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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm ellie and in this episode i'm joined by antonia emma and laura to talk about space travel emissions from rockets and whether it's all really worth it to start off emma what do you know about space travel space travel by itself i'd say i don't actually know a whole lot but um i'm doing like a physics i
finished my underground i'm doing my masters so i know quite a bit about the universe and actual the physics of how you know rockets can launch but generally i kind of think controversially to what other physicists may believe that the emissions from space travel and rocket launches don't necessarily always seem worth it especially when you consider that like when you know the space race was happening it was called a race it seemed to be like a pride issue which i
think is something we're still kind of battling with now so yeah i don't know if i really think the emissions make it worth it i know what you mean about it being a race and being more sort of country girls his country rather than for the greater good of humanity antonia what do you think what's your interest in this so i'm working carbon footprinting and looking at emissions and trying to reach net zero companies originally what got me interested in science was space i thought oh it's
amazing to think of all these planets you know the sort of exploration and you know all the wonderful things about stars and beautiful astrophotography that we've got but now i'm not sure about whether it's worth it there's got to be a point to it you know like you were talking about for the greater good i hope that through learning more about space we can do all sorts and maybe uh understand things we want to figure out from being on earth yeah definitely i think there's so much
potential for like real tangible benefits rather than just theories and photographs and all of that sort of thing laura you've got a little bit more of a spacey background why don't you tell us about that yes so i grew up in the 90s which is when the hubble space telescope was launched and they collected the deep field image the original one in 1995 and all that sort of thing along with other things that were popular at the time like x-files and various other sci-fi shows they
really got me interested into science i ended up doing astronomy as part of my undergraduate degree as well and of course now there's the james webb telescope which has just released its brand new first ever pictures into the world of the universe with spectacular detail beyond what hubble had found i think i feel like it would create a renewed interest in space science and in science more widely as well yeah absolutely i think especially with the james webb space telescope which is
obviously very topical at the moment having just released its first images it's such like an inspirational thing almost for people to look up to and see like this is what we can achieve with this huge sort of global cooperation i suppose like global investment in doing these huge huge projects but in the interest of playing devil's advocate i think you've all got some figures for me about how much carbon emissions the average sort of space travel costs especially with people like elon musk
and the guy that owns virgin going into space like sort of billionaire space travel versus even just sort of commercial air travel and then again as well scientific research like is it worth it are the cost of the emissions too much for the benefits that we're getting back yeah it was something that didn't really like persuade my point anymore but there was an article that essentially said that um the space industry and uh rocket launches have won in 100 000 of the global carbon
emissions compared to 2.4 percent of the airline industry it makes you think that it's not that big of a deal but to kind of persuade my own argument now i feel like that's not really accounting for the frequency of air travel compared to space travel and if their space travel becomes a lot more frequent and becomes this kind of commercial travel that i think a lot of the billionaires are wanting it to go through i think then you start to deal with some serious numbers but we don't
actually have those figures yet because they don't exist so because it's not that big of a problem now i think it's it makes you think that it's it's not going to be that different to air travel but i think it's scary because we kind of don't know what it's going to be like yeah i suppose in a way it's sort of almost just getting started like these are the first people doing commercial space flights which have never been possible before but now people have the
money and there's this real interest in doing this is this gonna go the way of standard air travel and commercial flights where no one thinks anything of it to hop on a plane for a summer holiday i have a question about air travel i used to travel a lot before the pandemic for work i've not traveled in the last few years but i'm sh i'm hopefully be going to japan soon again for work and i wonder what my emissions will be from that how bad should i feel about that trip to japan so antonia do
you have a calculation for that yeah so i use some conversion factors that the uk government's figures and it's based on assuming what your distance will be going to say osaka and your traveling economy then it's only 2.9 tons let's say it's 2.9 return because we had something that said that was like 200 to 300 carbon tons for a rocket launch which suddenly makes laura's trip seem not that bad in comparison but it's frequency right this is many hundreds of people probably on
laura's flight and subsequent flights throughout the week whereas maybe what 50 100 rocket launchers a year i have no idea you feel like the rocket launchers would be sort of more controlled in terms of payloaders i will be getting a schedule of flight so it's well i've paid for one so it's going regardless of whether i'm on it or not so what are the emissions like if that plane is half empty per person it's not a calculation you got first i don't think antonia no i
had it per passenger not for a flight overall that's fine because i guess what's important to a person is that person's carbon footprint of their travel but i guess it's interesting to see how there's a lot of detail in how those numbers are worked out so it depends on what you're comparing i guess is the conclusion to make from this part of the conversation yeah no i think it's interesting to think we've calculated this carbon emission per passenger and it kind of puts a bit of a moral
