The Final Frontier

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Hello, I'm Tom Heap and welcome to Rare Earth. But this week we're going to slip our earthly leash and launch into space. And I'm Helen Chersky. And I'm really excited about this programme because I think, obviously, we're a climate and environment programme. You might say, well, what are we doing venturing out into space? Are we just trying to be cool?

But actually, it's very relevant because we can see already that space can have enormous benefits for the climate. Just think about all those climate models that only run because they get data that was measured in space. But also, you know, those launches, it's a lot of rockets, isn't it, Tom? There is a lot of rockets. and that's a big fire.

which generally we frown upon in climate and environment programs. But I think the other thing that's relevant, and I know you're very keen on this, Helen, is the whole idea of being able to, excuse me, the whole fact of being able to see Earth from space did have a... a big impact on the sort of psychology of how we view our planet the small blue dot all those kind of things and quite how we fit in in our universe and how it relates to our care of this

currently one and only living space. Yeah, it's hard to remember now. I mean, I'm not old enough to remember, but to imagine a world before we had seen Earth. And there were two very famous photographs, Earthrise in 1968 and Blue Marble taken in 1972.

and on the Apollo missions, because you have to be far enough away from the Earth to be able to turn around and see the whole thing. So those are the only times humans have seen the whole of planet Earth. And those photos had a huge impact on the environmental movement at the time because suddenly we looked...

vulnerable and that is something that humanity had not felt I think and suddenly you look back and that the benefit whatever you think of going to the moon just those photos of seeing ourselves have been so

I think they've shaped our civilisation so much. So I think this is a really interesting and important issue. And I think the other reason for looking at it now is this extraordinary acceleration in the number of launches that are going on, the amount of times that we are reaching out to space. to put satellites up there. I think the figure is that in...

2018, there were 500 objects launched into space. In 2023, there were 2,664. So that's just in five years. Yeah, and that's more than five times as many in five years. Obviously, this is famously Elon Musk and Starlink and all those kind of things. But it's not just him. You know, a lot of people are reaching out to space as a way of boosting their business on Earth.

So this is what we're going to be focusing on in today's programme. What's going up into the atmosphere? Why is it going up? And what are the costs and the benefits to climate and the environment? Now.

I have a very specific memory of almost exactly nine years ago standing at the Science Museum hosting events and watching 3,000 schoolchildren counting down, screaming out a countdown as they watched a rocket on a huge screen. launch into space. And of course, they were there because one of the astronauts on top of that rocket was Tim Peake. And I'm delighted to say that Tim Peake is joining us in the studio, Major Tim Peake, to give him his full title. He spends 186 days in space.

aboard the International Space Station from December 2015 to June 2016. So, Tim, you must have been asked about that launch so many times. But just tell us a little bit about the emotion, the excitement of leaving the Earth. Wow, launching into space. I mean, it's a hugely...

exciting moment it is the build-up of all of your training as an astronaut it's something you've been you know looking forward to for so many years and when you're sat there as a crew of three you've got this real mixture of emotions because on one hand you're trying to be as professional as possible you're monitoring

the engine systems the fuel pumps the life support systems making sure everything's perfect and on the other part of you is this kind of childhood excitement of wow i'm sat on a rocket i'm about to launch into space and start you know the journey of a lifetime there's a lot of

vibration you feel the energy nine million horsepower lifting you off that launch pad and the acceleration of course that the g-force builds up and it pushes you back into your seat it's a very visceral experience you talked about that big fire and as we mentioned in in the

introduction we are going to be looking at that impact that that has on our atmosphere and with us we have Eloise Marais who leads the Atmospheric Composition and Air Quality Research Group at University College London. Just a quick question Would you go if you were given the chance? Would you take his seat? I don't know. With all that training that's involved and the risk associated with it, I imagine it's a tough decision to make. Well, we'll see what our final guest thinks about this as well.

And also joining us down the line is Andrew Forney, who is the co-chair of the Environmental Task Force for Space Scotland. Andrew, I don't know if you've ever fancied going up on a rocket, but just set the context for us here. Like how many rockets now are launched each year?

year um how many rockets unless you say about 200 i think is the value here and then to answer a question would i go i probably won't be able to go i would love to but our children definitely will be going more and more often

Wow. And just why Space Scotland? Some people might be surprised by the country name behind that. What's Scotland's role in this now? So basically in the UK you have what is called clusters where the space... industry is being promoted and there's a bunch there's one here down in Wales I'm in Wales at the moment and we've got some in Scotland, we've got Space Yorkshire you've got Space Cornwall you've got NI Space, Northern Ireland Space

All these different clusters promote the sector, the space sector, because it is such a big and important sector for us. Well, we're going to start at the beginning, which is launch. So let's get to the burning stuff, the carbon cost of all these launches.

Louise. I mean, is this a significant amount of carbon that's being expended here? Yeah, when the carbon cost, I suppose, is considered, it's really thinking about CO2 emissions. And for rocket launchers, CO2 emissions are quite small. They're quite insignificant in comparison.

into any kind of other industrial processes that we have on Earth that are producing CO2. It's really other things, these air pollutants, these aerosols and gas phase compounds that can react in the atmosphere. Hang on a minute. I've got to wind back. You say they're quite small. I mean, this is the...

