So You Want To Be An Astronaut?

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

And I'm Robin Inks.

This is Infinite Monkey Cage, the show that we make because we passionately believe that science is too important not to be part of popular culture.

Now, despite that, we've made it a little bit popular culture, but some people have accused us of being laddish.

As any of you who are lads in the audience tonight will know, one of the most laddish things to do is talk about quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology, such as who are you?

Who are you?

And if you are, can you entertain the self-conscious notion that it may well be an illusion

Or, oi, make your mind up Heisenberg.

Who ate all the pie?

Yo, mama, yo, mama is so fat, she is non-Euclidean.

What about yo mama is so fat, she's red-shifted.

It's intelligence, intelligent laddishness, isn't it?

The thing is that actually, even though we do something about the fact that some people said they find it a little bit laddish, and then we had to sit in the office talking to our producer, Sash, going, what do lads talk about?

So in light of that and the fact that we have obviously donned a new laddish mentality, we will not be talking about the nature of the Pomeron.

We are going to be talking about big rockets, though.

Saturn 5, for example, 363 feet high, a mass at liftoff of over 3,000 tons and successfully completed 13 missions, including Apollo 11, the greatest of all human achievements.

So it is the end of the shuttle era, with the Atlantis scheduled to be the last shuttle to take off on the 8th of July.

We ask, do you still want to be an astronaut?

Yeah, for the vast majority of children who grew up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, space was going to be the big adventure.

I mean, I certainly grew up remembering the Apollo space missions.

When were you born?

I was, I'm a little bit younger than you, but unfortunately, look much older than you.

Suggesting I am actually your painting in an attic, which is one of the most trendless things.

It's all makeup.

That's what no one realises.

Anyway, Brian.

To cover space exploration, we felt that we would need someone who had a degree in astrophysics, someone who had a degree in engineering, preferably someone who had a good understanding of space medicine, and somebody who had completed at least some parts of astronaut training at Kennedy Space Centre.

Fortunately, our first guest has done all of those.

It's Dr.

Kevin Fong.

And even though, really, we don't need any other guests, he would have managed to cover all those areas.

We then got worried that Kevin didn't know enough about Yuri Gagarin.

Kevin, how much do you know about Yuri Gagarin?

Nothing at all.

Thank heavens you said that because we can now keep you here.

Our other guest who made the fantastic award-winning In the Shadow of the Moon and new film First Orbit shows what Yuri Gagarin saw as he orbited around the Earth.

It is Chris Riley.

And someone who quite rightly declared it is rocket science with a recent Radio 4 series of that name, mixing her three obsessions, spaceflight, Satanism, and Nancy's, is comedian Helen Keene.

Kevin, what do you think that?

I mean, we are seeing the end of the age of the space shuttle.

Do you think, are we perhaps seeing possibly the end of manned space flight?

Well, I d I don't think that anyone really knows.

This could be something that we stopped doing, and it could be that human space flight becomes like the pyramids, you know, something that people look back in history and say it happened at huge expense and quite a lot of human risk, and it was magnificent, but we've stopped doing it now.

Or we could be going on to the next adventure, and no one knows for sure at the moment.

Don't you think that's rather US-centric in a way, though?

Because clearly the space station's still there, the Russians are launching people into orbit, the Chinese, the Indians have ambitions to do the same.

So is it really that perhaps the US, the West essentially, are losing interest to some extent, but certainly Russia, China, India are not?

Maybe, and no one knows whether this is, you know, human spaceflight is going to become like this sort of torch of imperialism that gets passed from superpower to superpower and and that's what lets everyone know that you're the superpower, you're doing more human space fight than everybody else.

But still at the moment, the United States spends more on human space exploration than all of the countries in the world world put together.

And so, if the United States decide to stop doing it, it could stop happening.

Chris, how important do you think it was actually that the rivalry, what was going on, the battle between Russia and the USA in terms of actually driving man ultimately to the moon by 1969, which Kennedy had said in his famous speech in 1969 that they would before the end of the 60s get to the moon?

How vital was that?

Oh, it was critical.

I mean, it was a race.

