 Hello, I'm Brian Schmidt, the vice chancellor of the Australian National University and it is great for me to welcome back to the ANU astronaut Andy Thomas. Thank you. Here we are 50 years after the Apollo 11 mission. Now just remind our audience, you were up in space starting in 1996. Is that right? That's correct. Yes. And for almost a half a year. Cognitive total for four flights was 177 days, the longest of which was my second flight, actually, which was on the Mir space station where I spent 20 weeks, which was... Well, that's a long time. That was a long time, but it was a great experience. Okay. Well, let's just go back to 1969. Now, I remember Apollo 13 onwards. I was two in 1969, so I don't remember 1969, but you're that little bit older than me. So tell me about... Thank you for pointing that out. Tell me about what 1969 was like for you as a young boy. I was 18 years old. I was a student in my first year at University of Adelaide studying mechanical engineering, and that was the day the earth stood still, really, because everyone stopped what they were doing to watch this amazing event unfold on this grainy black and white TVs as Neil took that one small step, and it was just amazing. The enthusiasm was just staggering, worldwide enthusiasm for this event, even though it was by one nation, the whole planet was behind it and was captivated and enthralled by this great undertaking. It was really a pivotal moment in the 20th century. It certainly was, and when I look back now, it's just... It is quite remarkable, 50 years on. It is still a pivotal moment, which we have not gone past, and the fact that we haven't in 50 years tells you how remarkable it is. Now, you said it was one nation, but actually, when we look back, Australia had a pretty big part in space back in the 60s. We had launched our own rockets, 1967, 69. Of course, those images came down very near where we are here in Canberra. Why don't you tell us just a little bit about Honeysuckle Creek and the tracking stations? Yes, the tracking stations here, first at Honeysuckle Creek and later at Parks, bought those images. The Australian tracking teams were in the front line trenches of this unfolding historical, iconic event of the 20th century. They were the first to actually receive the images. They then relayed them to Houston, and then from Houston they were sent around the world, but they started here from the reception here in Australia from the moon. It was really an amazing contribution. I think it's a contribution that Australia should be very proud of because not many Australians of the modern generation, I think, are aware of how significant that role was because that enabled the spacecraft to be communicated with while the other stations in the US were on the other side of the planet. We not had those communicational links. The whole time sequence of the mission would have had to change, and critical information about the status of engine burns and life support and crew health and so on would not have been available. It was really a very important contribution. Of course, that capability continues today. Tidman Billa, Norsia out west are the premier tracking stations in the world, and I know Tidman Billa is the place they rely on even to this day, and outperforms all the other stations around the world. Oh, that's interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Yeah. So it's very well equipped. Australian radio astronomers build some of the best receivers in the world, really know how to get the most out of the equipment. So it's an impressive capability even to this day. I mean, one of the other things that we, I mean, I know here is that Professor Ross Taylor was the person who they literally, NASA took his lab here at ANU and moved it to the US to analyze the moon. Yes, the principal investigator for the geology of the moon was an Australian Stuart Ross Taylor, the principal investigator for an experiment to understand the dust accumulation on spacecraft on the surface of the moon was Brian O'Brien, an Australian. So Australian investigators in Australian science community has made a big contribution to the Apollo program. There's no doubt about that. So let's then wind forward after the last of Apollo 17. The whole way space was done sort of had a transformation. You were part, I think, in the second half of that. Tell us a little bit about what happened post-Apollo from your perspective of the space programs. Yes. Space program went through a bit of a hiatus after Apollo. I think there were three more missions of Apollo planned, 18, 19, and 20, but they were actually canceled. And instead, the space shuttle was developed. And there was a hiatus there without a space flight capability, a human space flight capability in the US, much as there is right now. We're going through the same kind of hiatus as we transitioned to a new vehicle. But then the space shuttle came along, and then that led to the Shuttle-Mir program, which I was a participant on, that led to collaboration with the Russians rather than the competition that drove Apollo, which I think was a very positive development for humankind, for society as a whole. And now, of course, we have the International Space Station. And the engineering of these vehicles, their legacy in engineering can be traced right back to Apollo in the early days of human space flight. And what triggered you to decide to become an astronaut then in the 90s? Oh, well, my interest, of course, was sparked in the 60s by the early space flights that I can remember. I can remember when John Glenn flew and Alan Shepard. And then, of course, the Apollo landings themselves. And these were just, for a young kid with an interest in rocketry, these were just mind-blowing events. They were just fascinating. And I thought, what a terrific thing this is. Wouldn't it be marvellous to be involved in this? Wouldn't it be marvellous to become an astronaut? But for a kid growing up an Adelaide, or with the prospects, it wasn't actually until I'd worked in the U.S. and the airspace industry for some years that I realized I could, in fact, put together a competitive application to become a NASA astronaut. And then at that point I pursued it, and I was able to make it