Friday Fungus: The problem with mouldy spaceships

ARTHUR DENT:
Good grief! Is this really the interior of a flying saucer?

FORD PREFECT:
It certainly is. What do you think?

ARTHUR DENT:
Well, it’s a bit squalid isn’t it?

FORD PREFECT:
What did you expect?

ARTHUR DENT:
Well, I don’t know… gleaming control panels… flashing lights, computer screens… Not old mattresses.

It was a good joke that the Dentrassi sleeping quarters on the Vogon constructor fleet were dirty not the gleaming, shiny TV image of a spaceship. But the reality is (albeit perhaps not for Vogons) that keeping spaceship living quarters clean really is important.

The problem, however, is that cleaning spaceships isn't just a simple matter of wiping the surfaces with Flash and leaving the tricky bits behind the cupboards and under the bed till later when you've the time and inclination. Cleaning the places spacefolk live is a matter of life and death and mould:

In our day-to-day lives on Earth, the fungi we live with aren't usually an issue. But in the confined habitat of a spaceship and potentially a Martian settlement, some researchers worry that the microbes that thrive in confined spaces could sicken people or even damage equipment. Venkateswaran, who is a member of NASA's Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group, is also concerned about human settlers contaminating Mars with our own microbes.

As always with these things, cleaning space habitats has a name - 'proper maintenance protocols' - and really matters. Moreover, every time a new human arrives in the microbiome they bring in a whole new ecosystem of moulds (and you thought you were clean). And these moulds and bacteria change (evolve, adapt) pretty rapidly. We're not really sure about the risks but NASA and other space organisations take it pretty seriously:

In respect to human health, the importance of microbiological monitoring is extremely important for long-duration missions. In this investigation, the major focus is on indoor environmental quality control, specifically studies on environmental microbiology in space (astromicrobiological studies), in order to reduce potential hazards for the crew and the spacecraft infrastructure. Progress is made in these astrobiological studies based on past, and current, collaborative studies with JAXA. The continuing expansion of the on-going microbiological monitoring in the KIBO module, the project named “Microbe-I/II/III”, data is being collected on microbial dynamics in the habitable spacecraft environment. Collected data on these microbial communities aboard the ISS is shared with NASA, ESA, and JAXA.

Koichi Makimura who runs these experiments reckons there's a bit of an issue with those cleaning regimes:

"Fungal monitoring may (be) part of 'proper maintenance protocols' but no one knows what is 'proper maintenance,'" says Koichi Makimura, a medical researcher at Japan's Teikyo University who was also not involved in this study.

Makimura, who has studied microbes on the International Space Station, says that fungi research in general has been neglected here on Earth, so it's hard to conclude what this study's results might mean for the health of the humans isolated with these fungi. But one thing is clear—there's no getting rid of them entirely, even in space.

What's clear in all this is that any living space in space needs to be meticulously clean and cleaned. As the researchers point out there's no escaping from this because humans are 'natural fermentors' making us incredibly popular with moulds, yeasts and other micro-fungi. Maybe it's time for Kim and Aggie Clean A Spaceship?

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Friday Fungus: On the shocking absence of mushrooms in Neal Stephenson's 'Seveneves'

I'm a lot of a fan of Neal Stephenson's writing - he is among the most creative and innovative of modern SF writers. And 'Seveneves' is no exception as it tells the story of man's survival after the moon, inexplicably, blows up.

As ever with Stephenson, the writing is dense reflecting how much he's researched the ideas presented. Indeed, for non-physicists wanting to get their heads round the science and maths of orbits, the book is fantastic. But if your head doesn't want to get round Lagrange points and orbital decay the story still carries you along as a few thousand intrepid folk struggle to create a means of survival in space. And Stephenson knows his audience:

“We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”

So up there in space (and, as a sideline, in caves under Alaska too) the human survivors have to eat. Indeed, it's the lack of food that does for one section of the space-dwellers, turning them into cannibals. The mention of how this started is a beautifully snarky reference to the culture of blogging and social media:

“Tav started it,” Aïda said. “He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.”

The main source of food Stephenson gives us up in space is algae grown hydroponically in the little spaceships (delightfully named 'arklets'). And this is fine except that it's rather limiting. It's true that algae - as plants - have the additional advantage of helping with the atmosphere but it's a lot harder to get the necessary nutrients from this source than from another option - fungi. Yet, for some reason, this option isn't even considered even though the intensive production of fungi as meat substitutes is a well established science:

Mycoprotein is made in 40 metre high fermenters which run continuously for five weeks at a time.
The fermenter is sterilised and filled with a water and glucose solution. Then a batch of fusarium venenatum, the fungi at the heart of Mycoprotein, is introduced.