The mother of all fires going off there. I mean, someone, a friend of mine who used to work for Inmarsat, the satellite people, said even just the sort of carburettor, the thing that pumps the fuel into it, has the same power as a Eurostar. So, a train. talking about a heck of a lot of combustion at that point and creation of co2 in that zone yeah in that moment a lot of co2 is pumped out especially from the carbon-based propellants that are inevitably going to produce co2 in that

Very intense combustion process, but it's fleeting. It's a few minutes. It's not happening all the time. It's not at the cadence of things like aviation, like aircraft. flights. And so for now, at least with 200 launches a year, it's not a large carbon footprint. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be concerned about it for other reasons. And Tim, just set out for us, you know, we look, we send planes into the sky all the time.

something about a rocket launch you know you clearly need it's different why is it so much harder to get um things into space than it is just to fly to australia

Well, it's much harder because of the orbital velocity you need to remain up there in space. You can gain the altitude. You could send a rocket straight up and then just let it fall straight back down to Earth again. That would take a lot less energy. But if you want something to stay in space, space a satellite to monitor earth's climate for example then it has to achieve orbital velocity and that's about 17 and a half thousand miles per hour so it's it's it's fast yeah 25 times the speed of

So we gain altitude in rockets as quickly as possible to get outside the atmosphere because that causes drag. And then once you've gained that altitude, the rocket will go from vertical to horizontal and then you'll gain the speed in order. to stay in orbit. And most launches take around about eight to nine minutes in order to get into orbit and then the engines cut out.

And just give us an idea of the size of these fuel tanks on, I don't know, your rocket or the current rockets. Do you have any idea how much fuel they're burning? It completely depends on what you're launching into space. So, for example, the Soyuz rocket that I flew to space in, it had about 300 tons.

Tons of fuel carrying three people and a few tons worth of cargo. But if you're launching on the shuttle, for example, it would have been much larger tank. If you're looking at Elon Musk and SpaceX and stuff. Now, that's the size of a Saturn V. It's a huge rocket. So the Saturn V was the one that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon. That's correct. So now that we're starting back with lunar exploration, the sizes of the rockets...

are going up and up and up in order to be able to fulfil those missions. Sorry, I kind of cut Eloise off when she was beginning to talk about the bad stuff that isn't CO2. So just explain what those things are and what harm they do. Yeah, so these are things like small particles that are called black carbon.

call them soot particles. They're very, very dark in color. And because they're so dark, they're so good at absorbing the sun's rays. And when they absorb the sun's rays, they heat up the atmosphere that they're surrounding, that's surrounding them.

There are also compounds that are very reactive in the atmosphere and rockets are very good at injecting these straight into the stratosphere where they can react and essentially deplete ozone and potentially contribute to an ozone hole. So there's something here, isn't there, about the...

layers of the atmosphere and that we talk about you know we sometimes use the word stratospheric as something that's a very very long way away actually it's only 12 kilometers up but our weather happens in the layer below that and then you have the stratosphere but then there's these other layers going up and away and they're kind of slightly separate from each other so

it matters which layer these pollutants get injected into yeah the layer really does matter and the higher you go the longer they stay there because there's no weather like we have on earth that just easily cleans up the atmosphere and so they can stay there for two and a half three years and the longer a pollutant is there the more impact that it has on the environment

Well, whether you want to get to space, as we've just heard, or move around once you're there, you need propulsion. And one company who are very much into this are Pulsar Fusion. And more about the fusion bit in a moment. But a few weeks ago, I went to see their place in Bletchley to meet the founder and CEO, Richard Dynan, and director of operations, James Lambert. It was an extraordinary place. It was like...

Well, it was extraordinary and sort of banal at the same time. It was like a warehouse on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, where Bletchley is, basically. But inside, in effect, were chunks of outer space. And what I mean by that is that they had vacuum tanks. And vacuums are incredibly difficult to create on Earth, especially big ones. And so you had...

Some of these tanks, which were about the size of a big dustbin with really thick metal walls, some of them got much, much bigger, the size of a car or two. They looked a bit like when you see diving bells, you know, the really deep diving. underwater craft which and it's the same principle it's massive massive pressure but it was extraordinary because you had these little bits of vacuum and they wanted them because they needed to test their engines in a space-like atmosphere

There's going to be a bit of a noise here. And we should now be able to open the door. James and Richard are just taking the huge steel door off one end of this. It's about a metre, perhaps a little bit more in diameter, and has opened up a cylinder about a metre and a half deep, I'd say, something like that, maybe close to two. Inside you can see this is a 500 watt hall effect thruster. You can see the plasma burns around the edge of it.

What kind of craft would be propelled by this kind of engine and where? So that would be on a satellite in space. So it's been launched up on a big rocket. A satellite has been placed in orbit. And that satellite will de-orbit, navigate, change orbit, station keep, you know, keep its place using an engine just like that. That's actually...

relatively large for satellites. I mean, some satellites aren't much bigger than that engine. So that's quite a big engine. And if that's on, you'd have a blue plume of xenon plasma burning away there. propelling the craft. So I think it might just help here to help out the audience with the different stages. So you've got stuff to get mass.

objects people rockets from the earth into a sort of low orbit that's you know one stage and then you've got this sort of medium stage of propulsion that you talked about over here And then if you've got a kind of third stage when you're actually in deep space, outer space, if you like. So that is electric propulsion. So once you're in the vacuum of space, you'd be using a completely different type of propulsion system that we build, which is...

