Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. We're in the midst of an extraordinary space age, and yet very few people have actually been to space and can speak from a place of personal experience about what might be the future of humankind there.
In this conversation, former astronaut Chris Hadfield, who's been dubbed a space exploring James Bond, sat down with TED curator Whitney Pennington Rogers to discuss his remarkable experiences on the International Space Station and how it turned into writing high stakes fiction, including his latest book, Final Orbit.
The two of them explore the boundaries between what is science fiction and what is truly possible and help paint a picture of the great unknown of the cosmos into something we can all understand.
It feels like this is just an exciting time to talk about space and everyone seems to be doing it. I think maybe we could just kick things off and start right there.
Chapter 2: What does Chris Hadfield think about the current excitement in space exploration?
From your perspective, what do you think is driving this new wave of excitement and investment in space exploration? What feels different to you about this moment?
Access. There are amazing times in history, Whitney, where we collectively as a species invent something new that opens up whole new opportunities for humanity. Think about, you know, when we first harnessed fire or when someone built the first raft to cross, I don't know, the Red Sea or when we started mining. domesticating horses and allowed ourselves to travel quickly.
Or when the first train was invented, you know, late 1700s, early 1800s. And then the airplane and the car, all of those things changed not only how we could move around, but then where we could go to.
And spaceflight has been around now for 60 years, but we're in a revolution right now of reusable spaceship design, which is drastically dropping the cost, which then increases the access for everybody. And right now, it's possible to just buy a ticket and go to space for the price of a luxury car. And luxury cars are expensive. but there are a lot of people buying luxury cars too.
So it's just a kind of a revolutionary time in starting to leave earth in amongst all the scientific and explorative stuff going on. And I find it all really inspiring and exciting and also kind of delightful based on what I've done my whole life.
And I mean, and you've lived through many eras of space exploration from, you know, think about like Cold War competition to international cooperation. And now where we are, where we're seeing this sort of surge in private enterprise. And how do you think the purpose of going to space has evolved through these phases?
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Chapter 3: How has the purpose of space travel evolved over time?
How have people thought about it differently?
When I was born, and I'm by no means the oldest man in the world, no one had gone to space. Like when I was just learning to walk, that's when Yuri Gagarin and then a month later Al Shepard and then everybody that followed started going to space. So it's still incredibly new in the human experience. And I think the evolution makes complete sense, where initially it was just barely possible.
And we took an enormous risk to try and, just like we often do with a new capability, like the first people to Antarctica, a large percentage of them died, just trying to prove whether Shackleton managed to keep his whole crew alive, barely, but just trying to push them really the envelope of human experience. And that's where we were when I was growing up.
And then we evolved from the Apollo program with Apollo 13 and all those near misses to the shuttle program, which we regularize it a lot. But it's still we had two tragic, completely fatal accidents during shuttle. And But we've gotten better and better at it.
We've learned so much from each of those problems in the past so that now the vehicle that regularly takes people to the space station and back, the SpaceX Dragon vehicle with a Dragon capsule on top, it's the safest rocket ever. And that didn't happen accidentally. It is a natural progression.
And as soon as you make something safe enough and cheap enough, then it stops being just the purview of of a trillionaire like the Soviet Union or the United States. And it gets down to the billionaire and then the millionaire. And then I don't know what you call it under that the centenary or something.
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Chapter 4: What are the risks and opportunities for collaboration in space exploration?
Someone who has, I don't know, one hundred thousand dollars or seventy five thousand dollars. It's still expensive, but if you plot it on a curve, it's easy to extrapolate where it's going.
And that naturally then opens up a lot more commercial opportunity for putting things in space, for satellites to observe the world for commercial purposes, but also just for people not just to risk their lives and explore, but to just see what it's like to go for a ride. And lots of people are doing that now.
Wow. And it sounds like you think that we're probably going to see more of this or it will become even more accessible as time goes on.
Well, if you'd asked me the same question about airplanes in 1920, say, after we'd had a big area of government development with the First World War, and then the very first airlines started being formed, One of the first was KLM in Holland. And they, I mean, it was crazy. There were no regulations. Instrument flying didn't exist yet. Where do you get fuel?
