Artemis II, Dallas Campbell and Smile

21:35But unfortunately, we couldn't. We just can't use very little Russian artwork we could get, or we can't do any deals with any of the museums to use any of their artwork for obvious reasons.

21:45Sue Nelson:That's a shame, because I remember years ago, pre-COVID, you showing me a book about, something about Galena in the British Interplanetary Society Library. And you were obsessed with her then. I really was. You're a bit of a space stalker, aren't you? A bit of a creepy space stalker. But anyway, so I have this book. But what I'll do is I'll do it. If I do it, I'll be doing various talks on this book. So I'm going to do my secret behind the scenes talk of things that I wanted to put in, which I wasn't allowed to put in. That could be like the people who subscribe. What do they call the little extras that only subscribe?

22:24Sue Nelson:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So if you come and see me talk, I'm doing various festivals and what have you. So I shall talk about Galena and other weird things that didn't make it into the book for political reasons and weird reasons and cost reasons. One thing I wanted to do, because I was looking for this this morning in my bookcase, our bookcase, was you have one of these Brook Bond picture card books from 1971. 1971. I have that book, which is the one you reproduce. Now, because for anyone, this is such a weird thing when you think about this. So there used to be cigarette cards, little cards, little picture cards you got in packets of cigarettes.

23:09And then they were superseded by cards you got in tea. And then you collect the cards and you could send off for the book and you'd stick the cards in the book. And the books were like historical or transport. And I got the space one, which you reproduce some of that in your in your your book it was such a nostalgia rush i thought i've still got that book somewhere well that's that's what i mean by space as part of culture the fact that those sorts of things were in people's lives and were a big part of people's life actually the reason that is in the book was because my neighbor in islington oh i'm not in islington anymore but i was until last year but my neighbor there um trevor beattie who worked in advertising went up in virgin galactic he's one of the first Virgin Galactic space astronaut, what am I talking about?

23:58You know, paid to go up there. And he showed me, I saw a copy of his school book where he did a little project about Apollo. And it was so beautiful, his little school book. And he had all the Brookbond exactly as he did. I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to do a chapter about Trevor, my neighbour. And so he's in that and all of his stuff. That's because it's so weird, isn't it? Think about it. You've got a little card with tea that you then send off for a book. Loose tea. It wasn't tea bags either. It was a sort of cardboard box of loose tea. And as a result, we only had Brookborne tea, so we could get those little cards.

24:33But I think you can also send off for the cards, if you didn't have all the cards, I think you could send off for extra cards. I might send off for some and see if there's two. Yes, you probably sent off a stamp to Jess.

24:43Sue Nelson:By the way, I like that little section on Trevor, actually. Particularly, we won't go into too much detail because people will want to read it for themselves, about how it involved his school report card. I thought that was a really nice tale. So you've covered this big range of culture and I suppose we're on the verge of, you could say, potentially another cultural change with Artemis and getting back to where we started when we've got a new generation of people who knows what's going to... I'm assuming it probably, unlike the Klangas, it will be using AI and on YouTube and stuff like that in terms of cultural impact.

25:23Yeah, I suppose so. And I suppose Artemis, what is its primary goal? Obviously to do science and all those things, but also to inspire a generation in the way that people of my age grew up. Well, I suppose I grew up post Apollo. I was a bit too young. I remember Apollo as a kid, but just after Apollo. And again, but we forget, we get misty eyed about Apollo, but we forget about how difficult what the world was like then in late 68. 1968, America was dropping all kinds of ordinance over Southeast Asia. There were civil rights riots, there were assassinations. It was a difficult political time as it is now.

26:01And there are these, I don't know, that's that idea of history. If it doesn't repeat, at least it rhymes. And we're in difficult political times now, interesting political times, difficult political times. And we're going back to the moon again. But I hope just that act of going back to the moon, what is it about the moon? We're just obsessed with the moon. We always have been. You know what it is? It's that idea that the moon is this, it's unreachable. It's, you know, that expression, you want the moon on a stick. It is the thing that we cannot touch and yet we can touch it. It resonates with us, I think.

26:34And yes, there will be a whole new generation, I think, and hopefully obsessed with it.

