Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Epic Spaceman: Making cosmic scale human

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

When his filmmaking career stalled during the pandemic, Toby Lockerbie turned to the one place that had never stopped inspiring him: the Universe. With no background in visual effects, he taught himself the tools needed to transform complex space science into cinematic stories using everyday objects and beautifully crafted visuals to make the Cosmos feel human. His channel, Epic Spaceman, now reaches millions and has earned multiple Webby Awards for its innovative approach to visualizing scale, awe, and accessible science. This week on Planetary Radio, Toby joins host Sarah Al-Ahmed to discuss the creation of Epic Spaceman, how visual metaphors can change how we understand the Universe, and why awe remains one of the most powerful tools for science communication. Then we welcome Bruce Betts back for What’s Up, where we reflect on the end of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Akatsuki mission to Venus. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2025-epic-spacemanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Meet Epic Spaceman. This week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah al-Ahmad of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. When difficult times stifled his career, British filmmaker and cinematographer Toby Locker didn't give up. He looked up. His four-time Webby Award-winning YouTube channel, Epic Space Man, now reaches millions,

blending art and science to remind us how beautiful the universe really is, and that anyone can learn to share that beauty, too. We'll talk about how passion can turn adversity into creativity, and why sharing the story of space matters more than ever. Then we'll wrap up with Bruce Betz, our chief scientist, and what's up, as we mark the end of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsky Mission to V. If you love planetary radio and want to stay informed about the latest discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform.

By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it. For many of us who love space, there's a moment when curiosity turns into creation. That can mean making art and music or volunteering to share your telescope views with others, even voicing a podcast. podcast, or in the case of Toby Lockerbie, starting a YouTube channel. Toby found that moment during the uncertainty of the COVID lockdown. In 2021, after 10 years as a photographer and filmmaker, he decided to pursue a new project, sharing space with people around the world. Toby was already a professional in film, but no one can know everything. He had zero experience in visual effects, Yet he decided to teach himself how to build the universe from scratch one render at a time.

The result was Epic Spaceman, a cinematic YouTube channel that turns physics and astronomy into breathtaking visual stories. Toby even places himself in the videos as a digital astronaut. You can see his face beneath the helmet, guiding viewers through vast cosmic scenes and giving a human context to the scale of it all. What began as a personal experiment quickly grew into a global community. In 2025, Toby's work was recognized with four Webby Awards, more than any other individual this year, honoring his outstanding science storytelling and visual artistry. Toby's videos have earned millions of views and a place among today's most inspiring science creators. But what makes his work special isn't just the visuals.

It's the invitation. He uses free, open tools and tells everyone what he uses to make his videos, reminding people everywhere that science communication isn't just for scientists and filmmakers. On a planet connected by online communities, it's for anyone with a spark of curiosity and the patience to learn new skills. And beyond the special effects, there's a message at the heart of Toby's work that awe is worth pursuing and that sharing it can change how we see each other and the world around us. It's for that reason that the planetary society reached out to Toby and asked if we could sponsor some of his work.

Here's my conversation with Toby Lockerbie, the one-person team behind Epic Space Man. Hey, Toby, thanks for joining me. Hello, thank you. Yeah, lovely to be here. As someone who loves pretty space videos, can I just say well done? Wow.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. I sort of come from a cinematography background, there's perhaps, I think, an opportunity to have more sort of beautiful cinematography and sort of science content and, you know, the mixture of art and science is very much, you know, has a good history and should be embraced in as many areas as possible. So with each one, I try and kind of improve my skills and make my videos, you know, a bit better, improve the VFX in each one as I learn them myself. So, yeah. I think that's part of what's so impressive about it, right? You have

this history and photography and cinematography, but when you began this journey, you didn't have any VFX experience at all. Now, look what you're producing. I mean, that's quite a journey. Yeah, thank you. It's slightly unexpected. Before I made the channel, the YouTube channel, I was basically a sort of filmmaker, independent filmmaker videographer over in the UK. And I kind of prided myself on being a sort of one-man band that could act like a small production company and I did a lot of a variety of different shooting for a variety of different people and the only thing I couldn't do was VFX and there's a reason for that. It's quite hard to do and it takes you a while to learn and I yeah the only real reason I kind of had the time to do that

was because of COVID, because of lockdown in the UK, and my work just basically disappearing for a year. And so I had to find an opportunity to do something, to, you know, it was either that or sort of despair, I guess. And so I needed an outlet, so I needed to do something positive. And the upside for me was that even if I couldn't make this channel work, I would learn this new skill and I'd be able to, in the future, do videos involving VFX. So, yeah, I started teaching myself VFX. I got about halfway through one tutorial and I was like, is this moving too slowly for me? I need to actually start making my first video. And so I kind of try to run before I could walk and just started making the first video. And then I just basically didn't

release it until I was happy with it. So I spent about a year doing one video, which is not normally how you do YouTube channels. Normally, you know, you're supposed to crank them out pretty quickly. But I took a slightly different approach. I mean, honestly, you know, everyone gets stuck on that first blender donut. I did it too. Yeah, that's the one. It's a really interesting approach because I've seen so many people who have these beautiful ideas

