• Question: are you going to go to space?

    Asked by bfarmer to Jess, Adam, Alexander, Aron, Neil on 11 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by matt6448, tomd69.
    • Photo: Jessica Marshall

      Jessica Marshall answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Unfortunately not (at least in the foreseeable future!). The missions I work on are all unmanned, which means we send our spacecraft and instruments into Space to do the science, and they send us the information back using radio waves. I would, however, selfishly love to go into Space. I think though that I would want to go into Space to do research that can’t be done by robots, as it is much harder and more expensive to send humans into Space as you have to keep them alive. Therefore, I would want to be an astronaut! Generally, people have already done a job before becoming an astronaut as then they have more experience. Astronauts can be people from all sorts of different backgrounds, from pilots to chemists to engineers to doctors. Would you like to go into Space? What would you want to do once you got there?

    • Photo: Neil Bowles

      Neil Bowles answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Probably not, unless it gets much cheaper. I have a colleague now working in the US who may well go on one of the sub-orbital flights with Virgin Galactic as part of his work, so you never know!

      Actually, there is big difference between going into space and going into orbit. The commercial space tourism companies like Virgin Galactic and similar are targeting short, parabolic flight to altitudes above 100 km, going into orbit is a lot more challenging.

      I do help build things that go into space as part of robotic spacecraft, so its nice to think that something I’ve touched (with a glove on admittedly) is now ‘enjoying’ views of the planet Mars.

    • Photo: Alexander Finch

      Alexander Finch answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      Not in the near future! As with Jess (and I expect the other engineers!) I would love to go but it is fairly unlikely. By far most of the rockets into space have no one on board.

      However, the growth of space tourism might mean that we may be able to go to space one day! It’ll always be expensive, but perhaps not impossibly expensive in the future.

    • Photo: Aron Kisdi

      Aron Kisdi answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      Yes.

      Probably as a tourist when it gets a bit cheaper.

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