Space Tourism

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This is a download from the BBC.

To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4.

Hello, on my left is Professor Brian Cox.

In his desire to discover why the world is as it is, he has seen the Aurora Borealis in northern Norway, a total solar eclipse in Varanasi, a city described by Mark Twain as older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.

And undertaken a grand voyage two and a half kilometers below the Sea of Cortez to view hydrothermal vents, the very cradle of life on Earth.

But as Brian said to me only earlier today in a sad and mournful voice, Oh, Robin, I've been to paradise, but I've never been to me.

Then it got weird.

And on my right, Robin Inns, who hasn't really been anywhere,

but has recently finished writing a sequel to Flash Gordon from a quantum mechanical perspective but has struggled to find an actor with the gravitas and power to deliver the complexities of the science Gordon's alive

and Gordon's dead and he's alive and he's dead

Gordon's in superposition

never has superposition been told so sexily by physicists.

I looked into Schrödinger's cat and he was in a superposition.

Saucy.

Anyway, so we won't tell you who that guest is.

You just stay at home and wonder, was it Derek Jacoby?

Maybe it was.

We'll reveal that shortly.

So today we are going to look at space tourism.

Is it not enough that people can go to India to find themselves when they deal with one of their pathetic anxieties about the pointlessness of existence?

Do we need also to project them into space as well?

Philistine.

Yep.

Or will the technologies being developed democratize space travel, harnessing the engineering excellence, creativity, and capital available in the private sector to propel our civilization to its destiny amongst the stars?

To discuss the possibilities, the probabilities, and the points.

Or pointlessness.

For propelling ourselves from the planet Earth, we're joined by three enthusiastic supporters of commercial space travel.

Stephen Attenborough is the commercial director of Virgin Galactic.

He hopes to make a planet of space tourists and, with luck, may also transport hen and stag weekends into space so that we can enjoy Prague and Brighton without hideous people in pink Stetsons vomiting on our shoes.

Dr.

Kevin Fong is an expert on space medicine.

He's co-director of the Centre for Aviation, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine.

His first book, Extremes, is an examination of a variety of hideous and improbable deaths.

And he's the perfect gift for a hypochondriac aerophobic who's running out of things to feel paranoid about.

And according to the tagline of the film Alien in Space, no one can hear you scream.

Though I believe this man might test that presumption,

taking breaks from climbing Everest Kilimanjaro and walking to the Arctic in order occasionally to do his hobby of acting, this is one human who has the stamina to single-handedly terraform Mars.

It is Brian Blessed, and this is our panel!

Brian, we're going to start with you.

Probably end with you and do the in-between as well.

Yes, I will anything to help.

Now, you have been obsessed with the desire to go into space and space itself for many, many years.

Oh, shit.

I've been broken-hearted since I was six years of age.

When I was six at school, Mrs.

Garsell suddenly told us there are other planets like ours, and there was Mars, the red Mars.

I painted it when I was six years of age.

I wanted to go there.

And ever since I've wanted to go there, we had the radio, you know, Journey into Space, and we had Dundare, Pilot of the Future, and Flash Gordon once a week in black and white with Buster Crab at the cinemas.

I always played Voltan.

When I saw each episode, we'd go to the railway embankment and I'd go down there pretending to fly.

And I was Voltan.

Never dreamt that one day I'd actually play the part in a film.

But I've always loved space.

I yearned to get to space.

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.

I want us to all get out there.

Artists, new teleforming, new forms of Olympics on Mars, new forms, and on the moon as well.

And that stayed in me.

I mean, we are the children of stardust.

We don't just belong here.

I want to get out there.

And I've been pressing it, and I've done training and all kinds of things.

I'm determined to go to Mars and beyond.

But you took this interest, as you mentioned, to great lengths because you did about over 400 hours of astronaut training.

Yes, there's no end to my talents.

I mean,

I want to help the space program.

And I wanted to make a film to point the way to Mars.

Because, you know, I said the highest mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons, about three times higher than Everest, the size of Spain.

And the great, big, gorgeous valleys and the face in the Sidonia region.

Let's, let's go.

And so we made a film, and which Kevin very kindly was part of.

And we got lots of mountaineers, and we got macrobiologists, and geologists from NASA, et cetera.

