From the Earth to the Moon - with Libby Jackson

[00:00:00] We are professionals, you do realise that. But we've also had donuts. This is even worse than normal. I know. We had donuts. If you had the donuts. We had donuts so we're kind of like... They're amazing. They are good local donuts. A mindless wittering production.

[00:00:25] Running up and action. All I knew was I wanted to try and understand the way the world works, the natural world. I'm Laura Pipps. Science is the storytelling of our time. So me storytelling has always been the way to leave someone.

[00:00:51] Hello and welcome to Who Moved the Tortoise, a podcast about science and wildlife filmmaking. I'm Kate Dooley. And I'm Alex Hemingway. For our final episode of our first series, we're talking to head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency, Libby Jackson.

[00:01:07] After graduating with a degree in physics from Imperial College and a master's degree in aeronautics and space engineering from Cranfield, Libby worked in satellite operations for Airbus Defence and Space and as flight director for the Columbus module, Europe's lab on the International Space Station.

[00:01:25] As the UK Space Agency's head of space exploration, she's responsible for delivering the UK's activities in both human and robotic missions that explore low Earth orbit, the moon and Mars. She's one of Britain's leading experts in human spaceflight and was awarded an OBE in the 2012 World Space Agency.

[00:01:46] She's experienced the vomit comet and pulled multiple Gs in a centrifuge without throwing up all in the name of science. Libby's choice for the film or TV show that inspired her is Spider, the fifth episode of the 1998 miniseries from the Earth to the Moon.

[00:02:06] We choose to go to the moon easy, but be... How difficult was it to choose the thing that inspired you? Not at all. It was instant. As soon as the brief came in, what was it? And I can't remember how you phrased it.

[00:02:56] Possibly it's because it was steering in the TV direction, I can't remember, but from the Earth to the Moon was the TV thing that stuck with me.

[00:03:05] And it was been so lovely to dig out the DVDs and blow the dust off the DVD player and get to watch it again, actually. And I had forgotten just how good it was. And it's amazing how well it stood to the test of time.

[00:03:18] You go, wow, I was made back in 1998 or something like that. Oh my word, like 25 years old. And I was watching it going, wow, this is good. This is why it was good.

[00:03:30] This is why it inspired me. It was great. And then you said I had to pick a particular episode and instantly it was Spider. It is the one, we'll talk about why, but it just... Still to this day you ask me. It's just so easy.

[00:03:45] I know why it stuck with me, but it has. Can you remember when you would have first seen this? We always do a little bit of digging and we always try and work out when it was first broadcast or that kind of thing.

[00:03:55] And what I haven't been able to work out, because I've seen and loved this series as well, but I haven't been able to work out if it was ever even broadcast on UK television.

[00:04:04] It's an American show. It's an HBO show that launched in April 1998. Do you have any sense of where you would have seen it for the first time?

[00:04:12] I saw it on TV. I know I saw it on TV. So I know that Apollo 13 came out. That was a big Tom Hanks thing. Houston, we have a problem. We have a main bus B undervolt. We've got a lot of thruster activity here for Houston.

[00:04:28] It just went offline. Oh, there's another master alarm, Houston. I'm checking a quad. Christ, that was no repress about it. Maybe two quads. We've got a computer restart. I'm going to reconfigure the RCS. We've got a police lie. We've got multiple...

[00:04:40] To this day I have never seen it in a cinema and side note if anyone can arrange that for me and make that happen. It's amazing. From the Earth to the Moon, I think it was broadcast on Channel 4.

[00:04:52] Might not have been but I remember somebody must have dug it out of the TV listings and said, Libby, you've got to watch this. And of course I did. And I have a feeling I might even have tried to record it on VHS.

[00:05:05] But I loved it so much what of course the listeners can't see is I have sitting here in front of me two copies are from the Earth to the Moon. The beautiful shiny silver one. This is the US version.

[00:05:15] I bought that after it had been shown because I thought was so great. And I think I even bought myself a DVD player that would play US DVDs just so I could watch it.

[00:05:24] And so I then must have watched it on DVD a bit but mostly, yeah, I swear it was on Channel 4 and it was just captivated me. So if we assume that it was on Channel 4 roughly the same time, 98 maybe early 99. What were you doing then?

[00:05:40] Where were you at in your life at that point? I was at a sixth form doing my A levels thinking about what might come next, which was going to be a physics degree. And I'm pretty sure it got shown while I was still at home.