the Hall Effect electric propulsion engines. In terms of getting rockets from Earth into space, that first step, is anyone coming up with things that... aren't damaging to our environment, James. Is anyone coming up with climate-friendly ways of getting rockets from Earth, that first stage? Yeah, it's an incredibly difficult problem, and people look at it from a few different angles. One is researching liquid hydrogen.

as a launch technology which is a well-proven frequently flown tech but it's also it has no carbon and it wouldn't have any carbon dioxide emissions is the point yeah that's exactly right although people will immediately jump in and say well hold on a second where did you get the hydrogen from and you know it's very very difficult to decarbonize your supply chain

Other people are looking at really, really interesting concepts. There's a company in California called SpinLaunch, and their concept is literally to throw things into orbit using a rapidly rotating arm. So the idea of centrifugal force and then you suddenly...

let it go exactly right yeah exactly right that's ambitious it's that's what it is ambitious i love it and it's a wonderful idea tim would you love it or does that sound like bone melting g-force i don't think anything organic is going to survive kind of g-forces but but it is you know it's got potential in terms of manufacturing things in space so if you want to send lots of small objects into space that then can then be assembled into a structure then maybe

something like this is a viable way of launching it, something that can survive those high G-forces. But humans, no. It's a wonderful mental image, though, isn't it? Possibly, unless you're a bird that's about to get in the way. Andrew? Candlewax? Yeah.

That does sound terribly 18th century. You've got Orbex with BioLPG, you've got Skyrora with their recycled plastic fuel they're trying to get off the ground, eco-scene. So you've got a lot of organisations that are looking at what... propellant they're going to use instead of hydrazine and all the bad stuff that's coming out so they're less

Well, we're going to nip back to Bletchley now because what really excites Richard and James is the possibility of harnessing what is seen by many as the holy grail of energy sources, nuclear fusion. Ultimately... If you are talking about propulsion in space, space is a huge place. And even though you see us going up, you know, we're actually almost coming out of our house in the back door. We're only on the doorstep as a sort of analogy.

To travel meaningful distances in space, what may be very quick relative to ground speeds, are nothing in terms of how far away everything is. If you want to move meaningful distances in space... you need exhaust speeds, very, very high exhaust speeds. And nuclear fusion can offer that incredibly quick exhaust velocity that would enable us to reach further. So does it mean that interplanetary travel...

for humans, becomes much more plausible. Yeah, I mean, if we're talking about that cis-Martian environment, Earth to Mars, so it's Luna, Earth to Moon... Yeah, you're going to dramatically save time. It's actually exponential. So the longer the mission, the more of a net saving you'd get. However, if we are trying to get to other...

solar systems like Alpha Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away, possibly we could do that. It would only be with a nuclear fusion engine. There'd be no other way we could do that. But it would still take... 11 years excluding deceleration acceleration so it's a long mission but that's our closest three star system which has a habitable planet it's interesting you say habitable because we are

This is predominantly a programme about the environmental and natural history of Earth. One of the things people are saying is, you know, maybe we're going to have to create an Earth. In other places, you know, we have to create a habitable place somewhere other than this earth. Well, we should have a portfolio of habitable planets. And you think this is critical to making that a plausible reality? Well, I'll tell you one thing. We are... a propulsion company and that is in our view

No matter what you want to do. You want to mine asteroids? Wonderful. You're going to need a propulsion system. You want to go to the moon? Great. Propulsion system. You have a new system for the internet. We are selling ultimately the shovels for this industry. One of the criticisms we're going to hear in this program is a lot of launches going up, some of the somewhat dubious necessity for our lives on Earth. And these are adding to pollution in the atmosphere, all these kind of things.

Do you think in the end space tech is a net positive or a net negative for the environment of Earth? I think it's part of our evolution as a species. I think this is what humans do. What does a 100,000-year-old human species look like? It's probably very clean, interplanetary, fusion capable. And to have all your eggs in one basket doesn't seem to be a great idea. This basket being Earth. This basket being Earth. But also, we are, we itch.

to innovate and it will lead to nuclear fusion and it will lead to fusion propulsion with or without pulsar I can tell you Fusion is a reaction that humans have done and will continue to do more and more. And the impact will be that we will power our planet with a fuel source that is indefinite and we will be able to leave our solar system. And those are two pretty big promises from One Technology.

Tim, that does all sound very space age there. And of course, I mean, they're a company, they're in the business of selling this technology. So you'd expect them to say it's all wonderful and we're going to live in the sci-fi future. And we should perhaps say that fusion energy is this neat little quirk of physics that if you combine...

small atoms to make small atomic nuclei to make slightly bigger ones it gives off energy so you can use a relatively small amount of hydrogen and or something similar and create energy from very little you can turn mass into energy and so

Potentially, you've got vast amounts of energy that you're carrying with you. Is it credible, do you think? Is this really what the future holds? Yeah, we fast forwarded a few years there, didn't we? Sort of not just interplanetary travel, but off to our next star system.

Yes, it is credible. You have to look at the stepping stones along the way. And at the moment, you know, going back to the moon is something that we are actively involved in. We should see the Artemis 2 crew launch next year on that mission. In the late 2030s, early 2040s, then human missions to Mars will become a reality as well. So these are kind of the missions coming up in the near future. Fusion...

