Catherine benel Peg. Welcome to straight Talk. How are you going?
I'm great, Thank you.
You've got Australia's Space Agency. Are you there now?
Yeah, I'm at work here in Adelaide at Lot fourteen where the Space Agency headquarters is. This is where I spend most of my days here when I'm in the office.
That's amazing. What that jacket you got on? It looks very cool. I want one of those. Wow, can you explain what you got on there?
What is that? So this is my flight jacket, we call it. So basically on the left you wear your country that you represent, obviously Australia. You get where your astronaut wings, which you received when you pass basic training and eligible for a flight assignment. Your Space agency, Australian Space Agency. And this is my class patch. It's the Hoppers.
So I'm in a class with five others and we name the Hoppers in part because well, Australia is represented on astronaut training for the first time and we liked how you know, kangaroos go forwards and not backwards. And when you get missions, you get patches down your arms and across your chest as well, so you can kind of get a sense of what astronauts have done by looking at their jackets and their flight suits. But I'm a ricky astronaut by comparison to many.
Do you choose that name? The hoppers orders to zech get allocated to you.
It's allocated by the class that's ahead of you. So the class was ahead of us at the European Space Agency or ISA is called the Shenanigans, and they gave us the name.
What are they Irish or something? Were they?
Yeah, well they've played a lot of tricks on each other apparently, so that's why they got that name.
That's pretty cool, Like I don't know, like being in a space agency and being an astronaut, Oh my god, Like it's sort of what everybody they don't even dream about, they fantasize about, like especially young boys or young girls who sort of sitting around looking at all the stuff that's recently happened, of course with Artemis. But we'll come back to itemis in a moment. But like, do you ever have to pinch yourself?
Yeah, it's definitely a pinch stuff to be a qualified astronaut, you know, ready for missions to the International Space Station or even the Moon. It's been a long time coming, but it's still really kind of a new beginning of what the future could hold. So yeah, I'm excited for myself, yes, but also I hope what this can enable more broadly for the country, and I'm really grateful to be in this position too.
To qualify as an astronaut, it's not like going to university and becoming a lawyer or something. What's the process of becoming an astronaut is like to get a science degree or something? I mean, what does it mean?
Yeah, so when you finish school, there's no kind of graduate job or apprentice to be an astronaut. You have to have a first career in advance of even being able to apply, and that first career has to be something that's in a technical field. You can be a scientist of any kind. You can be an engineer of any kind. You can be a pilot, you can be a medical doctor. And on top of that, you need to be fit and healthy, not like an Olympic athlete, but kind of like you're in the military, fit enough
and healthy enough to do your job. You need to have expeditionary experience, meaning things like being in the military or in Antarctica or on like scientific field ships. You should have operational skills, which means things like having been in the emergency service or flying or scuba diving situations where you have to make decisions in real time where someone could die if you screw up. And on top of that, you should have kind of international experience or
speak other languages. So it's really broad and building out a CV hopefully one day. Being an astronaut is an awesome journey in its own right. So I tell people with this dream, you know, pick something in that huge breadth of fields that you love anyway, and becoming an astronaut's just the cherry on the top of a path that you're enjoying.
Would you be able to sort of open up sort of what did you do? Like go in your case, I mean, did you do an engineering degree university? And did you go to a university in South Australia or whereabouts in Australia? What did you do?
Yeah? So I originally wanted to be a pilot, right. I did aerobatic flying and loved science as well as a teenager, but I got medically postponed in the selection to be an Air Force pilot. So I had to go do something else, and I picked being an engineer and scientist. So I went to Sydney UNI. I grew up in Sydney and did a double degree in physics and aeronautical space engineering. And I picked up the engineering half of the degree just because it had the word
space in the title. I didn't actually know what engineering was. I'd never used a drill or written a line of code, but I thought it would be a way to kind of broaden my knowledge base. And I'm so glad I did. It took me on the most wonderful journey around the world, working on some of the best space missions I could have imagined. So I ultimately became a space engineer. So someone that designs and develops satellites, space stations, robots for
other planets. And I've done that for about fifteen years now.
Wow. So being involved in a team that designs a space station that sounds pretty hectic. I'm sure the team's pretty big. And if the errors, well, you can't afford to make one eraror I mean, I can imagine there would be definitely you know, you know the effect of making one era in a million is catastrophic, So you probably have to be you know, ten standard deviations away from the mean in terms of error rates, I mean, like,
how does that work? Like I can't even get my head around that, Like, in terms of error rates, you can't afford to make one slightest opportunity for something not to work.
