Should We Settle in Space? - Tim Peake, Kelly Weinersmith and Alan Davies

Speaker 1 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Speaker 3 Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Speaker 6 Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

Speaker 5 In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

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Speaker 15 You're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays, wherever you get your podcasts.
But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now.

Speaker 16 First on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 12 Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 16 And I'm Robin Inks, and we are in the Infinite Monkey Cage, which has just been teleported here to Harwell.

Speaker 15 Teleported.

Speaker 16 Well, actually, it was a four and a half hour journey in the vegetable on a train which had no functioning toilet, and I was stood next to a man who smelt of Dairy Lea.

Speaker 15 It is true, actually, that one of the benefits of teleportation is that you don't need a toilet.

Speaker 12 Don't you? No.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 15 Because it's instant. Right.
But the downside is...

Speaker 12 Hang on, why is that instant? What if I teleport you need a wee?

Speaker 15 No, teleportation is instant. So you can go through a wee before you get in the teleporter.
Right. What if I forgot?

Speaker 15 Shortly afterwards, you'll arrive at the location. Yeah.
So it's fine. The downside is you cease to exist at the point of origin.
So in your case, you'd have been vaporised at Manchester Piccadilly.

Speaker 16 I like vaporised at Manchester Piccadilly. It sounds halfway between Gary Newman and Morrissey, I think, that one.

Speaker 17 Oh, vaporised at Piccadilly Station.

Speaker 16 On a Tuesday, I'll never see Stockport.

Speaker 15 Back in the time of the Smiths, when we were young, we all thought that by the year 2000, we'd be living on the moon.

Speaker 16 This is true.

Speaker 16 If any of you are old enough to remember Space 1999, most wonderful TV show, but like everything in the 1970s, it was basically a public information film that would go, don't live on the moon.

Speaker 16 If you live on the moon in nylon flares, you'll find you'll set fire to a nuclear dump and then live a melancholy existence with a woman who occasionally becomes an eagle.

Speaker 16 Don't wear nylon on the moon.

Speaker 15 But now, as we approach the third decade of the 21st century, finally, it seems like science fiction futures of our youth may become a a reality.

Speaker 15 Within the next decade, there will be commercial space stations. Astronauts will return to the moon, and maybe we'll take our first steps towards Mars and beyond.

Speaker 16 Joining us to discuss the opportunity and risks as our civilization takes its first steps into the cosmic ocean and decides whether the water is inviting,

Speaker 16 we are joined by an astronaut, a Martian architect, and a man who is very probably quite interested in space.

Speaker 12 And they are.

Speaker 14 Hello, I'm British astronaut Tim Peake.

Speaker 14 And the most ridiculous thing that I've heard about Mars is there is a rock which looks like it's got a face on it.

Speaker 14 And some people believe that this face has been carved into the rock by an ancient civilization that used to live on Mars, which is, of course, complete nonsense because it wasn't carved, it was 3D printed.

Speaker 13 I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I'm co-author of A City on Mars and co-host of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 13 And I was reading about whether or not women could have babies on Mars, and there was this idea that maybe our bones and our muscles won't be strong enough when labor kicks in if we've been living at 40% Earth gravity.

Speaker 13 The solution is to sleep in a centrifuge, to give yourself artificial gravity.

Speaker 13 And I don't know how many moms out there couldn't sleep or got sick during their pregnancy, but I'm sure we all would like to be sleeping in centrifuges.

Speaker 12 Hello, I'm Alan Davis. I'm a comedian coming to a town near you soon, I hope.
The Don't make it sound like a threat.

Speaker 12 Yes, leave.

Speaker 12 The most ridiculous thing I've heard about Mars is it has a sister planet called Fun Size.

Speaker 12 It's very, very small and no one knows where it is.

Speaker 16 And this is our panel.

Speaker 15 Now, Tim, to set the scene, a very simple first question, which is why space?

Speaker 14 How long have we got, Brian?

Speaker 14 Why space? Three things.

Speaker 14 Science, inspiration, exploration. So in terms of science, because we can learn so many new things.
We've changed the parameter. We've gone from 1G to 0G.

Speaker 14 And when we start exploring other planets, we'll have different levels of G on those planets. So we learn new things.

Speaker 14 We can do new things like growing disease-causing protein crystals or making metal alloys that we can't make on Earth or printing human organs because there's no crushing force of gravity.

Speaker 14 So these kind of scientific processes could really improve life for everybody on Earth.

Speaker 14 Then there's inspiration, the Apollo effect that the United States benefited from back in the 50s, 60s, 70s as they were going through that program.

Speaker 14 And then there's the true sort of exploration, our innate desire as a human species to find out what's over that next horizon and to go and explore a different planet or a different moon.

Speaker 15 Because, Kelly, it is a a question that is often asked, which is why are we thinking about space, developing space, going into space, when we face the challenges we face here on Earth?

Speaker 13 Yeah, I do feel like people like to pit space against like poverty. And why are we going to space if there's all these problems we still have to solve here on Earth?

Speaker 13 I guess to be honest, I'm a bit of a cynic. I see no reason to think that if we stop doing space, we'll solve poverty.
I think we could solve poverty if we wanted. And space does give us a lot.

Speaker 13 You know, I use Starlink. I live out in the middle of nowhere in Rural Virginia.
Starlink is the only way my kids could get internet access to go to school during the pandemic.

Speaker 13 And so I think there's plenty of economic and like awesome and inspirational reasons to go.