I said, great scientists like Kevin here, all was on board.

And we made a film called Mission to Mars Mountain, and we assimilated climbing Olympus Mons.

And then eventually I went to Moscow.

I was training with the astronauts there, and Putin came in to watch me.

One of the hardest things for me to do because I'm terribly shy.

And I went to

in the centrifuge.

This is my point.

Yeah, I've got this in for you.

Shut your face, shut your face.

I will get this out to Kevin.

Well, that's how we got to take a bit of a turn.

So Kevin,

I went to a centrifuge, I went to 11 Gs, Marvel, isn't that marvellous?

11 Gs, marvellous, and different things we went on to.

I went in a MiG-29, MiG-29.

I went to 87,000 feet, 11 Gs.

And geez, I came back down.

I was two seconds younger than the other cosmonauts.

It's great, great.

And it was all like that.

And the whole thing was just an amazing experience.

So I went through the whole training.

It was just wonderful.

I was passing all my exams and everything else.

And then suddenly, they asked us to be on this tiny machine.

We'd been on the centrifuge, gigantic, as big as a trident.

And I was on this little machine and a little chair.

And they put two little rods on my neck.

And close your eyes, close your eyes, Brian, close your eyes.

The Russians have only done 50 seconds on this.

And it went round and round and round.

And I experienced my head head coming off.

My head came off.

My arms came off.

And my legs came off.

And I held on for about 75 seconds, which you said that was unwise.

Yeah.

You just checked.

Kevin's a good question here.

Kevin, feel free to speak.

No, Kevin, I'd like to ask you.

What happened to me, Kevin?

Kevin, because Brian is clearly indestructible and made of Kevlar or something like that.

But for the average space tourist, we talk about space tourism here, so initially commercial space flight.

What what's the minimum of physical requirements that one might be expected to endure?

Well well, we don't know what the limits are for people who want to go to space.

Uh and the indestructible Brian Blessed aside, mere mortals have been into space and some pretty unhealthy people have so far been up.

Don't pause!

You fools!

No, no, no!

Right, Kevin, I lost you a quick one, right?

Phil this is the first time.

Why was it that Brian that I genuinely want to know this?

Because before you get that, what was it that made Brian so sick?

Because he still doesn't know what made him so sick.

So I'm not sure.

That centrifuge was pretty bad, and I I can't if they weren't.

You said that machine it affected a cellar bellum, you said.

It's not used these days.

That space, you said, is easier than that.

Well, no, it certainly is.

And the centrifuge that they put you on, I mean, almost all of the flights don't get above about 4G now.

You know, the shuttle, even Soyuz, don't really, on normal missions, don't get above 4G.

And they took you up to nine,

sounds like beyond that.

And that's going to hurt anyone, even you.

So, Stephen, now you're looking at taking people into space as a tourist thing, basically.

What does that require then?

What kind of training, if we're going to send people into, first of all, how long are we talking about them going into space?

So, our first trips are called suborbital trips, which are a blast right into space and then back from where you started.

The total trip is about two, two and a half hours.

Get several minutes of weightlessness up there, as uh we said about three and a half, four G's of acceleration on the way up.

So it's a dynamic ride, it's a fun ride.

But the interesting thing is that our typical customer is very unlike the typical astronauts of the past.

You know, they tended to be super fit human beings.

Some of our customers are like that, but the average age, I think, is about fifty-five of the people that have signed up.

And there was very little data when we started to show, you know, how those people were going to withstand a trip to space, you know, with the acceleration, the zero G, and so forth.

And so the first hundred to sign up for Virgin Galactic, we actually took across to a centrifuge.

I think it was a much nicer centrifuge than the one you went on, Brian.

It was in Philadelphia rather than Moscow.

And we actually spanned them one by one, and we found actually that the human body is very robust.

The youngest person we had on the centrifuge was 18, the oldest was 90, James Lovelock, actually.

And we only had three people in those first hundred that we were not able to put on the centrifuge, and we had to cancel their reservations.

So, our expectation is that most people, providing you can afford it, of course, are going to be fine for the space ride.

Yeah, because you only do returns.

Do you do a single and then

we've had a surprising number of requests for single tickets, actually, from people's partners generally, but

just a two-way ride.

