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May 24, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:51
Edition 546 - Colin Stuart

British space expert and educator Colin Stuart - on travelling in space - and what you need to be and have to go there for long periods...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is definitely Howard Hughes and this is still the unexplained.
Hope everything's okay with you.
The sun is beaming somewhat through my window now.
A little earlier today we had heavy rain, dark cloud and all the rest of it, so I think we can probably sum it up in, it's a typical British spring.
Slightly, slightly warmer than the ones that I remember when I was a kid, but certainly variety is what it's all about.
And they do say that's the spice of life.
And summer's on the way.
And today when I record this, we're just starting to feel the benefits of the relaxation of some more of the COVID restrictions.
It means that basically people can go to places like cinemas now, watch a movie, they can dine indoors and that kind of thing.
We're not out of the woods yet, though, they tell us.
So we'll see how it all goes.
And they're also telling us something very confusing.
I would love to be able to go abroad somewhere.
I can't remember when I last did anything like that.
They're saying, yes, you can travel abroad, but we advise you not to.
So it's all silly.
But that's as much about that as I'm going to say.
Okay, the guest on this edition is Colin Stewart, award-winning astronomy author, writer, and speaker.
He is a great educator, and you'll find out how and why in this hour.
I think you're going to like it.
He's worked with people, including Tim Peake, and done some remarkable stuff.
We're going to talk partly about traveling in space and living in space, but also a lot of other cool things with Colin Stewart, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
I did say that there were a few people to say hello to, so let me just flip the sheet here.
Oh, this is from Aiden.
Aiden, thank you for getting in touch, regular listener.
I hope that you're keeping safe.
I am.
I hope you are too.
If I may say, particularly, he says some very nice things about me that I'm not going to read out here, but thank you, Aiden.
He says, highlights of the podcasts that he's listened to, and he's listened to almost all of them, I think.
Guy Lyon Playfair of the Enfield Poltergeist.
Gary Hesseltine, Kevin Goodman, Lionel Fanthorpe, John Hansen, the late and wonderful Stanton Friedman, Judy Wood, Tricia Robertson, Philip Mantle, Nick Redfern.
So a lot of people who are very well known, and they have played their part over the years in The Unexplained.
Paul in Leicestershire has a suggestion about the goings-on at the Skin Walker Ranch.
I'm going to try and get on that one.
Thank you, Paul, for that.
Ian in Scotland sent me a news story from the Scottish Daily Record.
Basically, well, is it a ghost?
I don't know what the image is.
But it's two spooky women dressed like if you're in England, your grandmother might have been dressed in 1970s clothing, wafting semi-invision and semi-out of vision across a photograph in a part of Glasgow.
I think it's Partick area of Glasgow.
But it's a weird one.
I don't know what to make of it.
Thank you, Ian.
And Anthony in Nottingham, thank you for an intriguing suggestion, Anthony.
And I've got to get on that too.
Getting tons of email at the moment.
I am seeing it all.
And if your email needs a reply, then of course it will get one.
But please know that I do see all of the email.
And it does mean a great deal to me that you keep in touch.
And it also helps me massively that you give me suggestions and news stories and all the stuff that you do do.
Okay, let's get to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
Did I thank Adam, my webmaster?
I don't think I did.
Adam, I'm sorry.
My webmaster, Adam, who's very, very hardworking at the moment.
Thank you for everything that you do.
And also, Haley, of course, for booking the guests.
Right, let's get to the guest in London, United Kingdom, Colin Stewart, astronomy author, writer, and speaker.
And many other things too.
Colin, thank you for coming on.
No problem.
Thank you for having me.
So, Colin, I've read a lot about you online, and you were on a list of interesting people that I've been meaning to contact for a while.
So I'm glad we got round to finally doing this.
How do you describe yourself?
So I'm an astronomy writer, author, and speaker.
So in pre-COVID times, I would normally split my time pretty equally between writing books and magazine articles and then going out and speaking.
So businesses, schools, astronomical societies, that sort of stuff.
I mean, that's been a little curtailed in the last year or so, but that's what I'd normally be doing.
It's a great time to be doing all of this, isn't it?
Because there is so much space news around and people seem to be almost like they must have been in the 1970s when the Apollo missions were on.
People seem to have really caught the space bug again.
It does feel that way.
I think there was a bit of a lull in the late 90s, 2000s.
And I think what really kicked it off in the UK at least was Tim Pete going to space.
Because we hadn't had a British astronaut go into space since Helen Sharman in the early 90s.
And that was a big gap.
And I think that really caught people's imagination.
They kind of realized that actually, yeah, Brits can go to space.
And now we've got things like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin and all of these kind of space tourism companies.
I think there's a sense that space is opening up now, not just for the really lucky few highly trained astronauts, but $250,000 to give to Sir Richard Branson for a ride on his galactic missions when they start.
It may well be more accessible.
You're right to all of us.
You mentioned Tim Peake.
I know that you did some work with him.
The nation, I think, the UK, held its breath when he did his first spacewalk.
Did you see that?
Yeah, amazing.
The first British spacewalk.
To have that union flag on the arm was a kind of spine-tingling moment.
And I was lucky enough, as you say, I got to go and meet him because I worked on one of his books with him.
And I just remember we had one or two days together.
And at one point, it was just me and him.
And he was walking me around the swimming pool at the astronaut training center, telling me how they trained to spacewalk and how the pool compared to walking in space for real.