and they get kind of bogged down in the tutorial part of the process and they lose their vision. And so I kind of love that you took that chance after beginning and getting the initial skills to just jump right into the project that you loved in order to motivate yourself to keep going. Yeah, I think, I mean, I would recommend it to most people. I think trying to do a similar thing to me. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted my video to be in. I had a very clear project in mind. So, you know, that is a big part of it. But I do think it's, you know, if you have a passion,

for something, the thing that will get you through it is enjoying the process. And so if you have a very specific end goal in mind and you know what that looks like and every time you work on it, you're getting closer, very slightly closer, it will motivate you to keep learning. But yeah, I would recommend just, yeah, try and run before you can walk and just go for it. And if you fail, you know, the wonderful thing with the blender, you know, this free 3D software is because it's free, because it's such a sort of great company, it's got such a wonderful community that literally any problem you will have in your beginner stages is one quick search away because there are a hundred people who've faced that same challenge.

And there's other sort of industry software that's potentially better. Most of them kind of specialize in different areas. Like, there's one called Houdini that kind of specializes in simulations and, and it's becoming, you know, like an industry with sort of powerhouse. The blender's a bit of a sort of jack of all trades. And you can, you know, there was an Oscar winning film was made with it recently. Flow, you can do anything if you sort of set your mind to it and you do enough Google searches.

I was on a similar process, right? I mean, it's not like I got into video and audio editing, you know, in astrophysics, this was something that just happened when I started working with free tools. So I used Blender and I used DaVinci Resolve and a lot of the same tools that you use. And I really appreciate that in the description under your videos, you add all the software and the hardware and the links to everything along the way. And I think it makes it a lot more accessible because there are so many people that are such wonderful, passionate science educators, but they just don't know how to turn that dream

into reality and seeing you on this journey and sharing the tools along the way I think makes it a lot more approachable. Yeah, thank you. I think it's difficult if you're a science communicator or you want to become science communicator. There's just a lot out there. It's quite daunting to be like, okay, I'm going to research how to become a video editor because you will be overwhelmed by the information out there. It's a lot for anyone trying to embark on like a different career or to try and do something different. And I'm happy to sort of help explain how I make things. You could have used these skills to go a million different directions. Why was it specifically educational animations about space that you wanted to make your passion project? I asked myself,

this was, you know, going back to COVID and I was going to start this channel. I basically asked myself, if I could make a video about anything in the world, you know, if I can make a channel about anything in the world, you know, what would it be? I sort of gave myself a, you know, there is no budget to this. It can be anything. It can be impossible. It could be something nobody's done before. You know, whatever it is. Really try to ask myself this question. And, you know, this is what I came up with making something that could help people, something that was that I found important, something that has been in my life in the past. You know, I've had very few like wow moments in my life. I think a lot of us hope to find awe and wonder in our lives. In everyday

life, we're also busy. We've also got so much going on. It's kind of hard to stumble across and hard to find. And a lot of the times I have found it have been, you know, learning about physics, learning about the universe, learning about what's out there. I've read a couple of, you know, wonderful books that have completely blown my mind. One of my favorite books is a brief history of nearly everything. I always get that title wrong, but I think that's correct. There's like four books with very similar titles. They all use different adjectives. But I think a brief history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson, I think it's a wonderful science book. And he has such a good kind of layman's perspective on things. And he describes things really

well, uses really good metaphors, and yeah, so many parts of it blew me away. And if I could make anything, if, you know, there was no limit, there was no budget, I would try and make a sort of video version of that. So I made the decision. I thought, right, you know, doing something on the university, something on physics, on scale, on understanding the world better. That was kind of my decision. I sort of worked on what I wanted it to be called. And I kind of had to think about how I would enjoy that being sort of presented to me. And so I wanted like a protagonist. I wanted a narrator that you could see. I got myself in the role because I was the only person available. And yeah, I just started teaching myself FFX that I could create this sort of science

superhero who would travel around and explain atoms or explain black holes. Generally, to not super high level, everything that I've done so far has been relatively bulk standard physics, but there's so much wonder in just a rough understanding of the world, a rough understanding of what's out there in the universe. And there's so many amazing numbers that lots of people know, but can't comprehend, they're too big, and there's a lot of wonder in many numbers that we hear about, whether that's how many galaxies there are in the universe or stars in the Milky Way or whatever it is. And I particularly enjoy trying to use sort of visual metaphors to show people

some of this sort of craziness and some of this wonder that's out there. And then the sort of cinematography comes in, I think about like, how would this be really beautiful? You know, how would this be really memorable? How would an average person be able to connect with this? What metaphor should I use? What object should I use for them to compare it to that they will have experienced in everyday life? This is why I always seem to put food in my videos because I figure everyone knows how big stereo is and experience it quite regularly and, you know, things like that. But really, though, it's so hard to grapple with the scale of these things and to visualize these numbers, right? And so giving people a visual, something that's in their everyday life that they can compare it to, is probably one of the most profound ways to explain it to people.