Speaker 13 And I don't think we need to think of it as pitting ourselves against other things when there's so much to learn out there.

Speaker 15 Everybody uses a great deal of space technology every day. Yeah.
Without necessarily noticing it's become a central part of our lives.

Speaker 13 Yeah, when you use a credit card, you're communicating with satellites. When you move around a city, your GPS, your phone is connecting to satellites.

Speaker 13 I saw a stat that we use, we connect with satellites something like 20 to 30 times every single day. So much of our economy is linked to satellites, and so we're intimately tied to space already.

Speaker 16 So, Alan, what we've discovered there is if we use a map and we've got cash, we don't need space. So,

Speaker 12 what's your general, your first, because I think it is, as Kelly was saying, sometimes you do think, you know, well, why are we spending this money going in that direction when we're doing so little down here but ultimately are there not enough humans who have enough empathy to want to change the world anyway wherever the money goes well the best argument i've heard for leaving earth is that it won't always be here but i think if earth disappears so does mars right so we've got to go a lot further and that then i read that when voyager left the solar system the next galaxy it was going to reach was 40 000 years away and i thought oh no we're stuck we may as well just go here the next let's so it's it's really far.

Speaker 12 So we need to invent sleeping, long-term sleeping, cryo chambers, you know, that sort of thing. And

Speaker 12 that's probably the first priority.

Speaker 12 For the moment, it's quite hard to get up the M1, never mind.

Speaker 16 Were you someone who kind of would have, as a kid, thought, oh, it's going to be amazing. We're going to live in space.

Speaker 16 Like beforehand, when we started this show, I was just talking about how Brian Blessed, when he came on, he really was angry that we hadn't been to Mars because when he was growing up, he saw these pictures and he was reading, you know, astounding tales and they were saying we're gonna be on Mars by you know the 1960s or the 1970s.

Speaker 12 Well I think all of our ideas of space were spoiled by Star Trek because it looked like everywhere you went you could just get out and walk about and everyone would talk to you and then I read that novel The Martian and it turns out that Mars is awful.

Speaker 12 I mean awful. It's freezing cold.
You can't see anything. There are dust storms.
There's nothing to eat.

Speaker 12 You've got to plant potatoes in your own poo and you've got to take your own potatoes in the first place. It'll take you five five years to get there, you can't get back.

Speaker 12 So it seems like a terrible idea to me.

Speaker 15 I'll just say, you've always got to take your own potatoes, haven't you? You can't,

Speaker 15 even on Earth, you can't just.

Speaker 12 There's not even a corner shop. There's always a corner shop.

Speaker 16 I've never seen you take your own potatoes, Brian. You've always got a little man running behind you with a sack.

Speaker 12 Someone does it.

Speaker 15 Tim, if we start in Earth orbit, could you characterise what we have currently done in Earth orbit and and how it's used here on Earth?

Speaker 14 Yes, so in Earth orbit, which isn't that far away, space we officially classify as 100 kilometers at the Kármán line. Beyond that, you're into space.

Speaker 14 And in orbit, we have a number of communication satellites, obviously. We've mentioned all the kind of ways in which space touches your daily life.

Speaker 14 But in terms of building a space station, actually humans kind of settling in space, if you like, we have had a number of space stations.

Speaker 14 The Mir space station was very successful as an early space station, and that paved the way for the International Space Station, which has been permanently occupied since the year 2000 and has been doing remarkable research.

Speaker 14 And now that the ISS is creaking and leaking a little bit, it's coming to the end of its life, we're looking at a number of commercial space stations to take over from that.

Speaker 14 And I should also mention, of course, the Chinese space station has been in orbit for the past few years as well.

Speaker 15 And although there's a lot up there, what is it? What's the number, 30-odd thousand plus currently?

Speaker 14 We've got about 11,500 satellites currently, but we will be about 30,000 satellites by the end of this decade. So it's growing exponentially.

Speaker 14 When I joined the space agency back in 2009, there were just 900 satellites. So

Speaker 14 it's quite a large increase in a short space of time.

Speaker 15 So does it feel crowded up there?

Speaker 14 No, because space is a big place, isn't it? We've been saying how far it is that Voyager will travel to the next star system.

Speaker 14 And when you think about geostationary orbit, that's the orbit where if you place a satellite in geostationary, it'll stay over the same spot on Earth.

Speaker 14 So it rotates once every 24 hours along with the planet. So between here and geostationary, it's 36,000 kilometers.
So that's a large volume there.

Speaker 15 But what is driving that increase in the number of satellites?

Speaker 14 Technology and cost. Miniaturization has meant we can build interesting satellites that are smaller and lighter and cheaper.

Speaker 14 And reusing parts of the spacecraft, so SpaceX, I mean, they brought down the cost of access to space by a vast sum.

Speaker 14 I mean from $57,000 a kilogram to low Earth orbit on the shuttle to $1,500 on the Falcon Heavy today. So that's why we now have the greater access to space.

Speaker 16 Alan, we're here in Harwell under the most incredible piece of art, which is basically a representation, 3D representation of the moon by Luke Jeram.

Speaker 16 What I'd like to know from you is, have you ever done a gig in a room this dark with the giant giant moon inside it? Because I really am beginning to get quite freaked out by the entire thing.

Speaker 16 Actually, what is the weirdest gig that you've the weirdest room you've ever done a gig in?

