AlumNouse has reached new heights (literally). Our latest AlumNouse interviewee is Neil Melville, who studied Physics with Philosophy in York and has been working for the European Space Agency since 2002 as a Parabolic Flight and Drop Tower Coordinator and Payload Systems Engineer. During Parabolic flights, pilots make a specific manoeuvre called the Parabolic manoeuvre, which creates zero-gravity, which is the same weightlessness that astronauts experience in space. I discussed with Neil his journey to working for the European Space Agency, his views on balancing space travel and the climate crisis,the commercialisation of space travel, and what he sees on the written in the stars for the future of space travel.
Could you explain your job role and your journey into it? Did you always know that you wanted to work for the European Space Agency (ESA)?
I was always interested in space, even as a little kid I was always fascinated with space, but it never occurred to me that I could make a living from it by working in the business. It was actually when I was walking through the University of York Physics department that I saw a poster on the wall for students to apply to the ESA education office with experiments to get on parabolic flights as students. That was my first contact with the agency, and I thought: that sounds like fun! Me and some friends put a proposal together, which got selected, and I went on a parabolic flight in 2001. Of course, I loved it. Then I saw that there was a young undergraduate trainee opportunity in the ESA education office that I applied to, and that is how I got involved. Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could work in the business.
My job is kind of a few different things, and that is the difficulty in explaining it really. The majority is parabolic flights, so I’m the coordinator of ESA’s parabolic flight campaigns where we use an aircraft to produce zero gravity or partial gravity which I started doing in 2016. We can do moon gravity or Mars gravity, anything between 0 and 1 for the purposes of scientific research and technology testing, and training astronauts. As well as doing parabolic flights, I am also a payload systems engineer. It is a technical role where I will take a lot of requirements from scientists and launchers that I then translate into engineering requirements.
What is your work at ESA like? Have there been any recent payloads launched by ESA?
Recently, a payload [an object or entity carried by an aircraft or launch vehicle] experiment landed on the far side of the moon which we organised with China. They have a sample return mission ongoing at the moment. It launched at the beginning of May and landed on the 2nd of June on the far side of the Moon. ESA had a small instrument on there: a negative ion detector that I was responsible for. I worked on that, which was really great. I was in China for the mission operations. In the operation control centre watching them do all of their drilling and sampling while we were commanding our payload. My job involves running the process of selecting experiments, figuring out which ones fit together on board; how many of them each time, how much physical space there is, whether we are in the power budget and seats budget. Then we spend around six months on safety because these experiments could have high pressure, high temperature, moving parts, so keeping everyone safe on board is obviously the highest priority. After about six months of prep, we all meet in Bordeaux – which is where Novespace is based, and they own the aircraft – with the hardware and spend a week checking everything and the second week actually doing the flights, and it is really interesting to be in zero gravity.
What is it like being in zero gravity?
It’s hard to explain. We do have some points of reference though. If you’ve been on a rollercoaster, that point at the top of a drop where you can feel your stomach come up and all the blood rushes to your head and that’s a scary feeling when you start to fall, right? It’s a little bit like that, but it’s much calmer. On a rollercoaster it usually happens instantaneously, or if you’ve ever done a parachute jump out of a plane, that moment when you suddenly start to fall and you feel this change in your body, but normally that’s instantaneous because you go from 1G to OG as you start to fall. On a plane, the transition is a bit slower and it takes one or two seconds so you are really aware of it. You have no sensation of movement because the windows are blanked out so you can’t see that you’re moving at all and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving at all. It feels more like a lift – when it goes up you feel heavy and when it goes down you feel light – it's like that, but more extreme, but you’re still in the lift and you don’t feel like you’re moving. I’m not a scuba diver myself, but some people liken it to scuba diving in some ways because you’ve got six degrees of freedom. It’s quite fun. You get lots of people who are very nervous about it, of course for the first time, but almost everybody after the first parabola has a big grin on their face and enjoys it. Of course we are not there to enjoy it, we are there for science, but it is very nice that we can enjoy it too.
Have there been any recent scientific discoveries that the ESA have made?