successfully. And as a result of that, I've had four great space flight experiences, four more than I ever thought I would have. And it's just been an amazing ride, an amazing adventure. Well, it certainly goes to show that it's kind of hard to predict the future. And just like, you know, my discoveries were a surprise to me, obviously, getting this opportunity would have been a surprise to you. It was. I remember the day I got the call inviting me to join the astronaut office, and I put the phone down after the call just stunned in disbelief that I had made this very improbable dream come true. Well, it does have to happen to someone. So dreaming is always a really important part because someone has to actually win the lottery occasionally. And so that's what I guess sometimes these things happen. Well, that's what I try to communicate to young people. A lot of people say, well, you've been very lucky. You've became an astronaut. Well, luck had nothing to do with it, really. It was a concerted effort developing the right skills and credentials to make it happen. And that's the message I give to young people, follow your dreams and make them happen, bring them to fruition. Because on that pathway, you'll encounter opportunities you can't even begin to imagine. And doors will be open that you can't even begin to imagine and it'll have a great adventure. But don't give up. Yeah, certainly making your own luck is very important. Yes. Now, I guess you would have trained tremendous numbers of hours to go into space. I've never heard this question asked of you. What was there anything in those 177 days that surprised you that your training did not, I guess, get into your mind, did not train you for? When you're weightless, which is what you are in zero in low earth orbit, you're effectively weightless. They call it microgravity, but you're basically weightless. You're weightless 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And I was really surprised how quickly this human psyche adapts to the idea of being weightless. It is, if you think about it, a fundamentally unnatural environment to be in. There's nothing like it on earth. People say, well, it isn't like being in water and floating. Well, it's not because there's always an up and down when you're floating. In zero gravity, there's no up or down. And yet your your psyche adjusts to it quite quickly. And you start to feel almost like it's a natural way to be like you've always been weightless, even though it's this fundamentally unnatural environment. And that really surprised me how quickly it's it's the measure, I think, of the resilience of the human psyche to adapt so quickly. You know, I had, I was just in Switzerland with a bunch of astronauts and several of them said exactly the same thing, but it's just like after three or four days, you're buzzing around and weightlessness and yeah, okay, it's fine. Yeah, you just sort of you take it for granted. Yeah, you take it for granted. And there's a lot of cool things you can do at space. There are. There are. It's a very frustrating environment, though, if you're trying to do delicate work with instruments and equipment and disassembling equipment, everything floats. So you can't put anything down. All your tools have to be tethered or velcroed and fasteners and screws have to be captured or everything floats away. And if you do let go of something like a pen, for example, it will float away behind a panel and you'll lose it. And it can be very frustrating. Yeah, I can imagine. And those are the little things you got to get used to. So now let's go forward a little bit. Last year, the Australian government decided actually it's time to have a space program. Why do you think, I mean, do you think, I know you're a big supporter. So why do you think Australia in 2019 should have a space program? Well, it actually had a space agency, not so much a space program, a space agency. The international space business accounts for something like 350 billion, that's billion with a B, US dollars a year. If you want to be a participant in that emerging market, that's powerfully as strong as economic market, you need to have a coordinated response. You need to have central planning. You need to have strategic thinking and strategic planning. And that's what a space agency offers to Australia. And I see it as a way of creating new business opportunities for Australians and for everyone in Australia. So, you know, there's huge advanced technology in Australia, and I think Australians forget about some of the things we're really good at. You know, you've had a chance now to go around the country. We obviously do a lot here at ANU. I guess what are the things that we do well in this space from your perspective? I think Australia's got a strong legacy, for example, in science, in medical research, particularly Australia's very competent, very capable and understanding the medical consequences of human spaceflight is a very important, very challenging problem. If we're ever going to go to Mars, we need a better understanding of the consequences of long duration spaceflight on the human body. I think Australia has a good understanding of signal processing and acquisition of satellite data for signal processing. That's clearly self-evidently important for a space program. Australia has a lot of experience in mining and geology. As we explore new worlds, if we go back to the moon and onto Mars, there will be a lot of geological issues that come up. Australia is well-positioned to contribute to the science in those areas, as it has done in the past. So, we've started, you know, a space innovation in space here, and so there's the technology side, and I so want to talk about some of the things, so people understand technology, I think, and, you know, building cameras to look at the ground and doing communications. But then there's some other softer issues like governance, you know, regulation of space. That, from an astronomer's perspective, has been thrown into a bit of chaos. We've had Eon, Eon must go through and launch all these satellites. They have radio frequency downloads. They're going to be traveling through our telescopes. It strikes me, at least, and certainly our institute here is looking