26:40Sue Nelson:Dallas Campbell, thank you very much indeed. The book is called Space Journal, Art, Science and Cosmic Exploration. And it is a work of beauty and interesting words. Don't worry, you're not overshadowed by those gorgeous illustrations, okay? I'm quite, I've learned to be happy to be overshadowed by the illustrations. The illustrations, well, not the photographs. They're the photographs, aren't they? they're yeah they're beautiful just tremendous yeah so there we go thank you and you notice dallas how sue segued so nicely from artemis into your book and then back out into artemis it's such a pro it's almost like i've done this before yeah i know almost yeah this is space bobbins we're in partnership with the naked scientists that would have been good if we hadn't crashed that that was almost good but we'll you know what we'll keep it we'll keep it in with its two juicy beef patties three slices of melted cheese and tangy big arch sauce the big arch is what happens when you start making a mcdonald's burger and never stop the big arch the most mcdonald's mcdonald's burger yet for a limited time

27:53getting touch on social media at space boffins email us podcast at spaceboffins.com or do send us a postcard, as many people have now, which is lovely. The address is on the Boffin Media website. And we've had an email from Owen. Sorry, Owen. Despite my best efforts, and I have asked the Royal Astronomical Society your question, we are struggling to answer. We have even emailed the Artemis II commander, Reid Wiseman, for an answer to your question. And I'm not going to say what the question is. So we will get back to you. We'll try and do it in the next podcast.

28:27Sue Nelson:Intriguing. Intriguing. Right, let's get on to a new spacecraft called SMILE. It'll be launching in April and it stands for Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionospheric Link Explorer. I'm glad it's called SMILE, to be honest, because that's quite a mouthful. I'll try it again. Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionospheric Link Explorer. That's a crazy acronym. It is. They've worked backwards, haven't they? Rich, we know this happens, but it's OK. It's a joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Now, the aim is to get a better understanding of the magnetosphere. That's the Earth's protective shield, effectively, from a lot of harmful incoming material from space.

29:11Sue Nelson:And the mission has got a lot of UK involvement. So my first port of call was Space Park Leicester, which is a part of the university, to speak to Dr Jennifer Carter about their contribution. Leicester has been involved with SMILE in terms of the X-ray camera on board. So SMILE will carry four instruments. Two of those are cameras and two of them are what are called in-situ instruments. The X-ray camera has been led by the University of Leicester. So various bits have been built from other teams across Europe. And here at Leicester, we've assembled that camera, the telescope. So that's made up of the optics and then the detector and then all the other subsystems around it, electronics, etc.

29:53and that's been done here in the clean rooms at Space Park.

29:57Sue Nelson:Now it's a soft x-ray imager and you know my first reaction was soft, soft, what do they mean by soft? So that is a very x-ray astronomy way of talking, so saying soft and hard x-rays, so that talks about the energy. So in terms of energy we're talking about around half a kilo electron volt, so this is much lower energy than you'd use in medical x-ray imaging for example, but it does tell us a lot about what's going on out in space as well. The x-rays that are emitted come through a process known as charge exchange. So what happens there is we have the solar wind coming in, oxygen and carbon for example.

30:36They make up a very small percentage of the solar wind, 1 % or less but they can interact when they get to near the Earth with hydrogen around the Earth and in that interaction they can emit an x-ray and that x-ray happens at about half a kilo electron volt So it tells us that the energy of that X-ray that we see can tell us about the element from the solar wind that's come in to create that interaction.

31:00Sue Nelson:And what is it that you want to get out of the mission? SMILE has its X-ray camera and the X-ray camera will use those X-rays that are emitted near Earth to image large areas of the magneto sheath. This is our shield from the solar wind. so we have a magnetic field here at earth and that protects us from the solar wind coming in at all times now it's not static it's a very dynamic situation and it's going to move in and out a bit like a bubble in a stream when you see these movies where you have a shock wave around a bullet for example like the matrix and so we can use the x-rays that are emitted near the earth to take pictures of that interaction that kind of shape that we see and the x-ray camera will do that.

31:46It's got a high orbit. Smile's going to be a long way from the Earth and looking down at the day side where the solar wind first hits the magneto sheath. And the x-ray camera is going to monitor how that shield, our magnetopause, moves in and out and changes shape. At the moment, we don't know very much about that shape. We assume a shape when we're doing our science. So we're going to see how it changes as the solar wind either blows stronger or weaker, has greater density, blows faster for example and we can see how it changes and moves around.

