Cancer vaccines and Commercial Space Stations

The aerospace startup Vast and Elon Musk’s SpaceX have announced that they intend to launch the first commercial space station in 2025. Nobody could dispute Vast’s confidence in the project, with the company reportedly selling tickets for its first crewed mission. So, what should we make of the bold proposal? Dr David Whitehouse is a space scientist and author of Space 2069: the future of spaceflight...

David - It's a very interesting project, and it will probably go very far because Vast Space are integrated with SpaceX, Elon Musk's outfit. Now, lots of American companies and startups have interests in building small space stations, and most of them are touting for investment and for business. But Vast Space have got Elon Musk on side. So they have a small space station, which is going to be launched by a Falcon Nine Rocket. Initially uncrewed. It's going to be tested in space. And this is not a very big satellite space station. It's the size of a moderately sized satellite, a communication satellite, for instance. So it's cope-able for a small company. And then eventually, I suppose the year or so later when it's tested out that we use a Dragon capsule that's already taken astronauts into orbit, as a sort of mini space station and to and from the Space Station, to go up and visit it.

Chris - Does this seem realistic? Two years away seems an incredibly optimistic timescale, or have they been doing so much work in the background that they are pretty confident they're going to deliver?

David - Well, this does seem to be credible, although you are quite right. Who knows how long it will take, because there could be some showstoppers along the way. And until it's actually ready to fly you are never really quite sure. But they have got a working relationship with SpaceX now. They've built their Dragon capsule, as I said, which can fly independently in space for several days. And a crew of four went up in the last year or so and just orbited the Earth without docking with anybody and had a great mission. So they have, if you like, the backup of SpaceX, they don't have to reinvent the wheel, they don't have to redesign life support systems and heating systems, because presumably what will happen is when a crew visit Haven One, Vast Space's first Space Station, they will live in the Dragon Capsule and only go through the airlock to Haven One to carry out experiments. So they're using a lot of what SpaceX has already developed.

Chris - What sort of experience are they offering? Because when you say this is satellite sized, it sounds pretty cramped.

David - Oh, yes. It will be nothing like the International Space Station. This will be a very small module, much smaller than the modules in which the astronauts live on the ISS. So it'll be limited to simple experiments, but what they're hoping is, if it's a success, they can start building it up module by module and expanding it in the same way that the International Space Station did. But clearly it's going to be very much more limited in terms of who can go there, how much equipment you can take up there, what you could bring back compared to the ISS, which is a tremendous facility. But of course the ISS is in its final years. It's going to be closed by 2030 at the latest, and Russia may pull out years before that. We don't know.

Chris - Do they see a gap in the market then? Is that the motivation for doing this? They see a space, if you will, opening up and the decline of the ISS, the decline of international relations with previous collaborators like Russia, meaning that there is this opportunity which this collaboration is seeking to plug into.

David - You are quite right. There is an opportunity here because the ISS is in its declining years because we can see an end to it because of the Russian components. Although Russian collaboration on the ISS has been going on almost independently of the international situation, the Russian components are beyond their useful lifetime in many respects, and they're starting to break down more. They're starting to show their age. So the Space Station is going to wind down in a few years time and become increasingly difficult to maintain. And NASA has said that it wants to see, and it will help fund, and it's already given money to three big aerospace corporations to develop smaller specialised space stations to do research into materials, into biology, into technology development, and even small hotels. So Vast Space's Haven One fits into, if you like, what could be a fleet of smaller space stations specialising in a way that the ISS was a mega space station, which did almost everything.

Chris - So it does have both a sort of commercial slash research aspect and a recreational aspect. They're eager to plug into both.

David - They are indeed because people will pay. There are, as we've seen with SpaceX, with other companies, there are people with a great deal of money who are willing to pay to go into space. SpaceX has already had several missions with its Dragon capsule, also to the Space Station, or as an independent free flying capsule with people who are eminently qualified to carry out research, to fly and command the capsule who are willing to pay a great deal of money for the mission. So as well as the founder of Vast Space, who I gather is a cryptocurrency billionaire, putting in $300 million of his own money. He could get probably more than that from a crew of four or several crude missions with people paying to go buy a seat.