In a space station, Yeah, there's an acceptable error risk, and you have all these different sigmas and things like you say. Overall for an International Space Station mission, which is about six months on a tested vehicle, it's been up there for twenty six years, you're designed in fatality risk is one in two hundred, so that been some
time in that mission. Your designed risk of death is one in two hundred, which is something I wouldn't get in the car for right, We're an airline of four, so astronauts do that because we believe in the discoveries you can make up there and the importance of that work. But as an engineer doing that before, you're very aware how important it is, and you only take risks you need to take risks. I worked for Airbus, so like Boeing, the developed aircraft and another part of the business, so
that safety culture comes across from designing aircraft. But when we design satellites, we should be not over perfecting and gold plating everything because we want to be low cost there as far as we can when we're looking at things like weather and disasters and communications, so that you know, we make it as economical as possible.
So what are your ambitions in terms of maybe one day going to the Moon or maybe even Mars. How do you control that ambition instead of because the day to day you do something different, but you've always got this burning ambition or desire to be chosen to go on the next moon expedition, whether it be landing on the Moon or just going around there, going to the dark side of the Moon or the other side of the moon like recently. I mean, how do you control that ambition? Excitement?
It's a great positive thing, it's a wonderful motivator. But the reality is most of an astronaut's career is spent here on the ground. I've only been a qualified astronaut for two years since April twenty twenty four was when I graduated, so it's relatively early days. You know, being a qualified astronaut from a country without a human space
flight program is unusual. So it's just another layer on the uncertainty youngion, and the way I handle that uncertainty is by knowing that I can contribute from what I've learned so far as well as continue to learn into
the future. So I've been able to get out and about across the country through the Australian Space Agency to speak to people, especially young people, about opportunities in space and technical careers and open doors also for our researchers and companies to be more involved in space opportunities and to support with what the Space Agency is doing for
Artemis as well. I think for most people that have become astronauts or people that have big dreams for themselves for their careers, the easiest way to manage it, I think is to make it not about what you want to be like yourself, but what you want to contribute. So be purpose driven and that helps to remove your ego from it. It helps you to stop being narcissistic, but also to stop worrying if you're good enough and just focus on getting the job done the best you can.
And also knowing that you're not alone in space. You're part of a crew, not just up there, but one hundreds of people on the ground supporting you and here on Earth. You know, space is part it's not a bubble. It's part of a broader ecosystem that underpins all our utilities here in Australia.
What is the broad objective generally for space exploration and in particular the Moon. What is the broader purpose of it as opposed to just to be a say, look we went there, we went on the other side and we were able to land. What's the fundamental reason why we need to land on the moon.
Yeah, so there's a number of reasons why you do it. The real focus for Artemis, which is the new Apollo, is about going back to the Moon, not to plant a flag and have footprints to be the first, but to go back there to set up a long term presence what's called a sustainable presence, in order to do long term science and also to have a presence in the same way you know as a nation, as countries we do in Antarctica to ensure all nations are using
it responsibly. So by going up to the Moon long term, we can understand Earth better. It's thought the Earth and the Moon formed from a collision Apollo Tortoise that because the Moon's moving slowly further away from us. We can tell from the reflectives we put on there, so we've formed of the same stuffs, but we can't see the early Earth. On Earth, we've got weathering and volcanic activity.
The Moon is frozen in time, so by understanding the moon, we know more about the inputs into our climate models and things like that to support early Earth. We can also look up there for sources like water, which can help us to live off the land up there and to go further afield. There's a lot of things we can research up there using the space environment. Radiation is
one of them. We've already learned a lot about radiation's effects on the human bodies through artamus I, which was flu crash test dummies called phantoms for women's bodies.
And actual bodies.
Well, it was like crash test dummies of women's bodies to look at how radiation from out there moves through them, which is something we didn't know before, and that data is already been used to improve like radiotherapy treatments for women on Earth. So ultimately we got there for science. We got there for international cooperation to set the stage to work together in big challenges that we have around the world. If we look at the International Space Station,
which is underpinned Artemis. So the International Space Station is a soccer field sized space station in the lower orbit, only four hundred kilometers up. It's been there for twenty six years and that has helped us work together with countries from around the world in ways that we would never have otherwise. It's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice because of what it's done to help integrate different nations. Basically, it's also an economic opportunity exploration in Australia.
Our exploration programs through the Australian Space Agency are returning seven dollars for every one dollar we've invested in them into programs like a small lunar ROVERA for the South Pole to take up our field robotics and our automation. We've invested in senses that will be helping land as
land on the Moon more safely. In senses that go on the surface that tell us what's under the surface, which is helping us to do that more sustainably on Earth, for mining, how to grow plants on the Moon that helps us with drought tolerant crops on Earth. That's all returning seven to one at least per project.
These are things that Australia is.
Doing relatively specifically.
