Dr Simon Jackman

Dr Simon Jackman

Alumnus Dr Simon Jackman on Jeff Bezos’s new space station Orbital Reef, Space Wars and Artificial intelligence.

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.”

“We are also looking at how to facilitate space traffic management. Like air traffic control, we need to prevent collisions in space. We have the added risk of old dead satellites, bits of satellites and asteroids also orbiting the Earth. The current International Space Station is getting old and damaged having been hit and dented over the years by lots of pieces of space junk, travelling at high speed. There is a convention these days that when you send a satellite up, you must have calculated what happens when it ceases to be useful; how to deorbit it and bring it back down to Earth, preferably to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.”

Can you tell us how you will be using artificial intelligence in your research?

“You can teach a computer to use and learn from a massive amount of data about the Earth. For example, where the forests are and how they are growing, what the terrain is like and where and how all the rivers flow and behave. Armed with this information, flood forecasting is becoming more and more accurate. Using AI, forecasters can model the weather on a computer, simulate rain falling on the land and then track where the water will go.”

The implications of having so much data available are vast. “You can look at forests to see how they are being de-forested and then re-grown. You can train a computer to count trees really quickly. We are using this technology to help us recover nature. At Oxford, we have a new centre, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, where we will be looking at sites around the world including in Peru, Ghana, The Andes, Borneo and closer to home in Oxfordshire and the Cairngorms. We will be undertaking experiments with data to understand and predict what will happen to nature. For example, rather than wait 50 years for a forest to re-grow, we can use imaging from satellites above and data from the ground to undertake experiments on recovering nature and simulate what this will look like for the decades to come. Our planetary ecosystem is deteriorating rapidly, so there is an urgency to this work.

Finally, Simon, what else might be possible up in space?

“We are also looking at the idea of building a massive power station in space - a huge set of solar panels where the sun will hit them all the time because they will be above the clouds in low earth orbit – you can harness a lot of power like that.”