Life in space

H: You’ve had two launches?

P: Yeah. Multiple scrubs, I can’t remember. Weather’s bad and the summer down at the Cape is afternoon clouds. So at about 9 minutes before you figure out that everyone really wants to go, weather’s good, people’s good. And then you tighten your straps down, pull yourself in very, very tight. Watch the clock. Ten seconds, all the navigation systems go click. Come alive. You watch the whole vehicle as it suddenly decides to wake up. Four seconds, main engines light underneath your backside. A hundred feet below you. Huge roar and the whole vehicle tips up against its stand, just the main engines of the shuttle, that is. And once they come up to 100%, and once the computer’s satisfied that the main engines are working okay, they light the solids. It’s at that point you are definitely going to go somewhere. You light the solids, you can’t turn them off.

H: Who lights the solids?

P: The machine does. You’re really going to go somewhere, you don’t know where necessarily, but you are definitely going somewhere. And off you go. It feels like somebody just kicked you in the back. There’s just an enormous smash in the back, you’re thrown back in your seat and the noise is deafening. Huge vibration and you’re off. It’s like being tied to the front of a runaway train. Just goes straight up. And you’re hanging on and everything’s shaking. Even the cockpit is shaking, your friends are shaking around. Your head’s banging around inside the helmet. You get to about 40 seconds into flight and the sky turns from blue to dark violet to black. Just changes colour. You’re out of the atmosphere. That’s at about one minute. At two minutes the Solid Rocket Boosters fall off. There’s a huge flash, a big bang, clank! You see both the Solid Rocket Boosters fall off and everything smooths out then, because you’re just on the liquid engines and they’re very smooth. And there’s another six minutes of that. So it’s a total of eight minutes’ flight from lying on your back in Florida and you’re doing 5 miles a second heading towards Africa. So five miles per second you’re going. Very, very, very, very fast. And as soon as the main engines cut out and you’ve been slammed at your seat at 3G - it’s like having two of you sitting on your chest. Very uncomfortable. As soon as the engines cut out, phut! Everything starts to float. Everything floats around the cabin. You float. You let off your straps, so you float over the seat and back against the ceiling. You’re coasting towards orbit, but everything inside the spacecraft is moving around.

H: Does it feel like it did in training?

P: No. It’s a lot more violent. Lot more noise and I really thought the vehicle was coming apart the first time I launched. The vibration. Shaking.

H: Weren’t you terrified?

P: No, head’s down, concentrating on doing what I was doing and looked at the commander and the pilot, they’ve both flown before and they look happy, so I’ve thought this is okay. And I’m sitting behind them.

H: At what moment do you think, I’m in space?

P: When you look out, the vehicle rolls up and you look out the window and you see this incredible blue, like neon blue, shining planet, just rushing towards you like this. You’re flying over it, but you get the sensation the planet’s rolling towards you. That you’re still and the planet’s rolling towards you. It’s just beautiful. No feeling of motion inside the cabin. You look down, it looks like the world’s moving past you. Very, very fast. Five miles a second, so you fly over England in a couple of minutes. The Earth looks like it’s rolling under you and then you roll into night. About a half an hour after launch.

H: And then you can’t see the Earth any more?

P: Yeah you can. Fly over India and you can see all the coastlines and all the city lights. You can figure out where the big cities were from the city lights.

H: But aren’t you having 24 sunsets in a day?

P: Ten sunsets, ten sunrises in a day. After a couple of days we get to space station which is like three bedroom house floating around the Earth with a big solar array panel sticking up inside to generate electricity. It looks like this big dragonfly. I didn’t make that up, they used to call Myr dragonfly. And you dock with it and then you get in and the shock it’s really cramped and you’re all crushed in there with your friends for a couple of days and you explode out into space station, which has got this huge volume. It’s got equipment, 4, 5 big rooms. And you can float all the way down the length of it. Just beautiful. And it’s funny, people who’ve been up in space for three months, they’re usually desperate for something like coffee or socks. Or clean shirts. They send out orders and we rush them up there. Last time it was a bushel of coffee covered chocolate beans. No, chocolate coloured coffee beans.

