86. Är vi tillbaka på månen än? - Artemis II, livsuppehållande system och återvinning i rymden! | Har vi åkt till Mars än?

Description

Artemisprogrammet är igång,
Artemis II närmar sig, och både NASA, ESA, Kina och privata aktörer som SpaceX satsar stort. Den här gången handlar det inte bara om att sätta en flagga – utan om att stanna.

I det här avsnittet pratar vi med astronauten Christer Fuglesang om de konkreta planerna för att återvända till månen, varför fokus delvis har skiftat från Mars till månen, och vad Artemis II faktiskt innebär.

Vi träffar också Shorena Tsindeliani, grundare av TITA Global Space Academy, som utbildar framtidens experter inom livsuppehållande system – allt som krävs för att människor ska kunna överleva på månens yta.

Och så fördjupar vi oss i Europas långsiktiga arbete med slutna kretsloppssystem tillsammans med Christophe Lasseur, tidigare ESA, och projektet MELiSSA – där avfall kan bli till syre, vatten och mat.

Så – är vi tillbaka på månen än?

Har vi åkt till Mars än? är en populärvetenskaplig podd om rymden, framtiden och människans plats i universum. Med nyfikenhet och humor tar den sig an stora frågor: Hur långt har vi kommit i rymdforskningen? Vad krävs för att åka till Mars? Och varför är vi så fascinerade av den röda planeten? Programledarna intervjuar forskare, ingenjörer och astronauter, och förklarar allt från livets uppkomst till raketmotorer – begripligt och engagerande för alla som någon gång tittat upp mot himlen och undrat.

Serien berättar inte bara om rymden – den använder rymden för att förstå vad det innebär att vara människa.

Förutom ämnen som mörk materia, galaxer, ljusets hastighet, satelliter och odling av mat i rymden så har vi i tidigare avsnitt följt astronauten Marcus Wandts resa mot rymden och hans förberedelser inför uppdraget till ISS – från träning i Sverige och runtom i världen till hur det känns att stå på startplattan. Har vi åkt till Mars än? finns också som en juniorserie för mellanstadiet där barnens egna frågor står i centrum: Hur bygger man en bas på Mars? Vad döljer sig i ett svart hål? Och vad är solen gjord av? Serien har 20 avsnitt med tillhörande lärarhandledningar som gör vetenskapen tillgänglig och rolig.

Har vi åkt till Mars än? görs på Beppo av Rundfunk Media i samarbete med Saab.

