Instant Genius - Kevin Fong: What happened to Apollo 13?

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

This week we catch up with Kevin Fong about the new series of his award-winning podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon. Whereas the first series celebrated the 50th anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements, the Moon landing, the new season follows what could have been one of our worst disasters – an explosion aboard the spacecraft Apollo 13. We discuss what happened on this ill-fated mission, how it impacted the astronauts and staff at Mission Control, and whether catastrophe at space could ever happen again. If you have a burning science question you want an expert to answer, send them to us on twitter at @sciencefocus, and we may answer them in a future episode. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Kevin Fong: Why is the Moon landing still relevant 50 years on? Katherine Johnson: mathematician and NASA pioneer dies age 101 Dr Erin Macdonald: Is there science in Star Trek? Dr Becky Smethurst: How do you actually find a black hole? Mike Garrett: Is there anybody out there? Monica Grady: What is the future of space science? Richard Wiseman: The mindset behind the Moon landing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. And the message of Apollo 11 was very clear that they, you know, if you could take a human being, you could fire them off the surface of the earth at 25,000 miles an hour and land them on the moon, then anything in this life must be possible. And then the lesson you learn from Apollo 13 is that even in the face of something that overwhelmingly looks like it cannot be beaten, that you cannot succeed, that this must be certain failure with a certainty of death lying on the end of it, that actually if you are lucky and if you can focus your efforts and if you can stop yourself disintegrating in the decisive moment, then you just might have a chance of fighting your way back. for survival. 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 app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus. And this week I catch up with Kevin Fong about the new series of his award-winning podcast, 13 Minutes to the Moon. Whereas the first series celebrated the 50th anniversary of one of humanity's greatest scientific achievements, the moon landing, the new series follows what could have been one of our worst disasters, an explosion aboard the spacecraft Apollo 13. We discussed what happened on this ill-fated mission, how it's impacted the astronauts and staff at mission control,

and where the catastrophe at space could ever happen again. You're just releasing your second series of 13 minutes to the moon, which was based off the back of the last series. why have you chosen to do another series and this time on Apollo 13? Well, it's interesting because when we're coming towards the end of putting the first season to bed of 13 minutes of the moon, we kind of began to get an inkling that there was unfinished business, that a lot of the flight controllers we were talking about, you know, once you're starting to pack away the microphones were sort of saying to us. So, of course, you know, that wasn't the only mission.

And then they'd begin and tell this story about, you know, especially Apollo 13, which by all accounts was far more dramatic. And so we thought we've got to do it. We've got to get up and we've got to get prepared to do it. So we thought we've got to come back again. And we were delighted by the response to the first season. So we thought we'd come back again. So what was it?

What was the major difference? So obviously after you say you packed up from Apollo 11, what happened in NASA between Apollo 11 and Apollo 13? name. So NASA after Apollo 11 are, you know, they don't let up the pace at all. They put their second mission onto the surface of the moon by the end of 1969. That's, of course, Apollo 12. So Apollo 13 follows hard on the heels of that, and that launches, you know, in April, 1970.

So it's less than 12 months after the first lunar landing. And what is remarkable to me, at least in the background and the buildup to this story, is to the American public, something that exists only at the edges of their imagination less than 12 months ago, by the time of Apollo 13 has started to take on an air of something routine.

And so there's much less press hoopla for it, people are less interested in it. And up until the point of the explosion, actually no one is really paying proper attention to the mission, outside of NASA and the operations community. and so obviously Apollo 11 was that their goal was to land on the moon

what was Apollo 12's mission and then subsequently what was Apollo 13's mission and why do you think that the public sort of lost interest a bit well I think I think in part and some of the controllers flight controller said to us you know we kind of made it look to almost too easy and this is this is part of what we were trying to do again with the original season was to unpack actually the true difficulty of landing on the moon because I think

when we tell those stories we don't give enough credit to just how precarious and just how difficult the endeavour is. Apollo 11 and 12 were really sort of almost demonstrating the proof of the principle of being able to send a crew from Earth to the surface