[00:05:56] I don't think I'd gone off to university. I really think it got it came out and it was broadcast that summer while I was doing my A levels.

[00:06:03] And I just that was the point at which a love space found space fascinating devoured the book that is also sitting here on the table, which the series was based on, which had all inspired me to go off to write to Nat.

[00:06:17] And then they said yes and then I got to spend two weeks seeing it. But I had understood at that point that space was a world that I was fascinated by and that there were really, really amazing jobs in it.

[00:06:31] But I still hadn't joined all the dots to work out that it was going to be possible for me to work in the sector as a Brit, particularly in human spaceflight growing up in 1998. Helen Sharman had flown in the early 90s.

[00:06:45] The UK government had looked at that went great. We're not going to fund human spaceflight. It was a time when it was really clear that the UK had actively decided not to participate in human spaceflight. So that was just it with my crazy pipe dream.

[00:07:00] And I was still just enjoying space and discovering the stories and the history of it. And still to this day, I still look back at like a how on earth did humanity get from never having put anybody in space in 1960

[00:07:17] to having put people on the moon less than 10 years later in eight years. I've been working at the Space Agency for a decade and we've done an awful lot of good stuff, but we haven't gone from not doing anything to putting a human on the moon in 10 years.

[00:07:29] So it was such an amazing time and the series brought it to life. But more importantly, it brought all the different stories to life, not just the astronauts, but the engineers and the people sort of building the spacecraft, the human stories behind it.

[00:07:46] There's what there's one about the wives. There's all the decisions that got made, the politics of it. It's just a wonderful series that kind of shows you what it's like and what has to happen to get people into space.

[00:07:58] For a long time, about the only people who gave much thought to the idea of going to the moon were science fiction writers. In October 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik and everything changed. Suddenly, going to the moon was a possibility. The question was, how do you do it?

[00:08:27] And so let's just rewind. You wrote a letter to NASA. I wrote an email, me and a friend. And actually it was my friend Sally who wrote the email. But we were... I was at school, lower sixth year 12 as it is now.

[00:08:44] And school I was at, which was an all-girls school, which I always think is worth noting. We'll talk maybe more about it. You read, I watched these go, there is not a single woman in this, it's white men. Completely.

[00:08:56] And how did I feel inspired by something where you couldn't see myself as a young schoolgirl? And we had to organise work shadowing. And we had all been asked, what did we want to do? Where did we want to work?

[00:09:10] And my mad crazy dream was yes, I want to work for NASA. That's how much I was into space, how much I'd read things. And when you look back at the sequence of timing, I don't think this can have come out yet.

[00:09:23] Well it would have been about that time because I was lower sixth, I was 17 which was 98. And this came out in 98 so it all around there couldn't tell you the exact timings. And I said, yeah, I want to work for NASA one day.

[00:09:35] So why not fire off an email to NASA? Didn't ever expect an answer, right? It was just like writing off to the Premier League or to your favourite football team or something crazy. And it was at the time email was not ubiquitous.

[00:09:51] It was not even ubiquitous in offices so it would have been unusual I think for anyone really to be emailing. I was quite an early tech adopter from that point of view. But it landed on somebody's desk and it came round and the answer amazingly came back yes.

[00:10:05] And then I had to explain to my parents what I had done because it was just... Yeah you just ask, you don't ask, you don't get. And they went to their utter credit and still they...

[00:10:17] Yeah okay, we'll get you on a plane and we'll find the money to make that happen. And I went out with my friend and we spent two weeks at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston and we met everybody doing all sorts of different things.

[00:10:32] And Lynn Bakemiah if she's ever out there to say thank you to her, she was the one who coordinated all of this. But I met scientists who were working out hydroponic systems to develop food. I met radio engineers who were looking at the signals.

[00:10:49] I met Franklin Chandea as the astronaut who was working on advanced propulsion techniques. I went out to Ellison Air Force Base and saw the planes. I went to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab and where the astronauts were diving.

[00:11:03] I went in all the simulation mock-ups and then I spent a morning in mission control. And that was the point at which I went, this is it, this is where it is. And how did I know that and why was I looking forward to that?

[00:11:17] Because I'd read all the books and I imbued all these stories of just the amazing things that happened in mission control and the people who were there keeping the astronauts alive and dealing with the problems and working out what happens when things go wrong.

