Jo Ritale:

Okay, now there is the official start. So good evening everyone and a very warm welcome to the National Library of Australia. It's wonderful to see so many people here in the Theatre and also joining us online. Thank you for joining us for this very special conversation, Exploring Australia's space, place in space and the remarkable people shaping its future.

My name is Jo Ritale and I'm the Branch Manager of Collections, here at the Library. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather this evening, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. I pay my respects to their elders past and present, and I extend that respect to all First Nations people here this evening.

Here at the Library, a place dedicated to collecting, preserving and sharing stories, it feels especially important to honour the world's oldest, continuous storytellers. For more than 65,000 years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have cared for country, passed on knowledge and sustained rich cultural traditions through language, art, and narrative.

They are our earliest astronomers, observing the sun, Moon, and stars to inform navigation, calendars and predict weather. As we celebrate the stories held within this library, we recognise that they sit alongside the deep histories and living cultures of First Nations communities. May we continue to learn from, listen to and walk respectfully with the traditional custodians of this land.

Tonight's discussion invites us to think about Australia's place in the modern space industry, its opportunities, its challenges and its future. It also asks us to reflect on the people behind that progress and the importance of recording their experiences. Katherine Bennell-Pegg is no stranger to the National Library of Australia.

In 2024, Katherine was interviewed and photographed by oral historian and photographer, Louise Whelan, as part of the Library's 'Women in the Space Industry' collecting project. This unique project was developed as a way to redress the lack of documentation around the critical role of Australian women in the space industry.

In 2023, the Library commissioned Louise, who is in the audience tonight to capture the contribution and experiences of 22 women in the Australian space industry through oral history interviews and photography. You will see some of these photographs tonight, including some striking ones of Katherine. And you will get a glimpse of the diversity of women and their roles in the Australian space sector.

Some of these women are running space institutes, launching missiles and training as astronauts. Others are working as space lawyers and medical specialists and the collection includes a space archaeologist, biologist and a space historian. You can explore these stories further by accessing the oral history interviews and portraits through Trove.

Now, it's my pleasure to introduce our guests this evening. Katherine Bennell-Pegg is the 2026 Australian of the Year, and Australia's first professional astronaut to officially represent the nation. She is a space systems engineer with 15 years of experience across agencies and industries in Europe, the UK, the US and Australia.

Her work spans robotics, human space flight, space debris removal, microgravity payloads, Earth observation, and exploration missions. As a Director at the Australian Space Agency, she has helped shape Australia's space capability, including the Moon to Mars Trailblazer 'Roo-ver' mission. She is a passionate advocate for STEM pathways and for raising the aspirations of the next generation, especially young women.

Joining Katherine in conversation is Neil Hart, a Director at Canberra Cyber Hub and former professor in Defence Technologies at Deakin University. Neil is a respected strategic leader with deep experience across government, industry, and defence innovation. Together, they'll explore not only Australia's growing role in the global space sector, but also the surprising ways in which space innovation delivers benefits back on earth.

Thank you for joining us for this special event presented in partnership with the Canberra Cyber Hub and the Australian Space Agency with support from the ACT Government.

Please join me in welcoming Katherine Bennell-Pegg and Neil Hart.

Neil Hart:

Wonderful to have you here, Katherine and it's very generous of you to give so much time around the nation to all of these endeavours. But before we start chatting, I just wanted to check in the audience if there's any aspiring astronauts or space nerds. Not as many hands as...we're going to convince the rest of you that space is the place to be because it really is extraordinary.

Can I start by thanking both the National Library of Australia and the Canberra Cyber Hub for the partnership in setting this up? It really is fabulous to be able to have these conversations and to spend some time with you, Katherine.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. Thank you, Neil. And thank you for having me here and thank you everyone for coming. It's fantastic to be here in Canberra and particularly here to speak with all of you tonight. And so I'm looking forward to our discussion to all your questions. Please ask whatever you're curious about and I'll do my best to answer what I can.

Neil Hart:

And so with that said, I'll bring up a Slido QR code, so hopefully you didn't turn your phone off, you turned it to silent. And so tonight, if you want to ask a question, please use the Slido app and the team will project them here on the screen here.

And I'll ask those questions as we go along or a little bit later in the conversation. So take the chance, please to have a look at that app. As you're going through the conversation, don't forget to write them down as you go so that you don't forget. Now, you've been all over Australia in the last little bit since the announcement of Australia of the Year. Congratulations.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Thank you. Yeah, it's been pretty tough.

Neil Hart:

Where have you come from?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

So yeah, I came from Adelaide for this trip, but the week before I was in Queensland, including Western and Central Queensland, places like Charleville. I'll be getting out and about to each state and territory this year, including remote and regional areas to speak about space and human space, flight and exploration.

But also STEM more broadly and to help people hopefully see opportunities and particularly help young people to have the confidence to pursue whatever it is that they wish to pursue, whether that's in technical field or otherwise. So it's a real privilege to have this platform and I hope it does great things for science and technology in the country.

Neil Hart:

Is there any reflection on the regions and the little cities you've been to at the moment on their interest in space or a particular area?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Absolutely. In fact, since they came back from astronaut training in mid 2024, so just over a year and a half ago, I've been speaking to people across the country and our researchers as well. And I can tell you that the excitement for the future of humanity and space is everywhere. Seven out of ten Australian kids in primary school want to go to space, which is something I shared with them at that age.

I think in Australia, we have a beautiful, natural environment around us and that lends itself very well to being curious about the world around us. That same feeling you get, if you want to look under a rock for a bug or climb a tree, just look at the view or see if you can. That sense of all you get when you lie on the ground and look up at the stars, that's that same feeling that has driven humans to want to explore and understand our planet and also to explore and understand space.

And yeah, clearly talent and curiosity are everywhere across this country. Aspiration isn't because opportunity isn't. We've got work to do to have opportunity within reach for many more, but it's amazing to be able to hopefully show people that you don't have to be a superhero to work in what seems like really out there fields like space or even to be an astronaut. You just have to be somebody that's super passionate about what you do and willing to work hard at it and you might find yourself there.

Neil Hart:

Now there's a great story that when you were at school, the teachers said, 'Write down three career choices,' and you only wrote down one. What gave you the confidence back there? Yeah,

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I think I was just a stubborn little kid. Yeah, I was in Year 8. We had to fill out this careers form. I think it's homework in three options. And I was like, 'Well, there's only one astronaut, right? What else?'

What better adventure could there be in my life that I'd want to do? I think before I wanted to be an astronaut, I wanted to be a bird or something. There wasn't really anything before. I was very young that I think, remember my mom telling me when I used to go outside and look at the stars and she's like, 'Oh, some of those stars, you know they're planets and no one's ever been up close to a planet.

No one's ever seen it up close with their own eyes.' And I was like, 'Wow, I want to do that.' I'd be like six, seven when you want to be the one to explore. When you look at space, the one thing that adventure plus curiosity means to you, especially if you love sports too, is astronaut. And in Year 8, my school was good enough not to patronise me or to tell me that's ridiculous because I wasn't top of the class, I wasn't near it.

I was far more into sports than school and they said, 'Well, go figure out what that would actually take.' Probably thinking that would help me see sense. But I actually learned that to be an astronaut is an incredible adventure in its own right. Just the pathway there. There is no downside. It's not binary. It's not you make it or you have no job. To become an astronaut, you have to have a first career.

And there's many things you can be for that first career and all of them sounded great. So I went out and I learned that to be an astronaut, and this still holds today, you can be a scientist of almost any kind. You can be an engineer of almost any kind. You can be a medical doctor, and I think maybe even a vet, because I met a vet in astronaut selection, and you can also be a pilot.

Ideally, you've got qualifications in more than one of those. You should have at least a master's degree, ideally two, ideally a PhD. You should have expeditionary skills and behaviours. What does that mean? That means you spent more than six weeks continuous in the field, away from normal society, doing your job.

So how do you do that? You could be in the military. You can be an Antarctic expeditioner. You can be on a scientific field trip, like on a ship. You can be doing aid work in a foreign country. You should have operational skills, meaning kind of in a situation where you make decisions and take action where if you make a mistake, yourself or someone else could have fatal consequences. So things like being in emergency services like RFS, SES, surf lifesaving at an advanced level.

And in that same vein, things like being a paramedic or being a pilot or a scuba diver, a skydiver, operating robots and like drones, that all fits in that skillset box. You should be internationally minded with international experiences, ideally speak a foreign language. I was like, 'What's the downside?' Right? Well, when you're young and you're curious about the world and you frame it as something you want to contribute.

And I wanted to be an astronaut at that point, not just for the adventure, but because I wanted to help unlock new knowledge about the universe, which in framed that way, it's not about an ego, whether you're capable or not. You just want to help out with that and that removes your ego from the equation. And so I set out to figure out what that would take. And it was the start of something really great and now I'm here.

Neil Hart:

There you go. And I was just checking off your bio. Four degrees, I think it is. Honorary Group Captain, Australian of the Year, you've got plenty of ticks in the box and you've been working at Airbus for a number of years doing actual engineering of 'Roo-ver' and other things back at the space agency, all sorts of technical and amazing things. Anything stand out in amongst all of that?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Oh gosh, it's been absolutely incredible. So I originally wanted to be a pilot actually, like you were a pilot. I went through the selection to be a pilot in the Air Force and got through almost all of that. And right at the end after my flight screening and everything and the selection panel, they medically postponed me for a medical thing. I was low on the bell curve. Well, I was low in a particular blood reading.

It was later found out after more than a year of ongoing testing, I was just low on the bell curve. But in the meantime, I had to go do something else, right? So I went to civilian university and I liked physics. So I did physics, but I also saw there was a degree called Space Engineering and I was like, 'Well, that's got the word space in the title.'

So I picked that up too. And I'm so glad I did. I arrived at university not actually really knowing what engineering was beyond the definition of the term. I didn't know an engineer. I'd never written a line of code. I don't think I'd used a drill. I did aerobatic flying so I could tinker a little bit. You had to work on the aircraft a bit, but I was well out of my depth, but I'm so glad I did it because I learned to get along with engineering.

I learned what it was to sum it up. It's problem solving, it's inventing, it's the how to science is why. But it took me on the most incredible career all over the world. I did my Masters overseas. I worked on some of the coolest missions I could have ever hoped to work on, helped develop a new part, a balcony basically on the front of the space station and payloads, the gateway concept for the lunar space station, which might not be happening anymore.

The missions to other planets, Earth observation missions, it was so exciting. And I got to learn from some of the best in the world and ultimately then bring that back to Australia. The Australian Space Agency finally set up in 2018. So when I grew up wanting to be an astronaut, we didn't have a space agency. We didn't have a pathway to being an astronaut.

Of course, we had Andy Thomas, Paul Scully-Power, incredible Australians that had been to space before, but representing other nations because they didn't have the opportunity to represent Australia, but that meant that they went with US payloads, US research and funded by the US. So I thought my path would be overseas, which is why I took the path I did. And then coming back to Australia was another incredible experience.

Neil Hart:

So as you were going through school, and university, was there something or someone that inspired you?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

There's no one person. There's no one hero I've followed. I think I take bits of inspiration from different people and that's something I try and tell young people like there's no one that's perfect for you to follow. Be inspired by bits of other people's journey. But write your own story because you're your own person and don't be limited by that other person's pathway and keep your eyes open for different ways to get where you want to go.

Neil Hart:

Brilliant.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah.

Neil Hart:

With that said, the National Library, you heard Jo say, has had oral histories of 22 amazing women in the space sector and we've got a short audio clip that we're going to play now of your transcript from last year. So that'll come up with a bit of a rolling slideshow of the various ladies.