to the moon and get them back again. Apollo 13 is the first mission in which there's kind of a fairly serious scientific program. They're targeting an area called the Frowmorrow Highlands, which are geologically a very interesting part of the moon. And Jim Lovell himself is really looking forward to this exploration. He's interesting as a character Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13. Insofar as he is a Navy test pilot. He is an aviator. But he is also at heart, this sort of

romantic explorer. He sees this voyage to the moon as, well, sees this voyage as an Odyssey, which is why he names the command module Odyssey. And he's looking forward to getting down, you know, in amongst the lunar landscape, having himself flown past it once on Apollo 8 in 1968. So this is the mission of Apollo 13, which at the outset is an exploratory mission. It's supposed to be for science and exploration. And again, Jim Lovell gave, you know, gave this mission. They have these mission patches that they sew onto their suits and on the paraphernalia.

And this was Apollo 13, whose mission motto was ex-luna Scientia, so from the moon knowledge. And so you get a sense of the man as being someone who's not just there for a flags and footprints mission. He wants to get on. He wants to really have a good look around. He wants to be in this new territory and sail this new ocean. And, you know, it's a very endearing character trait in Jim Lovell. You know, he's not just someone who drives very high performance machines around. He's interested in the voyage of exploration as much as anything else.

And so this mission was definitely very much more of a, you could say, it was starting the sort of science behind the moon as opposed to the science of getting there. I think by this time we got past the point where the moon was just somewhere that you visited, you know, as though you were doing a bank job and getting in and getting out as fast as you could before something bad happened. you know, this was beginning to start to think about longer stays with more science. So yeah, it's sort of sort of the beginning of the scientific

exploration in the moon that's enabled by Apollo or all of the Apollo missions that precede it, particularly 11 and 12 but also, you know, 10, 9, 8 and 1. Do you think that might have been part of the reason why the public were less enthusiastic or inspired by this one as the others? Well, the thing is that part of the reason that we think a lot of things are routine in the world in general is because it's, I think, very difficult to communicate the complexity and the level of risk involved in those things. And I think that that's true of landing on the moon. I think that's true of, you know, delivering medical care or, I don't know, expeditions in general in the modern era.

and you know I think that it may not be so much that the American public were bored by it but certainly the media are fickle aren't they and once you've landed on the one the moon once that's great but the third time it's kind of boring which is actually you know a crazy idea that just because he'd been to the moon twice the third mission wasn't a nail biting prospect but somehow how the networks have moved on. You, I mean, you also have to remember that it is a particularly tumultuous time in the United States, in the history of the United States. So there is a lot of, there are a lot of stories that you're trying to compete with for news. So, so, yeah, I, I'm, we often say there is that narrative that the American public up board of, you know, lunar missions. I'm not sure that that's true.

You know, I think, I think that the people who, the news gathering, kind of began to get a little bit weary of it. So Apollo 13 was less well focused on than the previous missions. I don't think that bothered Jim Lovell at all. Jim Lovell wasn't in it to become famous in any way. Jim Lovell was in it for the exploration. With obviously Apollo 13's mission being the third one to land on the moon and they'd had 11 and 12 before,

had they changed anything in between 11 and 13 or did anything different? Or was this sort of a carbon copy of getting to the moon just a different goal and objective once they were there? I don't think there are any radical changes in what they'd call the architecture

of the operation. Essentially, they were still looking for a landing. There was more precision involved in the landing. And in every mission, every human space flight mission, they tend to fine tune the way they approach that mission every time. sort of build in the things they know that worked well and amplify those and try and remove the

things that are, you know, less successful. But in rubric, I think it was not dissimilar to the rubric for Apollo 11. So up until this point, everything had sort of gone as planned up to launch and then, you know, as much as after the rocket went up as well. Well, I mean, I think you probably have to see this as NASA as an organisation kind of feeling like it's hitting its stride. been to the moon twice in the same year. It's beaten the Soviet Union to the moon. And now it's on its third mission and you now have a team of flight controllers who are, albeit young, I still now feel like they are up and ready for it. And so they have a rhythm for these things. And I think they feel fairly confident, quietly confident. Confident that the mission is going to go ahead as planned.

