Shouting dolphins and failed rocket launches

Excitement had been building for the first launch from Cornwall’s new space port; it was a UK first but sadly its first mission ended in disappointment: Virgin Orbital, owned by Richard Branson, had repurposed one of his old passenger 747s into a customised aircraft carrying the LauncherOne rocket carrying a payload of satellites destined for Earth orbit. But they never reached their destination. Blaming “an anomaly”, Virgin reported that the rocket had failed to deploy its cargo, which had burned up over the ocean. Space journalist and presenter of the Space Boffins Podcast Richard Hollingham was following the events closely. James Tytko asked him what went wrong…

Richard - The short answer to that question is we don't know yet what happened, but as you say, it was all building up to what we thought was going to be a success. I've been down there to Spaceport Cornwall, and it's an impressive operation. They got the Goonhilly ground station, which is being used to track the satellites, and then Virgin Orbit turn up, everything seemed to be going to plan, aircraft takes off, the rocket drops from the aircraft as intended, the first stage of the rocket fires. Then, it's not clear. Looking at the trajectories, it seems that the second stage of the rocket also fired, but then things went wrong and we don't know what went wrong. Fortunately, it looks like everything's insured, so although it sets things back, it will happen and it will happen again.

James - Well, that's obviously disappointing, but what you are saying there is cause for some promise, I hope. How long before the UK Space Agency can dust itself off and go again - rebuild and relaunch those satellites? Must take a fair bit of time, I assume?

Richard - Well, they're talking about a year. These satellites are only around the size of a shoebox. All the different missions that were packed into this rocket, yes, they can build them, rebuild them in a matter of months. You've got to have the testing and all the rest of it. So I would say a year would be optimistic. And it also depends on whether there's any fundamental problems with the rocket. There shouldn't be because this is a proven system, albeit a new system. But if there's some fundamental issue and there needs to be a redesign or whatever, there's a lot of moving parts here. So I think a year for this particular launch, for launch from Spaceport Cornwall, is probably optimistic.

James - And those satellites that were attached to the rocket, the whole point of this mission in the first place, which scientists in particular were there waiting to use the data collected by this equipment? Do they just sit there, twiddling their thumbs now until we are good to go again in the year timeline that you've suggested,

Richard - All the satellites on board, they were small satellites, and the UK is genuinely a world leader in building small satellites. They were all tech demonstration satellites. One by Welsh company, Space Forge, for example, it was a test of their satellite concept, and the idea was to be able to return satellites from space, which would be pretty amazing if they can do that. One of the satellites that I went to see, which was being built in Oxfordshire, I went to see that just before it was shipped down to Cornwall, and when I say shipped down to Cornwall, they stick it in the back of a car and take it down to Cornwall, that's the beauty of building and launching from the same country. That one was an investigation of telecommunications and GPS signals. So a lot of experimental satellites, a lot of things that could lead to other bigger projects, but all small teams, all small companies. So you really feel for these people and a lot of them are young, enthusiastic engineers. This is probably their first satellite as well. And you've got to see the big picture. And the big picture is in maybe 18 months time, hopefully those satellites will be in space. They'll be the mark two satellites and all this would've been forgotten. It will be a success. Ultimately, this will happen again.

James - You've preempted my coming onto a more positive footing to ask you whether, Spaceport Newquay, despite this failed launch, is a sign of things to come in terms of the UK's involvement in space science.

Richard - Let's be clear, the UK is a leader in some aspects already. The UK is a major manufacturer of satellites from the massive telecommunications satellites in high geostationary orbit around the earth, to small satellites, to scientific satellites. It's one of the major funders of the European Space Agency. We're about to have new astronauts for the UK. So, you know, the UK in space is doing pretty well. This was the missing part of the jigsaw really, to be able to do launches. You can design the satellites, build the satellites, and then launch the satellites. There's maybe a commercial advantage, long term, but also a strategic advantage that you're not relying on other countries to do this. So Spaceport Cornwall, there will be a successful launch from there, I have no doubt. There are also two other options coming up in the next few months. Vertical launches - conventional rockets - from Shetland Islands and also Sutherland, so very far North of mainland Scotland. Both those space ports are being built now. So there will be a launch from the UK in, let's say the next 18 months, couple of years. It will happen.

We’re often covering the topic of climate change here on the Naked Scientists with justifiable cause for concern. But this next item could be a reason to celebrate. Cambridge chemist Erwin Reisner has developed a system that can use sunlight to transform plastic waste and greenhouse gases into sustainable fuels and other valuable chemicals…

Erwin - My laboratory really develops technologies that can use sunlight to convert waste into useful products. So about 10 years ago, we started work on using the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide and developing systems that can convert this into fuels. And more recently, maybe five years ago, we started work on converting plastic waste into useful products and chemicals as well. And now for the first time we managed to combine these two approaches where we have a single solar powered reactor where we can feed in plastic waste and carbon dioxide and really make useful fuels and products.

Chris - Talk us through the nuts and bolts of this then. So the solar bit of it is the energy input because nothing happens. There's no free lunch in the universe is there? You've got to supply energy to make things happen. So that's powering the process. But what is the process?

