Australia's First Astronaut: The Artemis Program, Mars Mission and Elon Musk.

Dr Katherine Bennell-Pegg is the first astronaut to be trained under the Australian flag and a critical voice in the nation's emerging space ambitions. From her headquarters at the Australian Space Agency in Adelaide, Katherine reveals how Australia is playing an essential role in the Artemis moon programme and why space exploration delivers genuine economic returns. She discusses the rigorous process of becoming an astronaut, the real risks involved in space travel, and how her engineering background shaped her journey from designing space stations to potentially living in them. The conversation explores everything from toilet malfunctions on Artemis missions to the radiation challenges facing future Mars explorers. We also talk about... Australia's $7 return for every $1 invested in space programmes The five major hazards astronauts face in space How Australian technology supported Artemis 2's critical moon mission The reality of radiation exposure and medical risks for astronauts Why the International Space Station has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize Australia's role in the global space race versus international collaboration The technological hurdles preventing humans from reaching Mars Join my exclusive Mentored+ community: https://mentored.com.au/become-a-member/ Subscribe to the Mentored newsletter here: https://the-mentored-platform-pty-ltd.myklpages.com/l/WWJGc5 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Catherine Benalpeg, welcome to Straight Talk. How are you going?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I'm great, thank you.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  You've got Australian Space Agency. Are you there now?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I work here in Adelaide at lot 14 where the Space Agency headquarters is. This is where I spend most of my days here when I'm in the office.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  That's amazing. That jacket you got on, that looks very cool. I want one of those.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very cool.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Can you explain what you got on there? What is that?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  This is my flight jacket, we call it. So basically on the left you wear your country that you represent, obviously Australia. You wear your astronaut wings, which you receive when you pass basic training and are eligible for a flight assignment.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Your space agency, Australian Space Agency. And this is my class patch. It's the hoppers. So I'm in a class with five others. And we named the hoppers in part because Australia is represented on astronaut training for the first time. And we liked how kangaroos go forwards and not backwards. And when you get missions, you get patches down your arms and across your chest as well. So you can kind of get a sense of what astronauts have done by looking at their jackets and their flight suits. But I'm a rookie astronaut by comparison to many.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Do you choose that name, the hoppers, or does that get allocated to you?

• 1:16Speaker 01

  It's allocated by the class that's ahead of you. So the class that was ahead of us at the European Space Agency, or ESA, is called the Shenanigans and they gave us the name.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Or are they Irish or something, were they?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they played a lot of tricks on each other apparently. So that's why they got that name.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  That's pretty cool. Like, I don't know, like being in a space agency and being an astronaut. Oh my God, like it's sort of what everybody, they don't even dream about, they fantasize about. Like especially young boys or young girls who sort of sitting around looking at all the stuff that's recently happened, of course, with Artemis. But we'll come back to Artemis in a moment. But like, do you ever have to pinch yourself?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's definitely pinch me stuff to be a qualified astronaut, you know, ready for missions to the International Space Station or even the moon. It's been a long time coming, but it's still really kind of a new beginning of what the future could hold. So yeah, I'm excited for myself, yes, but also I hope what this can enable more broadly for the country. And I'm really grateful to be in this position too.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  To qualify as an astronaut, it's not like going to university and becoming a lawyer or something. What's the process of becoming an astronaut? Is it like, do you get a science degree or something? What I mean, what does it mean?

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when you finish school, there's no kind of graduate job or apprentice to be an astronaut. You have to have a first career in advance of even being able to apply. And that first career has to be something that's in a technical field. You need, you can be a scientist of any kind, you can be an engineer of any kind, you can be a pilot, you can be a medical doctor. And on top of that, you need to be fit and healthy, not like an Olympic athlete, but kind of like you're in the military, fit enough and healthy enough to do your job. You need to have expeditionary experience, meaning things like being in the military or in Antarctica or on like scientific fieldships.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  You should have operational skills, which means things like having been in the emergency service or flying or scuba diving, situations where you have to make decisions in real time, where someone could die if you screw up. And on top of that, you should have kind of international experience or speak other languages. So it's really broad and building out a CV to hopefully one day be an astronaut is an awesome journey in its own right. So I tell people with this dream, you know, pick something in that huge breadth of fields that you love anyway. And becoming an astronaut is just the cherry on the top of a path that you're enjoying.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Would you be able to sort of open up, sort of what did you do? Like in your case, I mean, did you do an engineering degree at university? Or and did you go to a university in South Australia or whereabouts in Australia? What did you do?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so um I originally wanted to be a pilot, right? Um I did aerobatic flying and loved science as well as a teenager. Um but I got medically postponed in the selection to be an Air Force pilot. So I had to go do something else and I picked being uh an engineer and scientist. So I went to Sydney Uni, I grew up in Sydney, uh and did a double degree in physics and uh aeronautical space engineering. And I picked up the engineering half of the degree just because it had the word space in the title. I didn't actually know what engineering was, I'd never used a drill or written a line of code. But um I thought it would be a way to kind of broaden my knowledge base and I'm so glad I did.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Uh it took me on the most wonderful journey around the world, working on some of the best space missions I could have imagined. So I ultimately became a space engineer, so someone that uh designs and develops satellites, uh space stations, robots for other planets. And um I've done that for about fifteen years now.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Wow, so being involved in a team that uh designs a space station, that sounds pretty hectic. Um I'm sure the team's pretty big, um and and if the errors, well, you can't afford to make one error. I mean, I can imagine there would be um definitely um, you know, uh uh you know, the the effect of making one error in a million is catastrophic. So you probably have to be, you know, ten standard deviations away from the mean in terms of error rates. I mean, like, how does that work? Like, I can't even get my head around that, like, in terms of error rates. Um you can't afford to make one slightest opportunity for something not to work in a space station.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's an acceptable error risk and you have all these different sigmas and things like you say. Um overall, for an International Space Station mission, which is about six months on a tested vehicle, it's been up there for twenty six years. Um your designed in fatality risk is one in two hundred. So that being some time in that mission, your designed risk of death is one in two hundred, which is something I wouldn't get in the car for, right?

