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Hello and welcome to Technically Speaking, where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest, share knowledge, and satisfy some curiosity. I'm Ellie and I'm joined by Antonia and Laura to talk about the imminent retirement of the International Space Station, the science that it's done, and what it might be replaced with. So Antonia, you've brought this up. What fascinates you about it? Since I can remember, there has been the International Space Station orbiting
around Earth. Is a kind of prominentish sparkle in the night sky if there's not too much light pollution. So, I thought, what have we actually learned from it? But also, it's like a massive symbol of international collaboration for science. Yeah. If it's going to be retired, I feel like it's the end of an era. I feel like it's the end of an era. Definitely.
Laura, do you feel the same? I honestly haven't paid a whole lot of attention to what the ISS or the International Space Station has been up to for decades now. I mean, it was put into space when I was a child, which has probably been a part of my childhood, and I suspect it's influenced me to become a scientist. So, it's definitely had an effect on me when I was a kid. Yeah. But now, I don't know, not so much. There's so much science going on that I lost track of
what it's up to. But when Antonia mentioned it, I started looking into how much science has been achieved as a result and how many things have been found out. And it's quite impressive. Yeah, it's seriously impressive. I think we need to state some facts. Start at the beginning. So Antonia said it's been operating almost as long as she's been alive. So that means it's been operating since 1998. Doesn't mean it has, but it has been. It
has been. It has been. Yes. which is a whopping 32 years, which is pretty damn impressive, I think, for a floating spacecraft, I guess we can call it. It's been keeping people alive for decades. It's older than probably anyone's car, I suspect. Oh, that's true. And it's still going. And it's been continuously occupied since 2000. So, we've always had someone in space since 2000. Yeah, I
saw that. That's like a meme that goes around periodically that like since 2000 the entire population of Earth has not always been on Earth. There's always been at least one person in the ISS, which is wild because that's still 25 years of someone always being in there, which is mind-blowing. Yeah. Cool. However, as we mentioned before, is coming to the end of its life. Poor thing. It's served its time. It's not a real entity with thoughts and feelings, though. I don't think it'll
gets decommissioned. I will always anthropomorphize space missions and the little robots they send to Mars, everything. I think it will mind, but it's being retired in 2030, so it's still got some life to go. Good 4 and 1/2 years of spacing around. I suppose it takes a bit of time to plan a retirement. You know, it gets it gets a little retirement party, right? I was just going to say that they've got 4 and 1/2 years to plan a retirement party for
the ISS. I'm guessing it's class as being pretty geriatric as well if it's using technology from the 1990s that was probably designed like 10 years before that even. That's what worries me slightly about it is like now they're deciding it's time for it to come, you know, people shouldn't really be going up there post 2030. Are we confident it's going to make it another 5 years? The sort of structure of it is old, but the technology inside can get updated. So like they'll have little missions to
take a new piece up. They definitely did change parts. It's just that some things will eventually wear and tear and that's hard to replace. I think we should mention that they aren't keeping it up there as well. It's going to crash into the sea or like large parts of it are going to crash into the sea. That's the idea. I'm not sure quite how they're going to do that. If they're going to like nudge it out of its orbit and send it hurtling into Earth's atmosphere, but
uh I don't feel good about it. I think it should be allowed to just drift forever round and around the earth regardless if there's anyone on there or not. I will say the idea of crashing something that's so historic and such a symbol of collaboration just destroying it seems a little bit sad. It feels a lot sad. I mean, I've already anthropomorphized it enough, but I am a lot sad that they're going to crash it into the ocean. Yeah, but it's probably the most efficient way of
decommissioning it. And that's part of any engineering project, isn't it? Decommissioning. So, just get it over with. Oh wow, Laura, brutal, brutal comments on the ISS. Quick and swift decommissioning. Yeah. Oh, okay. So, let's say we fast forwarded 5 years in the future. The ISS is gone. What do we do next? There's a new one being planned, isn't there? And there's some sort of competition for NASA to decide who's going to build it, isn't there?