Propulsion, fantastic. Fusion energy full stop for the planet is obviously going to be hugely beneficial. But before then, there's an awful lot of exploration to do within our own sort of solar system. There's the moons of Saturn.

and Jupiter which are very exciting to study as well before we start thinking about going off to Alpha Centauri. I think it's one of the interesting things about all of this is that actually if you sort of look objectively that the most interesting things are always closest to home but we've got this

And I think also what's going to happen, first of all, is utilisation of space. So we're talking about space exploration. But if you look at utilisation, what's happening at the moment is the cost of getting into space is coming down and down. Put some figures on that. It used to be about $57,000 to get one kilogram into low Earth orbit on the shuttle. On a Falcon Heavy today, that's about $1,500. On Starship, we're looking at perhaps as low as $200 to $300.

kilogram to the earth orbit that's opening up space for all sorts of potential possibilities things that we thought might be science fiction for example let's go and build a 10 square kilometer solar array that can use microwaves to get that that clean, limitless energy down to Earth, that becomes economically feasible. The European Space Agency did a study on this. As soon as you go below $1,000 per kilogram to low Earth orbit. So things that we thought might be 50 to 100...

years in the future could actually be very viable very quickly. They could afford to pay a hefty carbon tax then for the costs in other ways to come down. I won't bang on much further about that. They mentioned mining asteroids and i think that's something you think is is plausible too well the solar system is full of resources uh some as we start to run out of resources on earth or not even running out but if we start looking at well should we be

dredging our ocean floors for rare earth metals or should we be looking to capture an asteroid and mining it then I think that using resources that we can find off the planet is going to help to protect earth in the long run so I definitely the idea of mining asteroids to going into the deep sea and digging up things out there.

Absolutely. And as the cost of access comes down and as we start getting cleaner fuels and understanding more about how we can launch into space using things, as Andrew was mentioning, biopropane with 90 percent less carbon. emissions than something like kerosene or methane again, which is being used on lots of SpaceX's rockets at the moment. These are certainly better than RP-1, which is kerosene effectively. So if we can get cleaner...

access to space as well as cheaper access to space, then things like mining asteroids do become a reality. And Andrew, I mean, maybe that's outside the remit of the environmental task force that you're involved with, but does that sound, I mean, is that how you... view it that there's a there's a benefit it's all it's a net benefit basically mining asteroids there's nothing to lose here from an environmental point of view so yes and at the same time

It's a great idea, a great concept. I've been thinking about it for a long, long time. But at the same time, we're going somewhere else to dredge up an asteroid. And I know there's nothing that lives on it. Pretty sure nothing lives on it, but it's another environment. The clangers will be there round the back. Do we know what's on it? Is there an environment in there that is going to be impacted by us? We don't know. A lot of research needs to be conducted.

I'm saying to myself, yeah, sure, let's do it. Sounds like a great idea. Also, there's a great thing that we can do is manufacture in space because some of the manufacturing products that are done in space will last longer.

and will be more resilient to the use done on Earth. Eloise Murray, what do you think about this? Yeah, I think if the question was posed at me, is there a net benefit? I would say that I don't think we have all the information yet to be able to say what the environmental... impact is to sort of have a strong scientifically, you know, evidence-backed

Oh, a proper scientific with caveats response there. Well done. Yeah, I think there's just so much uncertainty, right? SpaceX has started using liquid methane as a fuel, but we don't know the quantity of pollutants and all the mix of pollutants.

come from that launch. There's also all of the space junk that is accumulating as a result of using low Earth orbit. And the way that we clean that up currently is that we send it back through the atmosphere and we hope it ablates completely. It makes new compounds. So there's a lot to consider, I think. be able to answer that with more confidence.

Well, this is Rare Earth on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. And this week we're talking about space and whether going into space is friend or foe when it comes to climate and the environment. And we are joined by Tim Peake, former astronaut and author of Space, The Human Story, by Eloise Murray from University College London, and by the co-chair of the Environmental Task Force for Space Scotland, Andrew Forney.

Well, currently, most of these launches and most of our interest in space is because of all the satellites that are there and the great... numbers we're putting up the increasing volume or quantity i should say of satellites that are there tim simple question really perhaps not what are all these satellites doing

Well, they're doing a whole raft of different things. We have about 10,000 satellites in orbit at the moment. Some of them will be monitoring Earth's climate. They're the finger on the pulse of the planet, looking at our ocean salinity, looking at biomass, looking at... atmospheric constituents, all those kind of things. Some of them will be newer commercial activities such as broadband internet, Starlink, for example. Some of these satellites will be part of government communication systems.

For example, we have a number of military satellites up there as well, part of the navigation systems, telecommunication systems. And also the real estate is interesting because, you know, there is real estate in space and some parts of space are more valuable.

and others we've got geostationary where if you put an object in the geostationary it will it will remain over that same place on earth geostation yeah yeah you just kind of said it but it's literally if it's a geostation and they're generally near the equator yes above the equator have i got that right or is that yes yeah yeah so if you were sat let's say above nairobi you always stay roughly above

Nairobi as the Earth spins. That's right, and that obviously has advantages. You also have lower orbits which will travel faster around the planet, where GPS satellites might be, the space station itself even lower still at 400 kilometres.

