The Secret To Breathing On The Moon: Sarah Cannard (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Sarah Cannard’s talk titled “The Secret To Breathing On The Moon” at TEDxSydney 2023 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Growing Up Dreaming of Space

When I was a little girl growing up in a country town in Australia, I used to look up at the night sky a lot. I used to wonder and daydream about what it would be like to walk on the moon and look back down at our Earth. I’ve always had questions about space, about our solar system, about our sun, about the trillions of planets that are out there, like our own.

I used to wonder about our own world, about why and how we came to exist, and whether or not we’re actually alone in the universe. Now I’m not alone in these types of questions. In fact, there’s government agencies out there, there’s space agencies, there’s private organisations who are funding massive space programs to make my dream, and actually their dream too, of exploring space a reality.

And it’s only very recently that some of these questions about why we’re here and are we alone are starting to get solved by using technology to explore the stars and visit our local celestial neighbours. And it’s through these mind-blowing space programs and technology challenges that I believe we will see humans living on Mars in our last time, on Mars.

Returning to the Moon

Now before we get there we actually need to learn a lot more about what it takes to live on another planet, and to do that we need to return to our moon. The moon is much closer, much closer, and we can actually use it as a stepping stone to improve our understanding of what it takes to live on another planet. So in many ways the future of human space exploration relies on us understanding how we can safely, sustainably and effectively live and work on the moon.

And to do this, the first step is we need to learn how to mine the moon and extract its natural resources and live off these natural resources. And this is the first critical step in having a sustained human presence on the surface of the moon and another planet.

Now the types of natural resources that I’m talking about are water and oxygen. Water, if we can find that on the moon and extract that, we can clearly, we can use it to drink, we can use it to grow plants, grow food, grow medicine. Oxygen, if we can extract that from the regolith, from the dirt, we can use that to create a breathable atmosphere inside the habitats for astronauts.

Now it’s not just water and oxygen that are important. If we can then extract hydrogen from the water, we can create rocket fuel. And because the moon’s gravity is so low, it’s only one-sixth the gravity it is here on earth, and there’s no atmosphere, it means that launching rockets from the moon is significantly easier than launching from here on earth. We could literally use the moon as a launch base, a launch pad for future space exploration and science.

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Now if we can take this one step further and maybe find other types of minerals on the moon, maybe metals or silicates, and we can extract these, then we can build structures, we can build habitats, greenhouses, roads, and other infrastructure that we need to survive on the moon and beyond. Now this is key. This is critical because we can’t take all of this stuff with us. It’s just, it’s too heavy, bulky, and expensive.

Abundant Resources on the Moon

It’s just not feasible, especially if we’re going to go on to Mars. But we’re in luck. Scientists believe that the moon has an abundance of these natural resources, in particular an abundance of ice water on the moon. And this is really, really important because what this means, this means that in theory the moon has everything we need to sustain human life, in theory, water, oxygen.

So the question is, can we create the technology to go to the moon, extract water for drinking, oxygen for breathing, and sustain basic human life? I’m a scientist and an engineer, and I’m working with an incredible team who are designing Australia’s first ever lunar rover for the moon to answer this question with our friends at the Australian Space Agency and NASA. This rover is called Trailblazer, and its mission, this trailblazing rover, its mission is to go to the moon, collect samples of regolith – regolith is a fancy word we call for moon dirt – collect regolith. And it needs to deliver this regolith to a NASA science facility which will also be on the surface of the moon.

And it’s here at the science facility that NASA will attempt to extract oxygen from the regolith. That’s extracting oxygen from moon dirt on the moon. This whole process is known as in-situ resource utilisation, and it is the first critical step of having this sustained human presence on the moon.

Now this is a big job for a little rover, and it is a little rover, a little trailblazer. It’s only about 20 kilograms, so imagine something the size of your microwave oven. So this little rover needs to collect several samples of regolith from the moon and deliver it to NASA, and it needs to do this within a period of 14 days, which is the length of a lunar day. So a bit of trivia there. And we’re not designing this rover to withstand a lunar night, it’s simply too hard. And this is a big job because working on the moon is a very, very hard thing to do.

Apollo Missions and the Challenges of the Moon

Very hard. We once visited the moon, but it was fleeting and it was short-lived, and it was over 50 years ago.