Speaker 12 I don't know.

Speaker 12 I had a terrible gig in a nightclub in Basildon.

Speaker 15 If we said, right, that your next gig is on the International Space Station, would you go?

Speaker 12 Yes. I'd like the idea of being there, of visiting.
You know, I'm very like Katy Perry in that regard.

Speaker 12 It's one of many similarities between Katie and I.

Speaker 15 Because many people that I speak to, because I would love to go into space.

Speaker 12 Many people aren't.

Speaker 16 SpaceX is quite roomy.

Speaker 14 I think you'd be fine, Brian.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I'd be alright in the dragon.

Speaker 15 But would you have any nerves?

Speaker 15 I want to go up there.

Speaker 12 It would be a silly way to die, wouldn't it?

Speaker 12 I mean, because completely pointless. I've got nothing to offer up there.

Speaker 15 Why would you want to?

Speaker 12 I mean, I think the first people who wanted to go were just curious, weren't they?

Speaker 12 I remember reading about Apollo astronauts wondering if they were going to see God or not, you know, and what would the Earth look like, and how would they feel and how would it affect them?

Speaker 12 And there was only so many accurate guesses that could be made initially. I mean, really, it's very primitive in the 50s and 60s when they were making these plans.

Speaker 12 I know, for example, I've done some scuba diving.

Speaker 12 And when they first invented scuba tanks and sent divers down, they used US Navy divers and sent them further and further to see exactly when they got the bends.

Speaker 12 And made people quite ill, but developed quite sophisticated charts as a consequence. And it felt a little bit like those early people strapped to the tips of rockets were similar things.

Speaker 12 They were kind of, you were a test pilot, Tim, right? There must be a time when they're putting you in, going, it'll be fine, Tim. Don't worry.

Speaker 12 But the Soyuz.

Speaker 15 The Soyuz is basically a 1960s bit of kit, isn't it?

Speaker 14 It is. It is.
I think, you know, thanks to some of those early cosmonauts who paved the way to make that vehicle as good as it is. They haven't changed much.

Speaker 14 You know, if it ain't broke, then don't fix it.

Speaker 14 We were flying a spacecraft that really had just had some glass cockpits in their bit of software, but ultimately, most of the hardware was all the same.

Speaker 2 I love that.

Speaker 16 If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it is broke, fix it really quickly, or you'll be sucked into the vacuum of space.
That's a good way of living your life.

Speaker 16 Also, I like your when you said that bit about being strapped at the tip of the rocket, for a moment I was imagining that you thought they were on the outside, not the inside.

Speaker 15 Would you take the opportunity?

Speaker 12 Can't we go in that room?

Speaker 13 It depends on how long I'd be up there. So, you know, when you first get up there, you often feel queasy, and I'm guessing I am the kind of person who would feel queasy.

Speaker 13 So if I could stay up for a couple weeks and get over that queasy bit, yeah, I'd go up and do some experiments or something. I don't want to go to Mars, but I'll go to the ISS.

Speaker 15 So how long did you spend in space, Tim? Six months. So how much do we know now about what happens to the human body?

Speaker 14 We know quite a lot now. We subsequently had quite a few astronauts and cosmonauts spending a year in Space Plus.
So we've learned a lot about the human body.

Speaker 14 how it changes and how to stop some of those changes from happening by good exercise and good nutrition.

Speaker 14 So when it comes to traveling further afield, space agencies are pretty confident that a Mars mission isn't going to raise too many problems that we don't already know how to deal with.

Speaker 15 I suppose one question before we move outwards is what role humans need to play in that economy, in that ecosystem.

Speaker 15 I suppose you could argue that we can have all those functions, the Earth observation and the communication satellites and even fixing satellites and so on, refueling them without a human presence there.

Speaker 14 I think that's a really reasonable thing to say.

Speaker 14 And as we're starting to think of things that we thought were science fiction, and actually, because of the costs coming down, they're actually within our grasp within the next kind of 10 to 15 years.

Speaker 14 I'm thinking large-scale solar farms, for example, one to two kilometers in scale, beaming down solar energy using microwaves.

Speaker 14 Now, you can think about manufacturing that kind of thing using robotics in space. And so, human construction of these installations isn't necessary.

Speaker 14 So, I think the interesting thing is that low Earth orbit now becomes more of a tourist destination potentially.

Speaker 13 It's really hard to follow up after an astronaut.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think there's a lot of things that the robots could be doing in space.
And I don't think we need humans in space to do a lot of things.

Speaker 13 But I'm seeing space tourism expand rapidly. And I think we're going to keep seeing that.
And I think we will see, you know, rotating space stations where we've got science experiments going on.

Speaker 13 And I think we'll send people there because it's awesome. And I feel like that's the motivation for a lot of people.

Speaker 13 They get into this because space is awesome and they want to go and they'll find a way to get there.

Speaker 16 So when you say space tourism expanding, what do we mean by space tourism? Because at the moment it seems to be you just go high quickly, look out of the window and then you come back.

Speaker 16 And if you're William Shatner, you go, oh, it's not gone down very well with me at all. I feel all sad.

Speaker 16 Which is, you know, you spend a lot of money on that. I mean, we've all had holidays like that, but that one's even shorter than normal, isn't it?

Speaker 13 Yeah, so the suborbital launches, there is a bit of a debate about whether or not that should count as going to space. I don't think that's a particularly interesting debate.

