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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 this series, we'll be in conversation with some of the most inspiring minds in the country, exploring the ways that the UK is using space to make huge differences to our everyday lives, as well as gaining a better understanding of its role in shaping and sustaining our planet for the future.
Now then, in this episode, we're going to be discussing the fascinating topic of microgravity, and joining us today, we've got two members of the Access to Space team at the Satellite Applications Catapult, we've got Jane Davies, who's the Business Development Associate, and Lara Gonzalez Lamazarez, who's the Space Manufacturing Lead. We're also joined by two wonderful guests from a company called Gravity Lab. We've got Brian Zielinski Smith, he's the Technical Services Director, and Charlotte Daniels, the Science and Data Lead.
Microgravity exists when only very small gravitational forces are experienced, and as such it's a unique environment that creates new opportunities and challenges for scientific research, technology development, and human spaceflight. We can use microgravity environments to study how living organisms adapt and change in a weightless environment, and this research can help us better understand the effects of long duration space travel on the human body, but can also lead to the development of new medical treatments and therapies.
Additionally, microgravity can be used to study physical phenomena, such as fluid dynamics and combustion, and aid the development of new materials and alloys, which would otherwise be impossible to study here on earth.
Well listen, it's delightful to have you all here. Lots to talk about. Well, okay, let's talk about definitions first. Microgravity. It's like gravity, but it's smaller than gravity. like tiny gravity. What do we mean by microgravity? Who wants to have a stab at that?
[00:02:22] Charlotte Daniels: Absolutely. Well, I mean, as the word suggests, micro does mean very small. It's a very small degree of gravity. You know, we take for granted on earth gravity being one g.
[00:02:32] Dallas Campbell: I don't take it for granted. No, everyday I marvel at the...
[00:02:37] Charlotte Daniels: Absolutely. Well, we are. We're definitely conscious, constantly thinking about gravity. But so microgravity is in the context of space, not actually Zero G.
Lots of people sort of mix the two terms together. You know, Zero G doesn't really exist. That's a bit of a misnomer. Because if I'm going to be a bit geeky early on in the chat, we'll get the geeky stuff early on. Newton's universal law of gravitation. Yes, I know had to get it in. We had to get it in.
Yeah.
[00:03:04] Dallas Campbell: best law of gravitation, isn't it?
[00:03:06] Charlotte Daniels: It means that every object in our universe and solar system is constantly affecting each other. So every mass, you know, we have, we're affecting the sun in a minuscule way compared to the sun affecting us.
[00:03:16] Dallas Campbell: It's kind of splitting hairs though...
[00:03:18] Charlotte Daniels: Oh yeah.
[00:03:20] Dallas Campbell: Well, I know what you mean. I know mean.
[00:03:23] Charlotte Daniels: Look, I'm physicist. I've just got to get that definition in there, you know?
[00:03:27] Dallas Campbell: Because you know, when you talk to kids and they see astronauts floating around on the international space station, I get a bit pedantic about that, and I like to point out, and I say it's not because of lack of gravity, because they're not that high up. They're only whatever, a couple hundred,
[00:03:40] Charlotte Daniels: Low orbit. Yeah,
[00:03:41] Dallas Campbell: earth There's just as much gravity, not quite as much gravity, much gravity up there as there is here, but they're in freefall, and hence... That's why, so it's a kind of, the appearance of lack of gravity rather than there being no gravity.
[00:03:58] Charlotte Daniels: Absolutely. Yeah. So for us, microgravity, you know, it unlocks a lot of things that again, we take for granted on Earth. It's an environment that is actually achievable when we pass something called the Karman line, which is really where Earth's own atmosphere ends. It's about a hundred kilometers.
[00:04:13] Dallas Campbell: It's 100 kilometers?
[00:04:14] Brian Zielinski-Smith: 100 Kilometres straight up.
[00:04:17] Charlotte Daniels: To the centimetre.
[00:04:17] Dallas Campbell: The centimetre.
[00:04:18] Charlotte Daniels: No, it really isn't.
[00:04:19] Dallas Campbell: I'm a pedant about the Karman line as well. When people start telling me that space begins here, there and everywhere. I'm like, nope, Theodore von Karman.
[00:04:27] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Yep.
[00:04:27] Dallas Campbell: 1950 something.
[00:04:30] Jane Davies: Sounds right.
[00:04:30] Dallas Campbell: Something like that, I can't remember. There was a conference and they picked it because it was a nice round number. So,
[00:04:36] Charlotte Daniels: Yeah, exactly. So we think, well, you know, plus or minus a few, more than a few kilometers.
[00:04:41] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. But anyway, the point is that my, but this idea of free fall, I mean, if you went straight up and weren't moving, you'd be standing on the International Space Station. You'd be able to walk around. It's just because we're going quite fast.
[00:04:55] Charlotte Daniels: Absolutely.
[00:04:56] Dallas Campbell: There we go. So that's the physics bit done. Is that it? Anything else? We could end the chat there.
So, okay, why, okay, so that's sort of, so, Microgravity, this idea of weightlessness, or the appearance of weightlessness, why do we care about? Who wants to jump in with, Laura's got a hand up from Madrid. Laura, tell, why do we care about microgravity? Why is it important?
[00:05:20] Laura Gonzalez Llamazares: Yeah,
[00:05:20] Dallas Campbell: Other than than it's fun to float about.
[00:05:23] Laura Gonzalez Llamazares: it is very fun to float about. I would love to go in a parabolic flight or to the ISS myself if I could, but I guess there's two points to it, and the first one would be that in microgravity, there's no buoyancy, so matters can actually be mixed exactly evenly, and no matter their density or anything, they can be properly mixed and be a more homogeneous mix and the other thing, the very important, interesting thing for us is that there's no sedimentation, and because there's no gravity, there's nothing pulling it down so that it can grow uniformly. So we can create microstructures and crystals that can be very homogeneous and with many less defects than the ones that we create on Earth. So that for me would be the two main points.
[00:06:04] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Yeah, and also to add onto that, just on the on the growing side of things, it also is unconstrained by gravity. So because it's unconstrained, it also can grow in all directions as opposed to just on a single plane, you can grow in all planes at the same time and you can get larger, better, and also as Laura said, more uniform and with less imperfections because it's not being. Acted on by the wonderful world of gravity.