responsibility on an individual person when essentially even though it's like not that much carbon compared to a rocket launch oh should we still pose the question should we be avoiding air travel because is it hypocritical to say well i don't think there should be commercial space travel when we are flying ourselves no i really like that idea you know if we're gonna go the way that space travel is bad because the carbon emissions are too high then you've got to go to the next one down on
the list which could be you know agriculture could be all sorts of things car emissions commercial flights for holidays and business is a huge emitter in and of itself as we know more so than space in the first place so yeah should we not even be flying in planes at all given the state of the climate crisis and the carbon emissions are only going up i do have some numbers for different types of space travel because obviously different technologies and they come
from an article on inverse.com but they did seem to agree with other sources so nasa's space shuttle transport technology which uses a solid fuel as the first stage and then hydrogen liquid oxygen for the second stage apparently that released about 400 tons of co2 per launch which is similar to what spacex has been doing spacex falcon 9. but then spacex's starship super heavy combo which is um the one that can go all the way to mars potentially that releases nearly 3 000
tons of co2 per launch which is quite a big difference compared to the falcon and the space shuttle and yeah as you said it that is huge compared to my carbon footprint of a passenger flight which is just a few tons there's other things like blue origin which is jeff bezos company apparently because it uses just hydrogen and liquid oxygen as the fuel doesn't release any carbon dioxide but then it does release water and apparently that can have some effect on the atmosphere with cloud formation
which can trap in heat and then sort of accelerate the global warming effect that's wild to me because you think like the carbon emissions are like the obvious big thing but this jeff bezos's company is able to launch with no carbon emissions because of the way they're doing it and the fuel but then there's still a problem because they're damaging the clouds like how on earth is that it's still a greenhouse gas effect which is what our issue with carbon emissions
are it's still making the world hotter even without directly releasing carbon so is there even a way to do what you would call green green space travel is that what the industry is going towards are they going to even try and do this do we think or is it all about profit and looking snazzy on instagram now there's like two questions you've posed there is there anything such as green space travel and then what are they even traveling for yeah i think commercial space travel feels very
just for profit because it's to allow people who are not astronauts to be able to go to space and have some form of like oh i've been to space as if like you were going to a different country that screams for profit and i feel like that's all i all these like billionaires are trying to go for it it's like a way to make money that nobody has before but then you have all the types of space travel which is like exploratory is that still for profit as well because people
want to see these pictures from telescopes and people want to know about space but it's just some more like a less individual basis yeah if you think of the james webb now that's not space travel in the way that you know jeff bezos going to space his space travel that's a launch of this huge multi-billion dollar project yes the carbon missions probably were very great from that launch but it's one launch for a telescope that's going to last hopefully a very long time it stops
getting hit by space debris like is that cost worth it on a purely you know james webb scale for that one project the benefit of that is it greater than the damage done to the uh from the launch itself that's a big question to try and answer in this podcast um and i think your other question about can they do more to become more climate friendly um i think antoni did some calculations for the historic nasa space launches for the saturn v yeah so the saturn 5 used kerosene that
was 770 000 liters of kerosene for a launch it was a reusable rocket as well so at least you know it's a little bit comparable to these uh commercial space shuttles and that was 2 000 tons so we can at least say there's been some reduction down to maybe 400 not exactly sure about the payloads that they can carry and obviously they have slightly different missions and if you think once those i don't know what to call them ships vehicles things are in space they
don't really need much to move you know we're talking about really low power stuff and they can be powered by solar panels so it's just the exiting of earth's gravity which kind of well uses all the fuel so it's just getting off the earth that's the problem once you're in space it's not so bad i think so that sounds about right to me because you you're in a vacuum you've not gotten as much resistance to movement and i guess if you consider that hubble was in operation for about 30 years and it's
only it's only just reaching its end of life isn't it and that was visited maybe about i want to say three times but i might be wrong about that in its entire operation to make upgrades or maintenance you can imagine you could get quite a lot of science out of those 30 years for three ish space flights i would have definitely thought so and that's the thing isn't it you have to this is what we're doing this is what the podcast is about is weighing up whether it's worth it and i think
something like james webb is easy because it's everywhere at the moment and that was you know a 10 billion pound project but what would you do with that money if you didn't spend it on space travel and you did something more if we're saying that you know space travels bad because of the emissions if you scrapped all that what would you spend the money on like where would that money go and what would those people do that weren't doing you know the research and