So we're innovating around sensing programs, the engineering of it, the software around it, the feedback from it, and the learning from it. I guess what we can learn from that. So that's so we are actually making money of what we spend. And is the Space Agency allocated money from the government, Like, where's that money coming from? Was the Space Agency have some private element?
So no, the money that the Space Agency administers is government funds. So we've had a program called Moon to Mars which is developing the rover for the Moon and a number of technologies for space that is returning at least seven to one on investment. The Space Agency is administered over one hundred and seventy million dollars in grants. Over the eight years, we've had a Space Agency across more than ninety different organizations, ninety different projects across Australia,
hundreds of organizations. So we're smaller than most space agencies, we're smaller than most space economies, but we're really emerging in this more commercial space era, which means that we're able to target our programs to ones that do bring Australia an economic return. Globally, the space economy is set to triple over the next decade, so if Australian businesses can access those markets, we stand to benefit economically as
well as from having our own capability. Because Australia really relies on space, and most of the space we rely on almost all of it is supplied by international companies or international or other countries, and so by being able to do more ourselves, we can become more resilient with our own needs.
Well, how do you mean Australia relies on space? I didn't know that. How do we rely on space? Whatfull?
So ninety nine percent of data about climate and where the globally comes from satellites in space. It's how we communicate across our land. We're shortly to have triple zero coverage across all of Australia direct to our mobile phones through satellites in space. If we look at the UK, I know eighteen percent of their GDP relies on space. For Australia it's even more. I don't have the number, but it's even more. Just inspection of how big and
vast and remote. We are across lands and seas. So one way to think of space isn't as a niche industry, but as a place. Space is like the ocean, and it's a place that is the ultimate high point from which we can see things. And from that high point, like a super high mobile phone tower, we can connect what we can see and what we can connect. We can send information through things like you know the GPS
that guides us on our Google maps. The timing data from GPS actually is what our banking system relies on. Every time you tap your phone to buy a coffee, the data in real time is being synchronized through clock measurements from space. It's the same behind our energy and transport system. And all of these things that we rely on are really international provided satellites. So we rely in many cases on the good will of other nations to provide that.
When we hear about the amount of money that's getting allocated to the Space Agency in Australia, most of us don'tuts actually sort of go to the next step and say, well, you know, what's the return and if we're getting a seven multiple of seven, In other words, every dollar we spend, we get seven dollars back or seven dollars contributed. That's not back, but we get seven dollars contributed to the
strained economy. Why wouldn't the government contribute more? I mean, instead of one hundred and seventy million, why wouldn't we make it a billion?
I mean, that's a question for government, But I'd say that what's really exciting is that our space sector, over the investments in the last few years, is moving from being auted to demonstrate capability to being able to deliver
operational capability. So we're poised to scale, you know, right as the global space sector is shifting geopolitically, it's shifting programmatically, it's shifting industrially to be more commercial and that is a really rare alignment and it's really powerful for us in terms of we've got the capability if we can bridge that gap to serving these international markets. But most space markets are quite closed, and that's the role of government and the role of the Space Agency to unlock access.
For example, we've recently signed an agreement called the TSA or Technology Safeguards Agreement with the US which allows US rocket companies to launch from Australia, and that business that could bring to Australia is thought to be over one billion dollars over the next decade because we're a fantastic place to launch from just where we are where we
are in the world. We've got the ability to launch near the equator, which lets lets you launch further afield, you know, to what's called geostationary orbit, which is a really important one for communications, or further out to the Moon. We can also launch orbits to go around the polls, which are really good for looking at the Earth because the whole Earth rotates underneath you. We are the only place in the world that has commercial capsules returning to
commercial spaceports. It's Australian businesses running a spaceport thoughts that are getting the economic benefit. And what those catsules contain are pharmaceuticals. So in space, because everything is really stable because it floats, you can make new medicines that you can't make on Earth and they're returning those to Australia and we've only just started that in the last few years, and there's been a deal just signed for twenty more
until twenty twenty eight. So Australia is really critical to the global space economy and everyone wants to work with us. I can tell you that when I went to train as an astronaut that all the other space agencies were so excited that Australia was stepping up in its space ambition.
In the Artemis, the most recent Artemis voyage. What's the role of Australia in something like that. It's more importantly the space agency, your space agency. What's the role that we play.
I mean, this is just the beginning for Artemis. We've just had the first man mission of many to follow, and it's also the beginning of Australia's role in it. For Artemis two, which just went around the Moon, just like an Apollo, Australia was critical for communications and tracking. So when the astronauts went around the far side of the Moon and then re emerged, they were actually above Australia, right. It was Australian operators that were waiting to reconnect out and recommunicate.
With them during that blackout period you took, yeah.
