The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Infinite Monkey’s Guide To... Space Travel

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Astronauts and explorers including Brian Blessed, Sir Patrick Stewart, Nicole Stott and Charlie Duke reveal the wonders, and challenges, of traveling into space.Brian Cox and Robin Ince have delved into the Monkey Cage back catalogue to hear from astronauts and some very well known would-be space explorers about their passion for space travel. Brian Blessed has been dreaming of visiting Mars since the age of six, but will he ever reach the red planet? Sir Patrick Stewart has warp sped across the galaxy as Captain Picard, but has it ignited a real yearning to explore the final frontier? NASA’s Nicole Stott explains her feeling of awe when she first saw the earth as a little blue dot and Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke talks about breaking a high jump record during the ‘moon Olympics’ and why mission control were less than amused.Episodes featured: Series 8: Space Tourism Series 7: Space Exploration Series 24: Astronauts Series 16: Astronaut special Series 22: An Astronaut’s Guide to IsolationNew episodes will be released on Wednesdays, but if you’re in the UK, listen to new episodes, a week early, first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3K3JzyFProducer: Marijke Peters Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. You're about to listen to an episode of the Infinite Monkeys Guide 2. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays wherever you get your podcasts, but if you're in the UK, you can listen to new episodes a week early, first on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robert Ince.

And welcome to The Infinite Monkey's Guide To... Space Travel. And this is one of Brian's favourite subjects. If you could see his library, I mean, it's not a very big library, but what it has got in it are all the leading books on space exploration he's got the ladybird guide to rocket ships uh not just one he's got the 1961 edition the 1963 edition he's got an extra edition so he can cut it out and make it a little collage of spaceships he's got three space 1999 annuals though it does now seem that space 1999 was a bit ahead of itself, predicting that 24 years ago the moon would start speeding through space and meeting all manner of alien creatures,

both kind and cruel. It is very seriously, I would say, the finest science fiction series on television. Oh, I love it. And also, you've got got the costume haven't you? You dress in the flares sometimes. I've got a Martin Landau outfit. We're not going to say anything just for a few seconds just so the audience listening can start just putting on that little dress-up doll of Brian and just putting on the little flares there the tight top nothing left to the imagination. We've been lucky enough to meet many astronauts while making the Infinite Monkey Cage, including Apollo 9's Rusty Spygert and Apollo 16's Charlie Duke. Rusty is such an interesting man.

The first time that I met him, his views on space exploration and the importance of basically we need to leave, as he sees it, Mother Earth. He seems to me to be one of the most philosophical astronauts and certainly one of the most philosophical Apollo astronauts and Charlie Duke as well he reminded me once that his father saw or read about the first flight the Wright brothers the first powered flight and then saw his son walk on the moon I love that because I think he said his dad couldn't believe that he'd walked on the moon. He just found it quite remarkable.

And his son thought, meh, no great shakes. But we start with a human who has always wanted to go into space but never quite got there. Brian, bless you, still wants to go to Mars. When I was six at school, Mrs. Gommersall suddenly told us there were other planets like ours and there was Mars, the to Mars. When I was six at school, Mrs. Gumsall suddenly told us there were other planets like ours and there was Mars, the red Mars. I painted it when I was six years of age.

I wanted to go there and ever since I've wanted to go there, we had the radio, you know, we're journeying to space and we had Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future and Flash Gordon once a week in black and white with Buster Crabb at the cinemas.

And I'd go down there pretending to fly and I was Voltar. I never dreamt that one day I'd actually play the part in a film. But I've always loved space, and that stayed in me. I mean, we are the children of Stardust. We don't just belong here. I want to get out there. And I've been pressing it, and I've done training and all kinds of things.

I'm determined to go to Mars and beyond. You took this interest, as you mentioned, to great lengths because you did over 400 hours of astronaut training. Yes, there's no end to my talents. I mean, it's like... I want to help the space programme and I wanted to make a film to point the way to Mars because, you know, I said the highest mountain in the solar system

is Olympus Mons, about three times higher than Everest, the size of Spain, and the great, big, gorgeous valleys, and the face in the Sedona region. Let's go! And so we made a film, and which Kevin very kindly was part of, and we got lots of mountaineers, and we got microbiologists and geologists from NASA, etc. I said, great scientists like Kevin here. All was on board, and we made a film called Mission to Mars Mountain, and we assimilated, climbing Olympus Mons. And then eventually I went to Moscow.

