Brits in Space

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Hello, welcome to the Infinite Month Cage podcast.

This is the podcast which is slightly longer, or sometimes actually very much longer than the version you may have heard on Radio 4.

And for purposes of balance, quite soon we're actually going to be using the podcast to bring out much, much shorter versions, like about seven minutes, which are very much the best of what happened in our conversation about ravens or quantum cosmology.

I can't let you say anything.

Can I, Brian?

Can I say something?

No, no, no, no, it's fine.

Anyway, listen.

Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox.

In the last couple of years, many people have considered leaving the country.

But we're more ambitious than that.

We've decided to become Martians.

But what skills will we need to take the monkey cage into space?

Now, to be an astronaut, you need three things in particular, which is, I would say, peak physical fitness, peak mental agility, and highly absorbent underwear.

And I have at least one of those things.

And I, Brian, shut up.

I am very good at doing puzzles.

And in fact, I can do the Times crossword, I would say, in under an hour.

And if it takes more than an hour, it doesn't matter.

I don't have to leave my armchair because of the.

Anyway, look, so you

today we ask what does it take to be an astronaut and what lies ahead for human spaceflight?

We're joined by two astronauts and for balance, someone who isn't.

And they are.

Hello, I'm Tim Peake.

I'm a European Space Agency astronaut, and the most surprising thing that I experienced in space was seeing some lights flying in formation past the cupola window and then discovering that it was Russian urine leaking from the ISS.

Hello, I'm Helen Sharman.

I'm the first British astronaut, scientist, science communicator, not in that order.

And the most surprising thing I experienced in space was a power cut.

I'm Mark Steele, I was the eighth British astronaut

and I had a very similar experience to Tim but I can't use that anecdote now.

But

my hope really was to play cricket in space as I think it's the one chance I'd have of ever hitting a six.

And this is our battle.

Can I just ask both you, Helen and Tim, I had heard that when when the urine urine goes out and it kind of sparkles stuff, but then does it kind of explode or it kind of

this wasn't where we were going to start, but you brought it up, Tim, to be quite honest.

So does that happen?

Helen will be able to describe the chemistry behind it, but it just crystallizes instantaneously and then the light obviously reflects and that's what you see sparkling.

So yeah, Helen said.

How did you know it was Russian?

Because it was

It was coming out the.

It was coming out the Progress vehicle.

And I saw where it was coming from, so I actually went straight to the Progress.

And there I saw Yuri with a screwdriver swearing in Russian.

And so I knew that that was exactly where the problem was.

He had already realized that something was quite wrong because he'd seen the pressure dropping in the tank.

So he'd gone down there to investigate.

So I just went to tell him it is actually leaking out the side.

Perhaps you want to come and take a look.

That is a very interesting, that is an episode of You Bet I Would Like to See, Someone's Skill, which is to tell the nationality by the crystals of Uri.

So, if anyone is thinking of doing a You Bet version in space, I'm available to host.

Let's move on quickly.

First of all, I want to know: what was the process of how did how did you become an astronaut?

So, I applied for a job, like most people do for any jobs.

Perhaps unless you're a comedian, I don't know if you apply to be a comedian, perhaps you don't.

But we apply for every other job and are turned down.

That's basically what happens, and then we have to.

So, yeah, this was a position that was open all of a sudden.

People from Britain could apply for a mission that had been created actually to put the first Britain into space.

And I heard it before, you know, now we

look on the European Space Agency website, but nowadays, when I applied, there was no website.

So, this was 1989 before the internet, and I heard about it on the radio.

So, driving my car home from work and heard an advert for a space mission, decided to apply.

Never thought I would get chosen, but you know, as it turns out, you never know, it's worth a go.

And was it quite a rigorous selection process?

How long did it take?

So it was quite quick as space selections go because a mission had been already assigned about two years after the advert had been announced.

So it was like a company had been set up to manage this mission, a British company to liaise with the then Soviet Space Agency.

And as soon as they'd got an agreement, they made sort of let out this advert to recruit their astronauts.

So it had to be quite quick because we needed to be in position.

I think it was actually five months later.

So in June, I heard the advert.

In November, I was already beginning my training.

And it's the training, the centrifuges, all the things that we imagine you have to go through when you're an astronaut, you get turned upside down.

And

in the training or in the selection?

In the selection.

Yes, in the selection.

In fact, the selection was the first time I actually went into a centrifuge ever, and actually the last time.

So I didn't do any centrifuge in training.

It was all in selection.

So once they decided they'd selected you, as far as they were concerned, I was G-force tolerant and they didn't need to worry again.

But no, there was a lot of this motion sickness testing as well.

So, the Soviets were quite keen.

I mean, someone can tell us if they're still as keen, but they were really keen to make sure that we didn't throw up in space.

But, I mean, having never done it before, I got no idea how I was going to feel.

I was more worried about blacking out, actually.

I got no idea how to really, really cope with this because I'd never done a centrifuge ever.

I mean, I bet being, you know, if you're a helicopter pilot, you do centrifuges, don't you, every so often?

I hadn't actually done the centrifuge.

No, my first time in a centrifuge was during training in Star City in Moscow.

So not even in selection?

Not even in selection.

We we had a very different selection process.

I mean yours was much more rigorous physically I think and it reminds me of speaking to some my Canadian colleagues who do all sorts of bizarre stuff during the Canadian selection process, like having to dive to the bottom of pools and do the jigsaw puzzles and things and being locked in a room that's filling with water and having to do mental exercises before you can get out.

The European Space Agency was actually very civilized in comparison.

A way to improve on GCSE results, wouldn't it?

In the classroom.

Anyway, I'm just thinking how sad that it is, though, if you'd managed to do everything.

You didn't vomit, you got to the bottom of the sea, you did all that stuff, but you weren't very good at jigsaws.

That's a really.

I can't find the corners.

A lot of this in the psychological training and psychological testing for our selection was a lot of this, you know, on a two-dimensional piece of paper.

Can you envisage what it's like in three dimensions?

Twist round this apparent shape 90 degrees in a certain way, and what shape do you end up with?

Is it A, B, C, or D?

That kind of thing.