Louise Whelan:

What point was it in high school? I think you might have spoken about this in other interviews, but what point was it when you decided that science or astronaut or working in space was something that you really wanted to achieve?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I really thought about being an astronaut before high school. I think it was around mid-junior school when I just had that urge to explore. I think we're learning about explorers and I loved learning about the world around me. My dad was quite into hiking and climbing and things like that. So that combined with my mother's interest for physics, just it's adventure and exploration just fit, but I didn't think about it too deeply.

And then in Year 8 at high school, around the same time that probably just after I think I went to the US and visited those NASA sites and the Smithsonian. We were asked to write down at school what we wanted to be when we grew up as part of a careers counselling process, the first one we'd done. And they said, 'Write down three things you'd like to be.' And I was like, 'Well, I just want to be an astronaut.' So I wrote down an astronaut and didn't fill out the next two lines on the sheet.

Neil Hart:

So an amazing little clip, and there's more that you can see here at the National Library, and there's some amazing women that are going to come up on a slide that'll roll. Why is it so important to capture those stories?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I think it captures a moment in time that passes us by if we don't capture it. Australia actually has an incredible space history that includes women in it as well, right back of course from our First Nations sky knowledge from Australia is perhaps potentially the world's first, longest continuing culture that looks to the stars in the way that they do, to the start of the modern space age.

When we had rockets launching from the red dirt of the Australian Outback in Woomera to our dish days, we had the most tracking stations and dishes connecting with Apollo outside the US. We were there at the start of the early kind of industrialisation privatisation of space with telecommunication satellites in the 80s.

But then when the rest of the world accelerated, we didn't really keep pace. And it's only with the miniaturisation of electronics and the lowering of the cost of putting things into space over the past decade or so.

We've had this new resurgence in space and the Australian Space Agency too. And the women, this is captured are absolutely incredible. They're just some of the incredible women we have in our space sector, but they are really remarkable women with a breadth of different careers. And I think it also showcases the breadth of careers you can have in space. Right now in Australia, even though we're much smaller as an ecosystem than most developed nations have, we have great talent.

And when you look at these oral histories, and I hope many of you do, including 'Beyond Tonight', you'll see that you can put the word space in front of almost any career and have a career in it. I think we heard in the introduction - space historian, space architect, we need not just space scientists to ask the big questions and engineers to figure out how to answer them.

We need people that are tradies to build and test what's designed. We need people to drive the trucks and drive the trucks and the ships carrying the rockets. We need people stitching the parachutes and the spacesuits. All these are highly specialised jobs. We need astronaut fitness instructors and nutritionists and psychologists. We need space lawyers that represent Australia at the UN.

We need interpreters to capture the opportunity that is the tripling of the global space sector over the next decade. And these women show that women are there, that we belong there. Women have been exploring space for 63 years. Valentina Tereshkova was the first of us. 19 years later, a while later, was the second, also a cosmonaut. She was handed an apron when she entered the space station at the time. There's been 83 women as professional astronauts in space orbiting the Earth in 63 years, 63 years, right?

So we don't just belong now. We've always belonged, but we're still in the minority. And that's a problem, not just because we need the best. And unless you have the ability for everyone to reach those opportunities, you're not getting the best because diverse teams are really good at identifying and solving problems in creative ways, but also because in space as women, we are also medical guinea pigs and a lot of medical issues affect men and women differently, right?

So unless you have more women in space, women on Earth are not fully benefiting from the medical breakthroughs we're making up there into things like osteoporosis, muscle wasting, how every system of our body works is affected in space like a fast forward of many diseases on earth and we guinea pigs for that. And these women give us a taste of the opportunity out there.

Neil Hart:

Brilliant. Now your husband's in the space sector as well.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

He is, yeah.

Neil Hart:

What do your daughters think of the dinner conversation or is it off limits?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

They're probably well and truly over it. I've got two kids, a seven and nine. It's great. We don't push space on them too hard. They're exposed to it. I've taken them to launches to see my colleagues launch so that they see that with excitement rather than fear for the first time in case it was me. They've run all over the astronauts centre.

They've been allowed to climb through simulators. Luckily they didn't press what they shouldn't. They were equally excited about the orange juice machine. I just hope they have a dream to enjoy. We don't push space as much as we would love them to do space, simply because both me and my husband, our parents are accountants and we recoiled from accounting. So we don't want them to recoil from state.

Neil Hart:

Fair enough too. Curiosity I think is that real important piece of that. Let's talk a bit about space then. You painted a great picture there of space tradies. I've often said space isn't going to be built by PhDs because plumbing seems pretty important in a pressure vessel, right?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah.

Neil Hart:

Tell me where Australia sits in the space sector. How do you see that? Do we have a niche or something that we can do? We're not the US, we're not Europe, we don't have the dollars yet.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yep. So I mean, when you look at Australia, yes, our space budgets are smaller, but a lot of our capability comes from our adjacent fields. So my first job when I came back in late 2019 to work at the Australian Space Agency, was to get out and about across the country and assess what we're good at on the global stage, what we could contribute that would be of interest to other global players, which would help us secure access to the data and the information which we don't get from our own satellites.

And I was amazed at the breadth and the depth of what Australia has. We are the best in the world without doubt at something called remote operations, which is remotely operating infrastructure from far away. If you look at our mining companies, they have like control centres in Perth operating mine sites more than a thousand kilometres away with huge trucks, with trains, with processing plants, with subterranean robots safely around people.

Space is not cracked up, right? Nowhere else in the world does that. And they have few operators, too many machines. In space, we have few machines, many operators. It helps us to flip that equation. And the world's interested in that, not to mine the Moon or Mars, but to be able to have robots operate safely around humans, mixed different kind of machines from different countries do that.

That's called remote operations. We're also really good at field robotics. That's robots that work in the real world, not a lab. So dirty, dull, dusty, dangerous environments basically, particularly subterranean robotic navigation. So underground, which can help us explore the Moon and explore other planets, and exploring confined spaces like space stations and map there.

We're really good at remote healthcare. We're really good at looking after our Antarctic expeditioners across our multiple sites and Antarcticas with lots of overwinters and that unique perspective of how we handle that is something that space agencies are interested in and it's an analogue for space.

We're really good at advanced communications like quantum optical, high data rate communications, also communications that are really low power, low data rate to send like a single emergency signal. So we've got researchers looking at beacons to support astronauts on the Moon should something go wrong or what's called internet of things where you put up lots of little sensors all over the ground or on cows or on water tanks or whatever, and they ping to satellite small bits of information.

One example is a company in Adelaide that puts water tank sensors for like how full the tank is. Farmers don't have to drive for like an hour each day to measure their water tanks. They just get it on their smartphone, right? Another company does that in a similar way, but with prospecting sensors like heat sensors on the ground and they can find subterranean copper and lithium in a way that means you don't have to drill.

So Australia's got that and more. We're really good at many, many things, but really in the niche. So it's how do we contribute in that niche? You have to build out enough of the basis of an ecosystem to be able to do that in a way you own it. And it's really very exciting because yeah, the capability is there. We have a lot of talented people.

Neil Hart:

And when you said cows, I was thinking cows in space and that's where the vet comes in, right? Is that ... No. Okay.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Not cows, but there's rats up there. There's a lot of science up there, but there's actually YouTube channels. You can look at the rats, but they are the most cared for medical animals in the world because they're so visible.

Neil Hart:

Is there anything about that breadth of space and the opportunities that continually catches audiences and people that you engage with off guard?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. I think space is just the rest of the universe. It's a wilderness out there that we're only just beginning to go out and personally explore. We've sent probes, satellites around every other planet plus Pluto, dwarf planet in our solar system and beyond. And we're still learning new things all the time.

There's still a lot we don't know. The way we use space, people are coming up with new ideas all the time and making good money out of our startups, right? So Apollo, those early days of space are the engine room for innovation, not just for Earth, but for the rest of the space sector, which we now rely on because of it. So space, the way I think of it is it's not an industry, it's a place, right? Just like the ocean is a place, but it's a place that is all around us and it's a high point in the sky from which you can see.

So up there, say the space station, 400 kilometres up, you can see anything with your eye bigger than 120 metres on the ground on a clear day. From up there, you can see phenomenon like bushfires and flood, the likelihood of bushfires and floods. You can see hotspots for modern slavery by looking, for example, at brick kill and activity in certain parts of the world.

You can connect to whatever you can see. So you can connect remote industries, you can connect first responders. We're soon to get triple zero coverage across the whole of Australia through access to satellites in space direct to our mobile phones. What you can connect, you can inform, right? Every time you tap your phone to buy a coffee, you are using satellite data in real time. That timing signal connected to services like GPS synchronises with the bank, behind the transaction.

And all of that creates an in- space economy to launch, to keep things up there tracked, to do all of those services. And that creates an opportunity for business too. Astronauts, we go up there to do science and research you can't do down here with gravity in the way and the atmosphere and the way into every field you can imagine because gravity affects everything. So into new medicine, into new materials into, but making even more environmentally sustainable beer manufacturer, looking at bubbles as one example. So I think the breadth of space utility surprises people. And it's often something we don't see. It's quite hidden.

Neil Hart:

Which is why it's so important to have these conversations, right? To get that story out there. You've often said that space isn't an alternative to problems on earth. It's a way of solving the problems. You've mentioned a few. Are there any key ones that really pique your interest in terms of that solutions in space?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. I think a really interesting one that I picked up more on astronaut training that I knew about as a space engineer was the medical advances in space. Yes, you are a guinea pig as an astronaut and there's been lots of advances in medicine because of that, but particularly what happens in the samples.

So there's a few things that happen in space. One is you can grow things in 3D. Stuff doesn't sit at the bottom of a medical dish. So you can grow what's called organoids or mini versions of kind of organs or bits of organs. You can grow, you can have 3D tumour cells in there and look at how medicine penetrates them.

Inside cells, in almost every cell, there are gravity sensors in plants and animals that change their behaviour. A lot of cancers grow quicker in space. So by looking at the why, you can try and unlock what the mechanism is that you don't see on Earth.

I think it's 70% of our pharmaceuticals are crystalline crystals in nature, in space, because things are suspended and don't drop to the bottom of solution, crystal and don't mix. Crystals grow really large, not this large, but much larger and more pure in space, which means you can see them better under a microscope. You can understand them better.

And so crystals make up pharmaceuticals, they make up metals, they make up proteins, and we can use that to help develop medicines faster. So the COVID-19 drug, Remdesivir, which is an antiviral you get if you're in hospital in a bad way. That now can be given to people with comorbidities like kidney disease because it's been reformulated in space. Merck's immunotherapy cancer drug, Keytruda, which is going to be quite mainstream across a lot of cancers soon, is now transitioning from an IV bag in a hospital setting to an injection, which means more of the world can reach it.

And in Australia, actually we have in South Australia, we are having the world's only ever commercial capsule, returning to a commercial spaceport. And the capsule's about the size of this sitting area here, containing pharmaceutical catalysts for new medicines. So we're part of that new economy and it's going to really take off in the 2030s.

Neil Hart:

So we've got people in the room who are probably doing cyber and AI and data. When you're a solo astronaut or a small group of astronauts, you have to be across so many of these different sciences.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, so astronaut training is as intense and as wonderful as you can imagine. So when you get selected to be an astronaut, you're not called an astronaut right away. You called an ASCAN, which is kind of a mean term for astronaut candidate. And basically, until you pass the gauntlet that is basic astronaut training or ASCAN training, it's the same curriculum at NASA in Europe, in Japan, in Canada, in Russia, all the human space flight space station nations that work together.

