Space Flight

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 Thank you very much. Hello and welcome to Imperial College and the Great Exhibition Road Festival in London.

spk_0 I'm Kevin Fong. This is the BBC World Service and we're here with our partners, the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851,

spk_0 to discuss space exploration with some of the world's leading spaceflight engineers.

spk_0 Almost exactly 50 years ago Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their lunar module eagle on the moon and human set foot on the surface of another world for the first time in the history of our species.

spk_0 It is one of humanity's greatest achievements and endeavour that captivated the world a signature moment in what we've come to think of as the first space age.

spk_0 And while it's been some time since we put an astronaut on the moon, we never stopped innovating or exploring.

spk_0 Right now we're in the midst of a particularly fascinating period for spaceflight and space engineering.

spk_0 NASA has peppered the surface of Mars with landers and rovers. India has discovered water on the moon.

spk_0 The European Space Agency has an ongoing mission to Mercury and perhaps most intriguingly of all, private enterprise has developed technologies that have the potential to revolutionize the field,

spk_0 from space planes and advanced engines to inflatable space station modules and reusable rockets that can fly themselves back and make a soft landing.

spk_0 We might think of this as a second space age and our guests tonight are at the forefront of it, making the technologies and engineering that one day take us to the edge of possibility in outer space.

spk_0 Please welcome Adam Steltsner, NASA's chief engineer for the 2020 mission to Mars and the person who masterminded the landing of the curiosity rover on the surface of Mars seven years ago.

spk_0 Anurada TK is the geosat program director in charge of launching satellites for ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization providing tele-education, internet access and importantly disaster management.

spk_0 David Parker, formerly a genuine rocket scientist, is now director of human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency.

spk_0 Please join me in giving them a round of applause.

spk_0 Let's start with you Adam, your chief engineer on one of NASA's flagship missions, Mars 2020, an impressive job title with a list of achievements in space exploration to match.

spk_0 But it wasn't always clear that your career was going to be quite so stratospheric, was it? Tell us about Adam Steltsner and the moment that changed it all for you.

spk_0 All right, thank you Kevin. I was not always interested in space or certainly not in physics or science or engineering.

spk_0 I was a poor student, to be honest, in anything I studied. And in the US we have high school, which ends at about 18, and it ended but not successfully for me at that age.

spk_0 And I was playing rock and roll around the San Francisco Bay area, looking to become a rock star. I wasn't a very talented musician either unfortunately.

spk_0 And one night returning home from playing a gig a show, I noticed that the stars were in a different place than the night sky. Then they had Ben when I first went out to load into the show.

spk_0 I clearly had missed that whole earth spinning on its axis thing. But I became curious about the apparent motion of the stars in the night sky.

spk_0 And I followed my curiosity to a local community college, one that you didn't need to have good grades to get into.

spk_0 And that spark of curiosity resulted in a fire of exploration that burned across my life, changed the course of my life, and now has me working on putting stuff on Mars.

spk_0 Thank you. Now, Anna, you are another space explorer, but you are the most senior woman at Israel.

spk_0 You oversee the launch of satellites into high orbit around the earth, upon which our digital communications and our digital lives on earth depend.

spk_0 So just give me an idea of the sorts of things that go into preparing these missions.

spk_0 Any of these satellites, they take about four years if they are totally new satellites. If it's a repeat satellite, it may take about an year to prepare it.

spk_0 So satellite consists of many smaller electronic systems, mechanical systems, thermal systems.

spk_0 All these systems have to undergo their own tests at subsystem level. Then once we bring them together, start building them up into a satellite.

spk_0 Those satellites also will have to undergo a whole lot of tests, you know, electronic tests, and you have to put them in the environmental conditions like it is in space.

spk_0 You have to create vacuum, put the satellite, and make it go up and down in the thermal cycles, and you have to make it vibrate and see that it withstands all the vibration effects during the launch.

spk_0 After going to the launch pad, we have several parallel activities, one for the fuel filling, one team will be working, other team.

spk_0 It will be unpacking the satellites and then two certain mandatory checks, because this is the last time we are going to test the satellite.

spk_0 And we have to have all the interface checks with the rockets. In the launch day, yes, no need to cross fingers. We are confident that everything is going to be fine.

spk_0 And it is interesting that you say that. I mean, I have been there for the preparation of these rockets. But actually my experience is that everyone who knows what is going on ends up crossing their fingers and holding their breath.

spk_0 David, you are now involved in space flight more than the strategic and political view these days, but you have a background in propulsion engineering.

spk_0 So you are well placed to explain what it is, but they are often asked some nervous people around launch day.