So, that was all done in a sort of a psychological testing profile.

That was similar to the European selection.

We had lots of psychological testing, psychological profiling throughout the whole year.

So, there was no way you could possibly cheat.

So, by the end of the year, they really had a good grasp on what your character and personality was like.

That's why that film was rubbish, then, wasn't it, with Sandra Bullock in and it, when they're all there when she's just a complete introverted, introspective mess.

In the selection process, she'd have lasted about three seconds, wouldn't they?

She'd have gone, oh, I don't really get out.

No, no, no, not.

You don't remember the scene where she did a 300-piece jigsaw puzzle of Corf Castle?

Yeah, so

the whole film, you know, if she'd, Sandra Bullock had realized she'd got a backpack on in the first five minutes of the film, she'd have steered herself back to the space station and everything would have been fine.

There'd have been no film.

So, you know,

can I just say that for people listening to Monkey Cage, you will have heard last week's episode where Robin also mentioned Corf Castle.

In a different context, would you like to tell people?

No, I won't.

You'll have to listen and find out some of my Corf Castle secrets.

Today's episode is brought to you by English Heritage.

He had an erotic dream about the masonry at Corf Castle.

Yeah, well, it was a show all about the science of dreams, right?

It wasn't a halfway through show about periodic tables.

Can I stop you there, Professor?

I had a dream about Corf Castle and it was eroticised masonry.

But

that would have probably meant my...

Sorry, Mark.

No,

my favourite mention of space ever in the media was on the weakest link.

My favourite answer ever on that programme.

And the question was:

What structure built in the second century AD is said to be the only building visible from outer space?

And the bloke said the Millennium Dome.

to be wrong for so many reasons.

But Tim,

I suppose you took the traditional route in a sense that you were test pilots

before.

Yeah, so yes, much more traditional.

Having said that, you know,

my colleagues were not all military test pilots, and we have scientists, engineers, medical doctors, all selected in the European Space Agency and school teachers as well within the astronaut corps.

So, we select from a much more diverse background now than when people might traditionally think back to the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo program, and those early Russian cosmonauts as well, who are all kind of alpha male fast jet test pilot community.

So, it's very different now.

And what's fascinating is to see how the selection criteria has changed over the years as well, from going that from the very initial sort of testing of spacecraft into the unknown and pushing the boundaries to now looking at long-duration space flight and as Helen was saying, you know, talking about medical fitness and psychological fitness, being able to live up there for six months, a year, looking forward to you know, three-year missions to Mars.

Is that the biggest obstacle now then?

Because that's sort of, as the lay person, that's what you hear with when they're talking about, for instance, people going to Mars.

That seems to be the biggest obstacle, not the actual business of getting someone there, but of getting someone there without them going, so doo lally, they can barely do a six-jigsaw piece of

Lulworth Castle.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, I mean, speaking to some of the Apollo astronauts, there's a huge shift in perspective from seeing the Earth just in low Earth orbit to seeing the Earth from 400,000 kilometers away.

But even then, the Earth is recognisable as our home planet.

But when you go on a trip to Mars and the Earth disappears to just one of the other bright lights in the sky, just like any other star, and you really have lost visibility of your home planet, that will have a psychological impact on the crew.

And you've got to make sure people are aware of that and they're trained for that and they're the right character and personality to deal with that.

And for that length of time as well, and

the prospect that you're going on an extremely high-risk mission.

I think it's also the communication, so from Earth to Mars.

So in low Earth orbit, it's pretty much instantaneous to get radio signals from the ground up to the space station but if you go to mars of course it could take at best about four minutes to get a signal to mars at worst when mars is furthest away we're talking over 20 minutes and then another 20 minutes or so to get that signal or that that reply back to earth so i think it's that isolation as well it's not just sort of seeing the earth you know the apollo astronauts they went relatively for a very relatively short time actually and it's only been Soviets and the Russians who were up for actually for a very long period of time.

They typically went for six months or even a year, and then now the sort of the Americans have started to join in on a space station.

So they're going for longer duration missions as well.

But they were used to going up for six months.

And when I was up, the back of the Earth, around the wrong side of the Earth, to the Soviet Union, we had no communication with mission control whatsoever.

So even in now, in Russian memory,

they may not have such a problem of going to Mars as perhaps some of the Americans might.

That's right, and actually, that's interesting because we're almost having to train not just the astronauts for the future missions, but train mission control as well.

For the last 10 years, the space station has become this fantastic scientific laboratory, and we have an amazing working environment, so we're putting a lot of science experiments up there, but it's almost become very routine.

Like Helen says, we've got instant communications all the way around the planet.

We have very few moments of the day where we might have a couple of minutes of communication dropout, and you might not get your terabyte of bandwidth that you're getting down to Earth.

And that kind of environment is great for what we we need the ISS to do.

But when we're looking towards the future and we want to get astronauts and mission control trained back to being, or the astronauts being much more autonomous and mission control having to hand back that autonomy to the crew, that's something we're working on.

We're talking about using the space station as a testbed for Mars now and having perhaps a period of a couple of weeks where we actually do a simulated Mars mission from on board the space station.

You talked about the psychological aspects of long duration space flight, but could you just describe what it's like?

I assume you can't really train for that launch and then being in space and then living in space for days at a time.

Could you describe what that felt like from the launch up through to your first experience of space?

Well, well, I think the launch, you can't train for the actual physical feeling of it, can you, Tim?

I mean, you can do a centrifuge, but that just gives you g-forces.

You can't really train for vibes of vibration, hearing the clunks and bangs, and then suddenly as the light streams in through the window, once you've jettisoned the fairing when you're out of the atmosphere, seeing the earth for the first time, all those things.

But I think it w what you can be selected for is a kind of a mentality, a psychological profile that's actually reasonably calm, the kind of person who takes in information, processes it, and then works it out.

You don't typically get astronauts who are really excitable,

but neither do we get astronauts who are pretty depressive.

I mean, that would make a really pretty bad crewmate, wouldn't it?

For six months, I imagine.

So, I think it's that psychological profile in the testing that actually does an awful lot.

And then, once you've trained to do your mission, then you just get on with the job you've been trained to do, think things through if necessary.