And that basically is a jack of all trades training. I had over 420 instructors. The six of us in the class called the 'Hoppers', which is there. Six of us, we had over 420 instructors in 13 months because space missions are usually many months long. So you have to be able to do all the jobs up there. In the start of the modern space age, all astronauts were military fast jet pilots in the Soviet Union or test pilots in the US because of the kind of missions they were doing.

Proving new vehicles, flying very operational, very individual and short duration. When they got to the shuttle era at NASA, it was very specialised. Missions were a few days long. You had to work intensely. You had a specialised job to do. You were a pilot, a commander, a mission specialist, or a payload specialist.

Now it's space station, which is weeks to months. So when you're up there, there's no [unclear] come fix the toilet. You do your own plumbing, you do your own heating, you do your own electronics, you have to be able to figure it out.

Yes, ground control is there to help you, but you need to know what to do and you need to be able to do any role. So at the end of that 13 months, when we all qualified, we got our wings, you can call yourself an astronaut. That's when you're ready for mission assignment in any role to any professional mission if your country should put you forward for that.

So in that 13 months, we learned lots of different sciences in labs and also in the classroom. We did a lot of medical work, learning how to be, I'd say not doctors because that takes a longer time, but beyond first aid, we also had to be able to take samples of ourselves and each other, not just blood and other biopsies, but also like muscle biopsies, like lumber punctures, ultrasounds, all that.

You have to know how to use all the fitness equipment in space because you do two hours a day in the gym up there. And if you do it wrong, you could really hurt yourself. And if you can't exercise for more than 20 days, it's a mission over for you and your crew. No one wants to do that.

We learn how to do space walks in deep pools underwater, because that's the longest time you can get in weightlessness simulated on earth, although inside the suit, you still feel weight.

We go into vomit comets or Zero-G planes where basically you're skydiving, no vomit in our comet from many astronauts at least. You fall through the sky, basically skydiving with a plane around you that catches you in a parabola shape and you get 20 odd seconds at a time of weightlessness. And you really, in that situation, realise you're a ping pong ball.

When you're in water, water dampens your motion. It takes effort to move your arms through water, right? In air, air compressors, so it's not as much effort. So with the push of a pinky finger, you fly across the room. You do CPR by doing a handstand on someone and doing squats on the roof. You have to learn how to use a drill and hold on, because if you don't hold on, you'll spin and be shot backwards. And it's very silly and is not very effective.

You have to learn how to use the tethers in space walks, get your feet into the foot restraints, which is really tricky because if you stub your toe, action and reaction means you do a somersault and you end up on the roof. So there's lots of embarrassing videos of me doing that out there. We learned to drive the robotic arm that is the 17 metre Canadarm, the Canadian robotic arm of the space station.

The space station, by the way, is the main home of astronauts today, 109 metres across, almost the size of the nausea soccer field, internal volume, 8380 passenger bit or five bedroom house, lined with scientific equipment like furnaces, glove boxes, all that. On the outside has more scientific equipment, stuff looking at the sun, space, the Earth and it's had people on it for more than 25 years. So we learn about all those systems, how to maintain them.

Spent time in Houston as well because the global astronaut cores, about 90 of us that are active from eight space agencies, and you need to know each other and get on. We do survival expeditions, winter survival, ocean survival, firefighting and rescue in various forms and use that also to hone, our what's called human behaviour and performance skills, which is like how you get along in those environments, how you perform under pressure, how you work in a team.

Had to learn Russian. That was the hardest part by far. I'm not great at languages. That was tough. And lots of humanities as well. So yeah, incredible experience. Fantastic to be able to bring those knowledge, that knowledge and those insights home to Australia as much as I was allowed to, to help us be informed about our place in this really opaque part of the space endeavour, but also a really important one.

Neil Hart:

Anything that stands out as the most enjoyable part of that training? It sounds intense mentally and physically.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

It was wonderful. The most enjoyable part was the people you do it with. The other astronauts, we're not in competition. We're all from different countries. The flights are determined by politics and whichever country wants to step forward first. So we were told on day one, there's three ways you can fail this training.

One is something medical goes wrong and we can't fix it, but we'll try and fix it. Number two is you don't put in the effort. They were like, 'We're good astronaut selectors. We pick well.' If you don't pass, it's your fault. You haven't put in the effort. Number three is if you're not a team player, you're toxic in the team, you undermine the team, you're all there to lift each other up. And we all had totally different backgrounds. The other five were a helicopter test pilot from France who's currently in space, one month into a nine months mission.

Incredible. Second is Rose from the UK. She's an astrophysicist. There's Marco from Switzerland. He's a paratrooper and urologist. There's Pablo from Spain. He's a aeronautical engineer and there is...oh, who am I forgetting? Oh, Raphael from Belgium. He's a neuroscientist and he'll be launching in about six months or so. So completely different backgrounds. So we all had different strengths and weaknesses. We all had things we could help each other out with and you just do and it works.

Neil Hart:

Fantastic. Sounds like a high pressure environment. Have you got any tips for dealing with the stress and the pressure that you've been through?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I mean, you had to get...the selection process itself was a year and a half, six knockout rounds, just like every astronaut movie. We had to live in a hospital for a week, having every test you can imagine without a scalpel. We had to do stress tests in teams, time at the astronaut centre being followed around by astronauts, choose your own adventure type stories, interviews in foreign languages you claim to know, impromptu speeches, which was a surprise and lots of things.

They really wanted to know also that you knew how to deal with risk, that you understood the downsides of being an astronaut and why you were in it. Yeah, that was a gauntlet. And through that process, you really come to understand what it means to be an astronaut. And so when I got there, I was pretty well across what I was in for.

But yeah, I just thought it was incredible. Yeah. The people you learn from were amazing. The first day of astronaut training were all told to arrive at the same time so they could film us walking in. And we walked in in this huge entrance hall kind of the size of this room with a huge space station model hanging from above and displays around it and waiting to meet us for all these other astronauts.

People who we'd looked up to as heroes, waiting to greet us as colleagues, as peers. And that was really special. It did make morning tea really difficult for conversation because we'd all sped read all their autobiographies and you far too much. It's like, 'Don't drop their wife's name, don't drop their kid's name.' But it was real special. And quite quickly we got down to work. But during that whole time, every stage of the selection process, becoming an astronaut, it would be so easy to be gripped with the anxiety of, 'I don't deserve this.I don't belong.'

But that's not a useful use of your energy or your time and you have to learn that pretty fast. So in the astronauts election, it was more of a personal challenge. I was like, 'Gosh, my goal is to get to the medical because I thought that what happened with me in the Air Force would kick me out.' But in fact, when I got to the medical, I took all that stack of data which showed I was just low on the bell curve for this blood reading and it wasn't really a problem and I passed, right?

So sometimes things come full circle. But then after that, there was a guy I sat next to at one of the selection rounds whose job was to go under volcanoes, drop sensors and get out of there and I passed the wrist bit and he didn't. And I'm like...

Neil Hart:

Hang on...

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I don't quite understand what's happening here, but I'm just going to go with it. And when we all got to become astronauts or as ASCANs, me and our class were all kind of like, 'Wow, how on earth did we beat out like 22 and a half thousand people?' You recognise that while the selection is as fair as they were able to make it, you could see that there was every effort put in to be an objective selection by the selection committee. Of course, someone having a good day or a bad day, yourself or the selection committee could do it. If you started again, it might not be you.

But you know what, you're there now, become good enough, become good enough in your own mind and look forward, not backward. And that's how you get the job done. You make it about what you're going to contribute, what you're going to do, not whether you are good enough or not.

Neil Hart:

You carry a lot of firsts. Did you carry some of those into this first under the Australian flag, first woman? Did that carry into your training and affect how you thought through this or that didn't really strike you until you came out the other side?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, I guess it's something that it's certainly a lot more of a challenging journey because a lot of people, this is new for them and they don't always know what they don't know. It's new for Australia. I applied to be a British astronaut. Wonderfully, it's a long story, but I'm happy to go there if people are interested. I won't now though, but I got to represent Australia, which is a greater outcome than I could have ever dreamed of. Didn't expect that could come up.

That'll mean it's a longer, more challenging road for me to space. We don't have a human space flight programme, but it's also a far more exciting position because of the impact you can make. I think I'm quite motivated in a way by contribution in the way that can be impact in developing with teams, new space missions, new technologies, the impact that can have excites me.

It's the same when you get to be the first. It's a change you can do. It's what you can do for others as well as you go through that. Getting to write your own story is kind of fun as well. And I look forward to whatever the next thing is. I think careers aren't mountains, they're mountain ranges. And as you get to one peak, you kind of see others in the distance. It's like, 'Oh, that one.' And you go for that, right? And so this is just a new beginning.

Neil Hart:

So Australian of the Year has given you a platform. What message is landing with the young people out there in terms of STEM and following? I know it's only been a couple of months, but I'm sure you've already met hundreds of people, thousands probably around the country.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, it's very humbling, the responses that I've received, particularly since becoming Australian of the Year. And I think that what I'm trying to ..I share with young people different pathways they can have, what I've done and the different journeys, the excitement, I hope, about how much remains to be discovered out. They're in the parts they can play in it as Australians from where they are in Australia.

In Australia today, you don't have to leave your home city or even many regions to work in really exciting space jobs or to create your own space opportunities. But also I think you just need to help light or stoke that fire and part of that is them having the confidence to believe they have a place in it. I remember when I was in Year 10. I did my Year 10 work experience at Parkes like 'The Dish', [unclear].

And when I was there, that was the first time I actually thought, 'Oh, maybe this could happen.' Because when I was there, I lived in the facilities with all the astronomers and astrophysicists for a week and spent meals with them. And I learned that they are not superheroes or super geniuses. They're normal people with a passion for what they do that have worked at it.

And I was like, 'Well, I have a passion and I'm willing to work.' And that's something that I think is important to show young people. You say you don't know if you don't know the answer, you show some humanity, you don't try and be perfect because nobody is and they can see themselves in that. So that's exciting.

I think in Australia, we have a really wonderful culture around sports. Sports are important to me. They're really foundational for a lot of the ways that we can work well in teams and motivate other people, but in sports, we are all willing to lean in and give it a go on the sports field.

Even if we're the weakest in the team, we encourage our kids to keep up with sports, even if they're not particularly sporty because sports can be fun for the love of the code because fitness is important. But when it comes to the classroom, particularly the science and maths classroom, if young people aren't top of the class, they're told, 'Don't worry, it's not for you. Go do something else.'

Or they're even encouraged out, even if they might like it if they're not doing well or they don't fit the stereotype. And I think we need to flip that around and be like, give it a go in the classroom because learning can be fun, because being challenged can be fun and it's important because there's problems that you care about. There's solutions that are exciting and you can get at them. If you find something that inspires you, you can become good at it.

A lot of scientists I've met did not do particularly great in science at school, but they worked at it and now they're doing incredible things. I met someone yesterday out at Tidbinbilla. She said she failed high school maths and now she's an astrophysicist. That's really hard math. So letting people see that, don't opt out before you see what you're capable of.

Neil Hart:

What about teachers, engaging teachers? Is there some great teachers you've seen out there or met or things that teachers could do with curriculum to try and inspire that next generation?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, teachers are amazing. The work they do is phenomenal. I've run around schools and given presentations. I'm like, 'Wow, this is their everyday, hats off to them. They've got a lot on their plate.' And what we've seen overseas is that when astronauts go to space, they do a lot of curriculum demonstrations that teachers can use in the classroom to support their work and not just in science and math, but also in like history, in geography, in politics, because it touches on all those fields because space is just a place like the ocean, it has breadth and a lot of applications.

