Instant Genius - How do you launch a successful space mission? – Mark McCaughrean

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

Launching a rocket into space doesn’t come cheap. That much won’t surprise anybody, but what goes into the planning, construction and the science before the mission even gets off the ground? And when it’s up there, what does it do, and what makes it a success? One man that knows how to put a space project together is Mark McCaughrean, senior advisor for science and exploration at the European Space Agency. During his 10 years at ESA, he’s worked on numerous projects, including the Rosetta mission to land a probe on a comet, and the enormous James Webb Space Telescope. Ahead of his talk at ESA's Space Rocks event on 21 September 2019, he talks to BBC Science Focus Online Editor Alexander McNamara about how to build a space project from start to finish, why studying space is so important for life on Earth, and reaching out through the power of rock music. We now have more than 85 episodes of the Science Focus Podcast, each of which is still well worth a listen. Here are a few that you might find interesting: What happened at Bluedot festival 2019? – Libby Jackson, Tom Shakespeare and Danielle George Is there anybody out there? – Mike Garrett What asteroids can tell us about our Solar System – Natalie Starkey Why is the Moon landing still relevant 50 years on? – Kevin Fong The most mysterious objects in the Universe – Colin Stuart Project Discovery and its search for exoplanets - Bergur Finnbogason Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a place like Los Angeles, people don't stop being who they are. Writers, thinkers, creators, people with stories still unfolding. That spirit lives on at Kingsley Manor, a community shaped by individuality, creativity, and lives well-lived. So when the conversation turns to what's next, it isn't about stepping away. It's about continuing the story. Explore your options at kingsley Manor.org, a nonprofit month-to-month senior community within the Front Perch family. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal.

Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended.

Visit name audio.com to learn more. And every mission, of course, is unique. Every mission takes many years to build, but this will be one of the biggest things, one of the most expensive things ever flown. So, yeah, everything's being double, triple-checked, quadruple-checked at this point. But, yeah, no, it's what you have to do. And you have to be able to close your eyes

and stick your fingers in your ears and get through that moment. they do fail. Occasionally, of course, rockets do fail. And we've had that happen to some of our missions, and we've gone back and rebuilt them and flown them another time. So, you know, if the science is still compelling, you find a way of making it happen. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Science Focus podcast.

I'm Amy Barrett, editorial assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. Launching a rocket into space doesn't come cheap. That much won't surprise anybody, but what goes into the planning, construction and the science before the mission even gets off the ground? And when it's up there, what does it do and what makes it a success? One man that knows how to put a space project together is Mark McCockran, Senior Advisor for Science and Exploration at the European Space Agency. Space Agency. During his 10 years at ESA, he's worked on numerous projects, including the

Rosetta mission to land a probe on a comet and the enormous James Webb Space Telescope. He talks to BBC Science Focus online editor Alexander McNamara about how to build a space project from start to finish, while studying space is so important for life on Earth and reaching out through the power of rock music. So my name's Mark McCorkran and I'm the senior advisor for science and exploration at the European Space Agency. And that means I work across all of the activities which are involved in robotic exploration of the universe and the solar system and also the human exploration. So the astronauts, which we have on the International Space Station, and hopefully in the next few years, going to the moon. So this encompasses a huge amount of

scientific range from astrophysics, looking at black holes, understanding the way that stars and planets are born to how the planets in our own solar system and their moons work and where they came from and how they're linked to the sun and the solar wind, but also things like fundamental physics, the detection of gravitational waves, which has been much in the news recently from things like the merging of black holes. When they combine together, they send out ripples through space time. So my job is actually to talk to the scientific community about all of the results that we have from all of our missions, and also to the general public. So, lucky enough, I get to go out and spend a lot of time talking to lots of very interesting

people and sort of constantly have to challenge myself to say, well, within the scientific community, this is how you would talk about this, but how do you talk about it in a more general public environment? So in some way, could you be seen as someone who's a bit of a jack-of-all-trades at ESA? Well, yes, that's part of the job description, but of course, you know, in a way, I'm an astrophysicist by training an astronomer. I've worked with ground-based telescopes and space telescopes for a long time, and my personal area of research is the birth of stars and planets. So I can only ever be a kind of a translator of all of the other stuff. I'm not a specialist in all the other material.

But what's interesting for me, though, is often to find a kind of. connection between science in various sort of siloed areas, something linking black holes and maybe, you know, searching for aliens, for example. And I get a lot, a real kickout of actually finding links between the various scientific fields that maybe others who are more specialized have missed out. There's a lovely phrase or a paragraph in Arthur C. Clark's book, 2001 of Space Odyssey, the book that went with the film. And there's a character there. If you've seen the film, you know, he's the kind of one of the lead characters at the beginning.