[00:11:31] And I sat there and I'm like, this is it, this is where it is. But I came back from that trip and I'm like, that's great but that's never going to happen.

[00:11:41] It's genuine and this is a genuine thing, my sort of life plan at that point if I was ever going to do it was I was going to have to find an American and marry them and get a green card

[00:11:52] to get the visa to go over to the states because that was where it was all happening. I was all in the states and I was not aware then of what was happening in Europe and the European Space Agency.

[00:12:04] The UK wasn't doing human space flight but we had an amazing space sector which I did know about and the satellites were there and it took years after this coming out for me to kind of just keep going through life

[00:12:17] and to keep taking those steps and I still can't ever quite believe I get to sit here today to you and go, yeah I'm head of space exploration and I've worked in mission control

[00:12:27] and there's an amazing career I've had and it just still to me shows you the seeds that everybody plants through TV, through movies, through meeting kids, through sharing stuff opening people's horizons to what is possible.

[00:12:44] You never ever know where it's going to lead and you can't ever track it back until you meet anyone and you guys, yeah it was this thing and that thing and the whole lifetime of things that leads anyone to why they're sitting there today.

[00:12:59] Four months after Sputnik, Werner von Braun briefed ahead of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. He presented the two best options for going to the moon. Well there are two methods. The first method we call direct ascent.

[00:13:12] You build an enormous rocket, put a capsule on top, boom! You go straight to the moon. The other method we call Earth orbit rendezvous. Instead of using one huge rocket, we perform several launches with somewhat smaller rockets each carrying a component of the spacecraft.

[00:13:33] We put the pieces together in orbit. You've made a couple of references to the book that is sat next to me. I made the slightly odd decision this morning despite the fact I've carried all this heavy equipment

[00:13:44] down to the train station and the train all the way here to Swindon. I took a really heavy book in my bag as well but it is for me, to me there are two books that I always go back to for this subject and this kind of era.

[00:13:57] There's Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire, but then there's Andrew Shakins, A Man on the Moon which is a chunky but very accessible complete history of, as you say, how we went from nothing to setting foot on the moon.

[00:14:11] And it's this book that directly inspired the series that we're talking about. Yeah, and I had read that book and devoured it as a teenager and it is the thing that I remember looking at. So I'm looking at it again.

[00:14:22] I really need to go and read that again. I made sure I rewatched Spider but I need to go and dig the book out and read it again and it is accessible. It just captures the stories, tells the reader what's going on

[00:14:34] and it's not just about the astronauts. It's not just about the missions. It's about everything that happened from the decisions that got made, the politics, the geopolitics, the considerations of what was going on in other countries. And I still find that story amazing.

[00:14:54] The great JFK speech about going to the moon and that decision to go to the moon got made after a single flight. Alan Shepard had been in space for all of 20 minutes or whatever it was

[00:15:09] and they had the audacity to go, right, this is what we're going to try and do. And it, to me, it's mind-boggling. It was a different time. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon.

[00:15:24] We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.

[00:15:46] I can't remember who made this quote, you may well, but one of the best descriptions I've heard of that time in the 60s was that it was like someone had taken a decade from the 21st century and just inserted it into the mid-20th century

[00:16:00] and that it was completely out of place and out of time that we managed to do all this in that period. There's a slight wistfulness I always have when I watch this kind of thing because I love it and I'm obsessed with it.

[00:16:11] It feels like we've slightly gone backwards a little bit in our ambition and our horizons and I don't know, you probably have a very different take on that given the job that you do. It is a different time and the world has changed

[00:16:24] and it was simpler back then. There was no internet. There was no social media. I think that meant that everything in its own way was simpler and slower and you made a decision and it got written down

[00:16:42] and it got sent on to somebody and it was just an absolutely different way of working but that led to a different way of thinking and an awareness of less of the world. I think today we all have a much, much, much bigger awareness

[00:16:58] of what's going on and the challenges and so there's actually more to do and the more there is to do, the harder it is to pick what is the one thing that you want to focus on. Risk appetites have changed too.