• 6:20Speaker 00

  No, totally.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Or a line of four, so astronauts do that because we believe in the discoveries you can make up there and the importance of that work. But as an engineer doing that before, um you're very aware how important it is. Um and you only take risks where you need to take risks. I worked for Airbus. So like Boeing develops aircraft in another part of the business. So that safety culture comes across from designing aircraft. But when we design satellites, we should be not over perfecting and gold plating everything because we want to be low cost there as far as we can when we're looking at things like weather and disasters and communications so that, you know, we make it as economical as possible.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  So what are your ambitions in terms of maybe one day going to the moon or maybe even Mars? How do you control that ambition instead of, because in the day to day you do something different, but you're always got this burning ambition or desire to be chosen to go on the next moon expedition, whether it be landing on the moon or just going around there, going to the dark side of the moon or the other side of the moon, like recently. I mean, how do you control that ambition, the excitement?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  It's a great positive thing. It's a wonderful motivator, but the reality is most of an astronaut's career is spent here on the ground. I've only been a qualified astronaut for two years since April 2024, which is when I graduated. So it's relatively early days. You know, being a qualified astronaut from a country without a human spaceflight program is unusual. So it's just another layer on the uncertainty onion. And the way I handle that uncertainty is by knowing that I can contribute from what I've learnt so far as well as continue to learn into the future. So I've been able to get out and about across the country through the Australian Space

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Agency to speak to people, especially young people, about opportunities in space and technical careers and open doors also for our researchers and companies to be more involved in space opportunities and to support with what the space agency is doing for Artemis as well. I think for most people that have become astronauts or people that have big dreams for themselves, for their careers, the easiest way to manage it, I think, is to make it not about what you want to be, like yourself, but what you want to contribute. So be purpose driven and that helps to remove your ego from it. It helps you to stop being narcissistic, but also to stop worrying if you're good

• 8:59Speaker 01

  enough and just focus on getting the job done the best you can. And also knowing that you're not alone in space, you're part of a crew. Not just up there, but of hundreds of people on the ground supporting you. And here on earth, you know, space is part, it's not a bubble, it's part of a broader ecosystem that underpins all our utilities here in Australia.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  What is the broad objective generally for space exploration and in particular the moon? What is the broader purpose of it as opposed to just to be able to say, look, we went there, we went on the other side, or we were able to land? What's the fundamental reason why we need to land on the moon?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a number of reasons why you do it. The real focus for Artemis, which is the new Apollo, is about going back to the moon, not to plant a flag and have footprints to be the first, but to go back there to set up a long-term presence, what's called a sustainable presence, in order to do long-term science and also to have a presence in the same way, you know, as a nation, as countries we do in Antarctica, to ensure all nations are using it responsibly. So by going up to the moon long-term, we can understand Earth better. It's thought the Earth and the moon formed from a collision. Apollo taught us that because the moon's moving slowly further away from us. We can tell from the reflectors we put on there. So we're formed of the same stuff, but we can't see the early Earth on Earth.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  We've got weathering and volcanic activity. The moon is frozen in time. So by understanding the moon, we know more about the inputs into our climate models and things like that to support early Earth. We can also look up there for sources like water, which can help us to live off the land up there and to go further afield. There's a lot of things we can research up there using the space environment. Radiation's one of them. We've already learnt a lot about radiation's effects on the human bodies through Artemis I, which was flew crash test dummies called phantoms for radiation, women's bodies.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Actual bodies?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Well, it was like crash test dummies of women's bodies.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  To look at how radiation from out there moves through them, which is something we didn't know before. And that data's already being used to improve like radiotherapy treatments for women on Earth. So ultimately, we go up there for science. We go up there for international cooperation to set the stage to work together in big challenges that we have around the world. If we look at the International Space Station, which is underpinned Artemis. So the International Space Station is a soccer field-sized space station in low Earth orbit, only 400 kilometres up. It's been there for 26 years. And that has helped us work together with countries from around the world in ways that we would never have otherwise.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  It's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice because of what it's done to help integrate different nations. Basically, it's also an economic opportunity exploration. In Australia, our exploration programs through the Australian Space Agency are returning $7 for every $1 we've invested in them into programs like a small lunar rover for the South Pole to take up our field robotics and our automation. We've invested in sensors that will be helping landers land on the moon more safely, in sensors that go on the surface that tell us what's under the surface, which is helping us to do that more sustainably on Earth for mining, how to grow plants on the moon that helps us with drought-tolerant crops on Earth.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  That's all returning seven to one at least per project.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  These are things that Australia was doing relatively to...