Speaker 13 They have a really nice view and they really enjoy it. They're getting what they want out of it.

Speaker 13 But I think there's more tourists who are also paying to go up to the International Space Station or orbit the Earth, and they have way more money than I will ever have.

Speaker 13 But they might be facilitating over time the drop in the cost of going to space.

Speaker 13 So maybe, you know, right now the super extra ultra-rich can go, but maybe it'll be the super rich that are going in a decade.

Speaker 13 And I don't know, maybe that's good that we're expanding the people who can get out.

Speaker 3 Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Speaker 6 Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

Speaker 5 In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Speaker 10 Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 12 Want to stop engine problems before they start? Pick up a can of C-Foam Motor Treatment. C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Speaker 12 Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine. Just pour it in your fuel tank.

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Speaker 12 Available everywhere, automotive products are sold.

Speaker 12 Seafoam!

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Speaker 15 How difficult is it to make the next step? I mean, for the radio listeners and the podcast listeners, we're sat below a giant moon, which is quite spectacular hanging from the roof of this room.

Speaker 15 So, I suppose the natural next step is the moon. How much more difficult is that?

Speaker 14 Well, we've done it once already, to anybody who doubts that. I promise you, we have done it once already.
And so, to do it again, it's not insurmountable.

Speaker 14 In terms of technology, of course, we have the technology.

Speaker 14 What we now have is political will from a number of different countries who've all signed up to the Artemis program to actually invest and go and do this in a sustainable way with a view of having a research facility at the south pole of the moon that hopefully at some point will be permanently occupied.

Speaker 14 So that's the difference between this Artemis program and the Apollo program.

Speaker 15 And why, Kelly? What is the rationale? How would you make the case for the moon?

Speaker 13 I mean, there's loads of interesting scientific questions. You know, we think the moon used to be a chunk of earth that got knocked off.
And so by studying the moon, we can learn more about the earth.

Speaker 13 But there's a lot of experiments that we could be doing. So if if we go to the South Pole, for example, we could be trying to extract some of the water ice that's in the craters there.

Speaker 13 But what we want to do when we're there could be really complicated. The moon is a very difficult environment.
It's a hard vacuum. So, if you go outside, you're in a lot of trouble.

Speaker 13 But there's all these little things about the moon that are different and complicated. Like the regolith on the surface is very sharp.

Speaker 13 And so, there's some concerns that if it gets back in the habitat and you breathe it in, it could scar your lungs and give you problems like that.

Speaker 13 And if we decide that we want to, for example, learn how to grow plants on the moon because we want to prepare for going to Mars, the moon has some carbon, but it's very carbon-poor.

Speaker 13 And we're carbon-based life forms that eat carbon-based life forms.

Speaker 13 And I think the most concentrated sources of carbon on the moon are probably the bags of feces and vomit left behind by the Apollo astronauts.

Speaker 13 And I think those are NASA heritage items. They don't want you to plant potatoes in them.

Speaker 13 So it's going to be a harsh environment to work on, but there's lots of cool questions we can ask while we're out there.

Speaker 16 And how do you feel, Ellen? Do you feel happier about the idea we're going to send you to to the moon now, that you don't have to plant your potatoes in other people's feces and sick?

Speaker 16 Or do you feel let down?

Speaker 15 You're not allowed to plant your potatoes in other people's feces.

Speaker 12 Who's going to tell?

Speaker 16 I'll take a grow bag.

Speaker 12 Is that the worst idea of it?

Speaker 15 You mentioned the South Pole. Why is it the South Pole that's the target?

Speaker 14 Well, Kelly, you mentioned there water ice. Where you've got water, it makes habitation easier.
You can split that hydrogen and oxygen for your atmosphere. You can have water to drink.

Speaker 14 You can make rocket fuel for your future missions, for example. And also minerals.

Speaker 14 We have had some rovers now exploring that region, and we're looking for what kind of rare earth metals, for example, what minerals could be useful, helium-3 as a potential future source of energy for fusion, for example.

Speaker 14 So these are the kind of things that we want to find out about the South Pole.

Speaker 15 I feel like I want to keep asking you. So we've got the low Earth orbit, and I share your view that I would love to go, even on one of the suborbital flights, I'd love to see the Earth from space.

Speaker 15 What about the Moon though? Because this becomes a whole different commitment, perhaps a different level of risk and so on.

Speaker 15 So if I said to you, right, the first moon base is there at the South Pole, do a gig at the South Pole of the Moon.

Speaker 12 They'll need entertainment.

Speaker 12 I suppose they could probably get all the sports channels. I mean, the satellites are right outside the door.

Speaker 12 I mean, I just think everything about,

Speaker 12 I'm sitting looking at Tim here and I'm thinking, Tim did this. He went in the rocket.
What a ride.

Speaker 15 You know, know isn't it a relaxing isn't it relaxing just like taking off from heathrow or is it a bit more it's a bit it's a bit more exciting

Speaker 14 it's relaxing once you get there actually it's the ride back home that's that's the worst that's where the spacecraft kind of blows itself into three bits and it gets a little bit warm outside the g-forces are higher and stronger and then the parachute's open and that's quite uncomfortable for half a minute or so so coming back to earth is still you know it's a bit of a roller coaster I've got to say, one of the best, because I was at my son's school and there was a special day.

Speaker 12 I think it was

Speaker 16 a Saturday you came back. I can't remember, but it was anyway.
There was an open day and it was a lovely, sunny day.