Otherwise, it's just large numbers, and they're so far beyond our human experience that it's almost impossible to fully visualize what it means. Yeah, I'm absolutely with you. I think even if everyone in the world knew all the numbers for all the sizes of things, it wouldn't really change anything. The average person, I think, has absolutely no idea how big the solar system is. It's so ridiculously huge. And you could tell them the number in whatever unit you wanted, you know, percentage of a light year or in kilometers or miles over in America.

You could say it in miles. it really wouldn't make any difference whatsoever. People would still have no idea how big that was. I mean, I think it's much more important that people have a rough grasp of the scale than actually know the numbers. You know, a lot of our pictures of the solar system, or when I say a lot, basically every picture

you'll ever find of the solar system is so wildly kind of inaccurate in terms of scale because you can't put these things on a piece of paper or in a book or on a poster. And so there's a lot of, not sort of intentional misinformation, but there's a lot of misunderstanding out there about how far away the stars are, for instance, or, you know, how big the galaxy is, or things like that. I think one of my first videos I wanted to talk about the Milky Way, and I asked a few

friends this, people who are, you know, pretty well educated. And the question I always asked was, what's the name of the galaxy we live in? And they all said the Milky Way. And then I say, what's the name of that thing that stretches across the sky? And then they look at me like they're about to say the Milky Way. And then they think, oh, no, hang on, that can't be right. And you realize that they've never kind of understood the connection. And so that was just, you know, one of the things I wanted to cover in in a video very briefly, that, you know, we're inside that thing that we see.

And just that kind of slight mental leap that we all. have to take when that's sort of explained to us or shown to us that the Milky Way that we see is something we're inside and the stars we see are just our local neighbours. So yeah, I really kind of enjoy trying to find sort of visual metaphors and because these are really like profound and wonderful things that I would just love more people to understand. I want it to be as accessible as possible. I don't need to do any sort of cutting-edge science. There's so much of science and the universe and the world under microscopes and behind telescopes that's so beautiful and profound and wonderful. And 99.9% of the population knows very little about it and has perhaps been intimidated and scared off by science.

So if I can use cinematography and videos and things that can help make things go viral by kind of making them, I don't know what the word is, slightly wacky. silly sometimes, then, you know, that's the best idea I could come up with to make a video about. Yeah, I think for a lot of the time in my younger years, I was really trying to grapple with this idea of like, why don't people care about space? Why don't they know these things, right? And when I was younger, it made me kind of upset, almost as if it was a kind of intellectual laziness that people just didn't think about it. But then I got older and I started having conversations with people. And I realized what a profound privileges it is to not only have access to this information, but to be in a headspace where I can begin to think about it and re-contextualize

my life within that. And so much of that for me was about the beautiful images from Voyager when I was a kid and watching Cosmos and things like that. And taking that into the modern age and making these beautiful visualizations, I think, is a wonderful way to give that access to people. because I've seen people's lives completely upended or even saved by simple space conversations that re-contextualize themselves. Have you had interactions with your fans where they've said these kinds of things to you? I think the thing that surprised me the most, I mean, my channel has blown up beyond my wildest dreams, I suppose. I sort of hoped it might get popular and it really has. And I'm so happy and thankful that people are really enjoying.

it. But from the beginning, I sort of started actually, because I only had one video on YouTube, YouTube doesn't do anything if you have one video. You know, there's probably millions of channels on YouTube. And so obviously everyone starts with one video and YouTube is not really going to share your single video too much. And so the first place I really put it was Reddit actually on our space there. And I was 100% set on being, you know, decimated. My first video was about how I would visualize the universe, you know, when you think of the universe in your head, you know, when you think of a galaxy or a planet or a star, you have

an automatic visual. But when you think of the universe, which is everything, there isn't, at least in my head, there's a sort of gaping void there. You know, there isn't really, or at least there wasn't really an obvious visual. And so my first video was like, what does the universe look like? You know, how should you visualize it? What should look like? And I sort of conclude that the best way to think of the universe is to picture the local group

and our local group of galaxies. It's like a good snapshot of what the universe looks like. And so I was trying to show what the local group looks like, basically. And I turned it into cereal and kind of had these bits of cereal floating around. And I was set on making everything as accurate as possible. So all the bits of cereal are scaled perfectly to all the, you know, the dwarf galaxies around, floating around. But I was, you know, I was very much set on people saying, you made this piece of cereal too big or, you know, you got this name for this dwarf galaxy wrong or, you know, just sort of tearing anything apart. And the visuals, you know, this was my first time making a video with VFX.