He, after all the bits with the apes beating each other up with bones. There's a character called Hayward Floyd. And he heads off to the moon because there's been a signal detected, or rather an object detected under the surface of the moon, that one of the monoliths. And he meets some Russian scientists on the space station on the way up. And one of them says, so why are you going up there? What's it got to do with you? You know, after all, you're just an astronomer. You know, what's this for you? And Hayward Floyd comes back with a line, something along the lines of, you know, I used to be an astronomer. It's years since I've done any active research.

Now I'm a scientific advisor. I know absolutely nothing about absolutely everything. So that's sort of my job. That must mean you talk to a number of different people and different government bodies and indeed space agencies as well. Yeah, I think that aspect is very important. After all, the taxpayers in Europe pay for all of the missions that we fly, and we collaborate internationally with many other agencies around the world. So many of our missions indeed have that very worldwide relevance. But it's also about making sure that our scientific committees, advisory bodies, people that are effectively helping us make decisions about which missions to fly in the future, that they know that we've done good things with the missions which are currently. in operation. So there's a very broad range of people I speak to from people that know way more about each thing I'm talking about than I do, but I'm bringing it all together in a committee sort of setting to, you know, the very most general public with kids and adults and, you know,

people who really don't have a background in science, but they want to know what it is that's going on out there. And so changing context sometimes can be a bit, difficult, remembering who's in front of you. And the easiest way I find of doing that is make sure your slides have no words and no graphs on them. It's just all pictures. And then you kind of add the information in to suit the audience a little bit more. So Issa is an organisation that covers many different countries of different sizes. How is it the missions are decided on and how much do the individual nations themselves contribute? Yeah, you're absolutely right. We have 22 member states. So right from the beginning, we're internationally.

in the way that we think about our missions, because the various countries in Europe contribute funding into the various programs. And there's sort of a slightly interesting detail there that in a broad sense, the countries get to choose which areas they would like to subscribe and put money into. So, for example, when it comes to rocket launchers, some countries put more money in, some put less, some put none.

We have telecommunications, we have earth, observation, we have the human exploration, astronauts on the ISS and so on. But the one area in ESO, which is universal, that if you join the European Space Agency as a country, you have to subscribe to. And the amount that you put in is actually effectively set unilaterally as a fraction of your GDP, that's science. So there's sort of kind of no opting in or out of science. Everybody's in it because it's seen as a core activity. It's one of the main things that we're here to do. So what's interesting, though, is that you could argue, you know, certain smaller countries might have communities which are more oriented to one area or the other. They haven't

necessarily built up a big community spanning all areas of space science. So they might be concentrating on solar, on the sun. Some others might concentrate on x-ray observing, for example. But when the committees come together, we generally have lots of proposals from the scientific community for a particular mission opportunity, we'll say, look, in 10 years' time, we're going to launch a mission of this size, what do you, the community, want to do with it? We then pulled together lots of experts

to assess those various missions. And it's very much an apples and oranges thing or apples and pears thing in that point. It might be very different. You know, you might be, somebody might say, well, let's go and land on a comet. Somebody else might say, well, no, actually, I want to look at black holes.

How do you make that comparison? But we pull people together from various communities, to make that judgment. It takes quite a long time. We also have to do technical assessment. Is the thing that people say they want to do? Is that actually technically feasible

for the amount of money that's available for that slot? But it works out, and we always pick good things. The problem is we always have to throw away good things as well. There's way more good ideas than we can possibly implement. So it's sometimes a little bit disappointing that something wins, which is great, but something else loses, and you think, oh, well, we really, really want to do that one as well.

So sometimes the missions may come around a second time, you know, and have another go as well. Do those missions ever get scrapped for good? Well, it's up to the community. If the scientific community wants to come back a second time, often they'll learn through the whole process of the proposals and in the technical assessment. And maybe even if they get fairly close to the end, if they're kind of in the semifinals, they'll have gone through many months and years even sometimes of, um, technical work to actually develop the payload and the spacecraft to the point where you can really make an assessment, is this really doable? They may lose at that stage, but armed with

that knowledge, then obviously they're in a much better position to come back the next time and put in a more refined proposal. I think the thing is important to point out here as well is that we work with the scientific community who define the ideas, but our missions are fundamentally built by European industry. So when it comes down to spending the money, it's not spent mostly in-house here at ESA. It's distributed around the member states. We have lots of big companies that are very experienced in putting space hardware together. And there's a competition there as well. So we may pick a mission and say, right, we're going to, for example, study the dark universe, dark energy and dark matter. And in an early phase of that competition, maybe different

industrial companies will come in and say, well, we want to be the people that build that. So there's a whole range of sort of open competition there, which we have to go through. Before we finally say, we're doing it, let's start building it. When it comes to actually building your projects, does ESA have an overall mission statement or specific objectives that you want to achieve that guides what you're going to do next? Well, in a sense, sort of more than 10 years ago, we put together what was called cosmic vision, this idea of looking across the field, what's been done, Where are the big questions?

