The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 690 - Space 2023 - Andrew Lound

Jan. 1, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:03:44

Edition 690 - Space 2023 - Andrew Lound

A big New Year conversation with our space expert Andrew Lound - we talk in detail about the Moon, Mars, the future of the ISS, space tourism in 2023, the James Webb Telescope and MUCH more...

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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 Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	And a very happy new year to you from a very stormy looking London as I record these words.
	Hope that you had a good holiday period.
	If you were working, then I hope it wasn't too bad and maybe you're getting a break now.
	And if you were off and just enjoying yourself, then I hope that it was everything that you wanted it to be.
	And now we're back into things.
	The TV show resumes with a full show on the 8th of January, Sunday.
	So 10 p.m. then for the TV show.
	And the podcasts are resuming right here, right now.
	Somebody famous once sang.
	You can tell me who that was.
	Remember that song right here, right now.
	So the topic on this edition of The Unexplained is, I think, a very good one for the beginning of the new year, and that is 2023 in space.
	2022 was an enormous year of space news.
	It seemed to be coming at us with three or four stories every week.
	There was never a shortage of material, and a lot of really exciting stuff from the era of private space travel for civilians, those who could afford it, to the idea that we're going back to the moon very soon.
	And we've been round it now, of course, with Orion, and that was a very successful mission for NASA and everybody involved in it.
	Plus progress on Mars and many other things, including, and maybe above all the rest, the amazing images that have come to us in the last year from the James Webb Space Telescope.
	We thought that Hubble was great and it was, but James Webb has been showing us space in a way that we've never seen it before.
	It's almost as if a veil has been lifted away from all of this.
	So I thought I would talk about some hot topics with Andrew Lound, our space expert from the TV show.
	And here on the podcast, of course, we can give him a bit more time.
	So I think that is a good thing to do.
	So we'll be connecting to the Midlands and to Andrew Lound very soon and doing that.
	Thank you very much for all of your emails across the holiday period.
	Just a few people to say hello to.
	Unfortunately, can't do everybody.
	But Nick, happy new year to you.
	Thank you very much for your email.
	Happy 2023 to Steve in Byron Bay, Australia.
	Natalie in Belgium.
	Nice to hear from you again, Natalie.
	All the best.
	Vicky in the west of England, ditto.
	David in Hampton, Virginia, USA.
	Thanks for getting in touch.
	Tom in Berlin.
	James in Birmingham, UK.
	Michael in Stockwell, London.
	Thank you for all of the points that you sent recently, Michael.
	I'm working through them.
	Dan in North Staffordshire, UK.
	Good to hear from you, Dan.
	Liam.
	Emma in Portugal, formerly in the Philippines, I think.
	Tim in Lincolnshire, good to hear from you.
	Steve in Helsinki, Finland.
	Happy New Year, Stephen.
	Thanks for all the support this year.
	And Anthony in Toronto, stalwart of this show.
	Thank you, Anthony, for getting in touch.
	And that's just a few of the people who've made contact recently.
	So thank you very much indeed.
	Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for another year of hard work on the show.
	Thank you to you for being part of it.
	If you've donated in the last year, these hard economic times, to the unexplained, a special thank you to you for doing that, to enable it to continue.
	I have a lot to get into during this year, a lot of changes and discussions to be considered.
	And all of that will become clear in the fullness of time.
	And of course, there's always the question of whether the TV show will continue in its current form.
	And I will be hopefully finding out a little bit more about that as we go through the next weeks.
	But that's another issue for another time, as I always say here.
	Thank you very much for being in touch.
	When you get in touch with me, please tell you who, tell me, or tell yourself, you can first.
	Then tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
	And if your email requires a reply or a response, then please put right at the top of it, response, reply, required.
	And then I will know.
	But I get to see and read.
	They've seen me through the holiday period every single email that comes in.
	Right, let's get to the Midlands now.
	Our space expert, Andrew Lound, is there.
	Andrew, thank you very much for doing this.
	Happy New Year.
	Happy New Year, Howard.
	So nice to speak with you.
	How was your Christmas?
	It was good.
	It was good.
	I use Christmas a lot to catch up on some movies and to do an awful lot of reading as always.
	Plenty of reading.
	You've got to keep on top of it because as we are going to discuss 2023, which is only just beginning, we thought that 2022 was going to be exciting, but there are so many things that are going to be upcoming in this year.
	It's going to be hard to keep really on track with them, isn't it?
	It's going to be, yes, it's going to be.
	2023 is going to build on what happened in 2022, which is good news.
	And there's a lot kicking up for the first time in 2023.
	And I think it's going to be very exciting, especially for Britain, because Britain's really going to get involved in space launches this year, all being well and fingers crossed, starting in January and running through the year.
	So, yes, we're looking forward to 2023.
	All right.
	Now, from the British aspect, and at the end of this, I want to talk to you.
	If we have a few minutes at the end of it, I want to talk with you about your research on the history of British space exploration and space research, because we do have that history.
	We just seem to have forgotten a lot of it.
	But in this coming year, am I right in saying that the two locations will be the one in Scotland and the Cornwall facility?
	They will be the focus of everything, more or less?
	That's correct.
	Yes.
	Virgin will be starting, hopefully, in a few weeks' time with the launch of Launcher 1, which is a 70-foot-long rocket which fits underneath a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.
	And you'll take off from Cornwall and fly it into just south of Ireland, where it'll reach an altitude of 30 odd,000 feet.
	And then it will launch the rocket, which will carry a number of small satellites into Earth orbit.
	And that will be the first time there has been a mainland launch from the United Kingdom, albeit an air launch, of course, which is quite exciting.
	But then later on in the year, we're going to see launches from Scotland.
	We've got the bases and Scotland, two bases in Scotland being set up at the moment by private companies, of course, which is even more exciting.
	And we expect to see the first launches from Scotland this year as well, which are, of course, aiming for polar orbits.
	It's a perfect place for doing polar orbits.
	So Britain is really going to get involved heavily at the moment with the launches.
	It's very exciting stuff, of course.
	Are we Involved in NASA's efforts.
	I think we are, aren't we?
	We always have been.
	It's one of the great misnomers that Britain isn't involved with space.
	I mean, there used to be a running joke going in the space fraternity where I was, and it said Britain got involved in the space program until the bottle fell over, which is always a bit rude, really.
	But there was an interesting point to that.
	It was about rocket launches.
	If it comes to satellites, space exploration, research programmes, instrumentation on spacecraft, Britain has always been there, always from day one.
	And that's really important.
	For instance, we also have the Skylark rocket, which was the most successful sounding rocket in history.
	Unfortunately, we couldn't launch it for Britain because of the regulations here, but that was very successful.
	So, no, we've always been involved.
	And we've got scientific packages on satellites, on spacecraft that go to other planets, spacecraft that go to the moon, and components which go into spacecraft and rockets as well have been built in Britain.
	For instance, in the Black Country, would you believe, the seals for the Apollo Lunar Lander windows were made in the Black Country as a subcontract to the main supplier.
	So who would have thought, and I'd never heard that, that part of the most famous to date mission to space, we had a hand in that in the United Kingdom.
