E32 The Future of Transportation
Transportation is about to get a whole lot faster. In this episode of 12 Geniuses, Don MacPherson speaks with aerospace engineer, rocket scientist, professor, and pilot, Dr. Anita Sengupta. Together they explore the futuristic forms of transportation that are currently being developed. From Hyperloop technology to interplanetary exploration, Dr. Sengupta explains how travel and transportation will be disrupted in the coming years. Don and Dr. Sengupta also discuss her work at NASA, and her current project at Airspace Experience Technologies (ASX) where they are designing electric vertical and takeoff aircraft as a commuter transport option in urban environments.
Season Three of the podcast is dedicated to exploring the future and how life is sure to change over the next decade. This episode provides insight into the future of transportation in order to understand how the way we commute, travel, and explore will be disrupted in the coming years.
Dr. Anita Sengupta is an aerospace engineer, rocket scientist, and pilot who for 20 years has developed technologies that have enabled the exploration of Mars, asteroids, and deep space. She is a Research Professor of Astronautics at the University of Southern California where she is conducting research on transportation technologies including electric propulsion for aviation, Hyperloop technology, and in-space propulsion systems.
Don MacPherson:
Hello, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. For 25 years, I have been helping organizations and the leaders who run them improve performance. Now I travel the world to interview geniuses about the trends shaping the way we live and work. Today's topic is the Future of Transportation. Our guest is Dr. Anita Sengupta from the University of Southern California. She is a rocket scientist who worked at NASA for 17 years and was involved in the mission that landed the Curiosity Rover on Mars. She has also worked for Virgin Hyperloop, and her latest endeavor is as co-founder of Airspace Experience Technologies, where she and her team are creating a new aircraft that is poised to revolutionize urban air mobility.
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We discuss all these topics, as well as commercial space travel, and why she thinks humans will one day colonize Mars. This episode of 12 Geniuses is brought to you by the Think2Perform Research Institute, an organization committed to advancing moral, purposeful, and emotionally intelligent leadership. You can learn more and access the institute's latest research at T, the number 2, pri.org.
Dr. Sengupta, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Dr. Sengupta:
Thank you for having me.
Don:
Let's start with your background and what got you interested in the work you're doing.
Dr. Sengupta:
Sure. So, my background is all aerospace engineering. All my degrees are in aerospace, BS, MS, PhD, and I have been a lifelong science fiction fan. I think I probably started watching science fiction at the age of six, both Star Trek reruns with my dad, and a Doctor Who on public television. And I've just loved the concept of space travel and alien civilizations, and I knew I wanted my career to be focused on that.
Don:
And do you think that sci-fi has informed you on what the future's going to look like?
Dr. Sengupta:
I think absolutely. I think sci-fi has definitely informed me in the sense that I saw a quote once, which was people who like science fiction are people who are filled with a sense of wonder. And that really hit me as that's appropriate way of a way I think about sci-fi. So, I think it shows you, for a utopian sci-fi like Star Trek, a version of the universe where people are exploring, where science and scientific exploration is the goal of what society is doing. There's no longer the concept of money. Everybody gets along. So, I do like that utopian vision. And of course, I like the technology that comes along with it in terms of facilitating space travel, facilitating communications, and all those things to me are very positive.
Certainly, a huge portion of sci-fi is dystopian, which I think is wonderful social commentary, which allows people to focus on social issues without having to put their day-to-day situation in it. I maybe appreciate it more objectively. Both dystopian utopian sci-fi are very useful art forms.
Don:
Your career is fascinating. You've spent time at NASA, actually quite a long time at NASA, and then you moved onto Virgin Hyperloop, and your work now is with Airspace Experience Technologies or ASX. Can you talk about what you're doing with ASX and what sort of problems you're solving?
Dr. Sengupta:
Sure. And I'm also a research professor at University of Southern California, so I do most of my projects under my professor title. And at ASX specifically, where I'm a co-founder, we're focusing on electric aviation for the urban air mobility use case. So, there are different ways to solve the transportation problem in urban, suburban environments. And many times you see people using cars, and cars obviously leads to a lot of road congestion. But just because of the two dimensions of the road network is somewhat limiting. If you can increase that to the three dimensions of airspace, you can actually do a lot to address congestion in urban and suburban environments.
Don:
What do the aircraft look like?