[00:17:09] You look back at the risks that all of those people took what absolutely huge and enormous, what it was like to be the first person to sit on top of an exploding bomb not knowing if you were going to be able to live and breathe in space fully

[00:17:26] and then it would happen. You can't believe how that would happen. As a society we're much more risk adverse and when something happens it's around the world instantly with 101 different opinions and so that's not good or bad. That's just how life carries on and progress carries on

[00:17:46] and there's other things we should be worrying about and there's a whole discussion we could have which would take us into a completely different place where space sits and the importance of it and all the other challenges that are going on in the world

[00:17:57] and why should we be doing it and not doing it. And I just think you look back and if you could bottle that you couldn't but it was just a unique combination of geopolitics. The only reason the US and the Soviet Union

[00:18:14] put so much money into it and it was a huge amount of money percentages of their budget, I can't remember the numbers now but they are large, was because they had a single country and there was the political will to go and show

[00:18:28] that this was the right thing to do and it was worth that money but the technology that came out of it the advances that happened let things forward. Computers shrunk from the size of a room to the size of a shoebox and space does that.

[00:18:43] In other worlds the cameras that we all have in our phones that are all strewn across the table are all direct lineage from space technology. In fact, space investments here in the UK have led to those charged couple of devices that went out into space first of all.

[00:18:57] So it was just a different time with different political priorities and different public priorities, different risk appetites, different ways of communication. It'll never happen again like that. It's amazing. We put a man on the moon as soon as possible. Just get him there.

[00:19:15] We can keep sending him supply ships until we figure a way to get him back. Well, that's... Hmm, that's... No. No, I'm sorry gentlemen. I'm sorry but there is no way on God's green earth we would ever, ever do anything like that. I'm sorry.

[00:19:41] So going back to the film itself what was it about this episode in particular that appealed to you? It's the engineering and it's the story of the problem solving. If we should explain what it is. So each episode, there are 12 of them in the series

[00:19:55] most of them focus on a single Apollo flight. The first one in an hour whistles tops you through from, yeah, Yuri Gagarin through to... And the decision can we do this and get us ready and it takes you to just before the end of the Gemini flights

[00:20:10] and getting ready for the Apollo program. And then each episode focuses on a single Apollo mission and Spider tells the story of the engineering team particularly Tom Kelly who were at Grumman who were the company who were awarded the contract to build the lunar module

[00:20:32] and how they over seven years went again from a blank piece of paper to can you just design something that had never been designed before to land in two people on the moon and in an hour distills the trade-offs and the design process

[00:20:53] and the efforts of all the people into it. And it was of course, it was the lunar module then that should have flown on Apollo 8 but it wasn't ready which was what for anyone who follows knows the story of Apollo

[00:21:07] it was that was what led in the end to Apollo 8 Frank Gorman's crew being sent on the most amazing mission to fly around the moon for the first time and the Earthrise photos and again the audacity of that

[00:21:21] the very, very first time you put humans on top of the Saturn 5 rocket you don't just send it into space and check it well it's now you point them straight at the moon and you send it round there and that mission today

[00:21:33] I still go would you be brave enough to do that again we digress. So the lunar module was destined for Apollo 8 but it wasn't ready so it flew on Apollo 9 the Apollo 9 crew, Commander Jim McDivitt Dave Scott who would go on to walk on the moon Rusty Schweikart

[00:21:49] they had trained and worked with the lunar modules they were supposed to fly Apollo 8 it wasn't going to be ready the spider tells you the story of all the challenges and they're really trying so hard and you can see the pressure they're under

[00:22:04] and there's this one scene where Tom Kelly is the manager of this kind of looks around goes he's just told them we're going to be ready and he looks to his team and he says are we ready? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and one guy has the courage

[00:22:17] and what is needed to say no I'm sorry we can't do this we're not, we're trying our best but it can't be done and then the rest of the team is like actually I could use a few more weeks and months. Sorry Tom

[00:22:34] the cockpit's going to take another three weeks we could use a few weeks ourselves thank you You know Tom, I hear Bolivia it's really nice this time of year You know this is so bad I can't even joke about it So I love this episode

[00:23:05] because it shows you what it takes to get a spacecraft into space to solve the problems that no one's ever solved before and you see the passion and the commitment of people to making this thing happen and right at the end of it Tom Kelly, the manager

[00:23:25] is saying goodbye to this spacecraft that he has poured his heart and his soul and his life into over seven years and they do, these spacecraft do become real things and they do carry the souls and the thoughts and the hopes

[00:23:43] and the hard work, not just of the astronauts who sit in them but all the people who were involved in the programs I suppose looking back it was that that sense of understanding that and capturing that that was what excited me

[00:23:57] and what led me to want to be a part and to have that feeling to be a part of those teams who were putting these amazing things in space that would go on to do things that have never been done before and it really is

