SPACE ROCKS AT THE ESTEC OPEN DAY: MEET ESA PROJECT ASTRONAUT JOHN MCFALL

Space Rocks is so so important about connecting people with space. People who have a love of music, have a love of science, have a love of science fiction, coupled with what is on offer here at ESTEC this Open Day. It's a vehicle for bringing so many people together on so many different levels and getting people excited about the wonderful world that is space. So, Space Flight for the Next Generation. I wanted to talk a little bit about, first of all, the ESA astronaut call, the recent astronaut call. Were you contacted directly or did you see it online? I was working peacefully and quite happily as a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon in the UK and I had a message from a friend of mine who I worked with. He was like, John, mate, John, they're looking for Paralympians to go to space. And I was like, what? That sounds weird. Some crazy experimental project. But he was right. And I looked up, I did a quick search and ESA had put out a vacancy notice looking to recruit in their astronaut selection in 2021, 2022. They were looking to recruit alongside the regular corps of astronauts. For the first time in the world, any agency wanted to recruit someone with a physical disability to see if it was possible to get someone with a physical disability to train for and live and work in space and fly on a long duration mission in space. So, I looked at it and it was just right up my street. And I think we have an image we can show on the screen that actually shows the call for the parastronauts. There we go. There we go. There it is. So, yeah, this was the vacancy notice that went out. And initially they were looking for, you know, they could have had all disabilities, right? But that possibly would have been biting off a little bit more than we could chew. So, they had to scale it down and look at, OK, what do we think is going to be feasible and not really a huge departure from able-bodied astronauts. So, it was amputations, either single leg or both legs, leg length discrepancy and short stature. And of course, that's not to say that in future we wouldn't be considering more, a wider range of disabilities. But with these things, you kind of have to start somewhere. Yeah, exactly. And I'm very conscious that my disability is only a very small representation of the whole spectrum of disabilities that there are. But actually, we've got to start somewhere, as you say. And I hope that this will be the first step in a much bigger journey in creating a legacy for understanding this a bit more. You mentioned that anybody could be stuck into a rocket and sent to space. But that's actually not what we're recruiting here. We would like to recruit career astronauts. And that means doing all of the other tasks that astronauts do. And that's sometimes being an engineer, sometimes being a scientist. Are there any elements of that that you're particularly looking forward to? All of it. Take it up. Yeah, I mean, for me, one of the reasons I got into this role was because I was hugely passionate about learning and hugely curious. And I think there aren't many jobs which involve so many aspects of the scientific community and curriculum, if you like. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of it. The next thing we do is zero gravity. Now we will have a series of four parabolas at the same timing that we had, but four instead of just three. They will all be zero gravity. OK. So at the beginning, we recommend you take it easy. Just learn what it feels like. The process is the same. The hypergravity is the same. You know how to do that now. Lay down. Keep your head still. Before and after. The zero-g is different. It's definitely different. You will notice. Stay calm, Jordan, like you did earlier. That was very good. Yeah. Try not to get knocked over. I'm going in all directions. You stay here, OK? Be careful, we're going to go down there. Yeah, Jordan, that's good. Slowly. Sorry, sorry. Nice. Slowly. Come on, lay down. Lay down slowly. It is an incredible experience, isn't it? And this was your very first one. Tell me how that was for you. I really enjoyed it. Thankfully, it turns out I'm not the kind of person who gets sick on a parabolic flight. Otherwise, it would have been a bit embarrassing. They call it the vomit comet for a reason. Yeah, being recruited to the space agency and not being able to tolerate a parabolic flight. But it was great fun. I learnt a little bit about, although it was quite brief, how to move around in reduced gravity, how to move around in microgravity. And you may have seen there, actually, when I was floating, my leg stays out straight. And, you know, if you watch gymnasts or divers or ice skaters, when they do tumbles or they spin on the ice, to tumble quickly or to spin quickly, you bring your limbs close to your body. And then to slow yourself down, you put your limbs out like this. It's called the conservation of angular momentum. And actually, having my leg out straight in front of me makes it a bit trickier for me to forward roll as quickly because of that extra inertia required to get round. So that's something that I picked up on that flight that might be something to address and practice on subsequent parabolic flights and