The funny thing was, in a way, that the race was won when Gagarin got up first, and then another race was invented by the Americans to keep the race going, to make it look like, well, that was just a kind of dress rehearsal, as it were.

But in fact, the Russian attitude towards space has always been it's a road to the stars, it's something that is just for the long term, we're in this for the long haul, it's not a race, it's a marathon, it's something that's there for the rest of the human race.

In contrast, the American program has always been galloping to get there, and the Apollo achievements in that short decade, it was four million man-years were put into that decade, the work of 400,000 people for 10 years to get human beings to the moon.

And I think as Kevin says, that's maybe something that we will never see again.

Perhaps we'll never see a shuttle again, a reusable space vehicle, but this sort of long haul that the Russians see it as will continue.

Helen, you know, we're talking there about the US would have used the ideas of the evil empire, you know, we had to get to the up into space first, get to the moon, beat them.

But actually the root of the space program has some very kind of dubious beginnings, doesn't it?

It does, yeah.

You sort of go back and you look at the people who were actually working on very early rockets in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and they're kind of extraordinary.

And obviously, I think probably most people know about how the actual origins were during the Second World War.

The Nazis needed to develop a super weapon, so that's when people really started to get interested in space rockets.

But you also have people like my hero, Jack Parsons, on the American side, who's a very keen Satanist.

What was his reason?

So, von Braun, you can you can understand it parts of a war effort.

What was the Satanist agenda in space?

Well, he was very, I don't know if I but he was very kind of involved with L.

Ron Hubbard as well.

And obviously, it's very interesting because he went off in sort of the direction of building rockets and working with NASA, and obviously, L.

Ron Hubbard went off in the direction of founding an entirely made-up science fiction religion.

But

hang on, I just heard a lawyer come through.

And he said, Yes, say what you want.

But I think it it sort of comes down to the really so interesting, the way that people are inspired was by reading science fiction, by these very strange ideas.

So so many things seem possible.

So you do get these quite odd characters and people with quite strange beliefs who are kind of involved in all this in the early years.

Well, Parsons wasn't driven by Satanism.

That was kind of like that was another part of his life.

It just me and I was like a hobby.

One side, you know, I want to build a big rocket.

And the other side, I'm a Satanist as well.

It's a weekend.

Well, Thelemites, you know, I could yeah, I should say I've got a complaint when I talked about my wife.

They're actually technically Thelemites, not Satanists.

Thelemites that they're the Satanists that hang upside down.

And Chris, actually, there's something I want to dig a bit deeper into what both of you said about the motivations for manned spaceflight.

Because you gave an almost cynical view that it was broadly politically motivated.

I mean, is that genuinely true?

Or, I mean, the more idealistic amongst us would like to see a more idealistic catalyst for it.

It's exploration, it's what humans have always done.

Is there no component of that and is that not powerful enough to sustain it?

You can't just go into space because it's there.

It costs half a billion dollars.

Kennedy said so in the speech.

He said it at the end.

Many years ago, the great British explorer, George Malroy, Mallory, Malroy, George Mallory.

But he says that.

He said he was asked why did he want to climb it?

And he said, because it's there.

Now, that was part of Kennedy's speech.

A political speech, indeed, but still, there's that element of idealism there, isn't there?

I mean, think what the space program human space exploration was isn't what it is today and shuttle is kind of like the adolescence of human space exploration I think it's had to face reality and the reality is the next fifty years of human space flight can't be like the the last fifty years if it's to continue yeah the the American budget for space exploration is now what point four of the national GDP it was five percent when Kennedy did that although there's the famous Chase econometrics study from nineteen seventy four which points out that for every dollar invested in Apollo, 14 came back into the US economy.

So as a stimulus package, which we all accept the veracity of, I suppose economically they work, that was one of the great stimulus packages of all time, wasn't it?

Well, I mean, if you see it, you see it's a jobs program, yeah.

And if you look at all the big programs, going to the moon, shuttle, all that, they all have to happen almost inside of a single administration.

Otherwise, the next guy who comes in, stops it, doesn't want to do it anymore.

And that's the worry.

It's democracy that's the problem here, I think, because

suppose I mean th these programmes, as Kev says, are uh are are so monumental and last so long that a single administration can't promise it.

Going to Mars will cost about the same as a banking crisis.