It really varies. It has historically been a bottom up approach. Rather than the agency dictating what science we are doing, we provide scientists in any of the EU member states that have research that 0oG could help further with an application that they can make to us. This is then peer-reviewed by external peers for scientific merit and if it passes that then they can come on board. The variety of science is huge. A lot of fundamental physics. A lot of stuff on heat transfer and phase changes because boiling, evaporation and condensation all sound like very boring things that we should all probably understand, right? But they work very differently in 0G. Just take the example of boiling a kettle. If you boil a kettle on earth, around the heat element the water turns to vapour which is lighter than water so rises to the top as bubbles. In 0G, there is no reason for the water vapour to go anywhere because there is no buoyancy. So the heating element ends up being surrounded by hot gas that keeps getting hotter and hotter, protecting the rest of the water from boiling. So you can’t boil a kettle. You could, but it would take far longer and you would risk fires. To make it work better you would have to force some movement. Stuff like that from a practical point of view we need to understand how to deal with it because we are going to have a lot of industrial machinery that requires these things like your phone, your laptop that have heat pumps and heat pipes in them. They all work differently. We are going to need to understand these things in order to live and work in space. And also there are a lot of very small effects with lots of physical processes to do with phase changes, evaporation, condensation and all of this that are normally swamped by gravity effects, but once we remove those gravity effects we can explore the fundamental physics that’s really going on. So there’s a lot of research going on with that. It’s so fundamental, so it’s hard to say why it’s important, but that’s true of all fundamental science. We also have a lot of tests on humans to see how zero gravity affects them, and this can sometimes be fed back to medical research on the ground, but of course we are also looking at helping astronauts in long term space flight which can cause significant bone degradation, significant muscle loss, and cardiovascular system deregulation. Astronauts from long term flights often come back much less fit, often unable to stand and walk around because it is so much easier in 0G for the heart to pump blood around the body because your blood vessel walls become less strong, your heart becomes less strong. We need to find ways of mitigating these effects, understand what the problems are in 0G and what countermeasures we can deploy to stop this from happening as humans spend more time in space in the future. So there’s a lot of work looking at that; testing exercises, looking at how the fluid shifts in the body, how pressures change, even how your neurocognition and spatial cognition changes in space, even your ability to understand where your own limbs are changes in zero gravity. And then technology testing. If you are going to send a satellite up with a fragile antenna, but you want to prove that they work before you send them and you don’t want to build something really big and heavy because then it costs a lot to launch, but if it is fragile and small then how do you test it on earth? Because you deploy a solar panel and it can just break off, which is why they come and test it on the aircraft.
So, I know you just mentioned that it is difficult to explain why fundamental science is important, but with all of this research why is it important to conduct these flights? There is a lot of discourse about space travel and the climate crisis: is there a balancing act here? Can they even be in balance?
I think we have a lot of problems to solve on Earth, and we see this being discussed: ‘why are we messing around in space? We have so many problems to solve down here on Earth!’, but that is a false dichotomy. There is no question about the fact that we have a lot of problems to solve here on Earth, but there is no reason why we cannot do both. If you are going to pick something to cut back on so that we have more money to spend on the climate, then space is only a small fraction of the money we spend. In the end, the cost of the European Space Agency is equivalent to about the cost of a cinema ticket per EU citizen per year. So how much of climate change can you solve with that? The money sounds like a lot, but not if you put it per capita and compare it to the money wasted by our politicians. For a start, it’s a false dichotomy because it is not that we can only do one or the other, we can do both. Secondly, it is false to try and suggest that they are equivalent amounts of money. And thirdly, space is really important for understanding climate change! The only reason that the vast majority of the data that we are using to understand the effects of climate change is that we got it from space. We have climate monitoring and weather monitoring satellites without which we would not understand what is going on, so it’s not only a false dichotomy and a false economy, it is just false to say that space isn’t helping. Part of what we are doing is helping climate change. On the International Space Station, they have to recycle their air, they have to recycle their water – they have to have a tiny sustainable environment. To set up Moon bases and Mars bases, you have to find technologies that are sustainable and are the least wasteful they can possibly be so that we don’t have to ship supplies up from Earth all the time. All of these technologies are going to be really helpful, applicable and adaptable here on Earth to solve the climate crisis.
There have also been conversations about the commercialisation of space travel with people like Jeff Bezos. What are your thoughts on the commercialisation of space travel?