Speaker 16 And one of the things that most impressed me was how Chris Hadfield filled the airtime when what you're really saying is still coming back at the moment, roughly the same thing, still coming back.

Speaker 16 He's going to be coming back for a while. And he just managed to fill it with so many little details.
It was like watching the home shopping channel, but NASA-based.

Speaker 15 So it seems you both share the view that it's likely that we'll be back on the moon with a presumably a permanent settlement. Where would you estimate we would be? 10 years, 20 years?

Speaker 13 I think it's really hard to estimate, so I'm wiggling out of that question a little bit. So I think it has to do a lot with political will.

Speaker 13 So for example, if getting back to the moon kicks off a really strong space race part two between the U.S. and China, I can imagine us making sure we get there really fast and staying on a timeline.

Speaker 13 I imagine we could be there pretty soon if we decided we really wanted to.

Speaker 14 If you look at what's happening in the short term, Artemis II is scheduled to launch next year.

Speaker 14 Four crew training on that, on the Orion spacecraft, on SLS rocket, to test out the orbits and the Orion.

Speaker 14 And then at the moment, 2027 is Artemis III, which is boots back on the surface of the moon again. Still, these are exploratory missions.

Speaker 15 So Artemis II is an Apollo 8 style orbiting.

Speaker 14 It's an Apollo 8 style in a different orbit, obviously, not equatorial, looking at a polar orbit.

Speaker 14 But Artemis III is the moment when you know generations are going to be watching those images coming back from the surface of the moon in full colour, high definition.

Speaker 14 It's going to be quite incredible. And that will be a significant moment, I think, for so many of us who didn't get to watch that the first time around.

Speaker 14 And then after that, the pace of the missions, I think, will depend, as Kelly says, on political will, on the Artemis program, on technology to an extent. What will the Chinese be doing?

Speaker 14 And what will commercial companies be doing? If funding and political will starts to fall down, will somebody like Elon Musk just say, well, I didn't build Starship for the moon anyway.

Speaker 14 I built Starship for Mars and I'm going to go there with or without NASA.

Speaker 14 So that's what's going to be really interesting to see how that sort of shapes out over the next 10, 15 years.

Speaker 13 You said the word settlement, which to me implies you're having families there and that you're having children who live there and go on to have children.

Speaker 15 A base.

Speaker 13 Oh, a base. Okay, yeah.
I feel like settlements is way farther off.

Speaker 13 We have learned a lot in our 50 years of having space stations orbiting the Earth, but we haven't really learned what we need to know to live on the moon or Mars.

Speaker 13 So we're protected largely by the magnetosphere on the International Space Station.

Speaker 13 So we don't have a great handle on how space radiation impacts cancer, and that kind of radiation is different than the kind of radiation we encounter here on Earth.

Speaker 13 And we know that having no gravity and being in free fall is bad for things like bones and muscles and vision, but the moon has one-sixth of that gravity.

Speaker 13 And maybe that makes most of those problems go away, away, especially if you're exercising and you have the right diet and you're taking some of the countermeasures that we know about from our time on the International Space Station.

Speaker 13 But I think feeling confident enough to have babies in space would require a lot more data, and we haven't even had rodents go through the whole process of reproduction in space.

Speaker 13 So I think we've got a lot of work to do before you actually.

Speaker 12 I'm still waiting, really help me, for rodents to build rockets. Yeah.

Speaker 16 Turns out pandas make rockets, and it's only gravity that's been slowing them down in terms of having sex because they're not keen are they?

Speaker 16 But imagine if we find out if you send pandas to the moon, you go, there's about a population, about 2,000 of them now, they won't stop doing it.

Speaker 12 Wow, that'd be great.

Speaker 12 Very cute.

Speaker 15 I was sort of assuming, I suppose, that you're on the space station, we've got a lot of data about the way that the human body functions in low Earth orbit, long duration.

Speaker 15 But the moon is a radically different environment, not only gravitationally, but in terms of radiation as well.

Speaker 15 So does that imply that we really have to redo this whole program of research again with humans spending long months and even years on the moon?

Speaker 14 Yes, to a degree. We don't know what a low-gravity environment is like for the human body.
How much is helpful?

Speaker 14 Is one sixth enough with a bit of exercise to really make it so much easier to live and work without those sort of negative effects of microgravity as we experience on the International Space Station.

Speaker 13 Most of the proposals that I've seen for life on the moon or Mars involve burying ourselves under a couple meters of that horrible regolith that I was talking about as a radiation shield.

Speaker 13 And when it comes to babies, we have had some rodents in space having sex. We've had geckos and all kinds of animals up there.

Speaker 13 But I think in general, we're sort of squeamish about questions related to this. So there hasn't been a very strong, consistent program to try to get a good handle on reproduction in space.

Speaker 13 So yes, I think when we get to the moon, there's a lot of stuff we'd need to start from the beginning.

Speaker 15 Did we send them up to have sex? Or did we just catch them at it?

Speaker 12 When we opened the cage?

Speaker 13 I mean it would be fun to be running that lab on the moon.

Speaker 16 Alan, are there other experiments now that we're talking about these animal sex experiments? What are you thinking in terms of the experiments you'd like to?

Speaker 12 Well I just feel like you're going to need a really, really big, probably centrifugal. I read a science fiction novel like this when it had a centrifugal

Speaker 12 spaceship so it created its own gravity and that it was enormous and you can replicate the Earth's atmosphere inside it and then off you go in that cylinder for years.

