Astronauts. Do we need them?

The Supermassive Podcast

Izzie Clarke

Astronomy, History, Science, Physics

4.6 • 556 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s a brave question to put to three astronauts live on stage but it’s a risk we are prepared to take. Recorded in front of a live audience at the UK Space Conference in Manchester, European Space Agency astronauts Tim Peake, Meganne Christian and John McFall discuss the future of human space exploration. Could robots or AI take their place? Will a trip to the Moon be as common as flying across the Atlantic? And can humans be trusted to not mess with Mars?

Host Izzie Clarke asks the big questions, producer Richard Hollingham threatens the audience, and (soft sceptic) Dr Robert Massey is prepared to be unpopular as they contemplate the role of astronauts in the 21st century.

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The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production. The producers are Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to the Supermassive Podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society.
0:05.0	We are live at the UK Space Conference in Manchester.
0:09.0	Yay!
0:14.0	I'm science journalist Izzy Clark, and for this special edition of the podcast,
0:20.0	I'm joined as usual by Dr. Robert
0:23.2	Massey, the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society.
0:27.2	I mean, this is...
0:28.6	That doesn't normally happen. It's amazing to be here. I was thinking I was a PhD student here,
0:35.0	35 years ago, 30 years ago. And I remembered a nice connection, which is that my university department in the 1960s, for a slightly nefarious arrangement, got a load of money from NASA to take pictures of the moon. So you've got Jodrell Bank down the road, which Andy Burnham was rightly talking about, but also, you know, there's that nice local collection. I think half a million images of moon that they the nassar used to help find landing sites through apollo so which and
0:58.7	richard was reminding me it's actually the i don't i can't remember what year because my brain's not
1:02.9	what 36 56th anniversary of the uh polo 11 was on its way to the moon on this date in 1969 so
1:10.7	there you go some nice connections oh lovely we should have done the maths before. We should have, yeah, exactly. A quick chat. I mean, yeah, basic arithmetic. It's not a good look. And for one month only, we have let our executive producer out from behind his computer screen lurking in the background. And we are joined by science and space journalist Richard
1:28.5	Hollingham. Oh. Well done. Well done. Thank you. Thank you very much. You've not heard me yet,
1:36.0	but I did wear the appropriate shirt for the occasion. We don't often have astronauts on the podcast,
1:42.7	but this time we have three.
1:46.1	In fact, it is an intimidating panel of overachievers on the stage with us.
1:52.7	And it's fair to say when we have astronauts, yes, it doesn't happen often, but we're going big.
1:57.7	We're really going for it.
1:59.7	We'll be discussing why send humans into space and could robots
2:04.7	or AI do a better job? They're all looking at me slightly threateningly now. Yeah, I know.
2:10.8	That's brave, Richard. I know Robert's got some thoughts on that as well. So good luck, Robert.
2:16.0	And I'm so excited. Thank you all for being here. So we are
	...

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