Dr. Sengupta:
For the urban air mobility use case as a whole, we're looking at the ability to have vertical takeoff on landing. And the reason for that is, if you're going into an urban environment, you're not going to have access to a runway, which means that the aircraft has to have the ability, or it could be rotorcraft, has to have the ability to take off on land, sort of on a dime on the top of a building and a parking lot. So, all the aircraft have been designed into this ability to do this vertical takeoff and landing. The one that we're working on particularly is a tilt wing. So, it looks like a traditional high wing, fixed-wing aircraft, but the wing can tilt to give you that vertical takeoff and landing capability. And then the other goal of the urban air mobility marketplace and community is to enable emission-free flight.
So, instead of flying on traditional avgas, or aviation fuel, you would use batteries and stored energy in batteries, and of course, those batteries would need to be charged, and that electricity would come from the grid. And the goal, of course, is for the grid to shift over to renewable sources of energy. If you can have that entire chain be based off of a renewable source of energy from solar, wind, that kind of thing, then you can have aircraft, which truly are emission-free as well as reducing the overall carbon footprint.
Don:
Where are you in the timeframe for testing and rolling this out? When do you think that this will be available for use?
Dr. Sengupta:
The target for urban air mobility use case to come out, it's probably around the 2025 timeframe. Now, you can currently take a helicopter, for example. So, there are many part 135 operators who fly helicopters back and forth. So, that service currently exists with different independent operators. But the goal to shifting over to electric aircraft, whether it's a quadcopter or a tilt-wing or tilt rotor aircraft, that's more around the 2025 timeframe. It's a slow rollout, right? Not everyone's going to shift over to flying cars. The initial operators will come out and maybe there'll be more business travelers to start off with, but you can imagine that opening up to include a wider range of consumers, sort of like an Uber or a Lyft shared ride model, but in the air.
Don:
And the version you're working on right now, it's called MOBi-One, is that correct?
Dr. Sengupta:
Yes, that is the aircraft name, and that's the tilt-wing aircraft.
Don:
How many people will that be able to transport?
Dr. Sengupta:
Currently, it carries four passengers and one pilot.
Don:
So, it is piloted, but is there a desire to make it autonomous?
Dr. Sengupta:
So, that's an interesting debate and everyone's got an opinion on it, and I have an opinion on it as well. So, you can design a vehicle system for autonomy, but you have to get approval from a regulator to be able to operate the system with autonomy. So, it makes sense, from an engineering, from a safety perspective, to design for autonomy. And of course, there's different levels of autonomy. But from a operational certification perspective, you would still have to have a pilot in the loop for the time being. And I myself am a pilot and I see tremendous value in having a pilot on board for safety reasons; just because when things go wrong, a human being is able to come in and do a triage of the situation and make decisions accordingly. I think it'll probably be many years before these systems, even though they can be flown autonomously, would not have any kind of pilot on board.
Don:
On the website, from what I saw, there was this idea that it's five times faster and the same cost of car transportation. Can you talk a little bit about what that cost structure might look like and when the cost structure would be able to hit these types of goals?
Dr. Sengupta:
So, when you think about costs for aviation, you think about the capital cost for the platform, the aircraft, but you also have to think about the operational costs. The operational costs include the cost of fuel, or in the case of a battery-driven aircraft, the cost of electricity, and then the cost of maintenance. One of the advantages of shifting over to electric aviation is that you have a lower energy cost because electricity actually is a lot cheaper than fuel. And you also have a lower maintenance cost because these aircraft have electric motors which have a much lower maintenance cost associated than a piston driven and a turbine-driven aircraft. The goal for the urban air mobility space, in general, is to get the cost down to the ride of like an UberX ride or a Lyft band ride. So, that's more like a $75 transit ride between downtown and an airport, for example.
So, that's a pretty solid use case to start off with as there's many people who would need to do that kind of transit. And because you can travel at 150 miles an hour and you're not stuck in traffic; you can go a lot faster than you could with the ground-based transportation.
Don:
What sort of infrastructure needs to be within a community in order for this to be widely used?
Dr. Sengupta:
It really depends upon how you're going to roll it out and what would be the first use cases. And the good news is that there's a tremendous amount of general aviation airports that already exist in the United States. And in the vicinity of large urban areas such as Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, there's many, many general aviation airports which have shorter runways; therefore, they may not be able to support jet landings, but they can support the landings of VTOL aircraft as well as smaller aircraft. The first use case, as I see them, would be utilizing these existing general aviation assets. And in a place like Los Angeles, you can actually get between places that you want to go by landing at these general aviation airports.