	Yeah, I mean, I mean, you have the main companies, Good Boeing, McDonald Douglas, and all these people, and then they subcontract and they know where they want to get their main components from, and they know they use their suppliers, but they're down the chain.
	And the supply chain is enormous, certainly for Apollo.
	And it's trying to actually trace them all is actually quite difficult for Nalino because, of course, it was still under secrecy because the project was done in the public gaze.
	But the subcontract level, of course, is always done quietly.
	And that's quite important to protect patents and things like that.
	And of course, as everybody knows, the hydrogen fuel cells used on the Apollo command and service module was actually designed by Britain and was made under license by Pratt and Whitney.
	And we have a bit of a history in every area of our technology of coming up with great ideas and then either not developing them or selling them off to somebody else.
	Do you think that with this new era of space exploration, space technology that's United Kingdom based, we might actually make a bit of a profit from these things for once?
	The big problem we've had here is something that other countries haven't suffered with.
	I mean, France, Germany, particularly Japan and the United States, their governments have been very keen To back their engineers and industry with cash.
	Britain hasn't, and that's the real problem.
	One of the reasons they've suggested this in the past was we couldn't afford to, but they threw ridiculous sums.
	I mean, we're talking about billions of pounds in the nuclear industry.
	There wasn't a problem with funding that industry, quite happily.
	But it did mean, of course, that other projects such as the hydrogen fuel cell just didn't get backed.
	And what the idea was, we would license it to other people.
	And I think the hydrogen fuel cell is a great example of how Britain operated.
	The National Research Development Corporation, which was a spin-off of the Board of Trade, took on the hydrogen fuel cell from Francis Tom Bacon.
	Unfortunately, it meant he could make no money out of that because he had to hand over the rights to the NRDC, who would therefore give some money to it and support finding backers.
	And he was in the end paid a salary.
	In the end, Pratt and Whitney took this up and they said, can we license it because we need it for Apollo?
	And they said, absolutely.
	And they spent $150 million developing it.
	Now, because it was under license, they gave the whole thing back to Britain without charging us.
	Of course, we, you know, because it was licensed.
	So we were given the whole thing almost free of charge.
	Brilliant.
	We've got it.
	And then we did nothing with it.
	It was actually, interestingly enough, it was given to Shell UK, who then just got rid of it.
	Don't want to know.
	And therefore, we should have had hydrogen fuel cell technology developing then from the early 70s onward.
	And we just think where we would be now if we'd kept pushing that one forward.
	But we didn't.
	And we have a habit here of not backing our brains in this country.
	And this goes back a long way.
	Babbage with the early computer in the 19th century.
	Another example of that.
	The government just simply says it's not our business.
	It's up to private people to fund it and sort it out.
	And what's, I mean, look at Whittle with the jet engine.
	It's a great example.
	He developed the jet engine.
	Britain essentially took it off him, handed it to the United States, handed it to Russia.
	And when the United States asked, could we actually have Whittle thinking, no, they're not going to send their designer over, they said, oh, yes, you can have him if you want him.
	And over to the United States, he went.
	The government and state is very poor in this country, are backing brains and particularly backing scientists and engineers, which is really what we should be doing.
	And of course, making political decisions, which shouldn't really be political decisions, because they're more about the welfare and future development of your nation.
	I mean, it's nothing to do with space, but I'm sure there are loads of examples in space.
	But, you know, there will be many of my listeners, I think, to this who won't be aware of the fact that we had a super fast military aircraft called the TSR-2.
	Oh, yes.
	It was a money spinner, but it was incredibly advanced.
	It would look advanced today.
	But because of fears of the cost of it and a certain lack of political bottle, you know, will, I think it was Harold Wilson's government in the 1960s that scrapped the TSR-2.
	And think of what we could have done if we'd wanted to with that technology.
	I mean, that technology could ultimately have taken us to very high altitudes and perhaps ultimately into low Earth orbit.
	It was a fantastic development.
	You can go and have a look at it.
	I think it's at RAF Cosby.
	You can go and take a look at it.
	It's a fantastic aircraft.
	The engineers who worked on that and designers went to Canada to work on the Canadian fighter bomber program, which was eventually scrapped.
	And most of them then went to NASA to work on Apollo and never came back.
	Hmm.
	Well, let's hope we've learned the lessons.
	We know that 2023 is going to be tough.
	We keep being told that economically it's going to be extremely hard.
	And I'm seeing examples of that already all around me.
	So let's just hope that this important work, and I'm talking about aerospace in general in this country, is not going to suffer at a time when it really needs to thrive.
	It's just interesting to have that conversation.
	And very quickly, while we're on technology that's in the UK, we are closer now to fusion power.
	And one of the things that fusion power may be useful for in the future, if we develop this properly, is powering spacecraft, powering spacecraft in a sustainable and long-term, powerful kind of way.
	We've done a lot of work on fusion in this country.
	We have.
	Nuclear fusion.
	I always liked nuclear fusion.
	I hope you don't mind me dropping this out.
	I actually collaborated on a book about hydrogen history of hydrogen.
	And I wanted to do a chapter on hydrogen fusion, but my scientific collaborators were totally against hydrogen fusion, said it would never work, and stopped me writing the chapter on it, which was sad.
	Because hydrogen fusion is the way to go.
	It's got to be the way to go forward.
	It's the way nature does things.
	And it's the way the sun operates.
	It's not easy.
	Britain, of course, has got a form of demonstration reactor operating, which is quite good.
	They're not getting, they're putting more energy in than they're getting out at the moment, which is a big issue because it's just not cost effective.
	But it is research.
	But the Americans, for a fraction moment in time, have had out more energy than they put in.
	So they've actually got the principles now working.
	Now, if you can get that working, that's where it should be going.
	And this was a good example of where we've just been talking about because the scientists developed nuclear fission technology, which everybody knows about.
	And we had small nuclear reactors.
	And the government was very impressed by that and gave them some money.
	And then when they got it working, they said, right, the next step is to go develop nuclear fusion.
	And the government went, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	This is working.
	Build big ones of these.
	And the scientists said, well, wait a minute.
	If we build big ones of these, we're going to have nuclear waste problems.
	No, no, no.
	Build big ones of these.
	This is what we want.
	And therefore, instead of pushing it forward and developing it, it sort of stopped for a quick book.
	And this is one of the problems.
	You've got to look far ahead into the future.
	And fusion technology is going to be great because that offers a better way, of course, of traveling in space.
	The big problem we have in space, of course, we're still using chemical rockets.
	We do use ion drives for throwing charged particles out the back of the rocket to a certain degree.
	But really, these aren't fully sustainable.
	And if we're ever going to reach the velocities that we actually do need, then we're going to have to have something with a bit more kick into it.
	And it's nuclear fusion would be the way to go.
	But I have to say, even though we've had some tests done at the moment, we're still a long way off from that.
	And do we know whether nuclear fusion would work in the same way in zero-G?
	Oh, yes.
	Yes, yes, absolutely.
	Fusion reaction.
	It doesn't rely on gravity or an oxygen atmosphere or anything like that.