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Australia specifically.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  So we're innovating around the sensing programs, the engineering of it, the software around it, the feedback from it, and the learning from it, I guess, what we can learn from that. So that's... So we are actually making money out of what we spend. And as the space agency allocated money from the government, like where's that money coming from? Was the space agency have some private element?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  So no, the money that the space agency administers is government funds. So we've had a program called Moon to Mars, which is developing the rover for the moon and a number of technologies for space. That is returning at least seven to one on investment. The space agency has administered over a hundred and seventy million dollars in grants over the eight years. We've had a space agency across more than ninety different organizations, ninety different projects across Australia, hundreds of organizations. So we're smaller than most space agencies, we're smaller than most space economies, but we're really emerging in this more commercial space era, which means that we're able to

• 13:51Speaker 01

  target our programs to ones that do bring Australia an economic return. Globally, the space economy is set to triple over the next decade. So if Australian businesses can access those markets, we stand to benefit economically as well as from having our own capability. Because Australia really relies on space and most of the space we rely on, almost all of it, is supplied by international companies or international or other countries. And so by being able to do more ourselves, we can become more resilient with our own needs.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Well, how do you mean Australia relies on space? I didn't know that, but how do we rely on space? What for?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  So ninety-nine percent of data about climate and weather globally comes from satellites in space. It's how we communicate across our land. We're shortly to have triple zero coverage across all of Australia, direct to our mobile phones through satellites in space. If we look at the UK, I know eighteen percent of their GDP relies on space. For Australia, it's even more. I don't have the number, but it's even more just by inspection of how big and vast and remote we are across lands and seas. So one way to think of space isn't as, you know, a niche industry, but as a place. Space is like the ocean and it's a place that is the ultimate high point from which we can see things.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  And from that high point, like a super high mobile phone tower, we can connect what we can see and what we can connect, we can send information through, things like, you know, the GPS that guides us on our Google Maps, the timing data from GPS actually is what our banking system relies on. Every time you tap your phone to buy a coffee, the data in real time is being synchronized through clock measurements from space to same behind our energy and transport system. And all of these things that we rely on are really international provided satellites. So we rely in many cases on the goodwill of other nations to provide that.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  When we hear about the amount of money that's getting allocated to the Space Agency in Australia, most of us donors actually sort of go to the next step and say, well, you know, what's the return? And if we're getting a seven, multiple of seven, in other words, every dollar we spend, we get seven dollars back, or seven dollars contributed, that's not back, but we get seven dollars contributed to the Australian economy. Why wouldn't the government contribute more? I mean, instead of a hundred and seventy million, why wouldn't we make it a billion?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a question for government, but I'd say that what's really exciting is that our space sector, over the investments in the last few years, is moving from being able to just demonstrate capability to being able to deliver operational capability. So we're poised to scale, you know, right as the global space sector is shifting geopolitically, it's shifting programmatically, it's shifting industrially to be more commercial. And that is a really rare alignment, and it's really powerful for us in terms of we've got the capability, if we can bridge that gap to serving these international markets. But most space markets are quite closed, and that's the role of government and the role of the Space Agency to unlock access. For example, we've recently

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Signed an agreement called the TSA or Technology Safeguards Agreement with the US, which allows US rocket companies to launch from Australia. And that business that could bring to Australia is thought to be over $1 billion over the next decade because we're a fantastic place to launch from.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Why is that?

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Where we are in the world, we've got the ability to launch near the equator, which lets you launch further afield, you know, to what's called geostationary orbit, which is a really important one for communications, or further out to the moon. We can also launch orbits that go around the poles, which are really good for looking at the earth because the whole earth rotates underneath you. We are the only place in the world that has commercial capsules returning to a commercial spaceport, so it's Australian businesses running the spaceports that are getting the economic benefit. And what those capsules contain are pharmaceuticals. So in space, because everything is really stable because it floats, you can make new medicines that you can't make on earth.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  And they're returning those to Australia. And we've only just started that in the last few years. And there's been a deal just signed for 20 more until 2028. So Australia is really critical to the global space economy and everyone wants to work with us. I can tell you that when I went to train as an astronaut, that all the other space agencies were so excited that Australia was stepping up in its space ambition.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  In the Artemis, the most recent Artemis voyage, what's the role of Australia in something like that? Or more importantly, the space agency, your space agency, what's the role that we play?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  I mean, this is just the beginning for Artemis. We've just had the first manned mission of many to follow. And it's also the beginning of Australia's role in it for Artemis 2, which just went around the moon. Just like in Apollo, Australia was critical for communications and tracking. So when the astronauts went around the far side of the moon and then reemerged, they were actually above Australia, right? It was Australian operators that were waiting to reconnect and recommunicate with them.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  During that blackout period, you're talking about?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when they came around out of the blackout.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  It was Australia that found them and connected them back up.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Because it was above us. So we have one of three big dishes in the world called the Deep Space Network, D S N, just outside Canberra. Um, and we were critical doing that, just like we did a similar function in Apollo. We also had a space laser. The Australian Space Agency, uh, co-funded with four hun- four point five million dollars, a new kind of space laser through A N U. That is able to get lots more data down. It's kind of like going from dial-up internet to broadband internet to get the data down. So when we got those beautiful images back from the moon, they were sent through optical communications, which we did not have in Apollo. But for future missions for Artemis, we're sending up hardware, a small rover