At the space agency, there's a team that's developed curriculum aligned resources to support teachers. There's a lot of online resources there that can support that too. So that's not my work, but it's my colleagues, but it's great that it's there. And we've seen overseas that that can help move the needle by giving kids the why should I care about this argument to what they're learning in class.

Neil Hart:

So as a pilot, I keep getting asked, 'Why do we need pilots anymore? We've got autonomy and AI.' What about in space? Robots, autonomy, AI?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, it's not robots or humans. It's robots and humans, right? So there's things that robots can do better than humans. There's things that humans can do better than robots and always will. Looking at the start of observing the Earth from space, the satellites up there had camera film, right? We didn't have digital cameras. So the main function of a lot of astronauts on the shuttle was to go up there, catch the satellites, remove the film, bring it back to earth. Wild, right?

We don't need to do that anymore, so we shouldn't do it anymore. So we don't. We have CCD chips, which were, by the way, advanced and invented through that need for that application. When we go out to other planets, it's with robots. No humans have gone to other planets, but humans are far better at robots, at multidisciplinary activities and understanding what's happening and at discovering mysteries they don't expect to find, which is how we have a lot of scientific endeavour pursued.

One example is with one of the Mars Rovers not too long ago, they were drilling on Mars and it just kept coming up with nothing. Couldn't figure it out. It took days to figure it out. It was drilling sand, right? If you have a human drilling to sand and nothing comes up, you figure that out in about three seconds because you've got the ability to assess your environment and see things that you weren't designed to see.

Some of the best Moon rocks brought back from Apollo, the most scientifically productive in terms of paper Moon rocks were ones that astronauts saw and went, 'Oh, it's a bit unusual', based on their geology training. When we go out to the Moon now, humans will be supported by robots, but can never be replaced by them. AI is having a big effect on space like it will for every industry in a good way.

Space also helps AI though. 99% of climate data by volume comes from satellites in space. Most of the 1% on Earth is ground truthing, that data and across calibrating the satellites. So that data feeds our AI models about our universe. But yeah, it's a really great time. Robots aren't quite there yet.

In space, you have quantum challenges, right? There's five main hazards in space. Let's see if I remember. The acronym is RIDGE. R is radiation. I is isolation and confinement. D is distance from Earth. G is gravity, hyper low gravity, microgravity, like weightlessness and E is extreme and hostile environments like lunar dust or radiation.

And those don't just affect people, they affect robots. So when you're out in the Moon filling a lot more radiation, you don't have as much computing power. You have to shield a lot more even within that. So our robots in space are far less capable than our robots on Earth today as well.

Neil Hart:

The other part I guess that strikes me is there's so much data that you've got to collect and do data science on and a huge team on Earth. So communications and other thing must be another one of the challenges.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Exactly. When I started out as a space engineer in about 2010 in the industry, it was kind of the gold rule that you get all the data or satellite collects to the ground because scientists don't like it processed up there because they want to know if the satellite did the calculations correct, right?

But now our instruments in space are so incredible that they're making so much data, it's hard to pipe them down. On the space station, the international space station, if you take a photo as an astronaut, you're not allowed to delete it. It belongs to science.

Maybe it's a bit of a blurry photo, maybe it's bad, but maybe in the back corner is something exciting for science that you don't see that a scientist might. As humans are going around the Moon on Artemis II, launching Thursday morning Australia time, by the way, about 9:30, I encourage you to watch the live broadcast of the launch.

As they go around the Moon, they won't have the ability to pipe it all back. The astronauts have, I think about 20 minutes a day to decide what to send back from their photos and stuff. CSIRO, Tidbinbilla will be communicating as one of the three major stations accepting that data. ANU at Mount Stromlo will be doing a demonstration with optical communications, laser tracking and comms, which would help high rate data, high res video and stuff come down.

And those two facilities might, I think quite likely that they'll be the ones in contact with this mission when it's at its furthest point from Earth, which might be the furthest point humans have ever been from Earth, which is exciting, but we're not keeping all that data. A lot of that data will be burnt up when the back half of the vehicle reenters separately and gets rid of all those hard drives. So yeah, we are data constrained in space. Yeah.

Neil Hart:

Yeah. No, that's great. And let's hope that strong wind that happened in the dish doesn't happen right at the wrong time, right?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

All clouds, in the case of layers.

Neil Hart:

Love it. Love it. You're also a Group Captain. Tell me how that's working and what the benefit there is, both for the Air Force and for you personally.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. So I spent a very short time in the military when I was at university, hoping I'd have the chance to go back and be a pilot and to test out that life. And I loved it. I was in the Army Reserve as a staff cadet and then left [unclear]. But then when I went overseas, I wasn't able to keep that up. So I learned a lot from that from me personally. I didn't contribute a lot, but I learned a lot.

It was very foundational to my skills as a space engineer and now to being an astronaut, what I learnt there. Now as a Group Captain in the Air Force, it's a very different position in the military, but I'm really grateful for this opportunity. So what I'm doing in Defence is I'm working and being supported to remain what I call 'match fit' for space.

So typically when you graduate and become an astronaut, you keep training on the international training continuum. I've not yet been put on that by Australia, but what I'm doing in Air Force is quite equivalent. And I've been told by the astronaut trainers is really great training and I can agree with that.

So looking at what astronauts are doing globally and my classmates are doing, mapping that to existing defence trainings, kind of like air crew training, survival trainings, medical support, operations trainings in like space command. And the list goes on and on. It's a really big spreadsheet. There's a lot there.

And so I'm learning a lot from Defence. At the same time, I'm doing my best to contribute by combining where I've learned equivalent topics with that, the meeting of that knowledge. Also, should I have the chance for a mission one day or further training, I'll be able to bring that knowledge back to defence as well.

We see defence around the world supporting civilian human space flight in operations, in crew retrieval after return and medical rehabilitation and support and so on. So it's quite close, as well as payloads up there. So it's quite closely integrated. A lot of astronauts have military backgrounds because those skills lend themselves well to astronauts for the most part.

So yeah, in Germany, they just started training the European senior astronauts on helicopter flying, basically kind of take off, hover land in terrains with non-horizontal horizons on non-horizontal terrain to try and represent the Moon quite well.

So those behaviours that what you call kind of crew resource management, making decisions under pressure in a complex environment, particularly in a team, are completely equivalent. So it's also good, I think, to set the stage for maybe one day if there's future astronauts, perhaps they can be trained in part in our Defence Force.

Neil Hart:

Let's talk about some cool stuff, Artemis and maybe about Australia's role in Artemis. You were the technical lead for 'Roo-ver', as Jo introduced before, an apt name, I think, chosen by the public. And you also did some work on the Orion spacecraft with Airbus. Tell us a bit about Artemis and then where Australia might play.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Sure. So Artemis is the new Apollo. People haven't been around the Moon or to the Moon since 1972 at the end of the Apollo programme. So it's more than 50 years. The world has changed. The reasons we're going are a bit different and our capabilities to do science are different.

So Artemis is named for the twin sister of Apollo in mythology, and it's going to the South Polar region of the Moon rather than the more equatorial mid-latitudes, because down there you can stay longer. You don't have the day, night of every month losing that light, meaning you're in a really cold environment, which our electronics can't really handle yet.

But in the South Polar region, we have those permanently lit areas on the ridges and the permanently dark areas in the valleys and craters, which are the coldest part of our solar system. And there'll be incredible things we can find there.

In the South Polar region, we've detected signals of water, water ice, which could be used for oxygen, could be used potentially for fuel, could tell us about how water came to be on Earth. The Moon is like a museum of early Earth. It's though that the Moon and the earth were formed from a collision of a proto earth and a big object and they kind of smashed together, spun up a bit, a big chunks spun off and solidified, which became the Moon and the earth solidified, but earth's bigger.

So we have climate, we have weathering, we have plate tectonics, so we can't see the early earth. It's a regret recycler. The Moon we can see, we think are signs of what the early earth might have been like. It helps us to understand the subsurface of the earth and the geothermal inputs into our climate models, like geothermal activity, volcanoes and so on.

That's one of the biggest parts of our model that need higher fidelity, so it'll help there. There are, of course, geostrategic angles there, but primarily we're going for long-term discovery and to venture forward again. So that's the goal of the Artemis programme. The US has recently reframed the architecture, meaning like the phasing of how the program's going to build up.

So we're now going to have humans on the Moon probably in 2028. We're going to have, from the 2030s, human missions every six months, we're going to have robotic landers. Australia's part of this, not just from the tracking and the communications, which is exciting.

And I talked about, but from a payload perspective. So we're building on our legacy. We have 'Roo-ver.' 'Roo-ver' is a 20 kilogramme. Rover is a way to get our first foot in the door with our remote operations capabilities. I talked about from our mining sector, that robotic capability.

'Roover's' going to help us characterise the surface of the Moon and test some other algorithms. We've got a payload looking at growing plants on the surface of the Moon. We've got a payload looking at what's underneath the surface of the Moon, like looking at the geology and stuff.

We've got sensors on landers that are helping the future landers to navigate because it's quite hard to land on the Moon. We've got operation centres supporting it. The list really goes on and these are all the areas we can build out our capability. The lunar economy is government made, largely US government made, but Australia can enter certain supply chains and be part of it there too.

Neil Hart:

Brilliant. So what kind of things can 'Roo-ver' do? You've obviously been very close. It needs to be able to do lots of things, right?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, very beginning, I have to say it was before I trained to be an astronaut. I worked on it. So a lot of people have advanced it since then. I was there in the early concept development, pitching that to NASA as part of our contribution, and that was thrilling.

I remember throwing snacks at my kids off screen while I was negotiating pre-dawn and they woke up early. But yeah, what's incredible about it is it's a really low cost mission compared to what you'd usually have for a Rover. It's small, it's agile, it's spinning in our defence robotics and our agricultural and our mining robotics into this platform.

And the world's excited for Australia to be able to contribute almost like those industrial services on the Moon to understand the Moon and to pave the way for future human sustainable long-term presence.

Like we are always on the international space station, anyone under 25 in the room, you've never been alive at a time when someone's not on the space station. In the future, people won't have been alive at a time when there's not a human working on the Moon, right?

The way I think of the Moon is a bit like Antarctica. It's a place you go to do work. I don't think we're going to have colonies and children and stuff up there for a long time. There's no need for that, just like there's no need to do that in Antarctica. And the resources that we're planning to use up there is living off the land in the same way you might melt a bit of water to drink the water in Antarctica, right, rather than to mine it for profit.

But yeah, it's really exciting. Right now, the world is shifting its space programmes, its geopolitical alliances in space programmes, and the economy is taking off and becoming more commercial than ever, which gives great opportunity for Australia as a country and Australian enterpreneurs and researchers to be involved.

Neil Hart:

So you talked a bit before, right at the start about technologies that came out of the space programme. Is there anything come out of the development of 'Roo-ver', new inventions, new technologies, new techniques?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

It's early.

Neil Hart:

It's early.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

We'll see. It's early. We'll see. Certainly we've had a lot of advances through our smaller demonstrator payloads going to the Moon already. So we've seen, for example, there's been a company in Adelaide that's moved or it kind of spread their business from the automobile car industry to the space industry with their capabilities and kind of their sensors and so on and that they've said has uplifted their standards across the whole company.

What we've had for a company called Fleet in Adelaide, that's the company I referred to, was referring to when I said there's distributed sensors on the ground to more sustainably prospect for minerals. They're the one doing the sensor on the Moon to understand what's under the surface.

Neil Hart:

Cool.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

They're kind of space qualifying that capability in a way that will show off what they're capable of on the earth and improve their product, harden their product.

We've got a centre for plants in space in Australia involving a lot of universities, and that's learning about creating new kinds of drought tolerant crops. Because in space, you can see lots of things about plants. You can't on Earth.

