Astrophysicist and cosmologist Brad Tucker
We are about to get our very own space agency. When the news broke in September, it was a surprise. After all, how can Australia compete with NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos and the European Space Agency? Perhaps the government was keen to bolster its shaky popularity? Those in the know, however, reckon we can hold our own in the big league. Indeed, we already are.
You see, massive government agencies don’t rule the final frontier any longer. Private companies do. Look no further than Elon Musk’s SpaceX, now worth an estimated $US21 billion. Its financial backers include companies such as Google and Fidelity and it seriously plans to colonise Mars. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has his own space offshoot, Blue Origin, and his own rockets and he plans to run a commercial satellite business.
Retail investors in the US have been snapping up shares in listed space companies mainly because of huge returns from communications satellites. Contractors such as Northrop Grumman, British Aerospace, Boeing, Airbus and Lockheed Martin already have offices in Australia.
Working alongside the big players are bright sparks from our universities. One is astrophysicist and cosmologist Brad Tucker, based at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra. “I realised when I started working here that Austral- ia was the third nation to build and launch a satellite from its own territory, after Russia and the US. That boggles people’s minds. How do you go from being the third space power to being behind second world countries? There are universities in the US that are more organised on space than the entire Australian continent.”
We lag, in Tucker’s view, because we need a space agency to co-ordinate activities, stimulate funding and cut red tape. He believes there is no shortage of brain-power and commitment to develop a thriving high-tech domestic industry. “There is no united front in Australia. NASA is successful because it has thousands of people spread across nine different centres around the US. When they do something, it’s not as one person in Texas, California or Alabama. They are doing it as NASA. In Australia we have just as many, or even more, cool things going on but people don’t realise what’s happening. The way to become a successful space nation is that different groups specialise. It’s manufacturing. You have one group that does one thing, then another group does their bit. NASA does that well and the Europeans do that well. Australia does that terribly because we have different states and organisations.”
Yet space is spawning an array of pro- jects for Australian researchers, and is attracting the interest of entrepreneurial investors. Most Australians know that local boffins developed wi-fi, which uses satellites to send signals to billions of mobile devices worldwide. “It was built by researchers who were trying to get their radio telescopes to look at black holes,” explains Tucker. “It was a solution to a problem that they got paid for, to study black holes, but not to do wi-fi. The development of wi-fi is probably the biggest thing that ever happened to us. Ever.”
Universities including ANU, Sydney, South Australia, Adelaide and NSW are now building and launching satellites. They are known for doing them cheaply
and small, the size of a loaf of bread. But our tech-heads have also invented a rocket thruster engine that uses just one gram of fuel. Others can point land-based lasers to zap dangerous space junk. “It is not quite Star Wars but it is as close as you are going to get any time soon. That’s a really cool project.”
Tucker was raised in Sacramento, California. He didn’t study science until late in his high school years, when he taught himself physics after his teacher became sick. He enjoyed it so much that he later majored in physics, theology and philosophy at Notre Dame University near Chicago. “I was never destined to be an astrophysicist or anything like that. It fell into my hands.”
His path to becoming an Australian came when a team member with a project he was working on was Brian Schmidt, vice-chancellor of the ANU and a Nobel Prize winner for physics. “I was looking for PhD positions and he said that I should come and work with him in Australia. It is nice to have that support, to allow people to blossom, doing what they are best at.”
He realised early on that he was good at thinking of abstract solutions to problems in space. An early example was his idea to fix NASA’s busted Kepler space telescope. Its mission was to find planets around other stars, and it captured Tucker’s attention by finding exploding stars and black holes. Kepler hit steering problems four
In Australia we have just as many, or even more, cool space things going on but people don’t realise what’s happening”
years before its mission was scheduled to end. Tucker’s idea was that it could continue to be steered by using solar wind from the sun. Kepler has since found hundreds more new planets.
Tucker runs other major projects from his base at Mount Stromlo. Perhaps the best known is to find the mysterious Planet 9. Its possible presence is linked to dwarf planets in our solar system that have an irregular, egg-shaped orbit around the sun. For that to happen, it’s likely that a force is pulling on them. That could be an unknown planet, between four and 10 times larger than Earth, that sits on the opposite edge of our solar system.
Australia is ideally suited to lead the Planet 9 project because the southern sky is still largely unexplored compared with the northern hemisphere. If the planet does exist, it is much more likely to be found from down-under. To speed up the massive task, a huge database of space imagery was put online and amateur astronomers were asked to classify likely objects. They found 4 million objects in 60 hours. Tucker’s team has greatly narrowed the list of candidates. He says they will know within six months whether Planet 9 has been found. “We will make a definitive statement soon.”
Another of his projects is asteroid mining. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen set up Planetary Resources to mine asteroids for water so it can be turned into fuel to power deep-space exploration. But Tucker wants to mine asteroids for valuable minerals. He won’t say too much now but Australian mining interests are involved.
“We want to target the rarer elements,” says Tucker. “One 4km-long asteroid could have 100 million tonnes of nickel, 10 times the yearly output of the entire world. You might get 50,000 tonnes of platinum, which would take 300 years to dig up here. Asteroids are giant stores of metal. The Earth has a finite supply of these resources. Minerals like platinum and lithium are running out. We need nickel lithium for battery storage. That stuff has to come from somewhere.
“Asteroid mining has real-world consequences. Let’s just say we can get 300 years of platinum from one asteroid. What then happens to the economy of South Africa, which currently produces most of our platinum? We would crash the platinum market. What happens when a country realises that it can mine all of the asteroids they want? Then they don’t have to import anything from the likes of Australia. Or, more importantly, they don’t have to worry about international diplomacy. They can say, ‘We have everything’. The laws of supply and demand will not apply to asteroid mining because there would be an infinite supply.”
Far-fetched? Maybe but Tucker says it could be a huge new industry for Australia. “We want to have a prototype in five years. We will see asteroid mining before there are people on Mars. Do you know why? This is the only space venture that will bring back money and resources and be profitable. All of the elements to do this already exist. Australia participated in the first such mission with Japan, which landed a probe on an asteroid, took a sample and then landed back on Earth. We are working now with NASA on another mission that will hover around an asteroid, extend an arm, drill down into it, take a sample and return.”
But can we mine asteroids before SpaceX’s planned manned mission on Mars in 2024? Tucker doubts that schedule can be achieved. Why? It is not widely known but space harms human health. “It is a very quiet thing,” he says. “A number of astronauts have weird cancers, vision problems, cardiovascular problems – you name it.
“Astronauts are usually peak physical specimens. But having people coming back with health problems is really scary. The human aspect of getting humans to Mars is what is going to hold up doing this. We think it is solvable but the technology is much easier than for humans to survive the journey or survive for long on Mars.”
“All the elements to mine asteroids for rarer minerals like platinum and lithium already exist”