Transcriber: Giorgia Cianfanelli Reviewer: Emanuel Restituyo Gil
Growing up as a kid, I loved watching shows about space. Maybe you did, too.
One of my favorites was Star Trek.
I dreamed of searching for aliens elsewhere in
the Solar System and looking for the origins of life down here on Earth.
And I remember one day at university I was studying for an exam
I was definitely not prepared for.
So I went to go get a coffee
Because I knew I’d be staying up all night studying.
I decided to take a slight detour, though,
to the engineering precinct because as a science student,
I’d never been there before and I heard that they had better coffee.
But on that walk, I found something much better than a good coffee.
I came across a flyer about a group of students
building a Mars rover as part of a robotics competition
in the United States. They were looking for an astro biologist,
someone who looked for life out in space, and I thought to myself: “Wow,
this is amazing. What are the chances? This is exactly what I want to do.”
So I signed up right there. Now, when I joined the team, this was the rover.
It was a metal box. It wasn't much,
but from that metal box we built our first prototype.
It was made using aluminium and door hinges we bought from Bunnings
and wheelbarrow wheels we scavenged from the backyard.
You could only turn left and its wheels kept falling off.
But that didn’t stop us. We continue to build and innovate
and soon created our final rover, which we called Sandstorm.
We then took Sandstorm with us overseas to the University Rover Challenge.
We represented Australia for the first time.
Now we couldn’t afford to send Sandstorm overseas as freight.
So we decided to disassemble it and then pack it into our suitcases.
We then went all the way through American Airport Security with our suitcases
full of metal and wires. Now that's a journey I'll certainly never forget.
Now, from these experiences,
I was lucky enough to go visit NASA Ames to work on one of their Mars rovers
as part of a simulated mission in the Atacama Desert.
But looking back, all these sequences of events sent from
a simple decision to take a detour when walking to get a coffee.
Now I want you to think about a moment in your life where you took a detour.
Maybe it was a slightly different path from what you were planning or
a surprise roadblock which stopped you from doing something entirely.
Now these detours in our lives, they can be frustrating. They could be exciting.
They can be meaningless or they can be life defining.
And today I'm here to talk to you about detours in space.
About a detour that some of us or our children may make in the not
so distant future. As NASA’s plan to send humans onwards to Mars and choose
the Moon as a stepping stone to get there.
To achieve this journey they’re planning to launch
the Lunar Gateway in 2024 to serve as an orbiting outpost
for human missions to the Moon and staging grounds
for refueling spacecraft before their journey to Mars.
The goal? Establishing an interplanetary human presence.
Now you might be thinking, “Daniel, hold on,
why should I care about space in the first place?
Isn't space just for billionaires riding their own rockets or
for NASA to go look at dirt on other planets?”
No, space is much more than that
in the words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek.
“Space is the final frontier.” And if you would ask me why explore space,
I would ask you: Why explore?
Because as humans, we are innately curious about the world around us.
It's the reason why we choose to explore the world or take detours in
the first place. Now, some of the most curious people I've ever met are kids.
I take every opportunity to explore the world around them,
and they ask the best questions. They simply ask “Why?” “Why is the sky blue?”
“Why is the sunset red?” “Why do stars twinkle?”
And ultimately, this is what my talk is all about. It's about being curious.
Now, some of you may be fascinated by space and others not so much.
And if that’s you, I hope by the end of this talk,
you'll be feeling just a little bit more curious.
Now, space is much more than a frontier for exploration or a playground
for curiosity. It’s a catalyst
for developing new technologies that benefit us down here on Earth,
and I could list the countless innovations in health, medicine,
communications, materials science, transport.
But I want you to look down at your feet.
Chances are, if you're wearing some air cushioned soles in your shoes,
they were made using a technique called blow rubber molding.
Now this technique was originally made to create shock absorbing materials
and spacesuit helmets. And then
an engineer called Frank Rudy pitched it to Nike and we got Nike Air.
So I like to think when Neil Armstrong took his first small step,
it really was one giant leap for mankind.
Now, if you woke up this morning and you burnt your toast and the fire alarm
started going off. You can thank space for that lovely noise
because modern day smoke alarms were made to detect fires
and toxic gases in Spacelab, which was America’s first space station.
If he then grabbed a cordless vacuum cleaner to clean up this crumbs of
burnt toast, then you just grabbed
a piece of technology that helped Apollo astronauts collect soil samples on
the Moon. Their equipment had to be small, lightweight, but most importantly,
battery powered. Maybe then grabbed a cool glass of water to chill out.
Well, you'd be chilling like an astronaut,
because up on the International Space Station, all water has to be filtered,
purified and recycled. What does this mean?
All water has to be filtered, purified and recycled, even their urine. So,
as the saying goes, the coffee you drink today is the coffee you’ll drink tomorrow.
Now you might be thinking,“Ok,
space is kind of cool, but why should I care about the Moon?”
“Haven’t we already been there a few times?”
Yes, but we've just scratched the surface, literally.
If you were an alien species and you landed six different points around
the equator, dug a few too many holes into the ground,
could you confidently say that you knew that everything there was to know about
the Earth? Well, this is how much we've explored the Moon.
In comparison, we've been studying the Earth for tens of thousands of years,
dug kilometers into the ground, and we still have so many unanswered questions.
One of those questions is the origin and evolution of life on Earth.
Now, liquid water is an essential ingredient for all life.