Get the scientific community to come together and define which areas are priorities for future study. And then when actual mission calls go out, so announcements, right, we're now going, we have a slot. It's going to, this amount of money is available. What would you like to do? Of course, we compare back to that plan and say, well, okay, that fits the plan or no, well, this is actually completely new stuff, which we didn't even think of 10 years ago. So we're now in the process of updating that plan, and the next one is called Voyage 2050. So it's very sort of Star Trek sounding, that we have sort of an academic committee, independent people outside ESA from around Europe, looking at where the field is.

So, for example, one subject that's blossomed enormously in the last few years is the study of what we call exoplanets. so planets going around other stars elsewhere in the Milky Way or even beyond. 25 years ago or so, those weren't even known. We assumed they were there, but they weren't discovered. Now we know of many thousands of them, and there's a whole huge amount of work can be done on following up those discoveries to try, for example, to measure the atmospheres of those objects. Do they have atmospheres like the Earth, or maybe more like Venus or more like Mars?

could they possibly be habitable? So we actually have several missions in our plan already that we are building to go and discover exoplanets and then characterize them, which really weren't originally in the cosmic vision plan. So obviously we have to keep updating this as science progresses. That's definitely a long-term vision, especially given the time it takes to get missions quite literally off the ground.

What happens when something crops up that doesn't fit into what you've already planned? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one very recent example of that was that just about a year and a half ago or so, it was a discovery made of the first object which had clearly come into our solar system from beyond our solar system, that it had come from another solar system, an interstellar object. It got the name, Omuamua, It's a Hawaiian name because it was originally discovered on the ground on the mountain of Mornakea in Hawaii. And when that object was seen moving incredibly quickly through the solar system, people could trace the orbit and say, well, it's not actually part of the solar system. Again, these are things that one might have imagined existed, but that very first discovery then sparked a huge amount of follow-up observations. And they had to be quick because this thing was leaving the solar system very quickly as well.

only dipped in close to the sun and went straight back out again. And in fact, there were some mysteries about it because it seemed to be speeding up as it went out of the solar system, which is exactly the opposite of what you'd expect. It should slow down due to the gravity of the sun pulling on it, but it was going faster than it should have been. People speculated maybe it was an alien spacecraft. Speculation's cheap. We're pretty sure it wasn't.

But as an object or as the first of a object, or as the first of a, class of object, it was very exciting because you could learn, if you could study that object, you could learn about other solar systems, not just our own, by a piece of material. Now, here's the problem. These things appear very quickly out of the sky, and you can't just then say, well, we're better build a spacecraft and launch it and get it to fly there. You have to be ready. And so at our last announcement of opportunity, as we call it, in our last call,

A group of scientists, led by some in the UK, but internationally all around Europe, put together a proposal for a mission that would actually be launched into space, go out to a point a million and a half kilometres away from the Earth, and sit there, waiting. Just waiting for one of these objects to come in, to be discovered from ground-based telescopes, surveying the sky, looking for rapidly moving objects, and then go off and intercept it. And I think that's just a, you know, stupendously exciting idea.

I admit, I was a little skeptical to begin with. I think, really, do we have the capacity to loiter around out at this point and then detect objects quickly enough to give ourselves enough time to then go in intercept, get some samples, fly past it. And that mission's been picked, and, you know, it's a comet interceptor, it's called. These objects that come in might be asteroids, they might be comets. And so that's great. I mean, that's completely new science, sparked off a discovery.

And the only problem is it's going to take us probably another eight or nine years to develop that mission and then get it launched. These things don't take, they're not quick. So I'm afraid, you know, we've got a little bit of time to wait before we see the results from it. But it's exciting to know that that's an option now. I guess one of the biggest problems that you have certainly with regards to the public view of space missions is that it seems like such a huge time between launch. and any meaningful results coming through? Yeah, it's a sort of an interesting time that we're in because, you know, people are a bit older.

Remember that in the 1970s and 80s, you had missions like Voyager that zoomed through the solar system did what were called the Grand Tour. Voyager 2 went to Jupiter, to Saturn, to Uranus, and Neptune, all in the manner of years, you know, in a decade. and people sort of are a bit, you know, why can't you do that now? Why does it take you so long, firstly, to build them? Secondly, why does it take so long to get to these places now when you could do it quickly in the 70s? The difference is now these days we want to stop when we get there. We just don't want to fly there at high speed and fly past.

And so we have to take much more circuitous routes to getting to places. I think one fantastic example of that is our mission called Beppe Colombo, which was launched last October, on the way to Mercury. Now, people may know Mercury as the closest planet to the sun. It's incredibly hot there. It's 450 degrees on the surface, you know, hotter than a pizza oven. It's an amazingly challenging environment to operate in. And what's interesting is it's not, in relative terms, it's not that far away.

