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Alumnus Dr Simon Jackman on Jeff Bezos’s new space station Orbital Reef, Space Wars and Artificial intelligence.
SPACE STATIONS SPACE WARS &
Simon, who left Trinity in 1984, is a Senior Innovation Fellow at Oxford University. He has spent the last fifteen years developing innovations and partnerships with businesses, researchers and government departments and is currently working with the space sector on a range of issues affecting the world today. When we interviewed him, Simon had just returned from a visit to Arizona State University where a team of people from across the world met to collaborate on using a new space station being built by Jeff Bezos’s company, Blue Origin, one of the three companies in the US leading consortia that are building space stations. Orbital Reef will be three times the size of the current International Space Station and will be launched by 2030. The team Simon is part of is looking at what research can be undertaken at the new space station and Simon is leading on the ethics of that research, for example, the use of Artificial Intelligence in an ethical way. The team is also exploring how to involve people from underprivileged backgrounds and from countries yet to get involved in space: “We want to ensure it is a dynamic international effort by recruiting researchers from different backgrounds, nationalities and diverse communities”. Asked whether we could manufacture things in space, Simon said: “Colleagues working in regenerative medicine are excited about growing tendons in space. You can grow them in a laboratory from cells and they are nearly as good as new. However, the gravity on Earth makes the cells in the tendons a little distorted, which makes them less flexible, but if you grow them in space, with zero gravity, the tendons are really supple and easy to attach. The same goes for fibre optic cables. When they are cast on Earth, gravity distorts the glass, but if you cast them in space, they are perfect and light can pass through them without distorting. So, we could be making long fibre optic cables on the space station, coiling them up and bringing them back down to Earth to use in our homes or in pipelines across the Atlantic.” Simon went on to talk about the dangers of conflict and has been in discussions with NASA and the US Space Force about what we should do to avoid conflict. This was about a month before the crisis in Ukraine began. “Only in the last few years, has it become possible to knock someone else’s satellite out by using a laser from your own satellite, by colliding with it, or by launching a rocket from one satellite to another. We rely on satellites for so many things these days. The GPS signal on your mobile could be lost, our satnavs may not work – not just in our cars, but suddenly, there could be no communications or GPS for ships on the sea and weather forecasting could be disabled.” “Countries can stop other countries looking at them - we have all seen the convoy of Russian tanks in the Ukraine via satellite – this can be very helpful to opposing sides during wartime.”