Erwin - That's correct. We only use sunlight, the most abundant energy form on our planet. And the process is really a reactor that consists of two compartments. In one compartment we feed in the plastic waste. In our case, for example, we use plastic bottles, which is PET waste, that can convert PET to glycolic acid. And in the second compartment, we bubble carbon dioxide and convert it into fuel components, which are known as syngas, carbon monoxide, and formic acid. This sounds very technical, but it's a very interesting intermediate chemical that we can then further convert to interesting fuels that can be useful.

Chris - How does the sunlight work then? Is it converted into electricity that powers that process or is it the heat or is it ultraviolet to split some of the things apart and give them energy? How do you use the sunlight?

Erwin - That's an excellent question. So we use solar energy directly to drive the chemical reactions. We do not really produce intermittent electricity. This is an integrated approach where the sunlight is directly used to drive the chemistry.

Chris - In essence then you need a sunny day. But what is there some kind of reacting surface where the sun comes in and does something to that surface that makes it able to modify these chemicals in this way?

Erwin - Yes. So a sunny day helps a lot. It also helps to have a close and sunnier climate.

Chris - Not gonna have a lot of luck with that at the moment.

Erwin - In the UK, it's still okay. <laugh>. So essentially yes, we do need an area where we take the light, where we harvest the solar energy and then the chemistry takes place, but the light harvesting and the chemical conversion happens at the same place.

Chris - How would this work practically then? Would you imagine that you've got the equivalent of what we see for a solar farm would be a chemical recycling farm in your hands?

Erwin - This is our ultimate dream to build a solar power recycling upcycling facility. And this would mean we will certainly have large areas where we need to collect sunlight. This could either be a hundreds of square meters or square kilometers array of solar reactors, or we take solar energy and sunlight and concentrate on smaller reactors that we can do the chemistry with.

Chris - One has to take into account when doing any of these kinds of analyses, the sort of circular economy, which is that the plastic doesn't get itself to the recycling plant. The CO2 doesn't harvest itself from the atmosphere and feed itself into your system. So when you do those sorts of calculations, does this still make sense? Is it viable? Is it actually a carbon saving? We're not burning loads of diesel to get the plastic to your plant to do this?

Erwin - That's a very important point. So for us, this is very early stage technology. This is really just what we would call a proof of principle to say this actually is feasible and viable. To address exactly your point, we work quite closely with recap, that's the Peterborough and Cambridge Waste Recycling facility. And we have been at Amey, the waste treatment facility, for example, in Waterbeach to collect samples and even inspect the facilities to see where, how we could integrate this technology with existing waste recycling. So we would do this technology onsite where we accumulate the waste. And in addition we have to think about carbon capture as well. So we are also working on technologies where we can really take carbon dioxide, either from industry or even capture from air and use this as an input to drive the reactor.

Chris - When you say use plastic, presumably you're not just chucking plastic bags in there. So do you have to put the plastic into some kind of configuration first so that the process can consume it?

Erwin - So, yes and no. So ideally a strength of our system is we can use quite a broad range of plastics. So when we talk about plastics, it's not one product. We really talk about hundreds of different products.

Chris - Well you preempted my question, because I was thinking when we look at what goes in the bin. Even in the recycling bin, it's a whole mixed bag of plastics isn't it?

Erwin - So with our systems, we can convert a good range of plastics, which are known as condensation polymers. So this is PET, PLA, and other types of plastics. And the process also works with biomass, which is actually really attractive because if we have contaminated food waste, for example, we can use this straightaway in our process and do not need to worry too much about, purifying the waste stream process

Chris - So it's not going to gum up the waste stream.

Erwin - So it's a very versatile, robust process.

Chris - Yeah. And what's the secret ingredient that makes this happen? What is the surface over which there must be some kind of catalytic process that's driving this. What's the secret to that?

Erwin - So exactly. So the solar energy provides the energy and then we need the catalyst, these materials that can really accelerate these chemical reactions. So in this case, we try to develop surfaces that can really then take the waste streams, rearrange bonds, and make this interesting product. So in our case, this would be based on copper for example, or cobalt, which are quite abundant materials that are possibly scalable.

Chris - I mean expensive, still, because everything's become expensive, hasn't it? But certainly that you're not talking about really rare materials which many of these other processes have to use.

Erwin - Yeah. So this is one of our core concerns. We try to avoid precious metals and expensive components that could not be scaled in the longer term future.

Chris - So just to finish, what are the figures looking like? I mean how much could you convert with a process like this? Is it meaningful? As in, we know the world makes millions of tons of plastic every year. Can you deal with it with this?

Erwin - Yeah so we hope with our work to inspire and to show what's technologically possible. To really make this a meaningful process this will mean multimillion investments from companies, government, stakeholders to really get to the scale stability and efficiencies that are being needed. So for now, to give you a scale, we work in our laboratory on a milligram maximum gram scale. But as you said, of course we have produced probably 10 billion tons of plastic since the fifties. So there's still some scale up that is required in the next couple of years.