[00:06:27] Charlotte Daniels: And also convection, though, we've got to include convection as the third pillar of of environment that's created, because that's super
[00:06:34] Dallas Campbell: What do you mean, so convection?
[00:06:36] Charlotte Daniels: Well, convection basically when warm air rises is replaced by colder. more dense matter at the bottom. But obviously for the manufacturing process, that has a lot of implications for again preventing bubble formation and also promoting the homogeneity of the materials.
[00:06:51] Dallas Campbell: You just hate gravity, don't you? just like down gravity.
[00:06:55] Brian Zielinski-Smith: No, not at all. Gravity's good. Gravity's good, it just doesn't help when you're walking upstairs.
[00:07:00] Dallas Campbell: But it's kind, that's true. It's kind of, basically... By being in an environment without it, as it were, you can do all kinds of things.
You kind of get rid of the noise as it were, doing experiments. I mean, is the whole idea of well, I suppose in something like gravity lab, is it manufacturing? Is that the point? It's like we can manufacture or
[00:07:20] Brian Zielinski-Smith: No, well, the thing is with what we're doing is we're providing an opportunity to have a lab in a space or microgravity environment. So we're offering the opportunity for people to kind of like test and develop and validate any products, any materials, any scientific experiment within an environment, which is completely unique, which you can't replicate here on earth.
[00:07:43] Dallas Campbell: Okay. Gimme some examples of the types of things we're talking about why, who's coming to you saying, okay, we need no gravity in order to do X. Like, what are the...
[00:07:53] Brian Zielinski-Smith: There's kind of two tranches, really, that you can look at. You've got the first, which is your academia, your institutions for your research, which are doing really core IP, and then the second is a bit more of the commercial side. But on the commercial side, there's so many opportunities.
So you can look at validating of hardware. Say you've got a new launch vehicle that's going up that's going to release satellites into low Earth or very low Earth or even kind of, you know, higher up as well. Obviously, you've got doors that swing open, you've got mechanics, and understanding how those mechanics work in microgravity, you've got to make sure that they can open and they can close again. Otherwise, you've got issues with regards to, you know, wasted opportunities...
[00:08:36] Dallas Campbell: Wait, what? What do you mean by
[00:08:37] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Hardware. Doors, so basically doors on the so payload doors.
[00:08:41] Dallas Campbell: Okay, on...
[00:08:42] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Got to, yeah, so something's got to open up to release, say, satellites into orbit. And so those mechanics need to be tested.
You've also got cooling. So. You've got processes, you've got electrical equipment up there and you've got to call it somehow. Now we've already said that fluids work differently within space, but also you've got the extreme environment of space. So you've got high temperatures, low temperatures, you've got high radiation.
You've also got you know, various different atmospheres you've got to contend with, and that affects the calling. And so you've got to work out how to call it efficiently, but in a really unique environment. So you test that in a space or microgravity environment, and then there's other cool things such as 3d printing and doing things like that.
So another case in point, then I'll shut up and let Charlie have some mentions. You've also got, like I said, 3D printing. Now, when we send hardware up into space, you know, you're constrained quite a bit by weight and by size.
[00:09:43] Dallas Campbell: You're constrained by, well, yeah, the power of the rocket and the size of the fairing.
[00:09:46] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Exactly, and you're also constrained by, you know, the more you send out, the more it's going to cost, the more fuel has got to go and launch it into space, and as a result of that, you want to reduce that as much as possible. So instead of having huge booms for solar cells, et cetera, which you've got to then pack somehow, and then extract somehow another way of doing is by 3d printing those booms and by 3d printing those booms, you're reducing weight, et cetera, and you're also reducing the amount of kind of storage you've got to have.
[00:10:15] Dallas Campbell: I can't get my 2D printer to work. Like, honestly, getting it paired up with...
[00:10:20] Brian Zielinski-Smith: I mean, IT support's a bit more difficult from a,
[00:10:23] Dallas Campbell: Okay, so, alright, so we got academia, so academics wanting to test stuff. Do we have to go into space to do this? Like, what's the other, have we always done experiments using microgravity? I mean, things like drop towers, for example, you very long in microgravity, you just sort of... drop something.
[00:10:42] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Yeah, well, we, I mean, we have two kind of options. We have a, an alternative to parabolic and and drop tower being a drone solution, which is effectively you can almost imagine it as a drop tower, but relocatable and a lot less infrastructure is needed for that. And then obviously we've got our atypical rocket that goes up and it's all the glitz and the glory of having a rocket going into space.
[00:11:07] Dallas Campbell: I'm going to talk to the satellite applications catapult in a moment to find out how they are facilitating all this stuff. Charlotte. Yeah. Just tell us. So from you, from a sort of business point of view, or it's well, I did it from a, what are the really exciting things that are happening at gravity lab?
I mean, are you kind of inundated with academics and companies banging on your door saying, we've got to test this. We've got to do
[00:11:27] Charlotte Daniels: Well, I think the really exciting thing that Gravity Lab is doing and is now starting to be picked up on by researchers in quite a sort of fast pace is that. So many people like biomedical researchers may have completely disregarded microgravity because they're thinking ISS it's expensive. It's a long mission lead time, you know, do I have five years of funding to actually get this up, you know into low earth orbit? And what we do is we are a very easily accessible stepping stone
[00:11:56] Dallas Campbell: go to the ISS? So you're not, you've nothing to do with the ISS? Or do you have a way of getting stuff
[00:12:00] Brian Zielinski-Smith: No we're effectively kind of a precursor to the ISS. So instead of spending an inordinate amount of money and waiting longer, in fact, longer than my daughter's alive at the moment just to get up there, know, to just to validate something, you know, it's better to actually chuck it on something like a suborbital or do a drone drop.
[00:12:21] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. So, ISS, we understand that, zipping round the planet, 17 and a half thousand miles an hour? Kilometres an hour, I can't remember. But...
[00:12:28] Charlotte Daniels: Kilometers maybe.
[00:12:29] Dallas Campbell: It's a bit of a faff, because it's expensive, and you need massive rockets and Elon Musk to get there.
[00:12:34] Charlotte Daniels: Yeah.
[00:12:35] Dallas Campbell: You're saying, okay, you don't need to go, we can create the same effects as that, but in upper atmosphere...