But I mean, it has been interesting because I've done a little bit of work with Virgin Galactic, and you sit around the table and you're looking at a bunch of people who aren't your average astronauts.

And that's the big question of how far you can kind of, I guess, democratize spaceflight.

And it's a little bit like the early days of commercial aviation.

You know, the early aviators were super fit, ex-military types.

And then we slowly over time started putting fee-paying passengers on.

And now you look around the average flight and you look at a bunch of people who in the early days of flying you would have thought they're never going to get on a plane.

And what are the real technological advances that have transformed spaceflight or the potential?

Because I grew up with Apollo and then you see Soyuz and you see, as Brian had explained, this extreme training you had to go through.

So what is it that's changed in the 21st century?

I mean, the whole key to human spaceflight is really not about the fitness of the individual, it's about the layers of protection that you draw around them.

And that's what's changed.

We've become incredible at protecting human physiology under the most extreme situations in medicine or in the physical world.

And so, why Steve and his crew can do what they do, why Brian was able to think about trips to Mars, is because the technology is so fully protective of human physiology.

You know, I would never have believed that you could have created a space plane that could do 100 kilometers altitude and get you to pull 4G and put ordinary fee-paying punters in it.

But that's where we've arrived at.

And so it is our ability to protect human physiology.

I think for us, anyway, you know, Richard Branson is one of the most impatient people I know, you know, and but even he had to wait until there was some suitable technology that came along.

Because the old ground-based vertical take-off rockets that we've grown to know and love, you know, just are not suitable for fair-paying passengers, you know, from a safety and a cost and from many other perspectives.

And so it wasn't until somebody came along with a very, a very different idea about how to launch safely and how to actually how to return from the atmosphere safely which is even more important in some ways that we were able to say okay let's seize the opportunity here and see whether we can do something with it.

Are you going to be going up?

Yes, I'm going to okay.

It's a funny thing that I still am a child, as you can see.

And of the mountains I've climbed, of course, there's the Earth.

And there's Everest, kind of not in the centre of the equator.

And the highest mountain on the equator is Shimborazo, near Cotopaxi in Ecuador.

And I stood on the point in frustration on Shimborazo, and I reached my hand out, and that was the closest I was to Mars.

And a wonderful feeling, oh, I'm getting an arm's length closer to Mars.

You know, sometimes you feel a bit lonely in your quest to get people into space.

Teleforming should be done with great taste and so forth

and done beautifully, and we respect the great landscapes of the planets and moons.

But we do need to get out there, and I do get frustrated that,

particularly Britain, when we did have in the fifties, sixties, and seventies Black Arrow and Blue Streak and Black Knight, that we were on the verge.

We have such great scientists, and they're out of work.

You know, that we're on the brink.

We're ahead of Werner von Brunn.

On the brink of going to Mars.

I mean, wonderful people like your good selves.

These heroic people.

I mean, I have to say to you all four of you that it's a privilege to be with you and that it gladdens my heart to be with you.

And I hope that this program will again help to propel us out into space where we belong, so the earth can rest.

Why is it, Kevin?

That's what I was going to say.

You know, when you were growing up, as a, you know, for a few generations, we were

fascinated by space.

Space was such an exciting thing.

The Cold War seemed to propel, you know, once it became something of its own battle.

And then over the last couple of decades, it seems the excitement and the imagination has disappeared.

What has done that?

Well, I think that always happens.

You know, the first foray into any new territory is always as it was for space.

It's usually led by a nation-state at huge expense.

It's usually incredibly risky.

And then you do it, and a few people often die, and then nobody really wants to go back until they've worked out how to do it much more safely.

And I think that's where we've arrived at.

So, I don't think it's so much that people have lost interest.

I think that you're just waiting for people to make it safer and more commercially viable before we went back and did it properly.

And that's not just true of space.

I mean, look at Antarctica.

You go there in 1912.

Of two expeditions, one dies completely, the other is successful.

Nobody goes back to Antarctica again.

Nobody sets foot at the South Pole again until 1956.

And when they do it, they go in aircraft that have been delivered, basically, by the commercial aviation industry.

And so I think that's what's going to happen with space.

I think that's why commercial space flight is so important.

Because we might like to romanticize exploration.