But, I mean, for in terms of a long period away from Earth, I was only away for eight days.

Tim, you were there for what, five, six months?

Yeah, six months.

And I was up when I arrived on the space station.

Scott Kelly was my commander.

He'd already been up there for nine months, and he was spending a year up in space.

So that was really interesting to me, him and Misha Konienko as well.

Yeah, so it is

when you go on the mission, actually, for me, I think the launch itself was hugely exciting.

And like you say, you can't train for it.

There's all these vibrations and everything, but actually, the re-entry

was even more so.

And I remember Jeff Williams speaking to me the night before re-entry, and I was kind of getting all my stuff ready to go.

And he said, now, Tim, re-entry is like nothing you have ever experienced before.

He said, There'll be several times during re-entry when you think it's all gone horribly wrong.

He said, It hasn't.

He said, Don't worry, there are a lot of explosions, there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of vibration, there's a huge amount of heat.

You'll be sweating buckets, it's all perfectly normal.

The biggest thing I thought actually was this: you know, when the parachutes come out, because there's a big sort of hole really where the parachutes are stored on one side, I suppose, of the soil, towards the top, but it's actually actually at the side, it's not physically on the top because, of course, that top is connected to your sort of your other module to start with, and before you've jettisoned that.

So, the parachute comes out from one side, and so the Soyuz itself swings quite violently.

And it's not until you've managed to get the parachute straight above you that that swinging sort of stops.

But I think, I mean, we in the training we had that profile, we knew the time and the g-force that was going to be created side to side.

But actually feeling that it's quite taken by surprise, I think.

And how sort of closed in are you then when this is happening?

Shall we demonstrate?

For all the people listening, we can demonstrate here.

We are touching shoulders.

Yeah, you are.

You get very friendly in the Sawyers.

Yeah, you get to know your crewmates very well, but you are literally touching, you're squeezed in there.

And there's all sorts of stuff packed around you as well.

Even when you're in the simulators in Star City, they're quite spacious.

But when you get in the real Sawyers and they really pack everything in, and you're coming down with the science experiments around you as well, there's not an inch of space left.

And it's never routine, is it?

I remember, because we covered your launch, Tim, on the both the launch and the docking live, Stargazing.

And I remember we were with Chris Hatfield when you were docking.

And I think you had a sort of a non-standard docking, didn't you?

I think something broke on the spacecraft, a retro-rocket or something.

And we were, myself and Dara were going, oh no, what's happened?

It's gone.

It's reversing.

And Chris is like, no, no, it's just

they'll learn how to fly the spacecraft again and then they'll dock it.

What do you mean by that?

It was funny watching back.

I was watching Chris's commentary back, and it was great because he knew actually that it was a little bit more serious than he was letting on.

So he was just doing the cool, calm astronaut.

Very calm.

Yeah, yeah.

Because the initial abort, that's not unusual.

It happens occasionally with the Sawyers.

And then Yuri took manual control.

But the first manual docking, Yuri was having a really hard time seeing the docking port.

The sun was setting, so the whole space station was like a bright mirror reflecting all this light down the periscope.

So he couldn't really see where he was going, and it was under a lot of pressure from Russian mission control to get it docked, get it docked, because, as Helen said, that we were running out of communication time over Russian territories, they wanted to do this whilst we had Russian communications.

And yeah, things didn't go well at all during the first manual docking.

But Yuri is a very cool Russian cosmonaut, six times up in space, and just backed it off, came back out into space again, and then brought it back in for a textbook docking.

Mark, do you think you have the psychological psychological make-up required that means you could have been an astronaut?

I am too scared to go on a walk, sir.

I have no faith whatsoever in whoever's put the rivets

in

planes I find utterly, utterly, you know, however much I am a fan of science over mysticism, once I'm in a plane, I find myself thinking things like, well, while we're above the clouds, at least if the plane conks out, we can land on one of them

I'm just sort of I'm in complete awe really of Tim and Helen because it's all the psychology of it putting trust in the science of it so when it swings violently or learning oh right these explosions that's all normal no

that that's that makes you quite unusual

would you not like the experiments around you it's like they've got a little sideboard and you know all of the antiques are falling off the shelf

Would you have to hold on to the test?

Would you not like to see that?

That's not too far off the mark.

Oh, don't drop the Russian you're in.

We'd packed in so much into our soils when we were coming back, and it was quite windy once we got lowish to the ground.

And the wind then blows the parachute split sideways, so you're coming in at a bit of an angle.

So, you've got these lovely what's called soft-landing retro rockets.

And Tim will tell you that there is never such thing as a soft landing, but they naively call these things soft landing retro rockets at the bottom of the Soyuz, it's about a metre and a half above the ground.

These fire to make the landing this bit softer.

But if they don't fire perpendicular, they fire a bit of an angle because the wind is blowing your parachute sideways a bit, then they're going to make you tumble head over heels.

So we tumbled head over heels.

All the stuff that we'd packed into the Soyuz, not very well, the stuff that we were holding on our bellies basically, which had come back in at five and a bit G, so you know, pretty heavy on top of us.

All of that sort of tumbled around the Soyuz, we tumbled head over heels a few times, ended on our sides.

And there's a split second when you know you stop tumbling and you think, Great, okay, and we're okay.

And I can't remember which one of us said first, you okay?

And then somebody else said, Yeah, I'm okay, I'm okay.

I said, 100, we're all all right.

And then I was on the top sideways, and I remember turning my head round just to see.

I could just about see the commander's hands.

And the engineer who was on the bottom was just covered in all of these things.

And it's sort of the hands sort of gradually appearing and pushing through all this stuff.

And that's how we landed.

I love that.

That's like you dad on holiday.

We better stick the roof rack on.

We've got a lot more stuff.

You were lucky to get that stuff through security.

Well, I think

you mentioned Scott Kelly.

I remember that I think when he first went up,

before you went up, didn't it?

Because you're allowed to take certain luxury goods, aren't you?

Certain goods you want.

And whoever the commander was before him had taken up a guerrilla costume, hadn't he?