[00:12:41] Charlotte Daniels: Yeah. Well, maybe starting off first with something going up sort of 80 to a hundred meters kilometers, sorry, and then possibly progressing onto a sounding rocket or our own one stage rocket in later steps.
[00:12:55] Dallas Campbell: So just remind us what a sounding rocket is?
[00:12:57] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Basically, I mean, our rockets, they're effectively a ballistic projectile, and that's the best way to, to describe it, and we don't control it, we don't have someone in the front kind of controlling it. All we're doing is we're pointing and shooting, and we have, it's a solid fuel underneath as well, so we're not using liquid fuel.
[00:13:12] Dallas Campbell: You need a big parabola.
[00:13:14] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Well, yeah. So, what we're doing is you basically fire it up, it spins and you know,
[00:13:18] Dallas Campbell: What do you mean it spins?
[00:13:19] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Basically what happens is because it's a ballistic, it's self stabilizes. it goes up,
[00:13:24] Dallas Campbell: Kind of rifling in a barrel?
[00:13:24] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Yeah, so, so it spins itself, which then stabilizes its trajectory, and then that goes all the way up and then we cut the engines or the engines cut off around about 20 kilometers and then, we continue with the actual kind of velocity we've achieved by that point in time, and that takes us up through the Karman into kind of the upper atmosphere and up to, you know, our altitude that we want to get to, have our microgravity and then come back down again.
[00:13:48] Dallas Campbell: So that, how long do you get of microgravity with something like...
[00:13:51] Brian Zielinski-Smith: So with the suborbital, with an hour one round about seven minutes.
[00:13:55] Dallas Campbell: See that's not very long is it? I'd be freaking out if I had my 3D printer. I'm like, get the printer, we've only got seven minutes to print the
[00:14:01] Charlotte Daniels: But there's a maze. It's amazing what that length of time actually can grant you. So I mean, we're currently talking to someone who wants to do some 3D printing applications in space, and so what she wants to start off with is just a very simple experiment where she just wants to test that her setup will actually extrude the polymer substance that she wants it to, and that only takes seconds. That will take about one to two seconds. That's all she needs for her first step, and then the next step would be maybe changing the material or trying to print a line or some dots and seeing how homogenous the material is once it's deposited and then you can see that we're starting to actually build a program of testing and verification for her, and which could eventually lead to a low earth orbit, much longer duration experiment.
[00:14:45] Dallas Campbell: That's good. Okay, so you've got a sounding rocket, so you get seven minutes. What else, because you just have like straight, you have drones that kind of drop. Bit like an old fashioned drop tower.
[00:14:54] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Kind of, but it looks a lot cooler.
[00:14:57] Dallas Campbell: It does look cooler. Well, anything with a drone, they're very fashionable drones
[00:15:00] Brian Zielinski-Smith: So we have a hexacopter drone. with, I mean, it looks like a bomb underneath it. I mean, it's pretty scary when this thing's kind of flying up, but goes up, it hangs, has this has what we call Louie.
So we, we name all of our launch vehicles out of appreciation for pillars of the scientific community. So for our suborbital is called Isaac. So we have Isaac Newton and then Louie is one of the brothers, you've got Louie and Jack and they were the developers of one of the first gyrocopters.
[00:15:27] Dallas Campbell: Okay.
[00:15:28] Brian Zielinski-Smith: So, Louie is our microgravity drop pod. So that hangs underneath the drone. The drone gets up to around about 2, 000 feet and then releases it, and that gives around about six, six ish seconds of microgravity.
[00:15:44] Dallas Campbell: And presumably there's not much left of it when it comes down? Or does it beautifully parachute down?
[00:15:48] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Well, I know what once it's achieved its microgravity, it's a, it pops up a little parachute and comes down.
[00:15:54] Dallas Campbell: And so you, okay. Are you guys busy?
[00:15:57] Brian Zielinski-Smith: We're very busy at the moment.
[00:15:59] Dallas Campbell: Really? I'm just interested to, I mean, how much of this is theoretical, experimental, we're still at the early stages of this kind of research or is it like no, it's all systems go, we're changing the world with stuff.
[00:16:11] Brian Zielinski-Smith: We're still, we're coming out of R& D phase at the moment, and we are in the process of doing our final testing with Louis, with a view to actually have that commercially released in the next couple of months.
[00:16:24] Dallas Campbell: Let's talk to Jane and Laura from your point of view, are there other people, or is it just Gravity Lab? Are there other companies?
[00:16:31] Jane Davies: There's other companies in the UK that are doing different kinds of microgravity. So there's other ones that are doing sounding balloons. So that's just a different kind of microgravity. There's also people who do, like RPM. So that's a desk based machine that does really small experiments, but it kind of does this reorienting so that it's simulated microgravity on earth.
So you're doing like microbiology experiments, that kind of thing. So small scale, but you're wanting to see how it would affect if it's like reorienting constantly, what you're saying about us on the ISS, how we're kind of going around really quickly, You're doing that on earth on a desk.
[00:17:06] Dallas Campbell: Okay, Laura, you need to get in one of those parabolic flights. I think as the satellite application catapult microgravity bod, you should demand one of those as a work thing.
[00:17:19] Laura Gonzalez Llamazares: Totally agree. Yeah, I think that would be very interesting. Now, the type of experiments that are done both in parabolic flights, sounding rockets and balloons, drop towers are really exciting. And they allow you to get that first glimpse of microgravity is as Brian and Charlotte were mentioning before, but there's some experiments or some even manufacturing.
They're talking already about production in orbit. That need directly space platforms. No. So it's interesting that we have those both stages in which we have air based companies, as Jane was mentioning, we have B2 space in the UK as well. There's a drop tower in Germany, in Sarm that we're able to access through ESA, through the European Space Agency.
The UK can participate in lots of different programs for parabolic flights as well. There's a company in France, Nova space, another in Florida called Zero G, and so there's many offerings. And then we also have the space platforms, and I think here the UK is now very interesting spot with this company Space Forge. There are positioning themselves as the manufacturing the space manufacturing company in the UK, and they're having very interesting developments.
They will have their first spacecraft very soon, and there's many others like them and usually at the moment, there's Some already available like companies can already send things to space to the ISS and there's companies there that commercially are exploiting these benefits, and it's very interesting that Charlotte also mentioned convection and also Brian mentioned extreme temperatures.