well confident that they can pull this off you know that's the difference between this and and the 13 minute descent to the moon which was unique in all of history before it and no one had ever attempted that and so there was a certain amount of anticipation about that but now you're effectively in terms of the location is changing and the program of science you're asking them to do is changing but actually the thing you're asking them to do in terms of you know the astrodynamics and getting a vehicle off the surface of the earth and round the moon and on the moon and back again, that they have now got experience in. So they would all say to you that spaceflight is never routine. No one who knows anything about spaceflight at all, and particularly human spaceflight ever says it's a routine mission, because none of them is routine. But they are at the stage now where they have enough experience in it to think, well, you know, maybe, maybe this is, you know, going to go without significant glitch. We can deal with small, glitches we have throughout the mission we did on Apollo 11. Apollo 12 was struck by lightning during the launch and they recovered from that. So they're there, I think by the time of Apollo 13,

they're a confident team. They're not complacent, but they are confident. There is a difference. But then, of course, in Apollo 13, something did happen quite significant. Yes. So Apollo 13 just really the beginning of the third day of the mission, around about 56 hours into the mission. There is an explosion in an oxygen tank. And this, you know, you automatically think, oh, well, that's the oxygen tank that gives them something to breathe. And it is that, but it's more than that. It's more important than that because the oxygen also feeds something called the fuel cell, which combines hydrogen and oxygen to make water and electrical energy in, in this device called a fuel cell. So when you lose the oxygen, when the oxygen tank ruptures,

you lose the thing the astronauts need to breathe in the atmosphere inside their spacecraft, but you also lose their means of generating energy in the spacecraft. And again, that doesn't automatically sound that awful because you think, well, I've been in my house when we've tripped the fuse and there's been a bit of a power cut. But actually, for a spacecraft, electrical energy is the lifeblood of that spacecraft. and if the electrical power fails, then you also will fail as a crew and you will die. So this is the worst of all possible failures that they could have.

It threatens the life support for the astronauts, but it threatens the lifeblood of the spacecraft itself, upon which the entire survival, the entire life support system really is built. So they were in a pretty bad position at that point. So in making this podcast series, we had a good, hard listen to the mission audio and the mission control loops. And, you know, you can hear in those opening moments how much confusion, how much ambiguity there is. There's a little bit of denial about how serious this problem is.

You know, at first, the flight controllers believe this might just simply be their instrumentation playing up. actually these are false readings given us in the monitors, because the alternative is to say, no, what the monitors are telling us is real, and this mission is catastrophically experiencing a catastrophic failure for reasons that we don't quite understand. And to me, at least, it was reasonably reassuring that that was how they responded to it.

Because even if NASA, who are exhaustively drilled in their procedures, can fail in that way, can experience failure in that way, you know, with all the attendant uncertainty and all the attendant, you know, missteps that they definitely do make in the first hour or so, then, you know, that must be okay for anybody to be in that situation. So it's a really interesting and unprecedented failure that they experience in the opening moments of, after the explosion on board Apollo 13. And you can see. NASA, for that first

hour, just struggling not to disintegrate as a team and trying to keep themselves and the spacecraft together. And that is just to me endless, endless, fascinating listening. Because, you know, we've been over that over and over and over again. And I

sort of pretty marvel about how A, there's a hint of fearful youth in the voices of the controllers as they play this, this scenario out. But also, be how rapidly they're brought under control to work the problem in a productive and an objective way. Was there anything leading up to the incident? Was there anything to suggest that there was a problem with the mission or something like this was going to happen? Well, in the investigation

that ensued after the mission was down and recovered, they realized that the oxygen tank itself had been damaged up to 18 months before the mission. And while it was being manufacturer, someone in a factory line had sort of dropped it in the factory. Now, it didn't drop very far. It fell a total distance about two inches. This is a titanium shell that drops about two inches. But that's enough to cause a small floor in the tank,

which then leads to a cascade. of errors and failures that in the end take out the vehicle. You know, it's really interesting. That tiny instant, you know, can you imagine you're working in a factory? This is the oxygen tank for Apollo and you sort of fumble it and you drop it two inches. And the temptation to not report that up must have been huge. It was huge enough that no one really did properly report it. And that that then becomes like this single falling domino which causes a cascade of failures,

