Gurbir Singh

Gurbir Singh is a UK-based non-fiction writer specialising in space. He studied science and computing and holds a science and an arts degree. Once keen on aviation, he has a private pilot’s licence for the UK, USA and Australia. He was one of 13,000 unsuccessful applicants responding to the 1989 advert “Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary” to become the first British astronaut. Helen Sharman was eventually selected and flew on the Soviet space station Mir in 1991.

He has written articles for The Space Review, Go Taikonauts!, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Spaceflight and has been interviewed for BBC Manchester, Deutsche Welle and the BBC World Service. In late 2018, he stopped working full time as Cyber Security Consultant to spend more time on his writing. He is also the publisher of www.astrotalkuk.org, a not-for-profit astronomy podcast established in 2008.

In 2011, he published his first book, Yuri Gagarin in London and Manchester. The book traces the visit of the world’s first spaceman’s 5-days in England with first-hand accounts from the people who saw and met him. His second book, The Indian Space Programme published in October 2017, is a detailed account of the origin of India’s space programme, its achievements and future ambitions. The third book, India’s Forgotten Rocket Pioneer, is a biographic account of the life and work of Stephen H Smith who experimented with rockets between the 1930s and 1940 in Calcutta, India. In 2022, he helped to publish the memoirs of Leslie Johnson. He served as the Hon Secretary of the British Interplanetary Society when it was founded in Liverpool in 1933. In 2022 he acquired his amateur radio operator's licence - M0KSN.