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Usually topical, frequently fun and almost always thought-provoking, join us as we take a conversational dive into the news stories from the University of Aberdeen and beyond that are making headlines around the world.
This podcast reflects the views and opinions of its contributors, not necessarily the institutional position of the University of Aberdeen.
Into the Headlines_ Episode 6: Watch this Space
Intro: (00.01) Six, five, four, three, two, one – ignition. We have a lift
off, we have lift off.
Speaker 1: (00.20) Space. Almost sixty years on from both JFK and Star Trek iconically
referring to it as such, it is still the final frontier. But it’s also changing. With the first orbital
satellite launch from Scottish soil due later this year and Elon Musk’s Starship rocket aiming
to have people on the Moon by around 2025 and then onward to Mars in the 2030’s; space
exploration is no longer the domain of governments or national and international agencies.
And that just makes it even more exciting. From the University of Aberdeen I’m Laura Grant.
Strap on your jet pack, cause we’re going Into the Headlines.
Intro music: (00.59)
Speaker 1: (01.12) Episode 6 – Watch this Space. I’m joined today by Professor Javier
Martin-Torres, theoretical physicist and personal chair at the School of Geosciences; and Dr
Maria Manoli, lecturer in space law at the University’s School of Law. Welcome both.
Speaker 2: (01.28) Thank you very much.
Speaker 3: (01.29) Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: (01.30) Javier, Scotland and the University of Aberdeen aren’t necessarily the
first places that people think of when it comes to space exploration but we’ve got quite a bit
going on here, haven’t we?
Speaker 2: (01.40) Yeah, actually Scotland is a beautiful place to be in the first instance
and the UK in general has been always a very nice place for space exploration. And
Aberdeen is a very interesting place in particular because, I don’t know if everybody knows
this but there is a site in Aberdeen where there is a mineral and this place where this mineral
called Macaulayite is found is the only place on earth where this mineral is. The only other
place where this mineral is, is on Mars, of course this is not the point that attracted me to
Aberdeen. I have always loved the environment of the city and the University itself and we
started this group of planetary scientists from scratch so this is a new group that in more
than 500 years of the University, it is the first time there is a department of planetary
sciences but there has been a few researchers that have been contributing to research in
planetary sciences, like John Parnell, who is still active at the University, and some other
people that have been contributing in the past to a very nice history of planetary science and
some papers about planetary science, space and about noctilucent clouds. I mean
noctilucent clouds is a very nice phenomena that you can see in the summertime in
Aberdeen, it’s one of the best places in the world to see them, and those are clouds that are
formed at more than 80km in the atmosphere and they are bright at night-time. Aberdeen is
a unique place to observe them and we had an astronomer actually in the 70’s or 80’s that
was working at the Cromwell Observatory at the University, he had an observatory of
noctilucent clouds and those clouds are very important from an atmospheric point of view so
there is a kind of tradition in studying space weather and studying planetary atmosphere but
this is the first time we’ve had a department of planetary sciences in Aberdeen.
Speaker 1: (03.48) I love that we have the mineral that’s found at the base of Bennachie, I
think they should put that on the welcome signs to Aberdeenshire – ‘twinned with Mars’. That
would be amazing.
Speaker 2 (03.58)
Speaker 1: (03.58) You’ve described the time that we are living in as being the golden age
of space exploration – what do you mean by that?
Speaker 2: (04.05) Yes, actually we are in a time where we see that there is a huge
increase economically in investment all around the world about space exploration. There are
many companies in the world now, some of them are very famous like SpaceX, but there are
hundreds of companies that start every year all over the world and we have, very recently I
heard a prediction from one of these broker companies in the United States where they said
that in 10 years the investment of space exploration in general will be around three trillion
dollars, which is a massive amount of money and very importantly most of this economy will
be moved by companies not, as traditionally it has been, by space agencies. Actually right
now we have it that space agencies like NASA rely on rockets launched or built by SpaceX,
for example, a company. So we have this transition that goes from the traditional space that
was governed by governments and space agencies, to a new era of space that will be
governed by space companies. Also you just have to look at the last five or 10 years, the
space exploration, the space launches that we had, hundreds of them, satellites – I mean we
have a constant constellation of satellites around the world that is used for
telecommunication; so we are living in an era where there is a lot of launches, a lot of space
developments that there has never been before. It is very popular and famous, that period of
the Cold War where the United States and Russia were fighting to be the kings of space and
to be the first to go to the moon and the first to launch an instrument to space, and that
period of time was kind of bimodal, there were only two participants in that career but now
we see that it is all over the world that we have countries able to launch instruments into
space. For example we have not only the United States and Russia, we have Japan, we
have Sweden, we have Israel, we have India, we have China – we have all of these
countries they have the capability to launch instruments into space, so I see that now we are
really living in the golden age of space exploration.