And then you have other orbits such as polar orbits. That's why Scotland is an interesting place to launch from because you can put small satellites into polar sun synchronous orbits and they have interesting... values as well for communication observation earth observation in particular so there's this interesting thing about location in space which is that you can't stay still

that's kind of the rule right so you're not actually talking about a single location you're talking about a path and the satellite is going to go around the path and it's a loop so you're just choosing the loop and it can be a small tight loop or a big very loopy loop but sorry it's what's

So the geostationaries are still in relation to the point on Earth, presumably. But they're still moving. They're only geostationary because they happen to have a rotation speed that matches Earth. So they're orbiting once every 24 hours.

I want to dig in a little bit into the Earth observation side, because in climate, I mean, Helen and I know we're always reading papers that have come from research from space. I mean, so Eloise, while we have concerns about the environmental ambient, there's little doubt. that they've hugely increased our environmental knowledge and sort of...

power and therefore willingness to address some of these problems. Yeah, and it's such an area of amazing innovation. We've been able to start to look at plumes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas at like 60 metre, 10 metre resolution. In my own research, I make use of Earth observation.

to try and understand air pollution in parts of the world where there isn't the capacity to monitor from the ground. So there's been so much benefit. Or the willingness sometimes. You can be a bit eye in the sky, can't you? You can spy on what's happening in an environmental sense. Yeah, especially if the regulation pushes you.

in the right direction, you can establish those ground-based monitors. So a lot of benefit to that. But the majority of the low Earth orbit accumulation of satellites that we're seeing currently is really driven by SpaceX. Right. Just to stick with the benefits, I think there's something...

interesting here and i'm interested in your opinion on it on on the sort of transparency and accountability the fact that if you put something up i mean there's no hiding almost from space right so if people uh they get better imaging technology there's better detection technology and you can of whiz round and round earth and you can see what people are doing so if someone is fishing for example if there's a fishing vessel that is where it's not supposed to be

You can see them. We talked about that in a previous program, they were switching their transponders off so they couldn't be seen. Yeah, it's an incredibly useful tool, especially the GHGSat instruments that are in space that are monitoring methane. Greenhouse gas. Yes, so they're monitoring. for methane leakages where they can see this at sort of 10 meter resolution. And not only is it useful for policy, but also for the industries who are losing valuable product. So it's wasted.

natural gas that we could be used to power our homes. I do think there's this wonderful thing about satellite data that if you make it open and available, people find uses for it. I remember Copernicus, who run the EU's observational satellite system, they've had these hackathons where they just say, well, here's a load of data.

come into our offices and see what you can do with it. And people did the most astonishing, came up with the things that they cared about that they could use this data for. But actually, I'm interested in a slightly different use of data, which is the emotional use of data, Tim, which is one of the things that...

almost every astronaut I've ever spoken to has said when they've come back, which is that this view of Earth changes it. Like being able to see Earth changes their relationship to it. And I just wondered how, you know, being able to see Earth from satellites, not just in the visit, visible light the way we see it, but perhaps in the colours we can't see it. How did it change your view of Earth? How important do you think that is?

It has a very profound effect on any astronaut, I think, who looks back and sees that, especially the Apollo astronauts who, as you mentioned earlier, went even further away and actually saw the entire Earth as a globe. On the space station, we're orbiting once every 90 minutes around this amazing planet. And what's interesting is not just the Earth, it's seeing it against the black backdrop of space, the vastness of space, and seeing the Milky Way galaxy rise and getting a perspective.

on just how big the universe is and our tiny place within it. But it makes you realise every sunrise and sunset, when you see that 16km thick... layer of our atmosphere um and that's what really makes you think oh that that's what keeps everything alive 16 kilometer thin in a way yeah yeah absolutely um

And that's what differentiates us from planets such as Venus, which have runaway greenhouse gas effect, or Mars, which has had most of its atmosphere stripped and has very thin carbon dioxide atmosphere. And you look at Earth's atmosphere and the clear vibrancy of...

life on planet earth and it's absolutely stunning to see we're going to come to some of that slightly more space-wise existential stuff at the moment but just i just want to stick with satellites because we've talked about what would be seen as sort of noble uses furthering science

improving our understanding of the environment but some i was looking at you know they're nakedly commercial i mean ones that i was reading about recently were about so we could make phone calls from airplanes that needed a whole load of new satellites well you know That's just a, well, to my mind, a slightly pointless commercial enterprise which is going to stick a whole lot of more metalwork in the sky, Eloise.

Would you think that's a good use of space? I like being on a flight when I don't have access to my phone. I can get away with being disconnected. But I think it really depends, right? How much is being added? What is the metal component? of those satellites that are being added? How long will they be there? But the point that I'm getting at is that it will just be used space if you can make a profit out of it, won't it? I mean, Andrew, that's presumably what's driving a lot of your companies.