So when they came around out of the blackout, yep, it was Australia that found them and connected them back up because it was above us. So we have one of three big dishes in the world called the Deep Space Network DSN, just outside Canberra, and we were critical doing that, just like we did a similar function in Apollo. We also had a space laser the Australian Space Agency co funded with four hundred four point five million dollars, a new kind of space laser through a and U
that is able to get lots more data down. It's kind of like going from dial up Internet to broadband Internet to get the data down. So when we got those beautiful images back from the Moon, they were sent through optical communications, which we did not have in Apollo.
But for future missions for Artemis, we're sending up hardware, a small rover to the Moon which is going to showcase the best of Australia's robotics up there and set us up if we wish to to be able to provide a lot of scientific and industrial services on the Moon.
Were the best in the world at operating complex mind sights here on Earth, lots of robots and automatic trucks and trains around each other and safely around humans, and that's something that NASA is interested in having on the Moon, not to MiNet but to help set up you know,
a man base and do expirations safely. And by being involved, Australia gets to show in a really visible way how good we are at building things and our science, and gets to integrate with other global ecosystems and supply chains in ways that permeates across the full economy. You know, Apollo was the engine room for innovation of its era, the whole space economy that we rely on now, Earth observation looking at the Earth, the communications, starlink and so on.
All of that came from what was created in Apollo, as well as advances on Earth. Artemis is going to be the engine room for the next wave of innovation in space and how it will support us as well as here on Earth. So from Apollo, we can thank Apolo for the Silicon Valley, right. We needed to have you know, transistor silicon chicks in order to stabilize the big rockets of Apollo. And when Apollo you know, wound down the Silicon Valley spun up, Artemis will have similar
follow on effects we can't even imagine yet. Now, I don't think we can justify space investment on spin out alone. You have to justify it on planned return. But we're getting those plan returns to So if.
I could just talk about Artemis for a moment, you obviously would have been following that with a great deal of excitement. I mean I was every morning when I was turning the radio on. I mean, it sounds ridiculous. I'm listening to radio relative to what you just explained some of the the most technologically advanced and engineered systems on the planet, either monitoring or assisting or within the Artomiss vessel itself. Here I am listening to radio in
a car. What was some of the moments that really captured your excitement. I mean, one of the things I remember, I'll start is when the toilet broke down and one of the astronauts, the female astroids, she had to go and try and fix it. And engineering. What are some of the things that you remember from Artemist too.
Oh, the whole mission for me was absolutely incredible and surreal. About ten years ago I worked on the vehicle, the European Service Module, which was a cylinder at the back of the vehicle that went around the Moon, and my husband too sort of special to see at launch and to be able to cheer on those that have been working on it to see you know, astronauts that you know I'd met in Houston when I was training go up there. It's very different when you move from satellites
to humans on top of a rocket. To see a launch and then to move to humans who you know on the top of a launch is quite something. And to have seen all the people, the thousands of people around the world that had spent their careers developing these vehicle and these systems to get to the combination of a launch was really special. Then you know, when to see the systems proceed and check out as an engineer was exciting. The toilet's always a good topic of conversation.
You know, I'm qualified to use some of the space toilets, so we have to do lessons, you know, and get the certificate. But that's actually an incredibly complex piece of kit and they had to go back to using you know, bags and stuff, which is what was used in Apollo or poly didn't have a toilet. But this vehicle is meant to be something that gets you know, used again and again as Artamus goes on this design, so we
need to get it right. I found it incredible and moving the human moments like when you know, Commander Reid, he had you know, part of the moon named after his late wife. That was really special and I think showed the spirit amongst the crew. Seeing how the crew trained together and interacted up there, we can see how much human performance and understanding his advanced in APOLO. Now, as astronauts, we train very much on crew cohesion as
underpinning the mission, and that came through very strongly. For me. I loved how, you know, when the astronauts were behind the Moon and had the eclipse, that they saw flashes of impacts on the Moon's surface in a way the
cameras couldn't pick up. It showed me, you know, what science can be done with humans on board in addition to in addition to the senses that are up there, the images that came back, and particular again as an engineer, the re entry was something that was pretty special to watch.
I knew what was going to happen in terms of sequence, but still watching it in real time, watching it with my kids, I was still holding my breath with the millions of others around the world that waited, and for me, it was really seeing you know, them come out of the communications blackout the paws until the parachutes opened, and when they said, you know, four green, they're all healthy
on return, that was that was quite something. And in fact, that's recently learned that more than half the Australian population watched that re entry, which is incredible.
I was one of them. When I see what they re enter in and as it lands, hardly four people fit in it, if you know, I mean, there's nothing. And then I think about how the speed at which it re enters and the temperature on the outside of the capsule, those things are sort of mind boggling to me. They're not things that I can even really understand or
definitely can't imagine. The engineer hearing that must go into those things must be quite extraordinary, and particularly the temperature of the outside of the capsule, like I can't remember thousands of temper degrees it is, but it's something really bloody hot, you know. And do they feel it inside?