Speaker 12 And the people that initially, for the first 50 years, they die, get jettisoned, or eaten, or turned into fertilizer, and the next generation take the ship on.

Speaker 12 And that's the only way you can get really far is by humans reproducing in a cylinder over thousands of years. I guess that's not in the planning at the moment.
I suppose at the moment

Speaker 12 it's some sort of clipped together flooring, laminate, probably. Basic furnishings, I imagine.
Basic furnishings.

Speaker 12 It's in a rudimentary environment. Not unlike being a student in halls.

Speaker 12 And what about psychologically as well?

Speaker 16 Because we've been talking about the radiation section, but obviously we know it's an incredibly long journey to Mars. You know, for you, how are long journeys generally?

Speaker 16 You know, are you someone who you think, you know, I can handle that?

Speaker 12 Well, you need to be like the guy in close encounters who goes with them at the end. Like he's burnt all his bridges on Earth, hasn't he? And his family's saying, yeah, go.

Speaker 12 And if your family's saying, yeah, go, dad.

Speaker 12 But at the moment, there are quite a lot of ties here on Earth.

Speaker 15 So are you implying that essentially to be a successful astronaut, you have to be tremendously unpopular?

Speaker 12 Well, to be the point of that.

Speaker 14 That's what our selection criteria is all about.

Speaker 15 This does bring us naturally, Kelly, to the next step. Your book, City on Mars.
So Earth orbit, the Moon, relatively close to the Earth, you know, a few days' journey, and so on.

Speaker 15 Mars, a completely different idea, but the one that is probably in everybody's consciousness at the moment, partly because of SpaceX and they're designing these spacecrafts.

Speaker 15 So, could you describe how big a difference it is going to Mars from going, let's say, to the Moon?

Speaker 13 Oh my gosh, such a big difference. Yeah, so Musk is saying he's going to have a million people on the surface of Mars in the next 30 years.

Speaker 13 To get there, it's a six-month journey with current propulsion techniques, and you can't just leave at any time. So, Earth and Mars are traveling around the Sun, but they're not traveling together.

Speaker 13 So you have to wait until they're sort of in the right positions where if you leave the Earth, you're going to shorten the distance it takes to get to Mars.

Speaker 13 And that window only opens up every two years. So it's six months to get there, then you're stuck there for over a year, and it's about six months to get back.

Speaker 13 It's so far away that the minimum communication delay is three minutes, and there's a maximum of about 20 to 22 minutes. So if you have a problem on Mars, you can't call and get live advice back home.

Speaker 13 So you're much more on your own than you would be on the moon where communication is near live. There's a little bit of a delay, but you can ignore it.
Mars is a really harsh environment.

Speaker 13 It has 1% of the atmosphere we have here on Earth, which means you still need a spacesuit to walk around on the surface, and that's not really enough to protect you from radiation.

Speaker 13 So again, you're probably going to be living underground. There's some proposals for living in lava tubes or caves, which sounds like kind of epic, but I think I'd get depressed pretty quickly.

Speaker 13 And then you also have to worry about that regolith and breathing it in. But on Mars, it has this added difficulty where there's also perchlorates in there.

Speaker 13 So these are endocrine disrupting chemicals that mess with the hormones your thyroid makes.

Speaker 13 And your thyroid is making hormones that controls your temperature, your heart rate, and brain development in fetuses.

Speaker 13 And we know that if you grow plants in dirt that has perchlorates, the plants will take that dirt up. And so you could be eating it if you're trying to garden in it, for example.

Speaker 13 There's ways to get it out, but just about everything that you would do on Mars would be a real pain in the rear end. And I've talked to plenty of people who don't care.

Speaker 13 They tell me that I can't stop them. They're going there anyway.
I was never trying to stop them. I don't know why they think I have any power there.

Speaker 13 But they'll tell you, I would be happy to die on the surface of Mars, and I hope we get good data. But it's a very harsh environment.

Speaker 16 What do you think it is, Alan, about this desire to explore?

Speaker 16 When I think in many ways, and I know we've talked about it before in the show, when we think about how much remains unexplored on this planet alone.

Speaker 16 You know, that desire of going, I have to get to Mars.

Speaker 12 Well, it's got a romantic image, hasn't it? It's the red planet. We've all seen it in the sky.
There's loads of films about it. Martians have been here, apparently.
It's been on the radio.

Speaker 12 So, but the practicalities are obviously, they're seemingly not insurmountable.

Speaker 12 Then you see, I saw one little short film about how they would create, using hopefully the water that's on the planet, create an atmosphere on Mars.

Speaker 12 And then they did an animation of Mars turning green as humans turned it into a habitable environment with the application of science. It's very convincing.

Speaker 13 Well, I'd say Mars sucks, but it sucks way less than just about anywhere else in space. Like it's got water, it's got a lot of the building blocks you need for life.

Speaker 13 It has a 24-ish-hour day-night cycle, so very much like what we have here. And at the equator at the right time of year, it's almost room temperature.

Speaker 13 So it's kind of Earth-like in a lot of ways, but it'll still be difficult.

Speaker 15 I agree with that completely. If we don't go there, we'll never go anywhere.
Yeah. It's the only planet we can go, conceivably.

Speaker 12 And there are plenty of places on Earth we can't go. We live on small little bits of our own planet.

