Instant Genius - Artemis’s First Launch, with Libby Jackson
Episode Date: September 8, 2022Over the last couple of weeks Artemis has had two failed attempts at its first launch. Libby Jackson, the Exploration Science Manager for the UK space agency explains what went wrong, why failures are... all part of the process and what’s in store for us all when we finally make it back to the moon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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From BBC, science focus, this is instant genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form.
I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor, and today we're talking about the Artemis launch,
the first in a series of missions that will take humans back to the surface of the moon and eventually to Mars.
In this episode, we talk about what's involved in a launch test like this,
how the UK has been involved and what will gain by going back to the moon.
I'm joined by the Exploration Science Manager for the UK Space Agency, Libby Jackson,
who was in the US two weeks ago at the Kennedy Space Centre to witness the launch.
Obviously, we were hoping to meet up and talk about how incredible the launch was,
but after a series of small issues, the launch was called off.
Here's Libby explaining why it was delayed.
Wouldn't it have been nice to be sitting here
that was amazing
but in some ways this is more fun
because we can learn a bit about the rocket
and what happened.
The very first launch attempt
back on Bank Holiday Monday
I was out in Florida
I was lucky enough to be there
and the countdown proceeded fairly well
there were two main problems
that meant that we didn't launch on that day
the first one happened early on
and this Artemis rocket, the space launch system SLS,
it's fueled and powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
Hydrogen and the oxygen combine, they explode,
and that control explosion gets thrown out of the bottom
and pushes the rocket in the other way.
So you've got to get all that cold liquid oxygen
and liquid hydrogen into the rocket.
It's called tanking.
And as that was happening on the first launch attempt,
the engineers in launch control who were monitoring all of this
saw there was a leak in one of the connectors
essentially between the launch pad and the rocket itself.
They've got these quick disconnects.
A bit like you have a hose pipe at home, basically.
Imagine that, but with really cold liquid gas going through it.
And everyone was the first problem we heard in the counter
and went, oh, that's not very good.
But actually, the team at launch control, I'd seen this before,
they warmed the quick disconnect up a bit,
with thermal expansion, it expanded, it contracted back down,
and then it kind of clicked into place, and we were fine,
and we carried on through the countdown, and that was great.
But then later on through the countdown,
there was another problem with the liquid hydrogen.
At the bottom of this rocket, there are four engines.
The four engines actually have been repurposed, refurbished from the space shuttles,
so they're not new, but they've been all refurb, checked out,
they're all lovely, ready to go.
But they've got to be really cold, ready for their really cold gases
to flow through them when you ignite the rocket,
when you reach the end of the countdown.
And the way that the team cool this down
is by flowing liquid nitrogen around the rocket.
They called it an engine bleed sequence,
which was confusing me and many, many people at the launch pad that they were talking
about engine bleed, we're all going, what's that? What's that? What do you mean? So they're readying
the chambers to receive the hydrogen and oxygen, and they need to be cool. Yes. And they have
temperature sensors that were monitoring the temperature of these four engines. And one of them,
Engine 3, was showing a little bit warmer than the others. And that was a problem because you've
got to make sure that they're all at the right temperature. And the engineers was cracking their
head and they were trying all sorts of different things to check it out. And that
plus the delays to the fueling,
plus actually some weather concerns,
there was lightning when we were getting ready for the countdown.
It meant essentially that they ran out of time
through the launch window,
and this engine was not getting cold,
and they called it a day on Bank Holiday Monday,
and the clock stopped at 40 minutes before launch,
never got going again.
We went home.
What NASA did and all the engineers did
was they looked at what had happened
with that engine that wouldn't get cold,
and when they looked at all the telemet,
that they saw, they worked out that it's just a sensor issue. The laws of physics were there. They knew
how much hydrogen was flowing into this engine. They'd know the flow rates. They'd looked at all their
other telemetry and they went, we know physics says this was cold enough. It was just simply,
this temperature sensor was wrong. You know, it's like thermometer needs tapping or something.
So they looked at all of that. They said, right, we can go again for another launch attempt. We're going to
look at all of our different telemetry data so that when we get to that point,
when we need to make sure that the engine's cold enough, we're good to go.
So everyone got back up and then on, we were originally going to try and launch on Friday last
week. They delayed it to a day to Saturday to give them more time to sort this problem out
and figure out the sensor data. Saturday, all started again. We all, well, I didn't, actually,
I'd come home at this point, but everyone went back to the launch pad. Everyone got ready to go.
