To Outer Space and Beyond with Mark Chang

Today I'm talking to Mark Chang, alumni of Alice Smith School and Aerospace Industry veteran. Let's get into this episode. Welcome to the Alice Smith Pot On Purpose podcast. Get ready to be inspired and informed as we uncover the stories of intentional impact and innovation. Mark, thank you for joining us on this episode of the podcast. How are you today? Thank you so much for having me on, Simon. Well, I'm fantastic and absolutely thrilled to be here. And where in the world are you coming to us from? The southeast corner of England, just outside of London in the county of Kent, where I've lived for probably about 15 years now. But prior to that, I've had a globetrotting career. Naturally, Alice Smith was close to where I grew up as a young child, went via Singapore, where I have the vast majority of my sort of extended family, went through to, my dad was a pilot, so we went through the continent of Africa, North America, much of Europe. And finally, I found my feet for about 10 years in the US and then decided, we'll establish ourselves down in England. Gosh, so that really is a lot of travelling around the globe. Let's just jump back to your time at Alice Smith School. And after that, I'm dying to talk to you about your aerospace career. But tell me about when you were at Alice Smith, which teachers or experiences had a big impact on you that shaped your spirit? Actually, I'd say, I mean, it was the whole experience in one, but names stand out. There was a very strict but lovely teacher called Mrs. Bain. And she effectively turned me from my wild child days into somebody who could be sort of made presentable in public. Let's put it that way. And the reason why I guess I'm describing it like this is because prior to Alice Smith, I was actually living for a while in the sort of islands in Malaysia, so out in Sarawak specifically. And I had a much more, let's say, ill-disciplined, very small youth, a very small childhood. So actually, coming into Alice Smith, it was like the first time I'd been in a more urban environment, I guess. So that's somebody I remember. I do remember the principal and deputy principal at the time, so we're talking about what would this be, 1970, '89, that sort of period. And generally, due to my slightly wilder ways of being, I did have a lot of interactions with them. I'll leave it to the imagination to fill in the blanks. But those are names that I definitely remember. Of course, I was little. So there's more in terms of impressions than memories. And all my impressions were of a happy time of the ability to run to sort of the edge of the compound as such, the edge of the school, just exploring, finding things, new things. Everything to me was fresh, was new. And I will also say that the, I think my level of English at the time, and I still, I do consider myself an English native speaker, but I did learn it later. I think my English at the time wasn't very fluent. Hopefully, it's better now. For sure it is. My ability to communicate was a little stilted to begin with. And the school as a whole drew me across that pathway. Why I didn't end up with stereotypically Malaysian English accent is basically one of elocution over time. So tell me how old you are when you discovered your passion for space exploration. Well, I think, isn't every child interested in three things. Space, dinosaurs and ghosts. So space, I mean, space as an intangible as a, you know, an imaginary thing forever. But when it became tangible to me, let's see, probably around the time I was considering what I'd do if I were to go to university. Going to university wasn't a clear cut thing for me. You know, I was wondering, should I leave school at around 18 and go into the world of work? It was still quite possible to do so and be pretty successful. Or should I take on a mantle of being the first in my family to go to university? Well, what happened was I went to, so at this point in time, I'm about 17, 18 years old, we're actually in England here, just around London. And I got a chance to go to visit one of the London, University of London Colleges, a place called Royal Holloway. And they took us around, they took the physics department because it was just a physics outing. And I got to sort of see the activities that they were involved in, both in terms of the very small, so high energy physics, and the very large, effectively, their input and contribution into the UK's ground-based observatories over in the Canary Islands, which lies off of North Africa. And I was starstruck. I mean, literally starstruck. I was looking at things. So I've always looked at the stars. I've always spotted the constellations. I knew Orion. I knew both the sort of Anglo tradition of stories behind the constellations, the Greek tradition. I used to go actually, remember, I used to go into the library at Alice Smith and I would pick out the old Greek mythologies and I'd read them and devour them hungrily. And I think that sort of stuck. And then I saw Betelgeuse, which is one of the top left-hand shoulder of the constellation of Orion. And I actually saw the first physical narratives around what it was and why it was there and why it had a particular weird colour relative to the other stars that I had always noticed. It was a bit redder, a bit larger. Why? That drove me