So some shots look really good. Some shots look not really good at all. But I just received the support, basically. Every time I put them on in places that I perhaps wouldn't expect support from TikTok to Reddit to YouTube, I just receive people being so happy and thankful that someone is making the kind of videos that you discussed before that have perhaps profoundly affected them previously,

like Cosmos or something like that and it's really, you know, profoundly affects me and massively motivates me to keep putting in the same effort that I put into that first video, which, you know, admittedly took me, took me about a year to make. I have been making them slightly faster, but kind of whenever I get better at making them, I sort of just expand my expectations of how good they look and things like that. So they still do take me a long time many months each. And yeah, I, it's kind of wonderfully supportive has been the experience that I perceive from other people. Yeah, crazy. This is the internet we're talking about, you know. I mean, really though, I mean, Reddit, one of the best places on the internet. I really love

that the community is self-filtering by upvoting and downvoting. So it's much different experience from all of the other places on social media. So going to Reddit was so glover and validating. I've had that same experience there. Whenever I've talked to friends who aren't on Reddit about Reddit, they have this strange perception of it, but I'm on Reddit all the time. I love it. I think they've got, they're the only social media that I think has found a good way to sort of filter out the worst of humanity.

By having, and it's just so simple, it's self-regulation, you don't necessarily need a vast number of censoring bots or whatever that are monitoring everything and tweaking everything. Most social media works on basically promoting whatever keeps you on the channel. And so whatever it is, if it makes you angry, if it makes you hateful, if it keeps you watching, then that's great because then you watch more adverts. So that's generally how sort of social media works. and Reddit, I think, sort of managed to find a formula where people spend a lot of time on it for a different reason

and it's because the information quality is relatively high and the sort of top comments are usually quite funny and quite informative. Whenever there's a good news story on there, if it's a sort of science news story, Reddit's interesting because you still need a sort of enough people to have looked at it to get good information and good comments but if it's if it's a big news story you know it will it will have passed through millions of eyes and there will be an expert in whatever that is is talking about and you know you don't get that

from the news you don't get that from most social media I think it's a really cool community at this point I mean you've already gone over half a million followers each one of your videos gets millions and millions of views and you won four webbies this year. So clearly, that old adage that sometimes less is more is true in this case. Sometimes you don't have to be pumping out content every single day. It's enough to just really focus in on getting something right and putting it out to the audience that matches your vision because it's working. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I could have predicted that success. It's like I was saying, it's kind of, no one does. Beyond my world of streams thing.

it could be so well appreciated. And yeah, I was a bit worried that there wouldn't be enough sort of people watching it. But going back to Reddit again briefly, I looked at R-space and how many people are in that community. And I looked at how many people were in the biggest sort of fictional communities on Reddit. And, you know, Reddit has the largest online communities in the world. So if you're a fan of, you know, whatever it is, Star Wars, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, if you're a fan of those things, then those are the biggest communities for you. And so I added up the number of, and obviously there'll be, some people will be in more than one, but I added up the number of people that are on Lord of the Rings, Marvel, Star Wars, a couple of others. And adding them all up together was less than the ones that are on space, you know. And so I sort of hoped, I should say I knew, but I feel like there's so much more support for space and education and science than is generally portrayed in media or generally, you know, that people are given access to. I guess they're underserved is sort of what I feel like.

They're underserved in so many different ways. And I think the reason big franchises like Marvel and Star Wars do so well, particularly ones like that, is because there is this internal thing within many of us that we want to see science, we want to see space. And so the only way we're getting it at the moment really is science fiction, which is wonderful. You know, I love science fiction, but I feel like there's a reason, and it's because we also want the science.

It's not just the viction that we like. We love the space, the adventure, the into the unknown, the understanding the world around us and exploring it. And I feel like the average person who loves that is underserved in terms of options and availability of documentaries and entertaining documentaries and TV shows that aren't just fictional. Yeah, I agree. It's probably why I get so absolutely fired up when I start talking about the TV shows and movies that I love with my friends because it's one of the only ways that we have to experience space.

And therefore, I'm sitting here having arguments about the way that this spaceship works in this particular Star Wars movie or whether or not that representation of a black hole is accurate. When really, you know, I should be able to suspend my disbelief for two seconds and enjoy those things. But it's because of this lack of content for the things that I'm wanting. We'll be right back with the rest of my interview with Toby Lockerbie after the short break. Hi, I'm Kate Howells, public education specialist for the Planetary Society. It's time to celebrate the most inspiring space moments and missions of 2025. Every year, we invite space fans around the world to help decide the Planetary Society's Best of the Year awards, honoring the discoveries, missions, and images that made us all look up in wonder.