H: They were all men?

P: Right now they are. Had two women do one mission up there, Susan Helms and Debbie Wilson.

H: Are there rules against starting relationships?

P: No rules, but no need to. Everyone’s kind of grown up. Space station romance would be kind of bitter. A bit tough. You’re working too hard for one thing. For someone like me, a shuttle guy, it’s like a raid. You assault the space station. You all charge in there, take in all the stuff you’re supposed to give them, you take back all the stuff they’re supposed to give you and then you set up for space walks. And in my first flight I did three space walks, on the second flight I did three space walks. You kind of do them on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday basis. Day off in between. So that’s the other thing which is really remarkable about space flight is going outside. Spacewalking. You get up really early and snarf down a breakfast bar and some luke warm coffee and decide that you really are going to go and do this, do the space walk. At the appointed moment you and your partner put on oxygen masks and start breathing pure oxygen and start the clock. You take it in turns to pedal on a bike, very hard, for perhaps 30 minutes. And this is all to flush the nitrogen out of your blood, by breathing pure oxygen. Because our space suits, when they’re outside, they’re at 1/3rd sea level pressure inside the suit to make them easy to move. And so we breathe pure oxygen. And if you go straight into your suit and straight outside you’d get the bends. So we do this long protocol of breathing pure oxygen and gradually reducing the pressure. So between putting your mask on and getting into your suit’s about 2 hours and then you slide your helmet on and your helmet doesn’t come off for another 10 hours. So you’re stuck inside the suit for 10 hours.

H: How do you go to the loo?

P: You have a little diaper. But I’ve never used it. Oxygen’s so dry that you dry out, you dehydrate. One guy decided he wanted to have a pee. He said this is all wrong, on TV and everything, so he went behind a piece of structure on the space station. He was embarrassed. So you pull the helmet on, bang, a little fan starts up, zzzz, and that’s a comforting noise. If it ever stops, something’s gone wrong. And you’re breathing suit oxygen at that point and you’re stuck in there, like I said, for ten hours. Eventually they lower the pressure, they put you in the airlock, they lower the pressure in the airlock, and you’re jammed in there. You and your friend, absolutely smashed in there with tools and spare parts. You can’t move, it’s like a phone booth. Two of you guys in there. Saves air. If you had a big room you would be dumping a lot of air every time you vented the airlock. Jammed in there tight. Get the word, open the hatch. And the first time I opened the hatch I was looking straight down at China go by and the Chinese coastline, the Pacific.

H: You’re still moving?

P: The station’s moving round the world. 5 miles per second. Everything’s moving, otherwise you wouldn’t stay in orbit. The station is orbit, the shuttle launches and has to catch it, sneak up on it and dock with it and then you’re both going at 5 miles per second. And when you come out the airlock, you’re going at 5 miles per second. And you look at the world between your boots. I kind of flew down the Amazon on the last spacewalk I did. I watched the whole Amazon go between my boots.

H: Over what period of time?

P: Three minutes. The whole thing, right down to the sea.

H: How far away is the Earth at that point?

P: 200 miles. You’re 200 miles up. The clouds look a long, long way down. The clouds are like this high above the ground. You’re up here and you see the clouds just above the ground with the cloud shadows under each cloud. Beautiful. Looks terribly intricate. The snow on the mountains, the rivers glinting, the little lakes flashing as the sun catches them. You see the forests.

H: What did you think the first time you saw that?