spk_0 Of course, it is a launch date, the culmination Kevin, of a huge amount of work that has just been described, years and years of work, and you have taken this beautiful flower, this delicate satellite, and you are going to put it on top of 700 tons of high explosive and press a button.

spk_0 So, wouldn't you be nervous? And it is even more nerve-racking when it is not a delicate satellite, but it is three human beings.

spk_0 Going and seeing astronauts launched on Soyuz vehicles in Kazakhstan, as I will be doing in a few weeks time to see a European astronaut being launched.

spk_0 That is a very special moment. And they are launching from the same launch pad to get a gar in launch from. So it is also another step in history for each of these astronauts.

spk_0 Now, before I come back to Adam, I just wanted to divert a second to talk to Annie really about one of those delicate flowers as David describes them launching on these rockets.

spk_0 And your particular satellites have a specific destination, mind you put them up to something called Geostationary orbit, which keeps them in a fixed position over the same point on the surface of the earth 24 hours a day.

spk_0 Just tell me a bit about that and how you do that and why you do that.

spk_0 So a satellite which is placed at 35,786 kilometers, about the means 11.

spk_0 It will have the same orbital period as the earth. Why is it important? Is because all the ground antenna, they are continuously seeing the satellites.

spk_0 There is a continuous line of sight between the satellite and the ground. So the most ideal thing for the communication purposes, for even the weather monitoring.

spk_0 So what we do is when we launch these satellites, so part of the energy is given by the rocket and it will put it in a highly elliptical orbit.

spk_0 And subsequently the satellite carries a small engine itself called the liquid upper chip motor.

spk_0 And we keep firing them to make it a circular orbit and go to the exact launch student position.

spk_0 That is the final point and of course later on you have to keep within its house a window within the orbital period.

spk_0 And just give me an idea of how high these satellites are. Now space station is in what we call low earth orbit, isn't it about 240, 250 nautical miles.

spk_0 It's about 400 or so kilometers. Where are these Geostationary satellites?

spk_0 These are at 35,786 kilometers. Like the lower thought bits you can have from 200,000 kilometers, 1500 kilometers you can have satellites.

spk_0 But they will have a rotation with respect to earth so that they will cover a particular area at a particular instant of time and they move away.

spk_0 Whereas at this 35,786 kilometers it moves along with the ground point.

spk_0 Perfectly in sync with the earth.

spk_0 Perfect now I want to come to Adam because we've talked a little bit about launch, about what happens when you get there.

spk_0 But they always told me that the hardest two feet in all of space flight are starting and stopping.

spk_0 And I want to talk about the stopping and how because you were involved in the entry descent and landing of Mars Curiosity in 2012.

spk_0 Well I listened to it not far from here in the Natural History Museum to the live audio of that landing.

spk_0 And for me it was sort of a nerve wrecking moment as you heard all those separate systems coming into play to try and get Curiosity onto the surface of Mars.

spk_0 Fantastic moment but you were part of that mission. So how fast was Curiosity moving as it came into Mars's atmosphere?

spk_0 Well it was going a little bit over 13,000 miles an hour, a little bit under 6 kilometers a second.

spk_0 So hugely quick and the problem is that you can't slow down a vehicle coming into the Mars in atmosphere in the same way that you can slow it down if it's coming into earth.

spk_0 Why not? Why is it harder on Mars?

spk_0 Well some Mars has got a very thin atmosphere, about 100th of that on earth.

spk_0 And you arrive with enough speed, enough kinetic energy that the energy of motion could melt or vaporize the entire spacecraft.

spk_0 And that in general of course is considered poor form.

spk_0 So we need to manage that. We put the spacecraft in a special aeroshell.

spk_0 We coat the aeroshell with a material that will smolder and will not burn.

spk_0 And we essentially shed that energy of motion to the atmosphere of Mars kind of burning a hole in the sky of Mars as we slow down.

spk_0 That process takes us down to about a thousand miles an hour or so.

spk_0 Still not slow enough to land on the surface of Mars. So we opened up a parachute in our case the world's largest supersonic parachute.

spk_0 Just under twice the speed of sound Mach 1.7.

spk_0 It gives us a next snapping 12 Gs of deceleration.

spk_0 The parachute again slows us down well but we're on Mars with this very vaporously thin atmosphere.

spk_0 And so no parachute we can put up will take us down to a sufficient speed to solve the full problem.

spk_0 So we need to let go of the parachute and go into rockets.

spk_0 Every successful expedition to the surface of Mars is used to those three pieces of the puzzle.

spk_0 But then there's a last piece of the puzzle.

spk_0 You're left with a last bit of air velocity and you take out with a landing system, a touchdown system.

spk_0 And this is the piece of the puzzle that I love the most.

spk_0 And it's the piece that you were in charge of in 2012.

spk_0 So this is the so-called sky crane.