• 20:09Speaker 01

  uh, to the moon, which is going to showcase the best of Australia's robotics up there and set us up, um, if we wish to, to be able to provide a lot of scientific and industrial services on the moon. We're the best in the world at operating complex mine sites here on earth. Lots of robots and automatic trucks and trains around each other and safely around humans. And that's something that NASA's interested in having on the moon, not to mine it, but to help set up, you know, a man base and do exploration safely. And by being involved, Australia gets to show in a really visible way how good we are at building things and our science and gets to integrate

• 20:51Speaker 01

  with other, um, global ecosystems and supply chains in ways that permeates across the full economy. You know, Apollo was the engine room for innovation of its era. Um, the whole space economy that we rely on now, earth observation, looking at the earth, the communications, Starlink and so on. All of that came from what was created in Apollo, um, as well as advances on earth. Artemis is going to be the engine room for the next wave of innovation in space and how it will support us as well as here on earth. So from Apollo, we can thank Apollo for the Silicon Valley, right? We needed to have, you know, um, transistors, silicon chips in order to stabilize the big rockets of Apollo.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  And when Apollo, you know, wound down, the Silicon Valley spun up. Uh, Artemis will have similar follow-on effects we can't even imagine yet. Now, I don't think we can justify space investment on spin out alone. You have to justify it on planned return, but we're getting those planned returns too.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  So if I, if I could just talk about Artemis for a moment. You obviously would have been following that with a great deal of excitement. I mean, I was every morning when I was turning the radio on. I mean, it sounds ridiculous. I'm listening to radio relative to what you just explained. Some of the, you know, the most technologically advanced

• 22:12Speaker 00

  and engineered systems on the planet.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Either monitoring or assisting or within the Artemis vessel itself. Here I am, listening to radio in a car. What were some of the moments that really captured your excitement? I mean, one of the things I remember, I'll start, is when the toilet broke down. And, and one of the astronauts, the female astronauts, she had to go and try and fix it. And engineering, what are some of the things that you remember from Artemis two?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Oh, the whole mission for me was absolutely incredible and surreal. About 10 years ago, I worked on the vehicle, the European service module, which was a cylinder at the back of the vehicle that went around the moon and my husband too. So it was special to see at launch and to be able to cheer on those that have been working on it since. To see, you know, astronauts that, you know, I'd met in Houston when I was training, go up there. It's very different when you move from satellites to humans on top of a rocket to see a launch. And then to move to humans who you know, on the top of a launch is quite something. And to have seen all the people, the thousands of people around the world that had spent their careers developing this vehicle and these systems.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  To get to the culmination of a launch was really special. Then, you know, when to see the, the systems proceed and check out as an engineer was exciting. The toilet's always a good topic of conversation. You know, I'm qualified to use some of the space toilets. We have to do lessons, you know, and get the certificate. But that's actually an incredibly complex piece of kit. And they had to go back to using, you know, bags and stuff, which is what was used in Apollo. Apollo didn't have a toilet. But this vehicle is meant to be something that gets, you know, used again and again as Artemis goes on this design. So we need to get it right. Um. I found it incredible and moving, uh, the human moments like when, you know,

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Commander Reid, he had, um, you know, part of the moon named after his late wife. That was really special and I think showed the spirit amongst the crew. Seeing how the crew, um, trained together and interacted up there, we can see how much human performance and understanding has advanced since Apollo. Now as astronauts, we train very much on crew cohesion as underpinning the mission and that came through very strongly for me. I loved how, you know, when the astronauts were behind, um, the moon and had the eclipse that they saw flashes of impacts on the moon's surface in a way the cameras couldn't pick up. It showed me, you know, what science can be done with humans on board in addition