I was training with the astronauts there, and Putin came in to watch me. One of the hardest things for me to do, because I'm terribly shy. And I went to, in the centrifuge, this is my point. I've got this thing for you, shut your face, shut your face! I'll get this out to Kevin. Well, that's all we've got time for today.

So, Kevin, I went to a centrifuge, I went to 11 Gs. Marvellous, isn't that marvellous? 11 Gs, marvellous. And different things we went on to. And I was on this little machine and a little chair. And they put two little rods on my neck. And close your eyes, close your eyes, Brian, close your eyes. The Russians have only done 50 seconds on this.

And it went round and round and round. And I experienced my head coming off. My head came off, my arms came off, and my legs came off. And I held on for about 75 seconds, which you said that was unwise. People said to me, is it not dangerous going to Mount Everest or is it not dangerous going to Mars? I think the greatest danger in life is not taking the adventure. is going to Mars. I think the greatest danger in life is not taking the adventure. I remember that one time doing an event with Brian Blessed where he got onto the stage and he tripped and I had to go and catch Brian Blessed and I don't know if anyone else has ever had to catch Brian Blessed

as he fell but I have never seen so much of my life. No one living. Yeah, it really was like, right, that's it. How are you going to die? How did Robin die? He died under Brian Blessed. Another one dies under Brian Blessed. When will health and safety realise? And the thing was, if you've been to a live recording of Monkey Cage, you'll know that it goes on for much longer.

And this one did because most of what he said was unbroadcastable. If we tried to broadcast the majority of brian bless's anecdotes it would have been just bleeped out and you would have heard a princess anyway i do remember he started it with um kevin fong was on the show and he just recorded something with kevin i think it was some of the russian space training that brian blessed did yeah and so we said and so on the panel is kevin fong and he went kevin fong he has nicknames for people and they often have a similar expletive deleted pattern to them don't they anyway sometimes we do get the commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield, but when you can't, well, why not instead get the captain of the USS Enterprise? Because that makes a good replacement. We asked Spatula Stewart if he'd wanted to go from acting

as if in space to actually exploring space. Many scientists that I know cite Star Trek as one of the things that inspired them to go into science. I know that the first spaceship, the prototype spaceship, Lenterprise, was named after your ship. I may explain it like that. So were you interested in space exploration? No. Are you now?

And suddenly the producers are thinking, have we made a terrible mistake? I watched the moon landings and was amazed and thrilled by them. But, and this is a sort of an admission really, and will make me, I suspect, very unpopular. For a long time, I was one of those creatures who said, we should not be going out into space because every bit of evidence on our own planet proves that whenever we have explored the unknown, we've messed it up. We've left ruin and death and chaos behind us.

Let's leave outer space until we've fixed this world. Well, that was my position. And then I was offered this job. And it was no longer exactly proper to say things like that. So yes, I'm for it. I think it's an excellent thing. And I know you're going to be talking about robots, but if there'd only been robots and man had not gone into space, I would have no career. What's your feeling on the value of humans getting out there into space? Well, let's look at it historically. If Christopher Columbus had been a robot,

would the idea of Christopher Columbus have been as exciting? Vasco de Gama. It would have been incredible. Don't you imagine? I don't think he means an actual robot Christopher Columbus. I think he means something more like the Curiosity rover. Instead of a human being. Or, you know, Captain Cook.

It is the person, the personality, the nature, the adventure that surrounds them that excites us towards exploration in the past. I don't see why that should change in the way we regard it in the future. And anyway, I need a job. So it's in a sense, it's cultural value as much as scientific value, which is one of the real questions that we have to ask in terms of how we spend our budgets on space exploration. I believe so. Ask any ISS astronaut what they did with their downtime. And more often than not, they'll say that they spent it staring out of the window.