You might like to say, Well, we do it because it's there, but at the end,

somebody, before you can actually do proper exploration and proper science, somebody has to make some part of that commercially viable and sustainable and a whole lot safer.

So that you know, post-graduates today can go to Antarctica and it's still a dangerous place, but they do expect to survive.

Stephen, I mean, your projections of Virgin Galactic, I presume it's not just going to be what currently seems to me is like a fairground ride.

It's a, you know, it's a it's an inch, but there must be now a vision that this is going to go much further.

This is going to stop just being 10 minutes looking down at the earth and then back down again.

I mean, what are you seeing in the future?

I think it's incredibly exciting because, but you do have to take it a step at a time.

And Virgin Galactic for me has been defined in some ways over the last eight years more than anything else by the fact that actually taking ordinary people to space on a regular basis, giving them a great experience, keeping them safe, acting like an airline in many ways, is hard.

Space is a fairly hostile place, and to put the layers of protection around people that means that you know they're all going to come back and they're all going to come back with a smile on their face, you know, takes time.

So, it's important to get that first step right.

And the first step is actually saying, Yes, you can do that.

You know, that all of us can go into space.

We can all have a terrific time up there.

It'll be life-changing.

We'll see the planet, we'll float in zero gravity, do all the things that we've always wanted to do.

But what we're really saying to the world at large, I guess, is that this is possible, you know, and we can do it in a commercially viable way.

Because if we're going to do the next things which we want to do, which may be hotels in orbit and then start looking at the moon, start looking at Mars, perhaps starting to look at point-to-point travel on Earth via space, all those things are going to need huge commitment for the private sector.

And that money is there and waiting.

But we need to prove those two things first of all, that you can take people to space safely and you can do it in a commercially viable way.

And how many people do you expect to take up, let's say, over the next decade or so?

Well, right now I think 530 people have been to space in the history of time.

We've just signed up our 600th,

which is a good start.

So we've just beaten that first number, if you like.

And I think we'll fly those first 600 people in the first, you know, maybe 18 months of commercial operation, which is a huge step forward because it's taken 50 years to fly the first 500.

And then I think we'll have a fleet of spaceships.

They're being built out in the Mojave Desert now.

We'll be increasing the rate of flight.

And we'll also, I hope, be able to bring prices down as economies of scale come in and competition comes in, as technology gets better.

So I would expect to see thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, perhaps going into space, albeit perhaps for a short period of time, you know, in the first decade of this new industry.

And I mean, I think it's an exciting time.

And I remember when I was at NASA, you know, at the start,

just at the turn of the century, and they started to talk about commercialization of space.

I just, I thought it was bonkers.

I thought it would never happen.

And then the Russians put people up in Soyuz to space station.

I thought that was crazy.

Virgin Galactic came along.

You know, and now you've got the likes of, you know, it's not just their operation.

You've got Elon Musk talking about going to the moon.

He thinks the moon is, you know, it's on the way.

He wants to go to Mars.

You know, I spoke to Elon Musk,

who runs SpaceX, and he said to me straight basically that he thinks by the time I'm at retirement age, I'll be able to sell everything I own and buy a return ticket with him to Mars.

Well, I saw it, I've seen him say that other people say of him that the reason he's investing so much, and he's already got the contract to supply the ISS, hasn't he?

Yes.

The reason he's investing so much is because he wants to go to Mars.

He's buying buying himself a ticket to Mars.

And he was also one of the first customers for us as well.

So

he's.

I get worried Ryan Air will get involved.

I went to Ryan Air.

I didn't know the oxygen was extra.

It seems to me that we're kind of working on all fronts and progressing on all fronts.

I mean, it's wonderful.

I mean,

it reminded me when I went to the Arctic and the North Pole, and it took me about six months to get there.

And

I could have flown.

I could have flown.

and went from Resolute in Canada and I met

Zerin

of course who is Mars direct and he's making cabins on Devon Island for astronauts for Mars so all kinds of people seem to be working on it when I got near the North Pole I went to the magnetic North Pole first which my hair stood on end which happens with electricity and a great Russian typhoon submarine came up alongside me.

And there were the Russians and I they opened it up and I got on board and we sang the Volga Boatman together and things like that.

We talked about space.