spk_0 Now I remember the first person to explain the sky crane landing system to me was not a sign-in system.

spk_0 It wasn't anyone who had anything to do with the space flight.

spk_0 And when they described it to me I thought you got to be wrong.

spk_0 That's a crazy system.

spk_0 So just tell me about that system.

spk_0 Right. I mean I have to share with you that when we first told the head of NASA, the NASA Administrator, Mike Griffin at the time,

spk_0 the leader of NASA, what we were planning to do, he also said it was crazy.

spk_0 So it is a little bit crazy.

spk_0 It was also the least unacceptable solution that we could come up with.

spk_0 The notion of the sky crane is that once we've flown out all the speed we can with the parachute and we go onto rockets,

spk_0 we've got a jet backpack, a propulsion system we called the descent stage attached to the top of our big beautiful rover, Curiosity.

spk_0 And we flew as a single unit, a single body down to about 22 meters above the surface and then released the rover below its jet backpack and lowered it down to a point of 7.5 meters below the descent stage

spk_0 and the two continue down until the weight of the rover is taken up by the surface of Mars.

spk_0 At that point we cut the descent stage free and we fly it off to a safe distance, some 650 meters or so away from the rover.

spk_0 Easy.

spk_0 But it looks crazy.

spk_0 It is a crazy scheme.

spk_0 I think if you see that in a science fiction movie any time before you thought that, it's just ridiculous.

spk_0 But I mean, if that doesn't sound science fiction enough, David, you spent a huge part of your career, 20 years also involved in the Rosetta mission.

spk_0 Absolutely. Rosetta is also an extraordinary mission because, to imagine trying to design a spacecraft that could fly halfway across the solar system to an object that was only 20 kilometers across,

spk_0 not just find it, go into orbit around it, actually an object that has almost no gravity, and furthermore try and put a little robot that weighs only 100 kilograms onto its surface.

spk_0 Seemed a possible challenge for Europe to take up in the early 1990s, so it was 10 years of thinking and designing building, and then 10 years waiting as it traveled across the solar system.

spk_0 And then an incredible day in November 2014, where we released the probe and waited to see what happened.

spk_0 And Phili, the little probe, made its land, bouncy landing, but started to relay back some fascinating information about what is kind of a fossil of the beginning of the solar system.

spk_0 And how water got to our own planet. And all of this fundamentally is about defeating gravity in the right way to move huge distances across our solar system to get into the right orbit.

spk_0 Just explain to me a bit about what gravity is, why it's so problematic for you, and what role orbits play in all of this.

spk_0 Well, it's a complicated challenge because when you try and describe what you mean simply by being in orbit, for example, around the earth, you've got to get this 7 kilometers a second to be in orbit, sometimes people describe it as escaping Earth's gravity.

spk_0 You're not. You're completely controlled by the gravity of the earth when you're flying around, flying around the earth.

spk_0 But indeed, to get to another place in the solar system, to get to Mars, to get to a comet, you have to escape the immediate gravity of the earth and head outwards.

spk_0 So you need a lot more velocity, yet again, maybe another, you need to get 11 or 12 kilometers a second to escape from the earth and head off to do that requires a lot of fuel.

spk_0 So with Resetta more than half of the weight of the spacecraft, the mass of the spacecraft, it take off its fuel.

spk_0 But even that is nowhere enough or near enough to get where we wanted to go to. So we use a trick.

spk_0 And the trick is the famous gravity slingshot. The technique actually invented by a guy called Giuseppe Colombo, we may come back to, an Italian engineer working for NASA in the 60s and 70s.

spk_0 And what you're doing is playing a game with the rest of the planets in the solar system, so that Resetta, it actually headed off into space and then came back to the earth and used the gravity of the earth to turn itself and in so doing exchanged a little bit of energy with the earth.

spk_0 The earth got tiny, tiny, tiny bit slower, but the difference in mass is so great, I don't think we noticed.

spk_0 But thank you, earth, it was given a little bit more kick and actually it went off to Mars and got a bit of a kick for Mars.

spk_0 Came back to earth, did that again, got a little bit more of a kick and that helped us head out into the solar system, so playing kind of into planetary billions.

spk_0 I think it's probably time to turn it over to the audience for some questions. So this is the spaceflight engineering from the BBC World Service.

spk_0 We've been exploring, putting robots on Mars, launching geostationally satellites and landing a probe on a comet.

spk_0 Later we'll talk about the future of space travel and the politics of space. But before we go there, who has a question on anything we've covered so far?

spk_0 Let's have a look. Yes, and just about four years back there, just there, thank you.

spk_0 Hello, yes, when things go wrong, is it possible to find out what went wrong and how it happened or is the evidence just unobtainable?

