Mission patch for Project Juno. Project Juno was a private British space programme which selected Helen Sharman to be the first Briton in space. As the United Kingdom did not have a human spaceflight programme (until Tim Peake's ESA mission in 2015), a private consortium was formed to raise money to pay the Soviet Union for a seat on a Soyuz mission to the Mir space station. The Soviet Union had recently flown Toyohiro Akiyama, a Japanese journalist, under a similar arrangement. Sharman was launched aboard Soyuz TM-12 on 18 May 1991, and returned aboard Soyuz TM-11 on 26 May 1991.