Now, it's time to pick your favorites from 2025. From daring new spacecraft to breathtaking cosmic images, your votes help celebrate the people and projects, pushing the boundaries of exploration. Cast your vote today at planetary.org slash best of 2025. That's planetary.org slash best of 2025. I love that you've inserted yourself into these videos as a character unto yourself. And for the longest time, I was trying to figure out how you were doing this, because you represent yourself as an act. astronaut, you know, the epic space man within this universe. And I was wondering initially if it was just you were animating the body and using some kind of like, you know, motion capture

for the face. But as I was watching this longer, I realized you have a whole motion capture suit. At what point in your process did you decide to get that motion capture suit and go for that extent of work? That is a whole other level of learning. My first video, I basically sort of stand still like a statue pretty much and my face doesn't really move either because I didn't really have a solution to making my face move around, let alone my body. I think I hand animated some slight movement a couple of times which for anyone who knows about VFX knows that hand animating a human is not fun. For people who don't know VFX, it's just a bit like you know, Wallace and Grommett having an actual model of something and you just move a finger

here, then move a hand there and, you know, stuff like that. So it's not very fun. It doesn't work very well, doesn't look very good. And so I kind of bit the bullet and got a low to medium end motion capture suit. It's kind of the only affordable one for an indie developer, indie filmmaker from a company called Rococo. And that was basically, that just gave some life to my avatar, my narrator and it meant I could sort of move around a little bit

but because I'm just sort of standing talking to the camera I don't really need to do too much and so it just adds a little bit of sort of micro movements that make a human being look realistic but yeah it was a bit of a step up to get a motion capture suit I did feel a bit

ridiculous you know standing in my office in a motion capture suit making the next video when I had, I think I had 500 subscribers after a few months of my first video. And so there I am betting on the future of this channel with a motion capture suit. I feel like the most engaging thing you can see in a video is like a human face. And if you're going to understand the black hole, you've got to start with someone's face, which is a pretty strange sentence.

But most videos about the universe are kind of in the cold blackness of space and there's an object in there. And you have no sense of scale and it's very hard to relate it to your everyday life when you're worried about, you know, whatever else is going. Worried about paying the rent or, you know, whatever else is going on in your life. And you're looking at just blackness and some swirly thing out there. And so I knew from the beginning that if I really want to engage people in a similar way to Cosmos, you know, I needed a character who was Carl Sagan walking on a beach describing something interesting.

And I think you really do need a sort of human connection to understand something that's cosmic. You need someone to kind of draw you through it. And also to provide a sense of scale, it's very useful to have a human being. of kind of an unknown proportion to be next to things when you're shrinking and growing and making things different sizes. And it just grounds everything in reality and grounds everything in the worlds that we all live in. And so I knew that from the very beginning that I needed a person in the videos.

And so I've kind of, yeah, the body is control with motion capture. And then the face, I've done it in different ways. I don't actually motion capture my face. I just use footage of my face. So I film myself. I actually don't wear a motion capture suit now. I've moved on to a different system that uses cameras that sort of track my movements,

multiple cameras and different corners of my office. And I film my face and I project my face onto a 3D model of my face. And that gives me the ability to, make something that looks just like me. I've only done this since the last video. So if you could just go two videos back, my face looks a bit weird because I used a slightly different projection system

and I'm slightly in the Uncanny Valley a little bit. But since my last video, I'm kind of out of the Uncanny Valley again and it actually looks like me. But over the last year, you've started kind of working with the Planetary Society and putting some little embedded ads for organization into your movies. How did you end up working with us? And why are we an organization that you decided was worth sharing the message of in the middle of your videos?

Well, I feel like I have an obligation to find a good partner that sort of represents the kind of values of truth and science and honesty and stuff like that. I'm unusually attached to my videos and I want someone to represent that sort of community well. and when the Plancho Society got in contact, I was like, you know, I didn't, I barely believed it, you know, that a non-profit, partly founded by Carl Sagan would be interested in sponsoring one of my videos, like my answer was, you know, of course, yes, regardless of what any offer would be from other people. My answer would always be yes, it's the Plantry Society. So, yeah, it's been wonderful to have you on the last. couple videos. I'm so, so proud that you'd get in contact in the first place and ask, let alone be on it. It's great. I support what you guys do. I think you're very important part of, you know, science and space advocacy. Yeah, it's wonderful. Very happy. Honestly, thank you from us. I mean, as much as it blows your mind, like your work,

especially as a one-person team, it's just such a beautiful example of what space fans can accomplish when they're passionate enough, when an artist invests enough time. And your community is so motivated and so passionate about not just loving space, but engaging with it and doing something about it. So I think it's a very nice kind of symbiotic relationship, right? Especially when you can make videos about, say, the search for life. I loved your most recent video. It was also your longest video.

For people who haven't seen it yet, and I'll link to this video on the webpage for this episode of Planetary Radio. You try to explain how many habitable worlds are inside of our galaxy by putting marbles in the Colosseum in Rome. And what a stunning visual. That is absolutely, even as someone who works with the numbers and fundamentally understands, it comes back to that idea that when you have a scale representation,

you can really understand, it completely re-contextualizes everything. Yeah, that was, the marbles in the Coliseum is obviously the wacky idea. that entices people into watching the video. And, you know, it sounds a bit crazy, but I, you know, I spent a while thinking about how to visualize how many, because the Kepler Space Telescope gave some incredible sort of profound information that basically nobody in the world knows anything about.

And there's so much, yeah, it's just so incredible how, many planets there might be in the habitable zone, so with the potential for water on the surface. Now, there are lots of caveats to that, obviously, there's lots of, a lot of them are red dwarfs, and they face problems being so close to the sun, they're sort of, you know, bombarded by energy, they're kind of perhaps they're not able to, even though they might, their surface This might be at a temperature where the liquid water could exist at. They may have no atmosphere. It might be impossible.