And

we talked about space.

And what is lovely about space people, you can see how happy these gentlemen are.

Dolumbeck, who is one of the heads of NASA, I mean, he's like something from Kermit.

I mean, you meet him, oh, Brian,

Mars is wonderful.

Oh, I'm wondering.

You just put your hands on, Brian, touch the surface.

It's It's history everywhere.

It's wonderful.

We've got to go to Mars.

And it's one of the great brains.

He's one of the great brains of NASA.

And Zubrin, of course, it's lovely.

Big bang, big bang, there we go.

And Zubrin.

Well, he's a great brain.

Zubrin, who's Mars director, and working on, he says he's working on a rocket that travels half the speed of light.

It'll be in a bubble and so forth.

And as he talks to you, he's mentioning Genesis and Red Shift

and the Bhagavad Gita in the same speech.

And he said, Bam, Brian,

there's no goddamn Big Bang.

What it is, Brian?

Brahma came out of the lotus.

And he came out, and the Creator said, you create the universe as you have done many times before.

Well,

I am not getting on his spaceship.

And he goes.

Before I sign up for Virgin Galactic, can you just ask one question?

Do you believe in the Big Bang?

I absolutely believe in the Big Bang.

Don't say it like that.

That turns it out.

Do you believe in the Big Bang?

Is science the new religion?

Not at all.

As I clung onto Darwin's beard.

Kevin, we were talking there about Mars, and obviously Dennis Tito, I think, was he the very first space tourist?

No, no, no, I think Tito was first up, yes.

Now, he's talking that this was announced back at the end of February about this idea of not actually landing on Mars but going around Mars and be looking for a couple who get on well enough to be able to do this 18-month mission.

And I would, you know, but there are enormous risks, aren't there?

I mean, the risks change a great deal from the risk of going to the moon.

I mean, in terms of things like radiation, is that right?

No, that's absolutely right.

And you're talking about the Inspiration Mars mission.

And when they announced this, and it was this bunch of privateers who were saying, we're going to come up with a private architecture to go to Mars.

We're going to take advantage of the fact that we're at closest approach around about five years' time, 2018, and we're going to go in five years' time.

Now, if a government agency, an international government space agency, said we're going to go to Mars in five years' time, you just laugh them out of the room.

And I utterly dismissed it initially.

And then you start reading the detail of this thing, and the terrifying thing is it's on the edge, on the edge of being possible, but just so long as you're not too worried about whether or not you come back.

And by that, I really mean that those guys are willing to embrace a level of risk that no international agency ever could.

And they're talking about going to Mars

with an architecture that would be so horribly uncomfortable and so unpleasant that no sane person would probably do it, but it could be done.

And it's like crossing the Weddell Sea in an open boat, as Shackleton and his crew did, you know, at the start of the 20th century.

You don't want to do it.

It's possible, but only just, and it's probable that everyone will die.

Brian, because you've done some very dangerous thing.

You've climbed Everest without oxygen.

Ah, yes, well I think that people said to me, is it not dangerous going to Mount Everest, or is it not dangerous going to Mars?

I think the greatest danger in life is not taking the adventure.

I mean, they're on Everest everywhere.

It can be a zimmaphreme, it can be your

garden projects everywhere.

You know, so I I just think that the greatest danger in life is not to take the adventure.

I I find it exciting when I that when I talk to the Russians that they've done a lot of exploration with the sun.

And you know better than me,

that it has many levels, of course, but they said there's a part of it, out about seven levels in, in which they have orchestras.

The sun sings like a whale and has orchestras that change their tune.

So one has not, it would seem, begun to really understand our solar system at all yet, that the sun, they maintain, actually has orchestras and sings, which was the Russians talking.

So I'm.

That was your question.

The question was: I think Kevin's words were something like: you'd have to be insane to go on the first Mars mission.

Would you go on the first Mars mission?

Oh, yes, I guess I told to blow with all cosmic rays, I'd eat them.

Gamma rays, coffee.

Kevin,

you mentioned that you first heard that we would go to Mars perhaps in five years' time.

You didn't believe it.

But actually,

when you talk to people who were involved in the Apollo programme, they would say that when Kennedy made that speech back at the start of the 60s, to imagine that before the Americans had put an astronaut into orbit, you would commit within a decade to go to the moon was equally or even more far-fetched.