I mean not if everything's working, If everything's working right, you'll continue to have your twenty one degrees inside and really, yeah, you're inside your suit as well. So they wear suits now for re entry, they have for the last few decades. Since there was an accident where a lot of astronauts died many decades ago. When above broken, it depressurized inside. But basically, yeah, you're in those suits, you're sitting in
the vehicle. You're scrapped in so your back is actually on the floor and kind of your knees up if you think of your tilt a chair backwards, so your head's on the floor, your butts on the floor, and your knees are in the air. That's their orientation, so that you feel the g forces on your chest. It's like having they hit about four gs, so it's like having three people your weight effectively lying on top of you. It's hard to breathe. You have to take SIPs of air.
They'd feel the shock is the parachute's open and as they impact, the outside of the vehicle was reaching half the temperature of the surface of the sun, and the plant you were in front of the vehicle was multiple times hotter than that as well.
Wow, they went.
The fastest humans that ever traveled ever because they were falling from higher right, they were the furthest humans that ever traveled as well. And yeah, the engineering was quite remarkable. That vehicle had never flied that profile before with that heat shield. So the first mission Artamus one, which just had those phantom crashed test dummies in it, the heat shield didn't work properly, so they changed the trajectory to come in hotter and faster rather than skimming off to
bleed off speed. So this was all done by teams of engineers, you know, in test facilities. But you can't fully replicate re entry in a test facility, can't get the airflow and the heat and all the kind of the plasma at once and through computers. And yeah, it really hats off to the team of engineers. I believe the crew went and hugged the lead heat shield engineer when they landed for what a good job that they did, which is enabling humans to go back to the Moon again.
You know, we can step out and look at the Moon and know that humans are back in the business of sending people out there and returning them safely to do good science.
Is it a natural space race?
Like?
Are we not us? But as the Western world let's call it America along with their assistance, which are us than others? Are we in a race against say China or Russia or what it was many many years ago, was a race against Russia. Are we in a race or is it? Or is it collaborative?
So for most of the world it's collaborative. There's a team of what's called Artemis nations. Australia is one of them, working together as a team of nations to go to the Moon and have this sustainable presence. You know, there's a saying that if you want to go fast, you know, go alone. If you want to go further, go together, because you can have a more cohesive program with a lot of people's interests looked after. China does have its own ambitions to go back to the Moon, which is
putting some pressure on the timeline. There's a lot of consideration around, you know, resources on the Moon for the long term, being able to use the water. Once you create you know, a base, how do you properly ensure
safe operations on that base. We can't land particularly precisely yet on the Moon and things like that, and that's dealt with through a series of international agreements called the Artemis of Courts, which sets out behaviors that we want to see on the Moon between all the nations that's signed up to it.
As everybody signed up to that, including say China for example.
The people right, they're not one of the Artemis nations. There are other big international treat is that underpin how we operate in space. There's five major ones, things like the Moon Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty, and so on. They say things like, you know, space is for all mankind, Moon is for all mankind. You can't have commercial exploitation.
So there's a lot of debate that goes on in places like the UN where Australia is represented through the Australian Space Agency, to make sure that when we go out there we do it in a way that is responsible and that Australia's voice is heard in those discussions. So the closest analogue I would consider is Antarctica. You know, it's a place with a surface, there is the ocean, like the high seas. That's the basis for most space law.
But Antarctica is the closest analog for the Moon because it's actually a territory and the way that we work together with international nations, international partners there helps us to think how we might like to see things happen on the Moon.
So you're is trained for this sort of stuff. Are there scary thoughts? I mean, I know I'd be terrified. Is it the more you know about it, the less scared it is, or the less you know about it, the less scared it is. Which one is it?
I mean, I'm someone that's comforted when I know more facts. Everybody's a bit different. I know that in the astronaut selection, they certainly wanted to make sure that we knew what we were in for from a risk perspective and the challenges that it's not all you know that it's not easy, that it's not about going to space to take a selfie, going up there to work and take risks for good reason, not for the sake of taking risks, But there are risks.
The riskiest part of a mission is launch and reentry, followed by a spacewalk. They're the three riskiest. And there's still so much we're learning about human body and space. Right We just had the first medical evacuation ever from space from the International Space Station and we still don't know the exact cause. The astronaut who had happened to recently when public about it and said there were minutes where he couldn't talk and they haven't figured out why yet,
so there's a lot going on. The way I rationalize it is by knowing that the teams that are working on it are doing their they really believe in what they're doing, They're very well trained, and that we've taken into account all the lessons learned from the past. That's been really a critical way to have trust and move forward. As astronauts. You are very well informed of all the risks that are happening during a mission if something goes wrong,
as well as in advance. But it's knowing that you go up there for a purpose, not for prestige, and truly believing in that purpose. So on the International Space Station, that soccer field sized lab basically is infrastructure for science, and a huge part of what you do is research into new medicines and pharmaceuticals. In dishes, you can grow cancer timbers, in three D you can grow Alzheimer's proteins.