to think, interesting. Maybe I could find out a bit more. And I've always had this fascination for the when I grew up in a dark skies part of the world, I can see the Milky Way. And it's not that easy to see when you're in and around the urban areas. But when you've got dark skies, this this translucent band and right in the centre of the translucent band, the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, it's very, very busy. And I was always curious, what's going on in there? And I had this idea that maybe it's possible to actually image, take a photo of what's in the centre there. And if you build that on top of the Greek stories and the Chinese stories about the Milky Way and the fishermen, sorry, the methodological characters that try to reach across the Milky Way. And then you put yourself in the picture of somebody in a physics department, sort of seeing the first real information that they'd ever seen me, never seen about the scientific nature of this stuff. And then being a little bit imaginative and possibly a little bit too influenced by cartoons and comic books, thinking, I can build something that'll let me see the centre of the Milky Way. That's, I guess, the long-winded way of saying, that's what catalyzed me, sort of set me down. I guess we need those kind of dreams to be able to propel ourselves into working in those kinds of industries, because without having those dreams in the first place as a child at the school so we go to, then we wouldn't be even thinking that anything like that could be a possibility. Equally, Mark, I'm very glad that you mentioned Betelgeuse, because I think it's about 600 light-years away, something like that. Yeah, 650. So just for the sake of anyone listening who maybe is a little bit younger and doesn't understand a great deal about that, that means that the light that we're seeing from that was, well, it came from that star in the 1300s or 1400s, something like that. Yes, 650 years ago, yes. So all of those world events that we all know about in the UK history, things like Henry VIII, that hasn't happened yet. Mozart hasn't been born yet. Some of the other great events haven't happened yet, as far as that light is concerned that's reaching us. Is that right? The Aztecs, their civilization hadn't really culminated as a peak yet. It's like, yes, exactly. And totally, it's something that is amazing. And Betelgeuse, since the light we're seeing is effectively 650 years old, it's one of the stars that is really close to the end of its life. And one of the oddest things about it is that we could actually be looking at a star that, if you were to transplant yourself and put yourself right where it is now, right in its location in the universe, it might not be there. It might have already gone supernova. And that's something else that is amazing to think. We're really looking back in time. Mark, I'm going to take us on to the UK's part in the space race. I'd love to talk to you about that. In particular, the Start Me Up mission. Tell me all about that. Okay, right. The Start Me Up mission, right. So the UK third nation to get a satellite or a set of satellites into space, and the first and only nation to give up its capability to go into space in the 70s, decided in 2021 that it would re-enter the space age. And it's exactly the right time. The new space where it's moved away from the purview of pure governments to every man, every rich man, but every man being able to do, to run programs and projects that reach out into beyond the atmosphere. Now, remember, the atmosphere is only, if you could point your car upwards, it's only an hour's drive to the edge of the atmosphere. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. It's 100 kilometers, 60 miles to the first doorway into space. So it wouldn't take very long to get up there. And was realized, yeah. So if the UK is going to go back into space, and we have a lot with, I think we're probably the nation with the fifth or fourth most satellites in the world. So we do a lot of in-orbit stuff and low earth orbit, medium earth orbit, geostationary orbit. So that's a few hundred kilometers, about 10,000 to 12,000 kilometers, all the way up to 36,000 kilometers. That's still not enough to touch the moon, by the way. The moon's 400,000 kilometers away. We do lots of stuff there, but we hadn't ever, and this is the European continent in general, we hadn't ever considered trying to build a launch site to hit space. And there's a lot of reasons for this. I mean, if you want to go far, it's better to launch something at the equator, because you use a spin of the earth to throw stuff out, and it'll go that much further and faster. But we are doing a lot of stuff only an hour away, right? As I said, by car. So you don't necessarily need to go 36,000 kilometers. You can go, well, most of the space junk out there is about 500 kilometers up. So if you want to avoid the space junk, maybe 800 kilometers up. Again, not that far. 800 kilometers is probably the sort of halfway up in the South of Malaysia, or in the UK. It's really, you've covered most of England or South. So what can you do? Well, if you're in low-earth orbit, what you want to do is you want stuff to generally not go around the way the earth is rotating east-west. You kind of wanted to go north-south. And the reason is, if you're going north-south and the earth is rotating under you, after about 20 to 25 orbits, you've covered the entire earth if you're looking down. Of course. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yeah. So suddenly, the UK becomes a perfect place to launch stuff from. And it's perfect not just because it's that far north. And you can go north-south very easily. But also, what's to the west of us? Mostly ocean. OK, Ireland, Iceland, let's just avoid doing anything there. But it's mostly ocean. So the Start Me Up program was to try to get the UK's first space launch. And for different reasons, we decided, we, the UK, decided to go and do this as a horizontal launch, i.e., an aircraft that carried a rocket, that carried the payloads, that would launch things into space. Probably the riskiest way to do this. It's much safer to do things as vertical launch, because you can do a lot more checks. And if things go wrong, it's just the actual vehicle that goes wrong than vehicle plus people. So I was involved in the regulatory side of it, the safety side of it, trying to establish the entire ecosystem, operational ecosystem, that would allow for virgin orbit and the Cornwall spaceport, Cornwall's land in the southwest of England, to be able to get all the checks to go, to have everything in place, and to achieve the technical success or not that they could. So it was actually the work of about nine and a half months. It wasn't behind the scenes. We had to establish the right legal regime. So there was a lot of work with government. There was a regulatory regime that had to go through. So there was a lot of work setting up the civil aviation authority that normally works with airplanes to be able to manage space, because it's outside its remit or was at the time. So we had to educate them. We had to set up their roles and responsibilities. We had to bring in the right people. And I was lucky enough to be in the center in the eye of that storm, trying to help the CAA. Then after we got that, the launcher, both the launcher authority, Cornwall spaceport and the launcher itself, Virgin Orbit, had to submit their packs of information in advance. And I was part of the team that had to review this and go through it with a fine tooth comb and try and work out what might be a risk, what might be a walk in the park. That wasn't easy because we'd never done such a thing before. We did have the backing of experienced people from both the European Space Agency and from the US, mostly the military people, from Vandenberg in the West Coast. But really, it was on our shoulders. We successfully established all of that. I was out in Cornwall in the dark night for the first attempted launch in December of all times. Of course, that first attempt got scuttled because of the bad weather. Everything got stored away. I left the area and watched it remotely in the new year. If you don't know what actually happened, most of the dangerous part of it was a total success. We had a galactic girl, which is an old 737 Boeing that took off from the airstrip, which, by the way, had to be completely rebuilt and refactored for such a large aircraft because it wasn't designed for that. It took off. It went out into the mid North Atlantic, which was the only area that would be safe and clear of stuff. We had to get shipping cleared out of the way. We had to get coordination to make sure that there weren't any satellites going overhead that might get in the way with all the calculations. There was obviously Coast Guard ready in case things went wrong. You had seven people on the 737. I think it was three US and the rest were UK nationals. Then you had this very, very fast, high propellant rocket that would effectively be launched from underneath the left wing of a galactic girl. That was the most dangerous part of it because firing this rocket, you think shooting a rocket is reasonably easy. It isn't. That went off into the stratosphere effectively. Kind of in the style of Virgin Galactic. Yeah, in that sort of style. This is not about the people on it. It was a lot rougher ride. This is stuff that had been tested, I think, six times or successfully launched six times in the New Mexican Desert being done in the Mid-North Atlantic in the middle of winter. All sorts of conditions that were totally different. It went off. Everything went right. Deployment from the rocket itself up at about 190 kilometers. No problem. Everything went up. There were, I think, six payloads ready to be deployed from a central fairing. It was just the actual fairing itself that didn't have the right boost. We lost the telemetry. Most of the telemetry was being collected from his site in the southwest of England called Goon Hillie, which is its own private company that was linking in, but it had super telemetry. We had loads of information. Oh, my goodness. It was almost there. I remember feeling we're there. It didn't deploy. It didn't deploy. Having been through that a few times, I've done about 10 missions in my life. I knew what had happened, but nobody really wanted to say not to jinx it. Anyway, that's my very long-winded experience of it, the emotional roller coaster. We got the regulations in place. We got the legals in place. We got the technical due diligence in place. We got the safety pieces in place. That was painful. I didn't really want