Oh, it's much more far-I mean, the

Apollo project is much, much, much more far-fetched, I think, than trying to get to Mars today.

Starting from where they started, you know, and and by the time he's giving the speech at Rice University, it's September 1962.

So, you know, a couple of years of the decade have almost gone, and he's saying do this before that decade is out.

And the scale of that ambition is eye-watering, especially in light of the you know, they're literally on the drawing board with that thing.

And what people, I think, tend not to fully sometimes fully appreciate about space is that the first two hundred and fifty miles are the hardest two hundred and fifty miles.

And And all the effort that we've taken over the last 50 years have been conquering the energetics required to get up to orbital velocities to sit yourself in orbit.

Once you're there, once you can deploy there safely, there's a hell of a lot you can do from that point onwards that is in many respects easier in terms of the engineering.

Stephen, yeah, picking up on that point, I suppose the first step, as you say, are the suborbital flights.

Because the energies are a lot lower, it's easier to come back into the atmosphere.

The stresses on the vehicle are not as much.

But so, do you have a program to go from that into orbit?

And if so, when?

And you said space hotels, etc.

Yeah,

we do.

I mean, I think it's really important

for us as a company to sort of remain largely focused on getting the first steps right, but also have a team of people that are looking at what's step two and what's step three and how you know what's the best way to transition and how we can do it as quickly as possible.

And

so, you know, but it is very difficult

to give timelines, except that I suspect it'll probably be more quickly than we expect.

Because I think we've almost become

of the mindset which is that space is so difficult, it's not for me.

Things are almost expected to go backwards as far as manned space travel is concerned.

And

Brian's probably more articulate than a lot of our customers, but he shares a lot of the same views of those people that have signed up.

One of the wonderful things about this project for me is to

see that that spirit of adventure and sort of pioneering never died.

You know, and when we first opened our little website back in 2004 and said we're going to try and do this, and put the video of the uh of the prototype flying to space and sat back a little nervously having asked for two hundred thousand dollars a ticket, I mean we were just inundated, you know, from people all over the world who said, I've been dreaming about doing this for so long, you know, and and just just sign me up as quickly as you can.

And the technologies are quite revolutionary, because this is this is a rocket plane,

which you know, you you talk look back to the NASA era, the the Apollo era, you're talking about X-15s and things like that.

So it's a commercially viable, reusable, safe rocket plane attached to this tremendous launch vehicle.

So it but it must have been a leap.

I mean it was.

And but you know, we we had the prototype which had flown Spaceship One, which many people would will know was the first privately built manned spacecraft, which was a revolution in its own right.

You know, it was built by a little company in California, a budget of maybe $25 or $30 million, and it put a man into space twice in the period of 14 days and actually went to to space three times,

which was just extraordinary.

And in fact, there was a prize that was put up in order to try and break this stalemate, I guess, of government agency approach to space.

And it works so well.

The private sector, when it's given an incentive, can sometimes just come up with the most wonderful solutions.

But you're right, the thing that we liked about it was that it seemed to overcome a lot of the issues that have been associated with the safety and affordability of manned spaceflight, particularly the fact that we launched from the air, so we launched at 50,000 feet rather than from on the ground, because we know how to get to 50,000 feet really safely.

You know, we've been, you know, we've been doing that in aeroplanes for a long time.

And so launching your space plane at 50,000 feet, you need

a lot less energy to get the space plane from there to

where you want to go.

And of course, if anything goes wrong in those first few seconds after the spaceship has been released at high altitude, you've got a winged vehicle.

You can just glide back down to the runway, sort out the problem and start again.

And then we have this incredible wing feathering device, so the spaceship basically folds itself in half while it's in space, acts like a shuttlecock, so you're not relying on a computer to

fly you back into the Earth's atmosphere, you're not relying on pilots to fly that.

It's the laws of physics.

So we love the simplicity of this system.

And it's really the simplicity in some ways that I think is going to be the answer

to really making sort of leaps and bounds into the sort of future of manned space travel.

And that's what's I guess exciting about it is certainly that architecture does look like the future.

You know, and you got used to NASA serving up the future on the back of a flatbed truck.

