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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to In-Orbit, the podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world. Brought to you by the Satellite Applications Catapult. I'm your host Dallas Campbell, and in today's episode we're going to be delving into the relationship between academia and the space industry. We'll explore how academia influences the space industry and how initiatives like Researchers in Residence Program facilitate things like knowledge exchange and collaboration between academia and industry, fostering groundbreaking discoveries and technological advancements.
Welcome to the show everyone, we've got a, well, almost full house in the studio today and we've got Rebecca Quinn, who's the Knowledge Exchange Manager at the Satellite Applications Catapult. Just explain, Knowledge Exchange Manager, just let's clear that up, what knowledge? What are you exchanging? What's the deal?
[00:01:05] Rebecca Quinn: Yeah, so knowledge exchange is really about sharing knowledge and creating societal and economic benefit from different information. So for example in this case translating academic knowledge so that it has significant and impactful benefits to both society and economy.
[00:01:22] Dallas Campbell: That's like a massive job.
[00:01:24] Rebecca Quinn: Yeah, it's really interesting. It's really exciting.
[00:01:26] Dallas Campbell: We'll sort of drill down into that a little bit later. Joining us in the room, so thank you, we've got Becca online. We've got Eloise Marais, who is the Associate Professor of Physical Geography at UCL.
[00:01:37] Eloise Marais: Nice to be here.
[00:01:38] Dallas Campbell: Physical Geography though, what's your kind of little niche, just so we know what your kind of geography niche is?
[00:01:44] Eloise Marais: Air pollution research. I'm a numerical modeler, so I sit in the office and code all day.
[00:01:50] Dallas Campbell: Okay, nice. Sitting next to me, we've got Daniel Oi, who's a reader in the Physics Department at the University of Strathclyde. Physics. What kind of, which bit of physics are you? Are you big physics? Are you little physics? What's the...
[00:02:03] Daniel Oi: You could say it's the little. It's the quantum physics.
[00:02:07] Dallas Campbell: That's as little as it gets.
[00:02:08] Daniel Oi: But you know, it meets big space!
[00:02:10] Dallas Campbell: We've got a, yeah, we've got a geographer, a quantum physicist, and we have got Dr. Santosh Bhattarai. What's your, I mean, you're a space person, what's your kind of title? What do you do?
[00:02:22] Santosh Bhattarai: The thing that I'm interested in is where things are in space and where they're going and so we call that Orbit Determination and Orbit Prediction.
[00:02:33] Dallas Campbell: Hang on. Where things are in space and where they're going?
[00:02:35] Santosh Bhattarai: That's what I'm interested in, so I could talk to you about that for a long time if you want to.
[00:02:41] Dallas Campbell: That's kind of... so tell us what's in space and where is it and why is it going to, that's kind of a broad, a fairly broad topic. Anyway, listen, thank you very much indeed. We're going to talk a little bit about academia and we're going to talk a bit about the space industry and the sort of title is Bridging the Gap Between Academia and Space. So I guess I want to know what the kind of gap is and then we can maybe talk about sort of bridging it.
Let's start with Eloise. What's your sort of relationship with the space industry as, I mean, you know, you're a geographer, you work in atmospheric chemistry, where does the space bit sort of come in?
[00:03:12] Eloise Marais: Yeah, so satellites have instruments on board that can observe the atmosphere. So they're looking down on Earth and as they're looking down on Earth, they're seeing these chemicals in the air that we can't see with our naked eyes and many of those chemicals are air pollutants, they're impacting our health, we breathe them in, they're changing climate. Space has been, I mean, eye opening, it sounds like I'm going to use a ton of cliches, but it's been eye opening because we can observe parts of the world that we can't observe from the ground.
[00:03:38] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. I think you know what's so amazing about all of us, you're all in quite diverse, separate topics, and yet all of you are connected by space. The trouble is most people, when they think about space, they don't think about that. They think about, maybe they think about Apollo, maybe. But actually, I mean, really fundamentally useful stuff to monitoring the health of our planet. Daniel, quantum physics. Where does quantum physics and space, where's the sort of intersection for the uninitiated?
[00:04:04] Daniel Oi: So, I'm sure people have heard about like quantum computers, maybe a bit of quantum communication, quantum key distribution.
[00:04:11] Dallas Campbell: Quantum Dishwasher Tablets.
[00:04:13] Daniel Oi: Quantum everything, yes. But yeah, most of the development of quantum technologies is, you know, is done for the earth, for terrestrial applications. But we know that you know, space has got huge potential and if you can bring quantum technologies into space, for instance, secure communication, I mean, a lot of our network traffic goes through space through communication satellites and if we can secure those against things like quantum computers, which might be able to break the codes that we're using today to secure the internet, then you know, we need to be able to take those quantum technologies, which are primarily developed for the earth, and take them into space, which we know that's a challenge. So, you know, I think there's huge opportunities there, but also huge challenges.