I think it's not only about microgravity. We tend about talking about microgravity and we love this word, but I think it's a little bit more open than that. There's, it's not only microgravity, but it's the whole environment there.
[00:18:58] Dallas Campbell: That's a really good way of thinking about it. So microgravity is just one bit of noise that you get to turn off. Actually, you can turn off lots of noises...
[00:19:07] Laura Gonzalez Llamazares: Exactly. There's many different variables there that help And I like to think about it as a lab. So same as in on earth to manufacture things, we need to expose materials to high temperatures or different circumstances. We have a very unique environment, a very unique lab in space, and we need to start making use of it or not even on space, but simulating this with these earth based companies and offerings that the companies like gravity labs and others are offering in the UK, but it's definitely a very exciting field because we have lots of space platforms, NanoRacks, Bartolomeo, IceCubes already in the ISS offering this service, but we also have commercial companies, commercial private space stations coming up live very soon, like Axiom, there's also the ESA SpaceRider, like there's many different companies looking at this sector at the moment, and I think one of the big examples at the moment is also Varda Industries. This is a company based in the U. S. and they've raised a lot of funding at the moment. They actually launched their first spacecraft already this last Monday and they have a, I think it's a 90 kilogram Capsule that is designed to carry a drug and do drug research into microgravity.
So a lot of pharmaceuticals and the objective is that they bring all of these materials and up there. They do the experiments and they return to earth, which I think is one of the biggest challenges so that we can use these very high value products for earth uses and help earth at the end. Right? Like, the importance is always bringing those benefits to society and humanity and I find that very interesting. Very inspiring.
[00:20:40] Dallas Campbell: Jane, with your business head on, what does the landscape look like? I mean, are you surprised by the, we just heard from Lara, the kind of variety of stuff that's being made? I mean, do you, do sort of companies come to you that you're surprised about? Like why would this company want to do stuff in microgravity?
[00:20:58] Jane Davies: I mean, it's a, we mostly get companies coming to us who are providing microgravity services who interested in doing that. But I think it's definitely a growing industry for people who are or companies or industries that are looking to pivot into
[00:21:11] Dallas Campbell: microgravity.
Who's looking to pivot into microgravity?
[00:21:13] Jane Davies: I think it's also, it's a, it's sort of a ongoing conversation. conversation. webe doing the work to advocate for microgravity and to show all these things that it can do. Like, I think what a big important one would be, the pharmaceutical industry has a lot gain from working in microgravity.
[00:21:26] Dallas Campbell: I hear that a lot. So give it, can you give us an example of that? Like, is there a company that's like that had sort of never heard of it? And now suddenly they're all about microgravity.
[00:21:34] Jane Davies: I don't have a specific example in mind, but I think that because the it's still quite a young industry in microgravity, but in terms of crystals coming together, I think there was a I can't remember the name of the company. So maybe you'll know. But there was one of the covid vaccines was tested there that like or something.
[00:21:50] Charlotte Daniels: So the great thing about microgravity is that there's not one catch all idea of how it affects microorganisms, bacteria and viruses. So it can either inhibit viruses or it can actually make it more, more virulent the environment. So it's not like we can think viruses are all going to act a certain way on the space station. So, absolutely. What a lot of people are now sort of catching onto is that we can create crystallized protein structures, membrane proteins specifically, which are sort of the cause of many genetic diseases such as Alzheimer's and cystic fibrosis actually use a process called X Ray Crystallography on these larger, pure structures that are made in space, and then observe a larger structure in more detail, finds the inhibitor that actually prevents the protein from mutating and causing the disease, and then coming up with a vaccine or a treatment for it. And there's been a 10 year study on the ISS for a muscular dystrophy strain that is actually now in clinical trials because of this.
[00:22:56] Dallas Campbell: Jane, is it the idea that you understand how drugs will work and then you come with that knowledge that we've gained from being in microgravity, we then do it on Earth, or is it we actually make the drugs in microgravity because the absence of gravity is important for drug production?
[00:23:12] Jane Davies: It could be both. So either it's because like crystals will come together easier or like more beautifully, like Brian was saying, they can grow in every direction. They can also grow exponentially because they're not inhibited by But then also doing that research as Charlotte was mentioning. So it's a bit, it's a bit, it's all, it's a sort of catch all miracle, if you
[00:23:28] Dallas Campbell: Miracle, I like that. These are the things, drugs I hear a lot about in this sort of area. The other thing I hear a lot about is sort of materials as well. Like, and particularly in the sort of high tech industries, you know, semiconductors
[00:23:43] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Yeah, materials is a big one, and it's, I mean, when I first joined gravity lab, it was kind of the major thing on my mind, partly from my background, but also from all the noise that I was
[00:23:53] Dallas Campbell: What's your background?
[00:23:54] Brian Zielinski-Smith: My background is mechanical engineering. So I got to play with a lot of different materials and kind of work out what's best for different structures and just the amount of interest in developing new materials and also creating ones which are resistant to types of rust or ones that can have a better kind of Crystalline structure, more ordered or unordered depending on kind of your process, and also ones that are better for space travel and you can create lots of things. You can also create better alloys in space, and then if you look at like the big one at the moment, our kind of tech industry is fueled by semiconductors and by silicon. So it's semiconductors.
[00:24:38] Dallas Campbell: I think I've never quite understood what a semiconductor is. Is this, is it like a kind of semi colon, like, or half a conductor? Like, I never quite, it's the sort of word semiconductor, I never really...
[00:24:48] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Well, quite simply, a semiconductor is made from silicon. Okay, so it's core, core substrate is...
[00:24:54] Dallas Campbell: it's about lack of resistance.
[00:24:56] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Yeah and within that you have other processes as well, and you have lots of stuff within the chips, within the semiconductors as well.
So you're looking at several different layers, but the major component is silicon and silicon itself is, you know, you can make it here on earth, but by making it in space, you make larger ingots, you reduce the amount of time it takes to produce it because you can grow the crystals again exponentially, you can increase the time or decrease the time in which to create these crystals and so you can actually manufacture The raw materials in space bring that raw materials back down to earth for processing and then those physicists that actually then process it into chips and into anything that uses silicon
[00:25:45] Dallas Campbell: It is crazy, isn't it? Did you see that thing a couple of months ago? It was Blue Origin. They made like a, they made a solar panel or a solar cell out of lunar regolith, just from kind of moon dirt. Yeah. I'm like, what? This is, it's like alchemy. It's like, oh my goodness!
