bedtime in space is flexible; no, it’s not difficult to sleep there; and
no, you probably won’t dream about it.’ In fact, it would have been much
less of a light-hearted and frustrating event for everybody.

The waters receded and the clear-up began, but every high tide brought
renewed anxiety. Stuart Anderson, a local GP, said many of his patients
kept asking, ‘It’s not going to happen again is it?’ He didn’t know, and
nobody else seemed to either.

The local council had won praise for the way it coped with the initial
emergency, but what next? Who was going to make sure it would not happen
again, or at least find out why it did in the first place? Anderson started
a support group both to relieve his patients’ anger and to do something
constructive to answer these questions.

Called the North Wales Flood Defence Group (NWFD), the group has grown
to include people living in Towyn, Pensarn, Kimnel Bay, Rhyl, Prestatyn
and Ffynnongrow-all places that had been flooded. After a year of consultation,
liaison and research, the NWFD has come up with its own solutions. These
solutions can be seen working in countries that have thought about long-term
coastal defence, such as Australia, France and the Soviet Union. But Britain,
surprisingly for an island nation, is badly off when it comes to coastal
policy.

The group soon found that responsibility for the British coastline is
shared by a large number of bodies, each one dealing with a small section.
But duties are blurred by complacency and inertia; with little appreciation
of the risk of flooding, concern is low. This was true of Colwyn Borough
Council, involved with defending the North Wales stretch, although the sea
wall itself belongs to British Rail, so accountability is not clear.

Local authorities are legally bound to protect coastal land above sea
level as part of the county structure plan. The National Rivers Authority
(NRA) is responsible for the low-lying stretches. With separate agencies
involved, the defence decisions for each stretch of coast are only based
on local budgets and criteria. Councils are pressured by residents to spend
hundreds of thousands of pounds to stop houses falling in the sea. This
means they are not able to act purposefully and manage the coast with foresight,
planning for change by, for example, paying house owners to leave their
home to the sea, rather than building sea defences.

This is a short-sighted system with long-term implications. It means,
for example, that management of one part of the coast can contradict and
interfere with techniques used farther along. Shorelines, along with tides,
waves and currents, form part of large cycles of erosion and deposition
that can span hundreds of kilometres. Defending one piece of coast can,
and often does, mean a beach disappears downcurrent. Robert Kay, a geomorphologist
working with the NWFD, believes each complete coastal system should be planned
for as a unit-which is not possible under the present system.

Towyn has not had a beach for years, and the high tide reaches high
up the sea wall farther along the coast, too. The group learnt that beaches
are important for coastal defence, but, ironically, having a sea wall means
losing the beach in front of it (plus, possibly, beaches down the coast).
By preventing erosion, a sea wall blocks the beach’s source of new sand,
so once the old sand flows away, the beach is no more. And a concrete wall
cannot absorb energy from crashing waves in the way that a beach or a soft
cliff can. Instead, the wave energy bounces off the wall, undermines it
and takes sand out to sea, making the coast even more prone to flood.

But because the sea wall is a symbol of flood defence the NWFD initially
wanted it to be enlarged and strengthened. And it has been. Only later did
the group come to realise that if the wall had not been there, the towns
would never have been built in the first place, in what is a naturally flood
prone area. By preventing small and moderate floods, the sea wall had created
a potential for disaster if water overtopped or broke through the wall-as,
indeed, it did.

The NWFD then found, to its horror, that more houses were planned for
the North Wales flood plain. Some already had planning permission. Members
organised a petition, publicly supported by the NRA, to bring an end to
development on the flood plain, at least while the flood risk is investigated.
Nationally it would make sense to designate some areas of coast ‘blue belts’
in which development is banned and residents are paid to move away. This
would leave the sea to eat away naturally at the land, producing sediment
to form protective beaches, says Kay.

The whole situation is crying out for coordination. Kay wants the government
to set up a new body to take over coastal planning for the whole country.
It would coordinate defence by choosing which areas of the coast should
be defended and those which should not. Ian Whittle, flood protection manager
of the NRA, thinks his organisation should take on the job. Either way,
something must be done.

Significantly, it was the NWFD which initiated the first ever talks
between all the bodies with some involvement with defending their coast
(borough council, county council, British Rail, the Welsh Office, the Ministry
of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the NRA). As a first step, the group
wants flood risk to be discussed openly so that everyone can find out the
chance of their own home (or prospective home) flooding. Meanwhile, the
group feels its most innovative scheme so far is a network of flood wardens-one
volunteer on each street-to coordinate and simplify any evacuation and generally
to pass on information.

The past year in North Wales has highlighted the huge human cost of
inundation, not just in terms of loss of home and possessions but in psychological
strain (especially for children and the elderly), illness and even death.
This is particularly alarming when you remember the spectres looming with
the greenhouse effect. Higher sea levels along with more stormy, unpredictable
weather are forecast for next century-a combination which will increase
the likelihood that waves will break over many coastal towns.

It was only because the flooding in North Wales happened mid-morning
that no one drowned; the death toll from hypothermia and drowning in a similar
night-time flood could be high. This means not only does the experience
suffered by North Wales become more significant, but also that the lessons
uncovered in the aftermath of the flood not by councils or authorities but
by a community-based group, could be crucial.