P: It blew me away. The first time I went out the hatch I was overwhelmed by the light. The light is brilliant. Brilliant white sun and it was overwhelming. It feels like it’s going through you. Everything’s so stark. The space station around you, you’re hanging on the bottom of it by a hang rail, so the space station’s above you and you’re hanging at the bottom. And it looks like it’s glowing, it’s so bright. In the sunlight. And the sun and the Earth looks like it’s glowing too. It looks like it’s actually giving off light, not just reflecting it. It’s glowing blue. And it’s all moving. The space station, quietly cruising around the world.

H: Did you think ‘I’ve made it!’?

P: No, I thought don’t let go. That comes later, the feeling of wow, that was terrific. Followed by what just happened?

H: What would happen if you let go?

P: If you let go, hopefully you’re tethered and you’re trained very strictly about tethers and you have a reel with (?) links to your cable. If that were to break, we have a little jetpack with a hand controller. You can jet back. We’re trained to do that.

H: You have looked down to Britain, haven’t you?

P: I have a photograph you can have a look at. I took this on the last day of the flight. 16th of July. What were you guys doing? Ireland. Wales. Land’s End. East Anglia right here, so we’re about here. You recognise it? London’s about here. And this doesn’t give you the feeling of motion, you’re racing towards this thing, in a couple of minutes you’ll be gone, be over France. You have to be ready for it.

H: Is it true that you can see pollution?

P: Yes. Over London, whenever I’ve seen it, looked pretty clear. So stopping all those coal fires was probably a good thing.

H: Can you see any pollution?

P: Yes. Ferocious. Over the Chinese industrial belt. Big, thick yellow cloud, you can scarcely see the surface. I mean it looks like tobacco smoke. It looks terrible. Some of the Russian cities, in the east you can see a plume of grey blowing downwind from them. European cities and the American cities, pretty clean. On the whole. So 20 years of environmental effort, or 30 years I guess, have cleaned them up quite a lot. You don’t see any industrial plume or haze coming off Europe.

H: Do you see that as part of your role?

P: No, no role. My role when I’m up there is to be space walker and get my job down as efficiently as I can. When I come back, I spend most of my life as a climate scientist. Global warming guy. Didn’t give me any particular insights, but it was beautiful to see something you’ve studied in theory in front of your own eyes. All working. All the little cloud systems, the hurricanes, the tropical…

H: But for a climate scientist to see all that pollution, must be hard.

P: See the pollution, Shanghai, that was kind of sobering. Beijing and Shanghai. As an academic I was working my whole life on the business of trying to explore the impacts of man’s activities on the climate system. To be honest, the kind of pollution that you can see from orbit is bad for the people who are living under it. But we all of us generate a lot of carbon dioxide which is changing the climate, and you can’t see that from space.

H: What’s the carbon footprint like of the space shuttle?

P: Pretty small, I would think. All the carbon dioxide we generate we dump overboard on the space station. Carbon footprint is more like a toe print.

H: What do you think about this idea we’re littering space?

P: I dropped my spatula. It’s crashed. It came down in the Atlantic in September. They tracked it all the way down. They track everything bigger than a golf ball. It was a putty knife. We were using a heat resistant putty to do an experiment to see if you could repair a broken shuttle wing in space.

H: How big was it?

P: Big. About a foot long. They tracked it all the way down and I launched my own satellite. Spatsat! They called the spatula. It’s called a spatula, the tool. So we called it Spatsat. The ashes are in the Atlantic. But that’s a real problem is the amount of man-made debris, it’s small stuff, in the low Earth orbit. The last shuttle that came back, 116, they had a hole in the radiator and they’d hit a piece of circuit board. A tiny little piece of electronic circuit board from some broken satellite that came apart. Some of this stuff is going at, relative to you, 2 miles per second. So if you think that 2 miles per second is about 5,000 miles an hour, something like that.

H: Do you come back down with everything you take up?