This is what it's going to look like.

Get used to it.

And so we all became a bit disappointed when we started folding back to old-looking rockets that were around 50 years ago.

And it's an interesting point you bring up about the synergies between private and

state, private sector and the state.

everything we're doing in space now has to have built upon what was done by the state in the past.

But it's true, I think, that the way it's got to go forward now is not either-or, but this partnership.

I think what's going to happen, what I hope will happen, is that the commercial providers will take on low-earth orbits, will make that affordable and reliably achieved, and then the agencies can go on and do what they're supposed to do, which is explore the next stuff.

You know, I think they can take on everything between low-earth orbit and the moon and Mars, and that's where I hope we'll go.

Brian, is there anything in Carl Sagan, the astronomer?

He once said, you know, we bashed this planet around as if we had somewhere better to go.

Is there a perhaps a worry that we still don't know what's in, you know, eighty percent of our oceans lie unexplored?

There is so much that we are looking towards going to other planets before we've even learnt how to actually look after our own.

Yes,

yes, I feel that the kind of idea, the principle that we must look after the earth first before we advance, is not healthy.

I think it's insular.

That we can become insular in the get the earth, right?

Get the earth.

No, no, no.

It's never been that way.

Exploration has always done that, bit there, bit there, bit there, some people here, and so forth.

Certainly, it would seem to me when you look at the Christmas tree of the earth at night from a high aeroplane, there's a tremendous amount of power being used, and it is taking a beating.

The earth is taking a beating, there's no doubt.

The animals are taking a beating, they're losing.

The elephants, rhino, tiger.

You know,

I think it is the mistake of thinking that the, you know, that the earth is a servant to us.

Well, we should be a servant to the earth.

And

that's much more healthy.

You know,

and somehow, and therefore I feel that if you're just going to get the earth right, no, you won't get it right.

We need help.

If you look at through the history of space exploration, one of the most famous images is the the Apollo eight image Earthrise, taken on Christmas Eve, nineteen sixty-eight.

Now, Stephen, do you feel that

that image, of course, very famously had an effect?

People talk of it as the beginnings of the environmental movement, the awakening, as Brian has spoken about, about having to look after the earth and value and cherish it.

Do you think as more people, we're talking about thousands, tens of thousands of people, see the earth from space, do you think that might be an important side effect?

I think it might be, you know, because if you read the accounts of professional astronauts and you meet them and you talk to them, I mean, most of these people, you know, they weren't chosen because they were poets or artists.

You know, they were chosen because they were very smart, very fit.

They went there to do an important job.

You know, and if they got a chance, you know, they just got lucky, they looked out of the window.

But these people come back and they don't talk about their trips for a day or a week or, you know, they talk about them for the rest of their lives.

And it is that life-changing moment of looking out of the window from the blackness of space down on, you know, down on the earth.

And it does something to people.

And, you know, a lot of astronauts come back as confirmed conservationists, you know, dedicated to peace and reconciliation.

A lot of good things come from people going to space.

So to put people into space for the first time who don't have to do an important job, you know, and they are poets and artists and they're people that have a voice and they come from all over the world.

You know, to put them up there and then to send them back to where they come from, you know, having had that experience, I think could be a really powerful, you know, force for good.

So, I mean, that's, you know, in some ways, we're looking at space tourism first, you know, from a very commercial point of view because it was a readily available market.

You know, people were ready to step up to the plate at a very early stage and to justify the money that we spent on the project.

But, you know, I think it's more than a joyride.

You know, I think it will be very, you know, surprisingly effective

ambassadors for the earth as they as they come back from that experience.

Bravo, I agree.

Gentlemen, not to impose myself,

I always let Patrick Moore down.

I mean,

I met Patrick many times when I was your age, and carried globes around television center for him from Z cars and kind of helped the program a bit and carry Mars and carry Jupiter around the car park.

Anyway, towards the end of his life,

I think they held a concert here a few two weeks ago, and I couldn't get to it.

And then they had one at his house, and he was dying.

Anyway, about two days before he died, he rang me up, and he's always sending me his books.

And

do the stanza for me from Lollington Downs.

And which will

do these seven lines.

It's Lollington Downs, the stanza five, I think it is,

by Maysfield.