[00:04:50] Dallas Campbell: Just very quick, when we say quantum technologies, you mentioned quantum computers and you mentioned security. What, just very briefly, what does that sort of mean in sort of reality? When you think of quantum computers, you might think of sort of GPS, you need to understand quantum physics for things to be in the right place at the right time, for example. But what, how does that work in terms of security for instance?
[00:05:10] Daniel Oi: Well, GPS is an interesting point because, that uses what we call first generation quantum technologies which are atomic clocks, so very precise timekeeping. The next generation of GPS could use quantum clocks, which actually go beyond further and uses new physical principles, which are entanglement and superposition and so this is really the basis for quantum technologies.
[00:05:31] Dallas Campbell: I never understand all that entanglement, this is where it all just, my brain just kind of melts when you start... that kind of crazy world of quantum physics that nobody quite understands, or you understand it, but it's quite hard to conceptualise.
[00:05:43] Daniel Oi: Well yeah, as famously, a famous physicist did say, you know, no one understands quantum physics! But we know how to use it, we calculate stuff and it's the basis of, you know, most of modern technology, really.
[00:05:57] Dallas Campbell: Okay, Santosh, explain a little, you mentioned about where things are in space and where they're going. Give us an example so we can, our audience can handle this.
[00:06:06] Santosh Bhattarai: Or not even an example, but what I would say is that space and the space space is changing at an incredibly rapid pace currently and so...
[00:06:18] Dallas Campbell: Wait, how do you mean space space? What as in, the physical space or the industry?
[00:06:21] Santosh Bhattarai: What I mean is, in a way, the amount of activity that we're doing as humans in space.
[00:06:27] Dallas Campbell: I see.
[00:06:27] Santosh Bhattarai: That's starting to accelerate and so when you look at charts of time series of the dawn of the space age, 1957 to, in terms of the number of objects that we're launching, it starts, you start to see this, what looks like a hockey stick pattern. So there's hockey stick growth happening and it's all started happening really since about 2018, 2019.
[00:06:54] Dallas Campbell: That was just, I've got tabs on my computer that are older than that. Wow and so, exponential growth of stuff in Low Earth Orbit and so your job is to, or your interest, your area of research...
[00:07:05] Santosh Bhattarai: The thing is that it's changing so fast that now we've 10,000 operational objects in space and we need to operate them safely and that change is starting to happen at an even faster pace so our activity is escalating. There are going to be developments such as the SpaceX Starship, if that becomes operational, we're able to put an order of magnitude more payload onto orbit with one launch and so the possibilities that creates is exciting for some, but it's also something that is potentially concerning for a lot of us as well.
[00:07:44] Dallas Campbell: So do you have to kind of, is your job or your interest keeping track of everything, all the 10,000
[00:07:50] Santosh Bhattarai: I, we did a study in 2018, 2019, where we tried to do exactly that, which we wanted to just take information about everything that's currently up there and then take information about what organisations are planning to do in space and try to do projections of what would happen over five, ten, twenty five year time horizon and so we kind of saw this pattern, this kind of upward trend in activity and then it happened. So we kind of compared our results in 2023 with what we predicted in 2018 and we were only off by about 200 satellites and so now we have some predictions for what's going to happen in 2030 and 2045 and things are escalating and can we safely operate in that scenario when already there are operators that are having to do maneuvers a lot more frequently to avoid...
[00:08:47] Dallas Campbell: Bumping into things. That's a whole other podcast, we could go into that podcast...
[00:08:51] Santosh Bhattarai: That's what I'm worried about.
[00:08:52] Dallas Campbell: That's really interesting. Well the, I mean the thing is that all of you have come from different academic disciplines, you all have different sort of interests. Becca, just as somebody at the Catapult, sort of managing all these different academics with different sort of interests, I'm interested historically in the kinda relationship with the space industry in academia. Could you give us a little bit of a, an insight of sort of how that has worked in the past and how it works now?
[00:09:14] Rebecca Quinn: Yeah, no, it's been really strong. A lot of the products and services that we have today are derived from the hard work that the academic community have been doing, like the projects that these guys are doing and all across the UK are really incredible and instrumental to enable the development of new products and services and so having academics who can share their knowledge and provide insights to industries is really critical.
[00:09:41] Dallas Campbell: Seems as well that, kind of, whatever you do in academia now, there's probably a job for you in space. I mean, just our activities in space is just, it's just so vast and all encompassing. So as a sort of knowledge exchange manager, are you kind of dealing with lots of different kinds of academics in lots of different fields, doing lots of different things as we, see here?