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Transcription

Marcus Pettersson
Susanna, we've been asking for like seven years now, we've been going to Mars. How's it going? Well,
Susanna Lewenhaupt
haven't you heard? Now it's the moon that counts. No,
Marcus Pettersson
here you are.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
The moon, then. Our closest neighbor in space. Where we actually landed people already in 1969.
Marcus Pettersson
Yes, a total of 12 people went to the moon's surface between 1969 and 1972. And then it seemed like we completely lost interest and stopped going there.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
But now, about 10 years ago, there are plans to put people back on the moon again through the Artemis program. And now it's different. Now we're not just talking about going there and putting up a flag. No.
Marcus Pettersson
Now we're talking about stopping, building, living and using the moon as a springboard further out in the solar system. The Artemis program is in full swing with new rockets, new capsules, new landers and new ambitions.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So even if the coming Artemis 2 will not land on the moon but just do a flyby, it is the closest we have come to the moon with people for a long time. So exciting My name is Susanna Lewenhaupt.
Marcus Pettersson
My name is Marcus Pettersson.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And you're listening to Harvi Åk till Mars 1.
Marcus Pettersson
We're standing right in front of Artemis 2, which, according to plan, will fly around the moon now in just a few weeks. We'll see exactly when it will be. The launch was set in February from the beginning. men flyttades på grund av tekniska problem. Så nu är siktet inställt på mars istället. Ja, månaden alltså.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Ja, och när väl Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cook och Jeremy Hansen sätter sig i raketen och åker, så blir det alltså den första bemannade månfärden på över 50 år. Så även om de inte ska landa så är det här stort.
Marcus Pettersson
Så hur ser då planerna för månen ut framöver? When does the first landing of people on the Moon happen? And what does the Moon program mean for our ambitions to reach Mars? Yes, the planet, that is.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Christer Fuglesang, astronaut, professor of spaceflight at KTH and space advisor at SAV. Let's start like this.
Christer Fuglesang
Artemis is NASA's, let's say, current Moon program. It's actually the case that in Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo's sister. One of the stated goals is that Artemis will be the first woman and the first non-white person on the planet. It's an international program, which is not Apollo. So that's very interesting. But it's Apollo plus plus, one could say.
Marcus Pettersson
And the reason we're talking about this now is because a few weeks ago... After a few weeks Artemis 2 will be sent away.
Christer Fuglesang
What is that? Artemis 2 is Apollo 8, the first manned space ship after Apollo that will travel around the Moon. They will not land on the Moon, they will not even go into the runway on the Moon. But they travel around the Moon and come back. The goal with this flight is to prove that all technical things work as they should. They did an unmanned flight three years ago, but now they want to do it in a manned plane.
Marcus Pettersson
What is it that makes it so? Like you, it has been a few years and now when you are going to send it out, is there something wrong with it? A little like days before, is that something you should have known about?
Christer Fuglesang
And of course, the space color program that he sent up. I think that every other month, I rarely went a round trip when it was planned. It was a technical problem, weather problems. So this is nothing unusual. Then it gets harder when you don't do it so often. This is only the second time you send up the Jet Rocket Space Loan System SLS. And that was three years ago last. One of the problems with the Artemis program is that it has an SLS rocket as the base. It's so expensive that you can only send one every other year. That's the problem. I think the program will change. It's not sustainable with ARS.
Marcus Pettersson
Exactly, tell us more about that. We're talking SLS, flying for the second time now, and is not as reusable as Starship. How did you come to this? And how are you going to work forward? If we continue on what you were talking about.
Christer Fuglesang
How you ended up where you are is in general political. When the space ferry was unloaded, the politicians in the states that contributed to the space ferry wanted to keep their jobs. And then they put together a program that could use a lot of components in the space ferry. And it's not effective. NASA would have liked to change this, but it was politically driven. So that's why I think what's going to happen, and Trump actually announced it in the beginning when he took office, but it won't be more than at least three, maybe at least four that are with SLS. You will start using new rockets, and that's mainly and other than SpaceX Starship. That can take as much space as SLS. Or Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos company's new rocket called New Glenn, that can take about half of what SLS can take to space. That can be a good contribution to the Moon program.
Marcus Pettersson
And you, SLS Artemis 2, are going to fly around the Moon. When will we see Artemis land on the Moon? Yes.
Christer Fuglesang
That's a good question. On paper it's 27. In reality it won't be 28, maybe 29. The bottle neck here is actually not SEDS, but it's the car that you should use as a moon lander. And it's actually a Starship, a version of Starship. It has to be qualified first. First, this has to be done without a crew. Starship has not even made a totally successful flight yet. And it is enormously oversized for being a moon lander. So you will have to check up on Starship in the ground. And then you will have to check up on the ship. 8 to 12 appreciates that it is a tank vehicle. To refuel it. Starship, so that they can go on to the moon. They put up a track around the moon. And then comes this Orion, which is sent up with an SLS rocket. There with four astronauts. They dock with each other. Two astronauts go over to Starship, which then lands on the moon. And it's huge. It's actually a completely insane hulk, which has historically been like this. We can talk about that in a program. Yes,
Marcus Pettersson
exactly. But we take a little of it now. Has this been the plan all the time? That Artemis would not land with SLS but that you relied on ANGRA, for example in this case SpaceX?
Christer Fuglesang
Yes, that was the plan when we started Artemis. We have to find a moon lander. And then we went out after a while. Artemis program officially started in 2017. So we went out after a while and said we need a moon lander. Which company can do that? And we need it very early. When we started in 2017, we were supposed to land on the 24th of June. And the only proposal that came in that could possibly last for a certain amount of time was SpaceX with a user-starch. In the last 10-20 years, NASA has normally tried to develop two parallel contracts. to develop. And you would like to give a... to Blue Origin. But you didn't have money for that. But then you got a little more money. So now there are months that get money from NASA to be developed, which is built by Blue Origin. But as I said, if you had from the beginning built up a program consistently in some way, then you would have done it in a completely different way than the Apollo program was. And if you go back in time, you can say that it's Obama's fault. Because Obama forbade NASA to land on the moon. So they didn't have to do anything. Then Trump comes in and says, now we're going to the moon. Then they had to do what they had to do. But there was absolutely nothing that had to do with the moon landing. Then they went after it. And then it went wrong in a bad way, I must say. The Chinese don't do that, I can tell you. No,
Marcus Pettersson
we're going to come back to China soon. I'm going to ask a few questions about that. First, just this week Elon Musk went out with the idea that we should They're not going to end their mission on Mars, but they're going to put the power on the moon. Are SpaceX working with that only within the Artemis program, or do they have their own plans?
Christer Fuglesang
They definitely have their own plans. They haven't developed many plans yet, but this is a very solid approach. The great development in space... I would say that it will be, during the time here, soon on the Moon. To be able to develop opportunities to build things on the Moon, which you can then send up from space, that is, from Moon material. Then you will be able to save a lot of money compared to sending things up from Earth. And that's what I think Elon Musk and SpaceX see. They have recently announced that they want to have up to one million satellites around the world for data centers. If you start building a lot of them on the moon instead, it will be cheaper. We don't know yet where all the possibilities are on the moon, that's why we haven't been there yet. But we had many estimates that there will be so many opportunities there and then you want to be part of the race. The other reason is that they feel the pressure from NASA and USA. What the hell, do we have to get to the moon as soon as possible? So maybe there are extra resources to talk about it in that way.
Marcus Pettersson
For Europe's part, how does our mix look now? Because we are part of Artemis in different ways. But as we say, the conditions change a little back and forth, at least. So what are our active parts in the Artemis program now?
Christer Fuglesang
Above all, it is Europe that stands for the so-called service module to the Orion capsule, the one that comes to the astronauts who go up with SLS and then fly away to the moon. It is built by Europe. It is the development of a cargo ship that Europe built for the International Space Station. So there we are a very integrated part and a very important part of the program. This is a big difference from Apollo, which was only clean. This is Europe from the beginning. And not just Europe, it's Canada and Japan. In the heart of the program, it also goes into the construction of a space station around the Moon. And you will do that before you start building some kind of ground station on the Moon. Lunar Gateway. And there, Europe is already building some modules to that space station. But it's not as big as ISS. It will not be permanently commissioned. But it will also be an important part of the whole program. And that's Europe more or less. It's a bit sad, but there have been plans to have a moon landing and so on, but not for Venice, but for November. And it was actually quite boring that there was a very successful so-called Administrative Council for ESA in November. That's when you put the budget for ESA three years ahead. A lot of money came in, many projects got more money than you asked for. But the man who was in charge of the space program actually got less money than you know. One of the few who got it. And another little comment in the context of. A few weeks ago there was a kind of space policy conference in Brussels. And there was a big panel debate. And Esas general director, Ars Bachel, said at one point. Yes, I think it's bad and so boring. China, Eruningen. own manned space program to the moon and we have nothing in Europe, I think that's bad. So it's not ESA that's the problem, it's the politicians in Europe that don't give the right money to ESA.
Marcus Pettersson
You mention Lunar Gateway here, when will it be sent up, the first parts, do we know that?
Christer Fuglesang
The first part is going to be sent up with Artemis IV, which on paper today is perhaps to be released sometime in 2028. But it's hard to know what to believe and when it can happen. I would say it's not even impossible that you will change the order of Artemis 3 and Artemis 4. You send up the first module to Lunar Gator before you send up the first crew to land on the moon because there are no moon landers. But then you have to think that Artemis... four, five, six, I should basically send parts to the new gate even with other archers if there is not I'm a little unsure but that kind of new glen can also contribute to sending parts to this And then the Artemis aircraft partly brought stuff to Lunar Gateway, but also planned to land on the Moon and go down for a while.
Marcus Pettersson
Then the leading question, will Artemis come first with the Moon to the Moon? You have mentioned China here now, how do other countries look outside of the Artemis cooperation?
Christer Fuglesang
China is the most obvious. They have a very good track record of doing things in space when they have said that they should do it in space. They have a space station that has been permanently occupied since 1922. They have about a number of moon landers. They have taken things from Akron, the back side of the moon had not been done before. They say that they will have people on the moon by 2030. They have even shown tests on moon landers and new rockets and so on. So there is no reason to believe that they would not land on the moon with people in 2030. Maybe by 2029. If they see a chance to come before, I think they will try to take it. At the same time, it is very uncertain how the Artemis program looks. My guess is that Artemis will come before. But I think China will have a much more regular program. I haven't seen their plans, but I would believe it. Artemis program is one flight with people to the moon every other year. It's not a good program to do in that way. But if you do it then, use Starship instead, then it will be better. Probably two moon bases will be built. from the beginning of the 20-30s. China has already named its International Lunar Research Station. They have already named it International. Russia, for example, is one of the countries that has written a co-operation paper for this. There are two groups. Most people consider the best area to be in is the South. pool, among other things, because there you can get craters, chambers, you can get sunlight almost all the time and then get electric solar panels and a lot of other benefits. And then Amritsar is worried that the Chinese will be the first to take the best place. You don't have the right to own land on the moon, but you don't have the right to disturb someone else who is doing something in the room. If someone comes here and says, I'm here, don't come close because then you land and throw up a lot of smoke on us. So you can in practice usurp or take a certain area. So this is a pretty big geopolitical thing that will definitely be exciting to see how it develops.
Marcus Pettersson
Cool Soon Mojo on the moon Yes, but...
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Åka till molen är en sak, men att överleva där är en helt annan. För om vi menar allvar med att stanna längre perioder, bygga molnbaser och till och med städer, då räcker det inte med raketer och landare.
Marcus Pettersson
Nej, vi måste kunna producera luft, rena vatten, hantera avfall och kanske till och med odla vår egen mat. Allt i en miljö som verkligen inte vill ha oss där. And then we have to actually learn how to do all this.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Sharina Tzindeliani is founder of and CEO of Tita Global Space Academy, an education focus completely focused on human spaceflight and life-saving systems. That is, everything that is required to keep people alive on the moon and Mars.
Marcus Pettersson
Brilliant So, Sharina, what is Tita Global Space Academy?
Shorena Tsindeliani
TITA Global Space Academy is the company that is specifically dedicated to provide a unique niche and undervalued education in all areas related to human spaceflight. Basically anything that contributes directly to keeping people alive and in well-being in extraterrestrial environments or basically on any other planet apart from Earth is... what we are aiming to do, whether it's life support that basically contributes with water, food and air or space resource utilization, which includes the oxygen generation, water recovery from ice or propellant development locally. And you need to think not only how to send people, but also how to sustain them. Space manufacturing, one of the... Very interesting businesses and in a couple of years will be one of the main businesses probably in LEO, considering the commercial space stations coming. Space medicine, very underrated direction. I mean, Markus, you are in a good relationship with astronauts and perhaps you hear how their health, both mental and physical, is affected just by being in LEO for a couple of months. But no one knows what will happen to health if a person stays for years. And it's important to prepare, to provide the preventive medicine, to diagnose, to provide some help in emergency situations. So anything that keeps people alive and well and fit in lunar on Martian surface is what life support is and what we are intending to teach.
Marcus Pettersson
So what exactly is it that you want to do?
Shorena Tsindeliani
So basically we aim to prepare five modules that will be environmental control and life support system, in space resource dualization, autonomous navigation and AI, human factors and medicine, and manufacturing and 3D printing. Right now we started developing our first course in E-Class which is intended to launch by the end of this year and then ISRU will follow etc. We will also have four different tires. or four different levels in each module, which will be foundation, professional, expert, and corporate, so that we can fit any background. The corporate packages will be on site, and right now we are in agreement with the Arctic business to provide us with a location in Luleå, but maybe in future also in Kiruna, which is a strategic move for us, because then we also have possibility to demonstrate in general Swedish. Sweden's capacity in terms of a human spaceflight with the S-Range being their universities and companies located in the northern side of Sweden.
Marcus Pettersson
So the course itself is not part of any university or so?
Shorena Tsindeliani
No, and the course will be completely independent. And our main IP is in the fact that we will extract the knowledge that is usually not presented and provided by the university. It's not generalistic knowledge, but more operational. For example, university can teach you how the water recovery system works on the ISS, what are the components included, what are the purification levels, what was the evolution between different components, what is OPEX. But perhaps you will not know what happens if you have an ammonium breakthrough 3am in the morning and how it is operationally dealt with. And this kind of knowledge exists only in experts had. And right now with the commissioning of the ISS, the key... And fundamental experts in this area are either at this retirement age or are already retired. So it's extremely important to document it to transfer. And we believe this will significantly increase interest in the life support and contribute also directly to the European autonomy by providing this education locally.
Marcus Pettersson
You talk a lot about the teachers, the experts that you're having. Who are they?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Our experts come from the different parts of the world. They are of different nationalities. They represent different countries. Some of them come from governmental organizations, some from industries. What really unites them is that all of them have a solid experience, 20-plus years of experience working in the industry. These are the people who build the systems. These are people that led the missions. and these are the main contributors today in the main developments of the space industry. What is very important to mention perhaps, we are also trying and considering collaborating with experts that are not bound by any specific agreements, for instance, ITAR agreements or export control agreements, so that they can freely share the reason for the failures or their very secretive experience with us. And then we just document it in the way that is easily transferable to the participants.