And somewhere then at the beginning of that launch countdown.
as I understand it, as they were getting ready to fuel again,
there was an unexpected and unintended over-pressurisation
of one of those lines, one of those hoses.
They got too much hydrogen through it.
And as they were doing the fueling again for this second countdown,
they found another leak in a different quick disconnect,
different connector between the launch pad and the rocket,
and they couldn't stop it.
I think it was actually quite a big leap.
They tried all the same troubleshooting steps at the,
they tried in that first countdown and fixed this problem, couldn't.
The suspect is that perhaps that over-pressurization early on
in the countdown might have perhaps caused some challenges there.
So they called that countdown off much earlier on through the sequence, actually.
I think there was a, I can't quite remember the details,
but it was much earlier on.
They said, everybody go home.
And now they've got to work it out.
They've gone, yeah, we've got a leak in this quick disconnect.
So what's happened now is that NASA engineers have gone to the long,
launch pad. They are constructing a sort of little clean room work site around this pesky quick
disconnect to try and fix it at the launch pad. They want to do that because having, you know,
replaced the quick disconnect, checked it out, I know, replaced whatever seals or whatever's happened
in that they need to sort out. They want to try and fuel the rocket again to make sure that it's not
leaking. And the only place you can check that this leak isn't leaking by fueling it is on the launch pad.
So that's what they're doing.
And all being well then, that will fix that out,
and then we can go for another launch attempt.
So I've got many questions.
So one, I think the most key thing probably to understand is launch windows.
They're not just there to set the draw.
I mean, they are quite dramatic and quite fun.
But why do we have these launch windows and why are they sort of bundled together
and then, you know, four weeks passes?
Whenever you want to put anything into space, you want to get it to somewhere specific in space,
a specific orbit, perhaps you're flying to the International Space Station.
In this case, of course, we're trying to fly to the moon.
And so there's a mission profile, the trajectory, how you're going to fly,
the route you're going to take through space to get from the Earth to the Moon.
And in order for that to work, you need the Earth and the Moon to be in just the right alignment.
There are solar panels on the Orion spacecraft, the service module,
that's attached to the capsule where the humans sit.
That's been built by the European Space Agency.
There are four solar arrays that will power the spacecraft.
So you need the sun in the right place
when you've just got up into space and these solar arrays deploy
so that you can get enough sunlight to make sure there's enough power.
So there's sort of little different bits through the mission.
They want to make sure that the sunlight's just right at the moon
when they get there so they can see what they want to see.
So essentially, you've got to make sure that when you lift off,
the earth and the moon are in just the right alignment so that when you get to the moon,
everything's just so. And that's what constrains us to only being able to fly at certain times.
We've got a little bit of flexibility here. When we were trying to launch on Bank Holiday Monday
on the following Saturday, there was a two-hour launch windows. There was a period of two hours.
If we launched at any point during that time, the trajectory, the route was going to be good enough.
And you could correct it in that time so that you would get to the moon.
but it's still quite specific.
If you're launching and trying to get to the International Space Station,
there is an instantaneous launch window.
You can only blast off at a particular time
when the International Space Station is flying overhead right over your launch pad.
If you go at any other time, you wind up in a completely different, wrong bit of space.
And it's surprisingly hard to get through space in the wrong direction.
Because of the laws of physics, you wind up spending way too much fuel.
It's really challenging.
So that's why it's always we talk about launch windows and launch times and it's really quite precise about when we launch.
So when are we, we're obviously waiting on some press conferences on when precisely they'll try and launch it again.
But what's the rough feeling on when it might launch and what their sort of main concerns are?
Obviously we talked about the leak and fixing that.
But what are the main factors?
So NASA obviously need to fix this leaky quick disconnect.
The other thing that they are looking at and might cause a problem is something called the flight termination system.
Now, this is the system in the rocket that needs to work if this rocket veers off course.
It would detonate the whole rocket causing a massive firework in the sky rather than an uncontrolled lot of, you know, very explosive liquid hydrogen and oxygen heading towards the wrong place on.
Earth. So you want that system to work. And the battery in it is essentially sort of reaching the
end of its best before date. If they have to replace that, they've got to roll the whole thing
from the launch pad back to the vehicle assembly building. That takes 12, 12, 24 hours, something like
that. You've then got to get into the rocket. You've got to replace it. You've got to roll the whole
thing back. We wouldn't be looking at launching until perhaps October or November. All of NASA's
statements have sort of kept referring to the current expiration date of this bit of kit.