As someone who's been obsessed with space since I was a child, that was an amazing moment.
You don't get sort of a one-on-one time with an astronaut.
We used to talk about the Apollo astronauts as having the right stuff.
And it seems to me that Tim Peake is an incredibly calm individual, a man who can handle any situation.
I've been trying to get to interview him for the last couple of years.
And there's a long queue behind me.
Or, you know, I'm at the back of a long queue.
Let's put it that way.
But it does seem to me that you have to have something.
And whatever the something is, he's got it.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't want to speak for him, but he's from what I encountered with him.
He's a pretty unflappable guy.
I think that comes from his background in the army, being a helicopter test pilot.
You've got to be pretty calm.
But what really interested me actually was if you think about the Apollo astronauts, they were the kind of gung-ho kind of alpha male characters.
And the modern breed of astronaut isn't like that.
Space agencies don't want someone that kind of impulsive.
They want someone who's a lot more calm, a lot more well-rounded, good at lots of different things.
And I think that's why Tim appealed to the European Space Agency so much is that, you know, he is very unflappable and he's also good at a lot of different things.
And these days, it does seem that, yes, you've got to do the big stuff, but also you've got to be a team player who, if the toilet, the suction toilet on the International Space Station needs to be unblocked, then you've got to be able to step up and do it.
Yeah, it's exactly that.
There's only normally, say, six people up there at a time.
Those six people have to have all bases covered.
Those bases include things like teeth extraction.
You know, they're trained in whipping each other's teeth out if they've got a root canal or something.
So they've got to cover a lot of different skill sets.
I mean, I don't know if Tim told you about that, but what do you know about actually having to do dentistry?
I never thought of that for a nanosecond on the International Space Station.
What sort of training can you get for that?
I mean, I think it's just a case of minimizing the patient's pain and getting the tooth out as quickly as possible.
But for those kind of minor surgeries, they're trained to cover some of those eventualities.
Unfortunately, they've never had to evacuate the space station if they need to, but they've never had to do it.
What's the procedure?
How long does it take?
I heard somewhere once that they could get someone down in about half a day if it was a real medical emergency, because there's always a spaceship attached to the space station as an emergency getaway.
So by the time they get people on board and get them down and get them to hospital, someone did say once that they reckon they could do it in about half a day if it was really, really serious.
And I suppose there's also the situation, and it's getting more and more possible, that something, a piece of debris may be heading at tremendous velocity towards the International Space Station, and that piece of debris can't be shifted from its trajectory, and the space station can't move sufficiently.
And even something small is going so fast in space, can be, that it can cause enormous damage.
So I guess in a situation like that, if there was something that was coming straight for them, like iceberg right ahead, they'd have to get out.
Luckily, because the space station's built in a sort of modular way where it's piece by piece stuck together, if it were to pierce the hull of the space station, they could move into another part of the space station and have that part still completely pressurized.
Okay, the air would start to leak out of the bit that's been hit.
But because it's built in this sort of Lego style bit by bit, they can isolate.
But Tim said when he used to look out of the Earth, out of the cupola window, he'd also have a little look around the outside of the spaceship just to check if he could see any damage from any of these little...
But if it's traveling at 17,500 miles an hour...
Well, that's been shocking.
Shot with a bullet, isn't it?
So it might not be the end.
I mean, if they got, yeah, it's the same as getting shot with a bullet.
But they might just be able to move into the other part of the space station.
Because we forget how big it is.
It's the size of a football pitch.
Yes, we do forget.
And sometimes pitches.
And they kind of move around.
There are different modules.
And it's the same for solar storms, for example.
If there's a big solar storm coming from the sun, they all go down to the Russian part of the space station because the walls are a bit thicker and it gives you a bit more protection.
So occasionally they've been asked to all sleep down there as a precautionary measure if there's a kind of nasty bout of space weather coming in from the sun.
Did Tim ever tell you that he was ever scared up there?
No, he didn't.
And I don't know whether he was or not, but humbled.
But no, he certainly didn't say he was scared.
Because I often wonder, as you must have wondered, what it's like to open the door in your pressurized suit and you are tethered and you are in a controlled environment.
But when you step out, like he stepped out, and he had some tasks ahead of him, so the focus is going to, you know, keep you on point and stop you from worrying too much about it.
But nevertheless, the feeling when you step out of there is unimaginable.
I don't think videos and photographs can actually tell us the enormity of that.
No, although what he did say was that because they trained so rigorously for these things and for all, well, not all eventualities, but the majority of eventualities, that sort of felt, in one way at least, it felt fairly routine because it was something that had been practiced time and time again.
Of course, there was the factor that it really was space, and that was different.
But I think astronauts in general, they're so professional these days that they've got a job to do, and they kind of have that mind on the...
I'm not sure I've ever met people who are more focused than focused than astronauts, but I guess that's why they get picked.
The book that you wrote with Tim Peake was the Astronaut Selection Test Book.
And, you know, I think the title tells me most about that, but what was that all about?
Well, so the idea was that for the first time, you would get to see some of the questions from the European Space Agency astronaut selection process, but also some of the attributes they were looking for.
Because there's such a wide range of things.
Some of the things you might expect, we've talked about being calm under pressure, team player, but even things like language skills.
Visitors to the International Space Station have to learn Russian because it's one of the working languages of the ISS.