Yeah, definitely. But I think there's also an element here that technology to make a phone call from a telephone also allows you to have less issues with your black box. So, for example, if a plane crashes or it's transmitting data, instantly, you need that to figure out what's happened. So currently, if you're flying over the Atlantic, you're going to have a black area where you can't see the plane anymore. You know it's flying, you hope it's flying, but it might not come back.

other side. Using satellite data, you can follow that plane through these dark areas. And the same applies to the rocket launches. Sometimes you lose contact and you hope for the best. Usually it's the best. But having that continuity of signal is...

really important for these safety purposes so i want to come to a slightly different thing about satellites which is what you can do in them because of course tim when you are on the international space station you know you're you're put to work you're doing lots of things and some of those things are experiments and of course you're trying things out that you can

do in in microgravity yeah that you can't do on earth have any of those got relevance for you know climate and environment how useful is it as a play how useful is space as a place to do things as a lab yeah it's phenomenally useful uh so when you remove gravity

effectively as a parameter then you can build things that we simply can't build on earth and and it seems to be you know small fragile structures that's where you get the most benefit so disease causing proteins for example like motor neuronal parkinson's or hunter

We can take those disease-causing proteins into space and we can grow very large, pure crystals and they can be brought back to Earth. And then the pharmaceutical companies can develop new drugs that can counter these proteins that require very low...

dosages for patients so low side effects and that's research that's being done right now on board the space station but also manufacturing metals for example metal alloys that you can't make on earth that are more elastic they're lighter they're stronger so potentially for our

our aircraft turbine blades you can make them so much more fuel efficient and reduce the carbon output for our aviation industry and then also things as andrew mentioned earlier semiconductors silicon wafers well if you grow any crystal structure that's very

large and very pure, you can make our processors much, much more efficient. So thermal rejection qualities are greater. Their actual power requirements are far less. But some of the most exciting research I think right now now is actually growing human organs so if you try and bio uh or print out a human organ uh using bio ink with a 3d printer here on earth you

You can do it with scaffolding structures, but they can tend to crush because of Earth's gravity. Sedimentation is a problem as well. But in space, you can 3D print these structures, very fine, small cellular structures. And that's some of the research that's going on. on right now so potentially the future could be taking cells from a patient printing out their own heart in space bringing it back down and transplanting it with no fear of rejection from the body and no lifetime of immunotherapy

Wow, I feel a bit bad asking a slightly prosaic question after that extraordinary vision. Eloise, satellites come to an end of their life, either usually deliberately, occasionally accidentally, and they de-orbit, they come down. What happens?

to them in the atmosphere and indeed when they hit the Earth. Ideally, they'll re-enter through the atmosphere under perfect conditions, the whole thing will ablate and nothing will land on Earth. So ablate just means it's a burn away. And does that burning have any impact?

The result of that? We burn anything and the side effect is always the production of pollutants. And so it really depends on what the satellite is made up of. But this kind of information is proprietary. So we don't really know the material composition. of all of these satellites that are being discarded. And so they're producing nitrogen oxides. They're producing a whole lot of metal particles. One of them we know about is alumina or aluminium oxide. And this is a site where...

essentially ozone depletion can occur very efficiently. And so this is another concern that we have is that that ozone depletion would then deplete ozone in the stratosphere, that layer that's protecting us from harmful UV radiation.

And Andrew Fournier, this is presumably something that you look at. Are people looking at perhaps making satellites out of different materials or doing something that's different so that when they re-enter the atmosphere, they're not as damaging? Yes, that's exactly correct. that is really important and a really big focus for

pretty much everybody that's working in the sector, European space agencies working on their decarbonisation strategy. But there's a lot of new manufacturing processes that are happening because of the innovation that happens in space. So if you look at this, I think there's a Japanese company that's...

or is going to send up a satellite made of wood. Most components, the external bits, are made of wood so that when it burns back in the atmosphere it causes less an impact in terms of what it brings back. But, you know... I think one of the big issues of orbiting, low Earth orbit, is how busy it is. And that's a big, big concern to me. This is all space debris, space junk concern. Space debris, space junk, and overcrowding it.

We could end up locking ourselves in, which would be catastrophic, obviously. What do you mean, sorry, about locking ourselves in? Lower Earth Orbit, getting busier and busier, you have to go through Lower Earth Orbit to go in. to the Moon. You have to go through low Earth orbit to go to Mars. You have to go through low Earth orbit in order to achieve all these great things that we want to do in space. If there's too much debris to go through...

then it's a problem because you're basically making a present for yourself, which isn't great. So this is why... Today, it's really important to make people aware that overcrowding low Earth orbit is not a good thing. I'll give you an example, 20,000 miles an hour, how things are orbiting around Earth. So imagine you have a screw that's flying. or it can happen.

It could damage a satellite really easily. I mean, I'm a biker. Or an astronaut. An astronaut at the space station. I think the cupola was hit once. I think, Tim, I don't know if you were there or not, but it got hit. I took a photo of the chip in the window. That's going to be a scary photo to take, hasn't it? Thankfully it's four inches thick. But you can, as a baker, I'm on the motorway, I get a chewing gum.

That is thrown from a window. And it hurts at 70 miles an hour. Imagine that at 20,000 miles an hour. That will destroy your satellite. You've spent a million dollars building a satellite. And five minutes later, it goes in orbit, gets hit by... By a screw. No.

you get into problems. And we need to be really careful about this. There's a lot of organisations doing a lot of good work in active debris removal. And I think the UK is one of the leaders of that. And we need to make people aware of the risk associated to losing satellites.

So just before we move on from satellites, I've got a question, something that I occasionally worry about, which is that the night sky, looking up at the stars, is one of those universal human experiences. And we have kind of hidden it behind light pollution, at least in the cities. But if we... fill the sky up with satellites are we at risk of losing this universal you know the view of the night sky tim is that something you ever worry about

Yes, it's a concern. Absolutely. Space is an environment that needs to be protected. And as we've been talking about here, there's all sorts of elements to that. Actually, the number of launches which we started... talking about hasn't increased that much from you know 143 back in 2021 to 225 this year is what we're on target for and is that because they're taking more satellites yeah but the point is that we're taking

more things into space with those rockets. So space is becoming crowded. We have lots of debris up there that's also a threat to the space environment and we're not regulating the number of satellites that can go into orbit. these broadband constellations could become, you know, 30,000 strong. So this is a constellation of satellites? A constellation of satellites around the planet that can provide communications, for example. And that can then have a detrimental effect on the night sky.