Speaker 12 So the idea that you'd go to Mars and you could only live in a strip around the equator, that's okay.

Speaker 15 Tim, the only plan at the moment is SpaceX's plan with Starship. There are many different opinions on the timeline.

Speaker 15 But from your perspective, what what would be a realistic timeline do you feel for the first landing on Mars?

Speaker 14 Well NASA have uh looking at kind of late twenty thirties as is what they've publicly advertised as that kind of mission time frame that could be brought forward, driven by commercial companies who want to get there faster and do things more quickly.

Speaker 14 But I wouldn't expect to see a mission to Mars this decade, but by the end of the 2030s, we really could see humans on the surface of Mars, even if just for a very short mission there and back.

Speaker 15 So, would you be disappointed if we weren't there by the end of the 2030s?

Speaker 14 I wouldn't be necessarily disappointed,

Speaker 14 depending on what we're doing on the moon, moon, because I think that's quite exciting. And if we've got the research laboratory, then Mars can wait.
You know, we'll get there in good time.

Speaker 15 And is it inevitable, do you think, that once we've been there, then this idea of a city,

Speaker 15 how do you see that unfolding?

Speaker 13 I don't know that it's inevitable. I think there's a good chance we get there and then we don't stay.

Speaker 13 And I think one of the problems is that we don't have a really good economic case for a settlement on Mars.

Speaker 13 Mars doesn't really have anything that would be worth worth going all the way out there to collect and then bring back to Earth.

Speaker 13 And the proposals that I've seen involved things like, well, we can do a reality TV show, and that will fund the settlement. But, you know, for the Apollo missions, everyone tuned in to Apollo 11.

Speaker 13 By Apollo 12, people were paying less attention, and Apollo 13 had really low ratings until the oxygen canister burst. And then people were tuning in again.

Speaker 13 And so I don't know that people would want to watch a reality TV show on Mars unless you had really interesting characters.

Speaker 13 And so, yeah, I don't know what the financial case is to sustain a a settlement.

Speaker 14 I mean, it's hard to see, and we've still got a lot to learn. I think there's a scientific case for Mars, definitely.

Speaker 14 And I think those first missions, yes, and a small research module on Mars, I can see that happening. And then it will be a case of, okay, is there a commercial case that follows on?

Speaker 14 Or is there political will? Is it going to be scientifically driven that will continue to have these missions sustained on Mars?

Speaker 15 So, Alan, I should carry on this theme of asking you. So, you said yes to a suborbital flight, yes to an orbital flight, yes to the space station, yes to the moon,

Speaker 15 one-way trip to Mars.

Speaker 12 Well, it would take a pretty serious pandemic on Earth to get me to the launch path.

Speaker 12 You did say that, don't ask them. But

Speaker 15 do you understand it though? Semi-sort of serious question. I suppose it's often described as the settlers who went out and crossed oceans in our past without knowing where the destination was.

Speaker 15 Are you that kind of person? Because there are people who are that kind of person. Obviously, there were in our history that got on a boat.

Speaker 12 Forget the war.

Speaker 12 What pushed a lot of people to go was terrible poverty where they were living.

Speaker 12 It would be a desperate situation on Earth for a larger number of people to want to upsticks and move to an inhospitable planet, although they could make a very nice brochure about it.

Speaker 12 Very convincing. Humans are very susceptible to promotion and PR.

Speaker 12 Look at the roomy room and the view of the, you know, don't mention the temperature or the chemicals or anything else. But it's kind of depends how life is here.

Speaker 12 Although I don't think it's an either-or, let's go and explore space and the planets and the moon and neglect our own planet.

Speaker 12 We do need to think at the same time about how we can apply perhaps what we learn to improving our treatment of the planet.

Speaker 13 Yeah, one thing that really struck me while I was researching this book is how great the Earth is. And it's hard for me to imagine anything we could do to the Earth that would make it as bad as Mars.

Speaker 13 Like, Mars is really rough.

Speaker 13 And, you know, when you were, when, you know, people were escaping religious persecution and going to the United States, they were in New Jersey, which like a lot of people don't love, but New Jersey had like deer that you can eat and flowing water that you can drink.

Speaker 13 And you don't step outside and immediately like die because the nitrogen boils out of your blood. So Earth has like a lot of things going for it.

Speaker 13 And I think it's hard for me to imagine escaping Earth and going to Mars. I can imagine long-term planning where you set up a settlement on Mars.

Speaker 13 That could be a plan B if, like, hundreds and thousands of years from now, something happens to Earth.

Speaker 13 But I think for the foreseeable future, if something bad happens to Earth, the people living on Mars are toast as well, because they're going to need resupply from this amazing planet we have here.

Speaker 16 There's a lot of questions we didn't get to because I couldn't read them because of the dark. So, Alan, what do you think are some of the challenges of operating machinery on Mars?

Speaker 12 I think,

Speaker 12 that all the machinery is going to be operated by robots, right? I think, you know, I mean, we're sending drones to deliver pizzas now, aren't we? I think that's surely the plan.

Speaker 12 And also, I mean, what about Alan?

Speaker 16 Do you feel that the space law we've got now is good enough,

Speaker 16 or do you think we need to change it?

Speaker 12 Do you think it'd be a bit like the Wild West? We're going to have to send a sheriff up there.

Speaker 15 I do want to just pick that up because we focused on the technological difficulties. How would you imagine the management or

Speaker 15 these outposts of civilization? How, in our wildest dreams, how do those things develop?