	It's actually the action takes place in a magnetic field, and that's ideal.
	You could actually put that in a back end of a spacecraft without any real problem.
	And of course, the sun works on this principle, and it's in zero-g.
	Yes, it does.
	It would be great.
	Yeah, I mean, that's the future, but that's going to be maybe 100, 150 years into the future yet before we see that happen, I think.
	In the news today and yesterday, and this will have been and gone by the time this conversation is heard by people.
	In fact, it's been and, well, it's still there, but it's in the process of going.
	This array of planets, you know, the BBC wrote it this way.
	There will be a chance to see all the planets in the solar system in the night sky last Thursday, this was.
	Five should be visible with the naked eye.
	The two furthest away, Uranus and Neptune, will be better viewed with binoculars.
	It'll be challenging to see Mercury and Venus in the UK because of their low positions in the sky.
	But nevertheless, they're there and they're in a line.
	And this is very rare.
	It's relatively rare, yes.
	The beauty of the, in this occasion, it was in winter time for the northern hemisphere.
	So the sun goes down, we don't have much of a sun.
	It drops quickly.
	And that's great because I gave you the opportunity.
	You needed to get to high ground to look down on the horizon just after the sun passed.
	And you'd easily pick out Venus.
	And then with a pair of binoculars, it would be safe after the sun had gone down.
	You could actually pick out Mercury right next to it.
	And then scan up with an arc which leads from the position you're looking at all the way to the other side of the horizon.
	And slowly you would start to see the different planets.
	You would see Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Jupiterverse, then Mars.
	And you've got Uranus and Neptune squeezed in there.
	But you would need to look at your map or your app on your phone to pick out Neptune and Uranus because they are quite dim, to say the very least, in modern skies, unfortunately.
	But it was all nicely aligned up for everybody.
	It was very exciting to actually have that opportunity to do it.
	I didn't get to see everything myself.
	I don't have a high point where I can look down on Venus and Mercury, but was able to see Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, which was quite exciting.
	And this is an astonishingly rare thing, isn't it?
	It doesn't happen.
	It doesn't even happen every 10 years.
	Every years, no, but it happens every few years.
	You do get to get the alignment quite good.
	Yes.
	I mean, it happens more often than you might imagine.
	It just happens that sometimes it's in the summertime where you're not going to get any chance at all of seeing Venus and Mercury together because it's going to be too bright a sky.
	But in winter time, that's the rarity.
	So you get a good chance to see everything.
	I didn't get a chance to ask you about this on the TV.
	We're always pushed for time on that.
	And I always have a list as long as your arm and we end up talking about three things and that's probably it, which is great that we have this chance now to speak at more length, as they say.
	Just before Christmas was this story, and I think I mentioned it just as a couple of lines of copy on air.
	The Sun newspaper and many others reported this.
	NASA's massive space telescope has found a bunch of planets, that's their way of putting it, that could well be suitable for life.
	Experts have got their first glimpse of seven planets orbiting their Sun, known as TRAPPIST-1.
	And the Sun put it this way, don't get packing your bags just yet.
	The group are located 39 light years away from Earth.
	And this is all to do with the James Webb Telescope, which through 2022 has been a gift that keeps on giving.
	This is the big astronomy news, really, of the year is the James Webb and the success of that.
	Looking at TRAPPIST-1 was something they really wanted James Webb to look at.
	It has seven planets.
	Now, TRAPPIST-1, it's named TRAPPIST after a telescope system.
	That's the name TRAPPIST.
	Not named after a monk or anything like that.
	And they discovered a red dwarf star, which is much smaller than our Sun, and it's a lot colder.
	And the planets, these seven planets, orbit quite close in towards it.
	So they don't take very long to go around it.
	But because they're close in and the star is quite cool, they found out that these seven planets actually could technically have liquid water on their surface if they're rocky bodies.
	So what it needed to do is have a look at the atmosphere of these planets.
	Now, this is one of the beauties of the James Webb Telescope.
	It will be able to look at atmospheres of other planets.
	It's already done that with one planet already as a demonstration and found a water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet.
	But it needs to look at these seven.
	It's looked at the first one already and hasn't detected a perceptive atmosphere around one of them.
	And that was really important because it needs to, the planets need to transit their star.
	In other words, they pass in front of it because then you can analyze the light that passes through the atmosphere.
	And from that, you get a spectrum analysis.
	And then you can actually find out exactly what constituents are there.
	And Webb Telescope is going to have a look at all seven planets.
	This was the test almost to see what sort of calibration is needed, what's needed to do it.
	But over the next year, maybe two, the TRAPPIST system is going to be studied in depth by the Webb Telescope.
	And it's going to look at others as well.
	That's the beauty of it.
	And sooner or later, it's going to look at a planet which isn't too far away from us going around a star.
	And they're going to say, well, actually, we found that atmosphere.
	It's got nitrogen.
	It's got oxygen.
	It's got water vapor.
	It's got carbon dioxide.
	Very similar to the Earth.
	Now, that's going to be a huge moment.
	And I actually feel that is going to happen within the next couple of years.
	I think it will too, because we're able to find more and more of these.
	It's being revealed almost at an exponential rate.
	But I wonder what it is.
	When the red light will start to flash here and people will start cheering, that we find a place that has all the ingredients.
	Does it mean if we find a place that has all of the ingredients for life that there will be life?
	Or is that an impossible question to answer?
	No, we don't know.
	That's why we're doing this work because we don't know how life started on the Earth itself.
	This is the interesting thing.
	You may have all the constituents of carbon chemistry in the right place, in the right zone, but what is it that actually kicks off that carbon chemistry to develop what we would call life?
	And we don't know.
	And the reason we need to have a look somewhere else is to find out whether or not this is a fluke down here.
	It could be.
	It could be a chemical fluke down here for all we know.
	And that's why we're going to look out there to find out if that is the case or not.
	I mean, even then, when we look at an atmosphere of a planet, if it has a large amount of oxygen in there and the balance is very similar, say, to the Earth or slightly more, you can say there's got to be another process rather than geology creating That oxygen.
	That's the whole thing you're looking at there.
	But of course, the great thing is if you get a spectrum analysis and find something like chlorophyll in the atmosphere of another world, then you know exactly what you're dealing with.
	But there's no guarantee that you have all the right constituents together, you're going to have life.
	For instance, as far as we know, looking at a comet, for instance, the comet Halley's Comet is a good example.
	All the constituents of life are actually on Halley's Comet, for instance.
	You've got all the right materials there, but no life was found on Halley's Comet because the situation wasn't quite right.
	And on Earth, for instance, the moon might play such a vital role, throwing that extra energy into our planet, moving the oceans around, moving the crust around of our planet, keeping the interior hot.
	That might be a critical factor.
	Take the moon away and you might not get the kickstart you need for the chemistry.
	And that's why we need to look out there to find out what's going on.
	And of course, there might be, as you say, another factor.
	And if you find a place where all of those ingredients are, but no life, then it suggests to you that there is some other factor and that maybe we arose because of some extra ingredient, you know, the yeast that made the bread rise that came here from somewhere else.