I'm not a botanist by any means. I can't keep a house plant alive. But in space, one of the things you can see is that plants, I'm told, do a happy dance, a 24 hour kind of movement day to night. And that is an indicator of their health. You can't really see it on earth because gravity kind of dampens it out. But in space you can see it so you can test and fine tune different things about their health. And that's helping with our vertical farming as well. Yeah, there's a number of examples.

Neil Hart:

I'm a child of the '60s. I've still got the coin from the Apollo mission that came with the newspaper, but the greatest technology back then was the space food sticks, all I'd have to say, but they seem to have gone away. So I'm looking for something new to come out of the new space programme we would get. Look, you also worked on the Martian programme, on going to Mars programme. Tell me a bit about that and where you think that's going to go.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. So I've done Mars in a few different ways. One was when I was quite young, the architecture about looking at...when I say architecture, architecture basically means phased plans for how you'd build up a capability. So like Marsha and architecture, how would you establish spaces and work for humans on Mars? It was all surface based, right?

And so I was looking at what would happen if you put people subterranean in lava tubes, because lava tubes scale with gravity. On Mars, you have like one third gravity. So your lava tubes are three times the diameter. So they're a nice size for a habitat.

And on the martian regulate, the surface material, at about one metre thick, you're blocked out from almost all the radiation. You could look to do that on the Moon, but you'd probably want to pile the rocks on top of you because the Moon has far less gravity, like one six.

So like you're looking at lava tubes of a hundred metre diameter, that's a long way to upsell down. So yeah, that was really interesting to be able to do. Technologies I worked on was for something called a Mars Hopper. And that was about what happens post Rovers and post kind of drones. How could you move kind of an asset around Mars one kilometre hops at a time? And we're looking at using the marsh and atmosphere as the fuel source.

So I had developed a system to extract CO2. And then there was another person that looked at how do you heat that up over kind of nuclear fuel and shoot it out the bottom like a hot last air. And then someone else did all the landing legs.

And we had to look at the full scientific landing sites and how you build that up. And that was very exciting.

Neil Hart:

Fabulous.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. But yeah, pretty great stuff. And one of the nice things about being a space engineer, just like being an astronaut is you're always learning, you're always doing your missions. You're always not the smartest person in the room by any stretch.

Neil Hart:

And we've all seen Matt Damon's already made it to Mars. How realistic is human space flight to Mars and actually getting there and setting it up? What are the challenges?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I don't think there's like any technical blocker we couldn't overcome, but we still have a lot to overcome. Part of the challenge is the time for any mission. If you're going to land on the Martian surface, you're looking at almost a three year round trip with current propulsion technology.

For that reason, NASA's just like publicly announced again, they're looking at more of a nuclear type propulsion to Mars to speed that up. Because when you take a long time in deep space, you're exposed to a lot of radiation. You have to be able to have the life support that's reliable.

You have to be able to have food stores that last. We cannot have shelf life for three years for all of our nutritional needs. That's simply, you could have a space greenhouse like the kind that Australia's looking at developing, but what if it breaks? Do you drop stores ahead of time?

And that's just one tiny part of the challenge. If you're going to land on Mars, Mars, when you land even a robot on it, it's like a terror, like to land on Mars because it's got enough atmosphere to make it difficult, enough gravity to make it difficult.

It's kind of like 1% of the density of Earth's atmosphere. It's like if you went 20 kilometres up. So that's where a lot of like the Martian and planes and drones are tested for that density, even though it's different chemicals. So you've got to get a rocket there, land it. We can do that now.

You got to somehow refuel it probably from what exists on the Martian surface. And you've got to do all that before people get there and you got to do it in a way that it's reliable. People have talked about one-way trips. I don't think that's particularly helpful. So I certainly wouldn't go.

A lot of astronauts say they would before they've had a family actually. It's quite interesting to see that switch. But no, I think it's a far more exciting, technical challenge to bring people home again and far more inspirational and important for science. There's a lot of things about the human body we don't know about in space. We're still discovering.

You might have seen the press about the NASA astronaut recently who had the first medical evacuation from space, quite serious, still some unknowns about that situation. We discovered a few years ago that the blood clot risk in space is much bigger than we thought.

Often in space, you're ultrasounding your neck because weird things happen with your eyes. For some astronauts, particularly men, you can't, like your eyesight degrades in space. It's thought to be because of the pressure difference between your intracranial, intraocular, your brain eye kind of pressure, but we don't really know.

We know it's somehow linked to the genes related to B vitamins now, which has meant people are now looking at B vitamins for brain, iron health. But when an astronaut was doing ultrasound of a neck to look at those flows, they found a massive blood clot, massive, right?

You can't go on blood thinners up there because actually your blood volume is already much lower than on Earth. Your body sheds a lot of that fluid. You don't want to bring them back to Earth because you dislodge it. So they just kind of had to wait it out. But now they're like, wow, well, that is a risk.

How do we deal with that risk? That is new. We're still learning a lot about bodies up there, and that's one reason why the international space station has been so important. It lets us have six months to one year kind of missions to build up that knowledge base.

Neil Hart:

Another role for Vegemite - B vitamins.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Absolutely. So I'm not sure if Andy Thomas took Vegimite to space. I'll have to check. And maybe that can be a first.

Neil Hart:

It should be a staple once you get up there. Yeah, tell me about then long duration human space flight. What's being done to kind of solve some of these problems before we start sending people on two way trips to Mars?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Well, that's why it's so important to have a continuous presence in low earth orbit. There's two main space stations up there today, the Chinese one, which is a bit smaller and the international space station, which has many astronauts from many countries on at seven right now.

When we go out to the Moon initially, it's 10 day missions. Artemis II, which is launching hopefully Thursday, if not sometime likely over the Easter weekend. That's a 10 day mission. Until we have a Moon base, that vehicle's not going to support much more than that for four astronauts, but then we can have longer term missions out there. So we need to build up that knowledge and that database to do it.

Neil Hart:

Is there things we can do on Earth for these long durations for it?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

So there are people that volunteer for bedrest studies. As astronauts, we don't because our bodies, we have to kind of save that for space. But in Germany at the astronauts centre next to it is a German space agency and they have a big bedrest test facility and basically they pay students a good wage to lie in bed...

Neil Hart:

Just lie there...

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

For summer and they're allowed to use their laptop, so often they'll work on their thesis and then they get recovered afterwards as part of the ethics behind it. They get to full recovery.

Neil Hart:

Safety volunteers. There we go.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

And it's basically, I think it's 20 or 30 degrees ... Oh, I should know, but 20 or 30 degrees head down back is similar to weightlessness in a lot of your systems.

Neil Hart:

Right.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah.

Neil Hart:

Wow.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

And you can't get up to even use the loo, so it's pretty rough for them, but they're happy to do it.

Neil Hart:

What about other sectors? Things like the people down on Antarctica, submariners. There must be some lessons that have been [unclear].

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So as I talked about the RIDGE, the isolation and confinement, which is the I, is things you can test in other environments. There are ground analogues on earth, including some that have been done here in Australia that put kind of pretend crews out doing missions.

It's hard to give them a real sense of danger and true isolation, but they can do pretty good work there. That's why Antarctica is such a good analogue because overwinter, it's actually harder to do a medical evacuation from Antarctica and winter than it is from the International Space Station.

I think Australian Antarctic expeditioners that go over winter, often the doctors at least, I think, still have to have their appendices taken out. We don't yet in space. And NASA's actually speaking to the Australian Antarctic division to be like, 'How's that going for you?', to see should they do it for astronauts going to the Moon where it's harder to get back to Earth in a timeframe where you could better deal with appendicitis.

Also, psychological factors, team living, looking at decoupling that factor. So if you're overwinter in Antarctica, your immune system drops just like it does on the space station. So perhaps it's more of an isolation from germs thing than it is from a weightlessness thing, right?

Neil Hart:

Interesting.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

We've trained our Antarctic expeditioners how to use some medical equipment like handheld ultrasounds with iPads to see how they learn. And we've also tested that in space. So there's a lot of collaborative work that goes on. With submariners, it's a little bit trickier because it's Defence, but certainly I believe the Portuguese Navy is doing some work on that too. Some of the tech similar in terms of life support systems and so on and the group living, the psychological factors, there's a lot of learnings in both directions.

Neil Hart:

And we know there's a lot of...no, I won't say that about submariners, psychological factors. Space junk, that's becoming a problem, right, for space, for satellites, for everything.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah.

Neil Hart:

What's the risk there and how's that being changed?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, space junk is a huge problem. And thanks to the movie 'Gravity', it's now much better understood by most people. It's not completely accurate. I watched that movie in a theatre in Germany where I lived at the time, which was kind of like a space city, lots of space companies and organisations and you'd hear mutters and size from different parts of the cinema.

But the wonderful thing is it made people realise kind of the worst case scenario, which could happen. So right back decades ago in the Apollo era, someone called Kessler came up with the maths that basically said, look, we're going to reach a point at some point in the future.

We've launched enough things to space that even if you do nothing more, you don't launch anything else, if you go hands off, that those things will start colliding and it will become an exponential growth function because when two big objects collide and smash, they create lots of little objects. Lots of little bullets that then go hit other objects that smash.

They go hit other objects that smash. It's quite simple dynamics, quite simple mathematics. It's not as complex to say something like climate change, which is multifactorial, it's just quite straightforward math equations. And people think we might be at that point today where that could start to happen.

We are having so many more satellites go up there, especially with the mega constellations like Starlink, which may have more than 60,000 satellites in a few years time. That's phenomenal.

So it becomes a tragedy of the commons issue, not just the dark skies and astronomy, but also like who's responsible, who pays, how is it managed and spaces inherently international, unless you're really far from Earth. Like 35 and a bit thousand kilometres, you're not hovering above a single point. Close to Earth where all these satellites are, you're zooming around it, you're only over a country for minutes and then you're over the next country.

So who's responsible? Who manages it? And so a lot of space agencies around the world, including ours, are discussing this, trying to figure it out as best we can. We're tracking it. And it's important not just for, so we don't pollute space. But so that we can continue to use space for all the applications, because if it's full of junk, you're not going to be able to get much through it unless it's armoured, which makes it harder to do things in space.

On the space station, which is lower than most satellites, 400 kilometres, you can hear ping, ping, ping on occasion of space junk. You're going at Mark 25 in low earth orbit, multiples times faster than a bullet and collisions can happen almost head on, which can be quite impactful.

So on the space station, when you're doing a space walk, we taught look at the handholds, like the rails for births, because there might have been tiny things hit it and create a bird that could catch you or the glove.

And you don't work around the front of the space station in the direction of travel for long unless you need to, just in case the space station is armoured.

But something the size of a bolt going multiple times faster than a bullet is going to puncture potentially. But because it's lower, it's in an area where things don't stay in that all but long, so debris falls down. So when say Starlink, to take one example, when those satellites launch in batches.

One way they're trying to manage the issue is they'll launch at a low orbit, check out the systems are working, anything that doesn't fully work, doesn't turn on, will just burn up quickly and then they'll orbit raise the ones that work.

So people are working on it, but it's far from being solved. We need to solve this better. There's rules like Europe has a zero debris charter. You have the obligation at the end of life to remove your satellites, for example. Yeah.

Neil Hart:

What's the emergency drill like for a leak on the space station then?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, so there's three kind of major emergencies. Toxic atmosphere, which is the worst, because there's ammonia loops for the heat pipes in the space station, which can kill you in seconds. That's the only one you do not go back for your crew for, you get out.

There is fire and fire and space is pretty awful, and you have to be able to suppress it and there's different ways to do that. And then there's a leak. Most leaks are slow. There are often slow leaks out of the back of the station just from we think fatigue and there's different procedures to manage that.