[00:24:11] I have felt that I have launched my own spacecraft I've been part of missions I'm now setting up missions for the future and my team are doing so much more to try and settle all of that and it is still that feeling of everybody coming together

[00:24:25] to do something that's just never been done before it's a feeling that doesn't go away and it's why the space actress is so much fun and Spider, it just encapsulates all of that in a little one hour bit of TV

[00:24:37] I can see why it was so inspiring from you I studied engineering at university did maths and physics at school and always loved it but I'm very practical and so this shows and not many things do but this episode really shows showcases engineers as heroes

[00:24:54] so many lovely tricks they did to do that they give them these really lovely hero shots and kind of slow mo's on them when they kind of get things right it just celebrates them in a way and makes them human and makes them interesting

[00:25:09] in a way that so many other shows don't and so it's such a joy to see something that focuses on them and what they do and why it's so hard and really trying to show you why what they did was so difficult they set it up so well

[00:25:21] they explain it really well you have the Tom Kelly characters voiceover he narrates the episode you don't actually know who he is till 11 minutes into the show That's true, yeah so he's actually telling you and explaining like this is the problem and then the characters in the drama

[00:25:38] take it away and you see oh yeah this is a real problem and they use so much humour and warmth it's like big bang theory how you meet these characters who are so fun and you get who they are really quickly and you're with them on the journey

[00:25:52] Yeah, one of my favourite bits of so much fun rewatching it when the team to the biggest challenge of getting anything into space is always mass the heavier something is the bigger rocket you need and that means more fuel and that means more money so everything in space

[00:26:10] is about trying to make everything even today small and as light as possible and they wound up with this lunar module that is the only spacecraft ever built and designed to be built to only operate in space and like they're going through the different trade-offs

[00:26:24] and they're trying to save weight here there and they go right here we don't need five legs four is gonna be enough and then they're looking at these windows and I love this scene they say, yeah well the astronauts are gonna eat windows but they're pretty heavy

[00:26:37] they go how heavy? oh a few grams yeah, no, not those windows, the actual ones so they say we don't need windows we don't need windows so big they've found a different way to solve the problem and Tom Kelly the manager is like yeah, I don't see it

[00:26:49] and they go and let him see it and they build this whole mock-up What the heck is that? Well we did instead of sleep Oh John, I can certainly see it now and that's how engineering works I didn't know at school that engineering and problem solving

[00:27:26] was the thing that what it was I didn't understand that name but it was what unpicked for me the bit of the whole space industry that I find the most interesting and exciting and put it there on the big screen and you could show it

[00:27:39] and it's about to be there you can see it and go I can do that one day and the whole series is so lovely the way it focuses on all the different aspects of it and I haven't had time yet to watch all 12 episodes

[00:27:51] but I'm going to again It's worth noting that I mean this is the 13th episode of the podcast that we've made it's the last episode of what we're calling our first series before we have a little break you're the first guest who has chosen something

[00:28:06] that isn't a pure documentary there is a documentary style throughout from the Earth to the Moon but it is dramatised and my question is, I guest to both of you really which is, is there something about these stories and the stories of engineering and space engineering in particular

[00:28:21] that you think lend themselves to a dramatic retelling rather than just pure documentary? Yes, space doesn't need a story space is always dramatic you don't need to write the script it's fantastic to tell it but I think the thing about this series that I liked and still like

[00:28:41] is that it is realistic and it's true and it's dramatised things but it hasn't taken a wild flight of fancy everything in this everything in that book has come from true stories that people have said and explained there's all sorts of stuff out there

[00:28:55] where you can take space and you can turn it into sci-fi and people are amazed but I am not a sci-fi fan and they still go what do you mean you work in the space sector and you should be a sci-fi fan and for some people

[00:29:08] I don't know, all respect to it sci-fi is amazing and it does brilliant things it imagines the future in ways that can't yet have been conceived and that sends people off into creative journeys that then go and turn sci-fi into reality but just for me

[00:29:22] I am someone who likes to sort of be grounded in the reality of the truth of what I know it is and I think I like this series because it is telling the true stories it lends itself because to take that engineering journey

[00:29:35] if it was a true documentary no, it would go on for three hours you can't, you can't condense it all it's something that is watchable and accessible it works well in that dramatised style that said there are some beautiful, beautiful documentaries that do tell these stories