I get the sense they're trying to look at it and find a waiver to this rule to say,
look, if we can show that the battery is still good and this system is fine,
we can go essentially pass the best before date and launch again.
And if they can sort all that out, we might see a launch attempt later in September or perhaps
into October.
So we'll wait in here.
So everyone's looking at NASA to give us an update on those.
different problems and decisions about and then when they can go for another launch.
But it'll be before Christmas.
And so then my next question is, so this is, I want to give the listeners a sense of,
like, this is a testing ground.
That is what Artemis won, the first in, you know, several missions that will take us to the
mean, is for.
So are these things, you know, so like the, the leaky hose, these are things you can only,
Are these things you can only test in situ?
Is it the first time that all of this is all tested together in place?
Yeah, so this is the first time we've ever tried to launch his rocket is a test.
NASA have done some tests before we get to this point.
They did something called a wet dress rehearsal.
So a couple of times over the summer, they put the rocket on the launch pad,
they filled it up with fuel, all about checking out that, you know,
everything works, it all connects together and so on.
And in fact, that first leak that I was talking about, those quick disconnect leaks,
they'd seen that problem in the testing, and that's why the engineers had the plans to how to fix it and to how to sort it all out.
They didn't, in those tests, get all the way down to the chilling of the rocket engines.
So that was why we came across, I think, that problem then.
The second time, and I haven't quite caught up with all the details, yeah, whatever happened at the start of that countdown that looks like it might have caused the problem.
I don't think that was supposed to happen.
So they'll be looking at that and go, why did that happen?
And let's sort our procedures out and someone.
But this is the whole point of testing and learning.
And whenever you do something new for the first time,
you've got to try these things out and work it out
and refine your processes and procedures.
I bet if anyone's ever tried to make a cake or follow a recipe for the first time,
you know, you do it once.
You learn the second time you do it.
You go, oh, no, I need to write down an extra bit that I need to do here
or I need to make sure that I put the oven on early or something.
it's the same sort of thing
and it's part of the space business
it's part of building a brand new rocket
and figuring out how to get it into space safely.
I'm really curious what the mood was like over there
because I've never been to a launch
and particularly this time around
it was probably the most exciting launch
maybe more exciting than James Webb in a way
that we've had in three, four decades.
I worried when they invited all the celebs down
because I was like, oh, you're like saying,
don't work with children or animal or something will go wrong.
What was it like over there?
You know, where were you watching from?
And what was the feeling like?
I was in the press center,
which was a very last minute thing that actually happened.
It was even very last minute that I went out at all.
So for me, one of the sort of feelings was,
I can't believe I'm here.
I can't believe that rocket is on the launch pad.
and that whether it happens today or whether it happens later, we are doing this.
I have to say, I've been working in the space business nearly all my life,
and in mission operations.
I've been to several launches.
I've seen lots of missions go.
And the one thing you sort of know is that a rocket is never ready to go until it goes.
So I had gone out there actually with the expectation that it wasn't going to launch,
because then I'd be really nicely surprised if it did.
if you go the other way, you wind up really disappointed.
And so, you know, you go, and you go, no, this might happen and we're ready for it,
but it might not.
And I think that was the sense of a lot of people at the press centre where I was,
because I was with journalists who had been to lots of launches before,
and we knew that this was the first attempt.
And I think without any real insight, the kind of armchair expert feeling and my feeling
was there was about a 50-50 chance of it getting off the ground,
because you never knew what was going to happen.
But of course, it was so exciting to see
because for me,
I got into the space business
because I read all those stories about the Apollo missions.
I was born in 1981 just before the first shuttle launch.
At the time, as I was growing up, Apollo seemed like ancient history to me.
I was reading the stories, you know, watching the clips devoured them.
That's what got me inspired and, say,
me to follow a career in space industry.
But, I mean, I look back, I can't believe it.
I mean, I was born nine years after the last moon landing.
It seemed like it was ancient history.
To have spent my whole career hearing about those moon missions, knowing about them,
loving, working in human spaceflight, the International Space Station, to suddenly be
there to see this huge, huge rocket on the launch pad, knowing that this is the first of several,
the European Space Agency is building the next service modules.
I hear about that all the time.
In NASA are building Orion.
We're building the Lunar Gateway.
There are contracts placed for the lander systems that will get humans to the moon.
This is happening.
And I think for me, being there in person, seeing it actually happening,
knowing we got all the way to launching it,
that was quite something to see and to feel and to realize,
because it can be quite abstract, I think,
even to a lot of us in the business.