Marcus Pettersson
How was it to connect all your experts? Was it hard to get them to get involved?
Shorena Tsindeliani
We see quite big interest. from both experts but also preliminary participants. And what is interesting, not only participants who come from the space sector but also participants from the medical industry, for instance, or autonomous navigation because they see that their skills can be applicable to space. They just need to have a mission context just to make this step. And that really is very good news.
Marcus Pettersson
So now we're touching on the subject of the participants and the people doing your course. Who are they?
Shorena Tsindeliani
We target anyone, if talking about the customer base, we target anyone who either wants or is in the human spaceflight related area. But specifically it's graduates or early professionals who want to receive operational knowledge in order to increase their chances of employment. On the other hand, it's also current experts and professionals working for years in these areas, but either want to always keep up to date or want to transfer from one area of life support to another. For instance, from life support to ISRU. Someone who wants to meet our experts and hear their own stories to learn from their mistakes or successes. And of course, it's companies and organizations that are understanding the importance of having their employees constantly trained and up to date because that directly increases efficiency and ROI in the end.
Marcus Pettersson
So what's the, what's not the plan or the goal, but where do you see the company in a few years? What is your main objective first, the first big step you want to reach?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Once TITA alumni is a synonym of operational depth and trust. And when I start feeling that, That's an indication of success. Once we train 500 people and the local network is created, that's success. And even if we look a bit longer than five years, once we see a European walking on the moon and you have all the environment around you, all the components that keep you alive, and I understand that there is some kind of contribution through the education. to make this possible, that's the biggest dream, professional dream come true for me personally.
Marcus Pettersson
Why is this important for Europe to have?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Well, space is not only about rockets. It's not only about satellites. It's not only about systems. The core is always human. And for the... Past decades, Europe has been extremely strong in developing systems, but perhaps the accent has not been on talent and neither on human. And if Europe really means to send humans, Europeans, on the surface of the moon by 2030, then we must start thinking about having the talent internally and education locally. Because that directly affects the autonomy and also reliance on the international talent. It is quite pity to be dependent completely on international talent and not being able to employ, for instance, a C-class engineer. When you have to spend a considerable amount to the third parties, you need to deal with expensive EOR or employment of record services. You need to deal with visas and so many other problems. So if we really want to sustain humans in space and if it's European targets, then it is definitely time to start thinking about now.
Marcus Pettersson
So how do you see this, not from your academy point of view, but because we have now, I mean, this is the perfect timing to set up this. I mean, we're going back to the moon, we're going forward to Mars. So in what way will you make a difference in the long run for this?
Shorena Tsindeliani
By providing the local education in these very crucial and niche areas, education in the shortest period of time, because not all professionals for instance can enroll today in a master's degree or even if it's one year master's degree, and obviously by providing internal pool of people of talent. within Europe itself. So it's easier to hire and you don't have to spend eight months to hire one person. And that is again directly contributes to both Europe's targets.
Marcus Pettersson
of doing this by the year 2030 with Terrae NOA and also by making the autonomy much stronger and dependency much lower.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
When we started talking about this back in December, I think it was, because you've been taken into SABIC and that is part of the funding for this is through SABIC. Can you tell me about that?
Marcus Pettersson
ISABIC is a European Space Agency business incubation center. There are different ISABICs depending on the country you are in. It's actually my second experience working with ISABIC. In my previous company, we also been part of ISABIC and we are alumni right now. But it's, I would say if you are starting a startup from the scratch and you don't have financial capabilities like Elon Musk. and you need to be part of the space network, that is the best way of starting the company. And I will say it's not easy because each year the demand from Isabik also increases and it's becoming more challenging to get in, both in terms of business plan and the pitching and interviews and the qualifications. For instance, in my case, since this is a company that starts completely from the scratch, It was not easy to get part of this, but I believe that they also saw the potential, then the opportunity and the need for this. ESA Big supports you with finances, but that's not really the most important. That probably gives you some engine to start with, but it's more about network. It's more about possibility to get basically any engineer you want within ESA or even SNSA. Let's say if I want someone to review a curriculum, I can get help from ESA Big and they will try to reach and they will pay to that person. And that's a tremendous support together with support in terms of the IP protection, in terms of the different technical support premises and many, many more. So for any startup that basically starts from the scratch. That's a very, very good opportunity.
Christer Fuglesang
Okay, now we have a good start. We're going to the moon, and we've learned how the system keeps us alive when we're on the spot. Check
Susanna Lewenhaupt
But we want longer than that. And when we talk about traveling to Mars and stuff, then we're on the next level. Because if we're gone for three years, then we can't take all the food, all the water...
Christer Fuglesang
What is MELISA?
Shorena Tsindeliani
So if you want to go to Mars, you need to, let's say, maintain the crew and transport also what we call metabolic consumables. So it will be oxygen, water and food. But this represents for a mission of roughly three years, a lot of mass. Too much for the capacities of the current launcher. So you need to recycle. So MELISA is this. You recycle the water, you recycle urine, you recycle faecal matter. But the problem is... is the food sources. Because if you want to produce food, you need biology. And this is where you need to consider plants, bacteria, microalgae, and so on. To simplify, it's a kind of an artificial ecosystem.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And is it an ecosystem that is up and running in space or is it just paperwork?
Shorena Tsindeliani
No, it's much more than paperwork, but it's not in space yet. The project started in 1989, so it's a long-term effort. It started mainly with France and Belgium, but now there are 14 countries involved. So it's really a European consortium, a European effort, and it really tackles all the domains. So waste recycling, urine treatment, CO2 capture, oxygen production, food production, and so on. So we have an integration site. which is located in Barcelona, which we call the Melissa pilot plant, where we progressively, let's say, assemble the bricks, or the piece of the puzzle if you want. And we have As well in parallel, a large number of flight experiments, just to be sure that our understanding, our control of the processes we want to use are still correct.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So we flew around,
Shorena Tsindeliani
I think, 10 or 11 flight experiments now, mainly on board space station, but not only.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Is there any plans for the whole system to be up and running in space?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Well, it's a very difficult question, because as you know, the international situation is a bit waving these days. I tried to be, let's say, very diplomatic there. There was an idea to go to Mars, to simplify, eight years ago. And then there was a big decision to stop this, to return to the moon. Now, visibly, this is what is planned. But there was discussion even a year ago to stop the moon and to go to Mars. So it's very hard to tell you. Now, in terms of technological development, it's reasonably clear that The return to moon will probably slow down these kind of processes because it's not becoming a top priority anymore. Top priority will be probably energy, radiation protection, and so on. So before, I would say, the plan was somewhere around 2050. But now it's very difficult to guess any date.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Can you describe, first off, what does MELISA stand for? And then... Yes, the parts of it. What is it that you do? How does it work?
Shorena Tsindeliani
So MELISA stands for Micro Ecological Life Support System Alternative. Yeah. And it's trying to mimic, or let's say it differently, it's inspired by a terrestrial ecosystem. So we go back to the early days of MELISA. We thought, is there any technology existing that we could be inspired in order to? And in fact, the technology is existing, it's a terrestrial ecosystem. And of course, we cannot fly a complete ecosystem. So we get inspired by a lake. So if you look carefully in a lake, at the bottom part of the lake, you will have no oxygen, more or less, no light. You will be in what we call anaerobic, and you will have microbial degradation with many bacteria. So they will produce shorter molecules. And then you are a little bit higher in the lake, so you will... you can benefit of a bit of light. So this will help you. We are in what we call photo-heterotrophic process, sorry for the complex name, which means mainly using light in order to transform other source of carbon which are not CO2. And you go a little bit higher, you are closer to surface of the lake, so there you will have a bit of dissolved oxygen. So you will be mainly able to transform the urea coming from urine, which is a main source of nitrogen for the plant. And then you will let's say oxidize it, you will go to what we call nitrate, NO3. And then you have more or less everything you need. You have the CO2, you have the nitrate, you have the light. So you can have photosynthesis, and then you will be able to grow plants and microalgae, produce food, produce oxygen, trap CO2, and even produce water. So you have a complete circular system.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And again, you talked about it, but how would this work? when you come to, when you go to space?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Of course, for, let's say, for the transit phase, or even to initiate the system, because the system is not perfect, so you will never have 100% of recycling. So you still need to transport. And then, of course, then the waste will be more or less collected, if I may say, CO2 coming from the astronaut, urine, and so on, and then will be progressively transformed. So if you speak about bacteria or microorganisms, You need to... Consider more or less a container, a container extremely well controlled, pH, temperature, styling, light and so on. And this you separate the liquid from the solid and you move to another big container where you will have another transformation and then at the end you will have the greenhouses where you will be able to produce, potentially the astronaut going there to harvest and part of course of the biomass is a waste, so it's returning directly. The other part is consumed by the astronaut.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
We're talking about Mars now. We should build it on Mars. How big will a system like this need to be to get it working?
Shorena Tsindeliani
That's a very good question because this is still one of the key challenges. There are two key challenges. Radiation. Also, the radiation is more an issue for the crew than for the bacteria. Bacteria have a tendency to resist reasonably well. The top priority issue for the radiation is the astronaut. And for the transit phase, you are limited in terms of volume. So probably for the transit phase, we will not aim to a huge percentage of the diet, maybe a few percent, let's say, the top priority molecule that you need and which are very difficult to store fresh. But when you arrive on surface and you can deploy and have, let's say, produce more and come back. So there is the requirement, we call it the requirement in terms of engineering, are very different. for the transit phase and then the surface phase.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And again, how big will it need to be when you get there?
Shorena Tsindeliani
It's difficult to give you an answer because it's very dependent on the diet. For example, we know that more or less we can have a proper diet, equilibrate, with wheat only. But of course, you cannot imagine that the astronaut will eat only wheat. So you see, all this issue is not decided yet because we don't have the number. We still try to optimize. This is always a kind of... equilibrium that you have to find between top priority for space, who as you know have been changing a lot over the last eight years, well even more very recently, and of course the cost of development, the research. The space industry, who to oversimplify, is not so much fascinated by plant biology or whatever, they would dream of bigger launcher, because this is their core business, this is where their knowledge is. So if you start to tell them you need to study plants and so on, there is a bit of a reluctance. And we see it every day. If you open the news, the big space company, they want to do bigger launcher. They don't want to recycle so much. This is not their business.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So if we leave space for a few seconds, what during these... 35 years or so that you've been working on this or this project's been going on. What have you come up with? What new things, what have you learned that help us here on Earth?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Indeed, we have a lot of what we call technological bricks, which are used to answer some terrestrial challenges. We have water recycling, of course. We have it in hotels. We have it in universities. So Clearly this is done, it's a commercial product now. And then we have this urine to fertilizer which is as well a commercial product. There is a few concrete realizations, there is a spin-off. And then we have microbial safety. For you to know, and this was not planned, based on the Mir experience, you remember Mir, the Russian space station. When we talk with the ocean, they tell us we have experienced big difficulties with microbial contamination. I'm back to the 90s there. So we thought, OK, we have to consider this. So we developed a technology to be able to detect and identify microbial pathogens. And this technology happens to be potentially usable for viruses. And guess what? It became, and it is still today, the first. a technological platform for COVID detection in the world. There are three big factories which are producing this unit, the consumable, so it's a tremendous success on this. But it was not planned, again, we were trying to solve the microbial safety of our space vehicles. We were not thinking that COVID will appear. So there is a few results. So now this is, again, this wording of technological bricks. Which is good, I mean, we have commercial companies, we are applied, this is good. Politicians are happy, we are happy because we learn as well, you know. If you have a technology, you need to validate it, you need to test it and so on. If you test electronic systems such as this microphone, you can plug it, restart it. But if you need to transform waste, and a consumer, you need both. Yeah, you need waste, you need human waste, okay? of which quality, you need to be sure what the people have been doing and so on, yeah? And you need somebody to costume it, yeah? And how do you do that? You cannot take people from the street and pack them in a container for three years. So this technology, the application of this technology for terrestrial challenges is very good for us because we learn with a lot of diversity what could be the problem and where are the problems and what we should improve, how to do the maintenance and so on. So now we, let's say the robustness of the technology is much better than it was due to this commercial application.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
You are now retired. But how does the project Melissa continue? What happens with that and how do you see it in the future?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Now of course Melissa will suffer today of this international situation. That's very clear. There is some reorganization at the level of the project, to what I hear, because I'm not involved anymore. To what I hear, there is some reorganization there. So I don't know exactly how this will settle. But there is risk. There is risk that the European effort will be seriously reduced.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
If we don't talk Melissa, what do we need to improve? What do we need to work with when it comes to human spaceflight for long term in space?
Shorena Tsindeliani
I would say radiation is a key issue. And I have no clue how they will solve it. Maybe if they are on the moon, maybe they will dig and go below with caterpillar and stuff like that. still for me a bit of science fiction.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So you thought there was lots of countries working together on this, but how many people have been involved during all these years?
Shorena Tsindeliani
There is plenty of contracts over the 14 countries, sometimes it's one country, but sometimes it's three or four countries together to do research. So I'm totally unable to tell you how many contracts we signed, but I know that there is more than 400 documents plus the publication and so on. By the way, If people are interested, they can look on the Melissa Foundation webpage. A large part of the reports are available. You can download them. So there is a huge quantity of information which is public. So people can really work on it.
Marcus Pettersson
We learn so much cool things in this program. And we learn you, dear listeners.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
If you want to know more about Melissa Foundation, you can find links and other food for recovery on our website, havioctimarschen.se. There you can also find more information about Tita Global Space Academy, Artemis and the Moon, and of course our previous episodes.
Marcus Pettersson
Yes, and our upcoming episodes. Although they are not there yet, of course. But in the future, it will be among other things Arctic, radiation... lite olika gränser, rymd och försvar.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Och så blir det ett avsnitt om Mars också.
Marcus Pettersson
Ja, äntligen Hörs framåt Musiken som hörs i serien, den är skriven av Armin Pendek.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Jag heter Susanna Lewenhaupt.
Marcus Pettersson
Jag heter Marcus Pettersson.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Har vi åkt i Marsen, görs på Beppo, av Rundfunk Media, i samarbetet, SAV. Hello,
Outro
the program is made by Rundfunk Media.