So, you don't necessarily have to have new infrastructure built to start using this urban air mobility use case. Also, in cities like Los Angeles and New York, there are helipads in specific locations. So, as there would be a gradual rollout of this, you would utilize existing infrastructure, and as more infrastructure assets become available, which obviously gets justified, the expenditure for it, by people using this platform for these intermediate use cases, then you would get more of that. But you can roll out this platform now using the existing airport infrastructure in the United States and in cities across the world, but where there are numerous general aviation airports
Don:
And you said that this can land in a parking lot or it can take off from a parking lot or on top of a building. And obviously, on top of a building, you need to have a certain infrastructure there. But I hadn't thought about parking lots that could be specifically designated for this. Is that part of your vision as well?
Dr. Sengupta:
I think that makes sense because if you're going to be able to go away from more cars going to the city and the parking lots are no longer being utilized, they could be repurposed for that. But of course, they would have to have things related to charging infrastructure, things related to lighting systems and telecommunications equipments at the parking lots. And you also would have to regulate this as part of the airspace, which includes how you would land and where you would land. But given that the space does exist, it's less of an issue than if you're doing something from scratch.
Don:
How will it do in weather -- high winds, rain? Or like in Minneapolis here, there's snow; we have a lot of snow and a lot of cold weather. Is it like a typical aircraft where it would need to be grounded under certain weather circumstances?
Dr. Sengupta:
Well, it depends upon each individual platform. And if you take a look at single-engine aircraft for general aviation use, you can fly them in rainy conditions. You can't fly them in icing conditions. Obviously, no aircraft should be flown in icing conditions unless it has the ability to de-ice itself. Certainly you would avoid flying this in an inclement weather, which includes icing and the potential for icing. I think that makes sense because that also reduces visibility. And when you're in a high-density urban environment, you obviously don't want to deal with loss of visibility. So, I imagine, initially, all of these platforms would be operating under visual flight rules, which gives you requirements for the pilot and for the aircraft, which is flown on clearance, from clouds, as well as visibility.
Don:
It seems like it would augment current transportation and it wouldn't threaten the current mass transit infrastructure. Is that your vision?
Dr. Sengupta:
A smaller aircraft inherently does not give you high capacity. So, it fills a space-based off of like routes that you want to fly in the overall shared transportation space, but it is not the solution to everything. So, you still need buses, you still need light rail, you still need subways, you still need trains, and you need hyperloops. It really depends upon what the city needs, but where it is a unique application is an existing distributed city which doesn't have the ability to put in additional ground transportation, for example. So, it could certainly augment that use case. And then connecting people from airports to other smaller airports and connecting people from airports to city centers is another use case, which makes a lot of sense.
Don:
I remember I was in Sao Paulo about 10 years ago, and there were so many helicopters because traffic was so bad there. I could see this being a very welcome solution for a city like that where there's incredible density, but a lot of tall buildings, a lot of helipads on top of those buildings.
Dr. Sengupta:
It reminds me of, I did a panel discussion probably about a year ago now, and it was about connecting people in rural communities to suburban and urban areas where, for example, they may need to work or to have access to hospitals and other services which are unique to the urban environment. And so, the advantage of having one of these platforms is that your capacity numbers would actually be quite low to send people from a rural environment to a city center. Whereas to put in a train line, for example, would cost a lot of money. This wouldn't have any infrastructure cost associated with it. So, it's actually uniquely suited to providing connections between rural areas and urban areas, which I think is very powerful. And it's an accessibility question which would help those people have access to those services.
Don:
It seems like the environmental impact would be fairly minimal. If you're using electric power, could you talk about what it sounds like? Would there be a lot of extra noise pollution or have you figured out a way to propel it without causing a lot of extra noise?
