Straight Talk with Mark Bouris
Australia's First Astronaut: The Artemis Program, Mars Mission and Elon Musk.
05 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Catherine Benelpeg, welcome to Straight Talk. How are you going?
I'm great, thank you.
You've got the Australian Space Agency. Are you there now?
Chapter 2: What is the significance of Australia's role in the Artemis program?
Yeah, I'm at 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.
That's amazing. That jacket you got on, that looks very cool. I want one of those. Can you explain what you got on there?
What is that? 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. 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 our You know, 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.
Do you choose that name, the hoppers, or does that get allocated to you?
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.
What are they, Irish or something, were they?
Yeah, well, they played a lot of tricks on each other apparently, so that's why they got that name.
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Chapter 3: What does it take to become an astronaut in Australia?
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 we are actually making money out of what we spend. And as the space agency allocated money from the government, where's that money coming from? Does the space agency have some private element?
So I know 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 $170 million in grants over the eight years.
We've had a space agency across more than 90 different organisations, 90 different projects across Australia, hundreds of organisations. 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 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 other countries.
And so by being able to do more ourselves, we can become more resilient with our own needs.
Well, how do you mean Australia relies on space? I didn't know that. How do we rely on space? What for?
So 99% 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 18% 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 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. 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 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 synchronised through clock measurements from space. It's the same behind our energy and transport system.
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Chapter 4: What are the major risks astronauts face in space?
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 about that Australia was stepping up in its space ambition.
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?
Chapter 5: How does radiation exposure affect astronauts on missions?
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 re-emerged, they were actually above Australia, right? It was Australian operators that were waiting to reconnect and re-communicate with them. During that blackout period you're talking about? The Australian Space Agency co-funded with $4.5 million a new kind of space laser through ANU 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, a
to the moon, which is going to showcase the best of Australia's robotics up there and set us up, 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 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 with other global ecosystems and supply chains in ways that permeates across the full economy.
Apollo was the engine room for innovation of its era and The whole space economy that we rely on now, Earth observation, looking at the Earth, the communication, Starlink and so on, all of that came from what was created in Apollo 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 transistors, silicon chips, in order to stabilize the big rockets of Apollo. And when Apollo wound down, the Silicon Valley spun up. 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.
So 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 most technologically advanced radio.
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Chapter 6: What technological challenges must be overcome to reach Mars?
Then, you know, when to see 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.
I found it incredible and moving, the human moments, like when, you know, Commander Reed, he had, 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 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. It's underpinning the mission, and that came through very strongly for me. I loved how, you know, when the astronauts were behind 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 to the sensors that are up there. The images that came back and particularly, again, as an engineer, the re-entry images 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 communications blackout, the pause until the parachutes opened. And when they said, you know, four green, they're all healthy.
on return, that was quite something. And in fact, I've recently learned that more than half the Australian population watch that re-entry, which is incredible.
I was one of them. When I see what they re-enter in and as it lands, hardly four people fit in, if you know what I mean, it's nothing. And then I think about how the speed at which it re-enters and the temperature on the outside of the capsule. Those things are sort of mind-boggling to me. They're not things that I can even really understand or definitely can't imagine.
The engineering that must go into those things must be quite extraordinary, particularly the temperature of the outside of the capsule. I can't remember how many thousands of degrees it is, but it's something really bloody hot. And do they feel it inside?
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