That was Scott who got it sent up by his brother, Mark Kelly, his twin brother, arranged it kind of under the radar.

So there were not many people who realized that was even going up, otherwise, they would have stopped it, I'm sure.

So it kind of got shoved in the top of one of the Sygnosaur SpaceX vehicles and arrived on board the space station.

When Scott first told me he had this gorilla suit,

I said, What, you mean like a mask or something?

He said, No, I've got the entire gorilla suit.

I didn't believe it.

I was like, how on earth did you get a gorilla suit in space?

He said, look, I want to get dressed up in this thing and hide in Tim Copra's crew quarter.

So when Tim goes in there, he's going to get the shock of his life.

So he got dressed up and hid there.

And he said, go and tell Tim that he needs to go and make a call to mission control, which you can only do from your crew quarter.

So I duly went and told Tim Copra, and of course he went to his crew quarter and Scott burst out in this gorilla suit and scared the living daylights out of him.

And he got through through all those psychological.

I want to know how did this gorilla costume get through all of the dust tests?

Because you know, our clothes were designed not to create dust.

Anything that we took, and even mission patches, were supposed to be especially dust-free.

So, how can a gorilla costume be dust-free?

You have to ask Mark Kelly that, I think.

He obviously pulled some strings.

Can you describe the space stations you were were on just briefly?

Because Helen, you're on Mir, Tim on the ISS.

Can you just characterize what that's like living on that station?

Well, as a comparison, I hope Tim won't mind me saying, but I have heard that if you had to compare the two, being on International Space Station now, I mean, everybody says it's just luxury.

You know, you've got your communications 24/7, you can have Heston Bloomington Hole Food, and it's all just absolutely amazing luxury and like living on a four-star hotel.

And the Mir space station is like going on a family camping trip.

Look at a picture of the Mir space station, Dave.

It just looks like the worst shed that's ever been made.

It's incredible.

I mean, when you first see that, when you first,

that's where we're going to live.

I mean, it's basic, but it works.

I mean, to be quite honest, the International Space Station now is still based on the Mir space station.

The modular design, the main base block is very, very similar, isn't it, Tim?

So the technology is there.

All you've got to do is keep air inside.

You know,

relies on a couple of o-ring seals,

but it is quite basic.

You keep air inside, you've got to scrub the air clean.

And so long as you can do that and provide yourself with the right kind of, you know, the food and drink and so on, you've got something that's liveable in.

Now, a lot of people, I would say most astronauts, would quite happily go into space and something that is a family camping trip.

I quite like going camping anyway, you know, I'm quite happy to rough it.

So it's the fact that it was a bit, let's say, basic doesn't really matter.

Submarines can be pretty basic, but people can survive in them.

What's funny about the ISS is Helen says actually half of it, the Russian segment, is just the Mir space station in a different configuration.

But it's the same diameter modules, they really haven't changed anything, same communication systems.

And then you move into what's called the American segment, but actually incorporates the Japanese, European, Canadian elements.

And that's all very shiny.

It's a wider diameter.

Everything in the US segment flew up on the shuttle, so a much larger diameter cargo bay.

So you get this real juxtaposition between coming from the cozy Russian segment where they even have carpet up the walls and on the ceiling, to this wide-diameter American segment, which, as Helen says, is much more spacious.

We have exercise equipment in there.

You even have sort of flat screens, TV that you can watch and things like that.

Luxury.

But actually, you once told me that because the different modules have got different noise.

I mean, I mentioned we talked about the dust and so on, and dust has to be cleaned from the air, as everything does.

And you have to circulate the air with fans in order to keep the air moving because you don't get the convection that we get on Earth.

Now, the fans are quite noisy, and I know on Mir we had about 69 decibels of constant white noise from the fans, so we had to monitor our own hearing.

The astronauts get back to Earth, and the families all complained that they need a TV turned up too loud and so on, because really, hearing levels are damaged at length.

But now it's got a bit better, and aren't different modules slightly different?

Yes, it is much better.

I mean, generally, it's about 30, 40 decibels, which is like a noisy office room, really, with lots of people talking.

That would be about that kind of noise level.

That's the majority of the space station.

But if somebody's running on the treadmill, for example, it can get up to 70.

It's really, really noisy.

So each module has its own idiosyncrasies, and some are noisier than others.

Brilliant, listening to two astronauts is just like listening to two people in any other profession.

It could be two gas fitters.

Oh, of course, you know, when we were back in the space station, you used to make a terrible racket, terrible.

Of course, they've sorted all that out now with your modern space station.

Things were at that in our day, we had the bloody clues and couldn't have a gorilla suit up there.

Terrible, all the dust would get everywhere, all up your nose and everything.

Terrible when it was swinging about, violently coming back onto the re-entry.

They haven't got a clue what they're doing back in that office.

The ISS, Tim that it is.

It's worth saying, it's one of the greatest engineering achievements, isn't it?

It's a vast structure up there.

It is, it's phenomenal.

When you see it for the first time from your tiny Sawyer spacecraft, when you're rendezvousing and it kind of peers out of the dark, it's like Drax's space station in Moonraker when it sort of looms out at you.

But it's the size of a football pitch, 400 tons of hardware.

And inside now, it's all of the habitation modules.

It's about the size of a 747, so there's actually plenty of space.

But from an engineering point of view, it's phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal.

It's been up there for over 20 years now

and inhabited for about 19, 18, 19 years at that.

So it's not a young space station by any means, but they do keep it very up to date.

Everything's changing out.

We're changing new batteries, new solar panel technology.

We've got Wi-Fi on the space station.

That was introduced a couple of years ago, tablets.

And so whilst it's an old structure, it's very much cutting-edge technology on the inside.

Helen, when you were up there, what was, I mean, first of all,

you were doing experiments up there, weren't you?

So, what what were the biggest challenges in the period of time that you were up there?

Challenges.

I suppose seriously, it was finding stuff.

So,

Mir Space Station had been up there a few years.

I think it started off in 86.

I flew in 91, so it'd been up there about five years with different modules like

International Space Station.

It sort of added to and built Mir Space Station in the same way.

So, it wasn't as big as it could have been when I was there, but it was still been up there a while.

