The BNSC is not “that place in Leicester where tourists can go to learn about space”, as one colleague ventured, understandably confusing it with the National Space Centre. It’s not a bank, either.

The BNSC is the British National Space Centre, and I’ve never really understood what it is or what it does. Its website (www.bnsc.gov.uk) is of marginal help. From this, I glean that it is made up of nine government departments and research councils (which ones?) and does the following: “Coordinate UK civil space activity; support academic research; nurture the UK space industry; and work to increase understanding of space science and its practical benefits”. I don’t know what any of this means in practice.

Still, the BNSC had a chance to redeem itself last week, when it published a report on the future direction of British space exploration. The report contained a humdinger of a recommendation: that the Government do a U-turn and consider sending British astronauts into space.

This is something that the BNSC could have shouted from the rooftops, mobilising the national appetite for all things cosmic (witness the media hysteria over Beagle, and that was only a robot). It could have wheeled out Helen Sharman, or one of those “British-born” Nasa astronauts, to give the report’s launch a bit of oomph and glamour. Instead, there was a rather muted press conference last week at which nobody said, in plain English, what they were really thinking.

Which is that it is ludicrous for Britain to remain the only important industrialised country to lack its own homegrown astronaut corps. How would we feel if the next flag placed on the Moon was not the Stars and Stripes but the Russian tricolour, or the golden stars of China? While I entertain reservations about the cost/benefit ratio of sending human beings into space, I also accept that unmanned missions do not inspire youngsters in the way that the Apollo programme fired up a generation. And I don’t want to see the UK left behind in the next era of space exploration.

Here is a sample sentence from the report summary: “(A demonstration programme that engages in preparatory human spaceflight activities) will in due course enable the UK to judge the value of a stronger involvement up to a level commensurate with our GDP.” Space is about passion, vision, thinking beyond the achievable. Couldn’t the BNSC show some passion a little more publicly?

MEN ARE supposed to have superior spatial skills but women win out when it comes to remembering where food is. Steven Gaulin, of the University of California, took 86 shoppers to look at market stalls; later, he asked them where they’d seen certain foods. Women were 27 per cent more accurate than men, an advantage the researchers put down to evolved foraging skill. Both sexes, however, were equally adept at homing in on high-calorie foods such as avocados. Or, in my case, a nice Battenberg.

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