• 24:53Speaker 01

  to, in addition to the sensors that are up there. Um, the images that came back and particularly again, as an engineer, the reentry, um, was something that was pretty special to watch. I knew what was going to happen in terms of sequence, but still watching it in real time, watching it with my kids, I was still holding my breath with the millions of others around the world that waited. And for me, it was really seeing, you know, them come out of the, the communications blackout, the pause until the parachutes opened. And when they said, you know, four green, they're all healthy on return, that was, that was quite something. And in fact, I've recently learnt that more than half the Australian population watched that reentry, which is incredible.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  I was one of them. When I see what they reenter in and as it lands, hardly four people fit in, if you know what I mean, there's nothing. And then I think about how the speed at which it reenters and the temperature of, on the outside of the, the capsule, those things are sort of mind boggling to me. They're, they're not things that I can even really understand or definitely can't imagine. Um, the engineering that must go into those things must be quite extraordinary, particularly the temperature of the outside of the, the capsule, like, I don't, I can't remember thousands of. Temper degrees it is, but it's something really bloody hot, you know, and do they feel it inside?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  I mean, not if everything's working. If everything's working right, the you'll continue to have your twenty one degrees inside.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're inside your suit as well. So they wear suits now for reentry. They have for the last few decades um since um there was an accident where a lot of astronauts died many decades ago when a valve broke and it depressurized inside. But um basically, yeah, you're in those suits, you're sitting in the vehicle, you're strapped in, so your back is actually on the floor and kind of your knees up. If you think if you tilt a chair backwards, so your ba- your head's on the floor, your butt's on the floor and your knees are in the air. That's their orientation so that you feel the G forces on your chest. It's like having, they they hit about four Gs, so it's like having three people your weight effectively lying on top of you. It's hard to breathe, you have to take sips of

• 27:05Speaker 01

  air. They'd feel the shock as the parachutes open and as they impact. The outside of the vehicle um was reaching half the temperature of the surface of the sun.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And the flight in front of the vehicle was multiple times hotter than that as well.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  They went the fastest humans had ever travelled, ever, um because they were falling from higher, right? They were the furthest humans had ever travelled as well. Um and yeah, the engineering was quite remarkable. That vehicle had never flied that profile before um with that heat shield. So the first mission, Artemis one, which just had those phantom crash test dummies in it, the heat shield didn't work properly. So they changed the trajectory to come in hotter and faster rather than skimming off to bleed off speed. So this was all done by teams of engineers, um you know, in test facilities, but you can't fully replicate reentry in a test facility. You can't get the airflow and the heat and

• 28:01Speaker 01

  all the the kind of the plasma at once um and through computers. And yeah, it really hats off to the team of engineers. I believe the crew went and hugged the the lead uh heat shield engineer when they landed, but what a good job that they did, which is enabling humans to go back to the moon again. You know, we can step out and look at the moon and know that humans are back in the business of sending. People out there and returning them safely to do good science.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Is it a national space race? Like are we, not us, but as the Western world, let's call it America, along with their assistance, which are us and others, are we in a race against, say, China or Russia? Or which what it was many, many years ago was a race against Russia. Are we in a race or is it collaborative?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  So for most of the world, it's collaborative. There's a team of what's called Artemis nations, Australia is one of them, working together as a team of nations to go to the moon and have this sustainable presence.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  You know, there's a saying that if you want to go fast, you know, go alone. If you want to go further, go together because you can have a more cohesive program with a lot of people's interests looked after. China does have its own ambitions to go back to the moon, which is putting some pressure on the timeline. There's a lot of consideration around, you know, resources on the moon for the long term, being able to use the water. Once you create, you know, a base, how do you properly ensure safe operations on that base? We can't land particularly precisely yet on the moon and things like that. And that's dealt with through a series of international agreements called the Artemis Accords,

• 29:46Speaker 01

  which sets out behaviors that we want to see on the moon between all the nations that sign up to it.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Has everybody signed up to that, including, say, China, for example?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  No, they're not one of the Artemis nations. There are other big international treaties that underpin how we operate in space. There's five major ones, things like the Moon Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty and so on. They say things like, you know, space is for all mankind, moon is for all mankind. You can't have commercial exploitation. So there's a lot of debate that goes on in places like the UN, where Australia is represented through the Australian Space Agency to make sure that when we go out there, we do it in a way that is responsible and that Australia's voice is heard in those discussions. So the closest analog I would consider is Antarctica. You know, it's a place with a surface.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Uh. There is the ocean, like the high seas, that's the basis for most space law. But Antarctica is the closest analogue for the moon because it's actually a territory. Um. And the way that we work together with international nations, international partners there, helps us to think how we might like to see things happen on the moon.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  So you're someone who's trained for this sort of stuff. Are there scary thoughts? I mean, I know I'd be terrified. Is it the more you know about it, the less scary it is? Or the less you know about it, the less scary it is? Which one is it?