You could get there in just a few months. You just let the sun's gravity pull you in, suck you down here, and get to Mercury in just three months. Great, except you wouldn't stop when you got there. You'd go careening past it and end up in the sun. So to actually get there and be able to go into orbit around Mercury, we are actually flying a crazy trajectory, which again we launched from the Earth October last year.

We come back next April to the Earth. You think, well, we haven't gone anywhere. But we then use the gravity of the Earth as we fly past, the Earth, we use the gravity to slow us down and change the trajectory of the probe and divert us towards Venus, but at a slower speed, then we'd gone straight to Venus, if you like. And then we do two more flybys at Venus. Same thing. Encounter Venus. Use Venus as gravity. And then finally, we get to the orbit of Mercury. But we're not flying around it at this point. We're just flying, we're not flying around the planet. We're flying, if you like, with the planet around the sun.

Then we have to do six flybys at Mercury before we can finally go into orbit. So a three-month journey becomes seven years. So that's why, in a sense, these things are much more drawn out now because you have to use much more circuitous routes to get there kind of slowly enough to be able to stop when you get there. So it seems a little bit backwards. But we're much more interested now, not just flying straight past these places, but being able to investigate them close up for long periods.

Much like if we go back, in history, 1986 had the first mission to fly past a comet that was Geotto, European space agencies, Giotto, went past Comet, Halley. Whereas Rosetta, a very famous mission in 2014, didn't just fly past Comet 67P. It rendezvoused with it and allowed us to put a lander on the surface. And that was a 10-year journey to be able to get onto the right orbit to encounter that comet. So working in our business, you certainly have to have some patience. Thinking back to Rosetta, there was definitely something different when it happened that captured the imagination more than any space mission I can remember in recent times.

Landing on a probe on a comet sounded so unique and almost within the realm of sci-fi. What was it about it that made it so captivating? Yeah, I think Rosetta was special in many ways. I mean, it was kind of this idea, as you say, a unique, never tried before mission landing on an object. I mean, comets have held this sort of mythical status for people over time. these kind of weird objects that appear in the night sky with their long tails. The fact that we were now in a position to go and land on one. But also scientifically, they're intriguing because they're made of material left over from

the birth of the solar system. So I think we managed to get that message across, convince people that it wasn't just a sort of a technological achievement. There was a scientific goal. What's that comet made of? Can we learn about the birth of the solar system? The 10 years was good because kind of it was half a person's career. People could understand the amount of time it took

and you could interview some of the old people who'd been involved in the mission, some of the young people. It became a very human journey in that way. And then there was that great tension, you know, would we get there? What would it look like? Because we'd never seen pictures close up of this object. And could we land on the surface?

In the event, we kind of, we did, but then bounced and flew around for a couple of hours. So it sort of added to the excitement. I will say that what we also did, and this is sort of an important topic as well, is, you know, you've got to put these messages out to the public. You know, again, they've paid for it. They deserve to know what you're doing. And I think we came up with a pretty interesting campaign using all sorts of new techniques, new for us, certainly, cartoons, telling the story of the two probes, Rosetta and Filet. We made a short science fiction film to try and explain the science. And it also very closely hooked up with lots of people in the arts world, poets, authors, and lots of musicians who did compose new pieces about the mission.

And so this actually opened doors for us in terms of the way that we do outreach. And I think all of that factored together, the excitement, the thrill of seeing something brand new, but also the sense that we put it out there for people in understandable ways, not just cold science all the time. Yeah, I remember Rosetta Mission really well, especially the moment when Filet sent out its final tweet. I'm not going to lie, I probably shed a tear at that point. Was it always the plan to make such an emotional connection with the public when you were planning the mission? Well, for sure, in the sense that we, social media was an important part of the campaign.

And I wouldn't for a moment want to say that we're being cynical and exploiting people's emotions. I mean, people here were crying just as much as people in the outside world were. So, in a sense, nothing was completely spontaneous. We had people working together to try to put those messages across. But we were always very clear that we didn't want to fake anything. I mean, in the sense of right at the end of the mission, so Fila landed on the comet in November 2014. And then Rosetta itself ended up on the comet later on. We ended the mission by landing Rosetta on the comet.

It wasn't designed to land so it was a crash land. And people kept saying to us, oh, but you need to land the two of the spacecraft together because they should be together for all eternity on this cold comet. And our cartoons were, you know, there was their temptation as well to put them together. But we didn't, because they didn't land next to each other. Scientifically, that didn't make a lot of sense. We wanted to send Rosetta somewhere different to see different parts of the comet than Filae had seen close up.