Would they be visible? In fact, when they launched, at dawn and dusk are when you tend to see the reflective objects from space. I have to say, I got pretty indignant about that. Was it earlier this year when there was a line of Starlink satellites in the sky? I thought...

what gives him the right to change this night sky which has been with us as humanity for you know as long as we've been around it's been pretty much unchanged i thought that was pretty damn cheeky there's a thing about the the styling trains as they're called which you'll notice now if you're looking at them through different lens is they used to be very straight.

Very straight line. But because of the fact that they've avoided debris, they're no longer straight. They've had to make corrections to their orbit to avoid getting hit. Yeah, and thousands of adjustments per year SpaceX are making to their satellites. The space station, about six or seven times a year, will do a debris avoidance manoeuvre to get out of the way. So it is a big problem, space debris.

The man behind the Starlink project is, of course, Elon Musk, one of many billionaires who seem to be very interested in outer space and possibly even life on other planets and whether we should have a planet B as a lifeboat for us. Earth. Tim what's your view of all this kind of enterprise?

Well, this takes us back to fast forwarding, doesn't it? Perhaps 50, 100, 500 years into the future. And it wasn't just Elon Musk. I mean, Professor Stephen Hawking also was an advocate for a planet B. As a human species, if we do... want to essentially survive as long as possible then planet earth will not be

We're now talking a long time into the future, so we need to start looking at where else we can live. Well, hopefully at the time of the future, we're doing a fairly good job of making it less habitable at the moment and a bit too rapidly. Yeah, we certainly hope it's going to be around for, you know, several...

100 millennia to come. But in terms of looking around at other planets, then yes, we have to protect ourselves as a species. We have to kind of de-risk our habitat. And that means having humans living on other planets. I said at the start.

that you know we went to the moon and really we look back at earth is it not possible that we'll go to mars and we'll say well this is very interesting and realize how complicated and intricate the earth is and appreciate it a bit more i mean it feels as though if you know even the most optimistic billionaire they might talk about Terraforming Mars, but...

to create anything as intricate of Earth is just such a gigantic enterprise. It feels very ambitious. Absolutely. And the one thing that really strikes you when you go to space and look down at Earth is just how beautiful it is. It's planet A. You know, why should...

where you want to live on planet B when you've got planet A doing everything for you and you start to miss nature. You miss everything our planet gives you. And I think it will be a very, very sorry place to have to spend your existences. some habitat on Mars. It will not be pleasant at all. So that's why I do think we are talking, you know, hundreds of thousands of years into the future when we start seriously talking about humans exploring other worlds and having permanent lives.

on other planets. Eloise? Yeah, I suppose the way I feel about this is that we're investing so much energy and infrastructure into innovating to go to planet B, to... geiform planet b and we're sort of forgetting about all of the energy and and innovation that we could be investing in trying to improve the planet that we're on Is it not also an associated danger that because we think we've got a lifeboat, we do less to actually maintain the craft, our spaceship Earth?

Potentially. I don't think we should be in any rush to go off and try and terraform Mars. I think in terms of space giving us... knowledge, giving us inspiration and education. There are many reasons why we want to go and explore Mars. It's a fascinating planet. It could tell us an awful lot about life in the solar system and maybe...

There might be even past signs of small microbial bacterial life on Mars. Who knows? And that would tell us an awful lot. So it's not a case of, I think, rushing off to Mars in order to set it up as a second colony. that can happen much much further down the line.

I'm interested in the idea of regulation. I know it sounds terribly boring, regulation, but actually I think that you kind of need some rules if you're going to have a system. And I'm just thinking about, you know, we do have some international treaties that are supposed to help regulate our...

Earth's atmosphere. But Eloise, when it comes to further out, you know, the stratosphere and the layers above, are there any rules for what you can pollute? And is there any hope of organising any rules that might say, well, please, can we not do that? There's no global governance that's controlling for emissions that are coming from rocket launches and that are coming from re-entries. There's also no litigation in place to be able to punish polluters for those particular sources.

But within particular agencies, there are efforts and within industries, there are efforts to try and be environmentally responsible. The European Space Agency, for example, has sustainability measures to try and mitigate... are in low Earth orbit. And then also they're starting to do research programs that are looking at what the environmental consequences are of cleaning up space. So the re-entry process, they're very aware this is a pollution producing process.

And they want to understand what the unintended consequences are of their sustainability measures. I just want to concentrate a bit more on who's doing this and why are they doing it? Because it seems to me we've got... Some billionaires on Earth concentrating on some flights of fancy in space. And who is it being done for? And this isn't a new question, because back at the Apollo time, there was a famous song poem by Gil Scott Heron called Whitey's on the Moon.

