In early August of 1982, the Danish national parliament met in special session to debate the topic of whether Denmark should join Project Hermes. By now it seemed as if the whole Danish population   had gotten involved in the controversy; even Denmark’s royal family were caught up in the hullabaloo, receiving something like forty to fifty letters a day asking their opinion on the issue. Wisely, they refrained from taking a definitive stance one way or the other. But that didn’t stop millions of their fellow Danes from choosing sides in the great argument over whether Denmark should stake a claim on the final frontier.

It was a debate that cut across political, age, gender, and economic lines. Alliances that would have seemed unimaginable only a few months earlier were being forged between groups on every end of the ideological spectrum as supporters of a Danish space program fought to get their country included in Project Hermes while their opponents escalated their campaign to halt the nascent Danish space venture dead in its tracks. The argument spilled across the front pages of Denmark’s biggest newspapers and onto the airwaves of the TV and radio networks operated by the Danish Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Danish postal carriers grew hunchbacked carrying sacks of letters to the Danish prime minister’s office trying to sway him one way or the other. The controversy even found its way onto the pulpits of Denmark’s churches; “It’s getting so you hear more about the stars than about the New Testament,” complained one parishioner at Copenhagen’s oldest Catholic church one Sunday morning after the senior priest there devoted most of his sermon for that day to the topic of Project Hermes.

The public galleries at the halls of the national parliament were packed almost to overflowing on the day the special session on Project Hermes was convened. Extra police had to be called out in order to keep things under control; in the days leading up to the special session, there had been slight hints by a few of the more radical opponents of the proposed Danish space program they might resort to disrupting the meeting if the parliament showed any sign of voting in favor of the project. There were certainly a fair number of picketers marching within sight of the Parliament of Denmark Building waving anti-Hermes placards and shouting anti-Hermes slogans in the Parliament’s direction. One or two of them even managed to slip through the police cordon long enough to unfurl an anti-Hermes banner on the Parliament building’s front steps before they were forcibly removed and taken into custody.

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In London and Paris, the respective top aerospace advisors to the Thatcher and Mitterand governments watched the ongoing political wrangle in Copenhagen with an anxious eye. If the pro-Hermes faction in the Parliament of Denmark prevailed, then Great Britain and France could welcome Denmark into the Project Hermes family with little delay and the project’s team leaders could start to work on persuading other European nations to participate in the program. But if the anti-Hermes side had the last word and Denmark said no to joining the project, those countries already working with Great Britain and France on Hermes might start having second thoughts about its value-- there was even a possibility of domestic critics among the British or French public advocating an end to the program.

A BBC news correspondent covering the parliamentary ruckus in Copenhagen wryly told his colleagues that “we probably won’t see the end of this for at least two more days”. His prediction would turn out to be wildly optimistic it actually ended up being two weeks before the Parliament of Denmark was ready for a final vote on the Hermes question. All of Denmark, and all of western Europe for that matter, was sitting on pins and needles awaiting the outcome of that vote.

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The great debate finally concluded on August 17th, 1982 when a lawmaker from Telemark moved for a full vote of the Parliament of Denmark on the Hermes question at the next day’s parliamentary session. The motion passed with very few objections; most Danish legislators at that point, whether they were for or against being involved with the space project, just wanted to be done with the whole affair and move on to other things. It was a sentiment that Denmark’s prime minister shared-- at a press conference three days earlier he’d come dangerously close to losing his temper when he was asked for the 100th time if he thought his government would be able to get the country into Project Hermes. He wasn’t sure if he could trust himself to keep said temper in check the 101st time.