So I think throughout that, the need for scientific integrity was important too, because it's a really tricky thing, right? Anything to do with social media? If you put something, try to make something viral, people will often say, well, you're just trying too hard. So I think we just somehow got a magic sweet spot there with some fantastically creative and engage people here in ESA in the team working on this,

but also people out in the community as well, responding to it and retweeting and kind of remixing, if you like, what we were doing. And I think that sense of community engagement it humbled us, to be honest. I think we wanted the world to know what was going on, but that response, it's actually quite difficult to talk about even now for me. I mean, it was my team that was in charge of all the communications there.

And so we worked really hard on all of that. And, yeah, as I say, quite emotional even now. We see each other in the corridors and sort of a bit of a tear comes to the eye. And, of course, all the people who worked on the mission, and the scientists, they felt that too, the engineers who were actually operating the spacecraft. It was, that was what was strange, I suppose. It was for all that it was a robotic mission. It was probably one of the most human missions that people had experienced,

certainly since things like Apollo, which is, you know, as we know, 50 years ago now. So younger generations have probably never quite experienced something so humanly emotional in space for a long time. And I think that was, you know, quite remarkable. So given the time it takes to create a mission from start to finish, and that scientific discoveries and technological events happening all the time, how do you plan for a mission and make sure that it stays relevant throughout this time? And how closely do you work with other space agencies? Well, that's a great question.

Right at the very beginning, of course, people will come up with an idea and say, well, let's take, if you like, the biggest example that's out there at the moment, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is this enormous observatory, been underdeveloped for more than 20 years by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. So when that was first proposed back in the mid-90s, people had a number of things that they wanted to be able to say, this observatory will achieve this. This observatory, if built this way, will allow us to see the first galaxies which are forming in the universe 13 and a half billion years ago. It will also allow us to study the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time. You know, how

do they change? How do they come together and make many more stars? So what that is codified as is what we call scientific requirements. We have to build a machine that is capable of answering these questions. If then the scientific advisory committees, the group say, oh, those are important questions. So yes, we agree. You should build this machine to answer those questions. You then design the spacecraft in such a way with its instruments as well to meet those requirements. Now, at some point you might decide, well, actually, it's costing way too much money to meet those requirements. We have to build a much bigger observatory. We don't have much more money, so we're going to cut it down.

So sometimes you get to the point where you say, well, actually, it's not worth doing anymore because it's only going to be incremental over what you've done before. So there's a constant trading and balancing of the technical capabilities and the money. In the end, it comes down to money. I mean, you know, we hate to say it, but that's always a factor. And saying, you know, are these scientific questions relevant? And also, you have to be quite honest. You know, there are times when somebody might make a technical advance or a discovery

when you're halfway through developing a mission, which might even change the whole way you do things. Because, again, with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is total budget in very broad terms, is around 10 billion euros, pounds, dollars. This is a huge machine, and yet it was never designed initially to look at exoplanets, planets going around other stars, because they were just not a big field at the time. So there are bits we have kind of retrofitted to the observatory,

and I've been working on it since 1998, where now that is a primary capability of that observatory. And unfortunately, in that case, you could just change, tweak a few parts of it and make it capable for that science. That doesn't always happen. You might actually say, well, we just can't do it. It's rare that you cancel a mission halfway through the development. There's a lot of sunk cost already. But yes, we are constantly keeping a check on what the state of the outside field is. You know, or other people finding other ways of doing this without a space

mission. Some things you have to do in space, detecting x-rays, gamma rays, they just don't come through the Earth's atmosphere. So you have to go into space. But other things, you know, optical telescopes like Hubble, we can do optical astronomy from the ground. So you have to have to be sure that the advantages of going into space, much sharper images, you can have a much colder telescope, which means it doesn't glow itself. Those sorts of things, you have to say, well, is it still worth doing it? When on the ground we're building far bigger telescopes, a much more light collecting area. So these are, yeah, it's not just space in isolation.

We have to look at what everybody else is doing. Are there many spacecraft that you build that could be retrofitted in a way that makes them more multifunctional? Well, some missions are designed in a way which they have, they, they, let's call them a survey machine. So they do one thing and one thing only. So a primary example of that would be our Gaia mission, which was launched in 2013. And Gaia is designed to measure the movements of stars in the Milky Way. The motions are tiny. You can't do this from the ground.

They move a very, very slight amount. You need a very precise telescope in space. Just to give you a sense of how tiny the motions are that we can measure. We can measure the movement of a star equivalent, which would be equivalent to the width of a human hair at 2,000 kilometers. So that kind of movement, imagine that, right? Just resolving seeing a human hair at 2,000 kilometers. Gaia can do that.

And that helps it measures the distances to stars and their motions. And that helps us then sort of decode the Milky Way. How are all the stars in the Milky Way moving around? How did they all come together into this shape we call the Milky Way galaxy? So you can't repurpose Gaia. Gaia does one job, does it brilliantly. And at the moment, it's producing fantastic data, a huge amount of science coming out.