at how we should be regulating space as, you know, the countries of the world, rather than it sort of seems a little bit like Cowboy, the wild west out there right now. Well, I think that's probably a fair analogy, because this is new days. This is a new evolving market and a new evolving area. And I think that's another reason why you need an agency. You need an agency which can coordinate a national response to these issues and speak for the nation on behalf of the nation at that international table where all these issues are discussed so that good plans can be put in place that suits everyone's interests. So often, if you're going to get a nation to, you know, engage in a substantive manner, you need to have some projects. So are there any exciting projects from your perspective out there on the table that Australia should be thinking about getting into sooner rather than later? Well, my background and my interest, of course, is human space flight and taking humans beyond low Earth orbit to the moon. Right now the agency, NASA, is planning a return to the moon sometime in the next decade. And that will be followed in the following decade, one hopes by human missions to Mars. I think there will be some really exciting missions taking place. In fact, these missions are going to be looked back on by our next generation the way we're looking upon Apollo right now as pivotal in the 21st century. And I, for one, would like to see a sophisticated, technically sophisticated country like Australia be an active participant. That doesn't necessarily mean sending crew members, although you could have that as an aspirational goal. But it does mean that you could make instruments, you could perform data analysis, you could build some of the equipment that crew members might be used as they do these explorations. So there's going to be a lot of opportunities, I think. Yeah, I think a lot of Australians and certainly politicians try to come to grips with the idea of the individual little acts that one does and then how that feeds back into the economy. And of course, Australia spends a huge amount of money each year on space. It just, but we don't have that much of an industry right now. We have certain capabilities. Maybe you want to give some reflections about how that connection actually works in practice. Well, I think that a good example of that is Apollo that we're acknowledging the 50th anniversary. After Apollo was, the program was finished, there were 400,000 people that worked on Apollo at its peak, engineers and scientists and technicians. Now those people just didn't give up their jobs once Apollo was finished. They diffused out into the community and took that technical knowledge with them. And they raised the level of technical literacy of the whole society. And that helped contribute to the modern technical economy that we have today. It created opportunities and inspiration for people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and led to the industries that followed on from their work. And I think that's a very good example of the intangible benefit that a big program can have to a community. Apollo, without a doubt, changed the economy base of the world for the better, I think, because of its investment. And how should we be working with other countries on this? I mean, we have New Zealand putting off its little launch facility. You've got India, China as new players, of course, Russia whose rockets you went up into space on, NASA, and then the Europeans. That's a big smorgansboard. How should we be positioning ourselves? I think we need to learn what our strengths are and what we can bring to the table that other countries cannot bring to the table. Certainly geography and the favorable geography of Australia is one for potential launch sites, for example. The near equatorial regions of the north are ideal for equatorial launches into geosynchronous and geostationary orbits. For polar orbits, the southern coast line is ideal because you can launch to the south without the concern of overflying unfriendly nations or large population areas. So there's a definite geography advantage that Australia could bring to the table. But you make a very good point. There are a lot of launch services and the market will whittle down and market forces will determine how many of these launch services ultimately survive. But we're seeing a dramatic cost reduction in launch services with the advent of people like Elon Musk and the commercial providers. And we're seeing a big increase in the opportunities for launches with downsizing of satellites and smaller satellites and multiple satellites on one launch vehicle. So the days of having big launch vehicles and big satellites are gone. So there will be a lot of business opportunities for small launch vehicles and smaller satellites. And I could see, I could well believe that Australia could position itself to contribute to that. Initially perhaps in collaboration with launch providers, but that would bring the technical capability to do launches to this country. And I see no reason why that's not feasible. So my academic home at Mount Stromlo, you know, we have a big space test facility where big thermal vacuum chamber where we can, you know, sort of simulate the conditions of space. We have a shaker table to simulate the conditions of launch. And you can put pretty good sized satellites. Any hints of the types of things we should be looking to put into that system? It depends on the programs that you establish through collaborations. The first step is to establish collaborations with the players. If you want to participate, for example, in scientific missions, robotic missions to Mars, which I think would be fascinating, then a facility like you described would be ideal for flight qualifying and flight testing and ground testing instrumentations, for example, a robotic rover or any tools and vehicles that astronauts might use. And just thinking a little bigger, any moonshot type things Australia should be thinking about? Thinking big? I mean, we've right now, I think the space agency is trying to come to grips with how big it wants to be, but it might be we want to do something big. Any suggestions? Thinking big? I would say if is human