[00:10:01] Rebecca Quinn: Yeah exactly and so the Satellite Applications Catapult is focused by four key mission areas, so essentially strategic pillars. We work to support research that's happening in those different areas and they're so broad, they really encompass a huge amount of different things. So yeah, definitely.
[00:10:20] Dallas Campbell: So as academics, just maybe whoever, just jump in. I'm interested in kind of your relationship with industry, because there you are doing your day job coding or whatever it might be and where does, how, maybe you could just describe your relationship with the industry and how that works.
[00:10:36] Eloise Marais: Yeah, I suppose maybe mine is slightly different in that I'm more involved with public sector, civic sector, in who I would work with outside of academia. I mean, what is that relationship like? I feel like I found it to be quite symbiotic, you know, what I can offer has been very useful for say, the local councils who are interested in understanding the sources that are contributing to air pollution in their cities or councils. At the national scale as well, they're regulators who are thinking about air pollution, where the air pollution comes from, how good the tools are that we use to monitor and assess air pollution and at all stages the observations that we're using that come from space have been valuable.
[00:11:20] Dallas Campbell: And Daniel and Santosh, do you both work, I mean, obviously you work at university, but do you work outside? Do you work with companies and do you work with the industry more broadly?
[00:11:28] Santosh Bhattarai: For me, I have experience working outside of university, but for international space agencies and government. I think one of the reasons I'm really excited about this researcher in residence program is trying to learn about how to make impacts in other ways with the research, so with industry I guess, industry is such a broad term so it's maybe one of the ways is to try to think of some of the ideas and concepts that we have, maybe try to develop that into some kind of spin out perhaps, or you know, identify commercial models or other models that would generate impact. So didn't answer your question specifically, but I think it's just, I have limited experience working...
[00:12:14] Dallas Campbell: Well actually the Research in Residence, Becca tell us a little bit about this. What do we mean by the researchers in residence? Have I pronounced it right? Is it Researchers in Residence? This is a Catapult scheme, isn't it?
[00:12:25] Rebecca Quinn: Well, so the first iteration of it was EPSRC, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, who are part of UK Research and Innovation, the UK's largest funder of academic focused research. So they funded the first iteration, which Eloise and Daniel were both on, working on different projects and it's a competitive application process for researchers in UK based universities and it enables them an opportunity to undertake knowledge exchange activity, so starting to think about how they might commercialise their research, whether there are potential routes to market, how they might share their knowledge in ways that are perhaps non-conventional to some researchers. So for example, not publishing their research in an academic journal article, which is predominantly only read by other academic researchers, but disseminating their research in other ways and I guess this podcast is an opportunity to do that and that's part of the knowledge exchange process.
[00:13:24] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, well I suppose that's going to bring us into talking about things like collaboration and the way that sort of academia works generally. I mean, for non-academics like myself and other people listening to this, are you sort of quite siloed generally in the sort of work you do? Like okay, I'm doing quantum mechanics over here and I'm doing atmospherics and you sort of don't talk to each other, right? How does it work?
[00:13:43] Daniel Oi: I think there is that tendency in academia sometimes and in some departments, you know, you do see that. I know that in my department we've tried to break down barriers, trying to get people to, you know, talk across the disciplines, talk to people working microscopy, see whether we can apply quantum imaging to biological imaging or something like that, talking to a marine scientist who wants to see whether we can use quantum imaging techniques to probe the ocean. I think that one does have to try to reach across the boundaries and actually look for ways that your work can be applied, but also, you know, get inspiration from other people's work.
[00:14:26] Eloise Marais: Yeah, but we definitely remain sort of siloed as well in our practices. We know that when we want to network we go to a conference, when we want to communicate our research we put it into a peer reviewed paper, whereas research in residence we have to suddenly start thinking about how we communicate outside of those.
[00:14:42] Dallas Campbell: That seems to be because it does seem to be that academics, you know, you're all fighting to get published in Nature or one of the sort of top academic journals, so that it's quite a small area that the academics are aiming for very often, papers that are very niche and quite, you know, and you're read by people in your particular area. So, I don't know, is this a good thing? I think historically people have been quite snobby about academics doing things like podcasts or outreach or you know, that kind of stuff because they don't really want to do that.
[00:15:11] Eloise Marais: Yeah, hopefully that's changing.
[00:15:13] Dallas Campbell: Well, I kind of think it is.
[00:15:15] Daniel Oi: I think so. I think there is a greater recognition that science is a, you know, it's a social thing. It's something that's done not for purely abstract things, but also for societal benefit and we have to get the message across to the public, you know, what we're doing, why it's important and why should they support us.
[00:15:32] Dallas Campbell: I suppose the idea is to be thinking much more holistically when it comes to space, given that space, what we do in space, is so diverse in terms of different areas, that we have to sort of rethink how we do, how we sort of communicate knowledge and such.