32:20Sue Nelson:Why is the spacecraft only measuring x-rays from the northern hemisphere from the North Pole? So the x-rays come from the dayside region of the earth. Now the other camera on board is an ultraviolet imager. Now that is going to be looking towards the earth so these two cameras they're not looking at the same place. The X-ray camera looks upstream of the Earth as the solar wind comes in and then the ultraviolet camera looks down back at the northern lights. So that gives us the cause and effect and we're going to get that with a smile straight away. So it's a simultaneous measurement of the cause coming in where the solar wind is hitting our Earth's magnetic field and then the effect down at the atmosphere.

33:05So these, because of the shape of our magnetic field and the magnetic field lines, If you imagine a bar magnet that you used to draw at school, you can imagine that in a bigger scenario, but one that's been squished on one side as the solar wind's coming in and pushing it, and it extends out on the night side as a kind of a long tail. And so we can link what's happening out in space to what's happening at the upper atmosphere, thinking about those magnetic field lines, how they're connected.

33:31Sue Nelson:There are two large CCD detectors on the SXI, or Soft X-ray Imager, and these will be the largest ever flown in space to measure X-ray light. They were designed and manufactured in the UK by Teledyne E2V and The Open University, whose Centre for Electronic Imaging has also been calibrating the detectors and testing them by simulating the conditions of space, such as in a vacuum and under very low temperatures. The detector's wide field of view will also help create a three-dimensional image of the Earth's magnetosphere for the first time. Dr Thomas Buggy is a calibration scientist at the OU. The OU, over the last probably 10 years, we've worked on characterising these charge couple devices for SMILE.

34:19It's the heart of the instrument. We've worked on testing the detectors, testing how radiation hard they are, so if they absorb so much radiation, can they still perform as they need to. Over the years, we've kind of got more towards the flight-like detectors. So initially we had some small test detectors.

34:36Sue Nelson:And these are the ones that look like the size of a sort of an SD card that you have in your video cameras. Yeah, but the ones we have now and the ones on the instrument are like 8 by 8 centimetres. You know, they're much bigger than an SD card, yeah. They're pretty large. So how are they going to work then? The detectors will basically take images when the spacecraft is orbiting the Earth. So the instrument will look back at the Earth. There's two large detectors and they'll take images of these X-rays that are emitted around the Earth. That data will be saved on the spacecraft, processed a little bit, and then all that really interesting data will be sent back remotely to a ground station on the Earth.

35:12A bunch more processing happens, and then it gets released to the scientists to do their fantastic science on.

35:18Sue Nelson:Is your role done then? You know, once it's launched successfully, then that's it for you. You've already tested the detector. You know it's work. It's doing exactly what you want. You know it's going to be protected from radiation. Is that for you job done? No, which I guess is good in a way. When these telescopes launch, and this is the first one I've worked on that has launched, but telescopes in the past, there's all things that happen in space that are unexpected. So you have to deal with those problems. You know, it might be a problem with the data. So you need to sort of calibrate or correct some kind of effect.

35:50The images will be degraded throughout the five years due to radiation damage. So we'll be working on trying to correct that damage. Also, when the data gets sent back from the spacecraft, that data has to go through a huge pipeline of processing and correction. And I'll be working on that part of the correction before the data goes to the scientists. So yeah, that long pipeline is a lot of scientists and engineers will work on that to improve the quality of the data, essentially.

36:16Sue Nelson:And how soon will you get data to work on after launch? Directly after launch, there's a two to three week commissioning phase, which is essentially health check for the spacecraft. Does everything still work? Does it work as we expected? and we'll get data back from that so within a few weeks which is quite exciting and then after that health check is passed fingers crossed then we'll start getting the real science data back and that will be maybe well directly after commissioning really so within a month or two after launch we'll have real data back that we'll start processing so yeah exciting times i'm colin forsyth i'm an associate professor at the ucl malad space science laboratory and I'm the European co-PI of the SMILE mission.

36:56So the thing that's come from us is the front-end electronics for the SXI instrument. It's going to be taking pictures of the X-rays coming out from space just in front of our magnetic field, and we're going to be using that to see where the edge of our magnetosphere is, this region of space dominated by our magnetic field. The front-end electronics are going to read off the X-rays detected by the CCD detectors within the instrument, and then it's going to pass them into the data processing system and then eventually down to the ground.