Nicole Stott was one of the last astronauts to return to Earth on the space shuttle, and now inspires children to be fascinated with the extraterrestrial through art. Here she joins comedian Katie Brand and space scientist Carolyn Porco to tell us a little bit about the view. We all, you know, remember that moment in some way. For me, you know, it was the chance to float out of my seat in the space shuttle and get to whatever window it was. I think it was an overhead one on the flight deck for me and just be in awe. First of all, I remember floating there and thinking, oh my gosh, I'm here,

I'm alive. This is a good thing. And then, wow, I should look out the window. And looking out the window, it's just so overwhelmingly, impressively beautiful, glowing, all those colors we know Earth to be, all those things. I didn't activate my brain cell to say, ooh, I should remember where I'm looking at when I've looked out the window the first time. I know there was water. I know there was a little bit of land. There were clouds. But it was just – You're looking at all of it, aren't you? I think you're looking at, well, you know, kind of a horizon to horizon view. And I think just

being overwhelmed by the presence of it, like, oh my gosh, we live on a planet kind of thing when you're looking out the window. I mean, we know that when we're in kindergarten. And you're right, Carolyn, we don't have to go to space to know that kind of thing. And we can see it in other ways. But I don't know, there's just something really special about it coming in through your eyes, getting into your heart and your mind and appreciating that way. And then every single time afterwards. And I'll tell you, I'm equally as impressed, you know, Cassini, Carolyn, with that picture, you know, those images we get back and you're learning all about Saturn and those rings. And then the one that I, at least for me, is the most impressive, that little dot of light below those rings where we make that connection to ourself again. And it's so important. I got goosebumps. I get about thinking about that all the time. Well, Carolyn, I wanted to ask you about that because you've been involved in,

I think, two of the most iconic images of all time, certainly from the Voyager mission. There's a very famous pale blue dot image, the Earth from four billion miles away. Or beyond the orbit of Neptune. Yeah. And then the Cassini image that Nicole referred to. And it is interesting to me that of all those beautiful images of Saturn and its rings, magnificent images, the one that really does elicit the most powerful emotional reaction is probably the least spectacular one in a sense, because it's that point of light. When I first was showing that to audiences as I was going around giving lectures, I showed the pale blue dot because that was the initial look of Earth from space from afar. It never failed to bring gasps.

I was involved in that with Carl Sagan, and his idea was basically to just take the picture, the pictures that were taken from the Apollo mission of the Earth from space, and just extend that concept and show people what it looked like from the outer solar system. And like you said, it was a ragged picture. It really was, but that wasn't, it was a ragged picture. It really was. But that wasn't the most significant thing about that picture.

It was what Carl Sagan had to say about it and the way that he romanced it and turned it into an allegory on the human condition that ever since made that phrase pale blue dot. It's become a meme. It's a meme in our culture. It immediately signifies a sense of brotherhood of being on this small little planet and a sense of responsibility to take care of this web of life that we are

intimately embedded in it's interesting a photographer friend of mine once described carolyn as the greatest photographer ever because she was involved in the pale blue dot image and then that beautiful image, The Day the Earth Smiled. Yeah, pale blue dot. It's a beautiful image of the Earth taken on Valentine's Day 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft that we're still in touch with now. Launched in 1977. It's a remarkable piece of engineering. And that picture is made unimaginably more powerful by carl sagan's reflections on the image that's here that's us on it everyone you know everyone who are matt it's just and it's such an interesting thing to me that that was an image he had to really argue for that photograph being taken in the same way that the image earth rise apollo 8 you know that wasn't on the itinerary

that kind of almost happened by accident where you know they're staring out the window and they suddenly see the earth and go that's where we live we better get a photo you know it's an interesting thing that some of the most important pictures from astronomy that have really helped us understand our place in in the galaxy in the solar system or in the universe that they were not necessarily the ones that were really you know the big parts of the plan yeah absolutely they don't have a a great deal of immediate scientific value but they do of course because i would argue that science is one of the primary ways that we attempt to understand our place in the universe no i think that's true so let's go back to another apollo astronaut, Apollo 16's Charlie Duke. Even for the first space travellers to the moon,