But even now there was still one last bit of drama to be played out: fifteen minutes into the session at which the deciding vote on the Hermes matter was scheduled to be taken, one of the key legislators on the anti-Hermes side leaned out of his chair and fell onto the floor, looking very gray about the face. Sensing there was a medical emergency, the speaker of Denmark’s Parliament immediately ordered the session suspended and phoned an ambulance to take the stricken man to a Copenhagen hospital; within hours it was learned that the gentleman in question had sustained a serious case of cardiac arrest from the stress brought on by the seemingly never-ending arguments over the Hermes question. Consequently, the final vote on Hermes was delayed by another 24 hours-- which gave the pro-Hermes side an unexpected last-minute opportunity to lobby any fence-sitters left in Parliament. It was an opportunity which they didn’t hesitate to capitalize on.

The lobbying paid off handsomely: by a majority, albeit a rather slim one, the Danish Parliament voted in favor of having Denmark join Project Hermes. There were some protests from the anti-Hermes camp over the pro-Hermes side’s last-minute pressuring of undecided legislators, but those soon faded as the national conversation turned to the topic of who would be the first Danish national to ride into space on board a Hermes capsule. Popular wisdom suggested the honor would go to a pilot from Denmark’s air force or a scientist from one of its leading universities; most of the Hermes astronauts to date had been either scientists or air force personnel.

So it came as a great surprise when the Danish government decided instead to bestow the position on an elementary school teacher from the industrial Jutland city of Aalborg. Few people were more surprised than the teacher himself-- up until then he’d never even left Demnark. Now he was about to venture thousands of miles into deep space. There was a very simple reason for what at first glance seemed like an out-of-left field decision: Project Hermes, in an effort to attract broader public support for its operation, had decided the time had arrived to send an everyday citizen into space. And one couldn’t get much more everyday than a public school teacher.

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The British and French press didn’t take long to begin transforming the previously anonymous schoolteacher into western Europe’s latest media darling. The Fleet Street tabloids were particularly keen to get to know more about the unassuming soon- to-be space traveler; News Of The World alone sent ten writers and six photographers to the Project Hermes training center to get whatever tidbits they could on the “space teacher”, as theGuardian had taken to dubbing him. When he appeared on BBC News to do an interview about his childhood and his teaching career, it was one of the highest-rated programs to air on BBC Television that week; only the soap opera Coronation Street and the venerable sci-fi series Doctor Who attracted higher viewer shares. At an English Premier League soccer match between Blackburn Rovers and Arsenal, fans of both teams eagerly bought up T-shirts showing a portrait of the fledgling space traveler. He even made a quick and
memorable cameo appearance on ITV’s children’s music entertainment series Razzmatazz as a guest host in a segment where he introduced
a pop song written by an up-and-coming band from Glasgow about the first Hermes mission.

But once the novelty wore off, he was all business as he trained for his history-making journey into the heavens. His fellow trainees and his instructors marveled at the vigor with which he took to the Hermes physical flight preparation regimen. He also did extremely well in the mental training exercises run by the Project Hermes team; on his initial IQ tested he recorded the second-highest score of any man on the Hermes IX crew. By the time Hermes IX was ready to launch, the “space teacher” had been trained to the point where, as one Project Hermes PR spokeswoman quipped in a press conference on the eve of the blastoff, that he “could have flown the capsule by himself if we’d asked him to.”

All joking aside, the Hermes IX flight crew was perhaps the best-trained the Anglo-French human spaceflight program had so far sent into orbit. This was particularly true of mission co-pilot    Wilhelm Schumacher, a West German air force officer with twelve years’ flying experience and two stints as part of backup crews for previous Hermes missions under his belt; in fact, Schumacher at one time held the individual record for most training hours logged by any crew member for a Hermes mission. (During the 1990s Schumacher would go on to serve as executive director of astronaut training operations for the European Union Space Agency.)

On October 27th, 1982 thousands of spectators gathered at the Project Hermes central launch complex in Wales to watch Hermes IX blast off for a twelve-day mission whose primary focus would be to monitor solar radiation patterns over northwest Europe and to test a new emergency escape system which had been devised in response to concerns that the Hermes V tragedy might repeat itself someday.

It went without saying that the system’s creators were hoping it wouldn’t be needed-- or, barring that, at least that the system would work properly should the Hermes IX crew find it necessary to make use of it...