Nick Bridge

Congratulations to British-born astronaut Piers Sellers, who took off from Cape Canaveral on Friday in the Atlantis Space Shuttle. I was honoured to be in Florida to see the launch, along with science experts from our Houston Consulate, who work closely with Piers and others at NASA.

There was a tinge of sadness. There are just two more shuttle flights, by Discovery and Endeavour, before the program comes to an end later this year. It is expensive in these resource-constrained times (an estimated $450 million per launch); and old, in what is a cutting edge business (the first shuttle took off in 1981).

Yet it remains a spectacular feat of human imagination and ambition. What you don’t get a feel for on TV is the staggering brightness and power of the rockets that take the shuttle up to a speed of 17,500mph - about eight times faster than the world’s fastest jet fighter. That’s the speed at which the International Space Station orbits the earth (one circumnavigation every 90 minutes, or 16 sunsets a day). The shuttle needs to go the same speed in order to break out of the earth’s orbit and dock alongside.

In terms of this blog, what is the environmental angle (apart from the half a million gallons of fuel that's burned getting the shuttle into space..)?

On each mission NASA collects masses of scientific data about space, but also about the earth: its changing atmosphere, weather patterns, and ecosystem. The UK is also contributing to this knowledge base. Last year, our Harwell Science and Innovation campus became host to the European Space Agency's first UK facility, majoring in climate and robotic research. Last month, we launched the UK Space Agency to coordinate all of the countries’ space-related activity.

I leave the final word to ace Air Force pilot and two-time NASA astronaut Bob Stewart, who talked to us at Cape Canaveral before Friday’s launch. Asked what it was like to look down on earth from space he just said, "All of us come back down environmentalists."


Nick Bridge

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