Richard Fidler

when you had to choose between Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica, which one was it for you?

Why Star Trek?

I never thought about it like that before.

I suppose Star Wars is all about one man who saves the galaxy, isn't it?

But Star Trek's about a group of people working together to solve problems, which is the reality of the kind of work you do.

Yeah, absolutely.

You come from an African-American family.

You're African-American yourself.

I have to ask, was Lieutenant Uhura a thing for you?

So once you'd settled on mechanical engineering, how did you then find your way to the space program, from Earth to the heavens, if you like?

So does that mean as an engineer, you're an engineer who's got to specialise in extreme gravity or lack of gravity and that kind of thing?

Does that change all the parameters of engineering when you're a space engineer?

They've got to bear weight though, don't they, these things, very often, don't they?

Oh, yeah, that's a big deal.

You mean like plastic can sort of very, very, very faintly start to disintegrate without air pressure on it?

I've talked about this on this program before.

One of the moments I remember so vividly from my childhood in the 1970s was when the paper landed on our front doorstep.

And it was one of those rare occasions back in the 70s when they made it.

It had a colour front page of the newspaper and it had photos of the surface of Mars.

It was one of the first Mars probes to land there.