Oh, wow. That's exciting. Yeah. As of what I've heard, NASA is working on it, but they're trying to find a lovely private company to actually own, build, and operate it. And then they can sort of borrow the equipment, the license to do science experiments there. But someone else operating it means they can focus on something much more difficult like deep space exploration. Oh, yeah. We should say that the ISS cost about 150 billion to build in the first place
in the '90s as well. Wow. Exactly. So it wasn't cheap to start with and you know cost of inflation and everything else. That was a serious amount of money then and I'm sure I read somewhere that it was like 3 billion a year to keep it going for the last 32 years. So again, not a cheap endeavor to put astronauts up there to maintain it to do whatever we needed to do. Yeah. expensive. But if NASA, you know, is freeing up all this cash and someone else is going to take
over, maybe that's a good thing. I had to look up how much 150 billion pounds was anyway in 2022 and 2023, that financial year, the UK total government spending was 1.2 trillion, right? So more than a tenth of the entire UK spending was just to build the ISS. Well, the equivalent of We didn't actually build it, did we? No. But it's an international collaboration. So presumably other nations chipped in. So it's probably not a huge amount of anyone's budget and all the science
that's come out of it. You could say it's worth it. Is that a worry then if we switch to a private company? Are we going to lose this beautiful international collaboration that we have
at the moment? I would guess it depends on so when I use was in academia and I wrote proposals to use like the diamond light source the UK's international synretron to do particle accelerator stuff I had to write a proposal which had to be judged by other scientists I'd like to think they do a similar thing for this but then I've never actually applied to use commercial labs which is what this would be so I don't know if it'd be the same yeah that's true it would essentially be a giant floating
commercial lab in space that I guess yeah that you would have scientists apply to to do different things. It feels slightly less rigorous of like the amount of training that astronauts go through. It feels like the research could maybe be influenced as well by whatever that commercial entity wants to get out of it. Like what is its agenda? Excellent point. Or what if you proposing science that directly competes with whatever science they're doing?
Yeah, exactly. If you're, you know, the private company and you want to have the post ISS 2.0, 0 whatever you want to call it and then people want to go up there to work out how it works and how to build their own one then you're going to be a little bit cross I should think what was interesting when I was doing research for this episode was already on the ISS they have companies work with them and do research there and they've actually produced patents for Proctor
and Gamble which already says to me sort of like a commercial entity has used the space station and got a piece of research and and then also have kind of secured it commercially. Yeah, I'm really intrigued how that came about.
Whether it was the astronauts were up there doing the research, published the paper, Proctor and Gamble then got a hold of it and made a patent based on whatever the like if it was a product or something or if they paid for the whole thing in the first place and then it was like their right to have the patent cuz it was their idea. I would expect that they came up with the research themselves and proposed it and said we will pay you quite a lot of money cuz we
can patent this. That's what I would like to think. So then their monetary contribution can help fund other scientists that aren't as well off. If you had to guess, what could the technology that they found possibly be? Oh my goodness, I couldn't even hazard a guess. Something about fluid dynamics or ooh flames. I read something about cleaning products and colloids, which are basically like tiny particles that can form within a fluid. Yes. They didn't give any details obviously cuz
it's patented. I couldn't work out exactly what they were doing. But they did say what product it's in. It's touch activated scent. What? Like shampoo or like it's like a room scent? No, it's in Fbreze. That's insane. What you mean? Like if you spray your carpets and then you walk across it. So they did colloidal research to find how to make things smell better or not smell. That is hilarious to me that the astronauts would be just like wafting around for breeze bottles in space. Can you smell
this? I thought it was interesting because I thought what could they possibly learn? And it's just because it was in low gravity or microgravity that particles suspended in liquid wouldn't be influenced by gravity. So they could study other phenomena and whatever they found was really useful. That is remarkable. I mean I guess it's like done loads of science in the last 30 years and you'd want that to continue in like whatever came next. Do you have any other examples of uh fun things that the
ancestor has discovered? What it's been up to? I suppose related again to fluids and just generally how physics works. We don't actually understand how water boiling works. That seems fundamental that we should have we should have worked that out by now. How does gravity affect what water does? So again, it's like there's lots of different things that affect how water
boils. And we're specifically looking at when you boil water, you know, there's like big bubbles that form and we call that like a Oh, like a rolling boil when you cook pasta. A rolling boil. Yeah. We actually can't predict when the bubbles form. Oh. So to understand it, basically someone's run an experiment and then measured the conditions that they boiled the water under or something, noted it down, and then gave a empirical
correlation. So anytime you're trying to replicate it, you're just using a bunch of empirical correlations. We can't actually simulate it properly. So empirical means someone experience something and just recorded it. They don't necessarily understand like the underlying physics behind it. Correct. Basically what engineers do all the time, which seems unfair. It's what a lot of sciences. Yeah, 100%. But in this case, the ISS helped. We we understand more now because we could do it in space.