And so, you know, like at any laboratory where I'm sure Brian won't mind me saying, but scientists, we don't like to throw things away because it could come in useful at some point.

And they've done the same with the space station.

Oh, this particular gadget might come in useful.

You know, what we'll keep this experiment there because that might come in useful at some point.

You know, the spare toilet we had was completely stuffed full of things that might come in useful at some point.

And there were things that would

be stored in places that weren't designed to store store things, so elastic straps around the walls and that had been sort of jerry-rigged on, so that you would put your camera there or your camera lens there as well.

And so, actually, it was finding things I found.

So,

my job, let's say, was to get out a particular experiment

to look at ceramic films.

So, I needed to find a number of different like a frame and the films themselves and some tools to work with the airlock with and so on.

And they would all be in different places, but they weren't in the places that they might have been had they been stored correctly, let's say.

So I ended up having to spend a lot of time just

finding stuff.

When we did a show about what was it, about two years ago, I think it was in Trondheim, somewhere like that, I forget which astronaut was says, Space travel will be impossible without Velcro.

And I think, you know, that thing I did, the importance of things like that.

So everything has a little bit of Velcro on it, so you can stick it to the wall and the wallpaper, really, like a soft Velcro.

So everything's then got its place, and

it's fine when you know exactly where it should be.

In fact, one of the tasks my crew had after I left was to barcode everything so that we could then actually find things much more easily.

And I think there was a lot of rubbish that was jettisoned as well.

One of my big feedbacks to all the technical managers back on Earth was that you know this is this is seriously sort of debilitating and impacting operations.

They need to do a good

basic clear-out, and that's what happened.

Now, MIA and the International Space Station are our first steps out into space.

So, could we talk about the next steps?

And I suppose, Tim, the planned next step is the Lunar Gateway, isn't it?

One of the main plans.

Could you describe that?

Yeah, so the Lunar Gateway is to get back out beyond low Earth orbit to support lunar operations again, a return to the Moon, but this time in a more sustainable manner, and a sustained presence on the lunar surface as well.

So, the Gateway is going to be a much smaller version of the International Space Station.

And it's going to be in a highly elliptical orbit around the Moon.

It's about a seven-day orbital period.

It'll come about as close as 3,000 kilometers to the lunar surface and out to 70,000 kilometers on the far side of the Moon.

And it will be able to facilitate lunar surface robotic and human missions.

And because of that highly elliptical orbit, it means that you can quite easily change the plane of the orbit with low fuel fuel usage.

So you can actually support any part of the lunar surface.

You're not just supporting just one area, the poles or the equator.

So you can really have many, many missions to the lunar surface from the gateway.

It's going to be very much an international partnership based on the same international space station partnership.

First modules should be launching in twenty twenty two.

So really in in the next few years we're going to see that the construction happening.

And that that will be constructed obviously by crews that are on that space station.

So, once the first module is in orbit around the moon, we expect astronauts to be there shortly afterwards?

Absolutely, yes.

First module will be a power propulsion element,

and then the second module will be a small habitation module, and then a lunar lander,

and that's all going to go happen between 2022 and 2024.

So, when Artemis III comes along, and this is the first crewed mission on NASA's new Orion spacecraft, so SLS, the Space Launch System, will launch this phenomenal rocket larger than the Saturn V.

Actually, the Orion spacecraft is powered by the European Space Agency service module, so Europe is very much part of this mission too.

That first crewed Orion vehicle will go dock to the gateway, and that will then have the first lunar surface operations again, hopefully 2024.

So, it's assembled robotically, as it were, so you connect these three modules together and then see everything's working, and then the crew go 2024.

Mark, actually, maybe could be

the first comedian in orbit around the moon.

Yeah, I've put down for it.

One of the things I find that fascinates, many things I find fascinating, is just sort of so when you talk about the international cooperation, and so in a sense, so you've got all this sort of amazing passion for science and just knowledge and so on that you exude so brilliantly, but it's all subject to the will of the people who control the world.

So, you know, we all know obviously that the space race was fueled by the Cold War, and President Johnson said, I don't want to go to bed by the light of a communist moon and that sort of thing.

And so that's what fueled the space race.

But that's now that the Cold War has long since gone.

And so you talk about sort of an international cooperation as if this is just part of the language now that you would use.

But that's very different, isn't it,

from

your sorts of missions, missions, from these sorts of missions being fueled by something that wasn't international cooperation.

It was a very international hostility that fueled it.

So it is subject to that.

I went to a very strange event on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing.

I was in Paris.

I went to this utterly peculiar event that was so Parisian, nobody quite knew what it was.

It was in the Grand Palais, which was this huge room, as big as St.

Paul's, and there was a techno band playing in one corner.

And then in the other corner there was a film of someone just banging a piano and lots of people who dressed up for the night were sort of just standing there watching it and applauding and there was food which was one ravioli that was 15 euros each things like that it was utterly parisian and then

tom pesque the astronaut was came out and was interviewed and it was just fascinating how he was talking so passionately about all these different countries coming together in order to to create these next missions and so on.

And I thought, how different that was from the original space race.

And it also made me think, and this is terrible because I'm going to bring in the subject that no one wants to bring in, but it did make me realise, I mean, he was explicit about this, that this is why he was passionate about the European Union and about the sort of cooperation that comes from that.

And I thought, well, it hadn't really occurred to me that that's one of the reasons why

people in your profession, you know, to you, international cooperation is something that fuels

the very projects that you exist for, if you like.

Absolutely, yeah, no, it's very true.

And

really, the Apollo Sawyers missions, you know, they were the first breaking of the ice after the Cold War race

or the space race began.

And ever since Apollo-Sawyers, we've just been building and building and building on that international cooperation.

When you think it's incredible that some of the events that have happened during that period and the tensions between the countries involved, and yet in terms of space, we seem to be able to transcend those political differences, very much like the scientific community as well, and be able to have a long-term vision and a common goal.

And I think that's the crux: that these

programmes, the objectives are so important to every nation that

international cooperation is absolutely key and will remain so for the next steps to the gateway and beyond.