But I try to sort of present the raw numbers in a way that's understandable by putting the marbles in the Coliseum and just sort of seeing how far they would go, how high up that pile would be, because it's very marbles in a jar, marbles in your hand, marbles on the floor. A lot of people have kind of experienced that kind of scale. Most people haven't been to the Coliseum, but if I can show enough images of it, I show enough video footage I can give with enough scale of reference. And again, this is where, you know, like a protagonist comes in standing in the middle of the arena like Russell Crow.

That was me just, basically, it's just me living my gladiator dreams, standing inside the Coliseum. Then you can kind of contextualize it. You can get to grips with how big that number is. And then I kind of, then I talk about the caveats, I talk about the red dwarfs and what might make life less likely in those habit of worlds. But then I also talk about the things that will actually make things more likely as well and how some planets, some moons, wouldn't even make it into this list, but could have life on. And I think for me, at least, making it and researching it. Because, you know, I go into all these things as a bit like Bill Bryson as a kind of, my education is not in astrophysics. I have a computer engineering degree.

And the important thing for me is to get the numbers right and get the science right. And so I have to a lot of research on all the topics, as does Bill Bryson and he needs to talk to the right people to be able to come up with the right analogies to explain to a layperson like himself. and I feel like an advantage I have in some regards is that I'm not an astrophysicist and I can perhaps have a sort of slightly better grasp of what a less educated person will connect with than someone who is really well educated on the subject and perhaps might have a few misconceptions about what the average person knows about things. And so, yeah, I spent a lot of time. I'm researching the possibilities of life on all these planets that might be, well, that are in the habitable zone based on, you know, Kepler's numbers and statistics working off that.

And, yeah, I think the big takeaway for me is that I think it's, it's very difficult to talk about alien life in a scientific way because there are no points of data on it. you know, a good scientist will be like, well, we don't know anything, so we can't extrapolate. But as I'm not a scientist, I feel like I can be a little bit looser with that. And even then, I don't really say, I believe this and I believe that. I still try and just present the data. But speaking just for myself and not as Epic Space Man or as someone kind of presenting a sort of nonpartisan video about the information, I sort of feel like I just want to get inside. I want to get inside Europa. And if we can understand planetary science, planetary weather, you know, the

composition of atmospheres of the planets in our solar system, we don't, we should be building, you know, bigger telescopes that have the resolution to be able to look at the atmospheres in exoplanets. But there's so much information. on our back doorstep, is that the right word, in our backyards? But we can do it. We have proven we can get, we can send probes to planets and our solar system. We can get a lot of information from them. One of the craziest bits of information was that there is a chance, however small,

that there's life in Venus's atmosphere, which I would have thought would be one of the last places, you know, life might be able to exist. But in, you know, in the upper atmosphere, I can't remember how high off the world. the surface, but like a 50 kilometers off the surface or something, the pressure is like one bar and the temperature is between like 35 and 45 degrees Celsius or something like that. I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit. Apologies. We have so much information kind of so close to us that I wish we were borrowing under

Europa's icy surface right now, but these things take time. I do understand. Time and investment. I mean, you point out in that video, that's a... Society spends more money on pet costumes every year than the entire 10-year budget of the Kepler mission. And that's part of why I'm so passionate about talking about these things, because what's holding us back isn't our capability. It's our investment and willingness to put the money and the people behind making these discoveries. It's all right there just waiting for us.

Yeah, that was kind of, in a way, that's actually the conclusion of my video, really. I sort of talk about it, I talk about where life might be, I talk about how we might be underestimating how much life there might be and kind of try to give scientific and statistical reasons for that. But also, the conclusion is, you know, we can build these telescopes and we can find the stuff out and we can visit these moons and we can go under the surface and we can find what's in there. And every time we try and do something like this, we tend to increase.

the expectations and the numbers, and if we did do that, it wouldn't surprise me that those expectations and those numbers increase again and again. But we've got to, you've got to pay for it. And we, as a society, the more we talk about it, the more we clamour for it, the more it's on our radar, the more it becomes household conversations, the more pressure we put on politicians on either side of the pond, I fully accept that, you know, the European Space Agency isn't doing as much as NASA. They're still doing some really interesting, cool stuff,

but I would, you know, love to live in a world where we were funding space. I mean, I'd love to live in a world where funding science in all sorts of different ways, better than we are. But I think space is a kind of a gateway science to, you know, people interested in STEM, and interested in getting into science and engineering in lots of different ways. When you lead the world in technology and exploration beyond earth, you become a hub of expertise for science.

And I hope America can continue with that. And we certainly look up to America and NASA speaking on behalf of the rest of the world here. It's quite big on my shoulders there. I would love for Europe to do more as well and the rest of the world. I would love to see much more collaboration between different continents as well on space and space exploration and investment into telescopes. And I know there is a lot already, but like you said, we spend more on pet costumes just as a society than we did on Kepler's 10-year mission, which is slightly disturbing. And like I say in a video, I have nothing against pet costumes. And that's totally fine, a legitimate.