You can put kind of like a seal between modules and see what way it kind of bends to see where the leak's coming from. Yeah, they're the main ones. So yeah, a big depressurization is less likely. But yeah, that's something you have to prepare for and there's different levels of procedures you deal with, very similar to aircraft procedures.

How you have your emergency staff, you know, and everything else you have checklists.

Neil Hart:

Brilliant. ISS is coming to the end of its life. What do you see about extending it or a replacement?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

ISS has done an incredible job.

Neil Hart:

It has.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

It's quite old, right? Yet right now in 2030, they're getting to the point where they're getting fatigue issues, which is hard to fix. It's like in the structure and seal and issues between modules. So you can keep replacing modules, right?

But at a certain point, your electronics, your computing systems are like 25 years out of date and the economics can move on too. Much of the world that's involved has had more than 25 years of learning how to operate space stations.

So the private sector's now more capable than they were when it started. So there's a chance to industrialise, privatise stations in low Earth orbit, which is the plan to have small station or stations in low Earth orbit, mostly with government funded research on it, perhaps some pharmaceutical research too. And then government does what only government can do, which is to really prove new ground, go out to the Moon and so on.

And it should be as government as necessary and as commercial and industrial as possible because that's a better value for the taxpayer. But yeah, right now the decision is ISS out to about 2030, potentially to 2032. There's discussions going on. Right now it's at its most scientifically productive because it's built.

So astronauts are spending almost all their time doing science and technology work as opposed to building. There's still maintenance to do, but yeah, produced thousands of peer reviewed publications last year alone.

Neil Hart:

You talked a bit about movies at one point, a little minute ago. Is there a movie you recommend to everyone that is accurate and actually portrays things closely?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Nothing's accurate enough.

Neil Hart:

Nothing?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I'm a terrible person to watch a space movie with, but I love space movies. They make us imagine a future and think about the kind of future we want to create. They make us reflect on how we might solve problems. I think when they instil a sense of awe, all can be really unifying.

And there's historical space movies too. If you look at 'The Dish', it's not accurate, but it reminds Australia of our legacy.

Neil Hart:

It does.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I was doing my Year 10 work experience there the year it came out. So that was really nice for me. '2001: A Space Odyssey' is a classic. It's kind of a slower movie, but a lot of the technologies that were predicted there have come true. What came first, the movie or the invention. Who's to say, right? You've got things like 'The Martian' or 'Hail Mary' where someone's thinking through problems.

I quite like the 'Hail Mary' book. How would you communicate with an alien? Just makes you think more philosophically. I like things like 'Star Trek', 'Star Wars', 'Interstellar', stuff that's really futuristic makes you reflect on, what do we want to take of humanity? Our lessons learned out to the solar system.

'The Expanse', I don't know if anyone's watched that. I was on a Zero-G vomit comet with the lead actor for that, which was fun. And he was doing some STEM videos. And then things like 'For All Mankind', which is the old alternative history of the Moon if the Soviets got there first. That's pretty accurate.

I quizzed a few of my astronaut instructors because I'd watched it shortly before the training and I was pretty spot on. So that was good to look at, what are the effects of what's happened on our life today?

They had things like, if the space race had never stopped, we would have had electric cars earlier because those innovations would have had a driving force and the geopolitics around it. I mean, the main reason a lot of countries do human space flight is because of the national posture.

What it demonstrates on the world stage to showcase your capabilities to work with international other countries is the most visible, positive thing. I think you can do dollar for dollar.

As a way to exert soft power by bringing in your partners and letting them be part of it. Japan, for example, gives experiment access across the Asia Pacific, as well as their education programmes. And that's something people don't realise when the war came down for the Soviet Union, the first plane from the US had NASA officials on it to negotiate Space Station for cooperation.

For the ISS, the International Space Station's been nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, hasn't won it yet for what it's done for international cooperation because when you have species level discovery, you can agree on it.

When you can't agree on other things. And amongst partner nations, it helps you to align your capabilities and integrate your industrial bases that set the stage for great global technical challenges like climate change. In terms of how does civil space help national security, in civil space, we can test ideas, right?

So to go out and work on a satellite to maintain it, which is technology is being developed, that's the same technology you need to approach and destroy a satellite physically. So by figuring out the norm, standards, behaviours in the civil sphere, and with civil applications, non-compliance stands out in the civil area. So that's a far less hairy place to be dealing with that.

Neil Hart:

So to give you a chance to have a drink, could I ask the Slido slide to come back up? There's some great questions scrolling up here from the audience, and I'm going to go to those in a minute. But in case you didn't get a chance to get that code or you actually turn the phone all the way off, do that.

If you really can't because you're like my mum and you're technology challenged, although she now can send me a Facebook message, sorry mum. There is a microphone that we can put your hand up and ask.

But please, if you've got some questions, feed them in and you can vote them up and down and we'll ask some of those questions as we get there. I just wanted to finish on a movie that I particularly love or a series. Tom Hanks narrated a thing, 'From the Earth to the Moon.'

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I haven't seen that yet.

Neil Hart:

Oh, I've got the box set. It's brilliant.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Okay.

Neil Hart:

I really love the history. Took me back to old days. If Australia gets spaced right, what's it going to look like in 2035? Let's go forward 19 years. What do you think?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Wow. So in 2035, I think Australia's space capability is transitioning from demonstrators to operational capability for commercial markets. Where I'd like to see us by 2035 is that we're delivering for Australian needs. At the Australian Space Agency, we coordinate across the more than 27 parts of government that use or contribute to the use of space to deliver essential services we rely on.

In our country, none of our satellites we rely on were built in Australia. Very few of them are owned by Australia. Right now, that's fine, but there's been circumstances in the past where there's been, say, a typhoon in Japan at a time we might need their satellite and who gets priority, right?

So by contributing some of the capabilities and areas that make sense for us to contribute because we're capable, that's the point where we can help secure those other data streams we rely on.

We don't need to reinvent the wheel, we don't need to do everything, but by taking a bigger presence of that core operational capability globally, we can secure our needs. So I think that's part of it. I would love to see in time an Australian Human Space Flight Programme, the next recruitment that would do tremendous things for STEM uptake in our country and our national pride in ourselves.

We can make things in Australia, incredible things. There's incredible Australians working in space abroad. There's incredible people here and I think that would help us to build our confidence that we're absolutely...People talk about us punching above our weight. Let's up our weight class because we're capable.

Neil Hart:

Love it. Love it. And I love the passion. Is there something about space that still fills you with wonder, that is still that motivation, that eight year old?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Just go outside and look up, right? The rest of the universe is out there. It's so huge. When you can look at the Moon on Thursday, there's humans going back around it. Australia's part of that. And just let yourself be inspired by inspiring things and breathe that in.

It's kind of important, I think. I think being able to let yourself be in awe of something, whether that's sporting achievements, a beautiful vista, something interesting on a bushwalk or the sky, that is a resilience driver.

It helps you to have an optimism bias. It makes you feel small, but connected. It drives togetherness in teams. And to find and foster your awe is how you can keep going in whatever it is that you care about, I think.

Neil Hart:

There's a great question here from Zara, wherever you are in the audience about speaking to Zena Cardman on the ISS, while she was on the Girl Guide Jamboree. And it said that Armstrong took his world scout badge to the Moon. What would you take? And I assume they've got weight limits, so it can't be anything.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Oh, they do. It's like, it's quite small. There's different things you can take. Yeah. I don't know exactly. I'd certainly like ideas, but I'd want to be able to use what I can physically take to space to be able to metaphorically bring the whole of Australia to space, whatever that may be.

Certainly things like chips I could put in school experiments that could go across the country that would be in there, things that matter to me. A lot of astronauts take recordings from Earth, sounds of waves, kind of things that remind you of living things like bird noises and different smells to help them connect with earth. But yeah, we'll see.

Neil Hart:

We'll see. Fantastic. Another one, space is typically targeted at the youth because of the years to build skills. Is there room for mid-career individuals to upskill and get into the industry?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yes, especially in Australia. So overseas when I was working in space, most people cracked in young and never left, so it was really hard to enter. But that also meant that the positive was most people entered technically and then branched out into other things.

Some became corporate managers, policymakers, politicians. It meant you had a depth of knowledge across all layers of decision making, but you're a bubble. So you're reinventing the wheel, you're missing innovation opportunities.

In Australia, when our space industry accelerated over the last decade, particularly, we had to hire in from the sides and that created incredible innovation. That's why we've had startups and SMEs that are finding non-government markets. You don't see that in very, many places in the world. It's quite remarkable.

And so absolutely you do and know that you bring value. Space is just a place like the ocean. Not everyone that works in it needs to know how to build a ship, right? You need space experts, but you need more than space experts.

Neil Hart:

You do. I love it. Okay, what's your favourite weird niche space fact?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Oh, there's so many. Gosh, there's kids in the audience and the questions have all been very professional. So I'm going to let you know that Uranus does smell like farts. The atmosphere has a bit of sulphur in it. So that's a nice space fact.

Weird and wonderful things that happen to your body and space as well, the fun space facts. I like that. The universe, the scale of it's phenomenal. There's more stars in our universe, we think, than all the grains of sand in the whole world, including the deserts, including the beaches and the ocean floors. In our Milky Way Galaxy alone, there's between 100 and 400 billion stars. We started looking at...

Neil Hart:

That's a lot.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

the one closest to us with in- space telescopes, as well as ground telescopes, and we're finding exoplanets. That means planets around other stars. And we found more than 6,000. Just in the last few years we started looking. So we think there must be planets everywhere.

Maybe that's part of the creation of almost every star. And the ingredients for life are the most abundant in the universe. So what does that tell you about the potential for life out there? It's pretty exciting, I think.

Neil Hart:

There's a question here about Canberra and what it would take to become a space capability hub. Obviously the Wombat XLs up on the hill, you've probably spent time up there. There's astronomy and amazing things with Animo and others at ANU. What would it take to get beyond the policy setting, which is almost an Australian problem, not just a Canberra problem, right?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. I would say Canberra isn't just a policy hub. The policy work being done is really good quality policy work. It's a lot of my colleagues in the space agency, but of course you need more than that to build out an ecosystem. We have incredible work being done at our universities in Canberra.

I was at ANU and UNSW Canberra today. The University of Canberra also does great work. We have startups like Skykraft that are looking at air traffic management from space here in Canberra. There is a lot of really good work being done here, I have to say.

But of course we can do more. And a lot of that is about being able to capture global opportunities. So the people doing policy are working to unlock access to international markets so we can access their supply chains taked part in their programmes. Also, people realising that they can use space to do lots of different things, like air traffic management from space. Cool concept, right? And things like that.

Neil Hart:

There's a good question here about high stakes environments where failure isn't an option. But you need to balance that innovation where failure actually might lead to some growth rather than perfection. How do you balance that? How do you strike that balance?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

So two things. Like with space engineering, when I started, I was working on exquisite bespoke, cannot risk breaking beautiful missions, right? That's fun engineering. I like it. What we've seen in the intervening years is that parallel to that, not replacing it, but parallel, you're getting more production lines of satellites, dramatically lowering the cost, accepting failure because there's so many of them.

That's sort of the Starlink principle. It's planet's principle, which is an Earth observation company whose original goal was to image the world once a day, now does it a lot more than that. That's really revolutionised space.

What SpaceX is doing in a similar way has lowered the cost of launch by at least two orders of magnitude just over the last decade. So that's really drastic. If we look at that from the perspective of human performance, as astronauts, we're selected and trained to focus not on perfection, but excellence.