Dr. Sengupta:
So, there are different components to an acoustic disturbance from an aircraft. There's basically the disturbance around the propellers themselves, and there's also the noise which is generated from the engine. The good news with an electric motor, there's very, very little noise from an electric motor just because it's a electromagnetic device. The way you control noise from a propeller is by limiting the tip speed of the propeller and therefore you can limit the acoustic disturbance. In terms of a requirement, which the community is working to, is basically an order of magnitude lower noise than a traditional rotorcraft. If you've ever heard a helicopter fly overhead, which I'm sure you have because you've been to Sao Paulo. I live in Los Angeles, it's actually pretty extreme. So, it is necessary, if we're going to use this platform at a higher use case than helicopters are, for example, that they'd be much less noisy to not provide noise disturbance. But that's an engineering design requirement which is being built into the vehicles.
Don:
Let's talk for a minute about Hyperloop, what it is and what you did for Virgin when you were working there.
Dr. Sengupta:
Yeah, so Hyperloop is a new form of ground transportation. Many ways, you can say it's a brand new form of transportation in general. So, it's a little bit like a spacecraft traveling on the ground, which is how I've described it in the past. And the best way to think about it is the passenger vehicle is like a maglev train car. So, it's magnetically levitating and it's being electrically propelled, but it all happens inside of a vacuum tube, which means that you remove the majority of air from the tube, and that allows you to eliminate or significantly reduce aerodynamic drag. And the really interesting thing is that as you go up in speed, your primary energy consumption for ground-based travel and for air travel is aerodynamic drags. You have to put yourself in a vacuum tube; you actually eliminate your primary energy consumption mechanism.
The fact that it's magnetically levitating allows you to reduce frictional resistance to the ground, also allowing you to be more energy efficient. And the fact that it's electrically propelled allows you to operate off of the grid, which means that you can have a very low carbon footprint, very fast, high-speed ground transportation solution. The other advantage to being in a vacuum is that you can basically go two times as fast as an airplane if you wanted to. So, you accelerate, you coast for a while, like a spacecraft inside this vacuum tube, and then you decelerate and get off at your stop wherever you're going to be going from point A to point B. And there's many other features of the architecture that I can talk to, but my role at the Hyperloop Technology company I worked at was a senior vice president of systems engineering and safety certification. So, I worked on developing a systems architecture for a hyperloop concept.
Don:
Is there no drag, is there no connection to a rail of any sort or is it just minimal?
Dr. Sengupta:
I mean, it really depends upon how it's implemented. Like, it could be implemented in many different ways. You do not have to have a vacuum level of the vacuum of space, for example, or the vacuum level that you test spacecraft at on the ground because it requires a lot of electricity to get down to that vacuum. You just want to basically get down to 10% or 1% of atmospheric pressure. And the way I like to describe it is, it is sort of like the surface pressure that you experience on the surface of Mars. It's very ironic. But at that point, you've gotten rid of the overwhelming majority of the aerodynamic drag. At that point, anything more, you have to trade between, do I want to spend more electricity costs to get it lower? But it doesn't really benefit it that much. So, you basically get to the point where the aerodynamic forces are not losing you a lot of energy and they're not really controlling the vehicle.
What you do have to consider, however, is that the potential failure mode for one of these systems is that you may lose vacuum, meaning you might come up to pressure, and then you would experience aerodynamic forces. So, the vehicles themselves do have an aerodynamic shape because it helps to reduce a little bit of drag that you do see. And it also allows you to have a more controlled coming to a stop if, in the event, the vacuum tubes start to come up with pressure. In terms of frictional resistance with the ground, by magnetically levitating, you essentially eliminate that completely. It does require electricity on an electromagnet to be able to do that, but you build that into your overall electricity budget.
Don:
Okay. That's where I was a little confused as to whether or not it was completely levitating or there was something connecting it to a rail or something else.
Dr. Sengupta:
One of the things that people don't realize is that the electromagnetic force is actually much, much stronger than the gravitational force by like six orders of magnitude. I was at a presentation one time by somebody who was working on the LIGO project, and they were like, “Look at it this way. It requires the entirety of planet earth to hold you down.” Gravitational force is actually quite weak. So, to be able to combat that with the electromagnetic force is relatively straightforward.
Don:
Where are we with Hyperloop travel? When will it be rolled out for commercial use?
Dr. Sengupta:
The big challenge, in my opinion, is that it costs a lot of money to implement any infrastructure project, whether it is a subway system, whether it's high-speed rail. And so, because there's a cost associated with it, it's always hard to get that approved and get that into a government's budget. I think the biggest challenge to Hyperloop isn't a technology one, it's a funding one, to get a country to implement it. Just like you can see California high-speed rail takes a long time, lots of years to be able to raise the funding to do it. And that's, I think, is the number one tenfold. I do think most likely you'll see a Hyperloop in the Middle East first because they're committed to having a brand new form of transportation like that probably maybe somewhere like the UAE.