And Tim said actually that that was one of the hardest parts of the entire training process, was learning Russian and technical Russian too.
You know, you're not just talking about the weather or your pets or the things you might learn at school.
You're talking quite technical, scientific, engineering Russian.
So, no, he said that was one of the hardest parts.
And are they, you know, in terms of the severity of the tests, are they tough questions that you have to answer?
I presume you have to know an awful lot about an awful lot.
Well, the tests weren't necessarily about knowledge.
I mean, there was some parts where they wanted you to know about pulleys and levers and, you know, some technical things.
But a lot of the other questions were things like problem solving or mental arithmetic.
And it wasn't the, it was the speed at which you had to do it.
So, you know, simple sums would flash up on a computer, five plus two or whatever.
And so that in itself, the sum isn't too hard.
But the pace ramps up over time.
And so, again, they're pushing you.
They're trying to make sure that you're calm under pressure.
It could be something like a dial flashes up on the screen for two seconds and you have to remember where the hand was on the dial.
Or they might change pace.
So they'll flash five up and you have to remember where the dial is null five.
Because if your system suddenly shuts off in space, you might have been the last person to see where the dial was when it turned off.
And so you need to be able to tell mission control, okay, it shut off when the pressure was X number of kilopascals or when the fuel gauge, for example, maybe the fuel gauge cuts off and you need to know how much fuel is left.
So it was those sort of under pressure computer-based memory tests.
So they were less looking for knowledge and they were more looking for a kind of personality type.
And mental agility.
And mental agility.
Yes, absolutely.
I've never thought of those sorts of tests.
I'd never thought that you would get asked those things.
And it's almost like it's a test of your mettle more than anything else, isn't it?
A test of what you are about.
And what they would always do is change it up.
So if you come up with a good technique, so for example, if you were given a string of numbers that you had to remember, it's easier if you remember a three-digit number as an actual number.
So instead of one, two, three.
If you remember it as 123.
Because then you're breaking down the list into you're only remembering three numbers instead of nine.
So you may have worked out a strategy and you're doing quite well at the questions that are coming up.
And then they'll deliberately change the pattern or the speed or the so that whatever method you're using before won't work anymore.
And a lot of people will get really flustered and say, and lose it.
What they want is someone who can stay calm, come up with an alternative technique that will allow them to keep going.
And so that was what they want adaptable people as well.
Right.
So they're not going to be asking you, how high is Kilimanjaro and what is the state capital of one of the provinces?
No, no, they were very much not, with the exception of some of the engineering questions.
There were a lot of kind of electrical questions.
What's the formula for electrical power?
But they were the only real fact-based questions.
The rest of them were kind of mental agility.
I mean, almost like IQ questions in a way.
And if you've ever done an IQ test, those...
And the reason why I would fail massively is that I'm really bad at spatial awareness in the sense of, you know, those questions you get where here's a shape, a 3D shape.
Which is the same shape seen from a different angle?
I mean, I'll get there.
I'll sit down and logically work it out, but there's no way I can do it at speed.
And that was what that was those sorts of questions.
And that's really important for the space station because you have to be able to move things around.
You have to think about the, if you're docking something to the space station with the robotic arm, you know, you have to be able to move things around in three dimensions quickly.
And I mean, if you're a helicopter test pilot like Tim, right, it's a walk in the park.
Yeah, but for the rest of us.
For the rest of us, it's something quite.
So is there, as far as you were aware when you were doing the research for this, is there a high failure rate?
There must be.
Yeah, absolutely.
So they received, for the last astronaut selection back in 2008, this is the European Space Agency one, they received 9,000 applications that met the basic criteria.
And to be honest, the basic criteria are pretty extensive anyway.
You have to have a certain number of years' experience.
You have to have an engineering background or flying time.
You know, it's a high bar even for the SIFT.
And then there was 9,000 people.
They knocked out 8,000 on those tests.
God.
And then from the thousand that were left, they brought them back in for some more like scenario-based assessment where they got them working in teams through certain puzzles.
From memory, they cut that down to, well, I can't quite remember, but maybe 100 or so.
So you get from like one in 10 after the initial tests, and then you go to like one in a hundred and one in a thousand.
Yeah, so it was 8,000 were wiped out of the 9,000 after those tests that I was sort of describing, the computer-based amplitude tests.
So by the time you get to be Tim Peake, you know, it's written all over you, and it's pretty obvious that you are special.
Yes, I think they had about 12 people from memory, 10 or 12 people that got all the way through that had done the medical.
And then it was just a question of picking between those kind of candidates.
Then you get into space and you've got to live there.
And that's another one of your books.
And this is one of the things about your work that fascinated me, actually, most.
I wonder how many people, based on what we know at the moment, and it's very relevant now, Have put it all down in book and tabulated form like you have.
How to live in space.
I mean, the selling line for it is your one-stop shop for crucial lessons about life away from Earth.
Find out how you eat, sleep, drink, and more.
You know, a lot of those things a lot of us haven't really given very much thought to.
We've thought about what it is going to be like to be traveling in a hostile environment and getting to a place that is also hostile, like Mars or the moon where we're going.
There's an awful lot to consider, isn't there?
Yeah, there is.
And I think we forget also that the reason why we are like we are, why we have the bodily systems that we do, why our bodies work the way that they do, is because we evolved to survive on the Earth.
As soon as you take us away from the Earth, all of those advantages that evolution has given us are taken away.