to go into that. We coordinated across multiple countries, Portugal, because he is ours, Spain. We had a large number of little NGOs in the area as well. I'm not exactly sure why they wanted to be in the area, but they were. We had to look after them too. Mark, tell me more about the future of all of this, because it's interesting hearing about where we've come from. It's interesting hearing about where we are now. Sometimes, whenever we talk about any kind of space projects, it always feels like they take such a long time. Clearly, there is so much to think about, but when we think about manned missions to Mars and things like that, people talk about sometimes decades in the future. Tell me what your realistic view is of the future of space exploration and technology and entrepreneurship in space. Wow. That's a big one. Let's break that down. Technology and entrepreneurship, they're actually very much involved in our everyday lives. The very fact that we can do this recording is partly supported, not entirely. It's not 100%, but it's partly supported by space-based communications, some of the timings, some of the calibration of our signals and the packets all being put together. That's coming from low-earth orbit systems. If you're trying to image things, weather forecasting systems, that's definitely coming from a clear set of known space-based entities, which are only 600 kilometers above our head. They're there. Those types of missions, which are run by governments, do take about three to four years to put into play, but three to four years isn't that long actually, because you try to bring a new model of car to the market. That's usually about five to six years. You look at our transition to electric cars, that's taken 30 years. It's not that long. You can do, and this is where the private sector has come in, you can do almost silly levels of speed. I know that a well-known UK company, Surrey Satellite Technology, based in Guildford outside of London, built, launched, and operated successfully a satellite in low-earth orbit in seven months. It's quite possible to do. That was the time when, of course, we had more launchers available. Now, actually having launchers is a little bit tighter, and that's due to geopolitics, which I won't go into. It was easier to get a ride share to get up into space. Even if you take that out of the equation, you probably could get a high-risk project up there within a year, year and a half. That's the power of the private sector coupled with the fact that I'm only talking about low-earth orbit, which is the most congested part of the heavens near us, up to about 2,000 kilometers away. You want to get out to somewhere further, geo, the moon. Those are going to be much longer, five years to a decade. I want to put up a business-as-usual telecom satellite that connects the world in terms of telephony. That's probably still a four to five-year project, because you can't fix it when you get up there. At least not yet. We are moving into the age of in-orbit servicing and manufacturing. It's actually something that I'm working on right now with the UK Space Agency. In-orbit servicing and manufacturing will change the way we can do things. It means we can robotically potentially go up there and extend the life of stuff, change, reformat stuff. It's not easy, but you can do so. We're also the UK. I don't remember how many nations, but a large number of nations are signed up to go back to the moon under the Artemis Accords. There's also a Chinese and an Indian, and I believe a UAE-led set of initiatives. Those are not part of the accords directly, but we will be going back to the moon in about two to three years optimistically. The European Space Agency has funded a UK company under a project called Moonshot to put a satellite around the moon in two and a half years time. If that works, that'll be something that's probably in low lunar orbit. We don't know a lot about the moon. We've been there many, many times. We've had 17 spacecraft effectively crash into the surface of the moon for different reasons, either end of life or deliberately crashing in to find out more about what's on there, and one of those, the Elkross mission, actually showed that there's water at the poles of the moon, so we anticipate being able to send people there in about six to seven years, led by the US. Yes, it's really ambitious. We will be sending robotic systems in two years time up there, as long as we're able to get all the clearances on ground to be done. Most of those for that level of exploration will happen in this generation's lifetime. I optimistically would say that we'll see people operating on the moon on a regular basis, rather like going to Antarctica or something like that by the end of the decade. Mark, that really is quite exciting. I'm thinking back to clearly in the '60s and '70s, we had the Apollo missions, and then we had the space shuttle that came along. I think to the average person, it feels like things have been quietening down, but maybe they have been quietening down regarding the everyday experience that we might see, but maybe it's all about to ramp up again as far as what we're being exposed to. Just think, it was only a few days ago, the first ever private company managed to take NASA equipment back to the moon. It did land on its side, but it