And I know there's a lot of talk about that. You can read about those articles online. So, my guess is it might happen there first, or maybe a place like Singapore, and then hopefully to follow up by a European location or American location.
Don:
And the speeds I've seen proposed are somewhere between 200, 300 miles an hour, all the way up to 700 miles an hour. Is that still what we could expect?
Dr. Sengupta:
Yeah, I mean you have to do the trade of what makes sense because there is also a cost to time for people. So, if there isn't a benefit of going up to three times the speed of an airline, and it's better to have two just because you have to spend more money to get there. And you have to also realize that most of the energy is spent on the acceleration and the deceleration phase. So, it depends upon the transit length of their journey, but in general, airline speeds may be up to a factor of two of airline speeds. It makes sense.
Don:
Okay. And what are the proposed costs for this? Not including infrastructure because obviously the infrastructure has to be built and that's going to be very expensive, but once this is widely used, and what could people pay or expect to pay, let's say to go from, I believe the original route was between San Francisco and Los Angeles; what would it cost in terms of just having a single ticket?
Dr. Sengupta:
I would say if you do a survey of all the different projects and all the different companies working on the Hyperloop, you can see cost implement the project similar to a cost of high-speeded rail. So in that sense it, it should be a drop-in replacement. And in terms of what the cost of a ticket would be, it would probably be similar a train ticket.
Don:
When you think about the top problems that the Hyperloop could solve, what are your top two or three?
Dr. Sengupta:
Well, I am a huge fan of public transportation, mass transit, and reducing the carbon footprint of transportation. So, I'd say the benefit of the Hyperloop is that it is a emission-free option that also has the ability to be energy positive. So, you can think of actually putting solar panels on the outside of the vacuum tube and generating your own power for the Hyperloop. And then providing that to the community that is alongside it. So, I just feel as though it solves multiple problems, which is high-speed travel, zero emission, energy positive, and then connecting people from one urban area to another urban area across a land mass, right? So, you could eventually connect all of India, all of Europe, and then all of Asia, to continental Europe. So, I just feel as though it has multiple solutions in that sense. And the biggest one, of course, is just the reduction in carbon footprint.
Don:
My understanding is that it would be a point A to point B type system where you're not stopping multiple times in between. Let's use the route between San Francisco and Los Angeles. You would be boarding in San Francisco, exiting in Los Angeles — there wouldn't be two or three stops throughout — is that correct? Am I understanding that correctly?
Dr. Sengupta:
Not necessarily. It would depend upon the route that you're trying to service and what the demand model looks like in for between stops. But what's different about the Hyperloop is, as it's envisioned, is that it is more like a highway where basically all the Hyperloop cars or passenger vehicles on the main highway tube are going from point A to point somewhere else. Then they exit the highway and then they go and land up at the station. So, whoever is on that car is only experiencing one acceleration and one deceleration before they get to their end point. Whereas a traditional train would have to stop and start, stop and start, stop and start, and be very energy efficient as a result. So, you could have multiple stops. You would have to just do a survey ahead of time of what the capacity would be like.
But the other advantage, of course, is that it isn't like a single train with multiple cars. It's individual pods, which means that you can scale up the number of pods going between a destination A to B or A to C based off of what the AI model tells you is the demand of the current time. So, it's very customizable and tailorable to support A to B, A to C, and then what the demands are for rush hour versus not rush hour. Whereas a rail network is more sort of like a binary approach where everybody gets off and everybody gets on and operates every hour. So, it's more efficient in terms of flattening out the usage profile.
Don:
Let's talk about your time at NASA. What did you do while you were at NASA?
Dr. Sengupta:
I did many different things because I was there for 16 years. My first one was my PhD research project actually, which was working on improving the design of a 30-centimeter ion thruster, which is my Star Trek reference because they had ion drive back on the original Enterprise. I don't know if they still do in the next generation Enterprise. But basically, I was looking at the design of an engine which was used for the Deep Space 1 mission and trying to improve its efficiency and its lifetime to be used on the Dawn Mission. So, Deep Space 1 went to a comet and an asteroid, and Dawn went to an asteroid and a proto-plant. And so, I operated the engine on the ground whilst the Deep Space 1 engine was operating, so I was able to run some unique scenarios that the Deep Space 1 engine was experiencing in space. And I was able to improve the design of the engine, and those design changes went into the Dawn mission.