[00:15:45] Daniel Oi: I think space is a very horizontal activity in that it encompasses so many things across so many different areas and that it's one of those difficult things in order to get public support for because it is sometimes very hard to identify the single thing that the public should care about. This is why when they talk about the moon landings and NASA's mission to Mars, they investment for that, you know, they have to point to things like, oh, discovered Teflon or, something that.
[00:16:14] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, it drives me crazy that it's like that kind of justifying for doing things, oh well, we've got non stick frying pans. It's like, oh come on.
[00:16:22] Daniel Oi: So I think that we have to be able to show the full picture, right? The entirety of why this kind of activity is so important. It's just like, you know, we didn't really know where the internet would lead to when people developing network computers in the sixties and when GPS was developed around the same time, we really did not know how massively important it would be for the world economy and just what a singular part of daily experience it is right now.
[00:16:48] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, no, it was a military application GPS, wasn't it? No that's, it's interesting. I don't think the internet will catch on actually, I think it's just a passing fad. Tell me about the Researchers in Residence. So when you sort of go, what's it like? What happens? Do you go to some nice islands somewhere and do fun stuff?
[00:17:07] Santosh Bhattarai: Harwell Campus.
[00:17:11] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, who wants to sort of paint a picture of what you guys do in your residence?
[00:17:16] Santosh Bhattarai: I've just started so, since September, but I've made my first visit to the Harwell Campus last month and it was really nice just to see the activity that's happening in the catapult building there. It's a really nice facility.
[00:17:35] Dallas Campbell: So you get, you kind of get a tour of, see what everyone's doing and how it all works?
[00:17:40] Santosh Bhattarai: Yeah, or at least people working there that will be interesting.
[00:17:45] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, and I think you two, it was in lockdown when you had yours.
[00:17:48] Eloise Marais: I managed to get a few residents in pre lockdown, but I feel like it's way fresher in your mind than it is in mine, like 2018, 2019.
[00:17:55] Dallas Campbell: But what's that structure of it? Like what, you know, what's the kind of...?
[00:17:58] Eloise Marais: I think what I liked is there wasn't, it wasn't so structured and rigid that you didn't have that opportunity to sort of discover something new or someone new to speak to.
[00:18:07] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:18:08] Eloise Marais: There was enough fluidity in it that you could explore all options and chat to many people and for me it was, I don't know, I feel like I'm generally ignorant about how industry works and I learned a lot about how industry is working, how to commercialise an idea...
[00:18:21] Dallas Campbell: And does industry come along as well? So it's not just academics talking to each other, is it industry and government and...
[00:18:28] Eloise Marais: It was a lead in. So the Catapult is the conduit for me, who sort of explained, well, this is how industry works, before I was sort of unleashed on industry and showed my level of ignorance and then there's sort of opportunities to network with, different potential end users without sort of any obligation on either side. So events like Saturccino and I'm sure I'm misremembering all the other events that happened. Satochino, Becca I'm sure would do a better job at explaining it than me.
[00:18:53] Rebecca Quinn: Saturccino is our monthly networking event where we invite members of the space community to come together and there's very short talks and yeah, a really great opportunity to come and meet other people who are working in completely different fields and getting that level of nuanced perspective on things like Daniel was talking about earlier.
[00:19:13] Dallas Campbell: It sounds like that sort of informality is actually a really healthy or should be more encouraged and is a healthy thing than perhaps is historically done in academia.
[00:19:23] Daniel Oi: Yeah, I think, my experience was very similar to Eloise's in that, you know, a majority of mine happened during lockdown, but I did manage to have one or two visits before everything shut down. But it was a really good opportunity just to take yourself away from the usual workplace, in a complete new environment, new people, interesting, doing very interesting things and the Harwell Campus is, you know, very vibrant place, full of space industry, and was able to actually meet and discuss, with other companies particularly, you know, these, very dynamic SMEs, small and medium enterprises, startups, doing amazing things and it was not only just a knowledge exchange in that the academic providing information to the space industry, but also, you know, it was a two-way street in that, for me, as an academic, very valuable to actually find out, you know, what are the challenges? What are the concerns? What are the applications? You know, what is industry looking for and seeing whether there's anything in the arsenal of academic research that I'm experienced with, you know, that could help them as well.
[00:20:28] Dallas Campbell: Becca, I mean, what would you say, as a Catapult person, are the kind of objectives of it, of the Researchers and Residents? Do you have a kind of headline of like, this is what we want to achieve?