So you can get very sick, for example, because what happens is that without gravity, the fluid in your ears starts floating around in the tubes in your ears.
And inside those tubes, there are hairs.
And normally, that's how you know whether you're leaning to one side, for example.
If you tilt your head, the fluid will move and the hairs will tickle and send a message to your brain to say that I'm moving.
But in space, with that liquid floating around in your ears, it sends a signal to your brain that you're moving.
And your eyes are saying, well, no, I'm not moving.
And your body's response is to make you really ill.
Seasickness, right?
It's a similar sort of deal.
If you're rocking around on a ship, that fluid is knocking around.
So a lot of people get very sick.
They throw up consistently for two or three days when they first go to space.
Then your body figures it out and you're fine.
I can remember working on a pirate radio ship in the Middle East years and years ago.
And I was on there for a couple of weeks.
And then I had an appointment on shore and I had to come on shore.
And I couldn't understand why the land was moving.
But I got what they call land sick.
So it's a complicated thing, isn't it?
And you have to pick people who are...
they may well get sick, but they've got to be able to deal with it, yeah?
Well, you can't really...
I mean, so they do put people in centrifuges, for example, and test them on high G takeoffs and things.
But actually, you can't, as far as I'm aware, you can't really tell even if a professional astronaut is going to get sick or not.
It's just one of those things.
They call them leadheads.
If you're fine, you don't get sick at all, you're a leadhead.
But otherwise, very highly trained astronauts can get very sick just for a couple of days.
What about dealing with radiation?
Well, so this is a big problem.
And I would say it's probably one of the biggest issues if we are going to the moon again or to Mars for the first time.
Because there are particles moving through Mars.
Well, there are subatomic particles flying through the universe from the sun, from exploding stars.
If they rip through your body, they can dump all of their energy into your DNA and make you very sick.
And right now, we don't have a good way to protect astronauts from that.
I mean, if you're on the space station, you're okay, mostly, because you're still inside Earth's magnetic cocoon.
So you're mostly alright.
But if you start going to the moon and you start going to Mars and you're outside that protection, right now we just don't have a good way to protect astronauts.
This is a bit of a worry, isn't it, Colin?
Because you've got the likes of Elon Musk putting dates on when we're going to Mars.
And if physiologically we're not equipped for it and we need systems to help us be equipped for it, then how can we put dates on this?
Well, it's certainly one of the hurdles we have to get over in order to solve it.
I mean, I like to think that it's an engineering problem.
The problem is quite clear-cut.
We know what the problem is.
And once you have a clear objective, you can normally solve a problem.
So, for example, NASA, when they're going back to the moon supposedly later this decade, the astronauts are going to wear what are effectively bulletproof vests.
Well, they look a lot like bulletproof vests.
And they have a thicker, they're thicker over the parts of your body where your organs are.
So they're going to be tailor-made to each astronaut.
So that's your liver and your lungs and your heart.
There is a sort of thicker amount of protection.
I think some of the problems that might be harder to solve, if we're talking about what we've got to do to get to Mars, are the kind of woollier problems, the ones that are harder to state.
So I give a talk to schools about sending the first people to Mars because the first people that are going to go to Mars are at school right now, given these timelines.
And I say that the biggest problem is probably psychology.
No human being in history will ever have been as cut off from everybody else as that first crew going to Mars.
If you're halfway to Mars, you can't see the Earth.
It's a speck behind you.
And you can't see Mars yet either because it's a speck in the distance.
The travel time for a message home to the Earth is probably going to be about half an hour, 20 minutes, half an hour.
So if you call your friends or your family back home and you say hello, it'll take a good 20 minutes for that signal to get back to the Earth.
And then 20 minutes for their reply to get to you.
So you don't have that kind of immediate anchor to your friends and family that they have on the space station.
You know, they can video call their friends and family.
They have an internet phone on the space station.
They can call anyone they want and the delay is a second.
When you're that far from home, and again, we said earlier, you know, they can get them down from the space station in half a day.
If you're halfway to Mars, you're three and a half months away from the Earth.
You are on your own.
I think psychologically, that's going to be really tough.
And I don't think people are talking about this as much as they should be.
The idea, you know, I think we're just starting to understand that it takes a long time for pictures from Perseverance to get back here.
And there's the new Chinese craft That landed days ago.
You know, it takes time to do that.
But we haven't really thought about the astronauts, the pioneers, the people who will go to Mars, and the fact that they're not going to ever be able to have a direct conversation with anybody other than the people who are with them.
To me, that would be a very, very frightening thought, a very daunting thought.
Well, I guess I also think that we're getting closer to understanding what that feels like, given the last year that we've had, of being, in some sense, isolated, not being able to go where we want, not being able to see who we want.
In some ways, that's similar to the kind of isolation that they experience.
Now, when you say we haven't thought about it, I agree that a lot of members of the public haven't, but I would say that space agencies, it's really high on their list.
So there have been experiments already.
For example, there was a Mars 500 project.
That was where six volunteers were locked up in this facility in Moscow, pretending like they were going to Mars.
They did the whole thing.
They did the fake launch, the journey, the landing.
They stepped out onto the Martian surface.
And at all times, they had that built-in delay, an artificial built-in delay with the outside world to mimic what it would be like.
And they were being studied by a team of psychologists the whole time.
Antarctica, too.
You know, we said you can get down from half a day from the space station.
