‘Spending money on rockets is not futile’
Fifty years after the Moon landing, Prof Brian Cox tells Cara Mcgooghan how space entrepreneurs will save mankind
‘Mars has a place in our future,” says Prof Brian Cox earnestly. “Even if there aren’t Martians today – by which I mean microbes below its surface – there will be, because we will go there and be Martians.”
Within five minutes of meeting Cox at a recording studio in central London, he is outlining his vision for the future of mankind. It’s certainly ambitious: resources will be mined from space and civilisation will expand to Mars. In the next decade, he hopes we will know the answer to the time-worn question: “Are we alone in the universe?”, as well as have scores of people operating in orbit.
“Our environment is not limited to the two-dimensional surface of our planet,” explains Cox, now 51. “We have to go somewhere, we have to expand as a civilisation.”
This is the message of his new series, The Planets, which tells the history of the Solar System in his awestruck style, using the latest data. It marks 20 years since a documentary of the same name, narrated by Samuel West, aired on the BBC, and a decade since Cox’s landmark series, Wonders of the Solar System.
It is also the 50th anniversary in July of Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” on the Moon. Cox, with his floppy hair – peppered with white flecks – dark jeans and hoodie, still looks more bandmate than physics professor. But underneath, he is wearing a commemorative T-shirt for the Apollo lunar mission that landed successfully on July 20 1969.
Human understanding of space has come on in bounds even since Cox’s first series, but there was a lull in human space exploration after Nasa stopped its Apollo missions in 1972. To date, only two countries have successfully landed on the Moon – the US and Russia – and just 12 astronauts have walked on its surface.
That could soon change. China has announced plans to build a lunar base in 10 years, and has sent a probe for
research. India says it will land on the Moon in September, and Israel refuses to give up on its plans after its spacecraft crashed in April. Meanwhile, US vice-president Mike Pence has said: “The first woman and the next man on the Moon will both be American astronauts.”
To some, this “new space race” is no cause for celebration, as escalating global tensions open up on another frontier. But to Cox, it is exciting. Rather than reviving the fears of mutual destruction that came with the Cold War and the original space race, Cox actually believes that space exploration could save civilisation as resources become depleted and the population balloons.
“You’re not going to fight over resources on the Moon or asteroids, because there are loads,” says Cox. “There’s no life in the asteroid belt and it’s not even pretty – there are no pristine landscapes to preserve. It’s just a load of stuff.”
It is for this reason that Cox agrees with the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson, who founded aerospace companies Spacex, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic respectively, that it isn’t futile to “spend money on rockets when there are problems on Earth”.
There is also a geeky side to Cox that is excited that “the astronauts are back”. He describes the palpable energy on a recent visit to Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where astronauts are training, people are building mining robots, and researchers are developing technology to refuel rockets on Mars.
“This year, we will see astronauts flying from Kennedy again – but on commercial vehicles,” he says, citing more US companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which are also keen to send people into space.
Private companies are working in partnership with public space agencies in the US, Israel and other countries, to develop space exploration. “It’s going to be the case in the next year that you will be able to fly to the International Space Station on two or three competing commercial vehicles. That’s when this stops being science fiction.”
For the biggest mission yet – for humans to reach Mars – there will need to be an international tie-up involving both the public and private sector. “I don’t see us going to Mars with just the private sector, no matter what Spacex claims,” says Cox. “If they’re involved, it will be in a big collaboration, probably with the US, Europe and Russia.”
Would Cox go to Mars himself? “No. It’s not a nice place. It would take a certain type of person…”
In the decade since his Wonders of the Solar System aired, he has gone from researcher at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern to nationally loved television presenter. So much so that he had to announce additional dates for his sell-out tour, Universal Adventures in Space and Time.
“The fact that 12,000 people a night want to come and see me talk about quite deep questions – cosmology and what it means to be human – took us by surprise,” he says. “So we’re doing the same tour again, this time at the O2.”
Despite his teenage dreams to be on Top of the Pops – which materialised in a brief career as a musician with Nineties chart-toppers D:ream – Cox has always found fame uncomfortable.
“I never thought I was a particularly good musician, I just wanted to be a pop star when I was 16,” he says. But when he became a television physics star, he got stage fright. “I didn’t really want to go out of the house. I still avoid big crowds… I really love being in places where no one knows me.”
Family life for Cox changed around the same time, with his wife, Gia Milinovich, giving birth to their son, George, now nine (she had another son, Miko, 20, with a previous partner). Milinovich, a television presenter and writer, agreed to let her career take a back seat to look after the children as Cox’s flourished. At times, she found it difficult to be at his side, and has talked about the “invisible wife syndrome”.
“Yes, it was difficult for her,” admits Cox. “It’s true that if you’re well known, people will want to talk to you. It isn’t particularly pleasant.”
For all of this, Cox is incredibly modest and brushes off the idea that he could be the next David Attenborough – “he must be one of the most famous people on the planet, you can’t replace that”. He laments that his television work has detracted from his research time, but is glad to have the time to teach a course at the University of Manchester in the autumn and work as a fellow for the Royal Society.
Cox can’t escape the vast questions that fill his mind, spanning the outer Solar System and into philosophy. He is certain that “humans aren’t
‘In the next year, you will be able to fly to the International Space Station’
‘I never thought I was a good musician, I just wanted to be a pop star at 16’
immortal”, but he also believes that because Earth is the only place in the Milky Way with civilisation, it is “the only place where meaning exists”.
“What are you to make of that?” he muses. “Cosmology is terrifying, but if you’re ever going to get to some personal resolution of what it means to be insignificant, then it will be by facing down the terror.”
Such knowledge never becomes too much for Cox, but in fact is what keeps him grounded. “Considering that question probably means I’m less likely to have a midlife crisis,” he laughs. “What I should have is an entire life crisis… But I’m unlikely to go and buy a sports car, because that’s futile as well.”
The Planets begins on Tuesday May 28, on BBC Two at 9pm. A book accompanying the series is out now (William Collins, £25). Buy yours for £20 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514