[00:20:37] Rebecca Quinn: Not specifically. It really varies by the types of projects and what the applicant wants to get out of it as well. We want to use it as a conduit to enable researchers to grow in their career, but also enable staff within the organisation to grow and to facilitate the opportunities that academics have to engage with industry and vice versa. So really providing, like Eloise said, that facilitating conduit into and out of, I guess, industry and academia.
[00:21:06] Dallas Campbell: Have you sort of seen tangible benefits of this kind of residence, Researchers in Residence?
[00:21:11] Rebecca Quinn: I guess Daniel and Eloise are best positioned to talk about the kind of outputs from their residency, I suppose.
[00:21:19] Daniel Oi: I think I was very lucky in that, you know, within the first year of my residence, you know, we were able to get together a project led by Airbus, together with several SMEs, both in quantum, but also, within the new space segment to work together on a very exciting, project to look at future constellations for quantum communication, for global secure communication and so you know, this was a really great opportunity to bring together a very diverse set of companies as well as academia to really attack this particular problem and seeing what will space, secure communication networks, look like in 10 years and so you know, this was, wouldn't have come about without having that experience.
[00:21:58] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, well, that's my question, like how good is this sort of model, this sort of way of doing things as opposed to everyone just being siloed, doing their own thing and going to the odd conference now and again?
[00:22:07] Eloise Marais: Yeah, I think even though it is an informal residency, there is that level of structure to it, you do end up meeting a lot of potential people to work with, you do end up growing your network outside of academia and I think I have the same experiences where perhaps I didn't achieve all the outcomes that I set out to do during the residency, but the follow on opportunities that evolved as a result of that have been really beneficial and I continue to collaborate with the Catapult to try and, you know, constantly inject my research into something beyond academia.
[00:22:38] Dallas Campbell: Have things sort of changed for you? Have things that you've done on this residency sparked your research into particular directions or given you interesting results?
[00:22:47] Eloise Marais: Oh, both, you know, interesting results in that I've seen the sort of real world application of the research that I'm doing in informing air quality policy or in assessing how good air quality policies are in working with organisations that build small satellites to monitor the earth because I become the end user of the data and so I inform how they design satellites that are launched into space.
[00:23:11] Dallas Campbell: And is this, Becca, is this something that's going to be continuing? I mean, and when you do these residencies, do you kind of learn from them and adapt, are they constantly changing? I'm interested in sort of how you're going to sort of work with these in the future and going forward.
[00:23:24] Rebecca Quinn: Yeah, so it's currently led by the Innovation Launchpad Network Plus. So it's sort of administered through them and there's another round of opportunities that should be opening in spring, around April time. So if anyone's listening and they want to apply, then...
[00:23:41] Dallas Campbell: I want to apply just to hang out, like do you just get to kind of hang out and kind of drink? Coffee.
[00:23:46] Daniel Oi: A lot of coffee. There's a lot of coffee!
[00:23:48] Eloise Marais: Lots of coffee drinking, yeah.
[00:23:49] Dallas Campbell: I think academia is pretty much fueled by coffee, by the caffeine, by the coffee bean industry. Okay, so you're academics, what is it about, you know, in terms of the relationship between industry say, and academia, what things in your experience do you, aren't working that you think could be improved or you'd like to change, if you could wave a magic wand?
[00:24:10] Santosh Bhattarai: I think in our sector, I think one thing that the university can provide is training and skills and maybe we need more of a dialogue in terms of what kind of skills collaboratively to do that, because there is a real skills gap I find.
[00:24:28] Dallas Campbell: Is there?
[00:24:30] Santosh Bhattarai: Yes.
[00:24:30] Dallas Campbell: And is that a conversation between your sort of department and industry? I mean, is there a constant dialogue or does there need to be more?
[00:24:38] Santosh Bhattarai: There isn't that I'm aware of and maybe that needs to kind of grow.
[00:24:42] Rebecca Quinn: I think quite often in universities, that kind of business support and insight will come when there is a really clear, viable product to sell and when that doesn't exist, then that support is maybe less available to the academics working in the university and some universities will be much more proactive and supportive than others based on the size and experience of that university. So that's where, you know, we come in as an organisation in terms of trying to support those researchers who maybe aren't quite sure where to go with their research, but we see an opportunity for that research to be applied and also to grow the space sector and to learn from one another and share knowledge.
[00:25:25] Dallas Campbell: What do you think, in the future, the sort of, the kind of collaboration partnerships are going to look like? And sort of, in terms of the catapult, like, do you have sort of big, overarching grand plans for the future in terms of how you want to change the relationship with academia?
[00:25:41] Rebecca Quinn: Probably slightly beyond our gift to instill significant change on like a UK wide scale, but we work really closely with a lot of different universities and not just on this scheme, not just on the Research and Residence scheme, but also on, you know, funded projects where we provide, you know, lots of different types of support. So I think our vision is really around encouraging more academics to work with industry and vice versa, which is part of what this scheme is doing.