If you winter in Antarctica on one of the research bases, the runway is closed for five months because the weather's just too bleak.
So no planes can come in and no planes can take off.
If you have a heart attack in the middle of winter in Antarctica, you're not being evacuated like you might be on the space station.
So in some ways, Antarctica is more remote than the space station.
And again, the European Space Agency very carefully studying things like the Concordia research station in Antarctica for, you know, what makes the best teams, what mix of people, what types of personalities fare well in, you know, winter in Antarctica?
Because, I mean, that's about as close as you can get to a trip to Mars.
But if we think about Mars, the psychological impact of, for example, you know, when we have conversations, there can be misunderstandings.
Just imagine having a conversation, maybe, with a family member on Earth, and you say something, and they respond, and it's clear they haven't got what you meant, and they might have taken it completely the wrong way.
You've got to wait 20 minutes to sort that out.
I think the psychological impact of that is going to be enormous.
And of course, we cannot change, as Scotty and Star Trek said, we can't change the laws of physics.
There is no way to make this any faster.
No, because it's limited by the speed of light.
And as far as we know, it's the fastest you can go.
So it's a built-in part.
I mean, what people have talked about is maybe doing it text, text-based, because then you can get on with something else while you're waiting for the reply to come.
If you're talking about video messages, you're just going to have to send pre-recorded video messages rather than trying to hope to have some kind of Zoom call like we've been having halfway to Mars.
So I would say that psychology.
I mean, radiation is probably the biggest engineering hurdle, but I would argue that that's easier to solve because it's easier to state the problem than it is to solve the psychological stuff because it's a bit more, you know, a bit more nebulous, a bit more woolly.
And of course, it's not just disagreements with family members.
It might actually be the solution to a problem.
You know, it might be some engineering situation, urgent engineering situation emerges.
You want a consultant on the ground to give you an answer, but you're going to have to wait.
Exactly.
And that's the problem.
There's no one's going to come out to get you.
Whereas if you're on the moon and you have an issue, it's a second and a half each way.
And someone can get out to you in three days.
You know, if it's really bad and you're in danger and you think you can eat it out for three days, we could send an emergency crew to the moon in three days to come and help you.
That's just not feasible for Mars.
You know, we're talking about months and months and months.
So this, and we need to consider this, it is important, is self-sufficiency to the nth degree.
You've got to be able to generate your own solutions.
So in that movie, The Martian, for example, there's Mark Wahlberg on the surface of Mars, has to find a way to grow his own food, has to be able to deploy whatever is handy for him, has to make his own solutions.
So these people are almost like a kind of Robinson Crusos, aren't they?
They're people who are abandoned on a desert island, only it's a planet very, very far away from Earth.
And they have to be able to rely on themselves.
Absolutely.
They are, for all intents and purposes, on their own.
It's why you've got to be very careful about who you pick, not just in terms of their kind of psychological makeup, but in terms of their range of skills.
Because on the space station, you can always ask mission control for their input, but you might not have that luxury on Mars.
I mean, it's why some people are talking about artificial intelligence being a really big, a big advance.
I'm not talking about sentient artificial intelligence, but just having a computer where if you asked an Alexa style thing, where if you asked it to run some scenarios for you based on what you're telling it, it can maybe give you, there's a 90% chance that if you do this, it will work.
And it can give you that answer in real time in a way that you wouldn't be able to get that answer from mission control because they're a 40-minute round trip signal away.
So if you had an advanced computer system that could quickly run different scenarios for you to give you the highest probability of success, that would be a really useful tool too.
And again, I've never thought about that, Colin.
Thank you for making me think about this.
So when you go to Mars, if you're one of the people picked to go there, if you have the fortitude to do it, you've got to be able to take with you, as far as you can, the sum total of human knowledge, because, you know, you can call on the sum total of human knowledge, but it's 40 minutes round trip away.
So you've got to have that stuff with you.
You do.
And that's why you would need to have, I think, when we sent people to the moon in the Apollo days, we had three people on board.
So on the very first mission, you had Armstrong and Aldrin go down to the surface and Michael Collins in orbit.
I think for Mars missions, you would just need more.
You might need 8, 10, 12 people because you just need that, a much bigger range of skills that just three people wouldn't be able to have on their own.
You know, like a doctor, for example, an emergency medicine doctor.
And that's their only job.
That's what they were.
And they've become an astronaut, but they're actually an emergency medicine doctor.
Talking about things like botanists, if we're talking about the Martian, engineers and flight controllers and, you know, quite specialized jobs to make sure that you have that, as you say, some total of, or you can approximate the sum total of human knowledge as best you can.
A psychologist.
I mean, absolutely a psychologist.
Because people are going to get down.
People are going to question themselves.
People are going to have those moments of doubt.
And so you absolutely are going to need a psychologist on these missions.
Yes, you will.
And what happens if somebody who is there, and here's another question that I hadn't really thought about until now.
If somebody who is there, all that way away from, you know, such a long journey back to Earth, it's not just a couple of days.
It's much, much, much more than that.
If that person gets news that somebody close, near and dear to them is ill or needs help or something, then the person on Mars is going to feel powerless because there's not a whole lot they can do.
Well, it happened.
I'm trying to remember exactly the situation.
It happened to somebody on the space station, one of the NASA astronauts.
I don't want to get it wrong, but I think someone's wife was in a car accident.
I dimly remember this, yeah.