And there's a nuance there that's often missed. Perfection is about ticking every box, making sure everything is just so. Excellence is about achieving a goal no matter how, in a way that nails that goal. So in our first round in astronaut selection, one way they tried to look at that was we had to sit down in a test centre.

I'm told it's quite similar to test pilot test centres, if anyone's ever done that where you go, it was like 14 hours of back to back test coordination, memory, different kinds of maths, physics, language ability, all that. And some of it was math problems. Some of it was really hard. They were trying to throw you.

But what we found out later was to pass that first selection where they took us from about 1300 people to about 300. We didn't have to ace any test. We had to get above the median score of our cohort in every test.

In other words, not be thrown, being able to be steady and keep going for that goal and not being thrown into paralysis if something goes wrong. And I think that's something that's really important to try and live.

Neil Hart:

So that resilience and adaptability is really important.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Perfection makes you procrastinate. Excellent. You have to be proactive to be excellent and to think outside the box to get somewhere and deliver something.

Neil Hart:

Great questions with curiosity. I love it. Can you see shooting stars from space?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

You can on the horizon part. If it's daylight, it's obviously too bright. If it's night, you can often see it. You can see a lot of things from space. So from the space station, you're quite close in. You can see sunrise and sunrise every 90 minutes. This is the speed you go around. You can see on the edge of that, as that happens, the thin blue line of air that is our atmosphere.

We have 90% of our atmosphere under 10 kilometres, which is where our planes fly. So it's very, very thin. In fact, you see no borders between countries, but you do see pollution. You do see fires, you see city lights. So in fact, the only borders you see are at nighttime. Say for example, between North and South Korea, where you see develop versus developing countries. But yeah, shooting stars are one thing you can see.

You can see Northern and Southern Lights, even though the latitudes you go to are not that extreme. You can see them and they're often above you. So if you go outside and do a space walk, you're just surrounded by all this and you're told don't look down because you get vertigo.

It's just your body is weird. You're told look around you, but not down till your body kind of establishes it's okay. You can't fall down from orbit. You're already falling. That's what orbit is. But yeah, the mind does weird things.

Neil Hart:

It's only 400 kilometres.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, I know, right?

Neil Hart:

Yeah. Tell me about space law and where that's going. Obviously, you had a lot of countries in Europe doing this. America is another island of space, but we've got other Russian, Chinese, others, India now getting into space.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, space law is basically international law for the most part, which is really about treaties and norms and behaviours discussing at the UN and bilateral agreements. We also have law like you have in any other industry contracts and things like that.

There's really interesting things like on the International Space Station, if a law's committed in a particular module, it's that country's law that applies. So if a Japanese person gets murdered in the American part by a French person, it's American law. Luckily that's not happened, but there's all these kind of weird things.

Neil Hart:

In the movies.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

It often comes from law of the sea.That's sort of where it's derived from. Also, particularly going to the Moon, there's something called the Artemis Accords, which more than 50 countries have signed up to. Which is about how are we going to explore the Moon to benefit humans in a way that is hopefully sustainable and all countries agree with. That's going to be tested. Yeah, let's see how that goes.

Neil Hart:

Talk then a little bit about the civil defence connection then and militarization of space and some of those things that are...

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, military space funding has exceeded civil space funding globally since 2024, particularly in the public domain, but in some big plays before that. Germany, for example, towards the end of last year, put down 35 billion euros to spend before 2030.

A lot of it's to defend the space assets we rely on. And so our militaries and our civilization can use those assets continuously. But yeah, there's a lot of work there ongoing.

Ultimately, though your industrial base is the same, your capabilities are the same across those borders. And that's why civil is so important to figure out ways to work together and understand each other's capabilities in a positive way, I think.

Neil Hart:

I see the National Library's putting a booking request in here for you to come back in 20 years and update your oral transcript. Are you happy to do that? And in fact, I would extend it further and say, could you add to it when you are in space?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Absolutely. Absolutely. You can do like...I got a WhatsApp from the Space Station the other day. It was quite fun. Yeah. What would I like to see in 20 years? I'd like to see there be other Australian astronauts and some of them to have gone to the Moon. That's what I'd like to see.

Neil Hart:

That'd be brilliant, wouldn't it?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

And everything that that would create.

Neil Hart:

Let's talk a little bit more about those commercial opportunities. SpaceX, Blue Origin, all of these that are...Frankly, they rescued the Boeing spacecraft that didn't quite work, et cetera. How do you see that creating bigger opportunities for us in space?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I think that is a way that drives down cost for people. So there's the industrialisation, I would call it, rather than for commercialisation of space. The US Government contracts SpaceX to provide the vehicles to take people to space. Your Blue Origin and your Virgin Galactic, that is purely commercial.

That's not really a government market. That's a tourism market for the most part. And I don't have a problem with it. It's different to what we do. We don't really overlap with it. I see it kind of like Antarctic tourism. There are expeditioners to Antarctica. There are people doing science for government or not.

And then there are tourists. And right now the market decides who gets to go. As long as it's done in a sustainable way, it's money being spent on new technology rather than other pursuits that government doesn't have to spend. A lot of those people are quite powerful and then come back changed. Come back to Earth having been moved by what they saw.

And so yeah, I don't really have an issue with it at all. Like Blue Origin now has suspended their flights to focus on the Moon and a lot of what they learn in those flights will help them with lunar landings.

Neil Hart:

What are your top tips for self-care in a high pressure work environment to ensure your performance is optimal?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, great question. Self-care is a performance metric for astronauts. It's not just a way to perform better, you're assessed on it. So that reframes it a bit in your mind because if you burn out, the team gets undermined because other people will want to work hard too to pull their weight and then everyone starts falling over or resenting each other.

So it's important that you rest enough to work hard, not work hard enough to feel you deserve rest. It's hard to live in reality. Everyone has their own limits and needs to learn them. And the way that I kind of manage it is I have performance indicators.

Things like how many hours sleep a night over a few nights. Have I exercised in a certain amount of days? Have I missed that because I'm working hard? That are orange flags for me. Because ultimately your performance drops before you realise it has.

It's almost like having one or two drinks. You think you're fine, but you're probably not. And it's the same with sleep. We were shown a lot of sleep studies on astronaut training, which shocked me. Things like if someone has, I think it was six hours night sleep a night for a week, they think that after the first couple of days, their performance drops and plateaus, but it keeps dropping.

And I was like, 'That's my normal sleep. How low am I?' But those kind of things you got to really manage. And it's a constant battle for many of us. I also try and overlap things I do. Like if I have to study something, I have to exercise and have to get to work. I could do them sequentially or I can ride a bike listening to a podcast on my way to work. That's why I save time.

I have kids. I want to see my kids and my husband. So I try and overlap stuff with them. So rather than be in the SES like I once was, I'm in surf lifesaving and kids can take part in that to a degree or they can be on the beach when you're doing it. So you overlap where you can.

Neil Hart:

Practising your multitasking that you need for space.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Exactly.

Neil Hart:

I love it. Where do you most want to go in space?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

The Moon.

Neil Hart:

The Moon.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Well, I mean, that is the dream of all astronauts today. I know that this is early days for Australia, so I'm not necessarily being realistic, but it would be remarkable to step out onto that surface, knowing you're creating new discoveries on behalf of humanity, bringing Australia there.

A space mission of any kind where it's real, not for a selfie, but to do real breakthroughs would be an honour in any capacity. But yeah, the Moon is like the dream of my generation of astronauts. I think Mars is the generation that is in the classrooms today.

It's often said that the first person to walk on Mars is in a classroom somewhere in the world today. Maybe it's an Australian classroom. Maybe it's someone in the audience's classroom.

Maybe it's one of them. I remember sitting in the audience listening to Andy Thomas and Paul Scully-Power, right? There's no insurmountable reason it couldn't be. If you're willing to give a go at it, if Australia's willing to step up for it.

Neil Hart:

So when do you think someone will be on Mars? When do you think will be that first footprint?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Whenever the world wants them to be. It will take effort and it's a product of time and effort.

Neil Hart:

There you go.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Right?

Neil Hart:

Primary school students. What should they start thinking and studying? And in my view, they also need an adventurous spirit and a balance to do lots of things. But where do you think people could start to focus in that early education?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

For kids that want to be astronauts, they should work hard at school. Performance matters, but they should also know they can become good enough at pretty much anything. If they want to be and they can find enjoyment in the learning that helps you get through the slog.

If you like what you're learning or you like the goal of what you're learning. But they should also work equally hard on their character through things like extracurricular activities, build those team and expeditionary behaviours.

Whatever those extracurriculars may be. Sport's a good one because you also need to be fit and healthy, but it's not the only one. Being an all rounded person just sets you up for a good life anyway, let alone trying to be an astronaut.

Neil Hart:

Perfect. What about citizen scientists and astronomers? There's heaps of people that are interested in space, the stars, astronomy, all those things. How do they help the space programme?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

In lots of ways, some of the really interesting discoveries in astronomy have been made by citizen astronomists. I really liked science and astronomy when I was a teenager. It helped to fuel my awe, so to speak. It helped me to realise that listening in math and science class helped me to do my hobbies better, whether that was aerobatic flying or astronomy.

Citizen scientists are scientists. Science is science. What else is science? But asking a question and then having the discipline to try and answer it and then testing that answer. Like that is science by definition.

That's why science didn't begin with the modern scientific method. That just sort of tightened and sped up the process of science. Science has been with humanity since the beginning.

It's how we...it perhaps defines how we're human, right? It's knowledge and ideas tested through generations of testing of generation long peer review. That is science and citizen science is science, so it helps.

Neil Hart:

It all sounds great, but there's a good question here about your favourite thing about being an astronaut and something you dislike.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Favourite thing. Yeah, the people I'm with that I get to help uncover new knowledge in teams, you're never doing it on your own. But also dislike, I'd say not dislike, but the hard parts are pacing yourself, potentially time away from your family in space and also in the training on Earth, and the uncertainty.

It's part of our selection that we're selected as people that can handle uncertainty and we're trained in uncertainty and resilience, but it is uncertain, right? Like you don't know what's coming up. You don't know if you're past selection, if you're past training, when your mission will be, if you get a mission, what happens during the mission?

For me, being an astronaut in the country without a human space flight programme is just another layer on that uncertainty onion. And you have to learn to live with many possible futures and steady yourself through that. That's hard, but it's also interesting. So I don't hate anything, I would say. I'm very fortunate to be in this position.

Neil Hart:

Sounds like a great career. How is space travel adjusting with more female astronaut representation? You mentioned that at the start. We need more to understand.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

We are having more. Women are still very much in the minority. I think if you count...it depends how you count, like professional, orbital, whatever astronauts where the line is, but it's just over 10% of professional astronauts in orbit have been women.

So it is changing because as I said, you need a first STEM career. Having few women in space has been a product mostly. Over the recent decades in having few women in STEM, that's shifting. So in NASA's most recent astronaut class selected last year, they're going through their basic or ASCAN training now.

First time ever more women than men. You couldn't poke a hole in any of their resumes. They're amazing. Those people, one of them's even been to space before as a commercial astronaut, right? And she obviously did a great job. And then if you look at that, my class, three women, three men weren't selected on a quota.

There was a big effort to get women to apply, but going through the process, it was all merit based, but it fell out that way. The 12 or so years prior when Europe did its selection before that, it was like one woman, six men. So it's shifting.

And what that means is that women's so- called issues no longer become hush conversations in the corridor, you're no longer the outlier, you are the norm. So when you're discussing things like how to use the toilet in space, it's part of the normal conversation, right? It's not something you need to be worried or embarrassed about and you shouldn't be anyway.