Okay, that is serious money.

Um and and maybe we're not ready for that as a society in terms of that kind of level of spending.

But you know, going back to the moon, that stuff's all very affordable.

It's very affordable.

You just you know, have to have politicians that believe in it as well, because ultimately they're signing the checks.

Is there any chance the banks have just done this as a bit of a front?

And actually, in 10 years' time, they're going to go, surprise!

Oh, surprise!

That's brilliant.

We've opened up the scatter already.

Kevin, what I mean, this is, I think, again, for a lot of people, they almost feel that once we landed on the moon, that's kind of there's been almost 40 years of treading water.

Could you fill us in a little bit about, you know, what have we been learning in the last 40 years of manned space flight?

Well, I mean, look, we think we've been to the moon.

God, I'm going to start the lunar conspiracy thing off.

Helen!

Did we go to the moon?

Let's just clear this up.

Pretty, pretty clear that we did.

That is a fascinating thing.

I mean, Helen, did you, for the, it's rocket science, it is rocket science, look into the idea that, you know, just that can, it's one of the grand conspiracy theories where, oh, the flag wouldn't look like that.

I'm an expert on what flags look like

on the moon.

Astonishing, yeah, because it's very easy.

All the allegations that are made, they're the same ones, they occur over and over again.

It's incredibly easy with Google, with YouTube, to see those, every single one of those points refuted effortlessly.

And I think it's just, I don't know, but the people seem to love believing weird things about the moon.

It's like all the kind of David Icke, it's actually hollow and full of lizard people.

We've been to the moon six times with 12 people, and we've hardly scratched the surface.

And so we don't know if there are lizards inside.

But in the last 40 years, what we really learned was how to cooperate in space.

And the first thing I remember is 1975 Apollo-Sawyu's test project in The Americans and the Russians, at the height of the Cold War, cooperating, floating flags through an airlock and realizing they had to have a partnership in space.

And the future of space flight totally depends on global cooperation in space.

So most of what we learned in the last 40 years was that, how to get 16 member nations to work together to build this platform that floats around the Earth at 250-odd miles at 17,000 miles an hour.

And that's a massive, massive, massive achievement.

And if there is to be any future for human spaceflight, that's an essential stepping stone.

I don't think that's fully appreciated.

Chris, that's an important point, is it?

It's not only the technological spin-offs and the economics, but it is the, I suppose, spiritual aspect, for want of a better word.

It's that, for example, the great Earthrise picture from Apollo 8, Christmas Eve 1968, or the blue marble, the Apollo 17 picture, which many people speak of as changing our view of our own planet.

I mean, how important is that emotional response to these great missions?

Well, Well, they were unexpected things, these, to be honest.

I mean, it was predicted that the first view of the whole Earth, so more than Gagarin got at, you know, 100 miles or so up, the whole Earth would change things dramatically in terms of our perception of who we were and what we were in the cosmos, the greater cosmos.

And of course, it did.

The thing I find curious is that, you know, on Apollo 8, they hadn't got it in their schedule to even look out for this monumental moment in human history, the first witnessing of an Earthrise.

And they'd been orbiting the Earth four times, and the spacecraft was focused on taking measurements of the lunar surface.

That's kind of what they were there for, I suppose.

But on the fourth orbit of the Moon, Apollo 8, the spacecraft's just turning, just

kind of accidentally as part of the programme, and suddenly one of them witnesses the Earth coming up.

And you listen to the onboard recording, and it's, oh my God, look at that.

And then they reach for a camera, and they've only got black and white film in it, and they take that first picture, and it's black and white, and it's never been reproduced very much because of that.

And they quickly scramble around and find a colour film, put the colour one in, take the colour pictures.

And when that picture was brought back to Earth and reproduced in magazines and newspapers around the world, it totally changed people's perspective.

It was printed on flags and given out in Central Park to celebrate the sort of first Earth Day.

The whole Earth catalogue was inspired by it and the cover picture is that Earthrise and that was seen by some people including Steve Jobs as the forerunner of the World Wide Web.

Friends of the Earth was formed.

It was felt that the Earth needed friends suddenly.

And so this whole ecological movement kind of kicked off.