Speaker 1: (06.39) Space is cool. There’s no two ways about it. It easily captures the
imagination but how easy is it to transfer into a career? The rise in private companies
involved in space exploration must be making that easier, is it?
Speaker 2: (06.52) Oh yeah it is, absolutely. Actually we have currently a Masters in
Planetary Sciences at the University of Aberdeen and the way that we advertise it is that we
try to communicate to students or to people in general that there is space for everybody in
space. Because in the future if we have colonies on the moon or Mars when we have a
space gateway around the moon, we will need people working in many different fields. We
need medical doctors, we need nurses, we will need lawyers, we will need biologists,
chemists, physicists, engineers of course, so we need people from all branches of science
who will have a contribution in space. So we cannot say that in the past we were always
thinking about space as something just for physicists, engineers, mathematicians and things
like that, now we are going to have the opportunity very soon to have more astronauts only
going to the International Space Station but also landing on the moon, trying to go to Mars
and land on Mars, so we are going to have a lot of opportunities for people from all the
different fields to participate in space, not only to working for space agencies, as I said
before, but also for companies which are going to be, I think, the biggest stars in the future.
Speaker 1: (08.14) We’ve spoken about Mars, you and your team are involved in the Mars
Exploration Research Programme, what can you tell me about that?
Speaker 2: (08.20) Well this is an ambitious programme I have to say, and I say ambitious
only because its relying on international collaboration, which is always difficult,. For example
we have developed an instrument that is in the ExoMars platform that is not going to be
launched soon as, due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, the mission has been
stopped for the moment. So its ambitious because we have to rely on international
collaborations, its’ also a very expensive mission where there are missions that have to be
planned many years ahead so from the time that you have an idea of a space instrument to
the time when it is really operating it could be 10, 15 years. So every instrument in every
mission has these long-term thoughts, this long-term process, this long-term funding too. We
need to keep people working for many years in one project. Some of the people, they leave,
because they find another opportunity, they change cities, they change country, so it is very
hard to keep running one project for 15 years in general, and so space is challenging in that
sense. And this Mars programme is now divided into three different stages. The first stage is
to have instruments in what is called low earth orbit, so we already have that, a lot of
satellites are spinning around the Earth, observing the Earth, so that one is already
accomplished. The second stage is to have what is called a Gateway, it’s another
International Space Station but this one is not going to be around the Earth, it’s going to be
around the moon. So there will be international space station, in this case called Gateway. It
will have contributions from the many different countries and space agencies and it will put
the basis for transportation of material from the Earth to the moon; and at the end we are
going to have a base of astronauts on the moon, either temporarily or permanent, this is to
be decided yet, but its likely to be a base likely in the south pole of the moon. And then the
third step is going from there to Mars. So it’s a very long term and ambitious project involving
many different stages. And that exploration of Mars, it has within itself different stages too.
One of them, and this is within what we call the Mars Sample Return Programme, this
programme has the idea of bringing samples from Mars to Earth and the first stage of that
programme has already started, it is the Perseverance Rover which is now on the surface of
Mars, this is a NASA Rover which is now making holes on the surface of Mars and taking
samples, so it is storing the samples and leaving some of them on the surface. Then there
will be another spacecraft in the near future that will go to Mars and will grab all the samples.
And then after that, there will be a rocket from Mars that will send the samples to space and
another aircraft that will be orbiting Mars will take them back to Earth. So it looks like a
science fiction movie and its something that will happen in the next 10-12 years, and this is
the first step to put a man or a woman on Mars. It will be the first step because we want to
know if, for example, there is life on Mars. We want to know if those samples are able to hold
life on Mars. That will be a very important discovery; and also one of the reasons that we
want to take samples from Mars and we are not launching astronauts to Mars yet is because
we want to know very well the environment of Mars. If you want to send your kids to a place,
you want to know how the environment is, you want to know if there is danger there, you
want to know everything very well. So we want to send astronauts to Mars and we want to
know that they are not going to suffer anything there as something that we are not
predicting. We want to know exactly what the conditions are, we want to know how are the
radiation levels, what kind of dangers they can find on the surface. We know that the surface
of Mars for example is full of perchlorates, those perchlorates, when they become humid are
a bleach, so the astronaut will be stepping on bleach, so they will be exposed to a high
levels of radiation, to extreme temperatures – so we need to characterise that very well
before we send astronauts to Mars.