	And the discovery of that, the discovery here on Earth that there might have been a catalyst that stirred the soup and made it happen, that would be an amazing thing, wouldn't it?
	It would be fantastic.
	And the idea of panspermia, where life is seeded on worlds throughout outer space, is quite possible, possibly from comets.
	Because, I mean, Chandra Rick Ramasingh and Fred Hall were really very keen on talking about this in comets, and everyone laughed at them until the data came up from Halley's Comet and found actually it's complicated carbon molecules being formed here.
	They're actually not so stupid after all.
	So you could see that the critical point could be perhaps the quantity of cometary bodies in a planetary system.
	Bombardment could be absolutely critical.
	Maybe a stellar explosion, which threw just the right amount of material into space, because all the elements, of course, are created in stars or formed in stars.
	And therefore, that could be the element.
	There are so many potential variables.
	We don't fully know them all yet, which could have just made it happen.
	For instance, we've got life here on Earth.
	As far as we know, there's no life on Mars.
	There's certainly no life on Venus.
	And those three planets are in the habitable zone of our solar system.
	And only one of them has struck well.
	So it's quite interesting to see exactly what the critical element is.
	But of course, we've got a European mission launching next year to the icy moons of Jupiter, which again throws another mix into this idea of where life can form.
	And how will we explore the icy moons of Jupiter?
	If they're icy, then how do we penetrate them?
	Well, the initial thing is going to be orbital work.
	We have JUICE, as it's called.
	This mission is going to be launched by the European Space Agency next year, and it's going to look at the three large icy moons of Jupiter.
	This is the principal thing.
	You've got Ganymede, which is quite important, of course, Callista and Europa.
	They won't be visiting IO because it's not designed to look at Io.
	You're looking at these icy worlds.
	And with very sophisticated equipment, it'll be looking for any emissions coming from these worlds.
	We already know there's a magnetic field being discovered on Ganymede, which is quite a surprise to everybody, which suggests some sort of iron interior, which is quite exciting.
	Looking for gas emissions, some sort of vapor, perhaps geysers going on.
	And the scientific equipment is so sophisticated, it will be able to actually penetrate the ice to a certain degree to see what actually is going on subsurface on these worlds.
	And they will give us a good indication of what's actually happening on those worlds themselves, because they have been far more exciting than we ever anticipated.
	If you find some kind of very primitive life, somewhere like that, and we've got very good mechanical systems now, look at the way that we've, and we'll talk about this in a few minutes, but the way that we've retrieved rock samples from Mars, and now we've got to collect them and bring them back.
	But if we find anything on one of these places, and we have the technology to collect a bit of it, there is a whole degree of concern.
	There are some scientists who are raising the alarm about this.
	A whole degree of concern about bringing something back that is effectively extraterrestrial to this Earth, because you don't know what imbalance you might cause by doing that.
	Yeah, there's got to be strict protocols on this.
	One of the reasons spacecraft haven't been crashed into the moons of Jupiter or Saturn.
	They've been crashed into the main planet itself is to stop any risk of contamination on those worlds, just in case, which is quite important.
	It's a bit too late for us with Mars, I'm afraid, and the moon.
	But we've had to be careful what we want to do with those other moons, and we've been very careful with that.
	I think if something is identified, I think it might be in situ work will have to go on rather than bringing something directly back until we're fully certain what we're dealing with there.
	Because you could have an organism, for instance, that operates with very minimum oxygen, perhaps, and it's quite happy with that.
	You bring it back to this atmosphere, which has 21% oxygen, and they might rather like that, and they multiply on a vast scale, and they might be quite dangerous.
	So we've got to be really, really sensible about this.
	And it's interesting because Britain has some of the leading places of Port and Down doing this work.
	And they've actually done some work.
	And that is a chemical and biological research facility for those who don't know.
	Yes, and the exciting thing about that, they've actually carried out experimentation there.
	Well, you know, microorganisms, what type of microorganisms can actually flourish in certain environments.
	So they're the experts.
	I mean, this is one of these great spin-offs you have from biological warfare, or in the case of putting down defending against biological warfare, is the fact that the spin-off technology is, it can help us identify living things and how to protect ourselves from them.
	So that's going to be really quite an important exercise.
	And you're right, we have to be careful.
	And the protocol, I think, will be to look at them in situ on those worlds rather than bring anything back immediately.
	But can you imagine finding single-cell organisms on Europa, for instance?
	What a staggering thing that would be.
	But there will be a clamor to get those samples somehow because we'll want to do the analysis on them, see what sort of DNA structure they have.
	Do they have DNA or are they formed in another way?
	Those are the questions we would really need to answer then.
	But I can tell you something now.
	If we found something or indicated something was there, the money would suddenly be available to race out into space to have a look.
	And that brings The question, you know, why are we so?
	I should have asked you this at the beginning.
	At the moment, we both know that this is the most exciting time in space exploration since we were both kids.
	It is white hot.
	So, why are we so interested now?
	Is the subplot really that politicians know that this Earth's resources are expendable, its population is rising massively, whether we try and stop that or not?
	It's just increasing, increasing, increasing.
	There will come a point at which we cannot sustain those we have here.
	So, is the reason why they're looking to space either resources from space that we mine and we take and we bring, or living there?
	What do you think?
	It's multiple issues going on here.
	Firstly, why it's exciting now, why it's happening now is because technology has developed now.
	We now have the technology which really we need to go into space.
	In the 60s, we really pushed it to the very limit, to be quite honest.
	We were 50 years ahead of ourselves, to be quite honest, when you start looking at the engineering, brilliant achievements, and it led to new technologies.
	But now we do have technologies which can actually do it.
	The commercial side is now looking quite serious because, of course, you have the commercial aspects of it.
	The technology is transferable to things on the Earth, which we desperately need, especially for green tech.
	Space does green tech, which is really, really important.
	And that can be filtered back down to Earth quite happily.
	But there is the potential that we need to look for better resources and other materials, and that's going to be available on the Moon, because, of course, there are limits to what we can actually mine on the Earth itself and how far we can go down.
	In the case of certain metals and certain rare earth minerals, as we call them now, they're actually more easily available on places like the moon and on the asteroids.
	And there would actually be more practical to bring those back.
	It's reached the point now where commercially it'd be more practical to do that.
	And that's quite important.
	And each nation is actually looking carefully with that.
	And we're talking about nuclear fusion as well.
	There's an isotope of helium called helium-3, which is not available on the Earth, but it's likely to be available in the dust and regolith of the moon.
	And if you could mine that, that would be useful for your nuclear fusion reactors, which is a big reason why people like China, Russia, and the Americans are very keen to get to the moon to have a look if this is available.
	There's the movie out called Moon, which is a brilliant film.
	That's exactly what they're doing.
	They're mining helium-3 to be used in nuclear fusion reactors.
	So there is that sense to it.
	You still have the sense, though, of course, of wonderment and excitement of going out simply to explore.
	And that is really quite important too for the human race, because the important thing about going into space, William Shatner, made a beautiful statement the other day about how it's changed his viewpoint of the earth and people when he took his flight into space.