[00:26:02] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Well, I mean, there's some silicone on the lunar surface, so I mean, it's prime building materials out there.
[00:26:09] Dallas Campbell: Dig it up. Let's go.
[00:26:10] Brian Zielinski-Smith: That's just it. But that is something which so many people are looking at as well, looking at the raw materials that are there, you know, and you've got loads of companies that are looking at creating the mechanics and the processes to build habitats using materials that are found on planets and on moons and like for instance lunar surface.
[00:26:31] Dallas Campbell: What do you think of the, what are the big challenges for this research at the moment, like what, for you guys, what, this is an open question, like, where are, what are the problems that you're trying to overcome? Is it getting rockets up or balloons up? Or, you know, is the dream to be getting suborbital or orbital platforms, which are sort of cheaper than the ISS or what's the...
[00:26:52] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Well it depends. Is it a problem for gravity, or the problem for the industry as a whole and other industries associated with it? So for us, it's more of a case of a lack of, I guess, understanding of the benefits that microgravity and testing within those types of environments give. Because I, everything like I'm looking at your desk now right now, and you've got your computer there, you've got your phone there, there's loads of other stuff around, and there's loads of other tech.
So everything that you're looking around has been tested in some shape or form, whether it be shock tested, vibration tested, or it's had package testing so it doesn't break when it's delivered to shops, but they're all tested in. single capacity. So it might be tested for temperature at one point, then tested in one axis of vibration, then another axis of vibration, then another axis of vibration, then a shock test, then something else test.
So you've got all these independent tests, you know, when you've carrying a laptop around, it's seeing three degrees of motion. Chuck it on the floor as well. So that's then seeing acceleration, shock, impact, and the vibration of you carrying it, and also all your different motions. So you're seeing all this all at the same time and also you might go and chuck your coffee over it and other things, and all of these things are happening all at the same time. But your computer and your phone, your laptop and blah, blah, blah, blah, all of that still works because it's been tested, but it's not real life testing. Whereas when you start using stuff like Suborbital rockets, you're then testing every single aspect all at the same time. It becomes a synergistic test for hardware, and so you're actually getting a more realistic testing environment for it to actually work.
[00:28:30] Dallas Campbell: Man, do you think industry are aware of this? Like, do you, at the catapult, is part of your job of selling this kind of idea to...
[00:28:41] Jane Davies: Not necessarily, but in terms of just helping the community grow so that knowledge can be.
[00:28:47] Dallas Campbell: Hmm.
[00:28:47] Jane Davies: Developed within the communities. I think that's something that is also prohibitive is cost for sure and access. So being able to send your end time, but being able to send your experiments to the ISS, for example, as we said, long wait time, longer than Brian's children have been alive and also then, and massively costly.
So, I think in terms of having more access and different mechanisms, so having drop pods, having parabolic flights, anything means that there'll be more companies that are able to pivot into that. So yeah, not necessarily that we are promoting it, but we're promoting the businesses and helping them develop their experiments.
[00:29:22] Dallas Campbell: Is the cost going to, presumably is going to come down as more and more companies get, see the benefits?
[00:29:26] Jane Davies: Exactly, and like, we've seen SpaceX has made a lot of spacefaring companies a lot more affordable because you're able to access flights more often.
[00:29:36] Brian Zielinski-Smith: But one of the things just to add on to what you were saying, it's like trying to get up into space and trying to do this testing. There is a long lead time, and so if you've something goes wrong, or you actually want to then redevelop that test and then validate it again, you know, from initial conception could be kind of year zero.
Then you've got to year two by the time you launch, and then in order to get back on another launch, it could be year four. So you've then got a four year lead time. Just to develop one piece of IP or to validate it with what we're doing and other people as well making it more accessible You can effectively launch get your data reset and be up again the following month if you wanted to.
[00:30:14] Charlotte Daniels: Or even just establish that your experiment is going to survive a launch.
[00:30:17] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Exactly.
[00:30:18] Charlotte Daniels: The G, you associated with that,
[00:30:21] Dallas Campbell: Basically, the ISS is a massive faff. That's the kind of bottom line for most people.
[00:30:26] Brian Zielinski-Smith: And the microgravity is really poor.
[00:30:29] Dallas Campbell: And the what sorry?
[00:30:30] Brian Zielinski-Smith: It's really poor.
[00:30:31] Dallas Campbell: No, it's the best. It's like constant. It's why...
[00:30:34] Brian Zielinski-Smith: But you've got people. You've got and each one of those, as we said right at the very beginning, every mass, you know, has some sort of gravitational field, so it's always pulling and everything's pulling everything else and when you've got lots of bodies and lots of things around you, the actually. poorer. Plus
[00:30:51] Dallas Campbell: people.
[00:30:51] Brian Zielinski-Smith: also...
[00:30:51] Dallas Campbell: Interesting.
[00:30:52] Brian Zielinski-Smith: When they're doing the experiments, they quite, they're not trained to do that.
[00:30:55] Dallas Campbell: They're astronauts.
[00:30:56] Brian Zielinski-Smith: So they just get a little, know, checklist, you have I done that? Have I done that?
[00:31:00] Laura Gonzalez Llamazares: No, I was just thinking that's actually one of the challenges about microgravity in space and one of the other challenges could be if we move on to more auto automated platforms and robotic platforms to be able to have platforms themselves doing all this work. They usually are astronauts because they are usually the eyes that are doing the research there.
But if we move more into robotics, these robotics are gonna have to sort of survive also the rocket launch and it's. It gets into a very technically complex topic well, and I guess the other complex and technical challenges that I see when we talk about microgravity in space and returning these goods toward is re entry.
For me that's the very critical point, and I'm very curious to see how companies like Space Forge or Varda Industries does it because If you imagine like you have this capsule coming 18, 000 miles per hour with extreme heat and you create plasma on your way down. So it's one of the most dangerous parts of any space journey, let's say. So I'm very curious of seeing how this is solved.
[00:32:06] Dallas Campbell: Jane, what is the important mission goal of the catapult, do you think?