I did that for about, I guess, four or five years, and then I shifted over to working on the entry descent and landing system for the Curiosity Rover for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission. And I love the development of the supersonic parachute, it's an aerodynamic accelerator for the rover. I did that for about, I guess probably another four or five years. I also worked a little bit on the Sky Crane, which was the terminal descent portion of that mission where basically the rover was hanking on a set of tethers from the Descent SAGE spacecraft on top, and assessing the pendulum environment from the engines as it was approaching the surface. Then I led the development of a Venus entry, descent, and landing system for a mission concept, which was to land a probe on the service of Venus to do scientific measurements, which is a very different situation from Mars.
Very interesting. Very intense entry conditions. I also worked on the development of the drogue parachute system for the Orion vehicle, at the same time running test programs and analysis for that team. Then I led the development of the Cold Atom Laboratory mission, which is a facility which is now on board the International Space Station. But we designed a brand new experiment to create a Bose–Einstein condensate in space. And we worked on that for I guess five years in total. I was the mission manager for it. And it launched in, I think it was 2018, and it's been up there operating, creating PECs, which are just above absolute zero. So, that's most of my projects.
Don:
The one thing I'd love to talk about more is your work with Curiosity and Mars exploration. When you think about the future of Mars exploration, what do you see? What are some of the big milestones that you feel we, as a human race, will hit in the coming future?
Dr. Sengupta:
Well, I am a big fan of the human exploration of space, and specifically for the purpose of setting up human colonies in space. I personally think that we should set up human colonies on Mars, and I think that makes sense for our first venture beyond lower earth orbit. There are a lot of technology challenges that have to be overcome before that happens. Some of them are related to human physiology, obviously the effect of microgravity, the effect of radiation, the psychological effects of being in space on distant travel for years, end to end. And then, of course, there are many, many technology challenges. And the primary one for Mars is the entry descent landing system. So, robotic exploration lands a certain amount of mass on the surface, and we're at the limit of what we can do with existing technologies for that.
In order to land people on the surface of Mars, we have to have a brand new suite of technologies to facilitate that. Good news is most of them are under development at NASA and in private industry in concert with each other, but we're still several years away from sort of qualifying them for safety purposes.
Don:
By when do you think we'll put a human on Mars?
Dr. Sengupta:
It more depends upon how much money is able to be raised from a combination of space agencies from around the world and even the commercial sector. So that I wish I could predict, but I would say, if everything, as I would love to see it go, probably within 10 years could be possible, but more likely within 20.
Don:
Oh my gosh, that's unbelievable. I was thinking 50 years, 100 years. That's incredible. That's not a long time.
Dr. Sengupta:
I think it could be a lot faster, but I think the real challenge is the raising of money. And I think this has to be an international endeavor. It can't just be a U.S. space program endeavor. So, we have to work together with India, and Japan, and Europe, and all the space agencies across the world because then you can kind of divide your resources, divide and conquer, and we can make it happen sooner. And also, everybody has different areas of expertise, so it just makes a lot of sense to do it that way. Then I think it could happen in 10 years.
Don:
What would the first colony on Mars look like?
Dr. Sengupta:
I don't have probably the right answer for that now. It would depend on whether or not it was being done purely for science purposes for sort of like a one-off demonstration or if it was being done to actually set up a new society there. If it was being done for the latter, then you would need people from all different expertises, all walks of life to establish everything from the infrastructure to businesses there, to entertainment services. So, then it would need everybody and would look like a sampling of America, for example. But it really would depend. And my guess is the initial mission’s probably would be more focused on scientific exploration and then maybe looking for resources in the subsurface. And then that would be more a combination of engineers and scientists.
Don:
When I posed this question, I was thinking more along the lines of something like biosphere in Arizona or the International Space Station where it's the scientists going, they're not necessarily regular humans, but it's exciting to kind of imagine what that might look like.