	And I think that's quite important because it puts a perspective to the human race that we actually desperately need at this moment in time, that we are a human species going out.
	And that's really important.
	It's strange when you look at it because here we say we agree.
	It's the most exciting time we've had since we were children.
	And yet when we were children, we had the Vietnam War going on.
	So we had a desperate war going off.
	The world seemed to be on the brink of nuclear war all the time.
	And yet at the same time, we were exploring in space.
	And here we are again, going back to almost a Cold War situation and a hot war in Europe.
	And yet we're exploring in space as well.
	It's this yin-yang of the human species, which I find absolutely fascinating.
	Same old, same old, as they say.
	Same old, same old, yeah.
	Okay, you mentioned Bill Shatner and the wonderful things that he said, not only at the time he took his spaceflight on Blue Origin, but also more recently he was in the press.
	And I think he makes some very, very good points about this.
	And people are going to listen to Bill Shatner more than they will listen to many other people who speak about these things because of what he's done and who he is.
	Yes.
	What happened to civilian spaceflight that everybody was so excited about?
	All of these people shelling out their 250,000 US dollars to be on Sir Richard Branson's flights.
	How's all of that going?
	We don't hear a lot about it now.
	It's ticking over.
	Branson's thing has yet to fly with commercial flights.
	His has dragged on for quite a long period of time without getting anywhere.
	He's had technical issues and it's also to a certain degree overtaken by people like Bezos and Elon Musk.
	We've got a commercial moon flight going at the end of the year with the Starship, SpaceX's Starship, where a billionaire Japanese artist is bringing eight friends or eight people with him, probably two members of a crew.
	We don't know how many big the crew is.
	So there's going to be at least 10 people on that flight.
	With a price tag in the billions of dollars, probably.
	It is, and flying people around the moon and back again.
	I mean, that spacecraft, I know this is just audio only, but just so you know what we're talking about, we're talking about this, you know, something that looks like it's from Dandare that's going to take people around the moon and back again.
	I just want to say that Andrew is holding up one of his marvelous models here.
	This looks a little bit like a chubby version of, if you're old enough to remember, Fireball XL5.
	Oh, what a wonderful.
	Yeah, I love Fireball XL5.
	I love that.
	But this could carry up to 100p passengers.
	100 people it could carry.
	Now, imagine, okay, this is going to be a commercial flight around the moon and back again.
	But it could take a team of scientists like in the film Destination Moon, drop it on the moon and bring all their equipment with them and do masses of research.
	This thing is really brilliant.
	NASA are already contracting him to do some work as part of Artemis for him to do that.
	Britain's also developing Skylon, which is a space plane, which is absolutely fantastic.
	And the engines being developed in that by Alan Bond, the brilliant Alan Bond.
	And fortunately, the government actually gave him some money to push this.
	And if Skylon actually becomes operational, then what would be fantastic, you would actually have the principles then of a spacecraft, which is essentially a space plane, to essentially take passengers to Australia in about 40 minutes by flying above the atmosphere and dropping back down again.
	And that then is the next little step to saying, oh, we have a spacecraft then which can dock with the hotels in space.
	And once it gets started, it'll be really going.
	And I think the next 50 years are going to be stunningly exciting for this.
	And it's going to, depending on how things happen on the Earth, economics plays a big role on this.
	But bearing in mind, the first real commercial airline travel started just after the last Great Depression.
	It was for the rich people only in the 1930s, but they weren't stunning and getting in big airplanes and flying boats, if you remember, were taking off from Southampton and flying people to America and to South America and so on.
	And so we're at that stage at the moment where we're just on the cusp.
	And of course, you know, within 30 years after that, there were package flights going all around the world.
	The ordinary people could travel.
	So this, even though we think this is science fiction, it could become science fact, just like aviation became available to people like you and me in a way that we would never have envisioned 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago.
	Then that could happen with space, which is exciting.
	You mentioned the idea of flying around the curvature of the Earth, getting to places very fast, like being able to go to Australia in a couple of hours.
	Wasn't there a concept plane called Hotel?
	Do you remember Hotol?
	I do remember Hotel very well.
	That was also Alan Bond.
	Unfortunately, the British government put a restriction order on it, so he couldn't develop that any further.
	It was sad.
	His next step along the line is Skyline.
	So Skyline, if you like, is the son of HOTOL.
	So it's moved on a little bit from that.
	But HOTOL was a brilliant concept.
	It's interesting because Russia was interested in working with Britain on that.
	And then Germany said they'd be interested to work with it.
	Now, I always was suspicious that the reason why it was cancelled was because I thought that the Americans might have been a bit suspicious of it because they had the shuttle program.
	And as the records have turned out, that's not the case at all.
	In fact, the Americans were encouraging Britain to develop HOTOL if they could as a complementary system to the space shuttle.
	But Britain didn't do that, as always.
	We pulled out of it, which was really sad because we had designed the best space plane in the world, air-breathing engine, but we've got one again with Skyline.
	Skyline is the son of HOTOL.
	And there is an old phrase that my dad used to use, and many people have used it over the years.
	You have to speculate to accumulate.
	And that's probably the story of British failure.
	Look, we've done some wonderful things.
	Let's not deride or drag down or derogate our nation.
	We've done amazing things, but we've also allowed that ball to slip past us into the back of somebody else's net so many times.
	We need to learn those lessons.
	It is because there's this long history of us doing things.
	I mean, the American government contacted the Wilson government and was very interested in doing things with us, and he wasn't sure.
	Richard Nixon, when he cancelled the Apollo programme to concentrate on Earth orbital stuff, actually invited Britain.
	We were the first ones they invited to participate in what he called a space station full part of the international community.
	We were invited because he said, we know you can't afford to do the program, but you've got some of the best designers in the world.
	Tell you what, you start designing them, we'll fund them and we'll work together.
	Tony Benn was sent to NASA to look at their facilities and we still turned it down.
	And we were offered it again with Thatcher.
	We were offered a chance and we've kept turning it down.
	It's very, very frustrating.
	But I have to be quite honest here, there's been a lot of resistance to human spaceflight in the UK.
	I mean, I know, I mean, I've been promoting space pull stop, robotic exploration, spaceflight, astronomy.
	That's what I do.
	I've been doing promotion of the thing since I was seven years old.
	But I can tell you now, the abuse I have received from various university professors, from very senior scientists who are well known in the public eye, for promoting human spaceflight, for talking a lot about the American program.
	They said, you shouldn't be talking about the Americans.
	You shouldn't be doing that.
	You should be just talking about us.
	I said, yes, but I want pictures of the planet Neptune and only the Americans have them.
	So I have to mention Voyager and things like that.
	And they used to get, I mean, you know, it's caused, I mean, I've been assaulted twice.
	You're kidding.
	I've been assaulted twice.
	I've had exhibitions damaged.
	Yeah, it's been.
	But hang on.
	Let's just, because you and I have never got to this point before.
	There's never been time.
	There is opposition amongst clever people who should know better.
	Opposition of that kind to the notion of American space research, but human missions.
	Why would they be opposed to sending people into space?
	It's all about money.