And so they had that, and there was somebody else whose wife went into labor.
And so they had to be, they were able to be at the delivery of the baby, but on the space station remotely.
And again, they couldn't just come down for that.
They had to wait for the end of their mission on the space station, which is normally six months at a time.
So yeah, absolutely.
There's many things that can go wrong.
There's a wonderful TV program also that's been on recently with Hilary Swank.
And it's exactly that scenario that she gets some news.
She's gone to the moon and she gets some news that something's happened to her family back home and she has to deal with that.
So just like the movie, The Martian, some of this, because they controlled the information that he got, he didn't get to know everything.
And he didn't get to know everything in real time like the people on Earth got to know it.
They drip-fed him information.
They controlled what he knew because they were working out what he could take, what a human being could withstand.
So a lot of this is going to be about information control, isn't it?
Those people on the surface of Mars are not going to be in possession of all of the facts.
They will be in possession of as many facts as they can manage.
There is, sometimes, yeah, it's dangerous, isn't it?
Because if you lose that mission control signal for any reason, then you kind of want to be in control of all the facts because then you can best solve things.
But there is often a kind of, I wouldn't go as far as a power struggle, but I've noticed that there is this kind of dynamic between the astronauts and mission control where they feel that they seem to feel at least that they're a bit over-controlled sometimes and micromanaged sometimes.
And so if you push them too far, the astronauts could decide, which is quite often happens in science fiction, the astronauts decide just to stop taking orders because, well, what can mission control do about it?
If they're halfway to Mars, they can go rogue and do their own thing.
You get a mutiny in space.
When you're on Mars, we are learning.
I think we're getting the technology to be able to generate oxygen on Mars.
We'll probably be able to find water somewhere that we'll be able to process.
Growing food, how is that going to work?
So they've tried.
So with the oxygen, you're right.
The Perseverance rover that's just landed had an experiment on board called MOXI, and it was extracting oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on Mars.
And they did that successfully in a very small way.
It's a kind of proof of principle.
For the food, I'm told that the most realistic Martian soil on the Earth, you know, the stuff that's the most like it, is the Hawaiian volcanic dirt.
So what they've done is they've taken this Hawaiian soil and they've tried to plant basic crops in it in as Mars-like conditions as they can make.
So similar temperatures, similar gases, similar atmospheric pressure, similar radiation, similar light levels.
Just make it as Martian as you can on the Earth.
And they've been able to grow peas and radishes and asparagus.
So it's not beyond the realms of question.
It's just the soil itself on Mars has these pretty nasty chemicals in it that you'd have to wash out first.
Will they be the same on Mars?
You might be able to grow them in Hawaiian dirt, you know, here on Earth and try to replicate the conditions on Mars, but can we replicate all of it?
There are going to be imponderables.
We're not quite going to know how food that you grow on Mars is going to turn out until we start doing it, are we?
No, exactly.
I guess that's why you always need a backup.
You don't put, you know, never in space do you put all your eggs in one basket.
An engineer once told me something wonderful.
They said, two is one and one is none.
So if you have one of something, you really have none of something because if it breaks, then it's gone.
Whereas if you have two different ways of doing something and one doesn't work, then you've always got another one.
So you would have some backup.
You'd have some probably really high calorie, high protein, you know, a souped up version of your protein bars that could give you basically everything you need in one, not particularly delicious mouthful.
Right.
So you've got almost like multiple redundancy for those things.
So you have something to fall back on.
And that leads to another question, again, I hadn't thought about.
And I'm sure that you have supplying a team of people on Mars.
How will you do that?
Will you rocket them, you know, parcels from home periodically?
How will that work?
You do it first.
So because it takes so long, you wouldn't want to go to Mars unless you knew that everything that was required from start to finish was there for them.
You wouldn't want to risk sending it later and it not making it.
So what you would do is you'd send an empty, well, not empty, uncrewed rocket ship to Mars first and land that on Mars first.
And then only when you know that that's safely landed and there, would you send your human crew to land right next door so that they would have another rocket right next to them that has everything that they possibly need on board.
So again, it's about contingency, right?
You just wouldn't risk sending it after the fact.
You only head to Mars when you know that everything that they need is already safely on the surface.
So do you think that Elon Musk, who's putting quite near dates on getting to Mars, do you think he's just being over-optimistic because there is so much involved in it?
SpaceX are always over-optimistic.
But I mean, that's no bad thing in a way.
They set ridiculously ambitious goals and they always miss them.
But they do do the thing they say they're going to do.
I think it's just a way for them to sort of focus their efforts.
But it's that it's his technology.
It's that SpaceX technology that we're talking about.
If you've seen the Starship 15 land in the last 10 days or so, that's exactly what we're talking about.
Send the uncrewed one of those to Mars, have it do that amazing self-controlled landing.
But Travis, what will take longer is I can see him sending one of those to Mars this decade easily without people.
But 50% of things that land on Mars so far have crashed.
So that first one might crash.
Then you have to wait two years for the planets to align to send another one.
Then it takes seven months to get there.
If that crashes, you've got to wait two more years and another seven months.
And that's before you've even started sending people.
So I think that's why it might take a bit longer is that if something fails, which it will, it's space that always fails to start with.
You can't just do it again the next day.
You've got to wait nearly three years to do it again.
So you've only got to have five failures.
And that sets you back 15 years.
God.
So when I talk to the school kids about it, you know, they're talking about the 2030s.