landed, and the payloads are working. Things are ramping up, and I think the reason is this. During the '60s to probably the early '80s, it was a massive national stroke international, well, superpower national endeavor. It took the entire industrial complex, the societal complex, to get up there. A lot of that was done in a hurry. We've actually forgotten or never recorded the sort of engineering level of detail of how we did things. A technology basis moved along. We couldn't get the transistors to build the stuff that we had in the '60s, because they don't exist anymore. You have to build to what's available now. Technology moves along in a window, you have old tech, then you move up, and you're in newer tech, and then we're in really new tech. Well, we've got to get the really new tech to work. We've also got a risk appetite that is much lower than our predecessors. We're not willing to lose so many people. In fact, we don't want to lose anybody. We need to factor in conditions they never thought about, sustainability. What does that mean for space? Well, it's an actual conversation that's ongoing, and it's a regulatory-based conversation as well in the UK. We need to think these things through. We need to be able to de-conflict, and most of all, if I have a satellite going around the Moon and I have another nation that's busy in the South Pole of the Moon, operating there with people or even without people, you don't want to finish your mission in low lunar orbit and crash your system into the surface of the Moon right where somebody else is operating. That's a definite no-no. We need to think about that now. This is all actually happening today. Literally this week, we've talked about this at an international forum. This is all really happening. It's really happening now. There's more interest. Why is there more interest? Because we've got catalysts like there's finance available, there's the technology available, there's the skill sets available, and the appetite of our leaders has changed. I think that's the basis. Do we have the skills available to us from, let's say, the general people who make this happen? That's the part I worry about. That's where I think the dreamers of the future generations need to come in. Mark, I'm keeping an eye on time. We're going to need to bring this to a close in a minute. Just thinking, if anyone is listening to this or maybe someone's got children who are aged, I don't know, 13, 14, 15, something like that, and if they're interested in everything that you've been talking about, what would you recommend to them? Okay, it depends on which country you're in and what opportunities you can leave her open. But say you're in the UK or you're in the region of the European Space Agency, any of the nations that's available there, there are many, many programs, outreach programs that are coming from these national agencies and international agencies that you can just go to their websites and engage with people. They would love to hear from you. People are looking at recruiting, training the next generation's plural with a fierce desire to make it succeed. The UK is leading the charge. Germany is not far behind. France has always been in there. France is Europe's major space power. The US on the other side is doing the same and it's trying to draw in as many people as it can with the skills to be able to bolster what it sees as its fifth economic domain. New Zealand, Australia, India, China, Korea, Japan, they've all got programs running around. The private sector, if you're young, hungry, ambitious, just go for it. Shape your destiny. You don't need to necessarily be purely technical. The insulation that goes around a satellite, for example, that's not a purely technical thing. That's an arts and craft thing. If you're a great tailor or seamstress, your skills, I know this from direct experience, your skills are more valuable than, say, mine as a systems engineer. You can actually make the darn thing and you can make the coats that fits around the satellite because these aren't not easy. Look for the opportunities. Push at the doors. If you want to be in this, you'll find a way in. I love that. Mark, finally, if anybody's listened and wants to get in touch with you or wants to follow you online, where's the best place they should go? Well, I've got a LinkedIn profile, I suppose. That might be an easy one. I think it's Mark Chang 2009. I'm fairly easy to contact there. I'm also an employee of a company called Capgemony in the UK. I am also available through the material front door on the web there. Of course, if anyone wants to get in touch with me through Alice Smith School, they've got my contact details and I'd be more than happy to talk to current or previous students and staff of Alice Smith. Mark, that's very kind of you and we'll put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes for this episode. In the meantime, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for talking to us today. It's been fascinating hearing from you and I really appreciate you giving up your time for it. You're welcome. Have a good day. There we are. That brings us to the end of this episode. If you have any questions at all, then please do get in touch with the school. In the meantime, thank you for for listening to this, and we'll see you next time. Bye for now.