Cyber Security
CC: Do you think it might be, or have been, an advantage in that environment. Trying to translate and communicate that into a business environment where business seems to be risk averse to failure. Again, in technology and in our digital transformation. Do you think we should be more accepting of failure in business? CH: Well of course you don't want the actual business itself to fail. But what are you doing when things are going well? It's kind of the real question. Are you aggressively pursuing the things that are the highest probability of going wrong? What are you most vulnerable to? You know, if there's a change in commodity price or if there's a shift in regulation or if some other nation suddenly creates a competitive version of your product or whatever. Just like how I've approached my entire life, as a test pilot and as an astronaut, we used to always say; ‘what's the next thing it's going to kill me?’ Because that's the only thing that really matters. What's the next thing that's going to kill me? And am I ready for that to happen or not. And if I'm not, then let's use every second that's available up until that moment to get ready for that. Because then if it doesn't happen, no harm. If it does happen then the business doesn't crash or the spaceship doesn't crash. And it doesn't apply just to spaceships or businesses, it applies to operating a car or how you run your own life. The inevitability of anticipating failure and then simulating it and training for it and learning how to deal with it, so that when it does happen, you're not flummoxed and stopped or worst case, killed by it. CC: Of course. Let's touch on cybersecurity in space and the level of training that you would have had. And again, the precautions. CH: It's a funny thing. You wouldn't believe it but all of the computers onboard the space station have a password. I just thought it was funny, there was only six of us up there. CC: Please don't tell me it's ‘admin’ ‘password’. CH: Who were we keeping the secret from? That's just the way it is. So, I even posted something on Twitter there, I think at one point. I said, just in case aliens come by, we’ve got passwords logging in all the laptops up here. Even logging into our exercise treadmill, you had to know the password. So of course, we just grease pencilled it on the wall. CC: So, the post-it notes are on the International Space Station. Good to know. CH: But we do take it really seriously, in that the space station is 100 percent digital. Operated in concert with the crew on board and mission controls all around the world. There's one in Moscow, one in Munich, one in Tokyo, one in Montreal and one in Houston. All of them are in high speed, continuous digital communication with the space station. So of course, the security of that is huge. If someone could somehow tap into it or get a command. Because we get e-mails up and down all the time, if someone put something into there, that would be any sort of malware, it could have deathly consequences for the crew onboard. And there's only one space station for the whole world. So, we take it very seriously and everything is scanned to the best of our ability. We regulate the type of files that can go up and down. But right down to anti
malware that's onboard the space station itself. Amongst everything else that's going on, we also very much worry about our software not getting messed up. CC: You must have seen that sort of progression of technology across that. Even you talk about from your early childhood, all the way through. Then to actually be sitting up there and then to be doing YouTube videos, throughout to the world. Where do you see this heading? What is your projection? I suppose to close this off. CH: The space station is relatively primitive computer technology. The space shuttle was ridiculous. 128K memory ran the entire space shuttle. These little, very primitive, old, proven, space hardened computers. The space station, its core hardware is that way. But we run a lot of laptops onboard to run all the various sensory systems. There's over 100 laptops on board. So, it's sort of piggybacking on top of the framework that runs the space station itself. But if you look at the new vehicles. The new one that Boeing has put out, which is Star Liner and the one that Space X has, which is their Crew Dragon. They're really taking advantage of the technology. A much more updated crew interface, much higher memory onboard. And that's just the start. We want to take advantage of the early glimmerings of artificial intelligence. We don't want to have to manually do everything all the time of course, like the Apollo guys did. There were five hundred mechanical switches in the cockpit of the space shuttle. And you had to be intimately familiar with everything. Really analogue kind of vehicle. But it's becoming more and more digital like it ought to. That makes things lighter. Easy to make more levels of redundancy. Easier to control from a remote location. So, we need all of those things. And as we're heading towards now, going beyond Earth orbit, putting robots, and relatively soon people, permanently on the moon, we will want as much artificial intelligence, as much robotic help, as we can possibly get for the first settlers that are living on the Moon. And just paving the way for going even further. And I'm all for artificial intelligence. We need to learn how to control it. Like gunpowder and like fossil fuels, and all the other things that enable life, but also can have a detrimental effect. We need to learn how to integrate those responsibly into society. Artificial intelligence is the same thing. There are ways to do it. We've got a lot of precedents. But the advantages it can give us are huge and especially in the realms of exploration where it’s still very difficult to get to people there. CC: So you're talking and you can foresee a base on the moon and then moving that, using that as a sort of, as you say a base or a satellite, to move on. And the International Space Station, the future of that will be continued do you think? CH: The space station, the first space was launched in 1998, with a planned 30 year life, so till 2028. Another 10 years or so. And that's the first piece. There's been lots of pieces gone up in the last decade. So, the station, assuming that we all can manage to agree to continue to work it and we will, I think we'll be up there until the late 20s, maybe early 30s. We'll see. When the big pieces start wearing out and breaking, just like any old car, it's just a machine, creates more maintenance with time, like an old car. CC: You don’t want to be on there at the time. CH: But eventually, we'll just have to declare the end of its life and deorbit it
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