It's what I'm told. They use it to validate theoretical models and some of the coding you would put into simulation cuz that was my first thought. Surely you could just simulate this and remove the gravity effect. But if you don't understand the fundamentals of what's happening, then you've got no idea if your simulation would be correct. Just kind of guessing. Yeah. So they did set out a bunch of different scenarios. Sort of what I don't understand the
significance of them. I mean, I'm pretty impressed that we've learned a how Freereeze works and b the fact that we didn't know how boiling water worked through the ISS. I think that's pretty cool technology/science in the first place. Laura, have you learned anything fun from the ISS? I have. I learned a lot. I got so distracted by this the other night.
An ISS themed rabbit hole. Oh, yes. When Antonia first mentioned this in a separate conversation, she shared an article by NPR that explained at least some of the science that had been done. And they said that aging is accelerated apparently by microgravity. And my first thought was what? How how can they separate out different effects like cosmic radiation or being in a stressful environment from the effects of gravity?
So I did a lot of digging and I'm not entirely sure some of the aging effects
are to do with being in microgravity. I remember the um astronauts that got trapped up there for like nine extra months or something and then when they came back everyone was like I mean I appreciate that it's a stressful time but they look significantly older than they did when they went which a lot of people were like their astronauts leave them alone they've been through a very stressful time which I do appreciate but also it was a bit of a shock I think to
people to see the photographs before and after. So, there were visible signs of aging, but was it actually aging or was it just being a bit knackered from an extra nine months of doing something stressful? Yeah. Did they just not have enough, you know, skin care and shower gel and things to actually look scrubbed up? Nutrition as well. Yeah, that's
probably true. I imagine there's not so many uh choice of like what to eat because we know that muscle atrophies and so was it the lack of muscle that also made them look more sort of haggarded potentially. Yeah. Yeah. See, the the bone and the muscle loss is a really obvious one. There's an experiment being run by the Japanese
space agency. I think that considers the fact that this releases when you get all that wastage, it releases a lot of material into your body in chemical form, which includes things like phosphate and phosphate stress can lead to aging. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. So, they want to look into the biochemistry of that and see if this phosphate overload is having a big
effect. I'm sure I read somewhere that they have to spend like 2 hours on a treadmill or like in an ISS gym to maintain enough like muscle mass to combat the effects of microgravity. So yeah, maybe it's the fact that it's sort of you are losing it regardless. So one of the ways they try and figure out whether the effect is due to microgravity or radiation or something else is they simulate microgravity on Earth. Okay. Well, I feel like we're doing this all backwards. We're
simulating microgravity on Earth. We're simulating goodness knows what else in space. Like whichever one we are, we're doing the opposite. So for humans, one of the ways they simulate this is just to give you bed rest, which I think is amazing. Just don't get up for a month. I don't know. It's probably not quite like that. Um or they put you on like a tilt table. You know, you've probably seen it in films to do with people training for space. Oh my god, I think I
would be sick so fast. Oh, this all sounds like stuff that I'm not going to volunteer for. Even though the sound of bed rest sounds great, but actually the idea of not leaving the bed kind of reminds me of that modern art piece that someone did. Oh, Tracy Emmen. Yeah. And you'll still get your muscle loss presumably. Maybe some bone loss as well because you're not having to if you were not walking around, you're not having to support your mass in the same way, are
you? And you're not using your muscles in the same way. Just waste away. Yeah. You're not you're not selling this to us, Laura, to be honest. I know. Be more exciting if you're up in space, right? Yeah, definitely. I mean, if I had the choice between lying in bed for a month or being on the ISS for a month, I think I'd know which one I'd pick.
Yeah. But for things that aren't people, uh, so if you just got some cells or presumably in the case of that Fbreze example that Antonio mentioned, if you've just got some chemicals, um, you can use something called a random orientation machine that I think just kind of spins your sample through like one of three different orientations every so often. And because it keeps flipping it, it's kind of like gravity has less of an effect because gravity is always coming in a different
orientation. So I do wonder why Un couldn't have just done that or whoever makes Freze why they couldn't have just done that to test how their colloids work. Maybe they wanted confirmation somehow. I think it's more cool in space cuz the only thing I knew of where you get that sort of freef fall weightlessness experience what people call um vomit comets where it's a plane going up and then coming back down. So you kind of float for a bit and then going back up again. And I was thinking
doing that in a lab. You're on a lab trying to do that. Oh, that seems awful. It's a bit easier for individual cell clusters or chemicals, I guess. Yeah. I'm not going through the same experience as them. No, but when they looked at some types of cells, they did notice changes in DNA. In some cases, it was associated with um more reactive chemical fragments being produced as a result of this simulated microgravity.