P: Pretty much. We vent some water, waste water. Throw that overboard. It makes a snow storm. Very pretty. Big blizzard, looks like a huge blizzard. Because it turns to ice as soon as we pump it out. It’s just condensate. When you exhale we’d have stuff dripping down the walls unless you had a little kind of refrigerator that chills it and drips it off. It’s like a dehumidifier. So you’ve got gallons of that stuff, you throw that overboard. Sometimes we vent urine. The trash on space station, when I was working there the Russians set up a robot space craft with supplies. It docks, they unload it, they put all their trash in it, then that de-orbits itself and burns up over the Pacific. So that’s pretty sterile. So space station and space shuttle don’t generate much space junk at all. Most of the junk that’s in space is from old rocket stages and bits and pieces.

H: What about human detritus?

P: Nothing. Poo, bring it back. And all the trash back, in a tank.

H: What’s the most difficult thing about it?

P: The most difficult thing about the business is training for two years, flat out. Day in, day out. Many, many hours a day and then, on the day, cranking yourself up again. To be at the top of your game. When you get up into space, I average 5 hours a sleep a night.

H: How long a day?

P: 13 hours. So we were all tired. And you have to train yourself to try and be as careful and as meticulous as you can, even though you’re tired and your friend is tired. You get the job done properly.

H: What’s the most uncomfortable physical thing?

P: The first day’s uncomfortable. Your back stretches out about an inch. You and I are like this, our whole body is pressing down the spine. And when you get into space, that goes. And it’s very painful, for me. The girls didn’t have a problem. They’ve got short spines. Headaches because the first couple of days all the body fluids in your lower body they kind of creep upwards and you get very full, fat faces. And a lot of congestion and headaches. That takes a couple of days to clear. Your stomach’s bouncing around for a day. Not puking, but not feeling very hungry, or particularly well. But all these symptoms, they’re very normal. They’re called Space Adaptation Sickness. And some people get it more severely than others, and different components more severely than others. But after about two or three days I think about 95% of people feel fine. If a little tired. And then it’s great because Zero G is a lot of fun. You can float around, you can be superman, lifting enormous objects around with no effort at all. Mike and I were lifting a one ton module around when we were outside. No sweat. Just one hand each. The sensation of being able to just float along, using your finger tips and sail across a room and spin while you’re doing it, like a fish. It’s like being a fish, it’s a lot of fun.()

H: You must have said this a lot of times.

P: I’ve said it a lot of times, but people are interested. Not many people get to do it and the people who do get to do it, I think have a duty to tell the people who don’t what it’s like. I say it a bit differently every time, I hope. You ask me questions, it makes me think of something else I didn’t tell someone else. My family never ask me, they’re bored to death. So I don’t talk about it. When I called my home I got myself saying I wasn’t in. They were out having fun. So then I called my mum and there’s a 5 second delay. I called her on the satellite phone and I said mum. She says, what, what? Who is this? She wasn’t aware of the 5 second delay, so she didn’t hear anything, she put the phone down. So I was 2 for 2 and then we lost comms, so I failed to make contact with any blood relative. That was the first time. Second time I briefed everyone a bit more carefully. Hey, if you get a weird phone call and there’s no sound for five seconds, don’t hang up. The other thing that’s hard is space walking. Now imagine that’s pressurised too, so it’s like a balloon. So you have to work quite hard to close your hand.

H: It’s not for fine work, is it?

P: No, but we have to do the kind of equivalent of fixing watches with these things.

H: What good does it do us all back on Earth?

P: It’s not all about just romping around. We are trying to build a space station and that’s a platform for doing science and technological development. You’ll see more tech development than you’ll see pure science. Material science, combustion. It’s been in a state of maintenance since Colombia, but now it’s coming back up. We’ve gone back up to a 3 person crew. We dropped the third person off, Thomas Reither (?) the European astronaut. A German guy. Back up to a three person crew, so science is beginning to start up again. In 2009, space station twice as big, there’ll be six people on board and a lot of science and technology will get done.

H: What do you mean?