There's not any big infrastructure of runways. But people saw that, hey, this is important. This is going to open up the whole world to us. And let's be on the cutting edge of it. Let's move out. You can't stop people's creativity and imagination and entrepreneurship. And that's the phase we're just really nicely entering into in space flight right now.
I, I helped run a big international technology incubator called the creative destruction lab. I run the space component of that. And so I regularly see hundreds of brilliant young people from all around the world, uh, building businesses, developing ideas so that they can take advantage of this moment in history to be some of the early developers of the technologies we're going to need.
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Chapter 5: How do technological advancements impact our future in space?
You know, I think another thing a lot of folks, when they're looking at the headlines, not just related to space, but just in general, there's, you know, a lot of things happening around, you know, global tensions and geopolitical tensions and Space is always in a lot of ways reflected the politics of the time.
And so I wonder if when you look at these headlines and see the things that are going on out there, what opportunities you might see for collaboration in orbit and potentially what risks do you think were presented in this moment when we think about the future of space exploration?
Yeah, all new inventions are dual use. You know, we don't really think about it much, but everything you ever come up with, any new idea, it can be used peacefully, it can be used antagonistically. You know, metallurgy with knives and forks or anything, fire or nuclear energy or, gosh, everything. And we're just people. Absolutely.
I got to know Jane Goodall, had multiple things we did together, and she just sadly passed away recently. But I was with her back in March, and we were talking. One of the things she discovered when she went into the jungles, quite optimistically about, you know, the innocence and the purity of animals, she discovered that chimpanzees murder each other and they wage war.
Tribes of chimpanzees wage war on each other. They commit genocide. I mean, and that's the closest animal in the entire living things on Earth that we're related to. We are very much that flawed being. But at the same time, we have developed society and societal rules and cultures that protect us from our worst nature. And we have police forces and military forces.
And so all of that is going to be exported into space. Right now, it's been maybe slightly more pure than it could have been because of the limited access to it. But you need to remember, in 1962, both the United States and the Soviet Union detonated nuclear weapons in Earth orbit and had horrific effects.
consequences like almost the whole world could see aurora because of the big disruption of the magnetic field it wiped out a whole bunch of satellites and some of the ground stations in hawaii caught fire because of all the tremendous amount of energy coming from the sky so you know we're by no means perfect what we need to do is look at this new technology just like we have all the ones in the past and figure out how should we regulate it how do we integrate it
so that it actually serves a purpose for the human condition. And I focus on a lot of different things, but that is very much one of them. How can I be part of the group of people that is thinking long term, thinking big picture? I'm the chair of the Open Lunar Foundation, looking at lunar settlement policy and how not to just mirror the problems that exist on Earth right now.
But if we wait for everything to be perfect, we'll never do anything. And we have to somehow do the amazing things while allowing for the imperfections of human behavior.
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Chapter 6: What ethical considerations arise with new space technologies?
Right. Well, it's much like how can you be a climate activist and invest in some other industry? Of course, none of the space industries are based in space. All of the industry and investing happens here on Earth. And so if you look at a company, for example, like GHGSAT, GHG stands for greenhouse gas.
And what they developed is a really clever little sensor that specifically looks for the gases like methane that contribute most to changes in the chemistry of our atmosphere and therefore the greenhouse effect that leads to global warming. And GHGSat is a very successful company. And And they're leading the world.
And what they do is they orbit the world and constantly, 24-7, look for unknown sources of big methane leaks and then inform the person that owns the pipeline or the plant or whatever. There's a company like Planet that has hundreds of satellites up that are imaging the world down to very fine resolution every day. And they do a lot of what you would have to call altruistic work to try and
let everybody see the actual health of our planet and what's going on. And so it's a big enough industry, multi, multi-billion dollar industry, that there's lots of different areas in it that you can choose to support by investing in certain companies.
Chapter 7: How can we ensure space exploration benefits humanity?