Chapters

Är vi tillbaka på månen än?
0sec
Christer Fuglesang om Artemis och bemannade månfärder
2min
Shorena Tsindeliani om TITA Global Space Academy
19min
Christophe Lasseur om Melissa
33min

About Har vi åkt till Mars än?

Har vi åkt till Mars än? är en populärvetenskaplig podd om rymden, framtiden och människans plats i universum. Med nyfikenhet och humor tar den sig an stora frågor: Hur långt har vi kommit i rymdforskningen? Vad krävs för att åka till Mars? Och varför är vi så fascinerade av den röda planeten? Programledarna intervjuar forskare, ingenjörer och astronauter, och förklarar allt från livets uppkomst till raketmotorer – begripligt och engagerande för alla som någon gång tittat upp mot himlen och undrat.

Har vi åkt till Mars än? görs på Beppo av Rundfunk Media i samarbete med Saab.

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About Har vi åkt till Mars än?

Har vi åkt till Mars än? görs på Beppo av Rundfunk Media i samarbete med Saab.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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Har vi åkt till Mars än? görs på Beppo av Rundfunk Media i samarbete med Saab.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Marcus Pettersson
Susanna, we've been asking for like seven years now, we've been going to Mars. How's it going? Well,
Susanna Lewenhaupt
haven't you heard? Now it's the moon that counts. No,
Marcus Pettersson
here you are.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
The moon, then. Our closest neighbor in space. Where we actually landed people already in 1969.
Marcus Pettersson
Yes, a total of 12 people went to the moon's surface between 1969 and 1972. And then it seemed like we completely lost interest and stopped going there.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
But now, about 10 years ago, there are plans to put people back on the moon again through the Artemis program. And now it's different. Now we're not just talking about going there and putting up a flag. No.
Marcus Pettersson
Now we're talking about stopping, building, living and using the moon as a springboard further out in the solar system. The Artemis program is in full swing with new rockets, new capsules, new landers and new ambitions.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So even if the coming Artemis 2 will not land on the moon but just do a flyby, it is the closest we have come to the moon with people for a long time. So exciting My name is Susanna Lewenhaupt.
Marcus Pettersson
My name is Marcus Pettersson.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And you're listening to Harvi Åk till Mars 1.
Marcus Pettersson
We're standing right in front of Artemis 2, which, according to plan, will fly around the moon now in just a few weeks. We'll see exactly when it will be. The launch was set in February from the beginning. men flyttades på grund av tekniska problem. Så nu är siktet inställt på mars istället. Ja, månaden alltså.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Ja, och när väl Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cook och Jeremy Hansen sätter sig i raketen och åker, så blir det alltså den första bemannade månfärden på över 50 år. Så även om de inte ska landa så är det här stort.
Marcus Pettersson
Så hur ser då planerna för månen ut framöver? When does the first landing of people on the Moon happen? And what does the Moon program mean for our ambitions to reach Mars? Yes, the planet, that is.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Christer Fuglesang, astronaut, professor of spaceflight at KTH and space advisor at SAV. Let's start like this.
Christer Fuglesang
Artemis is NASA's, let's say, current Moon program. It's actually the case that in Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo's sister. One of the stated goals is that Artemis will be the first woman and the first non-white person on the planet. It's an international program, which is not Apollo. So that's very interesting. But it's Apollo plus plus, one could say.
Marcus Pettersson
And the reason we're talking about this now is because a few weeks ago... After a few weeks Artemis 2 will be sent away.
Christer Fuglesang
What is that? Artemis 2 is Apollo 8, the first manned space ship after Apollo that will travel around the Moon. They will not land on the Moon, they will not even go into the runway on the Moon. But they travel around the Moon and come back. The goal with this flight is to prove that all technical things work as they should. They did an unmanned flight three years ago, but now they want to do it in a manned plane.
Marcus Pettersson
What is it that makes it so? Like you, it has been a few years and now when you are going to send it out, is there something wrong with it? A little like days before, is that something you should have known about?
Christer Fuglesang
And of course, the space color program that he sent up. I think that every other month, I rarely went a round trip when it was planned. It was a technical problem, weather problems. So this is nothing unusual. Then it gets harder when you don't do it so often. This is only the second time you send up the Jet Rocket Space Loan System SLS. And that was three years ago last. One of the problems with the Artemis program is that it has an SLS rocket as the base. It's so expensive that you can only send one every other year. That's the problem. I think the program will change. It's not sustainable with ARS.
Marcus Pettersson
Exactly, tell us more about that. We're talking SLS, flying for the second time now, and is not as reusable as Starship. How did you come to this? And how are you going to work forward? If we continue on what you were talking about.
Christer Fuglesang
How you ended up where you are is in general political. When the space ferry was unloaded, the politicians in the states that contributed to the space ferry wanted to keep their jobs. And then they put together a program that could use a lot of components in the space ferry. And it's not effective. NASA would have liked to change this, but it was politically driven. So that's why I think what's going to happen, and Trump actually announced it in the beginning when he took office, but it won't be more than at least three, maybe at least four that are with SLS. You will start using new rockets, and that's mainly and other than SpaceX Starship. That can take as much space as SLS. Or Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos company's new rocket called New Glenn, that can take about half of what SLS can take to space. That can be a good contribution to the Moon program.
Marcus Pettersson
And you, SLS Artemis 2, are going to fly around the Moon. When will we see Artemis land on the Moon? Yes.
Christer Fuglesang
That's a good question. On paper it's 27. In reality it won't be 28, maybe 29. The bottle neck here is actually not SEDS, but it's the car that you should use as a moon lander. And it's actually a Starship, a version of Starship. It has to be qualified first. First, this has to be done without a crew. Starship has not even made a totally successful flight yet. And it is enormously oversized for being a moon lander. So you will have to check up on Starship in the ground. And then you will have to check up on the ship. 8 to 12 appreciates that it is a tank vehicle. To refuel it. Starship, so that they can go on to the moon. They put up a track around the moon. And then comes this Orion, which is sent up with an SLS rocket. There with four astronauts. They dock with each other. Two astronauts go over to Starship, which then lands on the moon. And it's huge. It's actually a completely insane hulk, which has historically been like this. We can talk about that in a program. Yes,
Marcus Pettersson
exactly. But we take a little of it now. Has this been the plan all the time? That Artemis would not land with SLS but that you relied on ANGRA, for example in this case SpaceX?
Christer Fuglesang
Yes, that was the plan when we started Artemis. We have to find a moon lander. And then we went out after a while. Artemis program officially started in 2017. So we went out after a while and said we need a moon lander. Which company can do that? And we need it very early. When we started in 2017, we were supposed to land on the 24th of June. And the only proposal that came in that could possibly last for a certain amount of time was SpaceX with a user-starch. In the last 10-20 years, NASA has normally tried to develop two parallel contracts. to develop. And you would like to give a... to Blue Origin. But you didn't have money for that. But then you got a little more money. So now there are months that get money from NASA to be developed, which is built by Blue Origin. But as I said, if you had from the beginning built up a program consistently in some way, then you would have done it in a completely different way than the Apollo program was. And if you go back in time, you can say that it's Obama's fault. Because Obama forbade NASA to land on the moon. So they didn't have to do anything. Then Trump comes in and says, now we're going to the moon. Then they had to do what they had to do. But there was absolutely nothing that had to do with the moon landing. Then they went after it. And then it went wrong in a bad way, I must say. The Chinese don't do that, I can tell you. No,
Marcus Pettersson
we're going to come back to China soon. I'm going to ask a few questions about that. First, just this week Elon Musk went out with the idea that we should They're not going to end their mission on Mars, but they're going to put the power on the moon. Are SpaceX working with that only within the Artemis program, or do they have their own plans?
Christer Fuglesang
They definitely have their own plans. They haven't developed many plans yet, but this is a very solid approach. The great development in space... I would say that it will be, during the time here, soon on the Moon. To be able to develop opportunities to build things on the Moon, which you can then send up from space, that is, from Moon material. Then you will be able to save a lot of money compared to sending things up from Earth. And that's what I think Elon Musk and SpaceX see. They have recently announced that they want to have up to one million satellites around the world for data centers. If you start building a lot of them on the moon instead, it will be cheaper. We don't know yet where all the possibilities are on the moon, that's why we haven't been there yet. But we had many estimates that there will be so many opportunities there and then you want to be part of the race. The other reason is that they feel the pressure from NASA and USA. What the hell, do we have to get to the moon as soon as possible? So maybe there are extra resources to talk about it in that way.
Marcus Pettersson
For Europe's part, how does our mix look now? Because we are part of Artemis in different ways. But as we say, the conditions change a little back and forth, at least. So what are our active parts in the Artemis program now?
Christer Fuglesang
Above all, it is Europe that stands for the so-called service module to the Orion capsule, the one that comes to the astronauts who go up with SLS and then fly away to the moon. It is built by Europe. It is the development of a cargo ship that Europe built for the International Space Station. So there we are a very integrated part and a very important part of the program. This is a big difference from Apollo, which was only clean. This is Europe from the beginning. And not just Europe, it's Canada and Japan. In the heart of the program, it also goes into the construction of a space station around the Moon. And you will do that before you start building some kind of ground station on the Moon. Lunar Gateway. And there, Europe is already building some modules to that space station. But it's not as big as ISS. It will not be permanently commissioned. But it will also be an important part of the whole program. And that's Europe more or less. It's a bit sad, but there have been plans to have a moon landing and so on, but not for Venice, but for November. And it was actually quite boring that there was a very successful so-called Administrative Council for ESA in November. That's when you put the budget for ESA three years ahead. A lot of money came in, many projects got more money than you asked for. But the man who was in charge of the space program actually got less money than you know. One of the few who got it. And another little comment in the context of. A few weeks ago there was a kind of space policy conference in Brussels. And there was a big panel debate. And Esas general director, Ars Bachel, said at one point. Yes, I think it's bad and so boring. China, Eruningen. own manned space program to the moon and we have nothing in Europe, I think that's bad. So it's not ESA that's the problem, it's the politicians in Europe that don't give the right money to ESA.
Marcus Pettersson
You mention Lunar Gateway here, when will it be sent up, the first parts, do we know that?
Christer Fuglesang
The first part is going to be sent up with Artemis IV, which on paper today is perhaps to be released sometime in 2028. But it's hard to know what to believe and when it can happen. I would say it's not even impossible that you will change the order of Artemis 3 and Artemis 4. You send up the first module to Lunar Gator before you send up the first crew to land on the moon because there are no moon landers. But then you have to think that Artemis... four, five, six, I should basically send parts to the new gate even with other archers if there is not I'm a little unsure but that kind of new glen can also contribute to sending parts to this And then the Artemis aircraft partly brought stuff to Lunar Gateway, but also planned to land on the Moon and go down for a while.
Marcus Pettersson
Then the leading question, will Artemis come first with the Moon to the Moon? You have mentioned China here now, how do other countries look outside of the Artemis cooperation?
Christer Fuglesang
China is the most obvious. They have a very good track record of doing things in space when they have said that they should do it in space. They have a space station that has been permanently occupied since 1922. They have about a number of moon landers. They have taken things from Akron, the back side of the moon had not been done before. They say that they will have people on the moon by 2030. They have even shown tests on moon landers and new rockets and so on. So there is no reason to believe that they would not land on the moon with people in 2030. Maybe by 2029. If they see a chance to come before, I think they will try to take it. At the same time, it is very uncertain how the Artemis program looks. My guess is that Artemis will come before. But I think China will have a much more regular program. I haven't seen their plans, but I would believe it. Artemis program is one flight with people to the moon every other year. It's not a good program to do in that way. But if you do it then, use Starship instead, then it will be better. Probably two moon bases will be built. from the beginning of the 20-30s. China has already named its International Lunar Research Station. They have already named it International. Russia, for example, is one of the countries that has written a co-operation paper for this. There are two groups. Most people consider the best area to be in is the South. pool, among other things, because there you can get craters, chambers, you can get sunlight almost all the time and then get electric solar panels and a lot of other benefits. And then Amritsar is worried that the Chinese will be the first to take the best place. You don't have the right to own land on the moon, but you don't have the right to disturb someone else who is doing something in the room. If someone comes here and says, I'm here, don't come close because then you land and throw up a lot of smoke on us. So you can in practice usurp or take a certain area. So this is a pretty big geopolitical thing that will definitely be exciting to see how it develops.
Marcus Pettersson
Cool Soon Mojo on the moon Yes, but...
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Åka till molen är en sak, men att överleva där är en helt annan. För om vi menar allvar med att stanna längre perioder, bygga molnbaser och till och med städer, då räcker det inte med raketer och landare.
Marcus Pettersson
Nej, vi måste kunna producera luft, rena vatten, hantera avfall och kanske till och med odla vår egen mat. Allt i en miljö som verkligen inte vill ha oss där. And then we have to actually learn how to do all this.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Sharina Tzindeliani is founder of and CEO of Tita Global Space Academy, an education focus completely focused on human spaceflight and life-saving systems. That is, everything that is required to keep people alive on the moon and Mars.
Marcus Pettersson
Brilliant So, Sharina, what is Tita Global Space Academy?
Shorena Tsindeliani
TITA Global Space Academy is the company that is specifically dedicated to provide a unique niche and undervalued education in all areas related to human spaceflight. Basically anything that contributes directly to keeping people alive and in well-being in extraterrestrial environments or basically on any other planet apart from Earth is... what we are aiming to do, whether it's life support that basically contributes with water, food and air or space resource utilization, which includes the oxygen generation, water recovery from ice or propellant development locally. And you need to think not only how to send people, but also how to sustain them. Space manufacturing, one of the... Very interesting businesses and in a couple of years will be one of the main businesses probably in LEO, considering the commercial space stations coming. Space medicine, very underrated direction. I mean, Markus, you are in a good relationship with astronauts and perhaps you hear how their health, both mental and physical, is affected just by being in LEO for a couple of months. But no one knows what will happen to health if a person stays for years. And it's important to prepare, to provide the preventive medicine, to diagnose, to provide some help in emergency situations. So anything that keeps people alive and well and fit in lunar on Martian surface is what life support is and what we are intending to teach.
Marcus Pettersson
So what exactly is it that you want to do?
Shorena Tsindeliani
So basically we aim to prepare five modules that will be environmental control and life support system, in space resource dualization, autonomous navigation and AI, human factors and medicine, and manufacturing and 3D printing. Right now we started developing our first course in E-Class which is intended to launch by the end of this year and then ISRU will follow etc. We will also have four different tires. or four different levels in each module, which will be foundation, professional, expert, and corporate, so that we can fit any background. The corporate packages will be on site, and right now we are in agreement with the Arctic business to provide us with a location in Luleå, but maybe in future also in Kiruna, which is a strategic move for us, because then we also have possibility to demonstrate in general Swedish. Sweden's capacity in terms of a human spaceflight with the S-Range being their universities and companies located in the northern side of Sweden.
Marcus Pettersson
So the course itself is not part of any university or so?
Shorena Tsindeliani
No, and the course will be completely independent. And our main IP is in the fact that we will extract the knowledge that is usually not presented and provided by the university. It's not generalistic knowledge, but more operational. For example, university can teach you how the water recovery system works on the ISS, what are the components included, what are the purification levels, what was the evolution between different components, what is OPEX. But perhaps you will not know what happens if you have an ammonium breakthrough 3am in the morning and how it is operationally dealt with. And this kind of knowledge exists only in experts had. And right now with the commissioning of the ISS, the key... And fundamental experts in this area are either at this retirement age or are already retired. So it's extremely important to document it to transfer. And we believe this will significantly increase interest in the life support and contribute also directly to the European autonomy by providing this education locally.
Marcus Pettersson