P: There are some things that you can only do in Zero Gravity. Growing very large crystals. On Earth, the gravity distorts them and they collapse.

H: Why would you want to grow crystals?

P: For electronics and medical research. Protein crystals. There’s lots of medical applications for those. There’s a whole lot of medical research, the effects of space life on the human organism which we need to know a lot about if we’re going to go to Mars.

H: Why should we go to Mars?

P: Exploration of Mars. Maybe two billion years ago we know there was an ocean on Mars. There was an atmosphere, it was warmer. And the conditions, possibly, for the development of early life. The planet lots its atmosphere a long time ago because it’s a small planet. Couldn’t hang onto it. So exploration of Mars to see if there’s any signs of former life would be interesting. And if there is signs of former life, that’s fascinating. Means there’s probably life under every rock in the solar system of our universe. If there’s not, well that’s information too.

H: How does that help us?

P: Don’t forget that the first theory of global warming came out of studies of the other planets in the solar system. The studies of Mars and Venus basically triggered the idea in scientists’ minds about how carbon dioxide plays a role in keeping the Earth warm. And too warm.

H: Why do we need humans to go?

P: You’ve got to have robots for exploration leading the way, and that’s what’s being done now, all over the solar system. Humans will follow.

H: Why?

P: Well I think if you’re going to do an in depth exploration of Mars you probably need to take people along. It’s very tedious and very difficult to do it with robots. They’ll get better and I expect in the next 20 years that every planet will have been explored by robots, in the solar system. Even the outlying planets. By robots.

H: How many have been done already?

P: We’ve landed something on a moon - Titan. A moon of Saturn, that was impressive. I would expect all the moons of Jupiter and Saturn will have been visited. And we’ve sent a probe out towards the outer solar system. Pluto. It’s going to take a long time to get there, it’s a long, long way. It takes a decade to get there.

H: Why should humans bother?

P: I don’t think humans are doomed to spend the duration sitting on Earth. Spreading out.

(tape turns over)

P: You need humans to do thorough exploration. There’s a limit to what you can achieve with robots, no matter how clever. And humans are out there to explore and eventually to settle.

H: You really think we’re going to settle on Mars?

P: No. I think we’ll have a manned base on the moon in about 15 years. And it’ll be like an Antarctic outpost. A lunar base.

H: What will we do on it?

P: Finish up our exploration of the moon. Permanent little base sitting there in Shackleton crater, south pole of the moon.

H: You don’t think humans are destined to spend the rest of…

P: ..eternity sitting on just this planet. The same reason 500 years ago Europeans, some of them, thought it might be a good idea to move out beyond Europe, see what was out there.

H: We’re not going to want to go and live in a zero gravity…

P: Well that’s what they said about America. That’s exactly what they said about America. We don’t really want to go across that extremely deep, dangerous ocean where only half the ships get through to a disease ridden, hostile land.

H: Do you think that Britain ought to be investing more?

P: Britain’s got a fairly healthy unmanned science programme and participates in bits and pieces of US and European and Japanese scientific efforts. It’s got a pretty healthy space industry. But there’s no investment in the human space activity which, right now, involves the sixteen most developed countries in the world. Which is most of the European countries, the US, Russia, Japan, Canada. So that consortium has now pulled together for doing international space station and they’re sharing their technology, science and their results. And the UK is not a part of that. So there’s two arguments for the UK considering getting into human space activity. One is just to be there at the forefront of exploration, which Britain used to do a lot of. We used to be global leaders in that. The British explored the world for 200 years. For 200 years the British mapped the world. They did. They went everywhere. And they didn’t do it with purely a view to the financial point, a lot of it was just curiosity. Every single one of those exploration ships sent a scientists. Darwin, Joseph Banks. Banks did all the flora and fauna of Australia. Darwin came up with an interesting idea while he was sailing around the world on The Beagle. Changed our view of biology. So we owe a lot to the ships of exploration. The other reason is that we have all the developed countries in the world united together in a totally peaceful, totally open enterprise that exercises the limits of what our culture can do. The absolute limit of what our culture can do. The same as building a cathedral a thousand years ago. This is difficult stuff. And they’re sharing this technology and they’re sharing their ideas and that’s a really wonderful thing to be involved in. It’s purely positive, it’s purely positive.

