Knickerless Spacegirl

Why the nickname "Spacegirl"?

I have had this nickname since I was 6 years old. After leaving the Royal Air Force, my English father worked on Blue Streak until the Trident submarine-launched missile became more urgent and Blue Streak effectively became the first stage of Europa I, a launch vehicle for use in space flight.

In the late seventies, he was transferred to Vernon in the Seine Valley where he worked as consultant in the development of solid-fuel boosters for the Ariane high-orbit satellite launch vehicle.

He met my mother at a conference there. Father was in his fifties and mother in her mid thirties, having spent almost twenty years in Florida, developing computer systems for NASA. It was love at first sight and I was born 1981, within a year of their marriage. She was Catalan by birth, but her first language was a weird dialect of English called American.

The difference in their ages never caused a problem so I got used to the idea of a young woman marrying (and presumably having sex with - because I got to be born) a man considerably older than herself.

In view of all this, it was inevitable that I would end up speaking English as my first language, and also that I would have a deep interest and love of aerospace.

In 1987, father was transferred to EADS-Astrium in Toulouse while mother worked mostly from our valley near Sorède in Pyrenées Orientales.

From time-to-time, I would stay with father in the apartment he had converted from a riverside warehouse in Toulouse.

The workers at the Space Centre took to me at once. They joked that I would be the first woman on Mars, and I gained the nickname "Spacegirl".

And the name stuck.