You talk a lot about the teachers, the experts that you're having. Who are they?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Our experts come from the different parts of the world. They are of different nationalities. They represent different countries. Some of them come from governmental organizations, some from industries. What really unites them is that all of them have a solid experience, 20-plus years of experience working in the industry. These are the people who build the systems. These are people that led the missions. and these are the main contributors today in the main developments of the space industry. What is very important to mention perhaps, we are also trying and considering collaborating with experts that are not bound by any specific agreements, for instance, ITAR agreements or export control agreements, so that they can freely share the reason for the failures or their very secretive experience with us. And then we just document it in the way that is easily transferable to the participants.
Marcus Pettersson
How was it to connect all your experts? Was it hard to get them to get involved?
Shorena Tsindeliani
We see quite big interest. from both experts but also preliminary participants. And what is interesting, not only participants who come from the space sector but also participants from the medical industry, for instance, or autonomous navigation because they see that their skills can be applicable to space. They just need to have a mission context just to make this step. And that really is very good news.
Marcus Pettersson
So now we're touching on the subject of the participants and the people doing your course. Who are they?
Shorena Tsindeliani
We target anyone, if talking about the customer base, we target anyone who either wants or is in the human spaceflight related area. But specifically it's graduates or early professionals who want to receive operational knowledge in order to increase their chances of employment. On the other hand, it's also current experts and professionals working for years in these areas, but either want to always keep up to date or want to transfer from one area of life support to another. For instance, from life support to ISRU. Someone who wants to meet our experts and hear their own stories to learn from their mistakes or successes. And of course, it's companies and organizations that are understanding the importance of having their employees constantly trained and up to date because that directly increases efficiency and ROI in the end.
Marcus Pettersson
So what's the, what's not the plan or the goal, but where do you see the company in a few years? What is your main objective first, the first big step you want to reach?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Once TITA alumni is a synonym of operational depth and trust. And when I start feeling that, That's an indication of success. Once we train 500 people and the local network is created, that's success. And even if we look a bit longer than five years, once we see a European walking on the moon and you have all the environment around you, all the components that keep you alive, and I understand that there is some kind of contribution through the education. to make this possible, that's the biggest dream, professional dream come true for me personally.
Marcus Pettersson
Why is this important for Europe to have?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Well, space is not only about rockets. It's not only about satellites. It's not only about systems. The core is always human. And for the... Past decades, Europe has been extremely strong in developing systems, but perhaps the accent has not been on talent and neither on human. And if Europe really means to send humans, Europeans, on the surface of the moon by 2030, then we must start thinking about having the talent internally and education locally. Because that directly affects the autonomy and also reliance on the international talent. It is quite pity to be dependent completely on international talent and not being able to employ, for instance, a C-class engineer. When you have to spend a considerable amount to the third parties, you need to deal with expensive EOR or employment of record services. You need to deal with visas and so many other problems. So if we really want to sustain humans in space and if it's European targets, then it is definitely time to start thinking about now.
Marcus Pettersson
So how do you see this, not from your academy point of view, but because we have now, I mean, this is the perfect timing to set up this. I mean, we're going back to the moon, we're going forward to Mars. So in what way will you make a difference in the long run for this?
Shorena Tsindeliani
By providing the local education in these very crucial and niche areas, education in the shortest period of time, because not all professionals for instance can enroll today in a master's degree or even if it's one year master's degree, and obviously by providing internal pool of people of talent. within Europe itself. So it's easier to hire and you don't have to spend eight months to hire one person. And that is again directly contributes to both Europe's targets.
Marcus Pettersson
of doing this by the year 2030 with Terrae NOA and also by making the autonomy much stronger and dependency much lower.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
When we started talking about this back in December, I think it was, because you've been taken into SABIC and that is part of the funding for this is through SABIC. Can you tell me about that?
Marcus Pettersson
ISABIC is a European Space Agency business incubation center. There are different ISABICs depending on the country you are in. It's actually my second experience working with ISABIC. In my previous company, we also been part of ISABIC and we are alumni right now. But it's, I would say if you are starting a startup from the scratch and you don't have financial capabilities like Elon Musk. and you need to be part of the space network, that is the best way of starting the company. And I will say it's not easy because each year the demand from Isabik also increases and it's becoming more challenging to get in, both in terms of business plan and the pitching and interviews and the qualifications. For instance, in my case, since this is a company that starts completely from the scratch, It was not easy to get part of this, but I believe that they also saw the potential, then the opportunity and the need for this. ESA Big supports you with finances, but that's not really the most important. That probably gives you some engine to start with, but it's more about network. It's more about possibility to get basically any engineer you want within ESA or even SNSA. Let's say if I want someone to review a curriculum, I can get help from ESA Big and they will try to reach and they will pay to that person. And that's a tremendous support together with support in terms of the IP protection, in terms of the different technical support premises and many, many more. So for any startup that basically starts from the scratch. That's a very, very good opportunity.
Christer Fuglesang
Okay, now we have a good start. We're going to the moon, and we've learned how the system keeps us alive when we're on the spot. Check
Susanna Lewenhaupt
But we want longer than that. And when we talk about traveling to Mars and stuff, then we're on the next level. Because if we're gone for three years, then we can't take all the food, all the water...
Christer Fuglesang
What is MELISA?
Shorena Tsindeliani
So if you want to go to Mars, you need to, let's say, maintain the crew and transport also what we call metabolic consumables. So it will be oxygen, water and food. But this represents for a mission of roughly three years, a lot of mass. Too much for the capacities of the current launcher. So you need to recycle. So MELISA is this. You recycle the water, you recycle urine, you recycle faecal matter. But the problem is... is the food sources. Because if you want to produce food, you need biology. And this is where you need to consider plants, bacteria, microalgae, and so on. To simplify, it's a kind of an artificial ecosystem.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And is it an ecosystem that is up and running in space or is it just paperwork?
Shorena Tsindeliani
No, it's much more than paperwork, but it's not in space yet. The project started in 1989, so it's a long-term effort. It started mainly with France and Belgium, but now there are 14 countries involved. So it's really a European consortium, a European effort, and it really tackles all the domains. So waste recycling, urine treatment, CO2 capture, oxygen production, food production, and so on. So we have an integration site. which is located in Barcelona, which we call the Melissa pilot plant, where we progressively, let's say, assemble the bricks, or the piece of the puzzle if you want. And we have As well in parallel, a large number of flight experiments, just to be sure that our understanding, our control of the processes we want to use are still correct.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So we flew around,
Shorena Tsindeliani
I think, 10 or 11 flight experiments now, mainly on board space station, but not only.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Is there any plans for the whole system to be up and running in space?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Well, it's a very difficult question, because as you know, the international situation is a bit waving these days. I tried to be, let's say, very diplomatic there. There was an idea to go to Mars, to simplify, eight years ago. And then there was a big decision to stop this, to return to the moon. Now, visibly, this is what is planned. But there was discussion even a year ago to stop the moon and to go to Mars. So it's very hard to tell you. Now, in terms of technological development, it's reasonably clear that The return to moon will probably slow down these kind of processes because it's not becoming a top priority anymore. Top priority will be probably energy, radiation protection, and so on. So before, I would say, the plan was somewhere around 2050. But now it's very difficult to guess any date.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Can you describe, first off, what does MELISA stand for? And then... Yes, the parts of it. What is it that you do? How does it work?
Shorena Tsindeliani
So MELISA stands for Micro Ecological Life Support System Alternative. Yeah. And it's trying to mimic, or let's say it differently, it's inspired by a terrestrial ecosystem. So we go back to the early days of MELISA. We thought, is there any technology existing that we could be inspired in order to? And in fact, the technology is existing, it's a terrestrial ecosystem. And of course, we cannot fly a complete ecosystem. So we get inspired by a lake. So if you look carefully in a lake, at the bottom part of the lake, you will have no oxygen, more or less, no light. You will be in what we call anaerobic, and you will have microbial degradation with many bacteria. So they will produce shorter molecules. And then you are a little bit higher in the lake, so you will... you can benefit of a bit of light. So this will help you. We are in what we call photo-heterotrophic process, sorry for the complex name, which means mainly using light in order to transform other source of carbon which are not CO2. And you go a little bit higher, you are closer to surface of the lake, so there you will have a bit of dissolved oxygen. So you will be mainly able to transform the urea coming from urine, which is a main source of nitrogen for the plant. And then you will let's say oxidize it, you will go to what we call nitrate, NO3. And then you have more or less everything you need. You have the CO2, you have the nitrate, you have the light. So you can have photosynthesis, and then you will be able to grow plants and microalgae, produce food, produce oxygen, trap CO2, and even produce water. So you have a complete circular system.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And again, you talked about it, but how would this work? when you come to, when you go to space?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Of course, for, let's say, for the transit phase, or even to initiate the system, because the system is not perfect, so you will never have 100% of recycling. So you still need to transport. And then, of course, then the waste will be more or less collected, if I may say, CO2 coming from the astronaut, urine, and so on, and then will be progressively transformed. So if you speak about bacteria or microorganisms, You need to... Consider more or less a container, a container extremely well controlled, pH, temperature, styling, light and so on. And this you separate the liquid from the solid and you move to another big container where you will have another transformation and then at the end you will have the greenhouses where you will be able to produce, potentially the astronaut going there to harvest and part of course of the biomass is a waste, so it's returning directly. The other part is consumed by the astronaut.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
We're talking about Mars now. We should build it on Mars. How big will a system like this need to be to get it working?
Shorena Tsindeliani
That's a very good question because this is still one of the key challenges. There are two key challenges. Radiation. Also, the radiation is more an issue for the crew than for the bacteria. Bacteria have a tendency to resist reasonably well. The top priority issue for the radiation is the astronaut. And for the transit phase, you are limited in terms of volume. So probably for the transit phase, we will not aim to a huge percentage of the diet, maybe a few percent, let's say, the top priority molecule that you need and which are very difficult to store fresh. But when you arrive on surface and you can deploy and have, let's say, produce more and come back. So there is the requirement, we call it the requirement in terms of engineering, are very different. for the transit phase and then the surface phase.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And again, how big will it need to be when you get there?
Shorena Tsindeliani
It's difficult to give you an answer because it's very dependent on the diet. For example, we know that more or less we can have a proper diet, equilibrate, with wheat only. But of course, you cannot imagine that the astronaut will eat only wheat. So you see, all this issue is not decided yet because we don't have the number. We still try to optimize. This is always a kind of... equilibrium that you have to find between top priority for space, who as you know have been changing a lot over the last eight years, well even more very recently, and of course the cost of development, the research. The space industry, who to oversimplify, is not so much fascinated by plant biology or whatever, they would dream of bigger launcher, because this is their core business, this is where their knowledge is. So if you start to tell them you need to study plants and so on, there is a bit of a reluctance. And we see it every day. If you open the news, the big space company, they want to do bigger launcher. They don't want to recycle so much. This is not their business.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So if we leave space for a few seconds, what during these... 35 years or so that you've been working on this or this project's been going on. What have you come up with? What new things, what have you learned that help us here on Earth?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Indeed, we have a lot of what we call technological bricks, which are used to answer some terrestrial challenges. We have water recycling, of course. We have it in hotels. We have it in universities. So Clearly this is done, it's a commercial product now. And then we have this urine to fertilizer which is as well a commercial product. There is a few concrete realizations, there is a spin-off. And then we have microbial safety. For you to know, and this was not planned, based on the Mir experience, you remember Mir, the Russian space station. When we talk with the ocean, they tell us we have experienced big difficulties with microbial contamination. I'm back to the 90s there. So we thought, OK, we have to consider this. So we developed a technology to be able to detect and identify microbial pathogens. And this technology happens to be potentially usable for viruses. And guess what? It became, and it is still today, the first. a technological platform for COVID detection in the world. There are three big factories which are producing this unit, the consumable, so it's a tremendous success on this. But it was not planned, again, we were trying to solve the microbial safety of our space vehicles. We were not thinking that COVID will appear. So there is a few results. So now this is, again, this wording of technological bricks. Which is good, I mean, we have commercial companies, we are applied, this is good. Politicians are happy, we are happy because we learn as well, you know. If you have a technology, you need to validate it, you need to test it and so on. If you test electronic systems such as this microphone, you can plug it, restart it. But if you need to transform waste, and a consumer, you need both. Yeah, you need waste, you need human waste, okay? of which quality, you need to be sure what the people have been doing and so on, yeah? And you need somebody to costume it, yeah? And how do you do that? You cannot take people from the street and pack them in a container for three years. So this technology, the application of this technology for terrestrial challenges is very good for us because we learn with a lot of diversity what could be the problem and where are the problems and what we should improve, how to do the maintenance and so on. So now we, let's say the robustness of the technology is much better than it was due to this commercial application.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
You are now retired. But how does the project Melissa continue? What happens with that and how do you see it in the future?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Now of course Melissa will suffer today of this international situation. That's very clear. There is some reorganization at the level of the project, to what I hear, because I'm not involved anymore. To what I hear, there is some reorganization there. So I don't know exactly how this will settle. But there is risk. There is risk that the European effort will be seriously reduced.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
If we don't talk Melissa, what do we need to improve? What do we need to work with when it comes to human spaceflight for long term in space?
Shorena Tsindeliani
I would say radiation is a key issue. And I have no clue how they will solve it. Maybe if they are on the moon, maybe they will dig and go below with caterpillar and stuff like that. still for me a bit of science fiction.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So you thought there was lots of countries working together on this, but how many people have been involved during all these years?
Shorena Tsindeliani
There is plenty of contracts over the 14 countries, sometimes it's one country, but sometimes it's three or four countries together to do research. So I'm totally unable to tell you how many contracts we signed, but I know that there is more than 400 documents plus the publication and so on. By the way, If people are interested, they can look on the Melissa Foundation webpage. A large part of the reports are available. You can download them. So there is a huge quantity of information which is public. So people can really work on it.
Marcus Pettersson
We learn so much cool things in this program. And we learn you, dear listeners.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
If you want to know more about Melissa Foundation, you can find links and other food for recovery on our website, havioctimarschen.se. There you can also find more information about Tita Global Space Academy, Artemis and the Moon, and of course our previous episodes.
Marcus Pettersson
Yes, and our upcoming episodes. Although they are not there yet, of course. But in the future, it will be among other things Arctic, radiation... lite olika gränser, rymd och försvar.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Och så blir det ett avsnitt om Mars också.
Marcus Pettersson
Ja, äntligen Hörs framåt Musiken som hörs i serien, den är skriven av Armin Pendek.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Jag heter Susanna Lewenhaupt.
Marcus Pettersson
Jag heter Marcus Pettersson.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Har vi åkt i Marsen, görs på Beppo, av Rundfunk Media, i samarbetet, SAV. Hello,
Outro
the program is made by Rundfunk Media.