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm someone that's comforted when I know more facts. Everybody's a bit different. I know that in the astronaut selection, they certainly wanted to make sure that we knew what we were in for from a risk perspective and the challenges, that it's not all, you know, that it's not easy, that it's not about going to space to take a selfie, going up there to work and take risks for good reason, not for the sake of taking risks, but there are risks. The riskiest part of a mission is launch and re-entry, followed by a spacewalk. Um. They're the three riskiest. And there's still so much we're learning about the human body and space, right? We just had the first medical evacuation ever from space, from the International Space Station, and we still don't know the exact cause.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  The astronaut who it happened to recently went public about it and said there were minutes where he couldn't talk, and they haven't figured out why yet. So there's a lot going on. The way I rationalize it is by knowing that the teams that are working on it are doing their, they really believe in what they're doing, they're very well trained, and that we've taken into account all the lessons learned from the past. That's been really a critical way to have trust and move forward. As astronauts, you are very well informed of all the risks. That are happening during a mission, if something goes wrong as well as in advance. But it's knowing that you go up there for a purpose, not for prestige and truly believing in that purpose.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  So on the International Space Station, that soccer field sized lab basically is infrastructure for science. And a huge part of what you do is research into new medicines and pharmaceuticals in dishes. You can grow cancer tumors in three D. You can grow Alzheimer's proteins. You can't do that here on earth. Um, as astronaut, we are ourselves medical guinea pigs. Like our bones would degrade at two percent mass a month. Um, if we don't do two hours a day in the gym up there. And that means we can be um test subjects for things like osteoporosis on earth. Same for muscle wasting, same for every system in the body. And um, I think that's really important.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  It's also uh an important way to, you know, uplift the aspiration in your country. Yes, for technical fields, but also more broadly when um people have astronauts from their nation as well.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  That's interesting that um the study of an astronaut, like just pick out osteoporosis for for example. And you could probably even test the difference between men and women. But I guess that's got something to do with being zero gravity. Um, so there's no pressure on your bones, so your bones don't, don't, your body says, I don't need bones anymore. And therefore I'll, I'll give that, give that away in favor of something else, which is sort of how we've evolved, I guess. Um, but it's, do they, does somebody back here, uh, back on earth, are, are they, are they measuring that from you? Like, would they actually measure what happened to her? They do a, like a baseline before you go and they give you something when you come back. Is that how it works?

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Spot on. So right from astronaut selection, we had to live in a hospital for a week, undergoing every test you can imagine without a scalpel. Um, and throughout your career, you provide a medical baseline of data. Um, as well as towards the end of your career and post retirement, you keep having uh regular medicals. Um, that collect a lot of this data. So um particularly for women, there's been so few women in space, only just over 10% of professional astronauts to date have been women. It means that um that data is particularly important. For for medical science because men and women's bodies respond sometimes in different ways in space and certainly to conditions on earth too.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  But there's five main hazards of space flight and each creates an opportunity for research and discovery, right? So the acronym is RIDGE. R is radiation, so looking at how our body responds to radiation. Um, I is isolation and confinement. You're stuck in a tin can or an aluminium can, um, far from earth with a few other people and that does weird things to your immune system. Um, and your psychology, so there's a lot of psychological research done on us too. D is distance from earth, so that can mean it's hard to get back in an emergency. Even the International Space Station, we're only four hundred kilometres up, right? But it can take days to get back.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Um, the moon is further afield again, it can take weeks to get back. Um, and it will have communications delays. G uh is altered gravity, so zero G floating around. Um, hypergravity, like high G forces on launch and re-entry, or sort of low gravity on the moon or Mars, and there's a lot we don't know about that right now. And E is extreme environments, like extreme temperatures or moon dust is basically like tiny bits of glass shards. If you think, you know, we have hazards with things on earth like silicon and asbestos, moon dust will be like that too, and we have to figure out how to handle it.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Well, you just said something really interesting, well, something that piqued my interest anyway, is the um, the radioactivity, is it, is it when you're going to the moon or, or at least even if you're in the space, the space station, are you being exposed to a lot of this? I mean, is it, is it like out of control type of stuff? Cause you're closer to the sun, I guess.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're, um, it depends uh what vehicle you're on. So if you're on the space station, you're under the Van Allen belt, which protects us from a lot of the radiation on earth. So you get more up there certainly, but it's not as bad. And different space agencies have a lifetime limit on astronauts, after which they shouldn't fly anymore. So. Is one sievert for any radiation experts that are listening in. Um. When you get above the Van Allen belt, so when you go out to the moon, for example, you're subject to a lot worse radiation. So our sun has a solar cycle when it basically when it shoots out more radio, um, more radiation and that radiation can be like rays, it could be particles.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Um, but when it's more active, it protects us from the worst stuff. The worst stuff is from like our galaxy and intergalactic radiation called galactic cosmic rays. So you have a time where when the sun produces less radiation, you're more exposed to the the really bad stuff. So it's a bit of a trade off. So going back to the moon is a lot worse of a radiation environment. It's one of the huge challenges we'll have to deal with um when humans one day go out to Mars. Ways to deal with it are to have things perhaps like water shielding. So you store your water in the lining of the the vehicles, but it's pretty heavy. Um. If you're on the surface, about um one meter thickness of Martian regolith,