And so that was for me, I think, what it was.
And I suspect that feeling might be magnified on a much larger scale for the general public.
I think those who know know that this is exciting and that this rocket when it takes off is going to be a huge spectacle.
It's the most powerful rocket ever launched and that it's going to the moon and that it's got modern technology on it.
This is not the Saturn 5.
this spacecraft has got modern cameras,
modern communication systems.
We're going to see live pictures of the moon,
the most beautiful things.
Think what James Webb has done to us recently,
the stunning, stunning images that are coming back from that.
I can't even begin to get excited about what's coming back
because I can't quite imagine what these pictures are going to be like,
but we know they're coming.
And I think my take on it is for the general public.
We talk about this,
and they're like, hey, is nice, it's nice, it's nice.
But I sense it might be a bit like before the Olympics
or before the women's heroes recently
where we were talking about it.
But once it happens, once you've had that first game
and England win or, you know, the Olympic Stadium filled
and we got our first gold medal,
I think everyone's going to go, oh, wow, what?
You mean we're going back to the moon
and the excitement and the understanding
of what we're trying to do will take hold?
And then everything that we're going to get back
from these missions
and all the reasons we're going.
So, yeah, that's what it was like being there.
It was just this realization is happening.
Yeah, I think we were talking about it amongst the team,
and it suddenly occurred to us that we're going to,
a slightly nerdy thing to say,
but we're going to see the moon in 4K.
Not that the resolution is particularly important,
but just the idea that, you know,
the footage from the 70s is almost mythological in the way we, you know,
we look at it, we revisit, you know,
I don't know how many times I've watched.
those astronauts bounce around, and we're going to see that with today's technology.
Live.
Live.
As it happened.
All that footage before had to be loaded onto films that came back that has been preciously
processed and then hit the papers a few days later.
It was a bit more like James Webb, you've got to wait.
This is going to be, you know, they're going to be tweeting from the surface of the moon.
Yeah, well, it's early days, but do we think, I mean, do we expect that it's going to be
a little bit like the ISS, where we have, when they go out and do spacewalks, they just film it
and it's just there on, in an almost mundane fashion, it's just on their site. You know,
it's going to be something like that, isn't it? Yeah, the communication systems are there,
they're being put in place. The UK actually is taking a leading role in pioneering the
commercial access to telecommunications systems around the moon, because we're really,
really good at that in low Earth orbit.
It's something that the UK has been great at foot for decades.
And yeah, that you're further away,
you've got less infrastructure there,
less communications infrastructure.
But absolutely, you've got,
you will see, you know,
live images from the surface of the moon
in resolutions never before seen.
And I might,
I could be completely off the market,
but am I right in saying,
because it's something I'm very early on in researching,
But some of that communication will go through Goon Hilly in Cornwall.
So some of those images we might see, some of that data will be going through Cornwall.
Yeah, so Goon Hilly are involved in this first Artemis flight.
The team down there, they're prepped, they're standing by.
They will be tracking Orion as it goes to the moon.
They're providing communication services to some of the CubeSats that are on board.
Artemis and will be flying around.
So, yeah, we'll wait and see exactly how everything evolves as we get further through the program.
But absolutely, Goon Healy is a deep space communications dish, is able to communicate with the moon.
Not every antenna can do that.
And, yeah, I'm optimistic that we will see them involved in some way.
They're certainly setting up for that commercial service.
Because as well as the Artemis program, there's a whole fleet of commercial small lunar landers going to take payloads and all sorts of other things.
So there's a real ecosystem around the moon that's springing up now,
and the UK's playing its part in that.
Yeah, and so that's a perfect time,
because I think it's spectacularly cool that in the UK we do have a role in this,
and it's perhaps not very well known.
You represent the UK Space Agency.
So could you just tell us kind of how does the UK have a part in these Artemis missions?
The UK is a proud founding member of the European.
Space Agency. And it's always worth saying at this juncture, it's not an EU organization.
We've not left it. There's much going on with many different things, but the European Space Agency
is an intergovernmental organization. And so we collaborate with 22 other member states in that
to come together, to build missions that we can't afford to do on our own. And the Artemis program
is not NASA going back to the moon.
It's NASA going with international partners.
This is a global effort.
This is a difference to the Apollo program
back in the 60s and 70s.
On top of this space launch system rocket
is the Orion capsule.
The European Space Agency
had built the service module underneath.
It's got the solar arrays.
It's got the gas tanks
that will keep the crew alive.
It's got the thrusters.