[00:32:12] Jane Davies: Right. So our mission is to their many important missions for to be precise. Yeah, no. So we are here to support the space sector in the UK and help it grow and develop and just kind essentially help the UK become a space superpower, if you will. So in terms of microgravity, we're here to support industry working on those things and, you know, companies like Gravity Lab, we want to support them in the future going forward and how we can continue to help them grow. But also any industries that are looking to pivot into microgravity being that kind of contact point to say, look, this kind of testing would be great for you or this kind of mission would be good for you. So, for example, a 3D printing company could come to us and say, we're looking to transition into space or automobile company, whatever, that kind of thing, and I think also one of the great things we're doing is we have a microgravity working group which meets bi monthly, means...
[00:33:06] Dallas Campbell: Do they float that much?
[00:33:07] Jane Davies: How did you know? Yeah.
[00:33:08] Dallas Campbell: They're sort of sort of floating about
[00:33:10] Jane Davies: Yeah. We all get on parabolic flight, and we all vomit on each other. No so, yeah, so we meet twice a month. Brian's also part of the group, and it's to sort of discuss how we can help support the UK roadmap of sort of microgravity developments, and also talk through any challenges we're having in the industry, and just help create these relationships and synergies between different companies doing different things and research.
[00:33:35] Dallas Campbell: Are we going to be a space superpower? What do you think?
[00:33:39] Jane Davies: That's what the UK space strategy says.
[00:33:42] Dallas Campbell: That's what they say. But do you, I mean, are we on, are you, I mean, you, this is your day job, do you, are you hopeful? Are you, are we on the right course? Do we need to do more?
[00:33:53] Jane Davies: I mean, one of the things that the UK has on its side is we are like a manufacturing superpower and have been for many years. So that is something that we're, because space is developing into quite a manufacturing hub, whether that's manufacturing force space or in space we do have a really strong core there.
So I do think that could help lead us to be, a superpower. Plus, you know, we have a nice history being I'm joking. Yeah, no, I think we've been leaders in a lot of industries for a long time, which are able to pivot to space so that puts us in good position, and we're still all connected to the European sector through ESA.
So even though we're out of the EU, we're still connected through the space
[00:34:35] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Yeah, I was gonna say, just on top of that as well, we're not just, you know, manufacturing kind of excellence. We export so much IP,
[00:34:44] Dallas Campbell: That was academic research.
[00:34:46] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Exactly and we are, you know, really pivotal to academic research and academic development and IP development. But not only that, but. We love red tape here. We love process. We love developing kind of new structures and new ways of doing things and getting it written down and getting ways of working put in place that actually do work, and we are one of the leaders in the world at creating this stuff.
[00:35:11] Dallas Campbell: Do other people know that we're the leaders in terms of regulations and and legislations and rules of the road, as it were?
[00:35:17] Brian Zielinski-Smith: We do, which is why we're working on the space sustainability rating because that once we get that in place, it will then be something which can then follow on and people will then start working towards it and it'll bleed outwardly, whicwhy we are really good good at standards why we're really good at ratings and those kind of things, because it's just in our blood that we are good at.
[00:35:37] Dallas Campbell: We're just good.
[00:35:37] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Exactly. We are just good.
[00:35:39] Dallas Campbell: One of the things I'm interested in is the scalability of things. We talk, okay, I understand microgravity platforms for research and making small examples of things, but if we kind of want to manufacture materials, like, you know, when I think of manufacturing materials, I think of big you know, concrete, you know, cement factories or, you know, factories generally so everything's very small. We can't build things at scale though.
[00:36:08] Jane Davies: It depends on what you're building, because if you can, if you're building space structures, so like space based solar panels in space, you can just kind of print them infinitely into orbit, right? Or if you're planting fiber optic cable cables, which are Beautiful in space, apparently you can just like keep calling them up and...
[00:36:26] Dallas Campbell: Can you print? So when we talk about 3D printing in space, what do you, what are the materials that you're printing? Because I, when I think of 3D printing, I think of that kind of grainy plasticky...
[00:36:35] Jane Davies: Yeah,
[00:36:35] Dallas Campbell: But,
[00:36:36] Jane Davies: Yeah,
[00:36:36] Dallas Campbell: We're printing with other things.
[00:36:39] Jane Davies: Lots of research going on because there's even things as far as like printing human organs, like it's like putting down you've got...
[00:36:46] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Bioprinting, you've got bioprinting, but you've also got polymer printing because it's relatively lightweight and you are reliant less on its structural integrity because of course you're outside the bounds of one g gravity. So you can, as you said, print infinitely, but there's also other cool stuff so you can also print, and you can forge materials in space.
[00:37:08] Dallas Campbell: How do you mean forged? Forged, as as in with an anvil?
[00:37:11] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Well, no, so we're effectively we're not going medieval just but no, what you can do is you can actually create alloys. So we're talking about putting high heat on different metals and obviously create a smelt and then creating your alloy that and then you can create your specific alloys within space and you do that with...
[00:37:31] Dallas Campbell: So, but by new alloys, again, this idea of the crystal structure of an alloy being more...
[00:37:37] Brian Zielinski-Smith: or you can look at different lattice structures which are, on Earth, not very structurally sound and difficult to manufacture or unstable or brittle, but in space, because they form differently and they call differently and they are different for their inherent physical properties, you can actually then develop them in space and you actually have a better output.
[00:38:00] Charlotte Daniels: I do think that one of the more emerging and quite promising industries is actually in biopolymers. So replacing, trying to decarbonize using space and actually introducing plastic free materials. So biopolymers, they include things called, don't ask me what the acronym is, but PHAs. But what's really exciting about them is not only does microgravity stimulate the growth, so you can grow things faster if it was on the ISS or low Earth orbit, but actually there has been emerging research that instantaneous exposure to microgravity actually triggers the growth, almost the metabolic rate of the biopolymer straight away. So what you could do is send something up super quick, bring it back down, then culture and grow it on Earth. So that's hugely, like, got huge potential. So, and Estée Lauder is currently actually doing research with the ISS on that, so...
[00:38:49] Dallas Campbell: As in Estee Lauder, in...?
[00:38:51] Charlotte Daniels: You heard it right. Yeah.
[00:38:53] Dallas Campbell: Really?