37:29Sue Nelson:And you're also involved in a second instrument as well? Yes, so we're involved in the light ion analyzer. So that is a plasma detector. It's going to detect protons in the vicinity of the spacecraft and allow us to understand how much plasma is out in space as the spacecraft passes through and around the Earth. One of the key things that we did for that was actually bringing the instrument that was built in China over to the UK and calibrating it in one of our test facilities. What do you hope to learn about the magnetosphere that you don't know already? Because the Mallard Space Science Laboratory is pretty well known for this area of research.

38:10Yeah, we've been doing magnetospheric research for many decades. I've been at Mars Space Science Laboratory for nearly two decades now focusing on studying the magnetosphere focusing on, for my side of research, understanding something called a substorm which is something that happens several times a day and we get these big brightenings of the aurora.

38:30Sue Nelson:Is that a coronal mass ejection from the sun, a substorm? Is that the source of it? No, so substorms are essentially the things that happen day to day. There is always material coming off of the sun it is always interacting with the Earth. Instead of it being a sort of a steady throughput of energy, actually the Earth and the Earth's magnetic field acts to store energy and then release it explosively. Like a capacitor? In some ways, yes. Yeah, in some ways we've got this big build-up of energy and it's something like 10 to the 15 joules of energy is released during one of these events. That's 10 with 15 zeros.

39:07Sue Nelson:And when it's released, is it released out into space or within the Earth's atmosphere? About 50 % of it goes out into space, but an awful lot of it is coming down into the atmosphere, and that's what gives us things like the northern lights. So it's that energisation of particles out in space, firing them along the field, and getting them to interact and impact into our atmosphere that causes the atmosphere to glow. So if you're going to see the northern lights, and if you're looking for those bright dynamic displays where the whole sky lights up and you're seeing aurora everywhere, that's the thing that you're after that's a substorm.

39:43Sue Nelson:Will this teach you then more about this particular phenomenon that we've not known before? Yes exactly that's one of the key things of SMIL is we want to understand the substorm cycle so how we get that energy build up how we get that energy release. We want to understand how the magnetosphere and the configuration of the magnetosphere the shape of the magnetosphere might influence whether we get substorms or whether we get some other kind of activity. And we also want to understand what happens when the system is very highly driven. So we do get things like CMEs that come off the sun that impact on the earth and that cause a much, much bigger energisation of the space around us.

40:25And we see things that look like substorms during those times. But there's a big question, are they substorms? Is it the same sort of thing that's happening when the driving is much, much weaker? or is it something different? And so these are some of the key things that we want to go after with the SMILE mission by actually being able to see the change in the shape of the magnetosphere with the SXI camera and seeing the dumping of energy into the atmosphere with the UVI camera. We're going to see energy in, energy out and we're going to try and understand how that is throughput within the magnetosphere.

41:01Sue Nelson:Caroline Harper, Head of Space Science at the UK Space Agency. How will the UK benefit from the data that you're going to get from the spacecraft? We want to understand more about space weather and its effects. And this mission, SMILE, is going to be the first mission that will give us a global view of what's happening when the solar wind from the sun hits the magnetosphere, the magnetic shield around the Earth. And we really need to understand more about this because the solar wind can be pretty violent. we can have solar storms and when they hit they can impact satellites orbiting the earth so things like telecom satellites navigation satellites earth observation satellites all obviously of critical importance to people down on the ground a really bad solar storm can impact aircraft flying at high altitude and so we would want to understand when a bad storm was coming perhaps those aircraft might be rerouted to avoid the worst of the effects.

41:57And then a very, very bad storm could even impact power grids down on the ground. So we need to get better at forecasting space weather. And just like the normal weather forecast, we need to understand the science behind that in order to get better at forecasting so that we can protect all of our critical infrastructure and help people to stay safe.

42:17Sue Nelson:This is a collaboration with China. Is that unusual for the UK Space Agency? We're working through the European Space Agency with China and ESA has a long history of working with China on various different areas including space science. I think they have about 25 years of history of working together and the UK is very used to working with countries all around the world in Europe, everywhere including now China. Because these missions are so big and so ambitious and demanding, it makes sense to pool expertise and resources and to work internationally. And one of the good things we find about partnering on science with all of these other countries is that often builds bridges for partnerships and collaborations in other areas as well, which of course is going to be very beneficial.