[00:29:50] and if you, any engineering project go follow the team who do it from beginning to end and you will end up with the most wonderful story that you can be brought to life If you watch this show within the first two minutes

[00:30:03] because the opening titles are two minutes long Yes, I made a note of that they're really long If you watch the opening two minutes that answers your question because the music is so epic and dramatic the shots are a mix of the real

[00:30:17] and whatever CGI they used in the show of people going into space and being in space The American flag is waving there is so much nostalgia around this moment in time that you can totally make both drama and documentary

[00:30:34] but it's so easy to get wrapped up in the drama and let that take you into the moment It's life and death it's just so amazing that it's so easy to do it in a drama and you can with drama shortcut maybe some things

[00:30:48] that you might not be able to so easily do in documentary There are lots of little tricks you can do using character actors and kind of little things to kind of get you into a character very quickly so you understand who they are what their role is

[00:31:01] You can use humour you can set it all up and write the script so it perfectly does it which is what a drama script does it tells you the story with as little information as possible which in documentary would take a lot more work to try and do

[00:31:15] but because it's from the team that made Apollo 13 it's such a natural extension that when you watch it it doesn't really feel like it's aged it feels big it feels Hollywood but also they're telling the stories of the people who wouldn't usually get their stories told

[00:31:31] and that's what's so fascinating about it and it's a true story and it does I noticed it there are expositions they can use they've got some meetings where people are setting out the problems which you wouldn't have in documentary but it works really beautifully in their set ups

[00:31:48] I'd say it tells the story so, so well I was amazed at how well it has aged other than perhaps the diversity of the cast but that was the true story it was who was there subsequently there are female voices in there some of my other projects

[00:32:06] they're all about trying to uncover those and remind people that there were women there and the one episode I think that's all about the Wives Club, the first Wives Club but it has, they were they were the stories of the women who were keeping these households together

[00:32:21] while all these men and they were mostly men were working really really long hours and to achieve this goals that a president had set if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated would there have been the drive to achieve this by the end of the decade different versions of history

[00:32:39] what would have happened it was really hard for Congress to cut the money because the guy who'd set this amazing goal to be the Soviet Union had been assassinated it was the politics, the history it was his legacy then I therefore ask the Congress

[00:32:54] above and beyond the increases I have earlier requested for space activities to provide the funds which are needed to meet the following national goals first, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon

[00:33:13] and returning him safely to the earth no single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration of space and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish Tom Kelly has written a book

[00:33:31] and if anyone has not read Tom Kelly's book and goes and watches Spider from this it's worth a read as well it's Tom Kelly's view of it and it's almost Spider written down tells you all of the amazing stories about how they engineered this truly amazing spacecraft

[00:33:47] what's amazing is you don't know much about him his family, you see the engineers and you have little character portraits of them and Tom Kelly's character portrait is the great escape he's the guy throwing the ball against the wall you know

[00:34:03] and literally the music is playing as well so it hits you in the face you know this character, you know he's got a ridiculously impossible mission and you know he solves it but you're interested in the how aren't you? and he's hitting the ball against the wall

[00:34:19] and that theme comes back again and again and even at the end you know if you're going to do an EVA to test some things so that then they can test the vehicle he's just sick, he's going to throw up everywhere they can't send him out

[00:34:31] and Tom's there with the ball squishing it going oh my god we're going to fail you know if you know anything about the Apollo missions you kind of know it's going to be okay right but you still see it in your rhythm

[00:34:41] you're like oh no but there's that one character portrait of them that they use so well again and again but you go with it don't you and you get it but you don't know anything about him I wonder in the book if you find out a bit more

[00:34:51] him at all as a person or if it's he's just written it about the mission from memory there's a little bit but it is still about the engineering and the team and the story of how they made it and perhaps sweeping generalization that might be true

[00:35:07] engineers have a certain mindset what drives people to be engineers and engineering and it's about the problem in front of them and what we're doing comes across perhaps in the writing and the views of it the music I've forgotten how beautiful it was it is so lovely

[00:35:25] they've set the whole thing up so well with all the different imagery that's the other thing about spider and they did drop the line in there somewhere they filmed spider so a lot of the imagery in this is the real imagery of the real test

[00:35:41] and the real thing being built and it's done so well how they then swap between a real image and a real footage and then suddenly you brought the actor in to look like it's grainy like that original footage as well it's done very well

[00:35:55] but that with the score it was just really wonderfully set and it's why space is so fun and so beautiful and they had the music from the time as well though like you've kind of got a double start to the film in a way