You can't do that here on Earth. As astronaut, we are ourselves medical guinea pigs, like our bones would degrade at two percent massive months if we don't do two hours a day in the gym up there, and that means we can be test subjects for things like osteoporosis on a same for muscle wasting, same for every system
in the body. And I think that's really important. It's also an important way to uplift the aspiration in your country, yes, for technical fields, but also more broadly when people have astronauts from their nation as well.
That's interesting that the study of an astronaut, like just pick out austeo porosis for example, and you could probably even test the difference between men and women. But I guess that's got something to do with being zero gravity, so there's no pressure on your bones, so your bones don't Your body says, I don't need bones anymore, and I'll give that, give that away in favor of something else, which is sort of how we've evolved, I guess. But it's does somebody back here back on Earth are they
measuring that from you? Would they actually measure what happened to her? They do like a baseline before you go, and they'd give you something when you come back. Is that how it works?
Spot on? So right from astronauts selection, we had to live in a hospital for a week undergoing every test you can imagine without a scalpel, and throughout your career you provide a medical baseline of data as well as towards the end of your career and post retirement you keep having regular medicals that collect a lot of this data. So, particularly for women, there's been so few women in space, only just over ten percent professional astronauts to date have
been women. It means that that data is particularly important for medical science because men and women's bodies respond sometimes in different ways in space and certainly to conditions on Earth too. But there's five main hazards of space flight, and each creates an opportunity for research and discovery. Right, So the acronym is rich Ridge. R is radiation, so looking at how our body responds to radiation. I is
isolation and confinements. You're stuck in a tin can or an aluminium can far from Earth with a few other people, and that does weird things to your immune system and just psychology, so there's a lot of psychological research done on US. Two D is distanced from Earth, so that can mean it's hard to get back in an emergency, even the International Space Station. We're only four hundred kilometers up right, but it can date days to get back the Moon is further afield. Again, it can take weeks
to get back, and it will have communications delays. G is altered gravity, so zog floating around, hypergravity like high G forces and launching reentry or sort of low gravity on the Moon or Mars, and there's a lot we don't know about that right now. And E is extreme environments like extreme temperatures, or moondust is basically like tiny
bits of glass shards. If you think, you know, we have hazards with things on Earth like silicronas bestos, moondust will be like that too, and we have to figure out how to handle it.
You just said something really interesting. Well, something going to pick my interest anyway, is the radioactivity? Is it when you're going to the Moon, or at least even if you're in the space station, are you being exposed to a lot of this? I mean, is it like out of control type of stuff because you're closer to the Sun. I guess yeah, you're.
It depends what vehicle you're on. So if you're on the space station, you're under the Van Allen Belts, which protect us from a lot of the radiation on Earth, so you get more up there. Certainly but it's not as bad, and different space agencies have a lifetime limit on astronauts, after which they shouldn't fly anymore. So NASA's is one severt for any radiation experts are a little listening in when you get above the van Allen belts. So when you go out to the Moon, for example,
your subject to a lot worse radiation. So our sun has a solar cycle when it basically when it shoots out more radio more radiation, and that radiation can be like raised it can be particles, but when it's more active, it protects us from the worst stuff. The worst stuff is from our galaxy in intergalactic radiation called galactic cosmic rays. So you have a time where when the Sun produces less radiation, you're more exposed to the really bad stuff.
So it's a bit of a trade off. So going back to the Moon is a lot worse of a radiation environment. It's one of the huge challenges we'll have to deal with when humans one day go out to Mars. Ways to deal with it, I don't have things perhaps like water shielding sea store your water in the lining of the vieric, but it's pretty heavy. If you're on the surface. About one meter thickness of Martian regulis, I know,
can block almost all the radiations. So maybe the astronauts there will be piling rocks on top of their habitat or living in lava tubes is another concept. But what we learn about those environments teaches us about, you know, how to deal with radio active environments on Earth, light power plants and things like that, and how to better understand the effects of that in the body. We cannot replicate the radiation environment in space here on Earth at all.
That's pretty cool stuff because I think I read once that a human shouldn't be exposed of more than fifty sieve it's in a lifetime. So if you're doing one in one trip, if you're getting one seven one trip, and assume you live to seventy five years of age, just received one year's worth of radiation exposure in one outing. And of course you know these things are to associated with cancer. Is a bit of a personal question, but you know, the financial reward is it worth the risk?