[00:26:08] Dallas Campbell: Do you as academics, do you feel nurtured?
[00:26:10] Eloise Marais: I feel like this is opening up a can of worms where we can start to complain about academia and then we go down a dangerous path!
[00:26:17] Dallas Campbell: Start moaning. It's like, everyone's always very polite to start with this, oh God, it's so, this is so annoying. I don't know, I mean I speak to academics a lot all the time, and there's always things that seem broken in academia, things that they'd like to improve, things that don't work, you know, all kinds of things. I'm just wondering from your point of view, where you are, how could you be better helped?
[00:26:37] Eloise Marais: Yeah, I think one thing that is difficult to incorporate within the funding that's available for innovation is how to bring PhD students in without it being pressurised to achieve at a stage when they're sort of building their skills and going through a four year long program that is way longer than the industry on.
[00:26:53] Dallas Campbell: That's a really interesting point. So do you think there's too much pressure in academia? So because there's a lot of pressure all the time, do you think that actually stifles people's creativity and because people don't want to step out of that box out of fear of doing something wrong?
[00:27:07] Eloise Marais: Not necessarily for what I was referring to. It's more that PhD students are working on such a long time period and it's hard to sort of fit that time period within these innovation funding calls.
[00:27:19] Daniel Oi: Yeah, I think the timescales and funding, there's a bit of a mismatch between, you know, how things happen in academia and sort of how funding happens in like, for a industrially led project, particularly the academic unit of work or unit funding unit is like a postdoc and quantive of research funding is sort of like a postdoc year or something like that so this is not how...
[00:27:43] Dallas Campbell: Its a wave and a passport, it's both a postdoc and yet not a postdoc.
[00:27:47] Daniel Oi: But a project might only be funded for six months or 12 months and it is sometimes very hard to mesh how research happens traditionally, typically in many academic organisations and a more industrial focused way of projects funding. So I think there's something that, that needs to be, you know, looked at and seeing how can we get academic research, you know, the alignment between that and some of the funding mechanisms in the space industry.
[00:28:21] Rebecca Quinn: I think some of that is changing, so UK Research and Innovation, a lot of their funding opportunities are now cross council, which means the different, I guess, thematic areas of the different research councils, they're all coming together to support interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary research, which is really fantastic for the space sector in particular, because it is so diverse and a lot of the recent funding opportunities have also called as a requirement for co-creation and that's explicitly asking for researchers who are applying for the funds to work at an early point in their application with industry so that the outputs are industry aligned, which is really important for this kind of, I guess knowledge transfer activities that we've been talking about today.
[00:29:07] Dallas Campbell: So if people listening want to do this residency for example, how would they go about doing it?
[00:29:12] Rebecca Quinn: If they wanted to do the residency, then they can contact the Innovation Launchpad Network Plus directly via their website, or they can contact me. Hopefully the email address will be on the podcast when it's posted and we'd be more than happy to discuss that with anyone.
[00:29:27] Dallas Campbell: And how does it, like, do you sort of apply to be on it and then you get chosen? Or is that, can anyone apply to be on it?
[00:29:33] Rebecca Quinn: Yeah, as long as you're an academic in a UK based university, and meet the eligibility requirements that the network set out, then you can apply. Santosh has just gone through that process very recently.
[00:29:44] Dallas Campbell: I'm not going to be able to apply it. Yeah, I failed my maths GCSE. Maybe, what do you need to apply? Like, what's the...
[00:29:51] Santosh Bhattarai: It was a relatively lightweight form. Having said that, it was about 10 to 20
[00:29:55] Dallas Campbell: and what do you, What do you, what was the kind of...?
[00:29:57] Santosh Bhattarai: The information, I guess, was talking about a problem that you want to solve, but also some other things that you need to think about. Just making a program of what you want to work on and then thinking about how you want to make impact as well. So a little bit of thinking about what you want to get out of that program during the applications phase so that, you know, you can hit the ground running if you are successful, I guess, is the rationale for that form.
[00:30:25] Dallas Campbell: Is it something that people here in the room, you'd recommend?
[00:30:28] Daniel Oi: Yeah, definitely. I think if space is of any interest to an academic, you know, if there's any sort of connection that you can make with space, I think you should explore these possibilities, you know, I think it's one of those things where it's, unless you're in the industry or intimately involved in it, it's difficult to actually understand the wide ranging nature of it and how what you do could actually have an impact in the area. I was very lucky in that I was actually approached by the Satellite Applications Catapult because you know, they wanted some expertise in this particular area.
[00:31:02] Dallas Campbell: Get me a quantum physicist!