	At the end of the day, the big thing in Britain is particle physics, nuclear power.
	And that's where the money is.
	And therefore, if you start looking at money going somewhere else, you're going to start dividing it further and whittling it down.
	And there's always been this negativity towards human activity.
	It's very interesting that the attitude of many British scientists to the Apollo programme was that it was a gimmick.
	Simple as that, really.
	They didn't take it considerably very serious.
	Yet, you find there's a lot of British scientists who weren't really interested in that, went over and worked in the United States.
	But you do have a core, and unfortunately, certainly in the 70s, 80s and 90s, it was a core in positions of power and authority that could just quell anything that was being done at all.
	I mean, you couldn't get away with doing anything at all.
	It was very shocking.
	I had American scientists protect me at one point.
	I actually had to stand up to a British scientist and say, hey, lay off, Andrew.
	You know, he's doing a good job here.
	And he had to back off very quickly.
	And simply because they were so passionate about what they were doing and they felt that what you were advocating was going to take away money from what they were doing.
	I think there was a certain element of that.
	And the fact that I don't want to blow my own trumpet too much here, but the work we were doing at the time with the Plowshoot Society in Birmingham, we were able to do things at a fraction of the cost to promote space science that major organisations in the UK should have been doing and weren't doing.
	And I think they got a bit jealous of the fact that we could actually get things done and do it well.
	But we offered to work with them.
	That was the point.
	We offered initially to work with them.
	Can we do this?
	And we were given the cold shoulder very quickly.
	Oh, no, no, no, we don't do things like that.
	And I thought, oh, okay, then.
	And there's the famous incident at a British Astronomical Association conference in London where I went down with a colleague and a man looked down at me and went, hello, and where are you from?
	Oh, I'm from Birmingham.
	Oh, really?
	What on earth would someone from Birmingham know about astronomy?
	And that was the attitude we had to put up with.
	Dr. David Whitehouse, who, as you know, is a great friend of mine, the Former BBC Space and Science editor, an absolute encyclopedia of all things, and a truly wonderful man.
	He is from Birmingham.
	Yes, he is.
	He's absolutely brilliant.
	So, you know, there's nothing wrong with Birmingham.
	Yeah, there isn't.
	There isn't.
	We've had some of the greatest scientists who come out of Birmingham.
	Indeed.
	So, what a strange attitude.
	And I just didn't think attitudes like this existed.
	It would have been entertaining.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, I'm glad that you're still doing it.
	And you're still, the great thing about you is your huge enthusiasm.
	Now, look, one of the things that I haven't spoken with you about, I don't think ever, maybe just the once on the TV and the radio show, is the future of the International Space Station.
	It's got to end.
	Plus, there is the fact that the cooperation between ourselves and Russia must be wearing pretty thin now, given what is happening in Ukraine and the conflict and the ramifications and the sanctions and all the rest of it.
	So what's going to happen to the International Space Station and anything like it?
	The Russians have their own, don't they now?
	Well, the Russians are hopefully going to build their own.
	When they can afford it now, it's another argument.
	Putin has diverted funds to something else.
	You had Ragazin, who was in charge of the Russian space program, who was very mouthy and saying all sorts of things, and was suddenly replaced by somebody who was a bit more internationalist with the space program.
	About two months ago, wasn't it?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Ragazin then got himself wounded in Ukraine, which is quite ironic after all that.
	So I think Russia already said that they don't intend to stay with the International Space Station, but they're going to stay with their contract, which is a period in which the space station is probably going to be switched off anyway.
	So to be honest, they're not doing anything which people hadn't been expecting to.
	Sections of it are wearing out.
	And it looks like that the International Space Station will be closed down probably within 10 years, which is sad, but elements of it are wore out a little bit now, and it needs to be replaced.
	There are some suggestions that elements could be replaced on it, modules removed and replaced by other modules and so on.
	But the private sector is looking at that at the moment.
	Bezos and Musk were both looking carefully at that, whether there's some use they could make of the space station and perhaps move it into more stable, a higher orbit just to move it around a little bit to keep it available.
	But it's looking at the moment as if the International Space Station's lifetime will be coming to an end within 10 years.
	But that is the life cycle of the station anyway.
	People shouldn't get worked up and say, oh, they've all just pulled out of it.
	No, that was the lifetime anyway.
	So we need to be doing something else of that kind because we've done experiments on humans and how they can endure longer-term space exposure.
	We've done a lot of research on that.
	They've been growing things in space.
	I think they've had little creatures up there to see the effects on the little creatures in space.
	And they've been producing some materials, I think, in space to see how that works.
	So the International Space Station has paid its way, hasn't it?
	We need something like that, don't we?
	We do.
	What's happening at the moment is nations are building their own.
	China already have their own space station up there and fully operational.
	That was another big moment in 2022.
	Their space station is now fully operational.
	It's going to be permanently crewed.
	They've got three Tychonauts on there at the moment operating.
	And they've also now opened it up to other nations if they want to visit that space station with scientific research and so on.
	So they're doing theirs.
	Russia wants to do their own space station.
	India have already stipulated they're interested in putting a human spaceflight up there as well.
	So whether or not we see the European Space Agency and the United States working together, would be generally with Canada and Japan as well, to do a different form of space station, I'm not sure.
	Probably.
	Elon Musk has already said he's interested in putting a space station up there and so has Bezos as well.
	So they're already looking at private space stations which would be commercially available to scientists and for tourists.
	But of course we do have the Gateway Space Station which is going to be launched and that is a space station which orbits the moon of course, which is going to, if you like, be the gateway to the surface of the moon.
	So we're going to see an expansion of space activities.
	Whether we see something as large as the International Space Station is highly unlikely in the future.
	There'll be much smaller units, much more akin to things such as the Chinese space station, things like that, where you're going to have probably no more than six to eight modules attached to each other, rather than the huge football pitch side space station, which the International Space Station is at the moment.
	You just mentioned Elon Musk.
	He told us very bullishly about two years ago that he was going to Mars, taking people to Mars, and the time scale on that, I think, was 2025.
	It was very close to now.
	He's realized he can't do that.
	Where are we at in taking people to Mars?
	Well, this is the interesting thing about his spacecraft, the Starship.
	It's a reusable spacecraft, and there's going to be a suborbital test flight done probably the end of January, which is an aerodynamic test flight to see if it works and get the re-entry systems working on it.
	And then, of course, you've got the crew launching around the moon at the end of 2023.
	The same spacecraft would be put into Earth orbit, refueled, and that could go to Mars technically.
	So he already has the spacecraft to do it.
	That's the beauty of his design.
	So he is well on target there to get his vehicles out there.
	It's not going to be 2025 now.
	He would hope for that.
	We did have, of course, an issue in 2019.
	Of course, we had issues with COVID and things like that.
	And to be honest, we've lost two to three years across the world because of the COVID situation, unfortunately.
	But his same-designed spacecraft could actually go to Mars.
	It is designed for doing that.
	And as long as you could refuel it and get enough supplies on board, you could therefore go to the moons of Jupiter if you wanted to and things like that.
	That's the beauty of his design.
	And that's light years really at the moment.