the building of the mirrors and all the calculations what do you guys think well i think it's money well spent just for comparison 10 billion sounds like a lot but um actually uk um healthcare costs is in the realms of 277 billion in 2021 so you can do many james webb telescope launches or projects for for the nhs so really it's pretty good value did you guys know that the uk does actually have its own space agency what kind of budget does it have and what today for the
coming year it is 535 million but the uk space industry as a whole has generated 16.5 billion pounds of income in the previous financial year i think and directly employs thousands and thousands of people with about four times more so 47 000 people employed 190 000 jobs in the wider supply chain so there is an advantage to having a space agency in a uk space industry that employs people and they seem really keen on satellites to do things like gps telecoms and weather monitoring oh wow i found a
project about thermal monitoring of forests and buildings it's quite high resolution some of this stuff as well it's like so gps can get accurate to within what a few meters more than that probably so if you imagine that you're taking readings from buildings or areas of trees using electromagnetic radiation so maybe infrared or microwaves you can get an awful lot of information about things on a national or even a global scale from the instrumentation on satellites that's
something quite interesting because we're comparing what's the benefit satellite technology came from us trying to explore space and we get so much use out of it like telecoms and imagery yeah sky tv i was just thinking about google maps like i use google maps all the time and like when you can like put the little yellow figure in pretty much anywhere in the world and see like what's happening or what that country or city looks like which is a pretty handy byproduct of
space travel i mean i had to look into like satellites predicting natural disasters and some of the satellites don't even have like the most high resolution sensors that they could have but what they have they can still like successfully assess the flood damage in different areas and predict uh you know where the water is going to end up or with different areas that are vulnerable and there was even some talk on actually trying to update some of the sensors to make them more precise and
more accurate but again that's also going to probably be another admission but it's to actually help try and predict some natural disasters you also have like a bit of a double-edged sword with that because that's just updating what we already have but to make it better so does that make it worth it or should we just try and quit while we're ahead and we have something that works but it's not completely efficient it sounds like a lot of climate science has come from observations taken in
space we've learned a lot about climate change as a result of making those upgrades and putting those instruments up there that can measure things on a global scale i was reading something from the united nations framework convention on climate change they mention about 34 essential climate variables that require contributions from observations taken from space looking back at the earth and you know it's things like wind speed and direction other things in the atmosphere
like temperature and how much radiation is impinging on the earth and how much is coming back from the earth to space composition of the atmosphere and then things are happening in the oceans what's happening with the sea ice the ocean acidity and then what's happening on the land as well so what's what's the soil doing and those natural disasters that you mentioned like fire and volcanoes and things like that all these things you can find from looking at them from space so i would suspect those
upgrades are worth it because you get more detail that allows you to really unpick what all these really complex interplays and climate science are and figure out what's really happening yeah and i think we've been experiencing the heat wave in the uk getting up to 40 degrees celsius that's really out of the ordinary and you know as we have more effects from climate change we're definitely going to need better information to be able to mitigate against the disasters that are coming
yeah and i guess the heat wave was partially projected by some of the information we've gained from space so people could prepare for the the impending doom of 40 degrees to be very over dramatic and i guess there are also other things like i mean it inspired me to do a degree and it was earth science with astronomy my undergrad degree so effectively looking at the earth from space or looking at other planets so you're like one of those satellites that just came out you know went into
space and then looked back down on earth could be yeah i had a weird crossover where i was doing sort of climate science in my physics modules and i was doing sort of planetary science in my earth science module so i was sort of doing things like how do you figure out what the composition of a planet is when you're not standing on it yeah i love that idea there you go there is a crossover so let's say hypothetically emma you're in charge now of global space exploration are you continuing are you
funneling money into this do you think the benefits outweigh the cost is it worth it for the james webb telescope pictures for the international collaboration or should these very clever people be you know developing the next generation of medicines or tackling climate change from the earth side what do you think if it was up to you what would you do this is where i lose my popularity as a physicist because the pictures from the james webb telescope they're very nice and there's a lot of
analysis that can be done in them and it's interesting to look back that far into the universe and you know you can see like some of the curvature of the galaxies is like evidence for general relativity you know curvature of space time which is really cool and i i appreciate that on like a fundamental level that i think everyone can look at the pictures and be like that's really interesting but saying that i did just do a cosmology module where we learned about you know 12 weeks on i think it
might have been the first three minutes of the universe and i think for me personally i feel like i've looked into the start of the universe way too much so i don't know if i can justifiably if it was my money and i i was in charge of it all like you said i don't know if i would spend that much i can i can feel like i don't know if i was to say this in like some of my friends i can just i can feel like the anger don't know if i could do it because i feel like it's not that it's looking