Several papers every day, which, I mean, people, their minds are blown by Gaia. It's fantastic. James Webb, on the other hand, is an observatory. So what will happen there is people, as the mission proceeds, we aim to launch it in spring 2021. People will be able to propose on a yearly basis what they want to do with it. And that will be competitive selection. So people will say, I want to observe, you know, star number 47. Other people will say, I want to observe Galaxy number 19.

And again, committees will say, well, actually, star number 47. is much more interesting than Galaxy 19 this time around. The science you're proposing is the best science. So as long as we have enough versatility in the observatory, and we do, there's lots of different cameras and spectrometers and filters to enable lots of great science, then we'll go and do it. On the other hand, it's not an X-ray telescope,

so can't see X-ray radiation from black holes. It's got a core set of capabilities, which are very broad. So we're very excited. The things we originally said in 1990, in the early mid-90s, this is what this observatories for. I think at least half the time

will go to something completely different, which is great. I also assume that it's not just the actual scientific experiments that take their time to plan and execute, but also the creation of the probes and satellites themselves. Yeah.

You know, obviously what we try to do is build very complicated, very sophisticated machines with lots of optics and lenses and filters and mirrors and try in this case try to build the biggest machine you can

but then you still have to get it into space so you have to put it on top of a rocket and you have to shake the heck out of it in order to be able to get it through the earth's atmosphere there's an enormous amount of work on testing and making sure it won't fall apart so imagine you've built this incredibly complicated machine very delicate optics

big mirrors and then you have to shake it with the vibrations coming up through the rocket, but also the sound environment that the rocket is going to experience at launch. If you were to stand next to one of our rockets at the moment of launch, forget about the flames and everything else. Just the sound alone would kill you. The acoustic pressure is so enormous. So we have to test all of that.

We, for example, just down the corridor from where my office is, we have enormous acoustic chambers with giant speakers. Sometimes I want to go down there and plug my iPhone in. I'm sure it would be great. But, you know, they can simulate the levels of noise heard by a rocket. And you have to test everything in that environment before you are confident that you launch it into space. And that's where a lot of the time is. It's not only developing very sophisticated bits of hardware, but then testing everything

and making sure it will work once you've launched it. And once it's beyond us, our capability of going to go and repair it. So, yeah, the James Webspace Telescope, will be launched on the European Arian 5 rocket from French Guiana, and that's a very reliable rocket. And I'll say it's quite something. This is a US-led project and they're giving us the lead on launching it. So I think, you know, it'll be an interesting day when we finally launched this.

If nothing else, it'll be interesting because the countdown will be in French rather than in American English. But, yeah, we're very confident the Ariane 5 vehicle. for this big observatory. Does it make you nervous that you're the one strapping a $10 billion piece of kit to the top of a rocket? Yeah, well, I think, you know, that one was fairly unprecedented.

Every mission, of course, is unique. Every mission takes many years to build, but this will be one of the biggest things, one of the most expensive things ever flown. So, yeah, everything's being double-tripal-checked, quadruple-checked at this point. But, yeah, no, it's what you have to do. and you have to be able to close your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears and get through that moment.

Occasionally they do fail. Occasionally, of course, rockets do fail. And we've had that happen to some of our missions. And we've gone back and rebuilt them and flown them another time. So, you know, if the science is still compelling, you find a way of making it happen. Do things get more expensive when your mission involves sending an astronaut into space? Well, the one thing we've taught mostly about robotic missions, there's the whole human space flight side as well here. And there's a lot of discussion, of course,

there about what the next steps may be in human spaceflight. And there, for all that we talked about rockets shaking things around, at least they can be in a vacuum with the astronauts, they actually have to be able to breathe and the temperatures have to be okay. So that tends to add a whole other level of complexity, of course, when they're going to space. So I think we're actually, at the moment, we're asking for a bit of an increase in the money that we're looking for on the science side, the robotic side. We've got some great ideas for missions which would, for example, go to Uranus and Neptune again. We haven't been there since Voyager. We only flew past them. And there's a moment in time coming up in about 10 years where the planets will be

lined up in such a way that you'll be able to get there faster by using the gravity of Jupiter, this time to speed you up and get you further out into the solar system. So that's something where, if we have, you know, talking about huge increases, 20% will enable missions like that. But then if you go around and talk about the human space flight side, you've got the next step after we've just celebrated the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 is how do we get humans back into orbit around the moon and maybe down to the surface. And then beyond that, once we've used that as a testing ground, can we go to Mars?

And these are, you know, by definition, enormously expensive endeavors, international in scope. We're collaborating now very closely with NASA on human exploration on the space station, but also our next generation crew vehicle, it's called Orion, is a U.S. European collaboration. So many people remember what, and certainly after seeing lots of pictures this weekend, And Apollo had effectively a sort of a cone on the front, which is where the crew sat, and that reentered the Earth's atmosphere at the end of the mission and brought them back to the Earth. That's being built by the U.S. for Orion.