If you want to, you know, dress your cat up, you know, that's wonderful. But I think we also, we can afford to do some crazy stuff in the solar system. Enceladus, Europa are like two of the ones that I particularly think of fruitful expeditions. I mentioned in the video, going to Mars is certainly profound and wonderful and interesting. but it's this is as in sending people there it is also very expensive and very difficult and I think we still have a lot of so much we can learn from sending robots and probes to places having a robot car or mars drilling and finding stuff out is pretty incredible I think equally if you can market it well and promote it well this sounds

really weird. But if you can have really good videos and photos, because the thing, people care about Mars because of the, really, because of the curiosity, you know, because of curiosity and because the stuff we put on there, it takes videos and takes pictures and you can see it. People can see it. You can have a news report. You know, every time someone talks about something on Mars, there will be someone in a news station and behind them will be something like, one of the rovers and you'll be able to see mars and part of the reason i make my videos is because i want to connect with people visually on topics that are difficult and you need that stuff you need so much multimedia to convince people that something is a good idea and something is

impressive and if we can get something to somewhere like europa and be on an ice moon you know have some sort of something on the surface of europa and you can you can see a due Jupiter rise, you know, or, you know, whatever it is. That image, that video, that 360 image, there's one of the other missions is sending a mini helicopter to, I don't know if it's Titan or something like that. Dragonfly to Titan. Yeah, I mean, the footage from that, can you imagine? I mean, so many people love science fiction and you can give them something that science fiction except it's real

so it's even better and that's kind of within our fingertips if we invest in it for like a small percentage of a manned mission to Mars which I also fully support but we

have so many cool destinations in the solar system to send stuff to stuff in inverted commas we just kind of need to get on with it and that requires advocacy that requires pressure on politicians that requires people talking about it

Yeah, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, but yeah, it's really important. Well, it's one more reason why making these kinds of videos and making it more accessible to people around the world is going to help us advance these causes, right? You never know who you might inspire, who might go out there and advocate or go into this kind of science themselves. And as with large numbers, because your audience is so huge, there's no way for you to ever really know how many people you've inspired through your work, right? similarly here at the Planetary Society. So I just kind of keep that in my heart, that if we keep communicating about these things,

ultimately that means someday we're going to see those visions of Titan and we're going to see people walking around in other worlds. I think so. Yeah. I mean, like you say, I don't know if I've inspired anyone. I wouldn't know what any numbers were. All we can do is do our best, you know, and try and be a positive force in the universe.

Well, thanks for doing what you're doing and sharing this with people. And for the amazing amount of effort it has taken to do it. I'm absolutely in awe. You did it right, but in awe of what you've accomplished. So thanks for doing what you do and for taking the time to share it with us here on our show. Thank you. That's very kind. I really appreciate it.

Toby mentioned in our conversation how excited he is about the prospect of learning more about potential conditions for life on other worlds. like Venus. And today we're saying goodbye to the last ongoing mission that's studying that planet. Japan's Akatsky spacecraft, launched by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency in 2010, spent more than a decade orbiting Venus. It studied its mysterious atmosphere with its thick clouds and powerful winds. After a heroic recovery from a failed orbital insertion, which we'll talk about more in a moment, Akatski became a long-term explorer of Earth's twin, giving us our best,

look yet at that planet's turbulent weather and even possible lightning. Now, as Jaxa marks the end of the mission, Venus waits once again for its next visitor. Here's Dr. Bruce Betts, our chief scientist for what's up. Hey, Bruce. Hello, sir. Okay, so we haven't had a chance to talk about this, but this actually happened a little while ago, actually, the end of the Japanese Akatsky mission. I only just heard about this fairly recently. I think it was in September that they declared it officially dead. Yeah. Yeah, they lost contact a few months before that and then declared it dead, as you say. But they've been in orbit taking data for many years, and it was, Akatsuki was basically in the end a successful study of the Venus atmosphere, lots of different

wavelengths. One of the amazing things about it is orbital dynamics is fairly unforgiving, at least on short time, frames. And if your engine doesn't fire and fire the right amount, you don't go into orbit around a planet. And that's what happened to them when they first tried it in 2010 with Akatsuki. They basically missed Venus. They just kept going. And then what's amazing is they figured out with a great study and great patience that they could try to get back into a different orbit, but still a Venus orbit five years later. So they were supposed to go into orbit in 2010. They successfully went into orbit in 2015. They were in a different higher orbit, but they adapted and were able to carry out a successful science mission.