spk_0 I'm actually going to send that first to David because of Rosetta.

spk_0 Now Rosetta, our mission to the comet famously was very successful. God in and around the comet did a lot of work.

spk_0 But the probe got onto the comet's fellowver out of the sunlight so it couldn't operate solar panels.

spk_0 Now I always think, if I had flown halfway across the solar system, I would take a lie down in the shade when I got there.

spk_0 But that's a good question for you. How is it for you guys to find out what went wrong and an emission like that?

spk_0 Well, generally speaking, there's a tremendous amount of data being acquired aboard the spacecraft all of the time.

spk_0 And we can relay that back often real time whilst things are happening. So, Rosetta, in that case, the Rosetta spacecraft worked beautifully.

spk_0 But it actually recovered, joining as journey of ten years, not everything went perfectly well. There were some leakages in part of the propulsion system, but we knew that was happening.

spk_0 We were able to compensate for it. There are devices inside the spacecraft that help control which where it's pointing wheels that are turning continuously.

spk_0 Some of those were starting to get a bit sticky. They were starting to show some noise as it was flying along.

spk_0 So we had the backup ones back in the lab. We did some more testing. We understood what we had to do together them a little bit hotter, a little bit warmer to keep them cozy. And it will work fine.

spk_0 In the case of Phili, the Harpoon didn't work.

spk_0 Thank you. Okay, our next question.

spk_0 Hi. Thanks so much for coming here tonight. I have a question about the geostationary. I'm curious when the onboard engines run out of fuel.

spk_0 Do you find a way to bring debris back down and more of an international question? Are each agency looking in ways to recycle things that they've sent up or deal with debris that's currently up there at the moment for future projects?

spk_0 Thanks.

spk_0 The question is, what do you do after the life?

spk_0 So yes, when the satellite has run out of its onboard fuel.

spk_0 Actually, it is very important that at the end of life, we have to ensure that it doesn't remain there anymore.

spk_0 In case of geostationary orbit, it takes many, many, many years for it to come down on its own.

spk_0 Therefore, you have to save certain amount of fuel in the satellite so that it is at a calculated period of time when its operational life is complete.

spk_0 You have to fire those thrusters and take it away, at least 200 kilometers away. We call it as a graveyard orbit.

spk_0 Thank you, Anu. And we had a question just behind there. Perhaps we can have one for Adam, otherwise he'll feel left out.

spk_0 Thank you. I'm interested to know that as engineers, I'm sure you've done the calculations and it's very dangerous to go into space.

spk_0 But nevertheless, would you like to go anyway?

spk_0 This really is a question for Adam. So it's very dangerous to go into space. Would you go anyway?

spk_0 No.

spk_0 I mean, it is very dangerous. I think humans venturing out into space is actually very important.

spk_0 I think when we engage in this act of exploration, it's kind of a gesture of our humanity.

spk_0 Really, it's akin to a performance art, the art of the possible. What is our species capable of doing?

spk_0 And so I think it is important that humans are involved in exploration and space exploration.

spk_0 I have sweet children who I love, a beautiful garden, and I prefer to stay here.

spk_0 David, my answer is dangerously similar. But last time we had a call for astronauts to the European Space Agency, we had 8,000 applications.

spk_0 We ended up with recruiting a group of 5 extraordinary human beings.

spk_0 And we could have had many more of an equally high standard. And knowing all of those people now, they're all a much cleverer and more capable of doing the job than I am.

spk_0 Annie, would you go to space if you could?

spk_0 Oh, I would have loved to.

spk_0 Well, thank you. So there we must take a short pause. We'll be back in just a minute to explore more about space engineering, with Anurada TK, David Parker, and Adam Steltsner.

spk_0 You're listening to the BBC World Service. I'm Kevin Fong, and this is the Engineers Space Flight.

spk_0 Welcome back to the Imperial College London. We're here with our partners, the 1851 Royal Commission, to discuss space flight engineering with some of the world's leading engineers.

spk_0 Adam Steltsner, Anurada TK, and David Parker. So far, we've been discussing the formidable task of launching and landing spacecraft, and some of our engineers greatest achievements. But what does the future have to offer?

spk_0 Now, I'm going to start with you, Adam. NASA is going back to Mars in 2020. Why? Why are they going back? We've sent so many things to Mars. We know so much about it. What's all this effort for? And what, what, if any, are the unique technical challenges of the 2020 mission?

spk_0 Well, we ask the scientists of our nation, actually, really global scientists, regularly, NASA asks them what should we be doing? And we call that the NASA Decadal Survey.

spk_0 And most recently, they've said one of the most important things we can do is bring samples from Mars back to Earth. Because for all the ingenuity, we might pack an aerover or spacecraft.