[00:38:53] Charlotte Daniels: Yeah, absolutely. To remove plastics from their production processes and to mitigate. Yeah, so it's a really, so bigger names like that actually recognising the applications of microgravity are really important.
[00:39:06] Dallas Campbell: Jane, do you think, is it the... While bigger names sort of get involved in this idea, will there be a sort of trickle down once people start to... Well, Estee Lauder are, you know, doing it. We better
[00:39:16] Jane Davies: Well, yeah, I mean, isn't that sort of case in point with Elon Musk doing it? Like everyone's like, Oh, space is cool again.
[00:39:21] Brian Zielinski-Smith: I was going to say one of the kind of other kind of quite cool things like you just mentioned about Estee Lauder, Colgate have also been doing stuff in space looking at.
[00:39:28] Dallas Campbell: No one can hear you clean.
[00:39:29] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Ah,
[00:39:30] Charlotte Daniels: That was quick.
[00:39:31] Dallas Campbell: Come on!
[00:39:32] Brian Zielinski-Smith: But also people that, you know, looking at contact lenses, because everyone's trying to get into that because they know that it can unlock certain features and certain physical properties or, you know, understand fundamentals, which they cannot do in a lab, like a bubble formation.
[00:39:46] Dallas Campbell: Well, just while we're on the subject of decarbonizing, there's a lot of chat amongst the space community, as you know, about sustainability and being clean. You know, the more activities we do in space and low Earth orbit and, well, up in the atmosphere. Are you guys aware at Gravity Lab of that? Do you have a very, are you kind of...
[00:40:07] Charlotte Daniels: absolutely.
[00:40:08] Brian Zielinski-Smith: So, so for us, our core mission is all about sustainable space. So it's making space a sustainable venture, not just from us accessing it. So our drone and drop pod, that sustainable it's all based on electric. It's not, you know, diesel power or anything else like that and then our rocket as well, you know, with it being a hybrid fuel 75% less polluting than your current kind of liquid propulsion because we are only going up to about 20, 000 yeah, 20 kilometers. We're actually not putting any harmful gases into the stratosphere, which is good. Also our, the output from it, it breaks it down into, nitrogen on one side, oxygen on another, so we're not putting too much in the way of greenhouse gases into the, back into the atmosphere, which is obviously very important. And our rockets, because they're single stage, we don't end up having to waste a stage every single time we launch. What goes up comes back down, so we're not adding to space debris and space debris is a huge problem at the moment, especially in Leo. , which is why VLEO so very low very low Earth orbit is such a, an interesting kind of thing at the moment because it's obviously what doesn't manage to stay in orbit comes back down and naturally the orbits.
[00:41:30] Jane Davies: Well, I think it's important that companies like gravity lab and any other companies in the industry are leading with sustainability because there is a decent lack of policy and regulation around space.
[00:41:42] Dallas Campbell: All the time. It's one of those subjects that keeps coming up. It's like, it's all a bit Wild West. It's like we and it gets down to that messy geopolitics again, seems to be
[00:41:51] Jane Davies: Well, there's not been much done really since like 1966, 1967, when the outer space treaty was signed. So it's...
[00:41:57] Dallas Campbell: That, yeah, we need, do we need a new one? I'd volunteer volunteer to write it.
[00:42:02] Jane Davies: International cooperation. We'll see.
[00:42:04] Brian Zielinski-Smith: So that they are working on the the SSR so the space sustainability rating, and that's all about sustainable space. And that's not just about launch providers and making it accessible, but it's also about the hardware, making sure that it meets certain standards that it doesn't go and die on deployment.
I mean, we've got 50% of, well, just under 50% of all. Small sats fail on deployment and about 75% of that 50% fail instantaneously. So you imagine how many satellites are up there and how many of them don't work and that's due to the way that they're launched. The way that they're tested, it's validated through using materials and using, kind of, suppliers. Here we go, well, we've used them before, so why won't it work? Well, it's not always the same. All you need is one minor change and it stops working.
[00:42:54] Dallas Campbell: What do we think this sort of industry is going to look like in 10 years time? You've talked about some exciting things, pharmaceuticals, materials, like what's the, if we sort of get in our DeLorean and go back to good old 2050, I are we going to, is it, do you think it's going to be revolutionary do you think to life on earth? Do you think many of the problems that we see now?
[00:43:18] Charlotte Daniels: Yeah. So I know that it's obviously with global warming being. at the forefront of sort of being a global issue. One thing that is also very advantageous in a space environment is creating ultra resilient plant seeds. So that's actually another thing like an agricultural interest in space that if we can create plants that can grow, seedlings that can grow in the environment of the space station in microgravity and we can get them to withstand high temperatures, like high pressure environments, vibrational testing, then we can plant them on earth and actually help ensure that we have enough access to sustainable food for any potential challenges that the next few decades might bring.
[00:44:03] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, I hadn't even, I haven't, so, Laura.
[00:44:05] Laura Gonzalez Llamazares: I agree with Richard up there. I think agriculture and food is another one of the big markets that we need to start looking at. And I think one of the challenges that we have is that we always talk with space companies, but we need to also go into these other markets and talk to the experts in agriculture, in food, in advanced materials, and try to get them understand, as Brian was saying before, what are these benefits?
And this is something that we're actually already doing together with the European Space Agency. They have a program called the Business and Space growth network, the ESA PSGN, and they have selected three specific markets to work on and to have partners to work on directly. So there's one for agriculture and food.
There's one for life sciences and biomedicine, and as the catapult are leading the one in advanced materials and manufacturing, and I think these type of programs are key in NASA in America. There's NASA doing similar things with and I think we need to keep pushing and keep supporting companies. We usually have like a call for proposals. And then from those proposals that come up with ideas for manufacturing things in space and developing advanced materials in microgravity, we support them with specific partners that are not a space expert, but actually manufacturing experts and they know about the composition, the chemicals and all of that. So it's very important that we also dig into the details of these markets.
[00:45:24] Dallas Campbell: So Laura and Jane, so your, I mean, your job at the catapult really is to sort of nurture this environment and to act as a kind of...
[00:45:30] Jane Davies: Dating agency.
