From deep space to Dawley Bank

One day, this county scientist has his head among the stars; the next it’s very much down to earth. Ben Bentley talks astronomy and artillery . . .

Marko Bulmer is a man very much on a mission. When he isn’t an Army major preparing Shropshire TA soldiers for war and peace he is a scientist helping to plan NASA spacecraft missions to Mars, Venus and the Moon.

It’s all proper Boy’s Own stuff for a man who holds down not one but two of the jobs most kids would probably name when asked what they want to be when they grow up: soldier, leader of men, and space scientist.

Marko’s dual roles have taken him around the world, to the heart of war zones and intellectually to the edge of the solar system, and finally to Ludlow where life for the 41-year-old has come full circle.

Growing up just over the county border near Tenbury Wells, he studied to become a geologist before being lured across the Atlantic to Washington DC to conduct a range of scientific research projects.

Perhaps the most exciting of these is his ongoing space exploration work as part of a team for active NASA spacecraft missions at the Goddard Space Center in Maryland, a role which involves selecting landing sites for Mars rovers.

“I got involved in hard-surface planets that had a sun, such as Mars and Venus and the Moon, that you can actually put things on; Neptune - a gas planet - I don’t get involved with,” he jokes.

“It’s very exciting planning space missions to somewhere like Mars, and there are moments when I think I’m one of only a handful of people who have seen an image that’s come from 90 million miles away.

“It has been a golden age - I’ve been involved in spacecraft missions that send landers, or rovers, and in landing-site selection.

“For those that are orbiting, they have a range of sensors and my job is to understand what we are looking at from the images they send - what might be happening, and is Mars’ volcano, which is the largest in the solar system at 22km high, active?

“Currently I’m looking at images from Mars using new instruments. I’m one of those fortunate people who have found a job that I love doing.”

His findings are often applied to help understand geological situations and natural disasters on Earth - everything from volcanic flows in Iceland to the effects of last summer’s floods in the UK, and the very recent earthquake that rocked Shropshire.

Scientific missions have taken him to Nepal, Taiwan, New Zealand and Morocco. He spent much of 2006 in Pakistan identifying hazards following the 2005 earthquake, and is soon to set sail for Peru to look at ways of averting potential landslide disasters.

But the glamour of NASA spacecraft missions and trying to avert future world disasters is only half the story. That’s just the day job.

Having settled back in Shropshire with his American wife and their three young sons, aged five, three and one, Marko’s military role for the next two years (based at the TA Centre in Dawley Bank) is as officer commanding a squadron of the Royal Mercian and Lancastrian Yeomanry.

Marko, who has also served with the US National Guard, has been a member of the RMLY for the last 10 years, during which he commuted thousands of miles from Washington DC to the Territorial Army Centre in Telford, for training weekends.

He decided to make the arrangement more permanent amid the growing importance of the role of the TA in the British Army today.

“The TA soldier has experienced a revolution in the last five years, from a county focus to having an international role,” he explains.

“I’ve got people who work for the supermarket, for Ironbridge Gorge museums, health-and-safety officers, driving instructors and three who do IT.

“Seventy per cent of my soldiers have been deployed on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and everybody who joins the TA now comes in with the understanding that in all likelihood they will be deployed on operations.

“Everything that is asked of a regular soldier is asked of us. Most of my soldiers are from Telford and for some of them the first time they have left the region is to go to Afghanistan or Iraq - and when they come back from that they are expected to pick up their lives and go back to work.”

Marko is no stranger to action himself, and since he joined the British Army in 1986 he has served as a regular and reserve officer with mechanised infantry, light reconnaissance and armoured regiments in operations around the world.

In 2004 he was deployed to Iraq with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers as a battle group liaison officer overseeing security-sector reform.

His job was to get police and security services in south Basra operating with common intent. And like any soldier, he experienced the bombings and bullets which come with being in that part of the world right now.

Marko even manages to laugh while recalling the story of how he was at a police HQ in Basra when, he says, in strolled “a junior police officer carrying an 155 artillery shell modified with a detonator - otherwise known as a roadside bomb - and asked what he should do with it. These things are a daily occurrence.”

For Marko, being a scientist one minute and a soldier the next is certainly a juggling job, but it’s a situation he wouldn’t swap for the world.

He says: “Monday and Tuesday I’m a scientist, Wednesday I’m a soldier, Thursday I’m a scientist and part of Friday I’m a scientist and the other part I’m a soldier.”

Mission Impossible? Far from it - tell Houston it’s no problem at all.