space flight an aspirational goal for Australia or not? And I've read documents from the Australian Space Agency saying that it is in the future an aspirational goal to participate in it. And I think as we see humans returning to the moon and humans to Mars, those one questionably will be international missions. They won't be by any one country. And I would very much like to see on the side of the spacecraft that lands on Mars or on the moon and Australian flag along with the flags of all those other countries. I think that would be profoundly inspirational to the young people of this country. It would really, it's one of those things that would change the face of this country and rewrite the future history of this country. Yes, I think it would be good to have something like that to bring the country together and to focus, as I said, our abilities, which I think we often forget about. So let's do a little forecasting. And it's almost impossible to get this right, but it's all right. We'll hold you to it in the decades to come. So the United States, it says we're going to land on the moon in the next five years. What do you reckon is really going to happen? I would say sometime in the next 10 years. Five years is a challenge to flight qualify a lander and human rate a lander in five years as well as the gateway facility and lunar orbit they want, I think is probably not realistic. But I could see in 10 years that that could happen. And I think that would put it in the late 2020s. And then I think in the mid 2030s, you could also see a realistic goal of humans extending their outreach to Mars. And what about a lunar colony, a permanent presence or semi-permanent presence on the moon? I think that is what you want to try to achieve. I don't think you want to just do short duration missions where you go and plant a flag, leave a few footprints and come home. I think you do want a permanent presence to explore the moon. The moon has a surface area about the size of the continent of Africa. And we've been to six places with humans and about half a dozen other places with robotic probes. So there's a lot that we haven't seen. And I think we need to understand the geology of the moon and the origin of the moon. And the other advantage of doing that is that you get experience in deep space operations. And if we're ever going to go to Mars and have a successful human mission to Mars, we need that experience base. And I guess part of me thinks that having a permanent presence on the moon doesn't strike me as being any more difficult than maybe even the space station. It takes a little bit more to get the stuff there. But at least you've got something solid to be on. There's some advantages. There's potentially fuel and other resources locally. That's right. That's right. The big challenge we're facing I think for permanent presence on the moon or even missions to Mars, there's some engineering challenges. One is having a life support system that can function and provide breathable air and recirculate, recycle water, potable water without a lot of resupply coming from the Earth because you don't have that. But the other big challenge is actually a physiological challenge. And that's the radiation exposure. We know that there's a fairly high dose of radiation for crews that go beyond low Earth orbit because you're outside the magnetic field of the Earth. We do not yet have a good understanding of the long-term health impacts of that radiation exposure. And we need to understand that problem better and get a handle on it if we're ever going to successfully send humans to Mars. Yeah, that is a challenging one. The Earth's magnetic field isn't that strong, but it's very big. It's very hard to replicate without great expense. Exactly, yes. So looking forward to Mars, you've said maybe 2030s or it's that time frame. What do you think is the biggest challenge for us to get to Mars as a human species? I suspect a large part of its political will to do it. I think the engineering problems are tractable. The life support problems are tractable. I think probably we'll eventually understand the radiation problem to have therapies or mitigation strategies. But the biggest challenge is national will and international will and political will to do it because it is going to be a big challenge and a big investment. To my way of thinking, it's an important investment to make. I think the biggest reason for going to Mars is to look for evidence of early life. I think if we, as a species, were to find that life had once formed independently on Mars, that would be a profoundly important discovery. That would be one of the pinnacles of human intellectual inquiry. And it would have a profound effect on us as a species, I think. It would give us an honest assessment for the first time of our place in the universe. And that, to my way of thinking, more than anything justifies the expense and the risks of human exploration of Mars. All right. Well, I think that's a very good time and place to end our conversation. Thank you. For me, I hope that Australia and the world are able to, I guess, come together and do something to bring the world together. I am certainly worried in 2019 that we do need some big projects. And the economic return, certainly, if you get the right big project, can be actually quite high just because it gets everyone aligned doing this. And that's the big legacy of Apollo. There's a lot of legacies of Apollo. But the biggest legacy of all, I think, is the profound sense of optimism that it gave the human race. It gave everyone this incredible understanding of what people could do if they came together and used ingenuity and creativity to solve a complicated problem. And that's the legacy of Apollo. And it's a message that in today's divided political world we could do well to pay heed to, I think. Yeah. In 2019, I get goosebumps from 50 years ago, even though I was only two. I'm getting those again. I'm feeling Apollo all over again, which is quite remarkable. And there's more people alive today who did not see Apollo than who did. And they're just as excited as the people that remember it. It's really an amazing thing. Great. Thank you, Andy. My pleasure. I appreciate it. Thank you. Cheers.