[00:36:09] you've got this two minute epic title sequence which doesn't have any of the actors in which I noticed when I watched it I wonder why and then you cut to Tom Hanks in a big sculpture walking around hand in pocket giving you a bit of a story

[00:36:25] to start you off that perhaps is a little bit unexpected and in this episode it's all about the Sistine Chapel and the painting of the ceiling and it's this impossible task and a man who was a sculptor who was now having to paint something

[00:36:37] Before painting the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo had to first construct a massive scaffolding to allow him access to the ceiling without interfering with the chapel's daily use he had to develop special wax models so he could study the lighting effects to be duplicated in the frescoes

[00:36:53] and come up with a special slow drying plaster he suffered constant deadline pressure from frustrated church officials and the pope who just wanted the ceiling finished the work itself was uncomfortable and unending with wet paint and plaster dripping in the face of the man

[00:37:09] who was not after all a painter but a sculptor such challenges arise in all the great works of human imagination be they the creation of our world rendered upon the ceiling of a church or the view of our world evident by making the voyage from the earth

[00:37:27] to the moon and then you cut to 60s amazing fun music and comics, kind of sci-fi comics and these engineers going well this is the problem how are we going to solve it oh here's a crazy idea now we can possibly do that

[00:37:41] you've got these kind of two openings but the 60s music make it fun and you're setting up the problem so that the audience gets that this is an impossible task because you have to understand that this is impossible otherwise you don't get

[00:37:55] the journey do you and the lengths that these people go to four three two one zero all engine do you have a favorite Apollo mission that's like picking a favorite child now because there's the obvious ones right 11 the first landing 13 the most successful failure

[00:38:31] of all time and again the problem solving and the efforts that went into that to bring it home scripts you can't write you couldn't make it up amazing but then there's was scientific bits and pieces you know there's different moments in different missions as the geology got better

[00:38:47] they finally sent Jack Schmidt on a geologist to the moon on Apollo 17 and at one point they were trying to find a certain type of rock and there was just their sitting waiting for them to come along each one built and built and built

[00:39:01] and you even go backwards Apollo 10 the people flew all the way to the moon and never quite got there and that kind of thing all the way to the moon and never quite got there and that gets forgotten about nine the mission

[00:39:11] we're talking about that demonstrated the LEM eight that went round there seven which was the you know return the very first Apollo mission after the tragic tragic Apollo on fire there's a story in every single one I think it's like a book is so good

[00:39:27] and Apollo is so good there's so much to learn and unpick but I get excited always about the history of space exploration through its whole part Apollo is one chapter but you go back and you you look at just learning to put rockets into space Gemini

[00:39:45] in the States Yuri Gagarin the early flights in Soviet Union that was great then you have to solve all the problems in that everybody was doing to learn how to spacewalk well then we learned how to live and work in space and then you've got the

[00:39:59] International Space Station chapter and now we're heading back to the moon and space has always got so many stories the engineers behind it the astronauts who are there and putting humans into space challenges it's all in ways that we just we don't know how we're going to solve

[00:40:17] it I think back to why I like spider is it's a challenge and you solve it and you find out things but there will be stories that will go along we'll discover things along the way we will build things that will help everybody back on earth because when

[00:40:29] you challenge yourself you discover things and everything we do sending stuff into space it's all about helping people back on earth we are not a long way away from going back to the moon with Artemis I assume it goes without saying that you're excited

[00:40:43] about that I wondered if you could give us a sense of how significant it is that after all this time that we are finally on the verge of going back to the moon I don't think I yet understand the significance of it and I certainly think

[00:41:01] that the general public A have no idea it's coming and B are not ready for what they will see and understand I was born in 1981 easy to work out from the discussions we had and when I was growing up and I was reading Man on the Moon

[00:41:19] watching from the earth to the moon it felt like ancient history I was born nine years after the last flight now as a middle aged 40 something year old it's really easy to put nine years into context and go well that was last year

[00:41:33] I've been working with the space agency for longer but in the 80s the 70s to me as a child felt like ancient history and I have spent my whole life my whole career just knowing this is an amazing thing that happened and I didn't live through it

[00:41:49] and those stories are now happening and being told again and you can follow them actually right you can go and get on social media and follow the trials and tribulations and anyone who's been following the trials and tribulations of the Boeing Starliner flight which is still going on