into the past because i think it's interesting just to see how you know the big bang happened and try and look back as far as we can but i feel like we should push to the future but then i think you could also give the argument that looking into the past is looking into the future because you learn more about this and you learn more about that but i don't know is the future space travel though so am i saying take the money away from the telescopes and give it to the spit i don't know i think i
think i would safely just give the money to a different area of science antonia what would you do that was up to you well that's the thing i am kind of on the there's no planet b let's focus on issues at home and figure out all the problems that we have you know inequality when you search into medicine all that but then but then you think about how much people learn when they're not trying to solve that issue and they just came across it anyway so there's like so many things that we wouldn't
have got to if it wasn't for space travel so okay this one is probably not going to convince emma but camera phones because they had to fit smaller technology onto spacecraft that's the word for it space vehicles spacecraft cameras are so much smaller a third of all cameras contain this technology was it worth it going all the way to space just so we can have some selfies i don't know but there's loads of other medical benefits that have come out of space travel it's really hard how can you
restrict blue sky research and thinking because you don't know what's going to come out of it but then could you just spend it trying to solve that specific issue you're trying to solve definitely laura you might have seen this coming but it's your turn to lead global space development what do you think i do kind of feel that the whole space tourism thing probably isn't a very good idea because no one really benefits from it other than the people that own those
companies it's not quite the same as terrestrial tourism going to another part of the world and spending some money there and getting to learn about a different culture and enriching your own understanding of the world but then there are other benefits of space travel that we've already mentioned and things like improvements in material science making lighter weight materials that could work in extreme environments that could be useful on earth as well so maybe not the space tourism thing but
the space science and the um space programs collaborations that exist from things like the european space agency they seem like quite a good idea to me yeah i agree with laura like commercial space travel nah it's just so vain and egotistical really not going to get jobs there now are we i don't think you'll be getting a call from jeff bezos any time soon i'm doing it no but um yeah like laura says it doesn't really benefit any wider people it benefits a very small select few and what does it
cost to everyone else i can agree with that i think that's a good point yeah i mean i think these private companies probably have along the way developed technology to improve their crafts somehow and they could do what they want that technology they could commercialize it but they're probably patented it wouldn't they they wouldn't share it like you know nasa has i don't know if nasa has to share their science actually we have memory foam because of nasa don't we i don't know if that is
patented if anyone can use that maybe that's not a good example i need to do some more research on that but i think it's up to them isn't it and nasa is uh it's government-funded so maybe they have to release some of that stuff into the public domain i mean all their pictures of public domain all those you know james webb recent ones everything going back to hubble everything nasa has ever photographed those pictures are public domain they are for the benefit
of humanity as a whole are there data sets or the measurements that they take is that public domain or could you ask for it and it would be for free rather than behind some paywall i've definitely seen some papers that have used data collected by the european space agency that said we got this data that was in the public domain it came from some satellites so it might depend on the funding streams that we used but it does sound like that date some of that data
release is out there for anyone to take a look at it's interesting about the idea you develop something that is practical in the course of developing something for space you know like memory foam but then do you get any benefit like is it it's not yours is it must belong to the agency that you work for that like concept that material so then does it get shared across the world well i guess we all know what memory foam is so maybe it does but then yeah if it was
developed via a spacex or whoever that's a private company it's got no interest in just giving us all the nice things that they might discover along the way so maybe then profit is profit is king and they're going to use it much more commercially than government agencies and nasa and the esa and all of those sorts of people would do could you imagine if there was some sort of space organization that was like open source like linux is a community that everyone can contribute to when everything is
released under like a public license so anyone can edit the code if there were some way of doing that for space exploration it's like a body of interested people that wanted to go into space and they formed some sort of collective so it wasn't government-funded it was it was just funded by interested people that wanted to do good for humanity what would they do with it here comes my morals which is how do we determine if their project is good how do we sign off
from their projects if they are just a group of people i hate to be that person i think there has to be some restrictions some guidelines or you know a framework that you have to work within this shows so much where you sit on a political spectrum i kind of trust international collaborative agencies because they kind of can't sway it too much because everyone else would go against that i guess on the other hand it probably does make them a bit slower in developing things maybe