Once the organism has started to grow a continuous feed of nutrients, including potassium, magnesium and phosphate as well as trace elements, are added to the solution. The pH balance, temperature, nutrient concentration and oxygen are all constantly adjusted in order to achieve the optimum growth rate.

The organism and nutrients combine to form Mycoprotein solids and these are removed continuously from the fermenter after an average residence time of five to six hours. Once removed the Mycoprotein is heated to 65°C to breakdown the nucleic acid. Water is then removed in centrifuges, leaving the Mycoprotein looking rather like pastry dough.

If you were really setting up to survive in space entirely 'off-grid', I'd expect someone to suggest the role of fungi in making that possible. There's little about the process described above that couldn't be replicated off the planet. And for all you mushroom haters - you'd get used to it!

The next consideration - admittedly one Stephenson doesn't set out in scientific detail - is how to 're-terraform' the earth after it's surface had been scorched for four thousand years. Here, again the role of fungi (and to be fair those algae) is significant:

Mushrooms have been around for tens of millions of years and their activities are indispensable for the operation of the biosphere. Through their relationships with plants and animals, mushrooms are essential for forest and grassland ecology, climate control and atmospheric chemistry, water purification, and the maintenance of biodiversity. This first point, about the ecological significance of mushrooms, is obvious, yet the 16,000 described species of mushroom-forming fungi are members of the most poorly understood kingdom of life. The second point requires a dash of lateral thinking. Because humans evolved in ecosystems dependent upon mushrooms there would be no us without mushrooms. And no matter how superior we feel, humans remain dependent upon the continual activity of these fungi. The relationship isn’t reciprocal: without us there would definitely be mushrooms.

So, if you're going to create a human-friendly environment on a planet, the starting point has to be fungi because without those fungi it's not a human-friendly environment.

None of this distracts from the book. As James Lovegrove in the FT puts it:

Seveneves is a superhuman achievement, dense, eloquent, exhaustive, exhilarating, powerful, utterly readable, and ultimately uplifting. Stephenson imagines the worst that can happen, and insists that we can make the best of it. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels fine.

I just think it would have been even better with mushrooms.

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Pioneers wanted! Capitalism, Marxism and living on the moon.

"Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish."

Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski, Skylife, 2000

Starting a discussion of capitalism - in space or anywhere else for that matter - by quoting Rosa Luxemburg isn't a good plan. Dear old Rosa believed that capitalism needs a frontier - a periphery - to succeed. And, like most Marxists who talk about capitalism as if they own the term, Rosa gets it wrong. Still this didn't stop the chap from Lenin's Tomb getting all confused about space (and capitalism) in the Guardian.

Capitalism really isn't the point when we talk about space exploration. Google 'commercial exploitation of space' and you get pages of learned, legal tomes with titles like:

Law and Regulation of Commercial Mining of Minerals in Outer Space

Commercial Utilization of Outer Space: Law and Practice

Creating a legal framework for the commercial exploitation of outer space

Now this writing suggests two things to me - firstly that the capitalists really are interested in space. And secondly that the controlling hand of government is placing constraints on making money out there in the great blue beyond.

More importantly, exploration - and that's all we've done so far - never really interested capitalists, even the ones who termed themselves "merchant adventurers". Where we are familiar with space, commercial exploitation is commonplace and successful:

On 10 June 1995, International Launch Services was established, upon the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta companies, to market Proton and Atlas launch services to the commercial satellite telecommunications marketplace worldwide. Prior to the merger, each of these companies were competing in the commercial launch services market with the Proton and Atlas rockets. Lockheed entered the launch market in 1993 with the establishment of Lockheed-Khrunichev- Energia International (LKEI), the joint venture to exclusively market the Russian Proton launch vehicle. Similarly, Martin Marietta had entered the commercial launch arena with the family of Atlas launch vehicles. Neither rocket was new to the market, however, and provided a combined heritage foundation of more than 450 launches at the inception of ILS.

Despite the persistence of government controls and restrictions on space exploitation, capitalist progress has been made (and I guess we shouldn't mention Richard Branson selling over-price trips into space to celebrity millionaires).

