Planet organic: the professor who wants to send a city into space
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Occasionally, during my interview with Dr Rachel Armstrong, I sense that the Frappuccino drinkers of the Kensington coffee shop where we meet are eavesdropping, their ears pricked by our unlikely topic of conversation: the construction of a 20km starship that hundreds of people could live on for generations as it floats into another solar system. As she coolly describes the Starship Congress she attended last year in Texas, or the politics of space babies and sex in space, the suited man opposite can’t help but look up from his laptop. Call it the Star Wars effect — filming began on JJ Abrams’ sequel (Episode VII) in Pinewood earlier this month — or maybe it’s just irresistibly fascinating.
Last month Project Persephone, an initiative to work out how an enormous ‘Noah’s Ark’ could travel and exist independently in space, became the subject of worldwide fascination, with Armstrong, 47, as its glamorous public face. A former doctor who briefly dabbled in TV and the performing arts, and has written a satirical sci-fi novel called The Gray’s Anatomy about an alien who is abducted by humans, she is now a senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich’s School of Architecture, Design & Construction, a senior TED fellow and a regular entry in magazine lists of Inspiring Women and Big Thinkers.
‘Within the aerospace industry there is a consensus that in the next 100 years we will reach another stage of development of human space exploration, which is to leave the solar system,’ she says in a patient and reassuring tone. That’s the context of Persephone, which aims to think about the ‘living architecture’ that could make life sustainable inside a starship so that hundreds of people could live in it for over a century. ‘I proposed that instead of treating the starship as a giant pot plant, in which we just pour a load of earth, we think about engineering it from the bottom up, to understand how the chemistry would perform.’ That means focusing on soils and how they could be engineered to work for such a project — an endeavour that Armstrong thinks could end up radically improving how we live life in our earthly cities, too.
The Starship Congress was a meeting of the global participants of Persephone’s parent-project Icarus Interstellar — an international organisation dedicated to enabling interstellar space flight, manned by volunteer scientists and engineers. They met at a hotel in the Texas desert — ‘in a big building that could have been a spaceship itself’. ‘The congress was setting out a portfolio of projects that will take us towards key steps of building a starship within a hundred years,’ explains Armstrong.
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It’s all a bit much to take in. Were there NASA people among the delegates, I ask? ‘Yes, but they weren’t allowed to state their NASA affiliation when they spoke.’ (As a result of the agency’s rules on public speaking, she says.) ‘They have interest in this frontiers development — part of it is to keep an eye on what people are thinking.’ In fact, Icarus has received funding from the US Department of Defense’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Back in Queen’s Park, where she lives with her 13-year-old daughter, Armstrong’s daily routine involves lecturing at Greenwich and tweeting scientific articles to her more than 10,000 followers on Twitter. ‘And now… OpenWorm… the world’s first entirely simulated organism,’ she tweets at 6.30am when I check her @livingarchitect profile. It’s her sixth tweet of the day. Her 2009 TED talk Architecture that Repairs Itself? — about her research into whether protocell technology could stop Venice sinking by generating an artificial reef under the city — has received almost 770,000 views.
She spends university holidays in various labs working on the oil-water droplet systems that were the subject of her recently submitted PhD at UCL, and form the basis of Persephone’s ambition to ‘design with nature’ in order to create a ‘living architecture’ that would sustain itself. She’s in regular contact with the other Persephone contributors at the universities of Surrey and Warwick, as well as in the Netherlands, Italy and the US — all of whom are involved because they work on technologies and materials that could contribute to designing the craft. The project doesn’t have a ‘central pot’ of funding, but consists of conversations between the participants about how their current work could fit in.
Given the timescale, the initial task is relatively speculative — about asking ‘bold questions’ beyond the attention span of industry and governments — but Armstrong is willing to play ball with my desire to know about the specifics. ‘We’re probably talking about a giant sphere that may be 20km in diameter,’ she says, which would be about the size of a small Hebridean island. ‘I would say it probably looks like a beach — sticky sand dunes first of all. Or like a salt marsh — there’s water, and plants, and maybe there’s a tidal rhythm or a wind. In the modern world we kill all of our soils to build on them, but perhaps in Persephone we don’t. I can imagine them looking a bit like the caves in Turkey, where Star Wars is filmed. So maybe we live in burrows. We would need a sun — so maybe we would have nuclear fusion as the rocket fuel, and maybe that fusion is a kind of sun that produces light on the inside of the starship.’
She says the ‘general consensus’ is that a ship might carry 500 people to start with (there are currently only six people in space), but who ends up going is a ‘major ethical question’. ‘If we build a starship that exists in a time of plenty, in which we are boarding that starship for exploration and human advancement, for curiosity and for lots of positive reasons, that requires a different set of ethics. So I imagine it would be the Elon Musks [the technology magnate] of this world, and the super-rich who will be booking their seats, a bit like they have for Richard Branson’s [Virgin Galactic], because they are funding it. At the moment it doesn’t seem like we’re constructing a last-ditch space ark to get off a dying planet, so it’s not the last capsule before the world explodes,’ she adds when I quote from the excitable news reports about Persephone. Could it be? ‘If an asteroid is heading towards us to hit us within a hundred years, it could be, yes.’
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In the meantime, she hopes the project’s focus on creating sustainable environments will improve the way we live in cities. ‘What if our buildings weren’t just deserts of concrete and Tarmac but actually held spaces for bioprocesses,’ she says. ‘Plastic-munching fungi actually exist that can turn waste into something useful. You can have heating systems fuelled by the decomposition of waste.’
As interstellar thinking progresses, there will be seismic psychological questions raised, alongside the technical ones, most obviously about how leaving Earth with no intention of returning will affect a person. ‘Third-quarter phenomenon’ — the idea that the tension and moods of space crews worsen after the halfway point of a mission — is a key talking point in space psychology (despite two NASA-funded studies finding no evidence of it), but what happens when there is no end? And what kind of existential crises could plague a generation born in a starship who know nothing else?
Armstrong’s first interest in space came as a doctor when she looked intothe health implications of normal civilians entering space in the age of commercial space travel. She envisages that sex and reproduction would have to be separate on the craft, because current research indicates that normal conception is interrupted in space, as is male sexual performance. One imagines that Branson’s space flights — if they ever happen (see right) — will put those theories to the test.
Only when Project Persephone has to replace discussion with plans and prototypes will Armstrong have to walk the gauntlet of academic scrutiny from scientists, who — like the coffee drinkers around us — might look sceptically on a doctor who lectures in architecture, designs soils, writes sci-fi novels and dreams big. For now it has been warmly received as a rather thrilling — and hopeful — flight of fancy.