COVID retrospective, space security, and car brake particles

The former head of the NATO military alliance, Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said that politicians should not ignore security threats in space. Mr Rasmussen - who also served as the Danish leader between 2001 and 2009 - wrote in Politico recently that the “military threat in space is real, and it is growing” and that Western policymakers need to react. Joining me to talk about these comments is space scientist, author and former BBC science editor Dr David Whitehouse…

David - I think the Ukraine conflict has brought into focus a lot of the feelings and worries about space-based warfare that have been around for a long time. It is said in space warfare history that the Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the first space war in which space assets were a real importance to finding out what was going on on the ground and directing conflict. Ukraine is the first two-sided space war in the sense that Ukraine is not a space power, and yet it's been able to use space resources to aid its fighting in a much more efficient way than Russia has. I mean, Ukraine has used communications and it has used commercial satellite observations to find out what's on the battlefield. Russia, you would've thought, would have a space advantage, but it hasn't because it's outdated and it's not been able to get its systems to work. So for future conflicts, and people are talking in this respect, not about Russia, but about America and China, there are a lot of lessons to be learnt about the importance of protecting space, the infrastructure of space, during a conflict.

Chris - What sorts of legislation treaties, pre existing agreements are there to safeguard space, if any?

David - There are two that come to mind. The first thing that Russia did when it invaded Ukraine was hack the Viasat satellite system to disable Ukraine's communications. Ukraine responded by using a different set of communication satellites, the SpaceX satellites launched by Elon Musk. Legally, that actually means in terms of international law, that SpaceX is a participant in the fighting in the Ukraine. Under international law, Russia would have the right to attack a third party, which is aiding its adversary. That worries people a lot. But also the recent announcement by Russia that it was thinking about some form of nuclear powered weapon in space did force people to think again about the outer space treaty, which was signed in 1967, which prohibits the use of nuclear weapons or the kinds of weapons of mass destruction in space. And people realise that actually that wording in 1967 is rather loose, and that there are ways that Russia could put a nuclear powered weapon in space by not violating that treaty.

Chris - The other thing, of course, is that space is becoming quite crowded and there are predicted to be more than a hundred thousand satellites in space within the next decade. As some people have pointed out, you don't actually even have to put a weapon in space to weaponise space because all you'd have to do is to knock a couple of those satellites off kilter and there'd be potentially a runaway collision effect where everything would smash into everything else. You could cause a catastrophe and a major problem for everyone on the Earth's surface because of our reliance on space without actually having to fire anything anywhere

David - You are quite right. We are all vulnerable. There is a worry in the future that, particularly if a nation like Russia would get desperate, it could sabotage the whole space ecosystem for everybody. Because as you said, if you blew something up in space, you could create a self-sustaining cloud of debris which might achieve your military objectives, but it would blind you. It would blind everybody else. It would interfere with communications, with positioning television, with not just the military, but the whole space infrastructure. Satellite navigation in our cars might be affected by this. That would be a brute force, last resort strategy that military space planners don't rule out in extreme circumstances. As you imply, there is a whole space ecology on which society relies which needs to be not only investigated in terms of how vulnerable it is and how it could be attacked in space, but needs to be updated. It's very interesting to see the United States Space Force which is charged with protecting the American space system and developing ways to attack the Chinese space system in the future. They've been disappointed by the fact that they've got slightly less budget this year because they're going to spend a lot of money on upgrading, updating, and modernising all their space systems so that they could be more immune against attack. But you're right, if somebody blows something up and scatters shards of debris everywhere, there's no protection against that. So people need to talk.

A polio survivor, who lived inside an iron lung for most of his life, has died at the age of 78.

Paul Richard Alexander was born on the 30th of January 1946 in Dallas, Texas. He was a bright and able student, but succumbed to a widespread outbreak of polio, which was common, even in first world countries, until the 1953 rollout of a highly-effective vaccine. But that was too late for many, including Paul, who were either killed or left with serious disabilities after contracting it.

Polio is a particularly cruel disease because it mostly affects children under five years old. That said, it is possible to contract it later in life and America’s longest-serving president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was diagnosed with it at the age of 39.

For the majority, the infection is largely asymptomatic, with few or no symptoms. But in about 1% of cases, the virus, which infects only humans and spreads through the air, faeces and in contaminated water, attacks the central nervous system, targeting the motor neurones that control our muscles. It robs them of their nerve supply and leaving victims with weakness and paralysis.

In the summer of 1952, Paul Alexander - who was just six-years-old - began to suffer from pounding headaches, lethargy and a stiff neck. His symptoms worsened and suspicions grew that he had contracted polio. Indeed, many of the public amenities in Texas - such as bars, cinemas and churches - had been closed in order to curb the spread of the virus. Nevertheless, cases continued to grow unabated.

When it was confirmed that Paul had polio, he was taken to Parkland Hospital in Texas. He was so ill that nobody expected him to live, and almost died before it was spotted that he wasn’t breathing. Paul underwent a life-saving tracheotomy so he could be ventilated, and when he awoke he found he was paralysed from the neck down and encased in a metal cylinder called an iron lung, with just his head poking out at the top. He would spend the vast majority of the rest of his life inside the medical contraption.

But how exactly did the iron lung keep him alive for so long? The polio infection effectively destroyed the nerve supply to the muscles that moved Paul’s chest and diaphragm, so he couldn’t breathe for himself. The iron lung rhythmically pulled air in and out from the box he was laying in. This periodically dropped the pressure inside to below atmospheric pressure, so the higher air pressure in the surroundings pushed air into Paul's chest, inflating his lungs.

Paul, however, did not let his illness - or his iron lung - define him. Following an eighteen month stint in hospital, he was allowed to return home. His parents rented a generator and a truck for his iron lung and, with the help of his therapist, he began to practise breathing techniques that would allow him to leave the iron lung for short periods of time.

He was one of the first homeschooled children in Texas and, on graduation from high school, Paul attended Southern Methodist University. In 1984, he gained a law degree from the University of Texas in Austin. He was admitted to the bar two years later, and practiced as a lawyer for a number of years, managing to leave his iron lung and attend court in his wheelchair for a few hours at a time.

In later life, Paul would continue to attempt new challenges - including writing a memoir which took him years to compose using a plastic stick to type on a keyboard and dictating to a friend. He also joined the social media site TikTok in the months before his death, and was recognised by Guinness World Records as the person who lived the longest in an iron lung. Paul’s brother, Philip Alexander, told the BBC how he would be remembered:

Health practitioners have made huge strides in tackling polio in recent years. Since 1988, wild poliovirus cases have decreased by more than 99%, thanks largely to a hugely successful vaccination campaign. Of the 3 strains of wild poliovirus (type 1, type 2 and type 3), wild poliovirus type 2 was eradicated in 1999 and wild poliovirus type 3 was eradicated in 2020. As of 2022, endemic wild poliovirus type 1 remained in just Pakistan and Afghanistan.