it wasn't kind of all work and no play. In fact, 1972 was the year of the Munich Olympics. So Charlie and his fellow mission astronauts thought they'd do their own version on the moon. It didn't go that well. We had decided that at the end of every Apollo flight, somebody did something unique. Apollo 14, Alan Shepard hit a golf ball. And on Apollo 15, there was a hammer feather trick. Drop a hammer, drop a feather, and they both hit the moon at the same time. So Newton's gravitational laws work. And so we were going to do the moon Olympics because it was the Olympics in Munich that year. So we were going to do the high jump. We planned high jump and then a broad jump. But we were running behind schedule

and Houston was pushing us. And so I said, get ready to get back inside, guys. And John said, well, we were going to do the Moon Olympics, and he starts to bounce. And so I started bouncing. And so I jumped, and I was probably three or four feet over a meter off the moon. But when I jumped, I straightened up, and my center of gravity went backwards, and over I went backwards. and my center of gravity went backwards, and over I went backwards. And that was really scary because the backpack is not designed for an impact onto the moon and has all your electrical systems and all of your oxygen and regulators, and if it breaks, you're dead. So I started scrambling to try to break my fall, which I was able to do,

and it bounced onto my back, and my heart was just pounding. And John came over and looked down and said, you okay? And I said, I think so. Help me up. So he helped me up, and my heart was just pounding. And I checked everything out, and I was okay. I'd survived this high jump record. And then I looked up, and the TV camera was pointing out right at me and I

my wife Dottie was in mission control and she said mission control was really really upset. Now today the International Space Station is in contact with the Earth throughout the day but when Helen Sharman went into space on Mir, there were periods of true astronomical isolation. When I was in space, it was at a time when we could only talk to mission control, talk to the ground at all, really, when we were over the Soviet Union. And most of that was really over Russia, because then when we were around the other side of the Earth, so from two thirds of the orbit, we were out of contact with mission control. Now, we had an amateur radio station. So if somebody in the middle of the Australian outback just

happened to be listening in, then we might have a bit of a chat with them. But basically, the only connection we had formally with the ground was about a third of the orbit, 30 minutes or so over the old Soviet Union. And actually, the other side then, it was peaceful because we didn't have mission controls that were yabbering on us and saying, you know, do this, do the other, don't forget this, or repeat that one, by the way, you know. It was peaceful.

We could get on with it. But we got on with it, I suppose, knowing that within 60 minutes or so, we'd be back around with another contact. Let's end with the keenest space explorer we know again. Here is Brian Blessed. Oh, actually, I managed to do it there without doing the Brian Blessed thing. Oh, that's good.

Reading a poem in memory of Patrick Moore. I could not sleep for thinking of the sky, the unending sky, with all its million suns, which turn their planets everlastingly in nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs. If I could sail that nothing, I should pass through silence and emptiness

with dark stars passing and then in the darkness see a point of gloss burn to a glow and glare and keep amassing and rage into a sun with wandering planets

and drop behind and then as I proceed, see its last light on its last moon's granite turn to a night that would be dark indeed. Night where I might travel a million years in nothing, not even death, not even tears. There you are, Patrick. Remember, the Infinite Monkey Cage episodes we took all of these clips from are available on BBC Sounds and the Infinite Monkey Cage back catalogue. Next week

we'll be hearing about how you put the science into science fiction with author Alan Moore and Ross Noble discovers that there are actually three types of wormhole in the Infinite Monkey's Guide to the Moons. And before you go I'd just like to recommend another BBC podcast that I think you'll enjoy. What could be more modern than a net zero travel show? A show about going places that never goes anywhere. Welcome then to Your Place or Mine on BBC Radio 4. I'm Sean Keaveney and I love travelling almost as much as I love

staying at home and watching music documentaries. I figure Massachusetts, you know, for somebody like you who doesn't particularly enjoy broadening their horizons, it would be sort of a baby step, because Massachusetts is kind of the heart of New England. So, you know, it wouldn't be too shocking for you. Each week, another fantastic and intrepid guest attempts to lull me

out of my postcode with persuasion alone. Eat the insects too. I mean, that's what they do a lot in Oaxaca. They normally roast them and then you can scatter them on your guacamole. There's something deliciously kind of earthy and umami about insects. Anybody who's been on the back of my Uncle Paul's motorbike's eaten

a lot of insects. Yeah, there you are. Because he goes very fast. Your place or mine. With me, Sean Keaveney. Listen and subscribe on BBC Sounds.