Read the full transcript of Piers Sellers talking about life in space
Talk about coming down to Earth. Piers Sellers might be able to park a shuttle on a space station travelling at 5 miles per second, 200 miles above Earth, but he can’t cram a hire car into a drizzly London side street. Not without the right permit, the University of London parking attendant repeatedly insists.
Things don’t improve much when Dr Sellers changes into his working uniform: blue flight suit, Nasa badge, space gloves sticking out of his bag. As he walks through the corridors of a college in a grimy part of East London where he will talk about his flight on Discovery this summer, he is ignored by everyone we pass. “They generally think I’ve come to fix the bathrooms,” he says with a grin.
Dr Sellers always had lofty ambitions. As a boy in East Sussex, he stared out his window at the stars and dreamt of becoming an astronaut, though his father told him not to pin his hopes on such an impossible idea.
For one thing, he had to become an American first, because Britain does not want to spend the money to put people into space. Listening to Dr Sellers, you begin to think that this is rather a shame. “It blew me away,” he says. “The first time I went out the hatch I was overwhelmed by the light. The light is brilliant. It feels like it’s going through you. Everything is so stark. The space station’s above you and you’re hanging at the bottom. And the Earth looks like it’s glowing, it looks like it’s actually giving off light, not just reflecting it. And it’s all moving. The space station, quietly cruising around the world.”
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Did he think: “I’ve made it”? “No, I thought, ‘Don’t let go!’ 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. It took three minutes, right down to the sea.
“It looks terribly intricate. The snow on the mountains, the rivers glinting, the little lakes flashing as the sun catches them. Beautiful.”
It’s the sort of thing you want to tell your family about. Dr Sellers is only the third Briton in space, and the first to fly the shuttle since the Columbia disaster. So on his first trip, in 2002, he rang his wife and children from the space station. He got his home answerphone, with his own voice telling him that he was not in. Then he called his mother in Guildford .
“I said, ‘Mum!’ She says, ‘What? What? Who is this?’ She wasn’t aware of the 5-second delay, so when she didn’t hear anything, she put the phone down.” And then Dr Sellers’s orbit rushed him out of range.
The British are unreceptive to the idea of homegrown spacemen. When Dr Sellers comes through immigration, he tells them he is a “mission specialist”, not an astronaut, “otherwise they think I’m insane”.
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He learnt to fly, did a PhD in climate change and landed a mundane job in London. Then he wangled a civil servant post with Nasa in Canada, spent nine years becoming an American citizen and finally, at 41, was selected for the Astronaut Corps.
He doesn’t look very British any more, but nor is he the bar-room jock we had expected when we heard that he took a Leeds University flag with him on his second mission. Sure, he has the military-smooth hair, the flirty twinkle and the leather flying jacket of Top Gun pastiche, and some of the talk is a little macho: you “explode out” into the space station, you “assault” it.
But he is courteous: when asked, for the 1,000th time, what it is like to be in space, he smiles. “Not many people get to do it and the people who do I think have a duty to tell the people who don’t what it’s like.”
And he tells it well. Of the moment, eight minutes into flight, when the engines cut out and everything starts to float: “The vehicle rolls up and you look out the window and you see this incredible blue, like neon blue, shining planet. You’re flying over it, but you get the sensation that you’re still and the planet’s rolling towards you, very, very fast, so you fly over England in a couple of minutes. You roll into night about a half an hour after launch. You fly over India and you can see all the coastlines and all the city lights. There are ten sunsets, ten sunrises in a day.”
He will need all his eloquence and persuasiveness for what he tries to do next: convince the British public that, as the foremost nation of explorers, we must be at the next wild frontier.
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Britain invests only in unmanned efforts, such as the disastrous Beagle 2 probe to Mars. “We used to be global leaders in exploration. For 200 years the British mapped the world,” he says. “Every single one of those exploration ships sent a scientist: Darwin came up with an interesting idea while sailing around the world on the Beagle. Changed our view of biology.
“The other reason is that we have all the developed countries in the world united together in a totally peaceful, totally open enterprise. They’re sharing this technology and their ideas. It’s purely positive.”
And expensive: the US space programme costs seven tenths of a cent in every American taxpayer’s dollar. We think that this sounds a lot; Dr Sellers talks about it as a bargain.
“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 40 years.”
Yet shooting people into the universe is dismissed by many scientists as a publicity stunt to attract funding, when robots could do the job as well for far less money and risk.
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Dr Sellers describes space adaptation sickness: “Your back stretches out about an inch, it’s very painful,” he says. “All the body fluids in your lower body creep upwards and you get full, fat faces.” On ten-hour spacewalks they have to wear nappies in their spacesuits.
Since we are getting personal, does love blossom in space, or are there rules? “No rules. Everyone’s grown up. Space station romance would be bitter. A bit tough. You’re working too hard for one thing.”
We have got a little distracted as Dr Sellers prepares to strip into his flight suit, but he still hasn’t persuaded us that it is worth sending man rather than robot. “It’s true that the public is interested in human space flight,” he says. “There are good reasons for sending humans into space. We can do things that machines can’t do.”
There is a call to the human spirit, too. “I don’t think humans are doomed to spend the duration sitting on Earth. Humans are out there to explore and eventually to settle.” Does he really think we are going to survive on Mars? “I think we’ll have a manned base on the Moon in about 15 years,” he says. About a decade after that, there will be a base on Mars, even though “the Martian surface environment is absolutely lethal to all Earth organisms — no air, massive ultraviolet radiation and very, very cold”.
He adds: “It takes technology. No cave man could have lived through the Ice Age without fire and caves and clothes. Those are all technologies.”
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But, er, what’s the point? First, he says, for what it can tell us about Earth: “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.”
Secondly, because we might want to colonise the universe. “The same reason 500 years ago Europeans thought it might be a good idea to move out beyond Europe.”
But isn’t it a bit of a leap from crossing the Atlantic to living in zero gravity? “Well that’s what they said about America. ‘We don’t want to go across that extremely deep, dangerous ocean where only half the ships get through to a disease-ridden, hostile land . . . The first task for humans is to explore our own backyard, the solar system. See what we have. And just send back the word to the Queen of Spain what we saw. Between Columbus and the first successful settlement in North America was over 100 years.”
He could almost make you believe in little green men, so we ask him whether they are out there. “I’m convinced that we’ll bump into other life, yes. I’m convinced that there are lifeforms out there and they won’t look anything like us, but they’ll be smart.”
Dr Sellers just made the impossible seem a little bit more possible. Which, after all, is what his job is all about.
Space cadet
Born 1955 in Crowborough, Sussex. The day after his sixth birthday he saw the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin become the first man in space
Education State school in Kent; learnt to fly in the cadet force: Edinburgh University degree in ecology; PhD from Leeds University in biometeorology
Married His wife is a nurse he met in Leeds; two children
Jobs Joined Nasa as a climate scientist, then beat off the competition to be selected for the Astronaut Corps
Space 2002 — shuttle mission to the International Space Station; 2006 — shuttle mission. He has logged more than 24 days in space, more than 400 orbits of the Earth, with six spacewalks totalling 41 hours. He hopes to return
Big mistake In July he dropped a putty knife while on a spacewalk. Owing to the risk of damage to the craft it had to be tracked by satellite until it finally dropped into the Atlantic
Space golf Reaction to this week’s commercially sponsored golf stunt off the space station: “You’d have to ask the Russian space programme about that.” Would Nasa do anything similar? “No”