which eventually nearly kills the crew. It's amazing to think that just with all of the sort of intricate planning of the whole mission, just a tiny incident like that that was so long ago, was almost forgotten had such a big impact, you know, for a small drop, it had such a big impact to the lives of the people on board. Well, I think when you look at what the consequences of the damage from a trivial event caused and the consequences to the mission that that resulted in, actually what it makes you do is marvel at the absolute fierce complexity of this mission

and how much has to go right, how many subsystems upon subsystems have to go right for this mission to work and for the crew to survive. And to be honest with you, when you look at how complex the lunar missions were, you're surprised that we were able to get that many crews up there safely and you sort of ask yourself more, why doesn't this happen all the time?

But nevertheless, it's a tiny oversight and it's nearly down, well, it does destroy a vehicle pretty much entirely, or at least it destroys its capability to support a crew, and it nearly leads to catastrophe. So in the face of that catastrophe, how were the people, you know, how were the astronauts on board,

how did they respond to this instant? And what was the atmosphere like in mission control. So immediately afterwards, no one would describe it as panic. None of the flight controllers we spoke to you said there was panic. They did say that there was confusion,

you know, that none of it makes sense. What they're looking at doesn't make sense because these vehicles are built with lots of what NASA would call redundancy. So there are backups on top of backups. And this is all engineered so that when things go wrong, there's always a full black plan to go for.

Now, when the explosion happens, they're seeing errors across the board, not just in one system, but in lots of different systems. And those systems aren't linked. And so that puzzles them, it makes them unable to understand how could you have a single point failure that would cause all of these things to go wrong. And one of the flight controllers who spoke to was a guy called Cy Liebergot, who was in charge of a lot of the control, the power and life support systems on the command module. And he, you know, was on the back foot from the start and sort of acknowledges today, an interview with us sort of talked about actually how difficult he found that first hour of the mission and how, you know, they're trained at NASA to be pretty bulletproof and how he actually felt that he was left wanting by this emergency. So I've had a listen to the episodes. And I have to say that the first two episodes I've had the chance to hear. and compared to 13 minutes to land to the moon,

I felt that there was a bigger sense of danger as to what was happening here, and just the way how people dealt with it was completely different to how they dealt with the moon landing. Well, I think so, because for the moon landing, it's a little bit like sort of, you know, putting on the first night of a Broadway theatre production, having prepared for it for years and years and years,

you know what it's supposed to look like if it's going right, and then you sort of this headlong tumble into this thing that's actually quite brief. And, you know, you have unexpected events, but you manage them as they come up. So the jeopardy is very much there in the first landing in the moon, but it's very compact. It's very compressed into that 13-minute period. Whereas for this, of course, it's drawn out from the moment of the explosion until the moment they splash down in the ocean 87 hours later. and the sense of threat is palpable all the way through. And the astronauts who flew on it told us very clearly that they thought that this was a mission,

they may not themselves survive. And that's quite something when you think about it. You know, when you think about how people experience disasters, usually they're things that unpack over a few seconds, if not minutes. Whereas this is a catastrophe that spans many hours, you know, several days. in fact. And all of that time, there are moments

during the whole thing where you do have a tart moment. People in Mission Control and people on the vehicle itself would have had a moment to consider the possibility that they may not survive this accident.

So, you know, it has very different tone, very different feel to it. Because the explosion at the start knocks their confidence. You know, it definitely does injure some of the confidence

of a crew who think by this time they can probably do just about anything. And now here's a failure that's unanticipated that's threatening the lives of the crew and the safety of the vehicle itself. I find it very hard to imagine what it must be like to be sort of in this metal vessel

circling around the moon with little chance of survival. And you've actually got to speak to the astronauts about this. How did it affect them? How did they respond to the situation? Well, we spoke to astronauts who flew and also astronauts who are with them on the ground and supporting them from the ground. Because, of course, when you launch a space mission, there are astronauts who have jobs, duties on the ground to support the mission. So we were very lucky. In addition to Jim Lovell and Fred Hayes, who were on the mission itself, who were remarkably collected throughout the experience, but still, you know, under massively austere conditions.