H: It’s very expensive, that’s a negative.

P: Well it’s expensive but, wait a minute, every single dollar, yen, pound you spend on the space programme gets spent here. We don’t pay anybody in space. It’s a job here on the planet and it’s a good job. The technology. And one of the reasons why, you know, the United States is a leader in computer technology, aerospace technology and material science is because the government has funded a healthy space programme for the last 40 years.

H: So do you think Britain’s falling behind in all of this?

P: I think there’s a serious risk that if we don’t get involved in space technology, the only thing that pushes your aerospace technical base is weapons. And a little bit of civil aviation. I talk to people all the time and I’ve met very many interested politicians, obviously many very interested members of the British public. I’ve also met many people in British industry who would love to do something like this. They’re very excited about the prospect of building a model of a space station that was around a few years ago. That’s something that British Aerospace could have done a really good job on.

H: When did you last speak to a British politician?

P: I met Tony Blair two weeks ago. I gave him that picture, I said how about that for your kid’s (?).

H: What did he say?

P: That’s great. I said took it from the space station. And he took it. He said that’s remarkable. I didn’t lobby him. I think the man’s busy with a lot of stuff and he knows about this debate.

H: We are opting out of Aurora, aren’t we?

P: Britain’s opted out of the manned part of all programmes.

H: When you talked about why Britain should be involved, none of it was the manned part. The manned part is a publicity stunt to attract the funding.

P: No, I don’t think so at all. I don’t think that’s true at all. It’s true that the public is interested in human space flight to see a human in the picture. To see a human out there in the environment is interesting. There’s no question about that. But there are good reasons for sending humans into space. We can do things that machines can’t do. You can’t maintain or repair a space station with robots. It just doesn’t work. The same with the long term exploration of the moon. You couldn’t do it all robotically. The machines would just die.

H: Do you think the British have been wimpy about this?

P: It’s not a massive public outcry, there are no riots in the streets, it’s not that kind of a discussion. It’s up to the Brits and the British parliament and the British tax payer to figure out if they want to do this or not. And it’s up to me to just put forward the arguments why I think it’s a good idea. And it’s not just in Britain’s interest as a developed nation, but also the spirit of exploration. That is a good thing to be involved in. But it’s up to the Brits.()

H: So if there’s a choice between spending X million on all sorts of domestic projects, why should they?

P: Well let’s take the model of the US space programme. Because I know something about the funding of that. The whole of NASA cost the US taxpayer 7/10ths of a cent out of each tax dollar. So every tax dollar I pay to the federal government, 7/10th of one cent. It’s almost 1% goes on the space programme. Now what do we get back out of the space programme? We get a huge push for technology and science. A huge push for aerospace industries. That’s all good. It puts America at the lead of exploration, which again the America public considers to be ‘a good thing’. And the jobs that it creates are good, they’re high quality jobs. Now that very small spending slice, yes you could break it up and spend it somewhere else. It could easily disappear into something else. Defence. Education. Social services, health. You could easily do that. But I think it would be a very large loss for a very small benefit somewhere else.

H: You became an American citizen, do you feel embarrassed that you had to give up your British citizenship?

P: It’s an interesting thing. When I became a US citizen I called the British Embassy. I said well what now guys? And they said well, we have a different attitude towards this, they said your British nationality doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the Queen. And when she wants it back, she’ll give you a call, dear boy. That’s what they guy in the British Embassy in Washington said. So as far as the Brits are concerned, I’m a dual. It doesn’t matter what I say. And that is the British attitude towards nationality. Canadians are the same, Israelis are the same.