43:05If you think more widely about the economy, it's good to have those bridges built and those partnerships together with other countries.

43:12Sue Nelson:Caroline Harper from the UK Space Agency and you also heard Tom Buggy from the Open University, Colin Forsyth from the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory and Jenny Carter at the University of Leicester who will be taking over from her colleague Dr Stephen Sembe as Principal Investigator of the soft x-ray imager at the beginning of 2027. Now Stephen's been involved right from the start of the mission. So a huge personal contribution from him. And I know he's looking forward to both the launch and the return of data. I think he wants to get some data in before he retires. So let's hope the Smile mission brings a big smile to everyone's faces once that data comes back.

44:01Now, it won't have escaped your notice. It's everywhere on certainly my social media feeds. There's a new film out starring Ryan Gosling called Project Hail Mary. The film is based on the book by Andy Weir about a rescue mission to save the sun from dying out. And along the way, he finds company. Here's a clip from the trailer. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct, including us. Dr. Grace, the world is counting on you.

44:41Sue Nelson:Well, wow, that's quite a dramatic trailer there. I've been to see the film, as mentioned before, and I spoke to the producer-directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, for the Supermassive podcast. They were really good company, massive geeks. They've worked together quite a lot. They're well-known and probably the main couple of films that they're really well-known for, the Lego movie, Cloudy with Meatballs. And we're not going to play you the whole interview because supermassive podcasts have got that. But here's an extract of that interview where they talk about simulating the realities of spaceflight.

45:20He wakes up on the spaceship. He doesn't know why he's there. He's not an expert. And once we get to microgravity, he is clumsy and he bonks into things. and we had a lot of consultants from NASA and other scientists. Andy, we are on set all the time. But especially the NASA people are like, oh, yeah, your first time here in microgravity, you just bonk into everything. You can't understand how it works and your body just can't get used to it for the first few days.

45:50Sue Nelson:And a lot of astronauts get space sick. Oh, very. They don't advertise this. They don't want to admit it, do they? But they're like, oh, you're vomiting for days. And then it's not pretty. The video that NASA releases. The vomit just floating in space right in front of your face. That's not going to get you more funding. It's true. And so we wanted to be true to that. Like we had one of the first times we shot Ryan in microgravity. He was like smashing into everything. We set up this thing for him to like bonk over here, hit over there, spin around. So did you use a vomit comet? We did not. No, we had a specialty.

46:23Sue Nelson:We wanted to, but it was incredibly impractical. You only get like five seconds at a time. And we did some good old-fashioned wires. So we used a spin ring thing that allowed him to twist his body in whatever way he wanted to and sort of air parkour. And when we did the first take, we went over to Chell Lindgren, who was on set with us, and we're like, huh? And he goes like, that's exactly what it's like. So we're like, oh, we did it. Now, you've obviously used advisors from NASA to make the spacecraft as realistic as possible. And it does look like a sort of souped-up space station. ISS, sort of, yeah.

47:00Sue Nelson:With a bit more home comforts. Exactly. Yeah, so Charlie Wood is our production designer on the film, and he put his entire self into making that ship very credible and inspired by real things. One of the things we insisted on is space is messy. The guts of the ship are on the outside in case you have to fix them. We didn't want this film to ever feel slick. We always said it wasn't a Mac. It's a PC, right? And that space is messy. There's wires everywhere. And on top of that, Ryan's character is messy. And there's no one around. So he can just kind of throw his garbage over his shoulder and not worry about it.

47:45Sue Nelson:It was just like my teenage bedroom, basically. Exactly. Yeah, and my adult bedroom. I wasn't going to confess that. And in terms of the alien spacecraft, that was a very beautiful visual representation. How much of that was direct from the book and how much did you sort of bring to it? What was taken from the book was the concept that there was this very strong metal xenonite that was, you know, that's normally a gas, but was in metallic form that could withstand a lot of pressure, which meant there could be corners, which are generally not something you want to have a lot of on spacecraft, which is why all our Earth metal spacecraft are big tubes.

48:28But we thought, oh, the opportunity of that material is that our spaceship can have corners, and in fact it can not be driven by aerodynamics. Right. And so one of the – then we started asking, well what would a creature from another planet's aesthetic be? And so to answer that we asked well what are the aesthetics of animals on Earth? And one of my favorite most creative animals are birds because they make nests and they grab stuff out of the garbage and decorate them and so we thought well maybe it's a giant bird's nest. Right, and because there's so much density in the atmosphere of Rocky's home planet The idea was that they assembled this spaceship up in the upper atmosphere with a space elevator.

