Any day now an international rugby player will climb aboard a NASA rocket and blast off from Cape Canaveral bound for somewhere 250 miles above Earth.

Jessica Watkins will spend the weekend finalising preparations for her journey into space, a venture described by the fictional Captain James T Kirk of the 1960’s Star Trek fame as ‘the final frontier where no man has gone before’.
The notion back then of a woman going there, not simply as one of the crew but in charge of the entire expedition, would have been thought of as beyond absurdity, if it was thought of all.
This coming week, Dr Watkin...