H: But you had to leave the country.

P: It wasn’t so bad, I went to America first of all to do science. Which was wonderful, great experience. Worked like a dog for 15 years on the climate problem, but had tremendous fun. Then became a national. And if I’d never have become a national, I would have been a very happy scientist working at NASA on the global climate problem. That 7/10ths of one percent, let’s get back to that for a second. How about communications satellites? How about GPS? Anyone use GPS around here? These technologies are only possible, they only could have come with massive government investment in the space effort.

H: Britain is investing in science in space.

P: Some. A bit. It’s fragmented. It’s good. It’s fragmented.

H: Maybe there would be riots if we said we’re spending X zillion on sending Mr Astronaut.

P: Well that again is for the British tax payer to figure that one out. I would argue that just sending a British astronaut into space to send a British astronaut into space is not a worthwhile objective. That’s kind of space tourism. And that’s not what we’re about. If you’re serious about space exploration, about working in space, about doing things in space, then that astronaut will be part of the European Astronaut Corps, I guess. And they would be trained to do serious work. You have to consider what you would have when that British astronaut hits the dirt in Kazakhstan after a mission in space. What is left from that. If all he or she does is go up and come down as opposed to being part of a professional astronaut corps which is integrated into a space programme. I mean I feel like I’m part of a space programme. I work with lots of other people and I just happen to be the lucky guy who gets to go. Like the other 98% of the time when I’m not flying, I’m working with these people every day on trying to solve problems of space flight. And that’s what I hope a British astronaut would do. Would be in there. Not just waving the flag.

H: We were going to ask you about space tourism.

P: Space tourism is great. Don’t get me wrong. Space tourism is marvellous. And I think as a private sector activity. I think the more people that get up in space and see the world from a different vantage point, the better. I applaud Richard Branson’s efforts, I really do. But however, the government is not in the business of space tourism, right?

H: It’s an egomania thing?

P: It could easily have been someone else. Every time. I’ve flown twice in ten years. I feel very fortunate two have flown those two flights. And I wish I could take everybody with me, I really do. I wish I could take all my family and friends and curious people with me, so they could see for themselves.

H: Someone up there today is hitting a golf ball.

P: You’d have to ask the Russian space programme that.

H: Don’t the Americans do anything like that?

P: No. Sure, in our three minutes off, you’ll see what we do in our three minutes off. Release Smarties into the cabin. You see this little exploding cloud of M&Ms and people trying to eat them like fish. It’s kind of fun. Making balloons of water.

H: Why did you want to go into space?

P: I always wanted to do it. Ever since the beginning of the space programme. I grew up with this. This is my generation’s. It wasn’t there before my generation.

H: This is the worry, that it’s not there in the next generation.

P: I’m sure there are thousands of children who say they want to be astronauts in Britain. I’ve met them. I’ve personally met them and I get a blizzard of emails and letters and requests for meetings from kids in Britain. I try and answer them all. I really do.

H: Are they inspired by the moon landing still?

P: By shuttle and station too. But they always ask do you think we’re going to go back to the moon, soon? Is a very common question and I explain yeah, you know, this is what Mike Griffon’s trying to do. Our new administrator. Put us back on the moon in 12 years.

H: We might send Americans, not British.

P: I hope that Britain will become part of the manned space programme.

H: That’s not very likely though.

P: I don’t know. It might be. Might happen yet. I’m not a betting man with somebody else’s money. It’s British money. I’ll be surprised if Britain stays outside the fence forever. The whole European Space Agency, it’s been doing quite a long time and sure, there have been bumps on the road, but none of them show any signs of wanting to get back out again. Not one. They’re all in for the duration. And they’re interested in what’s coming next. If you go to France or Germany and said hey, how about you guys saving a few bucks and pull all your astronauts back and get out of the space programme, they’d be outraged. Absolutely. They take enormous pride. In fact Thomas Reiter, the first space station non-Russian, non-American to stay on the space station. And that’s a source of great pride for Europe and for Germany.