How fish sing in a bid to communicate with one another...

Will - What you're hearing right now are fish - singing fish. Okay. Perhaps singing is somewhat inaccurate, but you can't deny there's something remarkable about the sound being made. These noises in question were recorded as part of a series of papers released by the International Quiet Ocean Experiment. A group of scientists hoping to survey and ID fish based on their acoustics all over the ocean. The IQOE has an offshoot organization called the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds or GLUBS, yes. And member Miles Parsons took me through how fish make these sounds and what they tell us about the fish in question.

Miles - These sounds are produced for many species by particular muscles that are used to contract around a swim bladder. A swim bladder is a little gassiest body that they normally use for buoyancy, but several species of fish have developed the ability to use that swim bladder to produce sound. So these muscles contract around it, they change the shape of the swim bladder, and as that's pulsating, it creates noise. So if you can imagine that you have a healthier fish, a bigger fish, they have longer, stronger muscles that can contract around that swim bladder and that takes ever so slightly longer to do it. So they actually create a deeper sound because of that. And you'll actually find that in some species, the females that might be trying to meet a mate are attracted to the deepest sounding voice. So the size of the fish and the sounds it produces essentially are related and the sound gives information about the fish producing the sound.

Will - So these noises can create a handy sound profile when trying to ID fish in murky or dark water. Much easier than having a look. But the fish aren't making the noises for us, so what are they trying to say?

Miles - There's quite a few reasons why fishes produce sound. The main one is realistically spawning, or reproduction. They also make sounds in terms of territorial defense. There's also distress or alarm signals that they give off. And some species we think, actually communicate to each other to talk about feeding. So you get what you have called an evening chorus, which is a lot of fish coming together. Now, whether or not the sound they produce is a byproduct of feeding or it's actually fish calling on mass to tell others where the food is at. We're not quite sure, but there's a number of different reasons for why they produce sound.

Will - So now we know how they do it and what they're trying to communicate. Do these noises change as the environment does? What causes a fish to change its tune?

Miles - It's all really related to the behaviour that's associated with the sound. So if we use spawning as an example, in Australia we have in this one River we've got a big fish called the mulloway. And this makes a loud croaking sound. If you listen through the hull of a boat, it sounds like someone farting. Now that sound is produced with spawning and they are trying to time their spawning for the maximum chances of success for their eggs. So it happens mostly after sunset. It happens when temperatures are high enough in the water for the fish to be able to spawn successfully, and it happens after high tide when the tide will take the eggs out from the river out to sea. So realistically, lots of these spawning, or whatever communication purposes they're using for sound, can be related to long-term environmental effects. So you'll get daily patterns, you'll get tidal patterns, you can get lunar patterns and you'll get seasonal patterns.

Will - But the factors behind changing a fish's noise are not limited to naturally occurring events. Humans are never far from the subject of altering a natural habitat.

Miles - Yes. So the most typical one there is vessel noise. And you'll have some species of fish that have been shown to stop calling when there's a vessel nearby. But one of the main problems really would be the communication space that they have if they're being exposed to noise. So if you think about it from the fish's point of view, you have a male trying to attract a female. The female can hear it a long distance away if it's nice and quiet, so you've got a good chance of them meeting up and having a successful mate. But if there's boats around, then those chances are much lower, mainly because they're using sound as their main method of meeting.

Will - But sound and the marine environment isn't a complete match made in hell. There are still many good things that we can use marine acoustics for when it comes to protecting fish as well.

Miles - One of the uses that you've got is fisheries management. You can actually locate these fish by the timing of their calling and the sounds that they're making. So that means that you can work out when and where their best chances of spawning are. And you can use that to identify what we call essential fish habitat. And in some cases you could have a space and timing based closure of a fishery so you can identify the periods where you don't want to have someone targeting them. And you can use that to help manage the fishery.