spk_0 It doesn't match the ingenuity we have or the instantation that we have back here on Earth. So to really unlock the mysteries of Mars, specifically that mystery of life, the scientists tell us to bring samples back.

spk_0 It's a very difficult challenge. It takes three missions to do so. We're in a partnership with the European Space Agency to that end. But the first of those missions is an NASA mission, Mars 2020, and I'm the chief engineer.

spk_0 We're going to drill into the rocky material of Mars and take core samples of rock and reguleth for return to Earth. They must be absolutely sterile, clean of any Earth contamination.

spk_0 We don't want to get the samples back here on Earth and find mysteriously the common cold virus exists in Mars.

spk_0 So, you know, the architecting the designing of that sampling system to take seal and keep clean these samples, robotically, millions of miles away, it was this central challenge of our effort.

spk_0 I do love that idea that this is a mission that's going to go up and sort of take these samples and just leave them in a carefully marked location for another mission to follow up on.

spk_0 Yes. It does seem like only half the job being done to me. Fair enough. It ends up being that we humans don't yet have rockets big enough to put all the equipment we'd need to do it all in one fell swoop.

spk_0 So, we need to break the challenge up into pieces. Also, the budgets of our various countries can't really afford to do it all at once.

spk_0 So, we break down the engineering challenge into separable elements to be able to complete the first element to know that you've got, for instance, samples waiting for retrieval on the surface of Mars that makes the investment for the second one easier, the effort for the third, etc.

spk_0 And I guess this is part of where the international effort and partnership comes in. David, what role will ESA play in these sample return missions?

spk_0 Well, we're planning to play as an important role. So, Adam talked about three missions. The second mission would be a NASA lander to go back in 2026, go to the surface and then deploy a small, fast rover, European rover that would go out and collect the data.

spk_0 We'll take these samples that have been left behind by the 2020 mission. Bring them back, put them into a container, the size of a football.

spk_0 Launch them back into orbit around the red planet. So, the first attempt to launch a rocket from another planet, a rocket that we've had to take with us.

spk_0 We've had to come back into orbit around the red planet where a further spacecraft, hopefully to be provided by Europe, through the European Space Agency, will be in orbit, controlling all of this to providing telecommunications and all the rest of it.

spk_0 And then to capture this interplanetary football, seal it into a return vehicle to be provided by NASA, bring it all the way back. So, the first spacecraft to make the round trip to Mars.

spk_0 And when we're talking about moving things between planets, I mean so far the things we've talked about use fairly conventional propulsion systems, you know, using solid and liquid fuels to get them on their way.

spk_0 And these sample returns would use similar. But actually there are other types of propulsion, aren't there? Are you, well, ESA, really, ESA's mission to Mercury has used a rather exotic system, electric propulsion.

spk_0 Tell me a bit about why that is useful, necessarily, and whether or not we're going to see more exotic propulsion systems in the future.

spk_0 I think we do, we certainly will. So, BEPi-Klomo's the mission to Mercury. Another multi-decade project launched October 2018. It will make the most complex sophisticated survey of a very mysterious object, Mercury, and anomaly in our solar system.

spk_0 To get there, we'll do several of these interplanetary fly-by's we talked about also, but it also has the most complex, most challenging, electric propulsion system. What's that?

spk_0 We convert, instead of using rocket fuel, burning things, we convert solar energy into accelerated ions accelerated to enormous velocity, the breakdowns, Xenon, small amounts of Xenon, we carry aboard, accelerate that.

spk_0 And that pushes the spacecraft. Incredibly small amounts of thrust, fractions of a newton, so you'd need several of these just to lift yourself off the ground.

spk_0 But they're using incredibly small amounts of fuel, so they're super efficient.

spk_0 It's all about better mileage, isn't it, in the end, yes? Anu.

spk_0 Yeah, this is what is being thought of and already used in some of the geostationaries that leads to that, instead of having as engine, as small engine on the satellite to take it to the geostationary orbit, you can as well use the electric propulsion systems.

spk_0 Just a small amount can give four years of station keeping.

spk_0 And most electric propulsion sort of exploits that idea that in space there is no friction, so if you give a little bit of force and you keep giving a little bit of force, things keep accelerating.

spk_0 And so, you know, that's why that, that system wouldn't work anywhere on earth or in earth's atmosphere.

spk_0 You could never use electric thruster to get off the surface of the earth into orbit, but they're very useful for all sorts of purposes, and flying satellites very close to the earth, whether it's a lot of their atmospheric drag.

spk_0 And it's great to see these engines becoming really used a lot. The engine for Beppie Columbo were actually designed in the UK.

