When Claire Parfitt was 14, she wanted work experience in the space industry. She applied to NASA and was turned down. So she found something closer to home: a placement at the National Space Centre in Leicester, which was still being prepared for its opening in 2001.
More than two decades later, Parfitt, now 42, leads Mars exploration studies at the European Space Agency. The space toilet gets the headline. The more interesting bit is how an apparently minor second choice became her first real step into the industry.
At the National Space Centre, the exhibits weren’t on display yet, so Parfitt helped unpack them. “One of those was a space toilet, which I had never seen before and I helped to unpack it,” she recalled. Not glamorous. But that’s rather the point.
She didn’t remember it as a chore. “It was just an unusual piece of technology that is used for space missions, so it was really interesting to see,” she said. There’s something honest in that. The teenager who wanted into the space industry got her first hands-on contact with it by unpacking and helping clean something built for a very specific, very unromantic problem of spaceflight. Real space work turns out to be full of that.
The long climb after the toilet
What followed was not a shortcut. Parfitt earned a physics degree and then a PhD in spacecraft power systems engineering, worked in the UK space industry, and in 2019 moved to ESA’s technical center in the Netherlands. That’s roughly two decades of study and work between the unpacking crate and the job she has now.
The rejection letter didn’t shorten the road. It pointed her at a different first step.
Before joining ESA, she worked on the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover and the SMILE mission. The rover is the one I find hardest not to be drawn to. It’s designed to drill two metres below the surface of Mars, deep enough to reach material shielded from the radiation that scours the top layer, where organic molecules that could preserve evidence of past life are more likely to survive. Of that mission Parfitt said simply, “When Rosalind Franklin launches in 2028 that will be extremely exciting.” The mission is currently scheduled for launch in late 2028.
She now leads ESA’s Mars exploration study team, planning future human and robotic missions, and she chairs the international working group that coordinates Mars exploration across space agencies. Her framing of the work is careful rather than triumphant. “We have to plan the next decades carefully to make sure that we preserve Mars and get the best science data that we can back for Europe,” she said. Decades. Not the next mission, the next several.
Closing thoughts
It would be easy to run this as a joke with a nice payoff: from cleaning a space toilet to running Mars studies. But that reading misses what’s actually useful here.
Parfitt is clear about what the placement did for her, and she hedges it honestly. “I’m pretty sure it put me on the track that I’m on now for my space career,” she said. She remembered the centre’s director at the time being a woman, “a lady called Alex Hall” in her recollection, and said seeing someone in that role helped her picture a career of her own.
A 14-year-old on work experience got two things at once: proof the field was real enough to touch, and proof that someone like her could run part of it.
She called the centre “such an inspirational place for people to go,” and given where it started her, I’m inclined to take her word for it. The first rung rarely resembles the top of the ladder but that’s not a reason to skip it.