And, you know, there are some lines from that, you know, I can't pay my doctor's bills, but Whitey's on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but Whitey's on the moon. The point there... was that rich, privileged people are playing around in space, not fixing the problems down here on Earth. I mean, Andrew, that is a point, isn't it? Yeah, space is for all. That's a slogan, but where's the reality of that? The advancement of technology that's been...

given from space. So, for example, Velcro. I mean, everybody goes back to Velcro. Velcro was invented because of the NASA program. So, small things like that. So, for example, the example of the satellite data. Why is it there? How is it used? The financial transfers, all the benefits... Benefits. So everybody's got their phone. I'm sure there's a phone not far away from you right now, picking it up, looking at the weather forecast. That's the benefit you get every day.

OK, so we're getting towards the end and I've got a question for each of you. And I'm going to start with you, Tim, which is that... How should we think about space? You know, when it comes to climate and environment, how do we think about it in a way that might help us rather than distract us from really solving the problems down here on Earth?

Yes. So we need to consider space as an environment that needs to be protected. It needs to be regulated because it is incredibly valuable to us and incredibly useful. I think space is going to solve so many problems that we face in the future.

could be a potential source of clean limitless energy we can put things in space that we don't want on the planet or the orbital data centers that are using up vast amount of energy and producing vast amount of heat right now that's only going to get worse

with artificial intelligence. Get them into space, clean litmus energy up there, thermal rejection out there. I mentioned a few of the things that we're researching at the moment in terms of medical research, in terms of manufacturing. We're starting to do large-scale manufacturing space, things that will benefit.

fit everybody's lives back on earth so space is an incredibly valuable environment so we need to protect it we need to regulate it and we need to try and work together more in doing that Eloise, what do you think? How should we think about space? Yeah, I mean, Tim has summed it up very, very eloquently. And I think maybe to add to that, especially when we're starting to come up with new ideas, when we're starting to innovate, when we're thinking about...

a satellite that will be made out of wood. We should work with researchers who are really thinking about what the environmental consequence is of such an innovation. before we start to sort of pilot scale it and take it out into the real world, because there really are consequences that we should be thinking about and ensuring that we have limited impact on the environment when we start to make use of all of the benefits.

of space and Andrew your turn I think that we shouldn't leave space to the billionaires I think space should be for everybody I really want my son to be able to go to space for his job as a space plumber The question we started with, I'd just like to put almost like a one-word answer for everybody. Do the gains of going to space outweigh the environmental pain? Tim?

Yes, they do. We can do better, though. And we are doing better. Andrew mentioned some of the fuels that we're producing at the moment, debris removal, looking at those kind of activities. It's only going to get better. It has to. Andrew?

I agree. We have to do better and we're working on it. It's an ongoing process. Do the benefits outweigh the harms, Eloise? I feel like as an academic, I'm too hesitant to commit to something because there are so many uncertainties associated with this. I think, you know, everybody...

who's sat around this table has agreed that there are a lot of benefits associated with low Earth orbit, with space exploration. I hope that it stays like that. Thank you very much to our three guests, Tim Peake, Eloise Moray and Andrew Fournay. Well, that was good. I consider my mind expanded. I don't think I was adding much to the sum of human knowledge myself, but I felt I learned a bit.

It's really good to explore the costs and benefits of these things because it feels as though we kind of are at the start. If we get these things right now, if we set the course now, then it'll be much easier to do well rather than making a mess and trying to fix it later on.

really important time to be talking about all of this i think that's right i've still got this slight suspicion that because of the excitement and the drama of space that some of the banal but important questions of yeah how you're doing it as you said how it's regulated what the damage is

They can sound a little bit sort of nitpicky and not with the exciting programme. Sport, sport. Yeah, exactly. Killjoy-ish kind of questions. But it seems to me they are really important. And we didn't really get a chance to get into this, as in a lot of things. with a slightly fractured international scene at the moment. You worry if you're going to get the kind of international regulation that's necessary.

In order, for instance, to help clean up space debris or make sure there are certain regulations about how you launch and how you come back and what are the impacts and all that kind of thing. Yeah, and it does all come back to a different way of seeing ourselves. I think being able to look down on Earth.

and really look at ourselves. I mean, it's almost like having a doctor's appointment every day or an MOT. It's a health check. You can effectively give the planet a health check on an ongoing basis. And that's an amazing tool for managing...

things better on earth never mind what goes on in space so it's both looking out and looking inwards and of course we start to take it for granted you know when I was on a research ship this time last year for the first time we could make a video call from the ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and it's

because there were satellites up above transmitting that signal. And I'm not sure whether I like that. I think, actually, there are benefits to being away from that constant connection. But there's no doubt that if there'd been a problem, we were much closer to help. just took it for granted they didn't want to be away from their phones and they weren't away from their phones and so it's changing earth as well as changing space

Well, I hope you've enjoyed this outer space edition of Rare Earth. To hear previous episodes on topics as varied as microbes, bluefin tuna, decommissioning oil rigs and plastic pollution, head over to BBC Sounds. And to discover more about our environment and explore what we can do to help, go to the BBC Rare Earth homepage and follow the links to The Open University. Next week, we are going to be wading through the jungles of the Amazon. So do join us then. Rare Earth was produced by...

Toby Field and Alistair Cross. It's a BBC Audio Bristol production in association with The Open University. What happens when at-home DNA tests reveal more than you bargained for? My birth mum was still here. She's still alive. Six new stories of reconnecting and rupturing families. couldn't believe it i i had a sister after all lives upended and long buried secrets i then wrote back and said look the ripples from this will be enormous

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