spk_0 And for me, it means a lot personally because my father was involved in these engines very, very early stage as a physicist 50 years ago, at the time of the moon landing, as I remember him getting involved in this work, so it's great to see them being used for real now.

spk_0 And we're talking about your work with geostationally satellites, but of course Elon Musk and SpaceX have told us that have started work on their ambitious space link project, which will be a network of satellites that is going to put up in low earth orbit to bring internet access to every part of the world.

spk_0 And you think this is a great idea?

spk_0 In fact, this is one of the companies which is bringing it. A lot of people are thinking of bringing this small satellites, which can be at a lower orbit.

spk_0 There are two reasons. Now, georbit itself is totally crowded. I think somewhere between 1100 to 1400 satellites are there in the orbit, and many of them are old satellites, which are dead, which are there.

spk_0 And you're not getting a place to be there, or a bit spectrum is an issue.

spk_0 And secondly, the turn around time. There are also a lot of fears that what is going to happen at the lower orbit with so many satellites and are we reaching a point of Kesner effect?

spk_0 So we need to look at that, whether, and also it is not easy to maintain. Continuously, it is a production of satellites have to be happening.

spk_0 The life of the satellites will be less, and you have to keep replenishing them. And when you're using it, you need to have coordination with all the countries. It's a lower orbit.

spk_0 So it's a different ball game, and we need to watch and see. So the worry is too many satellites around the globe.

spk_0 But it is nevertheless attractive, isn't it? So everybody wants to have internet, the world, or whatever.

spk_0 Yes, it is looking very attractive. We have to see what the practical difficulties are.

spk_0 Is there another way of doing it? So other than having this sort of net of satellites so close to the Earth, the way Elon Musk is suggesting?

spk_0 One more thing is, what we have to look at is, why do we need such low latency?

spk_0 And when you say low latency, you know.

spk_0 What do you, what I mean is, if I send a signal to the satellite and get it back, it is taking a turn around time, around 500 to 600 minutes, 240 milliseconds, 250 milliseconds.

spk_0 Physically it requires, and then your electronics delay, etc.

spk_0 So why is that a moderation? Normally we don't even notice that.

spk_0 But today we are talking about some of the applications like internet of things, and having cars which are being driven without a driver,

spk_0 so that you need to have a very immediate information. So do you have to do it with the satellite, or can we have terrestrial systems to aid for it?

spk_0 This is some of the things practically we have to look at.

spk_0 The East is currently collaborating with NASA in developing Orion, the crude spacecraft, built ago, beyond Earth orbit for the first time in nearly half a century.

spk_0 What are the plans for that vehicle, that system?

spk_0 Yes, we're looking to try and get outside of low Earth orbit, it's been a while, as you mentioned.

spk_0 Orion is a vehicle that we're developing with a propulsion system provided by ESA to allow us to get out of low Earth orbit and to the moon, and possibly beyond, and put human footsteps on the surface of Mars someday.

spk_0 And David, Orion is part of the plan to extend our reach in space, back to the moon, and beyond.

spk_0 But ESA is also talking about getting involved in something called the Space Gateway, which should be an international project.

spk_0 Now these are sort of key components of what I like to think of as the second space stage, a vehicle that can go beyond low Earth orbit carrying astronauts, and this Space Gateway, and it's intriguing. Tell me a bit about that.

spk_0 Kevin, so we're entering this second era of human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.

spk_0 And I like to make the comparison with the race to the Antarctic more than 100 years ago, and we went to Antarctic 1912, but some people made it back, some didn't.

spk_0 But at the end of that, we forgot about the Antarctic.

spk_0 Then 40-50 years later, we established permanent scientific outposts.

spk_0 We were the scientists work at the Antarctic all the time now, and for all sorts of areas of science, including discovering the whole in the ozone layer.

spk_0 So it's not about going back to the moon, it's going forward to the moon, in the sense of not just making a quick round trip, but doing the science that can be done there,

spk_0 working out how we can use the resources of the moon to support exploration.

spk_0 And as part of that, the idea is the Lunar Gateway.

spk_0 The Lunar Gateway would be our space port around the moon, allowing us to control robots, but also be the place where we bring together all the pieces of technology to land on the surface of the moon, bring the astronauts back.

spk_0 It will be uncrewed some of the time, doing great signs around the moon, and when the Orion vehicle turns up with the astronauts, they transfer over to the human lander and go down to the surface.

spk_0 And these are the plans we're working on with the international partners right now.

spk_0 And Space Gateway is intended to be a sort of space station of sorts that sits at this kind of balancing point between the Earth and the moon, so that you can launch expeditions to any number of destinations.

spk_0 Well, again, we've talked a bit about orbits, but Gateway will be in a very unusual location.

spk_0 It's actually an orbit around the Earth, but as seen from the moon, it appears to be in a polar orbit.