So it's an amazing recovery. Side note, Jaxa also did with Hayabusa, their Asteroid sample return. Really? Yeah, a different problem, but same concept they ended up having to delay it. So it came back a few years later, but they figured out something that could, make it work. And so they've had two amazing saves of missions and basically engine problems or firing timing engine. And so you didn't do what you wanted it to do, but they made successful missions in the end. That is absolutely wild. I knew the comeback story of Akatsky, but I did not

know that happened for Hayabusa. That's a lot of dedication, a lot of time it would take to figure out how to correct for that. And what kind of instrument on board or what kind of jet or thruster you actually have available to actually make that work? What was the mission actually doing during the time that it wasn't in orbit around Venus, like during that five-year period? Well, the technical term is chilling hard. Just kicking back and watching the space go by. Chilling out. I actually don't know. I mean, they were designed to study Venus. So I'm sure they tried to extract what they could out of it scientifically, but their instruments were not designed to be flying around in deep space without a planet next to them.

I mean, the thing that makes me a little sad, I mean, whenever a mission ends, it's a little sad. But this is the last dedicated Venus mission that we currently have out there. So Venus is officially a world that doesn't have a mission that's alive in orbit around it right now. So it's all the more reason why we need to work to get the these other Venus missions out there. This is true. There are fewer and fewer planets or objects with orbitors around them at this point. Although you got Mars is a party and Jupiter's got, you know, but things are thin and out.

Poor Mercury, it's just, you know, well, no, it's getting some stuff. I forgot. Mercury is a party as well. Yeah, Bepi Columbo. We're getting there. They're getting there. They're getting there. And, you know, Magellan, of course, revolutionized our understanding of

Mercury and now, but anyway, we're not talking about Mercury right now. Why did you bring that up? But man, that means that Akatsky was out there 15 years, is that right? I mean, only functioning around Venus for almost 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Also, on their way to Venus, they launched with Icaros, which was the Japanese solar sail mission, the first successful solar sail, but a fairly big beast.

Anyway, fascinating mission, and we followed along a few years later with the much smaller solar sail mission. I mean, real talk, I love that both of these solar sailing missions were out there, but anytime I talk about light sail, I always have to stop myself and be like, but the award actually goes to Icaros first. Does that sting just a little bit? Yes, no. I mean, yes. We tried to be the first in 2005 with Cosmos won. And it successfully explored the northern ocean of the Earth before ever going to space. And so, but so yes and no, because we, one, the Japanese did an amazing job.

And they had very clever things as they always do, basically literally using origami folds and then spinning the sail out, having LED CDs that changed the, they had a very subtle method to change direction. On the other hand, they couldn't do direction changes very fast, and there were 300 plus kilograms. And so what we then were focused on the white sale was saying, well, how can we still contribute to this field in a significant way? And it was doing it using the new CubeSats, the small spacecraft, which can piggyback on launches and have a lot more flexibility to go places. and basically, could you shove a big sail in a tiny box, a size of a loaf of bread, and deploy it and have it work, and actually do solar sailing, use solar pressure? And so we did do that. I've thought about this a little bit.

You can probably tell. You probably tell. Well, seriously, good job, Jaxa. This mission has been awesome. And if anybody out there who's listening, hasn't seen the images of Venus from this mission, And because of the wavelengths of light that it's looking in, the image is just absolutely stunning. And every once in a while, I've actually seen people online say that these images aren't real because they're so different from the way that we usually see Venus.

Let me mention one other thing, Akatsuki, because we, the Planetary Society, were involved with Akatsuki. And we, along with Jaksa, collected names and messages that flew aboard Akatsuki and edged onto an aluminum plate. 260,000 people submitted names and messages for missions. And they're still hanging out around Venus. Yeah. Even when the mission's gone, we're still out there as part of that mission. So I don't know. It's true.

And at least for some period that I don't know what it is, they're still in orbit. You have to work to not be in orbit, especially in a highly, a big distant orbit like that. They probably have a long lifetime there. Yeah. Maybe one of these days. We'll snag a photo of that with our new Venus missions. Venus, Venus. It's matter.

Run them space, fact. Rewind, rewind. Facts so good. We're revisiting them. Hey, Venus, the Venus surface pressure is like being about one kilometer or about 3,000 feet under the Earth's ocean. serious pressure and down there, and there you go. There you have it. Oh, man. It's like one of those numbers that you can try to wrap your head around, but it's so far outside of human

experience that it's still really impossible. Like, the headache I get at the bottom of a pool is enough for me. Seriously, I could never go free diving. The point is, it's really hot and really high pressure on the surface, and that's why we haven't had a bunch of landers, especially ones that lasted more than an hour or two, which the Soviets succeeded in doing. And so it's a tough, tough environment on the surface. Yeah, it still weirds me out that they were able to do that at all. Like, just imagine the kind of weird chambers you would need to internally pressurize that contraption, whatever it is you're sending down on the surface of Venus, just to test it.

I mean, the fact that they managed to pull that off that long ago, for even the amount of time that the Veneer mission survived, is just... It's just a testament to the dedication of space people. Yes, it is. And the solidness of a good piece of spacecraft. They're beasts. Chonky. Chonky.

They're chonky spacecraft. All right. Everybody, come out there, look up the night sky, and think about dimming light switches. Thank you. Good night. We've reached the end of this week's episode. episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week with more space science and exploration. If you love the show, you can get Planetary Radio t-shirts at planetary.org

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