Overall, I think that it is a good thing in that it opens up space to be more accessible to more people. Clearly, that is the direction it is going to go. It is often hideously misreported in the media. People making equivalences between Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, and what we do on the ISS. Going to space is relatively easy, but going to orbit is extremely hard. Space is just up above 100km, and if you stop you’ll fall back to earth again. That’s what Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are doing. That’s why their rockets are very small, they are only going up to 100km. The rockets that we use to put stuff in orbit are huge because more than 90% of what we do is not going up but sideways. You have to go sideways so fast that the curve of your fall is the same as the curve of the Earth. That’s what orbit is, which is 8 and a half km a second. Getting into orbit is much more difficult. When the media tries to make an equivalence between the space tourism that Blue Origin is doing and what Space X is doing, for example, they are doing completely different things. But I understand that it's not easy for a media outlet to report about it to an average layperson. Increased access to space is good, and space tourism can feed into the aerospace industry. Space X for example, they are selling Axiom missions, a company that is flying some of ESA’s reserve astronauts, and some private astronauts. Those missions are testing new technologies that are going to feed back into what we are doing in the main agency missions as well. The fact that Space X is having such a high launch cadence and perfecting their landings is great for the industry in general because it is bringing down the launch cost and the cost of sending things into space in general, and they are doing this partly through the funding from their tourist activities. I should of course say that from a European Space Agency’s perspective, we prefer to use our own rockets and we have our own, Arian 6 , which is going to debut next month, hopefully. Space X are doing amazing things, so overall I think that space tourism is a good thing. I think there is going to be a gradual change that we expect over the next couple of decades. At some point, the International Space Station will come to an end in its current form. Probably lower orbit will become more commercialised, and space agencies will push further out because lower orbit will become, well, normal. The same has happened to our oceans. Initially, crossing oceans was the purview of state funded missions to discover the ‘new world’ and private individuals could not do that. Now, do we think that private individuals are wrong for building their own boats that can sail across the Atlantic? Of course, we don’t. We have all benefited from the fact that we are all now so interconnected and that that is possible. The same is going to be true, but with an extra dimension.
Is the international nature of your job an interesting part of it?
Yeah of course. ESA itself is founded on the idea of international cooperation within Europe. 27 member states and associated member states and in the agency we come from all of them and I work with people from all over Europe which is really nice. We work in English, which is lucky for me! I have got a Mars return mission – going to Mars in four4-six years time and that is being built in Hungary, so I have to go there to work with them. It is wonderful to be able to travel and meet interesting people and see the different approaches they take. It encourages us to look at Earth as one.
What is your favourite part of your job?
It is always a pleasure to get something into space. I am very lucky in my career that I have worked on quite a lot of small things. I have a lot of colleagues that work on major missions for twenty years, which is amazing because they make a huge contribution to these missions, but they may get only two things to fly, and if one of them goes wrong which is part of the business and can happen then that is a lot of personal work that is lost. In my career, I have had ten or so go up and every time it’s special to have something you have worked on go up to space. Now I look at the moon very differently. Now, I think: I have something on the back of that! I was literally controlling a machine on the moon a couple of weeks ago. With parabolic flights, I love the sensation of 0G otherwise I wouldn’t do it. It is one of the privileges – aside from seeing all the scientific success – but also personally watching people get their first parabola, and seeing their reaction when they understand what it is like to be in 0G.
Looking to the future, what do you see on the horizon for space travel?
That’s a very good question! It’s going up. Yeah I mean as you know between ESA and NASA we have this collaboration on Artemis for a return to the moon. And Artemis III will have the first European on the moon. Artemis should happen around 2030. And in the 30s we will see more humans back on the moon. Our reasons for going to the moon back in the Apollo days were clearly very political due to the space race. The reason we haven’t been back is because that political will died out. Now, I think (and hope) we are doing it for better reasons. That we are doing it for scientific reasons. And those reasons will send us to the Moon – and further to Mars – but that is a long way down the road as there are some very serious technical challenges. I am really looking forward to seeing what will happen in our lifetimes. I am curious as well, because I have worked on it so much, what will happen with the international space station?, Tthis isn’t really clear as the space station is supported until 2030. It keeps getting extended – maybe it will get extended again, but maybe it won’t. There is going to be more and more commercialisation of space travel. There are already quite a few commercial space stations that are being designed and some are starting to be built. I think we will see a slight shift to that where any interested parties, including space stations, can just pay to use instead of having to run our own. I also see a continued role for the space agencies because they are reaching out either robotically or with humans and this is a much bigger technical challenge. Space is going to have to be a collaborative project. Certainly, in deep space science, ESA will have a role to play especially in projects such as the 2004 Rosetta mission (which involved a shuttle following a comet on its orbit around the sun) and currently we have a shuttle on the way to Mercury. I have been excited about this stuff since I was a kid, and I love working for an agency that is actually doing it, and will continue to do so.