	I mean, that's 100 years ahead of what NASA are doing at the moment.
	NASA is still doing the same system, which they've relied on since the 1960s, you know, throw the rocket up there and then it all breaks up and then we build another one.
	He's not doing that.
	So to be honest, he's still now looking carefully at how to operate a Mars colony.
	And his spacecraft are so big, of course, that they can carry an awful amount of equipment with them.
	And because that spacecraft doesn't have to be fully manned, fully crewed, it could go remotely and drop onto the surface of Mars with tons of equipment on board.
	So if he gets this system working at the end of the year, flying them around the moon, he's got a spacecraft which is fully operational and they could start planning for Mars fairly, fairly quickly.
	And because he's a bit of a wild card, he doesn't necessarily have to be telling us about this if this happens.
	Right now, he could make a surprise announcement at any time.
	There are certain regulations he has to meet in the United States for launching.
	That's a strict regulation.
	So he would have to register the launch anyway.
	So that's quite important.
	But yes, he can push forward.
	I mean, you know, whatever people say about Elon Musk, I must admit, I do love the guy.
	I just think he just gets out and gets it done for whatever reason, you know.
	I mean, if he offered me a job tomorrow, I would go.
	I don't care how many hours I'd have to work because of what he, look what he can achieve.
	Look what he is actually achieving.
	It's absolutely astounding when you think about it.
	I just think it's breathtaking.
	So yes, it's that get up and go which you actually need to do.
	You need the money, of course, but you need to get up and go to actually have the drive to do it.
	It's a question of not saying why, it's saying why not.
	And that's what he's able to do.
	And maybe what we forget, you know, I mean, I'm not here to either promote or otherwise Elon Musk is that many of the great people, most of them, have been somewhat eccentric.
	Yeah.
	It goes with the territory.
	It goes with the territory.
	You've got to, because the only way of getting anything done in this world, you've got to do it slightly differently to anybody else.
	I mean, probably one of the problems I'd had with promoting space science when I was doing it in flight suits and things.
	People looked at me, oh, no, no, you need to have a tweed jacket with leather patches.
	No, you don't.
	Let's make this interesting.
	And can I just say that you're giving me video at the moment and this is only an audio?
	I say only.
	I like a lot of my listeners do too.
	I like audio, but at the moment, you're wearing one of your space outfits.
	Yes, because I feel the part now.
	And that's really, it's like an actor.
	You feel the part.
	It's like when you go, I used to be able to laugh when I used to go to, I worked in an engineering company.
	It was funny because we had to dress down Friday.
	And the dressdown Friday is I wore a different type of tie because I was at work.
	I have to feel the part.
	That's really quite important.
	But yeah, you've got to be slightly, I think, a bit different to make anything happen.
	And that's your enthusiasm.
	And you've got to have bags of enthusiasm, lots of drive.
	And of course, in the case of Elon Musk, he's got the money.
	That's the other bit that you actually, that's the thing I lack is the money.
	So watch this piece.
	We are still going back to Mars, just not sometime soon.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	And of course, we've already seen that America wants to go to Mars as well, but they need to go to the moon first because that's where they're going to do the training and the exercise of how to live on another world.
	And then they'll make the step towards Mars.
	But knowing Moscow, just go for it and see what happens.
	Everybody wants a bit of the moon at the moment.
	We've just had the Orion mission that was a tremendous success, test of the SLS system.
	What happens during 2023 with this then?
	Well, 2023, the space capsule is back to Florida.
	So they're going to actually have a look at it, check.
	They'll go through masses of data.
	There are huge amounts of data they've got to actually break down and have a look, see what went well, what didn't go so well, and find out why it didn't work.
	They did have a communications glitch at one point, but it does appear to have been an issue on the ground rather than on the spacecraft itself.
	So they need to analyze all of that.
	And when they've got all that analyzed and they're quite satisfied that the mission is a success, and that is where you have a viable spacecraft to put humans on board because it looks like you can.
	There's a lot of work to do on the dummies that were on board the spacecraft, the mannequins, because they were there to test the human reaction in space to find out what levels of radiation they had to deal with.
	That's quite an important issue to deal with at the moment because that's the biggest threat you have to any astronaut is radiation levels.
	And of course, the spacecraft flew a wide orbit of the moon, where it was actually further away from the moon than any human spacecraft previously.
	Apollo 13 did a wide one at one point.
	But this is a big test to see what sort of conditions are there.
	Are they safe for the astronauts?
	And once they've got all that data in, in theory, through 2023 and to 2024, they should be building the Artemis II because it's not built yet.
	It's a modification.
	It's a taller rocket.
	And when they do that, then the first crew will be sent towards the moon.
	It won't be in orbiting the moon.
	It's a flyby of the moon.
	So they'll fly past the moon and bend round and come back towards the earth as a test of a crew on board the spacecraft.
	So that spacecraft should be being built during the year.
	And then if that mission is a success, in 2025, they expect to put the first woman and first person of colour, as they're referring it, on the surface of the moon.
	Which is hugely exciting for a whole bunch of reasons.
	Now, look, I'm old enough to remember the Apollo missions, you know, hazy, of course, the memory, but I was there.
	Well, I wasn't literally there, but, you know, I witnessed it and saw my parents and friends' reaction to it all.
	There was a time when Apollo missions were every few months, it seemed.
	Are we going to get that way with the missions, the Orion missions, or rather the Artemis missions?
	They're going to be quite spaced out.
	Apollo came in quite quickly with each other because they wanted to do two year in order to get the mission sorted out, mates, or to get the thing done, which is what they were able to do.
	The Artemis will be much more slower initially because once Artemis 2 is launched and they can check that through and Artemis 3, which is the first landing on the moon, once that is sorted, then they will start to look at building the Gateway Space Station, which is critical.
	They need to get the pieces to the Gateway Space Station in lunar orbit.
	Now, when that's done, you will have regular flights, which could be every few months, like the space station, of crews going to the Gateway Space Station orbiting the Moon, and every so often dropping people to the surface of the Moon, where their aim will be, of course, to build a base on the Moon.
	And I think what you will see is after 2025, we will see a sudden increase in launches out to the Moon itself.
	And you'll be able to point at the Moon at some point and think there are people out there orbiting that world out there.
	And there will probably be no looking back once that's done because we've got other nations wanting to go to the moon as well.
	And Artemis, of course, is an international project.
	It's not just America.
	Britain has signed agreements, the Artemis agreements, as well as the European Space Agency, Canada, Japan, and even African nations, Nigeria and Ethiopia, have signed agreements with the Artemis project because they want their scientists and their people to become involved with it too.
	This is very much a global project to a certain degree.
	Obviously, Russia and China haven't thrown their hand into Artemis, but Russia and China have come to agreement themselves that they want to do their own moon base.
	So we're actually starting to see a division between East and...
	I think East and West is not right.
	So in a way, we're exporting our divisions from Earth up there to an extent.
	And that means, of course, there's the whole issue of territorial disputes that will have to be ironed up.
	That's a huge field at the moment.
	It is.
	The 1967 Treaty is still in place, of course, and nations seem to be abiding by that.