Dr. Sengupta:
Yeah. I think a great book slash movie was The Martian, which talked about obviously in early, and it's not really a colony, it was more like an expedition. But I think when I say the word colony, I think of literally people planning on having a permanent presence there. And people are going to come and go obviously, but because of that you would need a whole suite of capabilities and expertise and mixtures of personality types. That's why I think it takes a village, right?
Don:
It really does. What are your predictions for space travel for regular humans? We talked a little bit about Virgin Galactic. When do you think that we'll be available for more than just test pilots?
Dr. Sengupta:
Oh, well, I mean I think if you take a look at Virgin Galactic's press releases, probably obviously pre-pandemic, they're rearing up to start their flights pretty soon. So, they've already done their demo flight. I don't know when that was. It was probably about a year ago or so now. So, my guess is within the next year or two, they'll be flying up their commercial astronauts for sure, and that's for suborbital trips for space tourism purposes. And that's the first part of their business model. But I'm sure they must plan to do other things in future, which is lower earth orbit, for example. So, I would say within the next two years, those flights should start. And now that there's going to be the commercial crew launch using the SpaceX vehicle up to Space Station, that vehicle could also carry tourists, space tourists.
And there have been space tourists on the International Space Station already, several of them. So, that's just a much more expensive proposition because they had to go via the space adventures, Russian space program routes — it was more expensive — but I would say you'll see more expensive but still more affordable happening in the next two years, and then it'll come down, I think, over the next five years or so. But we do have to ask ourselves, does that make sense? Is that the right way to transition this as opposed to setting up in space infrastructure to support longer term stays and colonization and mining activities? I think the other thing that people are thinking about now is the commercialization of space, the commercial uses for space from a manufacturing perspective, from obviously a power production perspective, from a mining resources perspective. And then I believe one of the missions of Blue Origin is to do offworld manufacturing to reduce the carbon footprint of manufacturing here on earth. So, there are many examples of commercial uses that would couple well to that sort of colonization approach.
Don:
What would that look like in your mind?
Dr. Sengupta:
I think it would look like more space stations. It would look like a lunar base, a lunar gateway, probably space stations on the path to Mars, and then obviously colonies on the surface of Mars. So, I think that's a vision of the future, which is many years out, I think. But nevertheless, all the technologies that are being developed today facilitate that.
Don:
One other transportation advancement that I wanted to ask you about is supersonic air travel. And you think that it's coming back. Could you talk a little bit about when it will be back and why it will be?
Dr. Sengupta:
So, the challenge behind supersonic transport for commercial aviation purposes of the Concord era was the cost and the fact that you're limited in where you can fly them because of the acoustic disturbance from the sonic boom, which means that you could only fly them transatlantic or trans-specific, so that really limits your use cases. That is something that maybe changed. I've heard things in the news that say that, oh, maybe some of that supersonic noise abatement would be lifted. I'm not sure if that will happen or if that makes sense. But one of the things I am working on in one of my research capacities is a way to mitigate the acoustic disturbance to reduce it so that it would be less of an issue, and then you could fly a supersonic aircraft across a land mass and not have the same kind of acoustic disturbance.
So, that's a research project and it's something that I think should be done and implemented in the concept of an aircraft platform, which then would make it more feasible. But when we think about air travel, whether it's with single-engine aircraft like iFly or with jet aircraft or with supersonic aircraft, we do also have to think about the carbon footprint of that. I think that what needs to be coupled to that is sustainable aviation technologies, which, in my opinion, is either hydrogen or hydrogen fuel cells, to support these longer-range use cases.
Don:
How disturbing is this acoustic disturbance?
Dr. Sengupta:
It's very loud — very, very loud.
Don:
If you're at 30,000 feet, what does it sound like to somebody on the ground? Is it deafening?
Dr. Sengupta:
I have only heard the sonic boom from the space shuttle, which is shocking. And they have to tell you ahead of time because otherwise people will get freaked out when it happens. It happened very rarely in California. And if you ever heard a fighter jet at an air show, it's also quite deafening as well. There needs to be an agreement as to what is an acceptable level and technology can be used to help mitigate that. But it's important because public transportation, mass transportation is for the public, so the public has to be okay with it, and that's where regulations come in.
Don:
Are there any transportation technologies that you're following that we haven't discussed?