[00:42:07] there's a whole documentary there and the effort that I see and I know some of the people who are working on it to get that into space to get that vehicle flying it's the same story all over again so these stories are happening now but when we see

[00:42:23] Artemis 2 which is going to be the repeat of Apollo 8 and it's going to fly the Artemis 2 crew around the moon and we have humans who are seeing the moon up close and then transmitting that in live HD to everybody's handset in the palm of their hands I can't

[00:42:47] comprehend what that's going to be like there are people who did live through it and if you want to remember the moon landings you're getting on into your 70s it's my dad I've got a wonderful photo of him and his sister and his brothers

[00:43:03] all up at 5 o'clock in the morning all in their pajamas watching the moon landing and they were tiny, they were children and it will be significant it's a lot of money and there's an awful lot of questions that people are asking is this the right thing to do

[00:43:19] but decisions have been made it is happening, it is coming we will see astronauts walk on the moon probably by the end of this decade and I can't wait I don't know what it's going to be like, I can't wait to find out Where do you think

[00:43:39] you'll be when you see that person step off their lander Knowing my life these days I've been at TV studio somewhere who knows Where would you like to be? I'd love to be in mission control any time I step into mission control

[00:43:59] it's still like home, I love mission control there's a certain feeling certain peacefulness and a certain intensity with everybody just calm monitoring what's going on even when things go wrong you just calm, you get through it one step at a time

[00:44:17] you've got your data, you've got your information your problem solving to be in mission control that would be amazing that would be a very very special place to be I'll probably be sitting in my pyjamas with some makeup on doing a live zoom

[00:44:33] to camera or something from my home office don't I modern day who knows who knows but I'm looking forward to that all the missions that are coming up there's so many exciting things there's always exciting stuff happening in space the UK has got three new astronauts

[00:44:51] amazing, trying to get them to mission sorted out so we'll see those happen but it's not just about the astronauts we've got exciting missions coming up we've got ESA's juice mission which is going to study the IT means swinging by earth next week or something like that

[00:45:07] to say hi on its way back out to Jupiter what JWST is doing the technology that's being developed to allow us all to potentially get power from space to look after our orbits better which is really really important satellites getting smaller and smaller you can get internet

[00:45:25] wherever you like now in the world thanks to all of these satellite networks but that's causing new problems in space there's so so many exciting things going on and that's back to why I love human spaceflight things everybody's imagination and it lifts the lid

[00:45:41] on what goes on in this amazing sector that we all need and we all rely on every single day I don't know I think each limb does have a soul it's the soul of all the people who built her designed her first dreamdiver what number is this one

[00:46:01] this one is limb 5 thank you for inviting us here today you're welcome Mr. Hubbell you guys might not be anybody here today someone would have thought maybe and this is the actual machine that's going to land on the moon yep what are they calling this one this one

[00:46:24] this one is the eagle so just coming back to spider maybe for one last time having had the chance to rewatch it this week and sort of sit and talk about it and reminisce that film and that series mean to you the word that comes to mind

[00:46:51] which is not what it means to me but what it is is it's timeless it was amazing to pick it up and to watch it and to reflect that it's 25 years old and it does not look it the production quality, the CGI

[00:47:07] blind me I was half expecting to watch this and go oh this looks really old and it doesn't and therefore as a record of that Apollo time it's been done so well and it stood the test of time

[00:47:25] and so to go back to it and to see it again was amazing and we can manage to get a little renaissance going on and everyone can go watch it and shoot the top of the touch great it is brilliant what does it mean to me

[00:47:39] I know it's just really special to me it's just a piece of wonderful, wonderful I think everyone would call it it was television but it's art that brings to life I know what it feels like to work in the space sector

[00:47:55] and it's been really lovely to watch back and it goes that was the feeling that inspired me and to sort of see that 20 or something odd years later it's real right and it's still what keeps me going and still why I think this is a

[00:48:11] fantastic place to work thank you so much Libby that's been a wonderful discussion we've really enjoyed it I think Alex has really really enjoyed it I love all this stuff I've had far too little chance to actually work on films about this subject but

[00:48:29] yeah, this has just been a joy thank you for making me watch it again great invitation blowing the dust off DVDs and here's the reason I kept the DVD fire I cannot wait to go and finish rewatching the whole series that music

[00:48:45] as soon as it started playing it was like it took me right back there weird how stuff you haven't watched for 20 years is still in your memory