Chapters

Är vi tillbaka på månen än?
0sec
Christer Fuglesang om Artemis och bemannade månfärder
2min
Shorena Tsindeliani om TITA Global Space Academy
19min
Christophe Lasseur om Melissa
33min

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Chapters

Är vi tillbaka på månen än?
0sec
Christer Fuglesang om Artemis och bemannade månfärder
2min
Shorena Tsindeliani om TITA Global Space Academy
19min
Christophe Lasseur om Melissa
33min

About Har vi åkt till Mars än?

Har vi åkt till Mars än? görs på Beppo av Rundfunk Media i samarbete med Saab.

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Har vi åkt till Mars än? görs på Beppo av Rundfunk Media i samarbete med Saab.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Marcus Pettersson
Susanna, we've been asking for like seven years now, we've been going to Mars. How's it going? Well,
Susanna Lewenhaupt
haven't you heard? Now it's the moon that counts. No,
Marcus Pettersson
here you are.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
The moon, then. Our closest neighbor in space. Where we actually landed people already in 1969.
Marcus Pettersson
Yes, a total of 12 people went to the moon's surface between 1969 and 1972. And then it seemed like we completely lost interest and stopped going there.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
But now, about 10 years ago, there are plans to put people back on the moon again through the Artemis program. And now it's different. Now we're not just talking about going there and putting up a flag. No.
Marcus Pettersson
Now we're talking about stopping, building, living and using the moon as a springboard further out in the solar system. The Artemis program is in full swing with new rockets, new capsules, new landers and new ambitions.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So even if the coming Artemis 2 will not land on the moon but just do a flyby, it is the closest we have come to the moon with people for a long time. So exciting My name is Susanna Lewenhaupt.
Marcus Pettersson
My name is Marcus Pettersson.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And you're listening to Harvi Åk till Mars 1.
Marcus Pettersson
We're standing right in front of Artemis 2, which, according to plan, will fly around the moon now in just a few weeks. We'll see exactly when it will be. The launch was set in February from the beginning. men flyttades på grund av tekniska problem. Så nu är siktet inställt på mars istället. Ja, månaden alltså.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Ja, och när väl Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cook och Jeremy Hansen sätter sig i raketen och åker, så blir det alltså den första bemannade månfärden på över 50 år. Så även om de inte ska landa så är det här stort.
Marcus Pettersson
Så hur ser då planerna för månen ut framöver? When does the first landing of people on the Moon happen? And what does the Moon program mean for our ambitions to reach Mars? Yes, the planet, that is.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Christer Fuglesang, astronaut, professor of spaceflight at KTH and space advisor at SAV. Let's start like this.
Christer Fuglesang
Artemis is NASA's, let's say, current Moon program. It's actually the case that in Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo's sister. One of the stated goals is that Artemis will be the first woman and the first non-white person on the planet. It's an international program, which is not Apollo. So that's very interesting. But it's Apollo plus plus, one could say.
Marcus Pettersson
And the reason we're talking about this now is because a few weeks ago... After a few weeks Artemis 2 will be sent away.
Christer Fuglesang
What is that? Artemis 2 is Apollo 8, the first manned space ship after Apollo that will travel around the Moon. They will not land on the Moon, they will not even go into the runway on the Moon. But they travel around the Moon and come back. The goal with this flight is to prove that all technical things work as they should. They did an unmanned flight three years ago, but now they want to do it in a manned plane.
Marcus Pettersson
What is it that makes it so? Like you, it has been a few years and now when you are going to send it out, is there something wrong with it? A little like days before, is that something you should have known about?
Christer Fuglesang
And of course, the space color program that he sent up. I think that every other month, I rarely went a round trip when it was planned. It was a technical problem, weather problems. So this is nothing unusual. Then it gets harder when you don't do it so often. This is only the second time you send up the Jet Rocket Space Loan System SLS. And that was three years ago last. One of the problems with the Artemis program is that it has an SLS rocket as the base. It's so expensive that you can only send one every other year. That's the problem. I think the program will change. It's not sustainable with ARS.
Marcus Pettersson
Exactly, tell us more about that. We're talking SLS, flying for the second time now, and is not as reusable as Starship. How did you come to this? And how are you going to work forward? If we continue on what you were talking about.
Christer Fuglesang
How you ended up where you are is in general political. When the space ferry was unloaded, the politicians in the states that contributed to the space ferry wanted to keep their jobs. And then they put together a program that could use a lot of components in the space ferry. And it's not effective. NASA would have liked to change this, but it was politically driven. So that's why I think what's going to happen, and Trump actually announced it in the beginning when he took office, but it won't be more than at least three, maybe at least four that are with SLS. You will start using new rockets, and that's mainly and other than SpaceX Starship. That can take as much space as SLS. Or Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos company's new rocket called New Glenn, that can take about half of what SLS can take to space. That can be a good contribution to the Moon program.
Marcus Pettersson
And you, SLS Artemis 2, are going to fly around the Moon. When will we see Artemis land on the Moon? Yes.
Christer Fuglesang
That's a good question. On paper it's 27. In reality it won't be 28, maybe 29. The bottle neck here is actually not SEDS, but it's the car that you should use as a moon lander. And it's actually a Starship, a version of Starship. It has to be qualified first. First, this has to be done without a crew. Starship has not even made a totally successful flight yet. And it is enormously oversized for being a moon lander. So you will have to check up on Starship in the ground. And then you will have to check up on the ship. 8 to 12 appreciates that it is a tank vehicle. To refuel it. Starship, so that they can go on to the moon. They put up a track around the moon. And then comes this Orion, which is sent up with an SLS rocket. There with four astronauts. They dock with each other. Two astronauts go over to Starship, which then lands on the moon. And it's huge. It's actually a completely insane hulk, which has historically been like this. We can talk about that in a program. Yes,
Marcus Pettersson
exactly. But we take a little of it now. Has this been the plan all the time? That Artemis would not land with SLS but that you relied on ANGRA, for example in this case SpaceX?
Christer Fuglesang
Yes, that was the plan when we started Artemis. We have to find a moon lander. And then we went out after a while. Artemis program officially started in 2017. So we went out after a while and said we need a moon lander. Which company can do that? And we need it very early. When we started in 2017, we were supposed to land on the 24th of June. And the only proposal that came in that could possibly last for a certain amount of time was SpaceX with a user-starch. In the last 10-20 years, NASA has normally tried to develop two parallel contracts. to develop. And you would like to give a... to Blue Origin. But you didn't have money for that. But then you got a little more money. So now there are months that get money from NASA to be developed, which is built by Blue Origin. But as I said, if you had from the beginning built up a program consistently in some way, then you would have done it in a completely different way than the Apollo program was. And if you go back in time, you can say that it's Obama's fault. Because Obama forbade NASA to land on the moon. So they didn't have to do anything. Then Trump comes in and says, now we're going to the moon. Then they had to do what they had to do. But there was absolutely nothing that had to do with the moon landing. Then they went after it. And then it went wrong in a bad way, I must say. The Chinese don't do that, I can tell you. No,
Marcus Pettersson
we're going to come back to China soon. I'm going to ask a few questions about that. First, just this week Elon Musk went out with the idea that we should They're not going to end their mission on Mars, but they're going to put the power on the moon. Are SpaceX working with that only within the Artemis program, or do they have their own plans?
Christer Fuglesang
They definitely have their own plans. They haven't developed many plans yet, but this is a very solid approach. The great development in space... I would say that it will be, during the time here, soon on the Moon. To be able to develop opportunities to build things on the Moon, which you can then send up from space, that is, from Moon material. Then you will be able to save a lot of money compared to sending things up from Earth. And that's what I think Elon Musk and SpaceX see. They have recently announced that they want to have up to one million satellites around the world for data centers. If you start building a lot of them on the moon instead, it will be cheaper. We don't know yet where all the possibilities are on the moon, that's why we haven't been there yet. But we had many estimates that there will be so many opportunities there and then you want to be part of the race. The other reason is that they feel the pressure from NASA and USA. What the hell, do we have to get to the moon as soon as possible? So maybe there are extra resources to talk about it in that way.
Marcus Pettersson
For Europe's part, how does our mix look now? Because we are part of Artemis in different ways. But as we say, the conditions change a little back and forth, at least. So what are our active parts in the Artemis program now?
Christer Fuglesang
Above all, it is Europe that stands for the so-called service module to the Orion capsule, the one that comes to the astronauts who go up with SLS and then fly away to the moon. It is built by Europe. It is the development of a cargo ship that Europe built for the International Space Station. So there we are a very integrated part and a very important part of the program. This is a big difference from Apollo, which was only clean. This is Europe from the beginning. And not just Europe, it's Canada and Japan. In the heart of the program, it also goes into the construction of a space station around the Moon. And you will do that before you start building some kind of ground station on the Moon. Lunar Gateway. And there, Europe is already building some modules to that space station. But it's not as big as ISS. It will not be permanently commissioned. But it will also be an important part of the whole program. And that's Europe more or less. It's a bit sad, but there have been plans to have a moon landing and so on, but not for Venice, but for November. And it was actually quite boring that there was a very successful so-called Administrative Council for ESA in November. That's when you put the budget for ESA three years ahead. A lot of money came in, many projects got more money than you asked for. But the man who was in charge of the space program actually got less money than you know. One of the few who got it. And another little comment in the context of. A few weeks ago there was a kind of space policy conference in Brussels. And there was a big panel debate. And Esas general director, Ars Bachel, said at one point. Yes, I think it's bad and so boring. China, Eruningen. own manned space program to the moon and we have nothing in Europe, I think that's bad. So it's not ESA that's the problem, it's the politicians in Europe that don't give the right money to ESA.
Marcus Pettersson
You mention Lunar Gateway here, when will it be sent up, the first parts, do we know that?
Christer Fuglesang
The first part is going to be sent up with Artemis IV, which on paper today is perhaps to be released sometime in 2028. But it's hard to know what to believe and when it can happen. I would say it's not even impossible that you will change the order of Artemis 3 and Artemis 4. You send up the first module to Lunar Gator before you send up the first crew to land on the moon because there are no moon landers. But then you have to think that Artemis... four, five, six, I should basically send parts to the new gate even with other archers if there is not I'm a little unsure but that kind of new glen can also contribute to sending parts to this And then the Artemis aircraft partly brought stuff to Lunar Gateway, but also planned to land on the Moon and go down for a while.
Marcus Pettersson
Then the leading question, will Artemis come first with the Moon to the Moon? You have mentioned China here now, how do other countries look outside of the Artemis cooperation?
Christer Fuglesang