[00:45:31] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. Yeah, right, of like, yeah, them. Yeah, it's interesting. Actually, thinking about the food thing's kind of interesting. Just. Just quickly before we finish off, I, you know, for a long time you see them on the International Space Station growing food with various degrees of success and I always, you know, and the argument is, well, if we're gonna go to Mars, we need to kind of grow our own food, and I've always been really worried 'cause they only ever grow lettuce. like, that's not gonna keep you going in...
[00:45:56] Jane Davies: Yeah, definitely.
[00:45:57] Dallas Campbell: ...on a trip to Mars. You're gonna need something...
[00:45:59] Brian Zielinski-Smith: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about fresh fruit, and so with the ISS, they get regular deliveries of fresh fruit because obviously they can't, they don't have an orange tree growing on the ISS, and the thing is with kind of the amount of radiation that is in space, when they transport fresh fruit up there, it has a less nutritional value when it gets there left, and that's not because it's aged or anything else like that. It's because of the environment and it immediately starts degrading. And so they're actually getting less nutrition than say we are here. So they're having to take nutritional supplements and that's due to the breakdown of the amino acids and the proteins and so there's some, you know, quite a lot of studies on how Prolong the life of the food and keep its nutritional value for space journeys. But also that has an impact back here on earth because then it increases shelf life. It stops food waste. It lowers the demand on food production, those kind of things, and also stops the demand on expensive packaging and polymers, etcetera for keeping food fresh.
[00:47:04] Dallas Campbell: Space is ace. Every time I do these things, I, you know, you touch these subjects. You kind of know a little bit about what you've heard of. And then when you unpack it, like, it's amazing. Like, you know, it's the things that are possible. We're going to finish, but I just want to maybe go around the room.
I'm interested in what you're most excited about. I mean, we've talked a lot of things. Drugs and food and materials, and what's the thing that, you know, for you working in this industry, you're most excited about what gets you up in the morning, Shane?
[00:47:32] Jane Davies: I don't know about particular with the being in business, but my background is in like anthropology of space, of social sciences. So for me, what I'm most excited about is how people are going to relate in microgravity and how humans are going to continue to develop their culture off world.
[00:47:47] Dallas Campbell: That's really...
[00:47:48] Jane Davies: Yeah, whether it's in orbit or whether it's we become an interplanetary species, who knows?
But yeah, I think the way we relate in space is totally different. Like, how do you hug someone when you're having to float towards them? Things like that, that just change the dynamics of our relationships. That's why I'm most I'm most excited.
[00:48:03] Dallas Campbell: That is really, that's a really interesting area. I read a very interesting article about, about like when we go to Mars, like, will religion start on Mars? all those kind of like weird,
[00:48:13] Jane Davies: Like, how do you face Mecca when you're going around the planet times a day? Yeah,
[00:48:17] Dallas Campbell: Concern of NASA.
[00:48:20] Jane Davies: The answer is you just, God knows facing it, apparently. Yeah, you know.
[00:48:24] Dallas Campbell: Wow, that's a deep question. Wow, we've gone from microgravity to some really deep philosophical stuff. Lara, what's your thing that you're interested in?
[00:48:33] Laura Gonzalez Llamazares: I think there's like two angles to it. For me, there's the technology development and all these very exciting new drugs that are going to be developed and things that are going to help us here on earth. I think that's very interesting. Very exciting. But also the other side is the synergies and the collaborations that we can create not only within space companies, but actually between space and other industries or academia and industry, that's very powerful.
[00:49:00] Dallas Campbell: I think that is, I think this idea I think there's a, there is an idea that space people do space things over there, and actually space people need to come, you know, Estee Lauder's a good example, isn't it? Actually, space entering the mainstream of industry and business.
[00:49:15] Charlotte Daniels: Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I 100% agree with Laura, and I think for me, it'll be really, I hope I'm still working in this industry in 20 years time, because I'm really excited to see the potential for like regenerative medicine and stem cell research with space.
[00:49:29] Dallas Campbell: I I want to talk more about organs in space because that's just like, just very quick. Can we grow, are we going to like growing like organ farm?
[00:49:37] Charlotte Daniels: It's So I think we're at the stage of growing things called organoids, which do help us to sort of understand tissue structures and organ structures. But you know, the next step would be actually growing stem cells.
[00:49:49] Dallas Campbell: And then, brains in vats. We going to get there?
[00:49:53] Charlotte Daniels: But
[00:49:53] Jane Davies: We're not already, those
[00:49:54] Charlotte Daniels: Great thing would be, though, to have something where you didn't have, someone had kidney disease, they got a new kidney, and they didn't have to have anti rejection drugs because it was their own kidney. You know, it's just astounding, the sort of potential. So the next couple of decades, it would
[00:50:09] Dallas Campbell: I'm really annoyed. I was born a long time ago. I want to be born now so I can see all this stuff coming in 50 years time. Brian, what's your you know, you're in this business. What's the thing that...?
[00:50:20] Brian Zielinski-Smith: For me, well, I mean, I've always loved space and I absolutely love it to bits. So just getting up and being able to say that I work within the space sector is just great. But one thing I love seeing is how accessible it's been now becoming and it's the barriers have been broken down continuously to the point of where, you know, earth bound and civil bound kind of industries are now blowing those lines between what they're doing here on Earth and what they're doing in space, and there's now becoming a real kind of merging of the two. And there's a real technology transference from what we're doing here on Earth, and very simply, you know, knocking it down a few levels in terms of R& D, and then chucking it on a spacecraft, chucking it back up and next thing you know, it's now space tech as well, and it's just. having that transference and seeing it develop, seeing it become more accessible to the point of where say in 10 years time, you know, space is no longer going to be a buzzword. It's just going to be the norm, like getting into your full focus or whatever, know, can't go to school is going to go as well, where should we go this time?
[00:51:21] Dallas Campbell: Great. Well, there we go. That's it. Jane, Brian, Lara, thank you for joining us from Madrid, Charlotte. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been really interesting conversation. So thank you very much for stopping by and talking to us about microgravity.
[00:51:35] Jane Davies: Thank you.
[00:51:36] Charlotte Daniels: Thank you.
[00:51:37] Laura Gonzalez Llamazares: Thank you very much.
[00:51:38] Dallas Campbell: Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for your company. To hear future episodes of In Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favourite podcast app, and to find out more about how space is empowering industries between episodes, you can visit the Catapult website or join them on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.