	I was quite impressed with China.
	China made a statement, actually, that they pointed out that they agree, abide by the 1967 treaty and won't be claiming any part of the moon when they land on it, which I thought was quite an interesting statement to make.
	But of course, once you get out there and the minerals are found there, what do you do?
	It's going to be like Moon Zero 2.
	They say they've done agreements.
	Sorry, I jumped in there.
	But I just sense that there's going to be a bit of Wild West out there.
	There is.
	There is.
	There's going to be when you get there.
	And the question is, who polices it?
	There is maritime law on the Earth, of course, and that's understood.
	And most people abide by that.
	So we need the equivalent of maritime law now in space.
	It's reached that point because we've got that many private companies going up there.
	We've got nations going up there.
	We need maritime law that people are going to abide by for going into space.
	And I think that's absolutely essential now.
	I know there's a lot of lawyers working on it, working with the United Nations, trying to get something actually sketched out.
	And it's absolutely essential now.
	Otherwise, it's going to be a fiasco out there.
	We already have the US Space Force, of course, so they can actually police their elements of it and protect their elements of it.
	So obviously everybody else is going to be doing that as well.
	But there does need to be something really put down in writing.
	But the way the world is going at the moment on the ground, we can't get agreement on the ground, let alone in space.
	Are we working, talking about the moon?
	I have read in newspapers this last year that we are working on this, but I wonder how far we're working on this on habitations, on roadway systems and those sorts of things for the moon.
	Yeah, the habitations are going quite well.
	There's several companies, including the great Japanese company called Shimitsu, a fantastic company, who have been involved.
	I wrote to them in the 80s talking about their space development program, which was quite unbelievable.
	It's an engineering company.
	It's a construction company.
	So they're really ahead of the curve and always have been.
	And they're looking at making concrete and structures like that, 3D printing using lunar dust for things like that.
	This is well in development at the moment in the United States and Japan and in the European Union.
	European Space Agency have been doing some work on that, but nowhere near as big as Japan and the United States.
	So yes, that's what the development program is well in development at the moment with that.
	As for putting roadways on the moon transport, they're looking at large roving vehicles at the moment with large wheels to transport.
	But of course, you do have the situation, of course, that at some point or other, you're going to have to need flat tracked areas.
	Very similar to what you have in Antarctica, where you actually have to use a dozer to smooth out the surface to allow a flat track to go on.
	And I think that's the kind of thing we're going to probably see in the 2030s is them making roadways.
	Can you imagine that?
	What do you say to all those people, and you must have heard from them or read about them, who say that there are secret bases already on the moon, put there perhaps by another civilization, maybe put there by us at some point secretly?
	What do you say to those people?
	You know, those people who might also believe that the Apollo astronauts saw UFOs on the moon.
	I mean, I'm not here to say that they didn't, but I wonder what you think.
	Yeah, I mean, when I was a child, I actually bought a book, Someone is on Our Moon.
	I've still got it.
	It's a very famous book, of course.
	I looked at it and actually, the photographs they're referring to, they're just misinterpreting the photographs that you're looking at.
	There is no hard evidence to say anything like that exists on the moon.
	really, really is not.
	It'd be great if there was, but there has been no...
	And therefore, I don't mind people saying it.
	They'd just like to hand me the evidence, which I can be convinced by from a scientific point of view.
	That would be wonderful.
	Well, there are some fuzzy photos.
	They're fuzzy photos, but there's fuzzy photos.
	And I'm afraid they're not convincing at all.
	I've looked online.
	There's a guy on YouTube who puts a lot of good things on it.
	He says, oh, here we go.
	When we zoom into this, actually, you can see the structures.
	And you zoom into it.
	I said, well, sorry, that's just pixelation.
	Sorry.
	It is very hard to understand.
	It's the resolution of the image.
	I think I know who you mean, but we want to see clearer pictures than that, interesting though they may be.
	Very quickly, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.
	When you and I were kids, they were very exciting.
	They were going as far as you can go and further.
	Both of them still operating, I think, and both of them about to close down.
	Is that right?
	That's right.
	They're reaching a point really where the functionality is coming to a close.
	Both spacecraft launched in 1977, Voyager 1 going to Jupiter and Saturn and Voyager 2, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and both being flung out of the solar system and transmitting data back as it's interacting with particles in space and have found a barrier.
	We call it a barrier.
	It's just a term really, where the interstellar particles from interstellar space are more powerful than the particles from the Sun.
	So it actually reached this heliopause where it's actually going out into space itself.
	And of course they will never return.
	They're on a one-way trip out of the solar system, which is really quite fantastic.
	And yes, the transmissions are very weak at the moment.
	And slowly we're going to actually no longer receive any messages from them anymore after the years and years of work that's actually going to.
	Bearing in mind, 1977, and here we are in 2022 and still checking in on them To see how they're traveling through space, it's just unbelievable.
	Fantastic, you know, absolutely fantastic.
	And, you know, I remember because it was the first, I mean, I was a kid and I knew the first close-up, real good close-up images of Jupiter and its moons, Saturn in its moons, Uranus and its moons, and Neptune in its moons would be transmitted by these spacecraft.
	And I was on tender hawks waiting for this data to come through.
	And it's been part of my life.
	And I was really pleased to see those for the very first time.
	It's absolutely wonderful.
	And now they're traveling on and on.
	And of course, I think, you know, it's going to be 50,000 years before one of them comes even close to another star.
	50,000 years.
	And of course, on board, they have the gold disc, of course, which has sounds and images from planet Earth to indicate where their spacecraft actually came from.
	And it just makes me wonder if anyone will find it.
	Introduce the human race.
	What a fascinating thought.
	Listen, I was going to talk with you about the history of British space missions, rocketry and that sort of stuff.
	If you'd like to, let's do a whole separate one about that.
	If you ever have the time, let's do that.
	Always time for you, Howard.
	Always time.
	Well, listen, I love speaking with you because we never run out of stuff to talk about.
	Very quickly, the thing that you are most excited about in 2023.
	Oh, I want to see the SpaceX rocket work.
	I really, really, really do want to see that work because it's science.
	To be fair, there's so much, but also what the Web Telescope, SpaceX rocket and the Web Telescope, what data that is going to bring back to us is going to be unbelievable.
	It's just opening the universe.
	It's almost as if we've been blind and we're actually starting to see for the first time.
	That's a beautiful way of putting it.
	Okay, if people want to check you out and unfold the vistas that your website has to unfold to them, where do they go?
	Yes, www.andrewlound.com.
	And you can always, and if people want to email me, feel free to do so.
	And I put my diary on there as well if I'm doing presentations around the country because I do what I call dramatic presentations, which include music, costume, great images and things.
	Well, it's great that you put the theater into it.
	Happy New Year, Andrew.
	Happy New Year, Howard.
	Andrew Lound always delivers.
	We always say that about him on the TV show.
	He's always so good.
	And we'll have many conversations, I'm sure, during 2023, both here online and also on the TV show, which resumes, don't forget, on the 8th of January.
	Thank you very much for being part of my show.
	More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained in 2023.
	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 else, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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