Helen, I'm interested in terms of public reaction as well, which is when Mark was talking about that, when we did the Apollo show, something that a lot of people talked about was even though it was driven by this Russia versus America, when those astronauts were traveling around the world, everyone always said, we've been to the moon.

Everyone felt that there was this sense amongst all of the different populations of all of the different countries that we, the human race, had gone to the moon.

Now, when you speak to people about space exploration, do you feel that that is something that happens?

That once the adventure happens beyond the parochial boundaries of the planet Earth, people do see that as a uniting adventure.

I think there's two sides to it, actually.

I think people do see that this is something that

we do as individual people go into space, but it's done to help people and it's done to progress exploration for everybody.

Just like you're right, just as we all went to the moon, we are in space, we are on the International Space Station to a point.

The Chinese aren't on the International Space Station, they're looking at their own space station and their own lunar and Martian visits.

So, I think it's not completely there, but I think we're all still quite nationalistic about it.

So, I mean, when Tim was in space, and we in Britain were really, really excited about space, and then sort of waxes and wanes a bit.

And the Italians are all very, very excited now because Luca Parmitano is up there.

And so I think the space agencies still fund a lot of this stuff and still work a lot of the PR to make us very excited.

So I think there's bits of both.

But I think there's the social media as well makes it more accessible.

And I think also people are excited because they can almost envisage themselves going.

Tourism has been spoken about quite a bit.

We all got very excited about Mars and the Mars One mission.

Remember all that discussion about should we go to Mars and not come back?

And it just, even though the mission was, of course, never going to happen and it might be ethically unsound and all of that, nonetheless, it was great public debate.

And we all thought about dying on another planet.

It got us thinking.

So I think, yeah, people are starting to feel as though, even though it might not be their country, they're still kind of involved in some way.

The Lunar Gateway, it's very exciting to be going back to the Moon, multiple missions, surveying the Moon, the poles, places we haven't been.

But I suppose ultimately the goal in most people's mind is Mars.

We've mentioned Mars briefly.

Could you comment on the difference between missions to the moon, space stations in orbit around the moon, and then sending humans to Mars?

Yes, I mean it's it's an incredible challenge.

It's an order of magnitude greater than what we've managed to do previously in terms of the human physiology.

We haven't really touched on that much, but the body changes so much when you go into space, and you notice it straight away.

The first thing is you feel a bit sort of puffy-faced, and you get a headache off, and this intracranial pressure increases because all the fluid that's pulled in our legs shifts up to our chest and our head, and our body reacts by getting rid of that over the course of about five to six weeks.

You actually lose almost five kilograms through body fluid, getting rid of body fluid.

Your bones and muscles atrophy, your skin ages, your eyesight changes, your immune system becomes more depleted, cardiovascular system changes.

It's a fantastic environment to study the human body.

And so, when we're looking at these trips to Mars, we have to be able to counteract all of these negative effects of spaceflight and try and remain fit and healthy because you're going to go back into a gravity environment when you land on Mars.

And we spoke about that rough re-entry and the landing with no such thing as a soft landing.

At least we have people to help us get out of a capsule and to make sure we're okay and to provide shelter and food for us.

Those first crews landing on Mars are going to have to do all of that themselves and have to be in a physical condition after an eight-month journey.

So the challenges are immense.

We have to get better radiation shielding.

We get exposed to the equivalent of about eight chest x-rays a day on board the International Space Station.

That's going to be much more significant once we go outside of Earth's magnetosphere on a journey to Mars.

So radiation shielding has to improve, propulsion technology has to improve so we can make that journey a lot faster.

And then we've got to have good habitation modules, infrastructure in place that allow us to live and work on the red planet.

It's a huge, huge challenge.

On the moon, we're five days away from returning back to Earth.

And if you have a gateway, you're only a few hours away from leaving the lunar surface and having the sanctuary of a gateway to go to.

You know, people talk about you hear SpaceX and people like that are talking about going to Mars within a decade, and it sounds like actually we have problems to solve that may push it.

I mean I know it's an impossible question perhaps but I mean we're talking 20 years, 30 years.

I think so.

I would be extremely surprised if we have a human mission to Mars before 2030, certainly to the surface of Mars.

I think we might see an orbital mission but I'd be extremely surprised if we see humans on Mars before.

Quite soon though, so you're talking about a decade or so, possibly.

Yeah, I think towards the end of the is about as ambitious as we could get, late 30s, and that's with assistance from commercial, both commercial and national space agencies working hand in hand.

Helen, you were saying earlier on about when talking about growing things in space.

I mean, is that part of, I have read in the past, that that's part of the things we need to understand, that there has been the ability to start growing lettuce in space, but there is going to be a point in that 18-month journey where lettuce is not going to be enough.

And so

is that also within the technological ambition, there is also the ambition there with the organic as well.

Yeah, sure.

I mean, think it's, I mean, Tim mentioned radiation, which is the first big thing.

Because I suppose we could survive with food that we take, but that's hugely energetic.

You need so much fuel to take the food.

So, if we can, once we're on the surface of Mars, if we can grow our own food there.

But, yes, as I understand, there is, Tim, perhaps correct me, but we've grown the salady stuff, so basil, lettuce, you grew rocket lettuce, didn't you?

Brilliant, rocket lettuce.

I don't know, I'm sure you didn't choose that.

But yes, so salad stuff from seed, but not actually fruit, not fruiting bodies.

Matt Damon supposedly grew potatoes on Mars, but we don't know that we can do that yet.

So, yes, I'm sure people will want to be able to grow food and have a sort of to be able to better recycle.

Because I think the other big thing is, even International Space Station, it recycles a lot of stuff, but you know, we still get rid of heat, we still get rid of urine, we've heard about, of course, and we there's a lot of waste still.

And so, to have that much more of a closed-loop system so we don't waste so much, grow our own food, protect ourselves from radiation damage.

And that protection, actually, I'd like to see not just perhaps with we talk about shielding of spacesuits and habitats, but perhaps with by taking drugs, we'll be able to protect our body from the radiation that we do actually incur, which I think will be beautifully synergistic with a lot of cancer therapy research that's being done on Earth at the moment.