spk_0 I'm not going to explain the physics of it, but it means that from its location, you can always see the Earth, so it's great for communications.

spk_0 It can cover 85% of the surface of the moon, and what's more, you can control and see things on the far side of the moon.

spk_0 And so we're particularly interested scientifically to explore the far side of the moon, why? Because there's a big hole there.

spk_0 The South Pole aching basin has probably extracted the interior of the moon, and we haven't explored that yet.

spk_0 So for all of these reasons, we need an outpost around the moon to support our robots and our humans.

spk_0 Thank you.

spk_0 This is the engineers space engineering. We've been exploring spacecraft, the practicalities of launching them, difficulties of landing them, and what the future holds.

spk_0 So I now, I'm going to turn it over to our audience to see if there are any questions for our space flight engineers.

spk_0 Thank you.

spk_0 I'm Samantha. Do you think how long do you think it will be until commercial space travel?

spk_0 Thank you. How long do we think it's going to be before we see commercial space travel? I guess for people, for faster notes. Adam, what do you think?

spk_0 I suspect that you'll see the first space tourists, their time in space will be short.

spk_0 But I think you'll see that within a year or so, honestly. I have friends who told me it was going to happen last year.

spk_0 Commercial space travel for tourists or for civilians wanting to just go and see, I think, in an orbital or suborbital sense, will happen quite quickly.

spk_0 How long it will be before you're able to go to the moon? That's a tougher question to unpack. I'll pass on trying to figure that one out.

spk_0 Thank you. Another question, please.

spk_0 What would happen if evidence of life was discovered on Mars?

spk_0 Small question.

spk_0 What would happen if evidence of life and Mars? I have to go to our Mars and Adam. What would happen?

spk_0 Well, I was going to say that may be a question for a philosopher or more than an engineer.

spk_0 There's something called the Drake equation. If you take the number of stars and you multiply it by the probability that the star has a planet,

spk_0 which we used to think was quite small and the Kepler mission is demonstrated as not what we thought. It's many, many more of the stars that we look at have planets beside them.

spk_0 And then you look at the number of planets that are in the habitable zone, that is the zone in which liquid water can exist and so forth.

spk_0 And you ask the final question, what's the probability that on a planet that can survive and suit life, life occurs? That's a guess.

spk_0 But as long as that number is not absolutely mathematically zero, the Drake equation tells you that there are other things alive out there in our universe.

spk_0 One of the most captivating questions, of course, is, could they be on one of their nearest neighbors? Could Mars.

spk_0 So if we find evidence for life on Mars, I personally will be relieved.

spk_0 Because the notion that we are the only living things in this universe is terribly frightening to me.

spk_0 And one of his mission is looking for methane traces on Mars and methane possibly is a sign of life. Tell me a bit about that.

spk_0 True. Methane is something which gives indication that there is life. Could be life, even bacterial or that kind of form, which can generate a methane.

spk_0 So that is why there is a lot of hope that we find positively that there is some methane and then link it, why is it there?

spk_0 So whether there is any life. So that's one of the basic things for the life one looks for.

spk_0 And David, I mean, as someone involved in senior strategy at ESA, what are your thoughts about this? What happens if we find hard evidence of life on another planet?

spk_0 Well, my best guess is with Mars we won't find extent life. But the challenge that we've taken up with our exomars mission right now is to try and see if there is methane there.

spk_0 Okay, it might be active life, but more likely active geology on the planet.

spk_0 But we're searching with exomars rover that were going, launching next year to explore the planet three and a half billion years ago because we're going to explore an ancient sea bed.

spk_0 And the point is that life got going on this planet three and a half, four billion years ago, as far as we can look back.

spk_0 So if we find any evidence of life three and a half billion years ago on Mars, Bingo in the sense that Drake equation point that this probability goes dramatically up if two similar planets got life going at the same time.

spk_0 Then we start to, we start to put those numbers into all of the planets we're finding around all of the other stars all of the time.

spk_0 But the question is, is the life seem to have the same characteristics? So one of the characteristics of the amino acids is they're handed, they're either left handed or right handed.

spk_0 Are they the same handedness when we go to another planet? So that will tell us, does the life have a common origin or a separate origin for example?

spk_0 Thank you. And which leads us on to another question from our audience.

spk_0 Good evening. So I should drag this down into politics, but the current sitting US president has redirected NASA's focus from Mars back to the moon.

spk_0 So to what extent is going to the moon a necessary step in getting humans to Mars?

spk_0 Either of you two want to take that?

spk_0 I will spin that out to David.

spk_0 Okay, so I always do this at these events. It doesn't work on radio, but I'm holding my hands together as if they were a ball that representing Earth.