[00:31:06] Daniel Oi: I was quite fortunate in that, you know, had conversations, prior to the application process and really I was able to tailor the application specific to what the application, Satellite Catapult really needed.
[00:31:18] Dallas Campbell: Okay, as academics, who all have different disciplines, what's the most exciting thing that's connected with space that you're like, oh, this is going to be awesome? Eloise?
[00:31:28] Eloise Marais: There's a lot of overlap between what Santosh and I are doing because I'm also looking at what impact the growth in the space sector is having on the environment. So all of these rockets don't launch on fairy dust, they're launching and producing these very dangerous byproducts that are chewing up the ozone layer, that's protecting us from harmful UV radiation, that's changing climate and so...
[00:31:48] Dallas Campbell: Can I just ask, because I'm unclear about this. So obviously rockets are polluting and they burn methane, or methane, or, and they burn other things...
[00:31:57] Eloise Marais: Whole host of propellants, yeah.
[00:31:59] Dallas Campbell: Whole host of propellants and also there's some industry itself. But also there's not that many of them compared to things like aeroplanes. But also we wouldn't be able to know anything about climate change unless we had things in space. So how does that circle?
[00:32:13] Eloise Marais: Yeah, yeah, and so I do, I straddle both cause yeah, I use satellite observations, you know, that are launched into space, but fortunately the science enabled payloads are not the payloads that we're most concerned about. It's the Star Links.
[00:32:26] Santosh Bhattarai: Communications brought back from space.
[00:32:28] Eloise Marais: Mega constellations, yeah and...
[00:32:30] Dallas Campbell: Like teslas
[00:32:31] Eloise Marais: Yeah, launching random things. Yeah and at the moment, the rocket launchers aren't out competing aircraft, they probably won't out compete aircraft in number, but...
[00:32:40] Dallas Campbell: I guess, is it something we should be worrying? In my meter of do I need to worry about this?
do I
[00:32:44] Eloise Marais: don't think we should ignore it. I think, you know, it's going fast and we are putting chemicals into layers in the atmosphere that stay there for a really long time. So we don't have to have as long haul flights, you know, to be of concern.
[00:32:59] Dallas Campbell: Anyway, my question was what are you excited about? We got suddenly distracted that.
[00:33:04] Eloise Marais: But it's a really exciting thing to look at because it's also, you know, it's taking you out of your comfort zone, it's looking at rockets, I'm not a rocket scientist, so I'm learning things with the postdoc and PhD students who are working on this and that's always exciting.
[00:33:15] Dallas Campbell: So you're thinking about how to make rockets more sustainable?
[00:33:17] Eloise Marais: No, I'm not a rocket engineer, but trying to understand what the impact is to maybe inform policy that doesn't exist yet.
[00:33:25] Dallas Campbell: That's really interesting. I mean, from my experience, it does seem that the launch industry is very conscious of that. You're pulling a face.
[00:33:33] Eloise Marais: I don't think Elon Musk is going...
[00:33:35] Dallas Campbell: Well, not, I don't know, but I just, all the conversations I have with them are like, oh yeah, and we're very green and I don't know whether it's greenwashing or whether it's you know, how serious they are, but I don't... The trouble is, you've got physics to battle against. You need a lot of energy, and that comes at an environmental cost, I guess.
[00:33:50] Eloise Marais: Yeah.
[00:33:52] Dallas Campbell: Okay. Everyone's being very far too diplomatic. Okay, so that's interesting, that's exciting, that's gonna get better hopefully, maybe. What about in the world of sort of quantum, you, talk about encryption and you talk about security a lot. Is that the thing that you think this is gonna be, this is gonna be awesome?
[00:34:09] Daniel Oi: I think quantum encryption is going to be a stepping stone. So quantum key distribution is the first step of...
[00:34:16] Dallas Campbell: Quantum?
[00:34:17] Daniel Oi: Key Distribution. encryption keys, we can use quantum mechanics to generate those and distribute them in a secure manner.
[00:34:23] Dallas Campbell: Basically passwords.
[00:34:25] Daniel Oi: Yeah, yeah.
[00:34:27] Dallas Campbell: That's another thing for me to lose, my quantum encryption fee.
[00:34:31] Daniel Oi: Well, you don't want to look at that, otherwise you destroy it. These keys are actually just strings of numbers, but we want to generate them randomly and securely. Yeah, this is just the first step to a quantum internet. So just as today we have the internet, we want to be able to distribute quantum resources and quantum entanglement.
Can we
[00:34:49] Dallas Campbell: get the internet working first? Like get the, actually no, let's get my printer working first, sort that out,
[00:34:55] Eloise Marais: the train's working? I don't know. Thanks
[00:35:02] Dallas Campbell: quantum. is on the horizon?