• 38:07Speaker 01

  I know can block almost all the radiation. So maybe the astronauts there will be piling rocks on top of their habitat or living in lava tubes is another concept. But what we learn about those environments teaches us about, you know, how to deal with radioactive um environments on earth, like power plants and things like that, and how to better understand the effects of that in the body. We cannot replicate the radiation environment in space here on earth at all.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  That's a pretty cool stuff, um, because I I think I read once that a human um shouldn't be exposed to more than fifty sieverts in a lifetime. So if you're doing one in one trip, if you're getting one sievert in one trip, um, and assuming you live to seventy five years of age, you just received one year's worth of um radiation exposure and, you know, one outing. Um. And of course, you know, these things are associated with cancer. Is it? This is a bit of a personal question, but you know, the the the financial reward, is it worth the risk? I mean, I don't know. Is there a financial reward in this? Is it is it significant? Or is it more what you do? Because you're a scientist, you know, what you can contribute? To, you know, humanity.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really about that contribution. There's no financial reward for being an astronaut. You know, you get paid similarly to being in the military or being an engineer or a scientist. But it's really about that's the best way we feel we can contribute to this discovery. And of course, it's a wonderful journey and adventure, just like a lot of things that are hard work are. But yeah, there are risks. The risks aren't always known, right? There's known risks. It's probabilistic. If you have radiation, it doesn't mean you'll always get cancer. It's a higher risk of cancer. If one ray hits the wrong cell, something might happen. Yeah, and there's still so much we're learning. Even if your mission goes right, you have those outcomes.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  If you look at the Apollo astronauts, most of them that live long and healthy lives. But a lot more of them suffered from problems with their heart.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Which is also associated with spaceflight than from radiation effects. So it's going to be different when humans are back around them, back out on the moon for longer periods of time, more than, you know, days to a week. But for months, we're going to see different impacts. And that will hopefully help with medicine on earth.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Let's just talk about SpaceX for a moment. Elon Musk escape, very rarely escapes the conversation. It should be most things, to be honest with you.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  What are your thoughts on SpaceX and Elon Musk? I mean, the competition between, let's call it, private exploration and public funded exploration.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, the two go hand in hand, actually. So the real philosophy is as commercial as possible, as government as necessary. Because that's how, you know, you're, you get the best use of the tax dollars when private industry is able to deliver a service. And they can do it more efficiently, the same as for industries on earth. That tends to make sense in a lot of cases. So what we're seeing is in orbits closer to earth, which are a little bit easier to handle because it's lower radiation. We're seeing a lot more commercial activity, particularly from Elon Musk. When we're going further afield out to the moon, it's still very much a government domain because it's so new. The commercial benefits. Um. Are gonna come, but in time, once a lot of the technology risks have worked out,

• 41:32Speaker 01

  government, though, is still the primary customer of most things in space, even of things like Starlink, because they use to support countries and militaries as well, um, versions of them are. Um. Government is still the market maker around the moon, even though private companies are being funded to develop capability. So when we look at Artemis, right, this is looked at as a government program, but it was prime contractors that developed the vehicles. Um. When we look at um more commercial activities like SpaceX and SpaceX will be involved in Artemis. They are involved and they are involved in the space station. As soon as they're able to um deliver a service, then government would prefer to pay for that service.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  But at the moment, this is the US government, right? So it's not really a private or public, it's private and public. And I see it more as the industrialization of space rather than the commercialization of space. What I find particularly interesting, though, is that here in Australia, we have startups that have found purely commercial markets from space. Now, that's quite rare globally, and I think it's because our space sector has really emerged over the last decade or so, um, in a way that we've had to draw in talent from other industries. So we have a good product market fit. One example is Fleet Space Technology here in Adelaide. They produce um Internet of Things, so ground-based sensors,

• 43:00Speaker 01

  um, connected through satellites, which can help us find lithium and copper and gold deposits, far better than we could have um with traditional methods. And that is a space company which is finding the resources sector as their their commercial customer. We also have um other examples as well. So that's something that, yeah, you just don't usually see very often around the world. And one of the things that we are good at.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Could I ask you for a fearless prediction about Mars? Do you think we'll, say, in the next twenty five years, land in Mars?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Well, I think if we want to, it's a matter of will, it's not going to happen on its own, right? To get to Mars, we have significant technological hurdles to overcome. Um, right now, to get there, land and stay till the next orbital lineman come back, you're looking at a mission of almost three years. We don't even have enough um kinds of food that could sustain humans for that long if you were to pack the food for them to go with all the right nutritional profiles, let alone being able to, we can land rockets now, but then refuel it from what exists there, take off again, radiation protect. We're still discovering challenges with humans. A lot of astronauts have their eyes degraded in space um significantly to a point where if they were to take, you know, a mission to Mars,