and the great challenge, was supported brilliantly by people on the ground. So who kind of play this really interesting role? So these, the sort of capsule communicators, the astronauts who are able to communicate up to the spacecraft because no one else was allowed to. They sort of have to do this job of passing very technical information very accurately up to the spacecraft, but also have this role of trying to also mollify the crew, trying to calm, well, not calm, them down but sort of help them through what is going to be a very, very tough situation. And they do that with, you know, these injections of sort of humor here and there at times

it feels borderline inappropriate to be cracking a joke with the Apollo 13 crew, but they do it anyway. And there's a great example of that where as the spacecraft is approaching the earth, as the earth is getting larger in the windows, and mission control have not yet provided them with a set of instructions that are going to tell them how they should power up this dead command module. And Lovell calls down, Jim Lovell calls down quite angrily and sort of says, look, where's this checklist? Do we need it?

And I can't remember. I think it might have even been Joe Kerwin, another astronaut who said, I will have it to you by Saturday, Sunday at the latest. And of course, they were due to splash down on the Friday. And so, you know, you can hear this gentle chiding from the team in mission control, which is kind of necessary to take the edge of this thing. Because of course, Lovell and Hayes and Swigert, Jack Swigert, who's also in the module with them,

are constantly looking at their own mortality. You know, this is sort of 87-hour existential crisis if you allow it to be. And so that support is at least as important as the technical support. And so the technical support is coming in and explaining, it's explaining to them once they've worked out what's going on, how to get back home. And I guess they have to sort of explain

what the plan is for the return, what the chances are and everything like that. That must have been a lot for mission control to have to sort of work out what they were actually going to tell the crew of the Apollo 13. Well, I think they were very open and honest with the crew. In general, you don't tend to hold back information

like that from the crew. But the truth is that the outset after the explosion, and they don't know how they're going to rescue this crew. They don't know if they're going to keep them alive for a few hours. And then once they have succeeded in keeping them alive for a few hours, they're not sure how they're going to get them back to Earth. They're not sure when they're going to get back to Earth or where.

And everything is built around trying to do that and trying to get some control back. Because in the initial few hours, they think, well, it's going to take us a long time to get back to Earth. We're going to end up, the capsule is going to end up going into the Indian Ocean, where we have no U.S. Navy ships, and so we'll be relying upon, you know, the civilian ships from another country to hopefully go and pick them up. And none of that looked great. So they built this list of problems they had. How fast can we get them home? How can we make their resources last long enough to get them home? What do we need to do about their life support systems, keep them patched up? And it goes on and on and on. And once they've drawn that list up, they just

take it on and solve them one at a time, the highest priority first and the lowest priority last, and they keep moving and moving and moving. And to me, there was something familiar in that, in the way that NASA had got to the moon. In the first series, I remember someone saying, you know, we just kept, I think it was Krantz, Gene Krantz himself said, you know, we kept working and working and working until we got to the moon surface. And in some ways, this is exactly what they do here for Apollo 13. they keep working and working and working and working.

But this time not across a few tens of thousands of feet from the lunar orbit onto the surface, but across hundreds and thousands of miles. Wow. And I guess was it completely team effort or were there any individual moments of brilliance that sort of solved a critical puzzle, both from mission control and on board the Apollo 13?

Well, a puzzle this complex cannot be solved by any one person on their own. There was no one there. There were many brilliant people there, but no one brilliant enough to solve this problem on their own. And so as the accident unfolds, they start calling up more and more people to draw in more and more help from around the country. And I always have this picture in my head of this network of telephone lines sort of creeping across the United States and pulling in not just people at NASA. but people who built the vehicles, people who manufactured equipment for it,

and everyone's there. Everyone's kind of on call to try and support this mission. And we know now that the crew all landed, you know, they returned back to Earth safe and, well, safe and as well as you can be after such an instant. What was the response after that? How did the world respond to what happened and how did it unfurl them in the public's eye?