49:17And so it didn't have to blast off to get there. And so it was able to have all these metal sticks that we thought might be used for navigation because they're blind also. So there's a lot of thought behind it. But it ended up being something that was really beautiful and unlike anything you'd ever seen.

49:35Sue Nelson:Yeah. No, I was rather impressed by that as a big sci-fi fan. I was rather impressed by that. It's hard to make a spaceship. Yeah, it's hard to make a spaceship. This feels new. So this sort of touches all the bases in terms of your interest, doesn't it? In terms of it's got that mix of science and practicality that Andy Weir brings to it as a former engineer himself. Exactly. Along with the imagination. So which of the parts of the film for you, without giving away any spoilers for people who have yet to see it and maybe haven't read the book, were the bits that you enjoyed working on the most or that you think has come out like, yeah, I love that bit?

50:10Well, what I love about Andy's work and the interpretation of it by Drew Goddard, who wrote the screenplay, is just the way that the laws of physics inspire the imagination. And so we tried to make sure that this film never shortchanged those rules and didn't bend them, but rather use them as a launching point for what is spectacular. So, you know, in addition to all the fun we had making a centrifuge to create gravity on the ship and the fun we had on set creating a light rig to spin around the set as if the sun was moving around it. All of those visual opportunities. I'd say one of my favorite things is the astrophage sequence in which Ryan's character imagines the infrared light that is actually igniting all around him.

51:18And the way that you make a regular film camera into an infrared camera is you remove a filter that filters out the infrared light. We removed the filter and then created a lot of infrared lighting rigs around Ryan with good old-fashioned chicken wire. And to the naked eye, it didn't look like anything. But on the monitor, because we removed the thing that was blocking the infrared light, suddenly you could make the invisible visible. And there's all these sparkling, beautiful pink lights all around him and reflecting in his eyes. And it was just so gorgeous that it felt like using science to make your imagination bigger.

52:00Phil Lord and Chris Miller. I love that line, not a Mac, a PC, which is very much like this podcast. Ironically, it is recorded on a Mac. So what do you think? You sort of hinted earlier that you weren't as overwhelmed.

52:15Sue Nelson:No, I was, there was so much of it to like. The visuals, as I mentioned, with the spacecraft, this alien spacecraft was stunning. It was so intriguing, you couldn't keep your eyes off it. That I absolutely loved. The acting is great. I'm a huge fan of Ryan Gosling. I think he's so versatile and very, very good. pretty much everything he does. For me, it was more having not read the book, and I know you have, I've not read the book, so I go in cold. And so consequently, I'm sort of, I was like, what's the tone? It's very lighthearted. It's a lot of comic moments in it. But when the alien appears, I think most people have seen now the various trailers where you know that there's an alien in so I'm not giving anything away called Rocky I felt uncomfortable I just thought is this a kids film now and and so for me that was the bit that I felt hmm am I watching a Disney movie it feels it feels too kiddy and interestingly I heard an interview on Radio 4 with Ryan Gosling and he had said that he really wanted to make a film that his two daughters would love that was along the sort of he felt was like an E.T.

53:48Sue Nelson:style film and when I heard that I thought ah okay so it wasn't just me thinking oh it feels like a kid's film there was a sort of intentional because obviously E.T. is loved by adults and children, but not so much by me. And so for me, you know, E.T. is, I would never rewatch that again, for instance. It just doesn't do it for me. I find it too aimed towards the kids. And although there's, you know, there's quite a lot of adult stuff here, I think once the aliens involved, I just was not as interested apart from the wonderful space craft bit and the ending really annoyed me i just didn't like it a final scene so lots to enjoy definitely worth seeing it just and i know i've seen all these reviews of people say oh it's fantastic it's fun thing i'd be really interested to know if anybody else feels the same as me it's just like a slightly uneasy blend and for me uh too much on the side of a kiddie movie and i and i I didn't...

54:54So an old-fashioned family film, really.

