42 | Natalya Bailey on Navigating Earth Orbit and Beyond

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2019

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The space age officially began in 1957 with the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite. But recent years have seen the beginning of a boom in the number of objects orbiting Earth, as satellite tracking and communications have assumed enormous importance in the modern world. This raises obvious concerns for the control and eventual fate of these orbiting artifacts. Natalya Bailey is pioneering a novel approach to satellite propulsion, building tiny ion engines at her company Accion Systems. We talk about how satellite technology is rapidly changing, and what that means for the future of space travel inside and outside the Solar System. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Natalya Bailey received her Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, where she helped invent a new kind of ion engine. She is currently co-founder and chief executive officer of Accion Systems Inc. She has been included in 30 Under 30 lists from Forbes, Inc, and MIT Technology Review. Accion Systems Wikipedia page Twitter Talk on the Human Side of Rocket Science Real-time map of satellites currently in orbit See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:03.8	And today we're going to talk about space travel.
0:06.9	One of the things that you don't necessarily appreciate when you start talking about space travel
0:11.2	is the very different scales that we might be talking about.
0:14.8	So we're not talking about traveling to other stars today anyway.
0:19.0	We're not even talking about the very down to earth mission of taking a gigantic rocket
0:24.1	and launching it into space to put up human beings or satellites.
0:28.3	What we'll be talking about is once you get there, once you're out in space,
0:32.4	let's say you're in orbit around the earth, how do you move around?
0:36.4	The big problem with space travel is carrying weight,
0:40.0	carrying mass up into space.
0:42.1	And if you rely on conventional methods of propulsion once you're up there,
0:46.0	that means you need an awful lot of fuel just to adjust your position in orbit.
0:50.4	So today's guest, Natalia Bailey, is an aerospace engineer who has started a new company
0:55.7	called Axion Systems. That's ACC-I-O-N. It's named after a spell in Harry Potter,
1:02.0	not after the hypothetical, small particle that could be the dark matter.
1:05.7	What Axion Systems is doing are building ion drive engines.
1:10.4	If you're of a certain age, like I am, you remember ion drives as being this way that you might
1:15.6	investigate interstellar travel, because an ion drive can provide a small amount of propulsion,
1:21.7	but for a very long time with very little fuel being wasted.
1:26.2	So Axion Systems is building these incredibly tiny, you know,
1:29.4	centimeter-sized rocket engines that can be put onto little tiny satellites, like CubeSats,
	...

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