It's the thing that you need
to get Orion to and from the moon.
moon or two and from the gateway. And so we can't go back to the moon without the European
Space Agency and NASA. It's truly a partnership. And that Orion spacecraft for now is just
flying around the mooner, but in a few years' time, we'll be visiting the Lunar Gateway.
And this is a new space station like the international space station, but much, much smaller.
If the ISS is about the size of a five-bedroomed house, the lunar gateway will be as small,
these you, you know, studio flat, one-bed flat, very, very small, with four astronauts on it for a month's stay at a time.
And the UK's building part of it.
So the refueling system, which is really key because we're going to have to keep this thing positioned at the right place in space.
You need fuel to do that.
It will also provide fuels potentially for any lunar landers and so on.
there's a company in the UK called Talazilina Space down in Bristol.
They're building that.
Imperial College are building one of the science experiments is on board.
They're really good at building magnetometers, instruments that detect magnetic field.
In fact, I go right back to my career.
I did my undergraduate degree and I worked with the team who are now still doing that
and building these things 20 years later, so they're really, really good at that.
and that magnetometer will be there detecting the radiation environment,
seeing what the magnetic field looks like out there.
So we're playing our part,
and we're looking ahead to the Council of Ministers meeting
at the European Space Agency later this year.
These 22 member states, we all come together every three years.
We bring our science ministers and our approved spending from our treasuries,
and decide what to invest in
and what to spend money on for the next three years
and it will be the decisions that get made
at November in Paris
when all the countries come together
that will set the course
for what the European Space Agency
and their astronauts do
in these lunar missions.
Will we see European Space Agency astronauts,
I should say, will we see them landing on the moon one day?
Those are the sorts of decisions we're making.
So it's a really exciting time
as we sort of set the course for what this Artemis
program will be what the European space agency's role in it will be, what the UK's role in it will be.
But we, yeah, we're there and we're definitely part of the international community going back to the moon.
So I suspect most people listening will, you know, be as excited as you and I are about these missions.
But for the people who are skeptical out there, what does the UK get by being involved, I suppose,
and just more broadly, you know, what are the benefits of restarting this?
these visits to the moon, to put it very childishly. It's a very, very good and valid question to ask.
These space programs cost money that in a world we're in at the minute, cost a living crisis,
everything else going on, you've got to ask why are we doing this, should we be doing this?
The UK's contributions to the European Space Agency's exploration program cost, I think,
a lot less than people think. We spend one pound per person.
per year. And for that, we get access to the International Space Station. We build robbers that go to
the Red Planet, to Mars, to go explore that. We get access to a whole range of other facilities.
And we participate in the Lunar Gateway and the Artemis Program and all of these things.
And for every pound we invest, we see a return on investment of about £11. The UK government
wouldn't put this money into the European Space Agency if there wasn't a good case for doing so,
the economic reasons for doing it. So there's that, but as well as that, as well as the return,
we see science come back. The science that we get from the International Space Station helps us
better understand how we age, how we can develop need drugs, how we can lead longer,
healthier lives. In the Artemis program, we'll be studying the moon. Now, the moon is a
unique record of the history of the solar system and therefore a predictor of the future of the
solar system and earth and other planets. And we've been and we've got some rocks from it from
the Apollo missions, but they all came from about the same sort of area on the moon. And it's a little
bit like if aliens landed on Earth in the middle of the Sahara Desert and scooped up a few
bags of sand and went, oh great, we understand everything there is to know about that, that
that blue planet now. It's all covered in blue sand and that's that.
And by sending humans there, you can go and study the moon better.
You will say the scientists are massively excited about the rocks that they will return,
the information they will gather and the understanding they'll get about how the solar
system evolved, how it will in the future.
We're also really interested about looking at these things called volatiles.
The missions that when humans return, they're likely to land.
near the South Pole.
In fact, NASA have just recently released
some of their candidate landing sites for it.
And we're interested in the South Pole
because there's lots of areas there
that are permanently shaded.
Because of the way the moon sits
relating to the Earth and the Sun,
you think when we look at the moon in the night sky,
we only ever see the same side of it
because of how it's tidily linked
to the UK spins around.
But the poles there,
never really see lots of sunlight.
And in these permanently shaded areas,
we think there are these things called volatiles.
We know there are these things called volatiles,
which are really cold, solid bits of gases
that today you and I would know just floating around.
Oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, all sorts of different things.
And what the exploration community you're excited by
is that we might be able to use those
to help us produce things like oxygen,
for the astronauts to breathe.
