My fascination with space began with watching reruns of the original Star Trek episodes with my dad. We weren’t allowed to watch much television as children, but on Saturday afternoons he’d sit down to watch Star Trek and I’d join him. It was my first exposure to science fiction and I loved it. 

The stars have always called to me. They’re mysterious, beautiful, breath-taking. I grew up in a small town where light pollution wasn’t too much of a problem, but it was still a massive difference to leave the settled areas behind and experience the true darkness of the night.

One New Year’s Eve, we rented a cabin in the Black Forest in Germany. I must have been about thirteen, but I still remember that night as if it only just happened. My best friend and I had been out walking through the forest at night and returned breathless and giddy with excitement. We weren’t quite ready to go back inside yet, so we sat on a log in front of the cabin and simply looked up at the sky. I’d never seen that many stars before. It was breath-taking and we both sat there in silence, not caring about the cold. The longer we looked, the more lights appeared on that black canvas. Their sparkle seemed to tell stories and I realised why people had told myths about the stars and constellations since the beginning of time. We must have sat there for almost an hour until my mother called us inside before we ended up with hypothermia.

It was one of those unearthly moments that are hard to forget. 

After watching way too many documentaries about space, I looked into becoming an astronaut, but quickly realised that I was neither fit nor healthy enough to ever achieve that ambition. So I became a science journalist instead. In 2012, I interviewed a woman who’d bought a ticket on Richard Branson’s space programme enabling ‘tourists’ to orbit Earth. I shared her excitement and asked her way more questions than I needed for my article. We stayed in touch for a while and she kept me updated on her progress, but nine years later, she’s still not flown into space. Funny that my words should get there faster than her. That only shows the unpredictability of our slow journey into space. Again and again, missions have failed, but the ones that do succeed are the ones that write history.

I’m sending that article as part of my contribution to Writers on the Moon, along with several of my books. With over sixty books to choose from, I had a hard time deciding what to send on this mission. Every book I’ve ever written is special to me, but in the end, I selected a few that are the closest to my heart.