• 44:19Speaker 01

  they might not be able to do their job when they landed because they couldn't see enough.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Um, so we have a lot to overcome, but in overcoming that will solve a lot of challenges here on earth. Um, so I think it could definitely happen in 25 years, but only if we focus on on that as a goal. Um, and making sure that as we do that, we focus on um solving them in ways that solve problems here on earth too.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Do you think that um we need an alignment, more of an alignment than with, say, quantum computing to be able to help us solve these problems? Because, you know, some of these problems are going to take years and years and years to solve. But if we had quantum computing in the next 10 years, is that something that someone like you thinks about and something something about that, you know, the space agency talks about?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, certainly it's interesting to think about how space is impacted by these other huge disruptive uh changes in technologies. We're seeing a lot of changes in space through AI. We're affected just like every industry. Um, for example, in how we design, in how we manage data on robots in real time, if, say, they navigate, um, space is also helping these industries. For example, the huge masses of data generated from satellites in space, 99% of climate data by volume comes from satellites in space. That's feeding the AI models too. Um, when we're looking at data centers of the future, um, there's a whole um series of businesses that are looking at data centers in space.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  To get more power to manage them in a way that you don't have to manage it here on earth. Um, yeah, I think that the disruptions fade off each other and quantum is something that is important for Australia. Because if we can get to quantum encryption, which is not quantum computing, but a different part of it. Um, that goes hand in hand with our laser communications, which could let in time Australia have encrypted um, intercontinental communication via satellite. We can't do that through optical fibers. We can't make them pure enough for the long distances um, between Australia and other continents to have that encryption.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  When you think about all the milestones over, let's say, the last fifty odd years we've made with space exploration. Um, which one has really meant something to you? Which milestone has meant something to you? It doesn't have to be the most recent ones. Um, and what separates that particular one from all the others? Which is the one that stands out the most for you in terms of, let's call it, personal value?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Wow, um.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  There are things in life that just keep delivering. The more time goes on, the more you appreciate them. Seventy-five years of Penfolds Range, once tasted, never forgotten. Let's keep going.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Which milestone stands out the most to me? There are so many. Um, but one that I found particularly poignant was when we had um, twenty-five years of continuous human presence in space. So the International Space Station, um, that has had people living on it now for about twenty-six years, continuously without breaks. Anyone younger than twenty-six has never been alive at a time where humans haven't been on that huge station doing a work up there. And it passes over Australia, right? So you can see it occasionally in the evening as a bright star that takes six minutes to go across. I think the milestone of, you know, the voyages, uh, spacecraft

• 47:51Speaker 01

  leaving our solar system now, that's absolutely miraculous. Um, to, to know that we've sent something so far and can still figure out ways to communicate with it. It lasted that long. Um.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  That's amazing, isn't it?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's, it's quite remarkable and there's more to come, you know? With the increasing developments of space capability, what we're soon going to be able to see is, in times of disaster, we'll be able to get. You know, actionable insights, not just to our first responders, but to people on the ground. Right now, a lot of that data is more predictive or post the disaster rather than during it for the people on the ground. And that's going to be really important for bushfires and floods in Australia.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  You know, last night, knowing that I was going to be talking to you today, I was actually looking up in the sky where I live. And I'm fortunate enough to live in a place where there's not a lot of streetlights and stuff like that. And I was looking at the brightness of the stars and I started to think a little bit more like you guys think, I guess, probably think like this all the time. But I started to think about the time it's taken for the brightness of one star to reach me, given the distance it is and the speed of light. And some of these things are so expansive, given that that star's probably moving away from us and we're moving away from it as well in a galaxy sense.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  So the whole concept of space exploration is so, is so infinite and has so many possibilities and is so out there relative to what I do. For example, I think about in finite terms, like, you know, I think about in my main business, I think about interest rates and, you know, one basis points and what can change a basis point. Yet your world is like completely undefined in that it's infinite. I mean, there's so many possibilities. Does that ever sort of blow you away? Because it does to me, thinking about it last night at least.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  It absolutely blows me away, but it is also what initially inspired me into space, you know, looking up at the sky and realising how infinite the universe is, you know? There are more stars in the universe, we think, than all the grains of sand and all the beaches and the deserts and the oceans in the world. We're recently seeing through new in-space telescopes.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Exoplanets, planets around other stars and almost all the stars closest to us. So there's probably far more planets than that. You know, so much out there remains to be explored and the knowledge and discoveries we can gain from that exploration, I think, are also infinite. But ultimately, yes, we we explore for those discoveries, both pure science and almost the philosophical to practical applications. But we ultimately explore space to benefit us here on earth, right? When astronauts went around the moon for the first time on Apollo eight, so the equivalent mission to Artemis two but on Apollo, way back in nineteen sixty eight, they took that

• 50:52Speaker 01

  really famous Earthrise image, the first ever color image of the Earth. And they were amazed with, you know, our oasis in the black nothingness of space. And felt, you know, that we are really not on earth but of earth. And there was a famous quote that they said when they returned, which was, we came all this way to explore the moon, but instead we discovered the earth. And that made NASA realise that Earth itself is a destination for space exploration. So we turned our satellites inwards. And that's an important reminder for all of us. We go up there, yes, to explore further and discover new knowledge we couldn't have even imagined. And in solving it, we find new mysteries and invent new technologies.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  But ultimately, it's about improving life here in real time on earth.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Wow, that's an amazing response. You just blew me away. Catherine Bennell-Pegg, thank you very much. Seriously, like as having an opportunity to be able to talk to Australia's first female astronaut is amazing, but getting your insights has been even more amazing. And to be honest, like I really appreciate the level of intellect and knowledge that someone like you has to absorb and keep up with and probably more importantly, be able to express to me in a sort of simple way. So I appreciate every moment of this, I loved it.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  I enjoyed it. Thanks very much, Mark. Thank you for having me on.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  You're most welcome. Thank you.