And then the whole back end, the kind of Coke can part with the propulsion and the electricity generation and everything else, that's the service module. That's built by Europe this time. and we've actually delivered the first of those, sitting in the US already ready to fly on the big space launch system in maybe a year and a half's time. But if we want to build, say, a small space station going around the moon and then maybe send humans back down to the surface on a more permanent basis, that's going to take lots of money. But I think, you know, the goal in mind for many of us, of course, is Mars. We're working on a robotic campaign. We have, in Europe, we're launching our rover next year called, it's a program called Exomars, and the rover that's going to go down to the surface is called Rosalind Franklin,

named for the famous scientist involved in the discovery of DNA. And that should launch next summer and arrive eight, nine months later, and explore the surface and be digging beneath the surface looking for signs of, life in the past or potentially even in the present. And then the next thing you want to do is sample return, bring stuff back to Earth to study in much more detail. We're collaborating with XOMRs as a collaboration with Russia. Sample return is a collaboration with the United States. And then people, you know, on what time scale can we send an international mission to Mars to put the first boots, first people on the surface? And, you know, that,

That is obviously going to cost money. And we also have to look at the lessons we learned from Apollo. You know, Apollo was a political stunt very largely. It was linked to the Cold War. It was over pretty much as soon as it started. Once Apollo 11 was down, you know, it was just three years later. The whole Apollo lunar program was over. So how can we do it in a more sustainable way?

How can we do it in a way which makes sense not just as a political stunt, as a sort of Cold War, superpower statement, but also with something which is for all humankind. And I don't mean, you know, sending humans there to live there. That's, for me, that's all fantasy dreaming. Can we use spaceflight? Can we use human beings and our robotic missions to inspire kids and society, bluntly,

to take a more rational look at the way the world works? You know, if you can launch a rocket to Mars and put people on the surface, that says the laws of physics work. that says that mathematics works, that numbers add up, regardless of what you write on the side of a bus, or regardless of what you think about climate change, you know, if the laws of physics allow you to build a machine which can go to the surfaces of Mars, the same laws of physics have to work when it comes to putting CO2 in the atmosphere and warming it up. So I think there's, you know, for me at least, there's that background element that space is cool and interesting for itself,

but we have to make it relevant to the much broader general public who pay for it. And I think that that idea of inspiring kids to come into STEM and STEAM, not just, you know, the scientific subjects, but also cultural subjects wrapped around it, that actually is one of the reasons we're doing other things in outreach now, trying to put together public events to bring the public in and show them what we're doing. And we can talk about that now. It's what we call our Space Rocks events. So if we have the chance to talk about that, that would be great as well. Yeah, yeah, please do. Yeah. So, as I said, with Rosetta, we had lots of connection with musicians and with artists

who were inspired by what we did. And in fact, you know, they inspired us as well. They really opened our eyes to what was possible in terms of public engagement. But that was mostly through the web, through social media. And we decided at that point we wanted to take it. outside that we really wanted to go and have public events where you could bring the astronauts, bring the space scientists, but also musicians and artists and science fiction writers and authors to talk about the sort of bigger ecosystem of space, if you like. We did the first event last

April, April 2018 in London at the O2, and we're going back on September the 21st to the Indigo at the O2, a smaller venue on the side of the big arena. Tim Peake will be there, of course, familiar to everybody in the UK as Issa's British astronaut. But we have three big bands coming into play in the evening. We've got, as I said, Tim, we've got various other speakers. We've got Chris Lindot from the Sky at Night. We've got some people we're going to announce, and if the next couple of weeks will be very interesting as well. People from outside of science, but in the cultural world, science fiction people.

which should be really interesting. So it's a full day. People can come down with, it's mostly oriented sort of kids and families at the beginning of the day and then a slightly more sort of a late teen adult audience in the middle of the day. We've been talking about climate change as well

because, of course, that's something we see happening from space. It's unequivocal. We measure it going on every day with our satellites. And then the concert at the end of the day. Sounds like a really fun day out. Are these outreach events something that Issa is keen to do more of? Oh, definitely. I mean, I'm lucky enough that part of my job is to go out and give public talks and do things like this, talk to you. But there are many of us here at ESA are very keen on doing outreach, whether it's at the very local level, talking to kids in the school, where your own kids go to. Of course, we have this thing that we have 22 member states, so we have to cover, we can't do it all in English. It has to be done across all of the languages of Europe. And we're very geographically distributed. So we will move space. rocks around Europe. In fact, we did do one here in the Netherlands last year as well.