Speaker 13 Yeah, so we're still trying to figure some of that stuff out. So the 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that you can't claim sovereignty over anything in space.

Speaker 13 So, you know, Elon Musk says in his Starlink Terms of Service that he's going to start a nation on Mars and that they're not going to have to answer to Earth-based law.

Speaker 13 But according to international law, the people who go to space are still the responsibility of some nation. And so if Musk does start a settlement, the way it's managed should be consistent with U.S.

Speaker 13 law. And so if you had a Chinese settlement, that would probably be consistent with Chinese law.
But it's going to be really hard to police what people are doing out there.

Speaker 13 And because of that communication delay we were talking about, you need people who can make decisions right at that moment.

Speaker 13 And I don't think we've had enough discussions right now to figure out what will punishment look like on Mars, because that's going to be a difficult problem.

Speaker 13 That's what everybody says when I talk about punishment. They're like, like, oh, you kick them out the airlock.
But, you know, presumably you'd like to have some other options for minor infractions.

Speaker 13 But, you know, we need to figure out the system for that. And we don't really know yet.
And so I think there's a lot of work that still needs to get done. But it's fascinating.

Speaker 13 Like, imagine being the people

Speaker 13 figuring out the rules to govern the first settlements in space. Like, what a cool time to be working in international law.

Speaker 12 Yeah, remember

Speaker 14 it's quite interesting on the space station. If you commit a crime in the Japanese segment, you can be tried under Japanese law, float into the US segment and commit the same crime.

Speaker 14 You can be tried under US law. So it depends on which module you're in that has jurisdiction.

Speaker 15 You think that they're going to steal someone's biscuits?

Speaker 12 What's

Speaker 12 the best place to do it?

Speaker 14 But it does. It opens up so many questions about all these legal frameworks that have been built up over so many years here on Earth, and Mars is a fresh planet.

Speaker 14 At what point will the Mars colony break away and become independent?

Speaker 16 And also, thank you, Kelly, because one of the complaints we often get from Radio 4 listeners is people who are really into S SM and feel that we don't inspire them enough.

Speaker 12 And I think your just what will punishment look like on Mars is going to lead some really great role play this weekend for a few people in the Droit Witch area.

Speaker 13 I'm glad I could help with that.

Speaker 12 Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 13 Yeah, those are my people.

Speaker 16 What do you think punishment would look like on Mars?

Speaker 12 I think people would be required to write 100 lines. No one talks to you.
You get sent to Coventry.

Speaker 13 There have been a bunch of... So communes are a model for life in space that you hear a lot of the space settlement community talk about.

Speaker 13 And in those communities, shunning is actually a main way that they get people to behave. So they don't have prisons.
Maybe shunning will be how we punish people in space.

Speaker 16 Or eating the raw potato, freshly picked out.

Speaker 15 I'd hope to finish this in some kind of inspirational and educational way.

Speaker 12 We seem to have finished this.

Speaker 14 We always dub a bit later on where you go to explore space.

Speaker 16 The wonder of touching starlight. You know, we always have that thing at the end.

Speaker 16 No, I know, but that's why I deliberately did the impression with you being factually inaccurate. Apparently, it's affecting your sales.

Speaker 15 But we asked the audience a question.

Speaker 16 This is even better than the script, right? Because the light is blue. The pens you've used are blue.
The likelihood of us being able to read them out. So here we go.

Speaker 12 What did we ask them, Brian?

Speaker 15 We asked, what would you take to occupy your time on a journey to Mars?

Speaker 12 There's one here from someone called Kat who says, a truckload of Brzeco and a a karaoke machine. I'm assuming the geeks will bring sensible stuff.

Speaker 16 Cat, that is your answer to everything.

Speaker 15 Noise canceled earphones in case there's a baby on board.

Speaker 16 Brian Cox, so he can lull me to sleep with his treacle voice for the long journey, and so I can have sweet D-reams.

Speaker 12 What you got there? Chris Fuller says they take an IKEA self-assembly shelf system. Very practical.

Speaker 15 This is a better one, like teach yourself rocket maintenance.

Speaker 15 Do you remember that? I remember,

Speaker 15 I think it's in Norman Mailer's book about the Apollo programme when they were asking Buzz Aldrin in particular, your last few minutes on the moon, if the engine had failed, how would you spend your last few moments?

Speaker 15 And he said, fixing the engine.

Speaker 16 Well, thank you very much to our fantastic panel, Tim Peak, Kelly Wooney Smith, and Alan Davis.

Speaker 16 Next week, we will be asking how you can create the perfect athlete.

Speaker 12 You're asking for a friend, right?

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Do you think Robin would make a good astronaut?

Speaker 14 I think he'd be a brilliant astronaut, yeah. As long as you could kinda just go to your crew quarter, you know, where you go away from every perhaps five minutes every hour and just have a break.

Speaker 14 No one could shun Robbie and he'd wake us up with a Brian Blessed voice every morning.

Speaker 12 oh that would be great wouldn't it come on let's go look at earth see what they're doing down there every

Speaker 12 month the fools i'll crush them every morning for eight months the same joke

Speaker 12 good night

Speaker 12 in the infinite monkey cage

Speaker 1 again hi greg hi greg hi greg i'm greg furtz and my bbc radio 4 show Sliced Bread is back to investigate more of your suggested wonder products and find out if the latest fads really deliver on their bold claims.

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