[00:35:04] Daniel Oi: Far horizon, I think this is a very, you know, long term vision of where we might go with quantum technologies. It's natural to take quantum computers and want to network them.
[00:35:17] Dallas Campbell: And stick them in space.
[00:35:18] Daniel Oi: Could be, we could actually use a small type of quantum computers called Quantum Repeaters and Quantum Swapping to distribute entanglement, which basically are small quantum computers in space. But ultimately, what we want to do is we want to distribute entanglement, quantum entanglement, in order to enable a lot of distributed applications. So distributed computation, distributed communication tasks, but also things like improved navigation, improved quantum sensing. So for Earth Observation, if we can use quantum entanglement to make more precise measurements as well as distributed measurements, simultaneous measurements, all at the same time, we can get a better picture of what's happening on the earth. This is all predicated on being able to distribute quantum entanglement from space.
[00:36:02] Dallas Campbell: So a clearer picture of looking back at Earth, more and more focused, the lens becoming less blurry as it were. Santosh, what's your kind of like, this is gonna be epic, and exciting?
[00:36:12] Santosh Bhattarai: What we need to solve is kind of space traffic management, that's kind of the main thing that
[00:36:19] Dallas Campbell: But it's space junk. We is this what you're talking about, things bumping into things?
[00:36:23] Santosh Bhattarai: But it's not only a technical problem or a physics problem, it's kind of one of these trans disciplinary problems. So you've got to get the lawyers in, you've got to get, you've got to get...
[00:36:36] Dallas Campbell: That's when it gets complicated.
[00:36:37] Santosh Bhattarai: You know, it's got to be economic, someone has to do it.
[00:36:41] Dallas Campbell: This is what all the conversations I have in this podcast, we tend to think about space as a thing. Let's stop things bumping into each other. But everything comes down to money and legalities and frameworks and it is, yeah.
[00:36:55] Santosh Bhattarai: It's dry work possibly but someone has got to do it and I think there's going to be a lot, there's a lot of conversation growing in that space.
[00:37:04] Dallas Campbell: And it just, you know, you talked about that hockey stick of stuff in space. I mean, how, you know, space is pretty big as Douglas Adams told us and satellites are pretty small. I mean, just how bad, like, how much in my things to worry about...
much do I
[00:37:18] Santosh Bhattarai: It's well there's this concept that a lot of people in this field talk about called the Kessler syndrome and it's the concept that there is a capacity to the orbital environment and if you exceed that capacity, if you go beyond that threshold, then you're going to get objects colliding into each other and it's going to be kind of a cascading scenario, a tipping point and then you're going to get more and more objects created and they're going to distribute around the shell at a specific altitude to the point where If you want to operate above that shell, you'll be afraid of collision risk and so that might reduce or limit your ability to operate and...
[00:38:01] Dallas Campbell: We're now so utterly, all civilisations are now utterly dependent on what we do in space. Are we sort of designing systems that are going to be so complex and fragile that, you know, you just, it just takes...?
[00:38:12] Santosh Bhattarai: We shouldn't let ourselves get there and so that, I think that's why it's important at least to have this conversation.
[00:38:19] Dallas Campbell: is why we're having, because luckily we've got Becca here from the Catapult who's going to sort all this out, the Satellite Applications Catapult will sort it all out. That's kind of the aim though, isn't it? To think about these big problems and get these people together.
[00:38:32] Rebecca Quinn: Yeah, I mean, quite often what we do is bring industry and academia into the same room to start identifying problems and think about solutions, like real world solutions that could be implemented and these are the sorts of things that we'd be focusing on.
[00:38:46] Dallas Campbell: Becca for you, what's the kind of biggest challenge you think we face in the space industry?
[00:38:51] Rebecca Quinn: I think from my perspective and my interest, I think one of the biggest challenges is getting researchers to be aware that some of their really exciting work is applicable to industry and providing opportunities for industry to start engaging with researchers and working collaboratively is both a challenge, but also a massive opportunity for both of those groups of people.
[00:39:14] Dallas Campbell: It seems collaboration is the key here.
[00:39:16] Santosh Bhattarai: I like collaboration.
[00:39:17] Dallas Campbell: It does seem to be the key. Listen guys, thank you so much for stopping by and chatting a little bit about your work and your relationship with the catapult and with industry. It's been really interesting. Thank you.
[00:39:27] Eloise Marais: Thanks for having us.
[00:39:28] Daniel Oi: Thank you.
[00:39:28] Santosh Bhattarai: Thank you.
[00:39:29] Rebecca Quinn: Thank you.
[00:39:30] Dallas Campbell: To hear future episodes of In-Orbit, don't forget, be sure to subscribe on your favourite podcast app and to find out a little bit more about how space is empowering industries in between episodes, the Catapult website is the place to go, or you can join them on social media.