I mean, I don't know is there a financial reward in this? Is it significant or is it more what you do because you're a scientist, you know, what you can contribute to, you know, humanity.
Yeah, it's really about that contribution. There's no financial award for being an astronaut, you know, you get paid similarly to being in a military or being an engineer or a scientist. But it's really about that's the best way we feel we can contribute to this discovery. And of course it's a wonderful journey and adventure, just like a lot of things that are hard work are. But yeah, there are risks. The risks aren't always known, right, there's
known risks. It's probabilistic if you have radiation, it doesn't mean you'll always get cancer. It's a higher risk of cancer. If one ray hits the wrong cell, something might happen. Yeah, and there's still so much we're learning. Even if your mission goes right, you have those outcomes. If you look at the Apollo astronaut, most of them that live long and healthy lives, but a lot more of them suffered from problems with their heart. Oh really, which is also
associated with spaceflight than from radiation effects. So it's going to be different when humans are back around them, back out on the moon for longer periods of time, more than you know days to a week, but for months we're going to see different impacts and that will hopefully help with medicine on Earth.
Let's just talk as SpaceX for a moment. Musk escape very rarely escapes a conversation. Most needs to be honest with you. What are your thoughts on SpaceX and it a musk? I mean, in the competition between let's call it private exploration and public funded exploration.
Yeah, the two go hand in hand. Actually, So the real philosophy is as commercial as possible as government as necessary, because that's how you know, you get the best use of the tax dollars when private industry is able to deliver a service and they can do it more efficiently, the same as the industries on Earth. That tends to make sense in a lot of cases. So what we're seeing is in orbits closer to Earth, which are a
little bit easy to handle because it's lower radiation. We're seeing a lot more commercial activity, particularly from elon Musk. When we're going further afield out to the Moon. It's still very much a government domain because it's so new. The commercial benefits are going to come, but in time, once a lot of the technology risks have worked out.
Government no is still the primary customer of most things in space, even if things like starlink because they used to support countries and militaries as well versions of them. Government is still the market maker around the moon, even though private companies are being funded to develop capability. So when we look at Artemis, right, this is looked at as a government program, but it was prime contractors that
developed the vehicles. When we look at more commercial activities like SpaceX and SpaceX will be involved in namous, they are involved, and they are involved in the space station as soon as they're able to deliver a service, and government would prefer to pay for that service. But at the moment this is the US government, right, So it's not really a private all public. It's private and public and I see it more as the industrialization of space
rather than the commercialization of space. What I find particularly interesting though, is that here in Australia we have startups that have found purely commercial markets from space. Now that's quite rare globally, and I think it's because our space sector has really emerged over the last decade or so in a way that we've had to draw in talent from other industries, so we have a good product market fit.
One example is Fleet Space Technology here in Adelaide. They produce Internet of things, the ground based sensors connected through satellites which can help us find lithium and copper and gold deposits far better than we could have with traditional methods. And that is a space company which is finding the resources sector as the commercial customer. We also have other
examples as well. So that's something that yeah, you just don't usually see very often around the world and one of the things that we are good at.
God ask you for a fearless prediction about Mars. Do you think we'll say in the next twenty five years land in Mars?
Well, I think if we want to, it's a matter of will. It's not going to happen on its own right to get to Mars. We have significant technological hurdles to overcome right now to get their land and stay till the next orbital lineman and come back. You're looking
at a mission of almost three years. We don't even have enough kinds of food that could sustain humans for that long if it were to pack the food for them to go with all the right dreational profiles let alone being able to we can land rockets now, but then refuel it from what exists their takeoff again radiation protects.
We're still discovering challenges with humans. A lot of astronauts have their eyes degraded in space significantly to a point where if they were to take admission to Mars, they might not be able to do their job when they landed because they couldn't see enough. Wow, so we have a lot to overcome. But in overcoming that, we'll solve
a lot of challenges here on Earth. So I think it could definitely happen in twenty five years, but only if we focus on on that as a goal and making sure that as we do that, we focus on solving them in ways that solve problems here on Earth too.
Do you think that we need an alignment more of an alignment then with say quantum computing, to be able to help us solve these problems, because you know, some of these problems are going to take years and years and years to solve. But if we had quantum computing the next ten years. Is that something that someone like you thinks about and something about that the Space Agency talks about?