So, I'd love to see a lot more of that work just

brought brought to completion and actually put to use on Mars.

Mark,

I just wanted to, now you've listened to this for the show.

By the way, the one thing you've done to me, which has really annoyed me, is the moment you said, by the light of a communist moon, all I've had in my head is a Lenin and Stalin Laurel and Hardy tribute act.

And it's really

ruined my concentration.

But

if you have.

If you have a five-year plan you've got me into.

We will start by pushing the piano up one step.

Anyway, so

this is.

That's not a Russian accent.

It doesn't matter what accent it is, it's radio four.

Have you not heard some of the other shows what they get away with?

But I wonder: is there any particular experiment you think, oh, this would be something wonderful to do in space?

You know, if you were given that opportunity, you know, we've put you on the waltzer, you've not been sick, we reckon you're ready for space.

And so, is there anything you think, oh, that would be an amazing thing to do?

Well, I suppose, I don't know.

I mean, listening to Tim and Helen is just sort of

what I'm fascinated by is just that all the obstacles to going to Mars, they're not the ones that we thought they would be.

So I remember being at school when the moon landings happened, and I remember the teacher saying, by the year 2000, we'll be on Mars.

Now, I don't suppose he had any inside information,

Mr.

Hood, at the time, but that's the sort of feeling that there was.

And now it seems to be as far away as ever.

But all of the obstacles it was imagined at the time were technological ones about how on earth you get something that far.

But now it seems

it's all human.

It's all how do we feed ourselves?

How do we get

how do we train someone psychologically to be in that condition all that time?

So

I don't know.

I just sort of think that the human side of experimentation is probably what's most fascinating.

Rather than, I'm sure, you know, when we finally get there, we'll find some rocks and muck about with them.

But

the amazing thing, I mean, what can humans do, you know, just the physical thing of a human being?

Well, that's why it's so much more captivating than some little clanky metal thing that we've sent up to various places and people lose it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, clanky metal thing.

There's one on Saturn, probably, I don't know.

But there's no, it's a gas planet.

gasoline.

But you know, but it's all those human things.

What can a human do on Mars?

You know, just just walking on Mars would be what's that like?

That's what's captivating in the human mind, isn't it?

I think, rather than sort of, you know, any chemical experiments and so on, even though they will be infinitely more valuable, but just what captivates the mind is that

the defence of these clanky metal things.

I mean, they can do some some absolutely tremendous things.

And of course, by sending them first, they make the human mission safe.

But clanky metal things can, you know, got much better, let's say, sort of sensory acuity.

So they can really, really,

they can

discover one molecule and determine exactly what that one molecule is made out of.

A human can't do that.

A human can perhaps can work flexibly, can decide that it's worth investigating that piece of ground over there because that looks different from that piece of ground over there.

Whereas a clanky metal thing will have been programmed to investigate two parts that might just be happen to be identical.

But no, they, but when you've landed on a comet, you know, Cherry Marksman, we can actually go that far and land on something that is flying past us that fast.

I mean, I think that really got people excited.

Oh, it's wonderful.

It's extraordinary, it's human.

I wasn't seriously arguing that, you know,

is there any metal on this thing and no humans?

Scrap it.

But I think, in terms of what captivates captivates people,

the lay person,

it is, well, as Tim was saying, it's human beings going up to this thing, just obviously personalizing.

And the idea, I suppose, is to establish permanent bases on the Moon, permanent bases on Mars, and then we start to talk about the slightly further into the future, a colony on Mars.

And then human beings are spreading out into the solar system.

We become a space-faring civilization.

So what are your thoughts on that progress into into the future?

I mean, I suppose the question is: can you see us becoming a truly space-faring civilization?

Yes, I can.

I mean, definitely, in terms of a colonisation on the lunar surface and onto Mars, absolutely.

It's going to be very interesting to see how that develops in what kind of partnerships, what sort of legal framework, regulatory framework we'll have on the lunar surface, on the Martian surface.

Beyond Mars becomes very difficult again.

I mean, if it's one order of magnitude to get to Mars it's a whole different kettle of fish trying to get beyond Mars

and deeper exploration into the solar system.

I'm not sure that humans in our organic form will ever leave our solar system.

Maybe we will.

Maybe some sort of post human digital intelligence traveling at the speed of light will be what happens in a thousand years in the future or beyond.

But certainly in terms of becoming a multi-planetary species and having a colony on the moon, colony on Mars, and maybe making it out to some of Saturn or Jupiter's moons as well, I think that is certainly a possible future for the human race.

And it's interesting what you said there.

You read the the great evangelists for space, there's people like Robert Zubin, you know, who I know Elon Musk follows very closely.

You made that point about different ways of living, different legal frameworks.

It goes to what Mark said actually, he he sees that as one of the great benefits because you put humans on a frontier and they do things that they don't do in the comfort of their own village or their own town, or in this case, their own planet.

And that seems to me to be one of the most powerful

reasons why we would want to explore.

It's the human.

It's the human.

Why Westerns are so popular, isn't it?

It's like, oh, we've arrived in this land, if you leave aside the slaughter of the people who are already there, but

we arrive in this piece of land and we've got to work out our rules for ourselves.

We can't just go by the ones we've brought up with.

Yeah, so one of the great by-products of this exploration of Mars, the moon and Mars and beyond, may be

the development of different ways of living as a society.

But when we're discussing this now, and we obviously we're not involving every single nation on Earth, and nation versus state, that's sort of another interesting

difference to consider as well.

There were some people who, when the lunar astronauts went round to visit and trumpet how wonderful they'd done, there were some people around the world who were absolutely shocked and in horror about what had happened because their gods lived on the moon.

And the moon had now been

contaminated by humans and they'd left behind bits of metal on the surface of the moon.

So I think we have to be very careful when we are thinking about

why we go, what we're going for.

And

really, the idea of planting a flag on the surface and claiming it for a nation-state absolutely appalls me.

I don't know what you think, Tim.

Absolutely, yes.

And also, this concept of we've messed up this planet, so let's move to another.

I mean, that

is not anything like what we're discussing in terms of space exploration.

The two they're they're not mutually exclusive.