I can kind of see people going to Mars and orbiting Mars and coming home then.
But then actual landing may be another, I say by about 2050.
When I hope I'm wrong, right?
Well, I think, you know, we'd both like to be able to see it, wouldn't we?
But then when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon for the first time, he was 38.
So if we're talking about 30 years from now, that means the first person to walk on Mars is eight years old right now.
Never thought of it.
So this is not some, even at 2050, it's not some hype dream for some future unborn generation.
Even if it's 2050, we're talking about sending today's eight-year-olds to Mars.
So it's going to happen.
That's exciting to me.
Very exciting.
It's going to happen for somebody living now.
And what about the moon, though?
Because we're definitely going to the moon.
There's the Artemis mission, the American mission.
There's a plan.
There are a few plans to put a telescope, space telescope on the moon.
The moon is nearer, but the moon is just a lump of rock, isn't it, without any atmosphere whatsoever, just kind of hanging there.
Why do we want to go to the moon again?
Well, so the moon's a great staging post for Mars, because let me say it's closer.
So rather than just making that huge leap from the space station to Mars, if we go back to the moon again, then we can see if this technology works.
Kind of like we were saying earlier, you're only three days away from help and you're only one and a half seconds away from a message.
So if we step out to the moon and we can get it to work, then maybe we'll be more confident about Mars.
Because it'd be quite a jump just to go from the ISS, say, to Mars.
But long term, it makes no sense to keep going on and off the Earth all the time because the Earth's gravity is pretty strong.
The effort to get into space is enormous.
If you could start launching all your rockets from the moon without an atmosphere, as you said, and with a gravity that's only a sixth of the Earth's, the energy you have to expend to escape the moon is so much lower than for the Earth.
So you really don't want to keep coming on off the Earth.
You want to use the Moon as your, ideally, long term.
And we're going to colonize space in the solar system long term.
You want the moon to be your launch base, not the Earth.
It makes no sense long term.
And what are the moon colonization plans, the moon inhabitation plans that you know of?
Well, so again, you need water.
As we said, for Mars, that's a big deal.
And luckily, we know that the moon has lots of ice, particularly at the South Pole.
So that would be a good place to set up a human base long term.
It's also on the kind of points towards the Earth too.
You don't want to go to the back of the moon because it always faces away from the Earth.
And therefore, your signal home is blocked.
You wouldn't better send a message home unless you relayed the message to a satellite around the side and then back.
And it's more complicated.
But the other thing people never talk about when it comes to the moon and sending humans is that the moon spins so slowly.
It spins in a month.
So the Earth spins in 24 hours, one day, but the Earth rotates in a month.
And that means daytime lasts for two weeks and nighttime lasts for two weeks on most places on the moon.
So if you're having to be constantly pitch black for a fortnight and then constantly in daylight for a fortnight, You can't just use solar panels because if you're plunged into darkness for half the month, you have to store the energy and it makes it in a battery, and then it gets more complicated.
So, the other great thing about the South Pole, not only is the ice, but because of the way the moon is angled, you get about 90% illumination.
So it's lit up about 90% of the time.
And solar power is where your juice is coming from.
So for many reasons, if we're talking about building a moon base, it seems the South Pole is the most obvious place to do it.
Is it going to be America who will do this first?
It's tricky.
The way things are going, it wouldn't surprise me if it was China.
Because there's more of an impetus, a kind of political impetus to do it.
Also, you don't have to appease voters in the same way as you do in a sort of Western democracy.
If a president of the US says we're going to spend X number of billions of or even trillions of dollars on a moon base instead of schools, hospitals, you know, those kind of things, they'll probably never get elected on the ticket to actually do it.
Whereas if you have a more authoritarian regime where those hoops aren't quite such a problem, it wouldn't surprise me if it was China.
Do you think it's good that China is doing this in terms of, in many ways, they're rather like the Soviet Union was in the Apollo days, or before the Apollo days, really, the Gemini days?
You know, the Americans had to make sure that they were outpacing what the USSR was doing.
And that meant that the speed of technological advance was faster because of the competition.
Do you think we're seeing that again?
I don't know.
It's tricky.
I don't know how motivated the Americans are to beat the Chinese in the same way that the Chinese are motivated to beat the Americans.
So maybe it's not a sort of two-way space race in the way that it was before, with both teams wanting to outdo each other.
It's a bit more one-sided, I think.
And the only slight downside is with a regime like that, it's a bit more unpredictable.
I mean, look this week when they launched their latest rocket into space and a piece of space junk came down in a very uncontrolled way and almost smacked into the Maldives.
Some people in some quarters were saying that they were a bit sloppy with it and they weren't as sort of regulated as perhaps the Americans would be.
Well, in fact, there were some politicians who called the Chinese space people irresponsible for doing that.
To be honest, it's not the first time.
They've, maybe more than a decade ago now, they intentionally blew up one of their satellites with a ground-to-space missile.
And in terms of, okay, it was their own satellite, but in terms of the debris that was created, that sort of thing.
So it's something we've got to be careful of.
But I would imagine that if we're talking about going to the moon and going to Mars particularly, that there'll be more international efforts rather than, say, one country going to Mars.
So we'll see.
Because it just requires so much money and so much expertise and so much effort.
And the optics is far better, right?
If you have an international crew of multi-nationalities, multi-genders, multi-races, then it feels like humans going to Mars, you know, humanity going to Mars.