So that was transformative, it really was.

Apollo 11 continued with that, you know, with these iconic images that changed our perspective of our place in the universe.

And of course, ultimately, the Voyager 1 pale blue dot picture, which carried on that tradition.

You see, I strongly believe that the inspirational value of projects like this is undervalued catastrophically.

If you look back at the history of other explorations, if you look at Antarctica, if we were having this conversation in 1911, we'd probably sit around going, What did Scott just achieve?

Or what is Scott about to do?

It's a waste of time, and he's probably going to get himself killed.

And we've all had been right.

And yet, that programme of exploration becomes sustainable by the middle of the same century.

By the end of the century, the ice cores that they're pulling out have information and science in them that are literally saving the planet.

And there is no reason why that shouldn't be true of the moon.

Chris, you've interviewed many of these explorers, most of them, in fact.

So, can you give us some sense of what the effect was on them of being part of this great project?

Well, yes, I mean, the Apollo astronauts stand apart from everybody else, I think, in terms of people who've flown into space.

And it's a bit of a myth, but the common perception is they all went a bit off the rails after they got back and struggled with the kind of normalities of life, you know, the mowing the lawn, the walking the dog, the washing the car stuff when you stood on another world and back at your own.

And that's not strictly true.

And I think the message that came out was that they were all freed up to be more who they really were.

And by that, I mean that in our daily lives, we tend to be someone else.

We're always trying to be someone we're not, a little bit to impress someone at work or in a relationship or whatever.

And some of us never get to the point in our lives where we're just who we are.

It's a very difficult state to reach often.

But if you've been to the moon and you've achieved at that level by the time you're in your 40s, that was liberating for some of them.

And when they came back, they all went into rather strange careers.

Buzz Aldrin was just buzzed, that he made a career out of being buzzed and struggled with that sometimes, sadly.

Alan Bean on 12 became a painter extraordinarily.

He painted before, though, and that was the point.

He was always a painter.

It just allowed him to be a painter.

Buzz was always troubled.

It allowed him to be more troubled, perhaps, for a bit.

Apollo 13 is a bit different.

Charlie Duke on Apollo 15 went into the Christian faith and became an evangelical preacher.

And sorry, on 16, that was.

And in 17, Harrison Schmidt went into politics.

You've got to be pretty odd to do that, and became a senator so very different personality types but the point is they were that was already latently in them or before they went to the moon and it just freed them up to be who they really were Kevin we're talking about the psychological effects of a mission like that what about the actually I mean you know from a medical point of view what what would that I mean we're talking about just first of all the moon and then if we did manage to get as far as as Mars what what kind of what would be the effects or possible effects?

It kicks the hell out of you and you get into space and you remove gravity and you're, well, you've evolved, life on this planet has evolved over, what, 3.5 odd billion years, constant 1G gravitational field, and human life over the last 2 million years, constant with that input.

And then you take it away.

And it doesn't do well with that.

Your bones waste, your muscles waste, your heart, which is a muscle pump, decides to atrophy.

Your hand-eye coordination gets thrown off.

You spend most of the first 24 to 48 hours most astronauts spend feeling sick or actually being sick, which is a lot of fun for everybody.

And so when you come back, you're literally less than you were when you went.

And that's a big problem, especially if you want to go to Mars, because you you rock up back on Earth from a shuttle mission and you're attended by the medical services of most of the the United States Armed Forces, whereas you're gonna turn up at Mars and you're gonna be on your own and that's it, you and the other bloke in the first aid kit.

No one else.

And that's a big challenge.

So the the astrodynamics aren't that tricky.

Wrapping people up in a life support system and firing them in that direction, that's tricky.

Is it too tricky?

I mean, what's the length of a Mars mission, the minimum length of a Mars mission?

Conventional rockets, six months out, but it varies, but basically about six months out, and then either you've got 30 days on surface or one and a half years.

Those are your windows.

And then six months back.

Just because of the orbit of Mars around the Sun and the relative positions of Earth and Mars.

That's right.

And spending 30 days there after a six-month voyage is like going

London, New York, spending a half an hour in the gift shop and then going back again.

It's not a very sensible way to go on holiday and not a good way to explore another planet probably.