Yeah, I mean, certainly it's interesting to think about how space is impacted by these other huge disruptive changes in technologies. We're seeing a lot of changes in space through AI. We're affected just like every industry, for example, in how we design in how we manage data on robots in real time as say they navigate. Space is also helping these industries, for example, the huge masses of data generated from satellites in space. Ninety nine percent of climate data
by volume comes from satellites in space. That's feeding the AI models too. When we're looking at data centers of the future, there's a whole series of businesses that are looking at data centers in space to get more power to manage them in a way that you don't have to manage it here on Earth. Yeah. I think that
the disruption feed off each other. And quantum is something that is important for Australia because if we can get to quantum encryption, which is not quantum computing, but a different part of it that goes hand in hand with our laser communications, which could let in time Australia have encrypted intercontinental communication via satellite. We can't do that through
optical fibers. We can't make them pure enough for the long distances between Australia and other continents to have that encryption.
When you think about all the milestones over let's say, the last fifty odd years we've made with space exploration, which one has really meant something to you? Which milestone has meant something to you? It doesn't have to be the most recent ones. And what separates that particular one from all the others, Which is the one that stands out the most few in terms of let's call it personal value. There are things in life that just keep delivering.
The more time goes on, the more you appreciate them. Seventy five years of penfoiles range, once tasted, never forgotten, let's good going.
Which milestone stands out the most of me? There are so many, but one that I found particularly poignant was when we had twenty five years of continuous human presence in space. So the International Space Station that has had people living on it now for about twenty six years, continuously without break. So anyone younger than twenty six has never been alive at a time where humans haven't been
on that huge station doing a work up there. And it passes over Australia, right, So you can see it occasionally in the evening is a bright star that takes six minutes to go across. I think the milestone of you know, the Voyagers spacecraft leaving our Solar system, now, that's absolutely miraculous. To know that we've sent something so far and can still figure out ways to communicate with it lafter that long.
That's amazing.
Yeah, I think it's quite remarkable, and there's more to come. You know, with the increasing developments of space capability. What we're soon going to be able to see is in times of disaster, we'll be able to get, you know, actionable insights, not just to our first responders, but to
people on the ground. Right now, a lot of that data is more predictive or post the disaster rather than during it to the people on the ground, and that's going to be really important for bushfires and slides in Australia.
Knowing last night, knowing that I was going to be talking to you today, I was actually looking up in the sky where I live, and I'm fortunate enough to be live in a place where there's not a lot of street lights and stuff like that, and I was looking at the brightness of the stars and I started to think a little bit more like you guys think.
I guess probably think like this all the time. But I started to think about the time it's taken for the brightness of one star to reach me, given the since it is in the speed light, and some of these things are so expansive, given that that star is probably moving away from us, and we're moving away from it as well in a galaxy sense. So the whole concept of space exploration is so is so infinite and has so many possibilities, and is so out there relative
to what I do. For example, I think about in finite terms, like you know, I think about in my main businessing about interest rates and you know one basis points and what can change your basis point. Yet your world is like completely undefined in that it's infinite. I mean, there's so many possibilities. Does that ever sort of blow you away? Because it does to me thinking about it last night.
At least, it absolutely blows me away. But it is also what initially inspired me into space, you know, looking up at the sky and realizing how infinite the universe is. You know, there are more stars in the universe, we think, than all the grains of sand and all the beaches and the deserts and the oceans in the world. We're recently seeing through new in space telescopes exoplanets, planets around other stars, and almost all the stars closest to us.
So there's probably far more planets than that. You know, so much out there remains to be explored, and the knowledge and discoveries we can gain from that exploration, I think are also infinite. But ultimately, yes, we explore for those discoveries, both pure science and almost the philosophical to practical applications, but we ultimately explore space to benefit us
here on Earth. Right when astronauts went around the Moon for the first time on Apollo eight, so the equivalent mission to Artemis tu but on Apollo way back in nineteen sixty eight, they took that really famous earth rise image, the first ever color image of the Earth, and they were amazed with you know, ro oasis in the black nothingness of space, and felt, you know, that we are
really not on Earth, but of Earth. And there was a famous quote that they said when they returned, which was, we came all this way to explore the Moon, but instead we discovered the Earth. And that made NASA realize that Earth itself is a destination for space exploration, so we turned our satellites inwards, and that's an important reminder
for all of us. We go up there, yes to explore further and discover new knowledge we couldn't have even imagined, and in solving it we find new mysteries and invent new technologies. But ultimately it's about improving life here in real time on Earth.
Wow, that's an amazing response. S blew me away, Catherine banel Peg, thank you very much, as as seriously like as having opportunities to be able to talk to austral as first female astronaut is amazing, but getting your insights has been even more amazing. And to be honestly like, I really appreciate the level of intellect and knowledge that someone like you has to absorb and keep up with and probably more importantly be able to express to me in a sort of simple way. So I appreciate every
moment is. I loved it.
I enjoyed it. Thanks very much, Mark, thank you for having me on.
You're most welcome. Thank you