The real problem here is that our Marxist confuses the fact that lots of goodies undoubtedly lie below the surface of the moon (and all over the solar system) with whether those goodies are actually worth exploiting. Right now we're doing a pretty good job (whatever the greenies say) of fuelling our world - in most cases we're not running out of stuff and where we are there are some pretty useful alternatives that don't require us to go to the moon to get them.

What we have to consider here is that we need a sort of unholy alliance between the controlling government and the free spirit. People like John Leeming are needed:

“You seem to fit the part all right. Your technical record is first-class. Your disciplinary record stinks to high heaven.' He eyed his listener blank faced. 'Two charges of refusing to obey a lawful order. Four for insolence and insubordination. One for parading with your cap on back to front. What on earth made you do that?'

I had a bad attack of what-the-hell, sir,' explained Leeming.” 

So the government gave Leeming a state-or-the-art super-duper scout ship to explore the galaxy. Just as government funded Columbus, subbed Magellan and encouraged (if turning a blind eye to piracy is what we mean by 'encouraged') Drake. Because it got them out of the way by sending them off into unexplored oceans. If they died, it was their risk. But if they found something the government could take the credit.

Our Marxist lives in something of a binary world - the choice is between timid capitalism:

Of course, under capitalism the state's ability to explore the unknown is limited by its priority of making things work for business, or developing a greater war machine. States don't need an immediate return on investment, but if they're to justify taxing profits, they need to demonstrate some sort of plausible return. Hence, there's always more money for military arsenals than spaceships. 

And glorious socialism:

So, this is what we need. First, international socialism. And to paraphrase Lenin, socialism = soviet power + interstellar travel. Don't ask me how we get that, we just need it as a precondition for everything else. Second, an international space exploration programme, funded with the express purpose of adding to the sum of stuff and human knowledge. Third, a popular space tourism programme. 

I'm not intending to try and unpick the ignorance of demanding a system that is a myth to replace a system that is a fact. Instead, I want to offer another alternative - we'll call it the Eric Frank Russell system. We'll invite independent minded, pioneering sorts (with a scattering of John Leemings) to go and live on the moon. Not a few of them but lots - we'll charge them with the task of creating the means to live there, the ways to reach the moon and the way they'll run the place when they get there.

And hopefully what we'll get won't be international socialism or corporatist capitalism (the two choices our Marxist offers us) but this:

 

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Quote of the day...

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From the genius of P. J. O'Rourke:

I don’t pretend to be wise enough to know what the lesson is. But let’s send our children to the planets and the stars. And let’s keep them out of Congress and the White House. 

Amen to that! And the House of Commons too!

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Wink at the moon...

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I remember sitting on the floor of my primary school watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. In modern parlance is was, like, wow! Indeed those moments were to an eight-year old boy, a true wonder. We won't lose those memories.

Now Neil Armstrong has died his family have created the most poignant of memorials in an act we can all do to recognise his achievement - and the achievements of all those others who made it possible for him to make that great leap for mankind:

For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink." 

I know I'll be winking at the moon when I next see her.

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The Space Age is Over...Long Live the Space Age!

In one of those well-informed polemics that The Economist does so well, we are told that the ‘Space Age’ is over:

Their dream was for man to venture farther into the solar system and beyond, into interstellar space. Many people feel that these imaginings have been dashed. It is quite conceivable that 36,000km will prove the limit of human ambition. It is equally conceivable that human space flight, long the stuff of science fiction, will return to fantasy.

Just maybe. And just as maybe The Economist are wrong to be quite so sniffy about private initiative:

...the private ventures of people like Elon Musk in America and Sir Richard Branson in Britain, who hope to make human space flight commercially viable. Indeed, the enterprise of such people might do just that. But the market is uncertain. Space tourism is a luxury service that will probably not to go beyond low-Earth orbit. And ferrying satellites and other kit to the Earth's extended "technosphere" is hardly boldly going where no man has gone before.

The assumption in all this is, of course, that the conquest of space – the stretching of that final frontier – is something only possible with the resources and leadership of governments. And the statements about a “luxury service” are achingly reminiscent of the famous comments from crystal ball gazers about telephones (one per town), computers (a world market of five or six) and much else that is innovation.

For the record, Simon’s prediction is that we do indeed have a new space race, it will involve the commercial exploitation of space and it is between the western entrepreneur and the state-directed exploration of the Chinese. It’s likely that the moon’s next human visitors will be either western tourists or Chinese miners.

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