We're doing this in parallel, and many, many of the technologies that we're exploring in space exploration are absolutely going to help us overcome the challenges that we face back here on this planet.

Helen was mentioning about closed life cycle systems in terms of water purification systems in CO2 scrubbing, in terms of the environment that we're studying from space, looking back at planet Earth, over fifty percent of all of our climate change data comes from space observations.

So it is about first and foremost protecting the one place that we know where humans can live in the universe, and that is planet Earth.

There's nothing more beautiful than planet Earth when you look into space.

And when people say what's your favorite planet, well it's Earth because it it looks beautiful and it's the only place that we can actually enjoy ourselves and survive in an environment that we are comfortable in.

Mark, I was going to ask, because you know, I thought some of your expertise on this is this idea of traveling to the moon.

Now, you probably have had a similar experience as a working comedian where you've probably been with three other comedians in a fear uno going from Truro to Aberdeen in bad traffic.

So, can you give advice to those astronauts who are going to go to Mars about the things that will probably go wrong near one of the little shops?

Send comics up there.

Yeah, we'll be going, this is a doddle.

I haven't got someone trying out their new material in the seat behind me

while we're lurching wildly, re-entering the atmosphere.

Well, we asked the audience a question as well, and today's question, it was, if you could perform one experiment in space, what would it be and why?

And our first answer is, I would send Brian Blessed and have him shout, Gordon's alive, to see if his mighty voice can defy the vacuum of space.

Oh, it would have been great if he'd been in alien, they'd have had to have a totally different poster slogan.

You're quite right.

Oh, it would have never got onto the spacecraft.

It would have turned round.

I don't think any Brian had been on it.

This one says, Investigate the effects of microgravity on the exact point of the death of a strawberry.

Why?

To take my mind off Brexit.

It's from Georgia.

This is from Aaron, who says the experiment that he would would like to perform in space would be to see if Trump's toupee could reach escape velocity.

This is one, I don't know if they were there.

Can you blow-dry your hair in space, or does lack of gravity make it impossible?

Either have you.

No, absolutely.

I had long hair.

Tim probably never had long hair in space.

I'm sure I'd be much too cool for that.

But no, I had long hair in space.

And because you've got to circulate the air, because you don't get convection, so you circulate with the air with fans.

As the fans blow the air around, you can go by a fan and you can get a blow-dry by just sort of being by the fan.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's fantastic.

But I'd like to take a flat earther to space to see what they do.

You get that.

Do you both of you get those people having a word with you

thinking that you're just, I don't know what they think you're doing.

Well, they don't think you've well, let's not even go there because this.

I've had those old, and they just basically believe that everything is a fiction.

And when the ISS goes past, that's just some kind of hologram.

They're saying that you made it up, aren't they?

Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

And I find it incredibly frustrating, but I've gone beyond that point now.

And I think that

anybody who seriously thinks

it's so calm and measured to go through all that trouble of going through all them psychological profiles and jigsaws and centrifuging things and extraordinary experiments.

You've gone out into space, there's been a bloke with a gorilla costume, you've been up there six months, you ran a marathon up there, you swung wildly, and there were explosions while you were coming back in and then you get back here and someone goes nah you never went

it was funny I just find it a bit frustrating that soft I'm in awe I heard Charlie Duke talking earlier this year and I didn't realize he had a twin brother and he said during his lunar EVA, his lunar war spacewalk, his brother walked into mission control and there were so many heads turning.

Thinking,

what is this publicity stunt going on, Charlie?

You're supposed to be walking on the moon at the moment.

If the flat earthers then could have seen that, yeah.

Brilliant.

Mark, have you got any more there?

Go on, trust me.

Oh, okay.

To establish if breaking wind is a viable form of astronaut propulsion.

Now, actually, that's, but that doesn't really,

because all of that stuff is

that.

Conservation of momentum, it'll work.

Does it?

At some level.

Well, technically, but

it doesn't come out fast enough, I think, is it?

Do you know what?

That's one of the few challenges I can imagine.

A man in England's going, well, I'm going to prove something.

You must have tried it.

Sneezing's a better job because that really does.

You get

a good sort of bit of velocity coming out.

Well, it's about the mass as well as the velocity.

Equally scientifically, Daisy Hollywood has asked or said that the experiment she would like would be to put Brian in orbit to see if he ages even more slowly

in order to prove Einstein's general theory of relativity.

It's quite subtle on the space station, isn't it?

Because you have a special relativistic effect because it's moving relative to the ground, so that means the clock runs slow relative to the ground.

But also, it's in a weaker gravitational field, or space-time is curved a bit less, and therefore the clock runs faster.

And so it's quite a delicate payoff between the velocity, the orbital velocity, and the altitude.

And I don't actually know which one wins off the top of my head.

Do you remember?

I think general relativity wins slightly, and I think you come back something like 0.07 seconds younger after a six-month mission to space.

But I don't know that for sure.

I'll have to look it up.

So there's the answer.

It's a measurable amount then.

It's not like a billionth of a second.

No, I think it is a measurable amount, but it's a very, very small amount.

I know

for the GPS satellites, satellite navigation, they drift by 39,000 nanoseconds per per day,

the clocks.

And 39,000 nanoseconds, that's a thousand millionth of a second.

That light travels one foot per nanosecond.

So 30 centimetres.

So that's a 39,000 feet positional error per day, if you don't correct.

These bits always terrify me because I really have no idea when he stops.

There's a possibility of constant tag game of different, oh, new equations.

I just happen to know that number.

just happened to know that number just happened anyway um thank you very much to our panel of uh of the final uh show of this series thank you very much to Helen Sharman Tim Peak and Mark Steele

this this is the end of the 20th series of the infinite monkey cage we'll be back in 2020 with the 21st series and the only worrying thing is that if the world does continue to go in the direction that it seems to be going we'll actually be back on the BBC light programme, sandwiched between the Clitheroe Kid and the Billy Cotton Band Show.

Anyway, to play us out, here's Housewives' Choice.

You and all the powdered egg again, haven't we?

Thank you very much.

Goodbye.

So now nice again.

Hello, I just wanted to tell you about my new podcast.

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