think about, actually, if I do fly to the ISS and spend a significant amount of time in zero-g. Did you find it difficult to adjust to the hypergravity? No. So at the beginning, the biggest issue with hypergravity, or, you know, they say they call it the vomit comet. And they call it the vomit comet not because the floating makes you sick. It's actually the periods of hypergravity that make you sick. So it's the 2G. It really messes with your vestibular system in your ears and makes you feel sick. And you're doing so many of them again and again and again. But actually by the, you know, halfway through, I was doing the, I was in the zero-g and then I would come out of the zero-g onto my feet and I would stand through the 2G phase and I would go up again. That's pretty impressive. But for me, I felt that I was quite comfortable with that. But initially, they tell you to lie on your back as you saw them all lying on the back, keeping your head still. Because apparently if you move your head, that's the thing that makes you feel sick. So what have been your kind of key unexpected challenges because of your disability? Well, you'd be surprised actually. There aren't that many challenges. So generally the problem is not with me. Oh, I meant for all astronauts the challenges. It must be astounding. It is. There are. It's not until you really break it down piece by piece in every single requirement that you try to understand or that you can understand what are the difficulties. And there are so many difficulties. But from what I'm doing from the flight feasibility study side of things, the main difficulties are actually related to the hardware, so the prosthetic hardware and getting that certified to go into space. So because things like, you know, when you make a prosthesis, it's made out of lots of different materials. Those materials have chemical properties. Are they going to continue to produce gases when they're in space? So because the air in the International Space Station is recycled, if you've got something that keeps producing a toxic gas, it's going to be amplified for the whole duration that you're in space. So you need to be conscious about that. My prosthesis has a gyroscope, batteries, a microprocessor in it. Is this the right prosthesis for space? How is it going to work? Will the radiation affect the electronics possibly? There's all sorts of things like this we need to look at. We are going to look at things that we've identified so far in the FLY study that we want to address further. And the main things are looking at getting prosthetic hardware certified, because I need to exercise on the ISS and I need to wear a prosthesis, as we discussed earlier, at launch. So we're going through a process of hardware certification. But we also need to understand as much as possible how much... Obviously, being an amputee, I have about this much of my leg left, and I wear a hard socket. The volume of my leg could change, and we don't know exactly how much it's going to change and necessarily which direction it's going to change. So will it swell or will it decrease in volume? And so we need to try and predict as best as possible what will happen and by how much, so that we can be prepared for when I actually do fly. So we're doing what's called a fluid shift study or a suspension study to try and understand that. And we think, based on what we know so far, probably, if anything, the volume will get slightly smaller because your circulating volume tends to go more towards your centre because you haven't got gravity forcing it down into your legs. And then, of course, there's other things that you have to account for, like muscle loss and bone loss and other things like that that we use exercise as a countermeasure for. Yeah, exactly. So if my leg or my stump does decrease in size significantly, how are we going to mitigate that or solve that so that I can still do my exercise to maintain my bone density and muscle mass? And then we have the usual fun things like winter survival training somewhere in northern Sweden and things like that. You might see the northern lights. Yeah, we may do. So it's not all bad. If there's any advice that you would give to somebody with a physical disability who is dreaming of becoming an astronaut, hasn't seen this opportunity before, is now seeing you and maybe in the future they want to apply, what kind of advice would you be able to give? I think it wouldn't be advice just to people with disabilities. I think it would be advice for everyone. I would say challenge what is normal. Challenge what has gone before. Is it right? Question it. Why can't we do things? And be open-minded. Be ready to explore what is possible. But also specifically relating to disabilities, spread the word that I want to increase or raise people's awareness and thresholds of maybe what they already think that people with disabilities are capable of. I really want to raise that and demonstrate that they may actually be far more capable to do much more than we already think and be open-minded to that. It sounds like the right stuff is moving in a different and much better and much more inclusive direction. John McFall, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for joining me on stage and thank you for joining us at Open Day.