But being up there for a year and a half means a thousand days in space.

It's twice as long as the longest history in the whole of human space flight.

And that's the boundary condition problem.

That's the problem that you face as people who want to explore space.

It's the next closest place beyond the moon.

Do you think, Helen, we'd have a problem in getting people to agree to it?

Would you?

Would you agree to it?

Yeah, I would love to actually.

I read an interview with Valentina Tereshkova, actually, it was the first woman in space, and she said she would love to go to Mars even now, even if it meant a one-way mission, even if it meant not coming back, which quite often the right attitude, I think.

Maybe.

But yeah, I think definitely.

And I think, I think, because I think people worry a lot about the sort of psychological effects of these things.

I think if you go back, you know, obviously we were talking about the Earthrise pictures and how beautiful and the effect that that had on people generally.

But I think I remember reading about it in the sort of 1950s and 60s, and you would probably know about this, Kevin, where people were genuinely worried that seeing the Earth from space would send people mad, that they wouldn't be able to process that kind of information.

So I think people are always worried about this sort of.

Well, that's true, but I don't know.

Obviously, it's psychological and physical.

I mean, I don't think the psychological problems are overstated.

I think there's some statistic that the second most common reason for abandoning a submarine training mission after people falling down ladders and breaking legs and things is psychological emergency.

And, you know, locking,

you know, you've got to, this is locking four to six people who may not like each other very much up in something the size of a couple of caravans for a thousand days.

And it's like Big Brother in space, except for the evictions are much messier.

And you just don't want to do that.

And they have done this.

There's an experiment going on.

It's a Mars 500.

It's a Mars 500 in Moscow, which is an amazing thing.

And look, God knows who would choose to get locked up for 500 days.

If someone wants to lock me up in a capsule for 500 days when I open the door, I want Mars to be there, as opposed to Moscow again.

That would upset me.

Did you find, Chris, a difference with, I mean, in terms of you were mentioning the difference in the ideas between the Russian space programme and the US space programme.

Do you actually think, I presume you've met some cosmonauts now as well, do you think there is a different makeup of what makes a Russian cosmonaut and what makes someone who was going up in for NASA?

Well, you know, in many ways, they both started out in the same path with the same sort of application forms that you had to have certain heights and certain military backgrounds and so on.

And they were both

pretty focused in that respect.

And as Keb says, it was purely because these were test flights.

I mean, the shuttle is still in its 135th flight next month, is still a test vehicle.

But in those early days, they were very much test vehicles.

So these were military test pilots.

That's what they absolutely needed on both sides.

The Russian programme, very early on, because it was a little bit about first, gratuitously, I think, when you look at the sort of the safety breaches that were going on, where they would take off everybody's pressure suits and squeeze three into a capsule for two, just so they could get the first three-man craft up.

They put the first woman up very fast within a couple of years of Gagarin to get the first woman up into space.

Quite right, Jeep.

And then,

yeah, but they didn't follow through.

You know, the next woman to go up was like 20 years later or something.

You know, so it was just an exercise in grabbing headlines that, sadly.

To interrupt that,

the Russians have lost less astronauts in space, have they, than the Americans?

Well, it's a question.

I'm not sure.

They have, and and so Soyuz is the most reliable vehicle, I guess.

But um there's an interesting difference between American and Russian culture just generally in their approach to programmes.

And I I mean I worked with the medical uh the the sort of space life sciences and medical office out there and my very good friend who who is a flight surgeon told this story about taking the Russian flight surgeon aboard shuttle and showing him the advanced cardiac life support kit and he was saying Yuri this this is this is the the the kit that we will will deal with a heart attack, you know, and we've worked out how to have a defibrillator in space and look, and if you need to do cardiac compressions, you strap yourself down, you jump up and down the chest like there's no gravity.

We worked it all out.

And the Russian looked at him and said, Steve, in Russia, we just send healthy astronauts.

So do you think the,

you know, just to kind of finish off now, if it possibly is towards the end of manned spaceflight, what do we lose?

Because some people would say, I think Sir Martin Reese actually said that he

doesn't feel there's any loss by not actually sending people up into space.

That we can now do it through technology, we can explore space without sending human beings up there.