Well, I mean, it was, interestingly, I mean, it was one of those stories that news gathering organizations love in the story of, you know, recovery from heroic failure in a heroic way. But actually, again, what a lot of them said to me, the flight controllers and the astronauts said that actually this story remained reasonably little known until the film was made in 1995. And what we wanted to do to expand upon that was to move beyond the narrative itself and just the story, telling the story, but also to ask that question about what had happened, how it had happened, who had made it happen. And so I think that that for us was the important part. what the astronauts and the flight controllers would tell you was that for a while there was a lot of hoopla about the fact that they'd been to the moon and there'd been this explosion.

But again, that kind of attention waned for quite some time until someone saw fit to make a moving. Yeah, it seems that something, you know, as big as that after all of the space race that came before it, then this catastrophe that occurred, it feels like that should have more of a significant impact over the course of space exploration in general? Well, I think NASA learned an awful lot from it.

I think that they, you know, when you read, the important thing about an organization is in the wake of catastrophe like this, you have to be able to grow a little bit. You have to be able to learn from your mistakes and move forwards. And that's exactly what NASA do. And of course, the next time they launch a vehicle, it's relatively shortly after that. Apollo 14, I think, is launching not that long after.

Apollo 13, but they've revamped the vehicles. They've identified some of the problems they had with Apollo 13, and they've made appropriate corrections to the way that the future vehicles are engineered so that those problems don't arise again. And then I guess that happened continually for the rest of the Apollo missions. Well, it's happened through the entire history of human spaceflight. And indeed, broadly speaking, in most high-risk endeavors, that's what people do. They experience these catastrophes.

They learn the hard lessons that can be learned from that. And if they're smart, they implement mechanisms, which means that the same mistakes aren't made in the future. I guess throughout history, we've seen that sort of thing happen with all great exploratory missions, whether it be on Earth or in space. Yes, but very often you see in the face of something like that is people learn lessons and then forget them

and then are doomed to repeating that again. So NASA, at least at that time, But probably today as well, actually, is quite an impressive learning culture, and it's quite good at gathering information and quite good at objectively analyzing it. So do you think that something like this couldn't happen again or is less likely? Well, space, you know, human spaceflight in particular, but spaceflight in general requires the release of massive, massive amounts of energy. You know, these rockets, when you see them standing on the pad have the nuclear, have the explosive. of capacity of small nuclear weapons and making all of the things that need to work

work reliably in concert for every second of that mission is a huge feat. So could a could a human space exploration mission experience a failure of the same severity as Apollo 13 now today? Yes, it could because spaceflight is not routine.

Spaceflight is not without risk and actually the future is about recognizing that yes, you have these very highly trained organizations who can deal with these things, but also that, you know, you cannot eliminate all risk. And this is, you know, when people talk about what the future of human space feels like, you know, one of the biggest obstacles is getting society to once again accept that there can be substantial risks for an endeavor. And, you know, I'm not sure whether people are, you know, I'm not sure whether people have the same stomach for that. In the 1970s and the 1960s, I'm amazed at what the American public were willing to tolerate in terms of risk to their astronauts. And, you know, it's interesting

there with a weird like that today. I guess it sort of highlights with, you know, the advent of us trying to go further into space and then also, you know, space tourism, people going up who aren't, you know, astronauts in a traditional sense. You know, I guess there's something that we could all learn from Apollo 13 in the grand scheme of our... our aspirations out there in space? Well, certainly for me, the message of Apollo 11 was very clear that they, you know, if you could take a human being, you could fire them off the surface of the earth at 25,000 miles an hour and land them on the moon, then anything in this life must be possible.

And then the lesson you learn from Apollo 13 is that even in the face of something that overwhelmingly looks like it cannot be beaten, that you cannot succeed, that this must be certain failure with the certainty of death lying on the end of it, that actually if you are lucky and if you can focus your efforts and if you can stop yourself disintegrating in the decisive moment, then you might just might have a chance of fighting your way back for survival. But that takes dedication and application in every second of a mission that is. is going to be another 87 hours long, and that, you know, certainly the way the people who spoke to talks about it proved, proved exhausting.

That was Kevin Fong, talking about season two of his award-winning show 13 Minutes to the Moon, which you can download wherever you listen to your podcasts. While you're there, please be a star and give our show a rating or review if you liked it. The new issue of BBC Science Focus is out now, where we find out why social media makes so angry and what you can do about it. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. We're 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 app store.

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