And they thought it was something to do with your mitochondria responding to the fact that basically it doesn't know which way up it's pointing. It doesn't have gravity to tell it what to do. Oh yeah. I never thought about that. That suddenly they wouldn't know north south in the same way, would they? Or everything would be slightly funky for them. Yeah. You'd think they wouldn't necessarily care cuz they're inside your body doing whatever they need to do to
produce energy. Yeah, that's true. Would it affect them at all? Some researchers say that some cells such as stem cells they so they obviously have quite a big role in um renewal and regeneration of your body sort of undifferiated cells that can turn into whatever they want wherever they need to turn into. Yeah, they can respond to physical forces like say being stretched I guess or being put
under some sort of tensile force. So presumably that means they can respond to gravity which would be sort of mechanical force. Well, this is interesting because this is uh some of the stuff that I was reading about like um studying cells and organoids and stuff and they said it's better to do it in space because the forces of the container walls on Earth even influence how they all move and how they interact. But in space because there's no or there's like microgravity rather than no
gravity. It's like that doesn't affect it as much or at all. So then it's like a clearer picture of what's going on cuz it should have some surface tension, right? So they can just sort of levitate it and form a droplet that's not in a container. I guess they don't need a container cuz it just holds itself. Yeah. Just try not to lose it. Chase it around the ISS. Can you imagine this really important experiment? What if you exhale on it?
You've produced a little bit of force and some air and then it just blows away. So have you heard of the NASA ring shear drop experiment? Basically, if you have a cup of water on a desk, the gravity is holding the liquid into the cup of water and then the walls of the cup are keeping the water in place. But then if you go onto the ISS ring shear drop experiment, this like overcomes all that hurdle. It's like a device that uses surface tension to contain the liquid rather than a solid container.
Like we were saying about the petri dish, they did this for Alzheimer's. So they put protein aggregations called amalloid fibbrals into this ring shear drop experiment and they thought that these fibbrals formed a waxy plaque in the brain. Because of this study it confirmed that like the surface tension concept work and you could process this material without containers in microgravity which is just absolutely
wild. It sounds like there are so many different ways that your body can age or is affected by things that make it age. I don't think we've done an episode on this and I feel like we should. an aging episode that's going to make us all feel terrible. Yeah. So, it sounds like there are many different facets to figuring out how we age and uh how microgravity may accelerate it so we can figure things out a bit faster than just watching people get old. Yeah, I hope
so. It's really interesting as well because they've got the twin study. So, they've got an astronaut who's called Scott Kelly and they've also got his twin brother Mark. That's really interesting because they can like directly compare then like genetic changes in Scott to Mark because they were identical twins. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of the studies tended to look at either genes being expressed and some were upregulated or expressed more as a
result of being in space. Wow. Yeah. And there's also changes to DNA and a lot of the changes to DNA seem to be caused by radiation, cosmic rays, not necessarily due to microgravity, but yeah, same sort of thing. There are lots of different ways of doing these experiments. So, lots of aging related studies as a
result. We should say that there are lots of other space science missions that don't get quite the level of press that the ISS gets when we should say now the ISS goes under quite literally. There will still be lots of things in space that are conducting experiments. We've got to mention JWST. That's the biggest sexiest one probably at the moment. James W space telescope. Yeah, it's just doing so much. It's discovered its first exoplanet. It's taken some very snazzy space pics. It's got a lot
going on. A lot of it is very physicsy and I can't pretend to understand, but it is really cool. There's also Voyager. Oh, Voyager. People love Voyager. It's still going. When was it launched? We've got here Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have been going for almost 48 years. Presumably Voyager 1's going the longest out of those two. So, they were launched in 1977 and they're still producing information that we can use. I'm convinced Voyager 1 is still producing stuff that we're
using. I don't think they've they've actively decommissioned it yet. They're almost out of our solar system, I think. Is that the right word for it? No, they're out of like range of the sun. Yes. There's a thing about it like getting to a wall of fire. So, it's like at the edge of our solar system and there's like a wall of I think it's 50,000 degrees Kelvin and because it's gone so far for so long, it's like eventually going to hit that in quotes wall where the edge of the solar system
is. I am mildly surprised there is a a wall of fire that far from the sun or at such a high temperature that far from the sun I should say. I think it's because of the sun. Solar wind. Oh, this is really stretching my space knowledge. How does it accumulate? just keeps spreading out into space. This is my fundamental understanding of how radiation works. As it spreads out further from its source, it should
reduce in intensity. Could there be some other pressure, obviously not air, but some other type of pressure that kind of contains it and and condenses it into that barrier? I believe, and I could be wrong, that it's the edge of the sun's magnetic field and then it pushes up against an interstellar medium known as