Speaker 1: (12.58) And is there always going to be a need to send people? Is there not a
point where technology overtakes man’s ability to do something or is there always going to
be a role for humans?
Speaker 2: (13.09) Yeah, I think that as humans we want to explore, we want always to
reach limits that we haven’t seen before. I mean we’ve been to Antarctica which is probably
not the most nice place in the world and we’ve seen people like Scott suffering to reach
those places and dying in the process, and still we try. Even, you’ve seen this Mars One
Mission, that they were asking for people to go to Mars in a one-way trip and still they had a
lot of people that wanted to do it, I mean, so I think its human nature to want to explore. I
think the future of Mars exploration and in general solar system exploration, because its not
only Mars, after Mars we have, for example, very nice moons in Jupiter and Saturn that they
have surfaces like Mars, Titan for example has lakes; there are other places to explore and I
think the long term future of planetary exploration will be developed by artificial intelligence.
I think that artificial intelligence is growing exponentially with time. We see that more and
more algorithms and very intelligent algorithms have been developed in the last years and I
think that at some point we will have robots that will be able to use artificial intelligence and
take their own travel decisions on Mars without the need to expose live astronauts. Also it
will be much less expensive to go to another planet if we don’t have to feed astronauts, if we
don’t have to have water for them, if we don’t have to have food. We don’t even have to
have this robot back to Earth, we can educe a lot of expenses for missions.
Speaker 1: (15.02) I’m really interested to know a little bit more specifically about the
instruments that you are involved in developing for the Mars mission. Can you give me the
elevator pitch on what they are?
Speaker 2: (15.13) Yes, we developed in the past an instrument called REMS that is now in
the Curiosity Rover, it’s been operating on Mars for more than 10-12 years now, and that
instrument was a meteorological station, so every time you see the weather on Mars, it is
from our instrument actually. So we have developed a more advanced form of that
instrument, this time again it is a meteorological station but at the same time it is an in-situ
research observatory instrument. The instrument is called HABIT, that stands for
HabitAbility, Brine Irradiation and Temperature, and this instrument will produce liquid water
on Mars. So it is a prototype of how to produce liquid water on Mars, and that is an interest
that will kind of pave the way for future human exploration of Mars because with this small
instrument that is now a prototype you can develop a larger scale of that one and, for
example, produce water than can be used for a greenhouse or to feed astronauts.
Speaker 1: (16.15) Now Maria, I feel like we’ve spoken about a couple of areas where the
law might come into play and I’m sure you have some thoughts on that to share but, for
context, the University was one of the first in the world to incorporate space law into its
research curricula back in the 1980s - you joined the fold last year. Why was the University
of Aberdeen the place to come for you?
Speaker 3: (16.33) Yes, absolutely, Aberdeen has a history in space law with Professor
Lyall, one of the most well-known professors in the field having taught space law in the Law
School for many years so that’s what drew me to the University of Aberdeen. It’s tradition
and history in the field, it’s course in the field and also the fact that I was not going to be the
first one introducing space law in the curriculum in the Law School but I was going to be the
one reviving it. The University of Aberdeen is very, very well known to everybody that
conducts research in space law, together with other universities with tradition in the field
such as McGill and University of Cologne, so it’s one of the very, very few universities
worldwide that were able to offer me an environment with tradition in my area of expertise
and coming to the University of Aberdeen I’ve met colleagues like Javier with vison and
involvement in so critical projects for the future of humanity and that’s something that really
confirmed my decision to come, I’ve really found what I was looking for.
Speaker 1: (17.37) It’s really great to hear that. Now, I have to ask, if this is the golden age
for space exploration, is it also the golden age for space law? Or has the law not kept pace
with how technology and the industry itself has evolved?
Speaker 3: (17.49) International space law was produced in the 50’s and the 60’s so it’s not
a new field of law like a lot of people think, it’s quite an old one. It was produced during the
tensions of the Cold War and the two main countries that actively participated in the
negotiations for the five UN space treaties were the two superpowers of that era, the United
States and the former Soviet Union. So international space law emerged through the Cold
War period and the purpose of international space law was to secure peaceful uses of outer
space. Now, of course, it emerged out of necessity to provide a field for cooperation in space
exploration and that was its main purpose, it did not foresee modern space activity such as
space tourism, for example, or space mining or mega-constellations and things like that.