spk_0 Space station is the length of the back of the hairs on the back of my hand above the Earth.

spk_0 The moon is in about the fourth row of this lecture theatre. The unfortunately Mars is somewhere back to Paddington station where I arrived early this afternoon.

spk_0 Each step is a thousand times. And right now, even if we can build a rocket to go to Mars, the astronauts, they wouldn't survive the journey.

spk_0 We don't have to support them, protect them from the radiation, to support them with the food, the water, all the supplies they need to get them back there and back in one piece.

spk_0 So the moon is our black backyard for learning and developing all the techniques we need to go to Mars in my view to prove safely that we can make that journey.

spk_0 I think it would be unrealistic to imagine we make that single leap to Mars right now.

spk_0 Front row here, just down on the left, thank you.

spk_0 I'm willing to do. On the journey's two Mars, how, when and if, humans go to Mars, how can they bear with each other, would they go insane?

spk_0 On the journey to Mars, how will the crew bear the company of one another? It's about conventional propulsion, it's about six or nine months in each direction to Mars who wants to date that one and Adam, go for it.

spk_0 Yeah, it is challenging in general. There's, I don't know, a few hundred people in this audience, if we were to randomly select from all of us here in this room, whatever the number of crew we would absolutely be unsolicable.

spk_0 You need to select your people very, very carefully. We've sort of proven in closed quarters in submarines and other settings that you can choose a set of people who won't just be at each other's throats for that duration, but it is a substantial challenge and the psychology and the psychological makeup of a crew is essential.

spk_0 We've got time for another two punchy questions and punchy answers, so Peter, yes, thanks.

spk_0 Hi, I was wondering how do you make a breakthrough as an engineer.

spk_0 How do you make a breakthrough as an engineer? Anu, how did you make your breakthrough as an engineer?

spk_0 It's not tough at all. It goes by your interest. How will one breakthrough as a musician or an artist or an engineer, it is your basic interest.

spk_0 For example, I was always interested in maths and science throughout. Engineering was my first choice because I could pursue that.

spk_0 And application oriented maths and science is what I liked. It goes by your interest. It's not difficult if you're interested.

spk_0 Anu, when you studied engineering, what was the makeup of your faculty like? Was it an equal mix of men and women?

spk_0 No, when I passed out, that was in Dinosaur era. 1982, I passed out.

spk_0 At the time, we were 10 girls and I think 60 boys in the class. So that was a kind of ratio.

spk_0 But my daughters, when they studied engineering, it's 50%. Girls and 50% boys.

spk_0 And a last question from our audience. Peace of where do you want to go?

spk_0 Hi, my name is Greene. It's great that we're making rockets reusable and more powerful. But at the end of the day, it's still a very messy and primitive way of getting stuff into space.

spk_0 When can we come up with something better?

spk_0 When can we come up with a better and less messy way of getting into space? Adam, that's one for you.

spk_0 So I agree. It is messy. The very act of taking something from Earth and getting it into space is very energetic.

spk_0 If you think of the energy that something has in orbit, you have to put that energy into the device.

spk_0 Sometimes, especially in engineering, one of the features I love about engineering is that it ultimately must be practical.

spk_0 The solutions must pass the practicality test. Will it really work?

spk_0 So we hate propulsion as you see it today. There are ideas. But they currently, as I understand it, and I think it's likely to be the case for the foreseeable world.

spk_0 Rockets are the least unacceptable way of getting something into orbit. Things like rail guns accelerating really quickly down here on Earth.

spk_0 Great, except now you're moving orbital speeds down here on Earth. That's also very messy. That's a lot of atmospheric wreck.

spk_0 So we're always looking for a better way. I'm unaware of anyone out there that's waiting for us.

spk_0 So I guess part of this question is perhaps about the possible technology of space elevators, which involve geostationary satellites and orbits.

spk_0 What do you think about that possibility that there may be a better way that perhaps we could get an elevator into space? What do you think of that?

spk_0 What Adam said is right. We are all looking for better ways all the time. How to go.

spk_0 Today we are where we are. We have to take through our rockets. There's no other way. It present.

spk_0 David, I have some hope that the technology that combines the rocket engine with an air breathing engine technology.

spk_0 Something that has been worked on for a long time and is now becoming physical reality on test beds in Europe and in the US could create the machine that goes down a runway and goes directly into space and comes back again.

spk_0 And I don't think that's so far away. Thank you.

spk_0 And that is it for the engineers space flight from Imperial College in London on behalf of the BBC World Service, our partners, the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 and my producer, Charlie Taylor, please join me in giving a warm round of applause to our fascinating engineers, Adam Steltzer,

spk_0 David Parker and Anne Raderti K.

spk_0 Thank you.

Space Flight

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