Belgium and Switzerland have astronauts. So do Slovakia, China, Brazil and Malaysia. Yet throughout the 47 years since Yuri Gagarin first entered space, Britain has refused to pay to send its citizens into orbit.

Government indifference to manned spaceflight began in the 1960s, when the Blue Streak rocket programme was cancelled. In 1986 Margaret Thatcher made the policy official. After the Challenger disaster, she decided that crewed missions were a risky indulgence.

Britain withdrew from all European Space Agency manned programmes and space funding was invested in unmanned satellites and robotic probes. Scientists have long complained that the British position lacks vision and ambition. British astronauts, they argued, would inspire children to take up science, much as the Apollo Moon landings enthused figures such as Colin Pillinger, the architect of the Beagle 2 Mars lander.

But the bottom line has always won out: robots are cheap, they can travel much farther than people, and when they crash, nobody dies.

A change in global ambitions for manned spaceflight means that exciting missions lie ahead that our scientists are eyeing with envy.

Few researchers are enthusiastic about sending people to the International Space Station, which will never conduct much useful science, but the prospect of a permanent Moon base and future missions to Mars are a different matter.

Even sceptics who have considered manned spaceflight more a matter of national pride than scientific endeavour are changing their tune. The pressure on the Government to fund a few Brits is stronger than ever.

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