Well, I've debated this with Martin Rees on the Today programme, actually, a very scary thing to do.

And

you have to examine why he's so anti-it.

And actually, it's because for him, operating with a modest science budget in the UK, human spaceflight would be funded out of the science budget, so it becomes a serious either-or thing for his telescopes and his other cosmology research.

And actually,

when I went head-to-head with him, I did look at the sites that had come out of the space station over 10 years.

It was for the 10th anniversary.

And there were something like 800 experiments that have been done on board.

And I have to say, there wasn't much that

you couldn't have done on Earth or in other kind of laboratory conditions.

So

it's foolish to try and debate it as a, well, what science has it produced and therefore make your decision on that because it is, as we've been saying tonight, one of the things that defines us as human beings.

Like, you know, we build great buildings and bridges and write symphonies, and this is another thing that we can afford to do as long as it's not funded out of a budget of something else.

You've got to find a way of funding it, because it is important.

And must do, I would argue, eventually.

I mean, we cannot stay here on the surface of this world.

Not even indefinitely, you know, in the sense of millions of years, but perhaps thousands of years.

I mean, don't we need to operate in the wider environments?

Don't we have to learn to do that?

But we're operating with a bunch of governments who can't see global threats that are coming in a few decades, you know, let alone the thing that's going to slap you out of the sky in 65 million years' time.

Don't say global warming, the Telegraph blogs will go mental.

Helen, I mean, would you feel a loss at the end of human beings going into space?

Yeah, it would be a terrible thing because, you know, I mean, obviously, you've got these amazing robots.

You've got things like the Hubble Space Telescope, which has just been a wonderful thing and, you know, to encourage people to be interested in space.

And also you have the Mars rovers and things like that, that robots exploring other planets but you know a robot can't tell you how it feels to stand on another planet robot can't you know there's only so much information you can get from exploring robotically I think

that's the other faux argument I think if you talk to anyone who really knows about space exploration these days they sort of talk about humans and robots doing it together rather than I mean it's a pretty old argument is it should be humans should be robots and the other thing is you know you get people out there saying well you know in a couple of decades robots are going to be as good as humans in that environment if you get to the point where robots are going to explore planets as well as humans can, you've got a lot bigger problems than wondering whether

or not they're going to take over your government, basically.

I like the fact you've brought in moon conspiracy theory earlier on, and now the war of the robots has just

been hinted at there.

It's my fear agenda for getting us back into space.

We asked the audience a question as usual

because you don't get anything for free, not even a dinosaur in cornflakes anymore.

Ridiculous.

We want to know who would you like to see sent into space and why?

The first one, it says it's from Fergus, but I think it's from Giles Brandreth.

A sheep to see if it's true that in space no one can hear you scream.

This one says to me,

our audience is wonderful on Infinite Monkey Cage.

It really is genuinely a strange bunch of people all dedicated to rational thought and reason.

And this says it all to me.

It says, who would you like to see sent into space and why?

Merillion

to spread their musical genius to a whole new audience.

What ones?

That says it all, doesn't it?

I thought that science was becoming fashionable and beyond geekdom, and that was just happened.

Have a look what the question is that's next, or the answer that's next.

The answer is Merillion.

Yes.

Suggesting that Merillion is in the audience now, I think.

No, because eventually the air would run out.

The classic science debate there about did the Big Bang was it, basically there was more Merillion than anti-Merillion.

And that's.

My wife is, she would love it, and I need the sleep.

That's Jay Watts, just so you know.

One of my favourite answers, by the way, was just this one.

Gloria Hunniford.

She looks like she'd enjoy it.

Victorian Science and Physiography and Space Exploration.

Thank you to our guests, Helen Keen, Chris Raleigh, and Kevin Fong.

Next week, we'll be at Cheltenham Science Festival with Alan Moore, Dallas Campbell, and Professor Ed Copeland, where we'll be asking, is cosmology really a science?

And now we return to what we normally do for the 167 and a half hours when we're not in air.

I sit in a soft room, getting a headache as I continue to try and understand whether I keep collapsing the wrong wave functions, creating mistaken personal reality.

And I'm going to listen to Woman's Hour and drink sherry.

Goodbye.