Now modern space law and the production of modern space law is called upon to fill these
gaps but at the same time, because of the very general nature of international space law as
it was produced in the 50’s and 60’s it is able to cover a broad area of activities because
space law itself is very broad, it’s mostly a field of principals rather than detailed truths and it
has the capacity to govern and cover and address modern challenges as well, but the truth
is that the last internationally binding instrument that was produced was the Moon
Agreement which was signed in 1979 and entered into force in 1984. Since then there is no
internationally binding instrument produced to regulate the uses of outer space. It’s many
decades since then and many more activities have been introduced so it is true that it’s a
golden age for space exploration and perhaps it is a golden age for further regulation of
space activities but that being said the existing international legal framework is sufficient to
regulate the broad scope of even modern space activities. Just a tiny, tiny comment on the
Mars Sample Return Mission, it’s something actually that space law addresses clearly and
there is an exception to the Non-Appropriation Principle when it comes to return missions.
So governments, when it comes to scientific missions, they can extract and own space
resources for further exploration and we see here how space law really tries to enable
scientific exploration of outer space and how collaboration between law and science has
always been at the forefront of international space law.
Speaker 1: (20.36) What are some of the big-ticket items? Responsibility, I imagine, for
things, is a bit of a hot topic. Environmental concerns - debris, territory, patents – can you tell
us what the big questions are and how it works in terms of the legal landscape?
Speaker 3: (20.51) Absolutely, there are several issues that have been coming up all these
years. The issue of responsibility is quite a complex and interesting one. In the field of space
law governments are responsible for the activities of their private entities, their nongovernmental entities. So when a private company launches a satellite or engages in any
other space activity their government is in fact responsible for this activity, simply because
they have the obligation to authorise and continuously supervise their activity. The private
company will not be responsible internationally for their own activities but their government
that had to authorise and supervise this activity will always remain internationally responsible
for them, and part of this process is the licensing, so when a government licenses a space
activity they have to make sure that this activity will be in accordance with international law
and will respect international legal rule. So that’s one issue that comes into question
nowadays, simply because involvement of private actors and the influence of new space
actors is exponentially growing. Other areas that need further regulation or simply further
thinking, like you mentioned is the environmental protection of outer space, the production of
space debris which is now becoming an issue more than ever before, the regulation of space
debris does not exist, it consists simply of soft-law instruments, meaning non-binding
instruments, guidelines, manuals that are not binding among states so it is up to the goodwill
of states to follow them or not, and to the internal policies of states and private companies.
And of course one of the major issues is space mining, one of the most exciting but at the
same time challenging issues. Space mining involves, of course, the extraction of minerals
from outer space, from the celestial bodies of outer space, and that inherently involves the
question of whether this is legal or not, simply because space law prohibits the appropriation
of parts of outer space, so how could we mine something, how could we extract something
and perhaps even sell it at a second stage, for the private companies perhaps might want to
sell it at a second stage – how can we do that if we can have no property rights over parts of
outer space? And so here we see the shift from the global to the local, and from the
international to the national, simply because several states such as the US and Luxembourg
that are very active in space regulation and the regulation of space activities, they are willing
to provide a facilitative environment for private companies and an environment that will
attract them and could make them feel secure that profit can be a result of such activities. So
they produce domestic laws that allow for the appropriation of parts of outer space and they
have been very successful. The US was the first one in 2016 to introduce such a law, and
Luxembourg followed; and Luxembourg introduced their law in 2017 and within
approximately a year they really attracted an amazing number of private companies into their
jurisdiction but at the same time international law remains binding, so there is a conflict there
between the national and the international and we see that whenever the international
doesn’t cover modern activities we see a shift and a tendency to regulate from within
domestic forum.
Speaker 2: (24.23) I have a question for Maria. I am going in two weeks to Luxembourg
because there is a space week there organised by the European Space Agency and they
have this Master in Space Law and have passed this law. Is it a real thing or is it something
more like an invention or a way to attract companies to Luxembourg to invest money there?
Speaker 3: (24.47) I’ll just say that Luxembourg has been very successful in achieving what
they wanted to, to attract many, many private space companies. So I see Luxembourg as
the hub of space exploration, European space exploration, or potential hub, but I also see
Scotland being able to take such a role in the future. I’ve been reading about the strategic
geographical position of Scotland and how easy it is to perform launches from Scotland and
how cost efficient it might be so I’d say, yes, Luxembourg has taken the lead but maybe
Scotland should follow.
Speaker 2: (25.22) Yeah, we should try it.
Speaker 1: (25.24) We could get some University funding I’m sure, for something.
Speaker 2: (25.26) Yes
Speaker 3: (25.26)
Speaker 1: (25.28) Javier, how often do you bump into the law in terms of the activities you
are doing? Is that something you think about or just something you have to deal with?