China is the most obvious. They have a very good track record of doing things in space when they have said that they should do it in space. They have a space station that has been permanently occupied since 1922. They have about a number of moon landers. They have taken things from Akron, the back side of the moon had not been done before. They say that they will have people on the moon by 2030. They have even shown tests on moon landers and new rockets and so on. So there is no reason to believe that they would not land on the moon with people in 2030. Maybe by 2029. If they see a chance to come before, I think they will try to take it. At the same time, it is very uncertain how the Artemis program looks. My guess is that Artemis will come before. But I think China will have a much more regular program. I haven't seen their plans, but I would believe it. Artemis program is one flight with people to the moon every other year. It's not a good program to do in that way. But if you do it then, use Starship instead, then it will be better. Probably two moon bases will be built. from the beginning of the 20-30s. China has already named its International Lunar Research Station. They have already named it International. Russia, for example, is one of the countries that has written a co-operation paper for this. There are two groups. Most people consider the best area to be in is the South. pool, among other things, because there you can get craters, chambers, you can get sunlight almost all the time and then get electric solar panels and a lot of other benefits. And then Amritsar is worried that the Chinese will be the first to take the best place. You don't have the right to own land on the moon, but you don't have the right to disturb someone else who is doing something in the room. If someone comes here and says, I'm here, don't come close because then you land and throw up a lot of smoke on us. So you can in practice usurp or take a certain area. So this is a pretty big geopolitical thing that will definitely be exciting to see how it develops.
Marcus Pettersson
Cool Soon Mojo on the moon Yes, but...
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Åka till molen är en sak, men att överleva där är en helt annan. För om vi menar allvar med att stanna längre perioder, bygga molnbaser och till och med städer, då räcker det inte med raketer och landare.
Marcus Pettersson
Nej, vi måste kunna producera luft, rena vatten, hantera avfall och kanske till och med odla vår egen mat. Allt i en miljö som verkligen inte vill ha oss där. And then we have to actually learn how to do all this.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Sharina Tzindeliani is founder of and CEO of Tita Global Space Academy, an education focus completely focused on human spaceflight and life-saving systems. That is, everything that is required to keep people alive on the moon and Mars.
Marcus Pettersson
Brilliant So, Sharina, what is Tita Global Space Academy?
Shorena Tsindeliani
TITA Global Space Academy is the company that is specifically dedicated to provide a unique niche and undervalued education in all areas related to human spaceflight. Basically anything that contributes directly to keeping people alive and in well-being in extraterrestrial environments or basically on any other planet apart from Earth is... what we are aiming to do, whether it's life support that basically contributes with water, food and air or space resource utilization, which includes the oxygen generation, water recovery from ice or propellant development locally. And you need to think not only how to send people, but also how to sustain them. Space manufacturing, one of the... Very interesting businesses and in a couple of years will be one of the main businesses probably in LEO, considering the commercial space stations coming. Space medicine, very underrated direction. I mean, Markus, you are in a good relationship with astronauts and perhaps you hear how their health, both mental and physical, is affected just by being in LEO for a couple of months. But no one knows what will happen to health if a person stays for years. And it's important to prepare, to provide the preventive medicine, to diagnose, to provide some help in emergency situations. So anything that keeps people alive and well and fit in lunar on Martian surface is what life support is and what we are intending to teach.
Marcus Pettersson
So what exactly is it that you want to do?
Shorena Tsindeliani
So basically we aim to prepare five modules that will be environmental control and life support system, in space resource dualization, autonomous navigation and AI, human factors and medicine, and manufacturing and 3D printing. Right now we started developing our first course in E-Class which is intended to launch by the end of this year and then ISRU will follow etc. We will also have four different tires. or four different levels in each module, which will be foundation, professional, expert, and corporate, so that we can fit any background. The corporate packages will be on site, and right now we are in agreement with the Arctic business to provide us with a location in Luleå, but maybe in future also in Kiruna, which is a strategic move for us, because then we also have possibility to demonstrate in general Swedish. Sweden's capacity in terms of a human spaceflight with the S-Range being their universities and companies located in the northern side of Sweden.
Marcus Pettersson
So the course itself is not part of any university or so?
Shorena Tsindeliani
No, and the course will be completely independent. And our main IP is in the fact that we will extract the knowledge that is usually not presented and provided by the university. It's not generalistic knowledge, but more operational. For example, university can teach you how the water recovery system works on the ISS, what are the components included, what are the purification levels, what was the evolution between different components, what is OPEX. But perhaps you will not know what happens if you have an ammonium breakthrough 3am in the morning and how it is operationally dealt with. And this kind of knowledge exists only in experts had. And right now with the commissioning of the ISS, the key... And fundamental experts in this area are either at this retirement age or are already retired. So it's extremely important to document it to transfer. And we believe this will significantly increase interest in the life support and contribute also directly to the European autonomy by providing this education locally.
Marcus Pettersson
You talk a lot about the teachers, the experts that you're having. Who are they?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Our experts come from the different parts of the world. They are of different nationalities. They represent different countries. Some of them come from governmental organizations, some from industries. What really unites them is that all of them have a solid experience, 20-plus years of experience working in the industry. These are the people who build the systems. These are people that led the missions. and these are the main contributors today in the main developments of the space industry. What is very important to mention perhaps, we are also trying and considering collaborating with experts that are not bound by any specific agreements, for instance, ITAR agreements or export control agreements, so that they can freely share the reason for the failures or their very secretive experience with us. And then we just document it in the way that is easily transferable to the participants.
Marcus Pettersson
How was it to connect all your experts? Was it hard to get them to get involved?
Shorena Tsindeliani
We see quite big interest. from both experts but also preliminary participants. And what is interesting, not only participants who come from the space sector but also participants from the medical industry, for instance, or autonomous navigation because they see that their skills can be applicable to space. They just need to have a mission context just to make this step. And that really is very good news.
Marcus Pettersson
So now we're touching on the subject of the participants and the people doing your course. Who are they?
Shorena Tsindeliani
We target anyone, if talking about the customer base, we target anyone who either wants or is in the human spaceflight related area. But specifically it's graduates or early professionals who want to receive operational knowledge in order to increase their chances of employment. On the other hand, it's also current experts and professionals working for years in these areas, but either want to always keep up to date or want to transfer from one area of life support to another. For instance, from life support to ISRU. Someone who wants to meet our experts and hear their own stories to learn from their mistakes or successes. And of course, it's companies and organizations that are understanding the importance of having their employees constantly trained and up to date because that directly increases efficiency and ROI in the end.
Marcus Pettersson
So what's the, what's not the plan or the goal, but where do you see the company in a few years? What is your main objective first, the first big step you want to reach?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Once TITA alumni is a synonym of operational depth and trust. And when I start feeling that, That's an indication of success. Once we train 500 people and the local network is created, that's success. And even if we look a bit longer than five years, once we see a European walking on the moon and you have all the environment around you, all the components that keep you alive, and I understand that there is some kind of contribution through the education. to make this possible, that's the biggest dream, professional dream come true for me personally.
Marcus Pettersson
Why is this important for Europe to have?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Well, space is not only about rockets. It's not only about satellites. It's not only about systems. The core is always human. And for the... Past decades, Europe has been extremely strong in developing systems, but perhaps the accent has not been on talent and neither on human. And if Europe really means to send humans, Europeans, on the surface of the moon by 2030, then we must start thinking about having the talent internally and education locally. Because that directly affects the autonomy and also reliance on the international talent. It is quite pity to be dependent completely on international talent and not being able to employ, for instance, a C-class engineer. When you have to spend a considerable amount to the third parties, you need to deal with expensive EOR or employment of record services. You need to deal with visas and so many other problems. So if we really want to sustain humans in space and if it's European targets, then it is definitely time to start thinking about now.
Marcus Pettersson
So how do you see this, not from your academy point of view, but because we have now, I mean, this is the perfect timing to set up this. I mean, we're going back to the moon, we're going forward to Mars. So in what way will you make a difference in the long run for this?
Shorena Tsindeliani
By providing the local education in these very crucial and niche areas, education in the shortest period of time, because not all professionals for instance can enroll today in a master's degree or even if it's one year master's degree, and obviously by providing internal pool of people of talent. within Europe itself. So it's easier to hire and you don't have to spend eight months to hire one person. And that is again directly contributes to both Europe's targets.
Marcus Pettersson
of doing this by the year 2030 with Terrae NOA and also by making the autonomy much stronger and dependency much lower.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
When we started talking about this back in December, I think it was, because you've been taken into SABIC and that is part of the funding for this is through SABIC. Can you tell me about that?
Marcus Pettersson
ISABIC is a European Space Agency business incubation center. There are different ISABICs depending on the country you are in. It's actually my second experience working with ISABIC. In my previous company, we also been part of ISABIC and we are alumni right now. But it's, I would say if you are starting a startup from the scratch and you don't have financial capabilities like Elon Musk. and you need to be part of the space network, that is the best way of starting the company. And I will say it's not easy because each year the demand from Isabik also increases and it's becoming more challenging to get in, both in terms of business plan and the pitching and interviews and the qualifications. For instance, in my case, since this is a company that starts completely from the scratch, It was not easy to get part of this, but I believe that they also saw the potential, then the opportunity and the need for this. ESA Big supports you with finances, but that's not really the most important. That probably gives you some engine to start with, but it's more about network. It's more about possibility to get basically any engineer you want within ESA or even SNSA. Let's say if I want someone to review a curriculum, I can get help from ESA Big and they will try to reach and they will pay to that person. And that's a tremendous support together with support in terms of the IP protection, in terms of the different technical support premises and many, many more. So for any startup that basically starts from the scratch. That's a very, very good opportunity.
Christer Fuglesang
Okay, now we have a good start. We're going to the moon, and we've learned how the system keeps us alive when we're on the spot. Check
Susanna Lewenhaupt
But we want longer than that. And when we talk about traveling to Mars and stuff, then we're on the next level. Because if we're gone for three years, then we can't take all the food, all the water...
Christer Fuglesang
What is MELISA?
Shorena Tsindeliani