I'd love to build on that a little bit. You know, when you think about the technology and, you know, what's advancing in all spaces, but in space, we have reusable rockets now and AI being used to assist spacecraft and even autonomous rovers and that sort of thing. And you, of course, are way more versed in this than I am.
I'm a semi-autonomous rover myself.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess when you think about all this stuff, what are the innovations that you see that you think are most reshaping our path to eventually being able to spend significant amounts of time off of Earth?
Yeah. One of the first ones you touched on, Whitney, which is reusable rockets. Right now, we have partially reusable rockets. The first stage that gets you off the launch pad and above the air so that then you can go fast enough. You know, in order to stay in orbit, you have to go five miles a second, eight kilometers a second. You can't do that down here in the air.
There's just too much friction. but as soon as you get above the air then you can go sideways and accelerate out to orbital speed and so that first stage that does the heavy lifting gets you off the pad gets you up uh you know where there's virtually no air and then it runs out of fuel and spits you off Now those first stages, as most people on this call know, come back and land.
So you don't throw away any of the metal and you're really just paying for fuel. And that has radically dropped the cost of access to space. And not only is it SpaceX with their Dragon or their Falcon rocket that a lot of people know about, but Blue Origin has already launched once, but they're launching again within a few weeks.
Their big lifter that they named after one of the early astronauts, they call it New Glenn. And they're trying to land that first stage out on a barge. And then a New Zealand company, a real strong up and comer called Rocket Lab, has a new partially reusable rocket called Neutron that they're intending to launch from the east coast of the U.S. before the end of the year.
So multiple Western companies competing with first stage reusable rockets. And in China, they're doing the same thing. But the real challenge, change will be when we have 100% reusable rocket. So you don't throw away any of your construction and sunk cost investment with each flight. You can just bring the pieces back like an airline or fill them up with fuel and use them again.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Hadfield provide on the meaning of life?
financially viable. It doesn't take an enormous organization just to get to space. And that's coming quickly with SpaceX's new Starship. It's a monster of a rocket and a very complex thing to do. But if you watch their last flight, their 11th test flight, they had remarkable success. Both pieces safely made it back. They're pushing the edges of the
uh economical savings in in complexity but it won't be very long before you see a starship launch either from texas or florida the first stage come back and get grabbed and then the orbital stage get up do what it's doing in space and then come back and get grabbed stack them up fill them up with fuel and use them again that's coming quite rapidly That's going to drop the cost even more.
And so to me, access is everything. As soon as we can make it safe and simple and as inexpensive as possible for things to get to space, that's when the Earth orbit and Earth moon economies will really take off.
You've talked a little bit about some of the technological things that might need to happen in order to enable us to be a space-faring species. When you think about some of the other obstacles that we might face, whether that's political or ethical things, what do you see as some of the biggest things standing in our way from seeing this as a reality?
Well, civilizations rise and fall all the time. Some of them last a long time. The Roman Empire. If you look at China, they've been an anomaly in human history, although they've had all of their ebbs and flows. They've been kind of a discrete geopolitical unit for thousands and thousands of years in that part of the world. And that adds a sense of urgency to what's going on.
Because you don't have to look very far back in history to whatever the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, or Egypt had that zenith of civilization and then collapsed, or all the ones that came before that. And so you're just sticking your head in the sand if you don't think that our current civilization is going to come apart at the seams and crumble for a while before something else emerges.
So so there's urgency to what's happening. We're at a moment right now where we're capable of doing magnificent things. You know, it's kind of staggering to think of the huge number of things that are happening simultaneously on Earth right now, right at the cutting edge, stuff that was impossible just five years ago.
um and so a lot of what i do is to be part of the effort to help hold it all together to keep us from falling to our our bad chimpanzee natures and to actually um make the most of of the civilization that we've been handed but i also one of the things whitney that you really internalize orbiting the world is a sense of time.
In a frenetic place, in a city, everything's just going, going, going, and fast. And it's hard to even imagine the rest of the world. It sure is hard to imagine 100 years. And it's virtually impossible to imagine 1,000 years or 10,000 years. But on the quiet
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