I could not sleep

for thinking

of the sky, the unending sky, with all its million suns, which turn their planets everlastingly in nothing,

where the fire haired comet runs.

If I could sail that nothing, I should pass through silence, an emptiness with dark stars passing, and then in the darkness see a point of gloss burn to a glow and glare and keep amassing and rage into a sun with wandering planets and drop

behind.

And then,

as I proceed, see its last

light on its last moon's granite turn to a night

that would be dark indeed.

Night

where I might travel a million years

in nothing,

not even death,

not even tears.

There you are, Patrick.

See, that's what you want, Kevin.

You're talking about things on the back of a flatbed truck.

If we could just send, all the space agencies could send you around on a flatbed truck, a mix of John Macefield, and you go, get up off your backs, size, set what you call holes under the hammer, build something and look to the stars.

That's what we need.

Even you didn't mind poetry and you ate art.

Right, sir.

Thank you very much for that.

And we just got a few of the, we always ask the audience uh a question and uh this week we asked them if you had the opportunity to travel to space what would you like to find there and of course andy burden has gone straight with flush gordon alive

so near this one uh yes to bring it down to earth a little chef

leave now

if you have the opportunity to travel to space what would you like to find there guacamole

because unless they've got it it's probably not worth going.

So this is a literate Radio 4 audience.

Look at this.

The teapot floating in space, so I can make Bertrand Russell look silly.

This one is Major Tom, and that's from Anna.

This one, the real Brian Cox.

A fully functional Death Star, which is internally cooled.

No need for a vent.

Skywalker would have been thwarted.

Dedicated parking space.

Brian Cox staring wistfully at a camera describing things as amazing.

Don't worry, you don't have to go into space for that.

It'll be available on many repeats.

Anyway, so

that brings us to the end.

Thank you very much to our fabulous guest, Stephen Abbot, Kevin Fong, and of course, Brian Blessich.

And next week, we'll be discussing what makes a science a science.

Data.

Observation, rational thought,

applying common sense to understanding the natural world.

We don't need to do that one.

Well,

you say that, Brian.

Someone actually sent me a letter last week.

We said, if science is so good, why do they keep having to change it?

Come on, Brian, get it right for once.

Finally, to play us out, pretty much, I think,

we were talking before about John F.

Kennedy's rousing speech.

We thought it was very well written, but we didn't feel it was particularly well delivered.

So we thought we'd hand it to a professional.

So,

to play us out with his own interpretation of John F.

Kennedy's message.

I can't do an American accent, so I'll do my usual thing.

But I'm British.

Oh, crap.

Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mowry, who was to die on Everest in 1924, was asked why did he want to climb it?

He said, because

it's there actually he was quite irritated when he was asked that people don't know that say why do you climb Mount Everest go on

why did you climb Mount Everest oh because he's there

wasn't very romantic sorry let's just say that's really cast a dark shadow I'm so sorry

George I'm sorry

don't be it don't feed it

Why did you climb Everest, George?

Because it's there.

Well, of course, ladies and and gentlemen, space is there.

And we're going to climb it.

Who's written this?

Climb it?

We're going to fly it.

We're going to sail it.

And the moon.

It's a reference to Everest.

What?

It's a back reference to Everest.

It's a back reference.

It's been a good 50 years, but finally someone's gone, hang on a minute.

This is Kennedy's speech.

Just to get the moment.

You see Brian Blessing's changer.

It's absolutely fact patent.

Is this a battle of the forces?

Of course it's a good thing.

You can't rewrite Kennedy's university speech.

That's not the point.

You can't rewrite it whole genitals.

When I said, why do we have Brian Blessed on, you said, because he is there.

As a result of this speech, they went to the moon.

We thought it would be a beautiful lyrical ending to the show

that the great actor Brian Blessed spoke the words of John F.

Kennedy.

Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it.

And the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.

And therefore, we set sail.

As we set sail, we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous, dangerous, and gracious adventure on which man has ever embarked.

Ladies and gentlemen, you go for it, and don't let the bastards grind you down.

You can hear this recording in full at 430 during the school run on Radio 4

If you've enjoyed this program, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts including Start the Week, Lively Discussions chaired by Andrew Marr, and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts programme Front Row.

To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio 4.

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