It doesn't feel like SpaceX going to Mars.
And I think you'll get more buy-in from the general public if they see themselves sort of reflected in the crew in a way that maybe the Apollo missions didn't.
Looking at the current state of space exploration then, Colin, what excites you most at the moment?
Well, the thing that everyone is waiting for and has been waiting for for a very, very long time is the James Webb Space Telescope, which is due to go up in October.
But I say due to go up, it's been meaning to go up for years and years and years.
And I've read the other day that there's a potential another delay, which might put it back further.
But it's built and we're so nearly there.
So when it goes up, the sort of things that will allow us to do, which will be really important, is looking into the atmospheres of alien planets, for example.
Over the last 25 years, we found 4,000 or so planets and other solar systems.
But we're having quite a hard time working out exactly what they're like.
Now, we can say how big they are.
We can say how heavy they are.
So we might be able to say, well, it's the same size as the Earth.
And it's the same distance from its star as the Earth is.
So we start to get excited because, you know, it might be a copy of the Earth.
There might be life there.
But until we can work out what's in its atmosphere, does it have water?
Does it have oxygen?
Does it have those sorts of things?
We can get a bit too carried away.
But James Webb, that's the sort of thing it's going to be able to do.
We're going to start to say how Earth-like these quote-unquote Earth-like planets are.
So we're going to learn so much.
And how quickly will it be able to give us and start giving us data?
I'd imagine that we would see the first, sorry, science, such a slow process, right?
So you get the data and then it comes down, then the scientists analyze it, then they write papers, then they send it to journals.
And it takes a while.
So I would imagine that we might start to see the first results, assuming it launches in October, which comes with a big caveat.
Six to nine months later.
So by the say the middle of next year, we might get the first data.
Well, that's pretty good in space terms.
I've enjoyed this conversation.
They've talked about a few things that I hadn't thought about.
So you've made me stretch my mental faculties such as they are to meet those challenges.
And thank you for that.
What are you working on at the moment?
So I've just finished just wrapping up in the next week or so a book on time.
So looking at time travel in particular.
So it's a collection of 10 pretty short chapters trying to explain things like, is time travel possible?
Looking at all the paradoxes as well, which is always fun.
So the famous things like the grandfather paradox.
Can you go back and kill your own grandfather?
Because you will cease to exist.
More mysterious and lesser-known Paradoxes, too.
Do you think that time travel, in the way that we see it in Back to the Future and the movies generally, do you think that will ever be possible?
So, going forwards, time travel forwards has already been done.
So, the astronauts on the space station, for example, are already time travelers.
The person who holds the record is Gennady Podolka, a Russian cosmonaut.
He spent the most time in orbit, and he has time traveled 0.02 seconds into his own future.
So, we've done it.
Okay, I agree with you.
It's not very exciting.
But to make that bigger than the boring 0.02 seconds, we just got to go faster.
So absolutely, time travel to the future, it's as easy as learning to go faster.
Say we learn to time travel into the future.
Say we learn to go a month into the future.
We can't come back then, can we?
Not unless you have another separate way to come back.
You wouldn't be able to, there wouldn't be a sort of automatic route back.
No.
And so if you went on a loop around space on a rocket and your rocket was traveling at almost the speed of light, a tiny, tiny fraction under the speed of light, you'd be gone and you'd think 10 years will have gone by, but you'd come back to the Earth and 7,000 years will have gone by.
So you're 10 years older and the Earth is 7,000 years older.
Imagine just like turning up in the year 9,000.
And there's nothing really difficult about doing that as such, except that to go that fast, you require so much more energy than we currently have access to.
But there's no sort of fundamental limit in there.
There's nothing in the laws of physics that say that's impossible.
But yes, there is no way then to come back the other way, unless you have some exotic answer.
So in the book, for example, we look at how a wormhole might be used as a time machine to the past.
We don't even know if those exist or not.
So you start to get a bit more far-fetched if you do these convoluted gymnastics to try and go backwards.
But going forwards, there's nothing convoluted about it at all.
You just got to speed up.
Fascinating.
Always fascinated me.
If people want to check out your works, your books and stuff, what's your website?
So my website is colinstuart.net.
I can't have.com or.co.uk because there's a shoe designer with the same name.
So on my website, you'll be able to do things like look at my books.
I can send you a signed copy if you like.
I have a newsletter that I send out on a Monday with my favorite recent space stories.
You get a free e-book if you sign up to the newsletter.
So yeah, have a look.
There's all sorts of different things there.
There, right.
I looked at it today.
There are lots of things there.
Colin, thank you very much indeed.
And I appreciate your problem about the domain name.
There was another Howard Hughes.
I can imagine.
And I think he got to the good domains first as well, or his people did.
Colin Stewart, thank you very much.
No problem.
Thank you.
Your thoughts about this guest, welcome.
Indeed, your thoughts about all of the guests over the years, welcome.
You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can do what I did the other day.
You can go back in time.
Sounds like one of those old radio jingles, doesn't it?
Let's go way back in time.
And you can check out all of the early editions.
And I was doing that the other day.
I haven't done that for years.
And just listening to how my delivery has changed and my voice has changed over the years, the technology has changed.
But the idea of the show stays the same.
Basically simple idea, talking to interesting people about interesting things.
And we just saw over the years what it took us.
And it's taking us all kinds of places.
Fascinating, hey?
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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