the helop. And because the sun sends out a constant flow of particles on the solar wind, it like gets impeded by this interstellar medium and then forms a giant bubble around the sun called the heliosphere. And then beyond that is where the helopaus is. Yeah, it's complicated, but basically it's very hot and they're going to get there soon. I'm intrigued. I might do some more reading. And I just did double check. Yes, at least Voyager 2 is still sending back information to us and they expect it
will continue to until 2026. I'm amazed that it's still in range that we can do something with it. Yeah, there's so many. There's like just constant more and more stuff that's going on. Well, there's loads of satellite ones, but I like the ones that go off further into space to do more things like um the little flying helicopter on Mars. Ingenuity. I've heard very little about this. You've not heard of Ingenuity? I think I just kind of cuz I don't pay much attention to any of the space stuff
anymore. It never like appears on my radar. How can you not care about a tiny remote control helicopter on Mars? Cuz it's just a piece of technology. It's not an actual thing with feeling. Yes, it is. It's even got a nickname. It's called Jinny. Unfortunately, on January 18th, on its 72nd flight, Jinny broke its rotor blade and now will fly no more, which is the saddest thing I've ever heard. I think it was going on for 1,000 days. 1,000 days of service taking
photos of the surface of Mars. I mean, it's just really cool that we had a remote control helicopter on Mars. One of the things I concerned with on Mars is all the dust that would foul anything that moves, any motor, any joints, or if it's solar powered would just cover the solar panels in dust so it can't get enough energy. Oh, poor things. Poor things. No. Okay. If I'm going to be cruel, then I would say these unmanned missions, uncrrewed, please. Gender neutralism.
Unpersonelled missions. How are they going to conduct the same kind of experiments though? Cuz they won't have a person literally in the lab being able to dab stuff or or whatever into other not I was going to say into petri dishes, but they're not even using them. Yeah, to be fair, it's not quite the
same. But we did have that one uh that collected samples from an asteroid and then landed back on Earth and then people were able to put the asteroid samples in a petra dish once they got the lid off cuz the lid was like welded shut for a long time. A lot of this is about forward planning, isn't it? It's figuring out what data you might want to collect and then putting instrumentation on your space probe or whatever it is. Yeah, it depends what you're trying to
learn. Just making sure that you've got a data signal. Uh, I know some of the Mars rovers, they could send it limited instructions to make it do different things or go and like, I don't know, check out a different piece of terrain. But yeah, it just just depends what you're after. Like, obviously, if you want to do experiments in space, then you're going to need people in space to conduct them. Especially if it's like about chemicals or fluids or aging. You can't study aging with a robot
particularly well. But if you want to take pictures of the surface of Mars, you don't necessarily need a person on Mars to do that. But there may be in the future because people on Earth are developing effectively robotic laboratories that can kind of run through a whole different set of say putting some different chemicals together to make different compounds and it can just sort of iterate that completely autonomously and figure out a better way of making a certain chemical
or maybe making a new chemical. So it's kind of it's using AI and robotics to do it. So I wonder if that is something that could eventually be put on the new ISS or whatever they're going to call it. I suppose for like the understanding of humans in space, we still need to put humans in space. Well, a lot of it's just about using cells, isn't it? Looking at genetics and gene expression.
Do you think we have come far enough that we could do without it that we could simulate it or do you think there'll still be some element where we need people to actually unfortunately experiment on? Looking at all the literature that was out there on the aging studies, I think there will still be a component of effectively experimenting on willing participants is there is still a lot of unknowns. It sounds like I think there's still quite
a lot of drive as well. I think people still want to go to space and be astronauts and be in a international space station whatever that looks like. And there's like all the missions as well that are planned to go back to the moon and stuff and potentially even to Mars in the future. So I don't think we're uh I don't think we're giving up just yet. Leaving it all to the robots. Well, I think that might be everything that we have time for this week. We've covered an awful lot of the journey of
the ISS. It is pretty remarkable just what the ISS has achieved in 30 years, and it's still got five to go, less we forget. So, who knows what else might come out of it. And who knows what the next iteration of the International Space Station could look like, whether that be privately owned or not. I want to also add that if we wanted to continue to watch what's coming out, NASA published like an annual review of all the research that they have done or
highlights from it as well. So yeah, if anyone is still interested to find out even more cuz there is loads that we didn't cover, then there we go. Yeah, there's heaps and heaps of research uh from the last 30 years. We're going to have a lot of links in the show notes this time, I think. Definitely. And I'm going to be making Laura read all the articles that I find on other missions in space and what just what they're up to and what their nickname is and their
favorite plant. I will look forward to that and I guess we'll see everybody next time for another episode of Technically Speaking. Thank you for listening. 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 out if you could rate us, leave a review, and tell a
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