Dr. Sengupta:
I don't really do anything on the maritime side and I'm not that into cars. I am into motorcycles, and there are electric motorcycles, which is good, although I don't have one. But I actually think one of the most important ways that people need to get around in an urban environment is a bicycle. And so, I'm a huge bicycle fan and bicycle trans, basically commuter. So, even though it's not the future, I think it's actually the future of smart cities. The way it couples to the pandemic crisis is that now people don't necessarily want to ride in a packed subway car. So, being out in the open on your bicycle makes a lot of sense.
Don:
That was my next question is how has COVID-19 changed the way you're thinking about transportation?
Dr. Sengupta:
I think human safety is key. Whenever we would traditionally think about human safety in the context of aviation or ground-based travel, it's about ways that your system can fail to harm people. Now there's this whole new dimension which is about proximity to others and the transmission of infectious diseases, which also needs to manifest in a series of design requirements. Some of that might be related to ventilation, some of that might be related to spacing, some of it might be related to personal equipment, which is on board. And I think that is still to be born out in the near future. But what I can see however, is that a shift to lower capacity vehicles to provide some type of air transport might happen, and just because you would reduce the number of people on board, but I think that's going to be born out in the next few months as to what is going to be acceptable for people to travel, both from a regulatory perspective — that's still kind of in the works — as well as, what does the consumer feel comfortable with? But there’s so many things that we now have to consider from a safety perspective, which couple to transport, which we never really had to before. So, it's kind of, I don't know, a new area to be discussed and worked on.
Don:
It is, and you know, for your work; obviously you're thinking about rolling out in 2025. So, we are going to be past this then, but my fear is that people are going to resist using public transportation and we are not going to have funding to continue to develop it, and we're going to be in a tough space funding-wise over the next couple of years. That's my fear.
Dr. Sengupta:
Yeah, it is a real challenge. And I think, yeah, just the need to have physical distancing is very difficult if you're in any kind of closed space, whether that's in an office environment or in a bus. So, that may be where personal protective equipment and ventilation options come in. I'm amused when I see computational fluid dynamic simulations show on the evening use, looking at how infected aerosol particles spread in a office building or in a restaurant. So, there's a lot of rocket science in everything that we do nowadays, it seems, which is a good thing, right? Because quantifying things is the right way to make people feel comfortable. But I also think, and we were talking about this just before we started the recording, that the COVID-19 pandemic, as horrible as it is in terms of the tragedy, the loss of human life, I think it's allowed a lot of people to reset the way that they do business, which means that there will be more telecommuting, there'll be more working from home, there'll be more distributed teams, remote teams, which will reduce the burden on the public transportation system.
And I think another technology, which is artificial intelligence or machine learning, can help us to better optimize people's work schedules to maybe spread out how people use public transportation. So, there's many ways that we can use technologies to have the requirement of physical distancing manifest in so many different ways that we can use models to do predictive sort of design solutions on that front. But I do think that we've had a global experiment over the course of the past two months where we can see the improvement in air quality, we can see the airpollution levels as a result of cars being off the road, and fewer aircraft flying. So, the need for emission-free transport, ground-based and air-based, is absolutely needed, and people can see the benefits of it now.
Don:
I agree. I think this period of time can be so valuable for the human race in so many ways. One simple way is just reassessing our values, what we as individuals and as a society value. I think the impact on the environment has been one of those very illuminating things for us.
Dr. Sengupta:
And I think the other element also is sort of capital markets. In the past, maybe people were looking for ways to get a really big return on investment by developing some app. Maybe now people will see more value in developing technologies that have a huge benefit, whether that's in healthcare space with vaccines and telemedicine, or whether that's in the transportation space by reducing air quality or improving air quality —- not reducing air quality. So, I think there's an opportunity for capital to be redirected for, some people say profits for purpose or technology for good. And I see that happen, and I hope that happens.
Don:
Yes. I hope you're right. Dr. Sengupta, this has been a fabulous conversation. Thank you for taking your time to share your wisdom with us, and thank you for being a genius.
Dr. Sengupta:
Well, thank you for having me.
Don:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses, and thank you to our sponsor, the Think2Perform Research Institute. Our upcoming episodes include the Future of Reproduction, the Future of Privacy, and the Future of Psychedelics. Devin McGrath is our production assistant; Brian Bierbaum is our research and historical consultant; Toby, Tony, Jay, and the rest of the team at GL Productions in London make sure the sound and editing are phenomenal. To subscribe to 12 Geniuses, please go to 12geniuses.com. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.