Speaker 2: (25.35) Yes, it is actually something that is very important. As I said before,
international collaboration is very important, so international law applies. So I have a clear
example today, our HABIT instrument that was going to be part of the ExoMars Mission is in
the ExoMars platform right now in Italy, in Torino and because the platform is from Russia, it
was developed in Russia, because this project ExoMars was an international collaboration
with the European Space Agency and Russia, now we have that we cannot access the
platform, we cannot touch the platform because its Russian, but the platform is located in a
European place, in Italy. So the problem now is that Russian personnel from IKI, the Russian
Space Agency, cannot access Thales Alenia because they don’t have permission due to the
war and we are just waiting to see when they get permission to access and they can send
our instrument back because something important that I haven’t mentioned is that we have
received a grant from the UK Space Agency, something called bilateral grants, to collaborate
with another space agency and in this case the idea is that we are going to have HABIT
being part of the first Japanese mission to Mars. So international law is important and in
general all these big projects they are a joint effort between many countries so it is very
important of course, you know.
Speaker 1: (27.19) It sounds like you can also spend years planning and testing and
spending an awful lot of money and then something unexpected happens and pffft! It’s over,
or you have to wait for years for another window to come round. Is that frustrating to be part
of or does the scale of what you are doing outweigh the downside?
Speaker 2: (27.42) Yes, it’s part of the business I would say, I think it’s accepted. Of course
it’s very tragic when it happens. I mean when I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in California I was part of a mission to analyse the data from CO2 in the atmosphere. It was
a project they had been running for 15 years and I was at the launch site and the instrument
fell down into the Pacific Ocean in three minutes, after launch.
Speaker 1: (28.12) Oh god.
Speaker 2: (28.12) So all that work from a lot of people working for 15 years was lost in one
second. So yeah, it was tragic but I think it’s part of the business, I mean we see other
examples. Actually, in the history of Mars exploration, I think that around 50% of the
missions have failed.
Speaker 1: (28.34) Really!
Speaker 2: (28.34) So it’s a lot, yeah. It was mainly at the beginning, in the 60’s, 70’s and
80’s. Now in the last years we’ve been more successful but still there is a risk that the
mission is not successful, there is always that risk. By the way, before I forget, I’ve been
looking at the numbers, you asked me about the golden age of exploration and there has
been 250 robotic space crafts launched, and humans on the moon we have 24. And in the
last 20 years we’ve had more than 600 people that have been in space as astronauts and
the number of launches every year of satellites is about four hundred, and this is increasing
with time, so we are really living in an age where space is becoming more and more
important and our lives rely on space. One of the courses that we teach in the Master is
about space weather and we were discussing today how catastrophic it would be for all of us
if one day the Sun sent a lot of energy to the Earth and killed, for example, all the satellites
of communication. We would be lost.
Speaker 1: (29.58) That would be it, wouldn’t it. No telly, no phones.
Speaker 2: (29.59) No, even no ATMs and no phones, no internet. We’d be lost. It would be
quite cathartic but we rely on all these space crafts that are in orbit around the Earth.
Speaker 1: (30.15) One last question from me. Would you like to go to space?
Speaker 2: (30.18) Are you asking me?
Speaker 1: (30.19) Yes, both of you.
Speaker 2: (30.21) No.
Speaker 1: (30.23) No?
Speaker 2: (30.25) No. You did say at the beginning, I’m a theoretical physicist.
Speaker 1: (30.28) Feet firmly planted on the ground.
Speaker 2: (30.30) Yeah, yeah, yeah. And definitely I would not go to Mars. The more I
study Mars the more I see how dangerous it is.
Speaker 1: (30.39) Apart from the no oxygen thing it’s a fairly hostile environment all round.
Speaker 2: (30.42) Exactly, exactly, But I appreciate that others do it. That’s great.
Speaker 1: (30.38) what about you Maria? Any interest?
Speaker 3: (30.51) Well in space law, the biggest part of space law scholarship
characterises outer space as an ultra-hazardous environment, so I’d say no.
Speaker 2: (31.01)
Speaker 1: (31.02) I think we’re all in firmly in agreement on that one.
Speaker 2 & 3: (31.04)
Speaker 1: (31.05) And on that happy note we’re going to have to bring this conversation to
a close. Thank you so much guys for taking part, it’s been brilliant. I say this every time I do
one of these podcasts but this has been so interesting so thank you so much for giving me
the time.
Speaker 2 and 3: (31.18) Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: (31.20) And thanks to you for listening. I’ll be back soon with another dip into the
headlines from the University of Aberdeen but if you just can’t wait, you know what to do.
Visit abdn.ac.uk/news to catch up on all the latest announcements.
Outro music