If we can learn how to do that,
we might one day send humans to Mars.
Now, why do we do all of this?
What's the point of it?
Some of it is human nature.
We've always wondered what's round the corner,
over the mountain,
you know, up in the oceans,
up in the sky and so on.
Every time we've done that
and we've developed boats or planes or anything,
we end up developing technology
that comes back and improves all of our lives
and allows us to fly across the Atlantic
and allows us to live in homes.
The space industry has brought us the cameras
that are in our camera phones every day.
We've been talking about the solar power
or the solar arrays on the Orion spacecraft.
The developments of solar technology in space
were the things that kick-started, I think,
some of the solar technology here on Earth.
When you put something into space,
you have to rely on the sun.
You have a very small volume.
you have to make things as light as they possibly can be
because getting stuff into space is really hard.
So when we do all of that
and we force ourselves to invent new technologies
to go and explore the moon and perhaps one day Mars,
we are investing in technologies
that help everybody back on us.
You do all of that.
And we get the photos, the excitement,
the inspiration that led me to,
and many, many other people I know
to choose to work in the space industry.
It gets people excited by science
technology. We all rely on space every single day, whether we are checking the weather forecast,
whether we're grabbing our phone and asking it to get us to whichever meeting we need to get
to, whether we're watching live sports from around the world, and these things have bounced
off satellites. It's all there, and we need people to get excited by the space industry.
We need people to get excited by the technology industries. So that inspiration element,
the fascination of space, that's as much a part of doing it.
it as the science and the technology and the economics and all these other things.
So there's loads of reasons we do it.
And should we do it?
Could we do it?
It's a massive debate and a discussion we have.
It's a very fair question to ask.
But I do think that human nature is going to do this.
And America essentially said we're going.
We'd love your help.
Come join us if you want to or not.
And that's sort of the discussion I think in this country is should we be participating in it,
what's the right value.
All that money we put into space, none of it really ends up in space.
There's a space station up there.
There's a little bit.
But the costs of these things, we don't pile all the money on the launch pad and set fire to it.
It's all invested in jobs and technologies and developing things that are all here on Earth,
and it continues to support everyone on Earth.
To go further down that route, I think now more than ever it feels like, particularly in the UK,
there is a real industry around these launches.
There are all these companies all working in little areas together,
sharing engineering stories and development,
like, you know, building the satellites, building the communications.
And as you said earlier, with the fleet of other nations and private companies going up there,
it is a real kind of boom industry that's sort of just about just coming into life.
well, coming to life is unfair because it's been around for a little while,
but it's about to explode, I suppose.
Maybe not explode, but grow massively.
The UK space sector is still growing,
even through all the sort of troubled times we've had and slow growth.
The space sector is growing.
It employs about 50,000 people at the moment.
It's forecast to continue to grow.
And it's regional.
We're not in London.
The jobs are all over the country.
We're looking forward to the first launches from down in Cornwall
and up in Scotland.
There's fantastic industry growing in Wales,
there's Lester, where there's lots of great work
that's done there at university and technology's there.
It's really definitely a success story for the UK,
something that is growing and something that will continue to grow.
We need people to come join the industry.
There's opportunities there for lots of people.
And then just lastly, probably a real unscientific question.
But, I mean, it feels like something we probably need
after the last few years we've had.
it's a belief question, but do you believe it'll be a real unifying moment to see
humans go and explore the surface of the moon?
I hope so.
I have just heard about what Apollo did, and this is our generation's Apollo.
And I'm excited to experience that, to see what it brings, to see where we go.
Apollo was a race.
It was a politically driven race.
this time the return is more sustained and sustainable.
It's about learning how to live and work on the surface of the moon,
learning how to do that so we can one day send humans to Mars.
There's this goal that has just been there for decades and decades.
As soon as we got people to the moon in the 60s,
people were talking about can we go to Mars.
It is that human push to just go explore.
and I'm excited just to see where that goes to,
but what we get out of it as well.
And I look forward actually to the debate and the discussion about what's worth it
and how do we do it and all of these things that people are asking good questions about now.
But yeah, I'm just excited to see what we learn and what it brings us
and what it's like to be a part of it.
That was Libby Jackson.
there, the Exploration Science Manager for the UK Space Agency, explaining what we gain
by going back to the moon. If you want to find out more about the Artemis missions, head
to sciencefocus.com forward slash space, forward slash Artemis. This is a page we'll keep up to date
with the latest developments and news surrounding the next launch and the next launch window.
Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the Team
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