But basically it changes that dynamic very much. We had special sports scientists helping us with our fitness and stuff based on women's needs versus men's needs. It wasn't just the men's model. In space, space suits are mostly quite big, mostly designed for men.

There was even a case that was famous where the first all female space walk couldn't happen because in space they found that they didn't have the sizes for the two women that were meant to do the walks. Future spacesuits are now being made for all kinds of bodies. So we're seeing that change.

Neil Hart:

I won't ask you about how you use a toilet in space. There's movies. You can watch it. Showers and things.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

More interesting is how did they develop the toilet on those vomit comets?

Neil Hart:

Oh, did they?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, there's a really good astronaut biography called 'Riding Rockets' by Mike Malane. It talks about that in depth.

Neil Hart:

Oh, wow.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

You can read that. It's quite good.

Neil Hart:

It must be in the National Library somewhere, Jo. Yes, maybe. How can we ensure that space technologies and other cyber and AI are developed with the good of humanity and collaboration in mind? What can be done? What is being done?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Silver bullet. I think we've got to realise we need to walk into these with our eyes wide open and know all technology can be used for good or bad. And the more powerful technology, the more good or the more bad.

And there's an important role for government there as well as industry, as well as the public. And I think sharing openly lessons learned and mistakes is a huge part of that.

Neil Hart:

Do the space agencies share amongst themselves?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Absolutely. And at every layer, you have debriefings and lessons learned when there's failures. We often had sort of astronaut debriefs, how to look after your family, where other astronauts had screwed up. That's how you learn and go forward.

That's important too, as we learn to use other technologies. I think because if you hide those mistakes, other people could make them, and there could be other vulnerabilities we don't know about.

Neil Hart:

So for people finishing some sort of STEM degree that can't see a pathway to space, what advice would you give them? Do they need to go offshore? Do they need to do something else? Do they need to get four degrees?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

No. To work in space, you can put the word space in front of any job and there's probably a space job out there, or you can create it, right? In Australia, the wonderful thing is now you can have good space jobs in many kinds of space jobs here right now.

I went overseas because I couldn't see a path to doing what I wanted to do at that time. In Australia, you now can do that. You can be part of science missions. You can build lunar Rovers. You can do rockets. You can do space capsules. You can build space thrusters.

You can make almost any kind of space equipment here in Australia and be part of either homegrown missions or international ones. So it's very, very exciting. I would encourage young people to apply everywhere and see where the chips fall. There's a lot of opportunity out there.

I know Skykraft today were telling me about their massive internship programme here in Canberra for undergrad students.

Neil Hart:

Now there's a question here about Space Reactor-1 Freedom and Skyfall missions. Can you talk a bit about those? I have to admit I'm not following them.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I'm actually not across those super well. Does anyone in the audience want to enlighten me?

Neil Hart:

Expand on those missions? If not.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

There's a hand up there.

Neil Hart:

Oh, please. Great.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I've heard of them, but I don't know enough to weigh in.

Neil Hart:

We're into that.

Audience member:

It's the modification of the power system that was originally intended for the gateway, the Artemis Gateway, essentially being struck to a nuclear reactor to deliver three helicopters, three opportunity...I can't remember the class. The helicopters to Mars to potentially scout from resources that could potentially be used for supporting human habitation.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Ah, that was announced like a week or so ago, right? From NASA.

Audience member:

Yeah.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

I haven't looked into that in detail yet. I've been on the road, but I think it's exciting. I think if they can repurpose the work done for Gateway, that will be a good use of the investment into that. Gateway was a planned lunar station. I worked on the early concepts for it a long time ago, and now it's likely to not be...it's been postponed.

But some of the modules are already built, right? It's being postponed so people can focus on the lunar surface space. And if they can repurpose it for Mars, that's great. I think the helicopters on Mars are a fantastic way to cover a lot of ground and to sort of scout for where to do deeper science. So if they can make that work, the nuclear propulsion will help people get to Mars faster as well as an area that's being looked at.

That's going to help us with a lot of the challenges of Mars exploration. So I'm excited to see what comes of it. Thanks for raising it.

Neil Hart:

Excellent. Tell me about the considerations for maintaining the planetary landscapes that we're impacting by exploring, digging, doing what we're doing.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. I mean, if we move a rock, we're not going to put it back, right? But it's an interesting question. The Apollo landing sites, I think, have some heritage on them, right? So what is heritage versus changing?

When we go to places beyond the Moon, the Moon has nothing living on it. When we go to places like Mars, we have really highly strict rules around something called planetary protection, so that we don't contaminate Mars with earth life.

It has to be in the most crazy controlled clean rooms, purpose-built facilities so that we do not send Earth microbes to Mars because we want to know if we find something there that it's from Mars. I mean, now we can do gene analysis. We've got the ability to know for sure, but not with the robots we're sending.

And also if there is life on Mars, we don't want to kill it. So that's really, really important. And that will be the case for anywhere we think there might be life. So then there becomes a question, if we think there might be life there, should we go at all to see if it's there?

But then if there is life there, we want to know if it's there, right? And is that life from the same tree of life as us? In which case, where on Earth did we come from? Or is it from a different tree of life than us? In which case, life must be abundant in the universe, and that's also exciting. So it's philosophical.

It changes what it means to be human. So we're hungry for that knowledge, right? There's a whole field called astrobiology that looks at that. They're also the same kind of scientists that look at extremophiles, life and how it adapts in extreme conditions on earth and lives in subsea vents. We now know through that field about how earth-based life can live in space, like tartar grades, tiny microscopic animals that look like gummy bears with extra legs. They live everywhere, probably in your garden.

They can live on the outside of a spacecraft. For weeks, they have a hibernation, a weird kind of... It's really interesting if you like that stuff. They kind of crystallise. Their cells don't pop like most frozen cells. Lichen has been found on the outside of space stations. Life can live in space, right? Which means life can move through space. So yeah, there's a lot of exciting things there that we need to be really careful of keeping pristine.

Neil Hart:

So do the wings get you the all access past to area 51? Have you seen...no?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

What's your clearance level? No. Well, I can tell you that I get the alien question a lot and I could tell you if intelligent life had visited Earth, I'm sure we would have been briefed that we might get a knock on the space station door. We have not had that brief.

Neil Hart:

You said you heard little pings outside. Maybe that's something.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, I said was knocking on the door, but it was some internal pipe or something, but I'm like...

Neil Hart:

That must have freaked them out for a while.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. So yeah, it's pretty interesting.

Neil Hart:

Tell me about good sources rather for tracking and watching and listening to the developments in space. Have you got some good sources that you're regularly monitoring?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah I mean, in Australia, the best new source is the Australian Space Agency website and social media has weekly updates and ad hoc updates when there's something big of what's happening in Australia and space, which can be really useful.

Neil Hart:

Is that bad? I was knocking, no? Okay, just checking.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. No, you're fine. Then there's global news sites, like your space news and things like that, although that just had a paywall put up. They're really good to look up the NASA website and the other space agency websites are helpful, but they wouldn't let you know about what's happening here in Australia.

So yeah, I'd encourage you to look at the Australian Space Agency website. We also have a podcast. It's called 'Outback to Orbit', where we'll have in- depth interviews from different people working in our space sector, like the 'Roo-ver' mission and other things where you can hear about how they got to be doing that and how it's going in the future.

Neil Hart:

Do you think we're ever going to travel at the speed of light?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Oh I think physics makes that pretty rough. I mean, there's lots of fun maths you can do. If I remember correctly, if you were able to build a spaceship, an impossible spaceship that could keep accelerating at 1G, so 9.81 metres per second squared, you would reach the edge of the universe by the end of your life because it's exponential, right?

And because of time dilation, you'd see the whole universe pass you by in terms of time. If you could survive falling into a black hole, you'd also say the whole universe pass you by and you'd look frozen in time. I think that it's going to be pretty impossible based on our understanding today, but who's to say what becomes possible in future?

Engineers make what's impossible, possible. Scientists have the ideas to help them do that. But we would have thought that speaking on the phone is impossible a few hundred years ago, right? So it's impossible with today's physics. It's not necessarily impossible with tomorrow's.

Neil Hart:

You're obviously optimistic about Australia and space. What conversations and what work has the space agency or you have done that's really starting to shift the dial? What can be done in there?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah. So I mean, one example is we signed a technology safeguards agreement with the US, which is an agreement that means US rockets can launch from Australian soil. That's been modelled to bring in potentially more than $1 billion to the Australian economy over the next decade because we have spaceport businesses that provide those service for launch and returns.

Are we currently negotiating a cooperation agreement with the European Space Agency, which might mean that Australia can access European markets and European missions, which is exciting. Looking at our exploration programme, which includes the Rover mission and the other payloads, starting to really kick goals, a lot of those are going to be going to the Moon over the next few years.

A lot of demos, but how exciting is that, is the first step for many different organisations into that world involving every state and territory. And that programme is already returning, seven to one return on invests, $7 for every $1 spent on it, which is quite amazing.

So it's not a sync for cash. It's something that is an investment at the same time as developing these capabilities and opportunities and hopefully inspiring other people to follow.

Neil Hart:

Brilliant. I think we all want to see, and Canberra's behind you, getting you to space and we want to get you to the Moon. What can we do to get behind you, Katherine?

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

That's very kind...so I'm a public servant, so I can't lobby or say what the government should or shouldn't do.

Neil Hart:

Well, that's what we're here for.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

In public.

Neil Hart:

And there's a public servant or two in the room, I can see them that are quietly thinking, 'Ooh.'

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Yeah, I'm actually the first public servant to have the honour of being Australian of the Year. So often they have a lobbying platform, but for me, it's a little bit different. I hope what is...I've been at a creative space for others to say whatever they want to say about science and technology and space as well.

If people want to see human space flight in Australia, make your voice heard, but make it about what you want to see. Don't make it about me. Make it about future astronauts. Make it about the payloads you want to send, make it about the effects you want to see.

And I think it would be incredible for our country. I've seen incredible things overseas in other countries from it. It ignites the nation. It pulls together a lot of people, and it's not really just about the astronaut.

We're just a bit more visible. It's hundreds of people working on the missions from the payloads to the support crew that all get that uplift. And what I think's most exciting is getting a generation through, including the people who are in the workforce today. They don't have to be kids. Hopefully it's sooner than kids of the next astronauts and the next wave.

Neil Hart:

Perfect. Katherine, you've been very generous with your time. You've been very generous with your answers and the information that you've imparted as we've gone through here. And I love the fact that there's no aspiration that's too big for an Australian really that comes out of what you've said. We can all have a go and contribute. So can you all join me in thanking Katherine Bennell-Pegg.

Katherine Bennell-Pegg:

Thank you so much. And thank you also to Neil for the great interview and for the opportunity to be here today and to speak with you all.

Jo Ritale:

So yeah, I think my mind has been officially blown by the conversation tonight. Again, I just want to thank you, Katherine and Neil, for such an inspiring and generous conversation.

I think the insights that you've shared into Australia's growing space capability and the human stories behind it, it really gives us a powerful sense of what's possible when curiosity, courage and collaboration come together. Events like this remind us why the National Library exists, to collect, preserve, and share the stories that shape our national imagination.

Through our women in the space industry, oral histories, and picture collections, and the personal archives entrusted to us, we're proud to be documenting Australia's journey into space as it happens, ensuring that future generations can look back and understand not just the missions, but the people who made them possible.

I want to thank the Canberra Cyber Hub, the Australian Space Agency and the ACT Government for supporting tonight's event. And thanks also to all of you for spending your evening with us and those fantastic questions that you put through.

We hope you leave tonight feeling energised, curious and maybe even a little more starstruck by the possibilities ahead. So please enjoy the rest of your evening and we look forward to welcoming you back to the Library soon. Thank you.