54:57Sue Nelson:Yeah. But I don't want to watch an old-fashioned family film. You want gritty aliens. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I suppose I do. Yes, I do like my sci-fi. We have interviewed Andy Weir. I have interviewed Andy Weir for this podcast. Yes. And it only just occurred to me that I probably was about this book, actually, because I love the book. Reading the book, Going in Cold, if you just read the book, what I thought was genius about the book is you you you are with the lead character because he doesn't know where he is what's going on that's done very well in the film but that's how it from the trailers we obviously know there's an alien involved that you don't know that in in the book so they shouldn't really show that should they no so when I read the book where they you know I suppose it doesn't you know they want to get the best stuff the best visuals in the trailer don't they but reading the book you absolutely you're with the character and you don't know what's going on of course anyone reading the book now does know what's going on um but that's what i thought the great thing about the book was but what annoyed me a little bit and i think this is as we were talking earlier about the martian the wisecracking there's a lot gets me down a bit there is a lot of that and at some point i i did think while i was watching it is this the same character um I mean they they're different in that in in the Martian obviously it's it's a botanist and in this one he's a he's supposed to be an everyman but he's not really an everyman and that's all I'm gonna say when you learn a bit more about his background but he does do that opening where you are totally feeling the same where I mean and I loved all this bit because a large part of the film is just him on his own either on his own or with the alien i really preferred or really like the bits where you get the backstory and the build-up to it because there's a really interesting character a woman um who is sort of effectively his boss and getting scientists together to try and who we heard in the trailer yeah and that i just thought she was amazing so i would have i i i sort of preferred those parts of it so i would have maybe just reduced the bit but i obviously it's based on a on a book but yeah well i'm looking forward to seeing it i have not a chance to see it i did love those two though those um they were great producer director they were hilarious yeah so you can hear the the full interview in the the supermassive podcast um but that gives you a real good sense of it what we just played um i've booked my flights to Florida.

57:37Sue Nelson:Let's hope it all goes ahead within that little first week of April schedule. If so, I will hopefully be getting you a little something for space boffins on that from a very excited region. My plan is to do an audio diary, I think. What, like today, I had cereal in the motel which had sugar on it and was coloured green. That's exactly that sort of thing. But I think it would be quite interesting because I've never done a launch from Cape Canaveral in the press pack. I've been there. I've actually stood on the Artemis launch pad. I've been in the Vehicle Assembly building but never around a launch.

58:18So I think it's going to be a fairly hellish media scrum around that. And I think it would be quite interesting to give an insight into that.

58:25Sue Nelson:I know you're doing it with the BBC's name, with BBC Future as well as from us. But you will find, and I know you know this anyway, that, you know, we may think the BBC carries a huge amount of weight because it's so important. But whenever it's something like NASA, we're at the bottom of the market. Oh, right at the bottom. Yeah, you should see some of the emails. So I reckon a lot of your audio journal is going to be... Didn't get an interview with Jared Eisenberg. They said they promised us and they gave it to CNN. I'm waiting here. So, yeah. So I want the rough and the smooth. But that's why I thought that might be quite interesting.

59:02Okay. Well, we'll give it a go.

59:03Sue Nelson:See what I think. If you don't get an audio diary, you know it wasn't as successful. It wasn't as successful. It's just ranting. It's just ranting. And also, I bought a new recorder, so we'll see how that goes. All right. Those little DJI microphones that the influencers use. Well, you're a bit better at the... I'm, as you know, very reluctant to change. New technology, yeah. New technology, so I tend to try and just use the same thing until it basically dies or parts can't get replaced. Yeah, so I can still, you know, absolutely get it spot on. Oh, well, but that would still be fun. I think so.

59:38I think so. It'll be interesting. I really hope it happens. Yeah, so do I. So, you know, we've got this launch window at the beginning of April. And then if not, there was one date at the end of April.

59:48Sue Nelson:You're not staying out there for the whole of April. I actually happen to be in the States at the end of April as well. Oh, yes, that's right. To go to Kansas City at the end of April. For a programme, yeah. for a BBC radio programme. So we'll see. But I'm really hoping it goes at the beginning of April. It's interesting that NASA have not published launch opportunities beyond April at the moment. So we've just got those ones at the beginning of April and the 30th of April. So nothing for May, June. So I would assume they're pretty optimistic as well. Well, so am I. Go Artemis. We'll see. Thank you very much to the UK Space Agency for sponsoring this edition of the Space Muffins podcast.

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