So if you want to go to Mars, you need to, let's say, maintain the crew and transport also what we call metabolic consumables. So it will be oxygen, water and food. But this represents for a mission of roughly three years, a lot of mass. Too much for the capacities of the current launcher. So you need to recycle. So MELISA is this. You recycle the water, you recycle urine, you recycle faecal matter. But the problem is... is the food sources. Because if you want to produce food, you need biology. And this is where you need to consider plants, bacteria, microalgae, and so on. To simplify, it's a kind of an artificial ecosystem.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And is it an ecosystem that is up and running in space or is it just paperwork?
Shorena Tsindeliani
No, it's much more than paperwork, but it's not in space yet. The project started in 1989, so it's a long-term effort. It started mainly with France and Belgium, but now there are 14 countries involved. So it's really a European consortium, a European effort, and it really tackles all the domains. So waste recycling, urine treatment, CO2 capture, oxygen production, food production, and so on. So we have an integration site. which is located in Barcelona, which we call the Melissa pilot plant, where we progressively, let's say, assemble the bricks, or the piece of the puzzle if you want. And we have As well in parallel, a large number of flight experiments, just to be sure that our understanding, our control of the processes we want to use are still correct.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So we flew around,
Shorena Tsindeliani
I think, 10 or 11 flight experiments now, mainly on board space station, but not only.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Is there any plans for the whole system to be up and running in space?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Well, it's a very difficult question, because as you know, the international situation is a bit waving these days. I tried to be, let's say, very diplomatic there. There was an idea to go to Mars, to simplify, eight years ago. And then there was a big decision to stop this, to return to the moon. Now, visibly, this is what is planned. But there was discussion even a year ago to stop the moon and to go to Mars. So it's very hard to tell you. Now, in terms of technological development, it's reasonably clear that The return to moon will probably slow down these kind of processes because it's not becoming a top priority anymore. Top priority will be probably energy, radiation protection, and so on. So before, I would say, the plan was somewhere around 2050. But now it's very difficult to guess any date.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Can you describe, first off, what does MELISA stand for? And then... Yes, the parts of it. What is it that you do? How does it work?
Shorena Tsindeliani
So MELISA stands for Micro Ecological Life Support System Alternative. Yeah. And it's trying to mimic, or let's say it differently, it's inspired by a terrestrial ecosystem. So we go back to the early days of MELISA. We thought, is there any technology existing that we could be inspired in order to? And in fact, the technology is existing, it's a terrestrial ecosystem. And of course, we cannot fly a complete ecosystem. So we get inspired by a lake. So if you look carefully in a lake, at the bottom part of the lake, you will have no oxygen, more or less, no light. You will be in what we call anaerobic, and you will have microbial degradation with many bacteria. So they will produce shorter molecules. And then you are a little bit higher in the lake, so you will... you can benefit of a bit of light. So this will help you. We are in what we call photo-heterotrophic process, sorry for the complex name, which means mainly using light in order to transform other source of carbon which are not CO2. And you go a little bit higher, you are closer to surface of the lake, so there you will have a bit of dissolved oxygen. So you will be mainly able to transform the urea coming from urine, which is a main source of nitrogen for the plant. And then you will let's say oxidize it, you will go to what we call nitrate, NO3. And then you have more or less everything you need. You have the CO2, you have the nitrate, you have the light. So you can have photosynthesis, and then you will be able to grow plants and microalgae, produce food, produce oxygen, trap CO2, and even produce water. So you have a complete circular system.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And again, you talked about it, but how would this work? when you come to, when you go to space?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Of course, for, let's say, for the transit phase, or even to initiate the system, because the system is not perfect, so you will never have 100% of recycling. So you still need to transport. And then, of course, then the waste will be more or less collected, if I may say, CO2 coming from the astronaut, urine, and so on, and then will be progressively transformed. So if you speak about bacteria or microorganisms, You need to... Consider more or less a container, a container extremely well controlled, pH, temperature, styling, light and so on. And this you separate the liquid from the solid and you move to another big container where you will have another transformation and then at the end you will have the greenhouses where you will be able to produce, potentially the astronaut going there to harvest and part of course of the biomass is a waste, so it's returning directly. The other part is consumed by the astronaut.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
We're talking about Mars now. We should build it on Mars. How big will a system like this need to be to get it working?
Shorena Tsindeliani
That's a very good question because this is still one of the key challenges. There are two key challenges. Radiation. Also, the radiation is more an issue for the crew than for the bacteria. Bacteria have a tendency to resist reasonably well. The top priority issue for the radiation is the astronaut. And for the transit phase, you are limited in terms of volume. So probably for the transit phase, we will not aim to a huge percentage of the diet, maybe a few percent, let's say, the top priority molecule that you need and which are very difficult to store fresh. But when you arrive on surface and you can deploy and have, let's say, produce more and come back. So there is the requirement, we call it the requirement in terms of engineering, are very different. for the transit phase and then the surface phase.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
And again, how big will it need to be when you get there?
Shorena Tsindeliani
It's difficult to give you an answer because it's very dependent on the diet. For example, we know that more or less we can have a proper diet, equilibrate, with wheat only. But of course, you cannot imagine that the astronaut will eat only wheat. So you see, all this issue is not decided yet because we don't have the number. We still try to optimize. This is always a kind of... equilibrium that you have to find between top priority for space, who as you know have been changing a lot over the last eight years, well even more very recently, and of course the cost of development, the research. The space industry, who to oversimplify, is not so much fascinated by plant biology or whatever, they would dream of bigger launcher, because this is their core business, this is where their knowledge is. So if you start to tell them you need to study plants and so on, there is a bit of a reluctance. And we see it every day. If you open the news, the big space company, they want to do bigger launcher. They don't want to recycle so much. This is not their business.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So if we leave space for a few seconds, what during these... 35 years or so that you've been working on this or this project's been going on. What have you come up with? What new things, what have you learned that help us here on Earth?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Indeed, we have a lot of what we call technological bricks, which are used to answer some terrestrial challenges. We have water recycling, of course. We have it in hotels. We have it in universities. So Clearly this is done, it's a commercial product now. And then we have this urine to fertilizer which is as well a commercial product. There is a few concrete realizations, there is a spin-off. And then we have microbial safety. For you to know, and this was not planned, based on the Mir experience, you remember Mir, the Russian space station. When we talk with the ocean, they tell us we have experienced big difficulties with microbial contamination. I'm back to the 90s there. So we thought, OK, we have to consider this. So we developed a technology to be able to detect and identify microbial pathogens. And this technology happens to be potentially usable for viruses. And guess what? It became, and it is still today, the first. a technological platform for COVID detection in the world. There are three big factories which are producing this unit, the consumable, so it's a tremendous success on this. But it was not planned, again, we were trying to solve the microbial safety of our space vehicles. We were not thinking that COVID will appear. So there is a few results. So now this is, again, this wording of technological bricks. Which is good, I mean, we have commercial companies, we are applied, this is good. Politicians are happy, we are happy because we learn as well, you know. If you have a technology, you need to validate it, you need to test it and so on. If you test electronic systems such as this microphone, you can plug it, restart it. But if you need to transform waste, and a consumer, you need both. Yeah, you need waste, you need human waste, okay? of which quality, you need to be sure what the people have been doing and so on, yeah? And you need somebody to costume it, yeah? And how do you do that? You cannot take people from the street and pack them in a container for three years. So this technology, the application of this technology for terrestrial challenges is very good for us because we learn with a lot of diversity what could be the problem and where are the problems and what we should improve, how to do the maintenance and so on. So now we, let's say the robustness of the technology is much better than it was due to this commercial application.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
You are now retired. But how does the project Melissa continue? What happens with that and how do you see it in the future?
Shorena Tsindeliani
Now of course Melissa will suffer today of this international situation. That's very clear. There is some reorganization at the level of the project, to what I hear, because I'm not involved anymore. To what I hear, there is some reorganization there. So I don't know exactly how this will settle. But there is risk. There is risk that the European effort will be seriously reduced.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
If we don't talk Melissa, what do we need to improve? What do we need to work with when it comes to human spaceflight for long term in space?
Shorena Tsindeliani
I would say radiation is a key issue. And I have no clue how they will solve it. Maybe if they are on the moon, maybe they will dig and go below with caterpillar and stuff like that. still for me a bit of science fiction.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
So you thought there was lots of countries working together on this, but how many people have been involved during all these years?
Shorena Tsindeliani
There is plenty of contracts over the 14 countries, sometimes it's one country, but sometimes it's three or four countries together to do research. So I'm totally unable to tell you how many contracts we signed, but I know that there is more than 400 documents plus the publication and so on. By the way, If people are interested, they can look on the Melissa Foundation webpage. A large part of the reports are available. You can download them. So there is a huge quantity of information which is public. So people can really work on it.
Marcus Pettersson
We learn so much cool things in this program. And we learn you, dear listeners.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
If you want to know more about Melissa Foundation, you can find links and other food for recovery on our website, havioctimarschen.se. There you can also find more information about Tita Global Space Academy, Artemis and the Moon, and of course our previous episodes.
Marcus Pettersson
Yes, and our upcoming episodes. Although they are not there yet, of course. But in the future, it will be among other things Arctic, radiation... lite olika gränser, rymd och försvar.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Och så blir det ett avsnitt om Mars också.
Marcus Pettersson
Ja, äntligen Hörs framåt Musiken som hörs i serien, den är skriven av Armin Pendek.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Jag heter Susanna Lewenhaupt.
Marcus Pettersson
Jag heter Marcus Pettersson.
Susanna Lewenhaupt
Har vi åkt i Marsen, görs på Beppo, av Rundfunk Media, i samarbetet, SAV. Hello,
Outro
the program is made by Rundfunk Media.

Chapters

Är vi tillbaka på månen än?
0sec
Christer Fuglesang om Artemis och bemannade månfärder
2min
Shorena Tsindeliani om TITA Global Space Academy
19min
Christophe Lasseur om Melissa
33min

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About Har vi åkt till Mars än?

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Chapters

Är vi tillbaka på månen än?

Christer Fuglesang om Artemis och bemannade månfärder

Shorena Tsindeliani om TITA Global Space Academy

Christophe Lasseur om Melissa

Chapters

Är vi tillbaka på månen än?

Christer Fuglesang om Artemis och bemannade månfärder

Shorena Tsindeliani om TITA Global Space Academy

Christophe Lasseur om Melissa

Chapters

Är vi tillbaka på månen än?

Christer Fuglesang om Artemis och bemannade månfärder

Shorena Tsindeliani om TITA Global Space Academy

Christophe Lasseur om Melissa

Chapters

Är vi tillbaka på månen än?

Christer Fuglesang om Artemis och bemannade månfärder

Shorena Tsindeliani om TITA Global Space Academy

Christophe Lasseur om Melissa