Under NASA’s Apollo program – you may have heard of it, not a hoax – under NASA’s Apollo program we sent humans to the moon over a decade. So 12 men have been to the moon, and in that total time across the entire Apollo program they spent just over 80 hours on the surface of the moon in a decade, because the moon is a really, really hard place to live and work.

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And that was over 50 years ago, and we have not been back since. We have not had humans on the moon for 50 years. All of that is about to change. NASA’s Artemis program is the next in a series of deep space exploration with the aim of returning humans to the moon and onto Mars.

And in fact NASA and its Artemis partners, including Australia – we’re a partner – are already developing the launch vehicle, the lunar landers, the new spacesuits and the rovers that are going to help get them there. And in fact the Artemis astronauts have already been selected and are training for this mission. And this includes the first woman and the first person of colour who was set foot on the moon in 2025. How good is that?

It’s about time. So I believe, I really do believe that the daily lives of astronauts is really about to change significantly forever, very soon. They’ll no longer be confined to low-Earth orbit on the International Space Station – as amazing as that is – but I think they’re going to be living and working at a lunar base camp, a lunar habitat. They’re going to be sleeping there.

Life on a Lunar Base

They’ll wake up and have breakfast and brush their teeth, and if they’re lucky they’ll get to watch the Earth rise over the lunar mountains. How cool is that? But most importantly they’ll go to work and they will do science, amazing science, science that you simply can’t do down here on Earth, science that will change the way we see our universe, change the way we see ourselves in our universe. And they’ll do other things as well.

They might do some maintenance on their habitats. They might explore their local area, they might head to their little farm, pick their vegetables that they’ve grown from the water they’ve extracted on the Moon. They might explore the local area and check on their robotic counterparts, their rovers that are helping them with their day-to-day lives. It’s pretty cool.

But the first step, the first step is to demonstrate we have the capability to extract this oxygen from the lunar dirt, from the regolith on the surface of the Moon. This Trailblazer rover, Australia’s Trailblazer rover, is the most complicated and challenging mission Australia has ever undertaken, ever.

And it’s not just because the rover itself is a technically challenging thing to design and build, is it ever, but we’re sending this rover to the lunar South Pole. And for those that aren’t aware, the lunar South Pole is one of the harsh, most harsh environments known to humankind.

Challenges of the Lunar South Pole

In fact, the South Pole is one of the coldest locations in our solar system. Temperatures on the South Pole range from minus 220 degrees in the shade up to 120 degrees in the sunlit regions. What’s even more bizarre about the Moon, check this, because it doesn’t have an atmosphere, the temperature in the shade behind a boulder or in the shadow of the lander can literally be hundreds of degrees colder than it is right next to it in the sunlit region.

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So we have to design this rover to withstand boiling temperatures facing the sun simultaneously the freezing cold sections of the rover that are in the shade. Again even more bizarre, because the Moon doesn’t have an atmosphere, there’s no way of the light to scatter and reflect off all the particles. So what it means is that behind the boulders, in the craters, it’s pitch black. You just can’t see in it like you can in shadows on the Earth.

So we don’t know if there’s something in there worth checking out or something in there that might damage our rover.We don’t know how deep the crater is, we don’t know if there’s other boulders behind in the shadows that would damage the rover. And then there’s the regolith. So remember, this is the stuff that we’re going to be digging up and playing with while we’re there. Now this is really nasty stuff, really nasty.

Imagine a talcum powder type material that’s made up of sharp abrasive dust and this dust is statically charged and it’s going to be floating around and it’s going to want to get attracted to our sensors, our cameras, our solar panels and get into all of the moving parts. So my role as engineer of this team is to help my team overcome these challenges and design Australia’s rover to withstand these harsh conditions.

So this rover, Australia’s Trailblazer rover, is our contribution to demonstrating we have the capability to return to the Moon, collect regolith and extract oxygen on the surface of the Moon and put us all on a journey of a sustained human presence on the surface of the Moon. We are all part of the Artemis generation now, all of us.

Looking to the Future

And I do believe, I do believe we will see humans living on Mars in my lifetime. So now when I look up at the night sky with my kids in our backyard, we see a destination, not just daydreams. We are at a tipping point of human space exploration and I am over the Moon about what the future holds. Thank you.