So it is something, it's interesting. I think culturally, obviously with the moon landings and the long history of NASA, many people are aware of them and what they've done. But I think it's, you know, we have a different take on things because, again, we have 22 member states, we have this very international outlook in the way that we work. We have areas of science, which are They're not unique to Europe in the sense. Of course, science is science. Everybody can do it. But there are areas like Gaia measuring the motions of the Milky Way,

which Europe does extremely well. We do better than anybody else. So I think it's important that we do do a lot more outreach. And not only through public events like this, but partnering with film directors. I do film consulting and script consulting for TV and this kind of thing. Kind of get the message out there. Not again in a, it's not a heavy-handed advertising thing.

I think that's probably a little bit too deliberate. but to try and get out what it is we can do, what the technical capabilities are, but what the philosophical implications of the things that we're doing are as well. I mean, I think there's a lot of jumping off points for people to talk about things like, is space a public commons? Is it something which industry can go and exploit? Can they go and mine the moon without any ramifications legally? Or should, as we do, you know, should the international laws be applied?

and say, well, hold on, you can't just go and dig the moon up. It's owned by everybody in the way that we manage Antarctica, for example. So I think there's a lot of discussion to be had there. There's also, I suppose also what you hear a bit from some of the private companies is this idea that space is going to save humankind. We're going to go and put people on Mars, and it's going to be an insurance policy against us being struck by an asteroid or something. And I think I'd rather turn it around and reflect and say, what can space teach us about the Earth? How can it actually help us protect the earth better? Again, we study it intensively from space. We see climate change happening. We see evidence for humans and their activities all over the Earth. And with that in your hand,

you can put it on the tables of governments and say, look, we've got to do something about this. So I think we shouldn't just be concentrating on, let's call it, the kind of the cool G-WIS, wouldn't be fantastic to go into space, because let's be honest, most of us won't actually go there. But how can we use what we are doing there to inspire people to think more carefully about how we need to live together on the earth and collaborate to make this planet habitable? As Greta Toonberg says very eloquently, you know, there is no planet B. This is the one we live on. And we've got to make sure, as much as we look outwards, we've got to be able to reflect backwards

and protect the planet which gave birth to us and which we fundamentally depend on. So given that we have so many issues here on Earth, is it difficult to keep people engaged with the space missions that ESA are currently doing? Can you still make them relevant? Well, I hope so. I mean, you know, I don't want to be naive about this. I think there's one of the problems we probably sometimes suffer in the space community is that there's a point at which you can sort of feel like a hobby, you know.

some people like to go to rock concerts, some people like to watch football matches, and some people like to watch space probes go past planets. And I think that there's a danger of us sometimes overestimating the general public interest, if you like in the core things, you know, the science. Why would you be interested in learning whether comets have the same kind of water as the Earth has? That's a sort of scientific, geeky question. A lot of the public are interested, but I wouldn't say everybody is. So you have to make it more relevant.

There's a lot of things we do in space which are applications driven. Enabling, of course, everybody walks around the streets now, just come back off holiday, and everybody's wandering around the streets, saying, where's the nearest restaurant? How do I get there? And that's all navigated from space. And in a way, that's invisible to people. They're just looking at their mobile phone and walking around. But space can be incredibly positive in terms of improving the way that we live on the earth.

But again, I would lift it one level higher than that and say it's a sort of a slightly more philosophical thing. It casts the question of where have we come from, where are we going, you know, how fragile is this planet when we see environments out there? Even living on the space station, it's really hard. You know, you don't just go up there and twiddle your thumbs for six months. It's a huge amount of energy and effort put into making sure the astronauts say healthy and able to do their jobs there, doing science. And some of that reflects back on Earth. Some of the health care we have on Earth has been miniaturized because of the need to put it into space.

So that's where I'm really focused, is on trying to make what we do as relevant across as broad a spectrum as possible. Because if we just sort of say, give me more money, I want to go to Uranus and Neptune. people might legitimately turn around and say, well, hold on, I want my hospitals, I want my infrastructure, I want the trains to run on time. And those are absolutely legitimate things. But they needn't be in competition. I think that there's, you know, we have to be able to look at what we do as a civilization beyond, if you like, sort of just bread and shoes. We have to be able to lift ourselves up and look out at the sky to try to try to understand

and where we are and where we've come from. And I think that's probably a fairly fundamental thing for many people. That was Mark McCockren, senior advisor for space and exploration at the European Space Agency. You can get tickets for space rocks at space rocks official.com. If space really does rock your world, pick up a copy of the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, where we go on the hunt for the mysterious planet nine. There is much more inside, but in the meantime,

if you want to listen to another one of our space-themed podcasts, Why not check out the episode where I speak to Libby Jackson at this year's Blue Dot Festival. Libby is the Human Exploration Program Manager at the UK Space Agency, and she tells me about advances in the space industry and human space exploration. If you like it, don't forget to rate and review the episode wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling sites and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist Focal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music. just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals

because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.