H: Britain still is a nation of explorers.

P: In scientific exploration too. We have bases down in Antarctica. We have a lot of deep sea exploration. We have unmanned science stuff.

H: Why are we not then?

P: I think it’s been the government policy for a long time and it’s been difficult to change because the funding for space is kind of fragmented within Britain. There’s not a single ‘go to’ agency. And every time there’s discussion of getting involved in the human space station it’s where is the money coming from? Is it going to come from an existing budget? I.e. are we going to cut all the unmanned research to fund the human space programme? Well that’s not a good idea. It would have to be new money. And that’s a problem. So it would take a government policy change to make it happen.

P: On the moon there is no life except what we left there. When we brought back a little piece of a spacecraft that had been on the moon for several years, there was some bacteria had managed to stay alive, tucked in out of the way. So Earth organisms are pretty hardy. There are at least traces that can hang on.

H: Can we create life on the moon?

P: It’s so harsh I doubt. There is nothing for life to do there. There is no resources, there’s no available water, there’s no air. And there’s ultraviolet radiation that will just fry your eyeballs and take any cell apart.

H: And yet they do survive.

P: Out of sight. Traces of them were left.

H: If we’re searching for life on Mars and it’s sterile…

P: Well with the robot explorers we sterilise everything that goes there, obviously. With humans its going to be a little trickier. But again the Martian surface environment is absolutely lethal to all Earth organisms. No air, massive ultraviolet radiation and very, very cold. It takes technology, just like no cave man could have lived through the ice age without fire and caves and clothes. Those are all technologies.

H: How far off do you think that prospect is?

P: On Mars? Well on the moon, you and I will see it in 15 years or so, we’ll see a base on the moon. On Mars? I think 20, 25 years. A little base on Mars, yeah. Not a very big one. No Jacuzzi.

H: What about people populating other planets?

P: That’s a long way off. That’s a long way off. I think the first task for humans is to basically explore our own back yard, the solar system. See what we have. And just send back the word to the Queen of Spain what we saw. And it’ll be followed up. Between Columbus and the first successful settlement in North America, it was over a hundred years. 1492 and 1607 was the first settlement.

H: Do you think there are little green men out there?

P: I don’t think there are in our solar system. I’m convinced that we’ll bump into other life, yeah. I don’t know how intelligent it’ll be. Organised life. Evolution drives. We’ve seen this happen several times on the Earth that you start with something extremely primitive and end up with a very sophisticated organism. Charles Darwin driving the truck. We’ve seen going from tiny organisms to humans, reasonably intelligent and also split off another tiny organism we’ve ended up with octopuses. Which don’t look anything like us, don’t have a brain organisation or anything like us, but are as intelligent as cats. Very intelligent. So I’m convinced that there are life forms out there and they won’t look anything like us, but they’ll be smart.

H: Do you believe in God?

P: I’m not a religious person.

H: Are you at the back of the line now?

P: I’m at the back of the line now. I flew twice in quick succession. It’s an addiction.

H: Would you like to be going to the moon?

P: I’d love to go to the moon. I won’t get to go, I will be rooting for the people who will go. I’m convinced. I’ll be too old. The oldest working astronaut was about 58. And he was an outlier. 55 is a good cut off. But on my corridor, where I work every day, there are some young guys and gals. And I’m sure that one of them will go to the moon. At least one of them will go to the moon. People in their 30s and they’re smart and they’re really good and they’re really dedicated and I’m sure that we’ll see one of these people. And you don’t know their names yet, I know who they are. They’re all fantastic people, the latest crop of young astronauts.

H: Are there more now than there were 10, 20 years ago?

P: We’ve got about a hundred in the office. That keeps the shuttle supply to the station.

NB: this is a transcript from a tape, and the questions have been edited