Kevin Fong: Meet the man who wants to put children in space

Had Kevin Fong landed the job of his dreams, he would be in low Earth orbit this week, instead of Major Tim Peake, circling the globe at 17,100 miles per hour. Fong, one of the UK’s leading experts on space medicine, applied to the European Space Agency to be an astronaut in 2008. His hopes surged when he made it through the first round of interviews, but ultimately he didn’t make the cut. “Of course I was very disappointed not to get selected,” says Fong, who wears a multitude of hats, none of them a space helmet.

As a former Nasa employee as well as a doctor and academic who specialises on the effects of space on the human body, Fong knows that Peake will play a crucial role in inspiring future astronauts. Despite staying earthbound, Fong, the founder of University College London’s Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Physiology, is playing his own role in firing up the next generation of Peakes.

The 44-year-old doctor will use three Royal Institution lectures, How to Survive in Space – to be broadcast on BBC Four between Christmas and New Year – to show children that they don’t need to be in the International Space Station to be part of something “at the limit of all we’re capable of as a species”.

He wants his talks, aimed at 11- to 16-year-olds, to inspire children about life beyond Earth “before they’ve become too jaundiced [and] have created an impression of a world that has walls”. Speaking in the Royal Institution beneath a bust of the chemist Sir Humphry Davy, Fong says it is vital to take advantage of the short period of time when kids think anything is possible. “We’ve got to get them early, earlier than we probably do,” he says.

This matters because “as long as you can suspend disbelief on this wonderful thing of exploration, then people can go on to do incredible and creative and wonderful things”. He worries that his students risk limiting their options because they are too focused on preparing themselves for a solid career.

“They take university much more seriously than I ever did. They feel like they’re running away from the mushroom cloud of the great recession ... and that’s a shame.”

He wants his RI lectures to be something that families can chew over during dinner, providing a bit of stimulation amid all the televisual Christmas stodge. This, he reckons, is how to engage kids and help them to comprehend “the importance of science in our culture”.

Fong likes to describe his earliest memory – waking up in the middle of the night to watch the flickering images of an American Apollo module docking with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 1975 – to explain his fascination with space, but he credits dinner table chats with his family for fuelling his interest. Neither of his parents had a science degree; Fong has degrees in medicine, astrophysics and engineering.

For all his many jobs and passions – he’s an Air Ambulance doctor as well as an author – he makes time for his own children, two boys aged seven and 10. His talk is peppered with references to juggling work and kids and how tough it is.

“I used to be impressed with people who were superlative in one area. But now I’m more and more impressed with people who put all those balls in the air: family, home, and their job.”

He hopes his own kids won’t grow up “thinking of me as the absentee parent”. He has special sympathy for those navigating the early years.

“I do think our generation has lost the idea that zero to five is really, really hard. If you talk to our parents, they say, ‘Zero to five, we were broke, we never slept.’ I think we, in the modern myth of the über parent, feel you’re meant to be able to run over that like it’s a little speed bump, and actually I think parenting is hard.”

Fong says parenthood is “hands down” more tiring than his erstwhile double life when he was a junior doctor in the UK and a Nasa researcher in the US; a period when he’d use all his spare leave to work at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “I was genuinely doing two jobs, one of which almost didn’t pay at all.” That was in the Nineties, when junior doctors would “go to work on Saturday morning, work all day, all night, all day, all night and then come home again on Monday afternoon”.

With the right political will and enough financial backing, Fong, who helped to lobby the Government to rejoin the European space programme, thinks “almost anything” is possible in terms of space exploration during the next 50 years. “Things are speeding up. Space had such an incredibly fast start that I think they expected more.

“In the literature [of the Sixties], they thought they’d be on Mars by the Eighties. Then the funding dries up but that doesn’t mean we haven’t made progress.

“When you look at it properly, the progress from what was once a surrogate battlefield for nuclear war to a programme of multinational, peaceful co-operation in low Earth orbit, I think it’s an enormous achievement.”

The question of how Britain uses the interest sparked by Tim Peake’s adventure to inspire future astronauts – a phenomenon Fong describes as “cashing in its astronaut chip – is a vexed one. Asked if the UK made enough of Helen Sharman, our first cosmonaut (her 1991 space mission was paid for jointly by the USSR and a consortium of British companies), he says, “Possibly not.”

Personally, I failed to register the significance of Sharman’s mission despite sitting science GCSEs at the time. It still haunts me. Fong won’t be drawn on the issue.

Instead, he’s pinning his hopes on Peake and, in particular, managing to make contact with him during one of the lectures. If that happens he’ll be handing the floor to the schoolchildren: maybe Peake can tell them how he got the job.

Keven Fong’s first How to Survive in Space lecture will be shown on BBC Four at 8pm on 28 December