because there's an awful lot of bureaucracy involved in international organizations like that it's my experience of working with the international atomic energy agency anyway but you'd rather that way wouldn't you space is still there do we have to like get there quickly yeah like i don't think we need to because i think though you had the initial space race and then you had like you have the commercial space race and that's why like i think blue origins keep on trying
to do like stuff that's making headlines to kind of prove that they're the first people to do it and it's like if we actually just took some time maybe they took all the time they need you they have like some great people working on it but if there was more of a like commitment from like the team to try and do something with like a goal by like 20 30 or something find it like a good way to do it and then actually happens and it's more of like a launch that you
would have with like nasa but because they're always like planned out but it feels like all of the like independent companies are just trying to just do what they can when they can as fast as they can to be the first but it's like if they just slow down a little bit maybe they get to you know more of these discoveries along the way do you think it's gonna spiral do you think you know we've done the moon we've done commercial space flights is it going to be the next space race to mars do you
think that's a possibility oh yeah i think that's already the plan but what's the point who who does it benefit they talk about you know some of these agencies say oh you know it's so that when everything goes really badly on earth we have somewhere else to go and isn't the energy and the time and the resources and the carbon all better spent protecting the earth that we've actually got rather than seeking out a new one yeah yeah i think i have like the biggest disagreement with um space
exploration in the hopes to find a new earth because i think that feels like the most hypocritical thing like that's the thing that stands out the most to me is like yeah i would agree with that i quite like being on this earth all the greenery and listening to the birds tweet and the sea breeze i can see the appeal of going into space just for the discovery i'm also a fan of gravity so i wouldn't necessarily be the one going into space but i can see why is if the human race
is curious and it wants to know more about the universe it's something that people would want to do and there'd be an international collaboration to do it yeah but like curiosity killed the cat you know with a bigger chill phil sometimes it's in the sinks or 60s you know it's it's 20 22 now like a lot has happened and it's like how much more can happen in you know the next 20 years i don't even know if mars is possible in the next 20 years maybe it is i feel like i
don't have that much of a gauge for what the advancements are meaning but i wouldn't go to mars if i had like the chance to go i think i'd say no but if you consider all the technology that's developed since that original space race like would you be willing to do without your mobile phone a comfortable bed um whatever other advancements not velcro apparently i've learned velcro is not developed by nasa but all these things that make life easier got a list ear thermometers imagine not knowing
what whether you had a fever or not yeah i said maybe have a goal for like way in the future and then maybe those advancements like those developments can still happen i don't know is it is it so out of the question to think that we could have you know smaller cameras without space travel i don't know would that be like the natural progression of technology i like to think we would have developed thermometers at some point without space travel i'd like to think
that we would have got there some way or another do you mean more modern thermometers antonio it was in-ear ones ah they use infrared technology which we used in imagery imagine you're just trying to take pictures of space and instead you discover a better way to measure your own temperature maybe that's just the classic though when your mind's not focused on well when your mind's focused on like one goal you get these like other things that come through and you think oh that's that's a
good idea so maybe people just need like a a strong goal yeah i would like to think that many of these developments would have occurred anyway and maybe some of the organizations like nashville are saying yes we we spent money on research into leds but they're not the only people that researched led so maybe the leds that we have now that have helped make more energy efficient lighting and have helped contribute to climate actions maybe they would still have occurred anyway regardless of
whether nasa put that bit of funding in or not i mean with the tiny cameras earlier the we were doing that episode about animal hunting strategies and the tiny cameras on those seal cheeks maybe someone developed a tiny camera to do that anyway without going into space but no one would have got satellites without going into space true so you wouldn't have gps and apparently faster telecoms you know the internet would be very bad if we were still using cables oh but
then we have internet fiber really yeah apparently satellites kind of pushed the development and speed that we could transmit data ah i feel like we should maybe do a separate episode on how that works in more detail because intuitively i'm like the wi-fi in my house is rubbish regardless of what we do so i'm on wired connections for all of my important things yesterday i was literally sitting in the garden trying to fill the form in because my wifi was down and i had to use my 3g instead
which just seemed silly yeah i hate using 3g in the house yeah i'm gonna have to learn how a satellite internet works now i feel like we've found a whole new episode we can do and we're sort of gradually veering away from is space science what is uh space exploration worth it well that seems like a pretty good place to leave it we've covered a whole range of things from whether you should even go to space what the benefits are what we've learned from space and even whether we could do
without the things that space travel has brought us if you'd like to get involved with the conversation you can find us on twitter let us know what you think let us know what you would do you have the power to control global space exploration the next 20 years and we'll see you for the next episode the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us
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