But exactly how and when Earth got its oceans,
I’m not entirely clear. An answer to this question could lie up on the Moon.
We think that the icy comets, which contain a large amount of water,
slammed into the early Earth, giving us some of our oceans.
These same comets would have slammed into the Moon as well.
But if you look at the Moon, there’s no oceans, there’s no rivers.
And in the source report back there would try it in the dry soils we have
on Earth. So, where’s all the water?
It's up in a dark place that even the Sun doesn't shine.
Unlike the Earth, the Moon rotates perpendicularly on its axis.
This means that light from the sun grazes across the top and bottom of the poles.
So, if a meteor ever creates an impact crater up at the pole,
it creates a crater that light can never directly enter.
We call these regions persistently shadowed regions or PSR.
Now what do you think happens to a place that doesn't receive sunlight
for billions of years? It gets cold, really cold.
So cold, in fact, that we've recorded
the coldest surface temperature in our solar system in a PSR on the Moon.
It was about 25° above absolute zero or - 250° centigrade.
Now, why is this important?
Because any water that enters a PSR becomes permanently trapped.
Because the molecules are moving so slowly because it’s so cold.
This means that as water accumulates and builds up,
there could be a several billion year old history of ice delivery to the Moon.
This means that by studying the Moon,
we can learn more about the origins and evolution of Earth,
oceans and even possibly life. Now this is where my Ph.D. research comes in.
I'm interested in finding out how much water there is,
where it is and what are its properties.
Now, we've never visited a PSR before or collected any samples,
so this makes my job really difficult, but also really exciting.
Now the Moon means a lot of different things to different people.
What does it mean to you? It could mark the beginning of a new lunar year
and celebration, or it could just illuminate the sky
as you drive home at night.
For me, the moon is a gateway to the rest of our Solar System.
It’s a hub for both new scientific discoveries and knowledge. Knowledge,
which I hope to contribute to over the next few years.
Now, why should you care about water on the Moon, though?
Because water is essential for keeping humans alive in space. We drink it,
we use it to grow crops. We can split it into oxygen, hydrogen to breathe,
and we can even use it for rocket fuel.
If we can learn to use the water we collect from PSR on the Moon,
then we can keep astronauts alive in space for longer.
This removes the need for heavy and expensive resupply mission from
the Earth and is all part of NASA's dream to live off the land to use
the resources we find in space to keep astronauts alive for longer
and to explore further than we ever have before, eventually to Mars.
But before we go to Mars, we need to demonstrate that astronauts can collect
their own water, grow their own food and create their own air. And to do this,
We need to demonstrate that it works on the Moon first.
This is why the Moon is important. It's more than a rock we visited in the 70s.
It’s a sandpit where we can develop new technologies that benefit us on Earth.
It's a library where we can study the origins
and evolution of Earth's oceans and possibly even life.
It's not just a detour on the journey to Mars to refuel.
It's an essential stepping stone in our journey to get there.
So what does this all mean? Why should you care?
How does space, the Moon or Mars relate to your life?
Because right now you’re living through the fourth industrial revolution
of the world. There is already
an estimated demand of about 500 metric tons of water to be collected from
the Moon. This will generate about $2.4 billion of revenue annually.
This demand stems from refueling spacecraft and satellites,
astronauts living on the lunar gateway and on the Moon.
Space agriculture and space tourism.
Now, this all sounds amazing,
but why can't we check into a space hotel right now?
Because moving things in space is expensive in lunar orbit,
one liter of water costs about $36000 if it's sent from Earth.
But if we can collect one liter of water from a PSR on the Moon,
it would only cost about $500 because water can be used for
so many different things. It’s access to cheap water underpins
the future of space travel.
But the biggest thing holding us back right now is that we can only get water
from the Earth. So if we can learn to use water from the Moon,
things become cheaper. When things are cheap and there’s demand,
then there’s an economy.
Now, the space sector is currently worth about $450 billion
and it's poised to explode several trillion dollars by 2040 and to try
and capture this lightning in a bottle.
The Australian space agency released
a report back in 2019 outlining their intentions to triple the size of
the space sector and to grow 20,000 additional jobs.
All these jobs won’t be up in space, though; most will be down on Earth.
Now, whatever it is that excites you about space,
I want you to imagine yourself in 10 or 20 years.
Imagine yourself as humans are setting foot on Mars and establishing bases
on the moon. Where are you? Are you in Australia? Are you overseas?
Are you on the Moon or are you even on Mars? What are you doing?
It could be similar to what you're doing right now,
or something entirely different.
It was not so long ago that jobs like Project Manager
or Data Analyst didn’t exist,
so I'd like to think that the jobs that will be working in the future don't exist.
Yes. Who else are you working with?
Because no single company or nation can build a global space sector
on their own. And this is why we need people from every background
and every discipline to help us get into space and to stay there safely.
Now, this is why I’m excited about space and going to the Moon.
I'm curious to explore the world around me to see the way
the next detour in my life will take me.
And I'm excited to share that passion with space with others
and help you connect to space.
So, I invite you all to reclaim your childhood curiosity.
To alway ask: Why? To be willing to explore new paths
and to take detours, to think about what space, the Moon and Mars mean to you.
Now, some of you might find yourself taking a detour in your life,
working in a role you never planned for,
in an industry that you didn’t know existed.
And you never know,
it just might happen the next time you go get a coffee.
Thank you.