Epic Spaceman: Making cosmic scale human

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Meet Epic Spaceman this week on Planetary Radio.

I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. When difficult times stifled his career, British filmmaker and cinematographer, Toby Lockerbie didn't give up. He looked up. His four-time Webby-Award-winning YouTube channel, Epic Spaceman, now reaches millions, blending art and science to remind us how beautiful the universe really is and that anyone can learn to share that beauty too. We'll talk about how passion can turn adversity into creativity and why sharing the story of space matters more than ever. Then, we'll wrap up with Bruce Betts, our Chief Scientist in What's Up? as we mark the end of the Japanese aerospace exploration agency's Akatsuki mission to Venus.

If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest discoveries, make sure you hit that "Subscribe" button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it.

For many of us who love space, there's a moment when curiosity turns into creation. That can mean making art and music or volunteering to share your telescope views with others, even voicing a podcast, or in the case of Toby Lockerbie, starting a YouTube channel. Toby found that moment during the uncertainty of the COVID lockdown. In 2021, after 10 years as a photographer and filmmaker, he decided to pursue a new project, sharing space with people around the world.

Toby was already a professional in film, but no one can know everything. He had zero experience in visual effects. Yet, he decided to teach himself how to build the universe from scratch one render at a time. The result was Epic Spaceman, a cinematic YouTube channel that turns physics and astronomy into breathtaking visual stories. Toby even places himself in the videos as a digital astronaut. You can see his face beneath the helmet, guiding viewers through vast cosmic scenes and giving a human context to the scale of it all.

What began as a personal experiment quickly grew into a global community. In 2025, Toby's work was recognized with four Webby Awards, more than any other individual this year, honoring his outstanding science storytelling and visual artistry. Toby's videos have earned millions of views and a place among today's most inspiring science creators. But what makes his work special isn't just the visuals. It's the invitation. He uses free open tools and tells everyone what he uses to make his videos, reminding people everywhere that science communication isn't just for scientists and filmmakers.

On a planet connected by online communities, it's for anyone with a spark of curiosity and the patience to learn new skills. Beyond the special effects, there's a message at the heart of Toby's work, that awe is worth pursuing and that sharing it can change how we see each other and the world around us. It's for that reason that The Planetary Society reached out to Toby and asked if we could sponsor some of his work. Here's my conversation with Toby Lockerbie, the one-person team behind Epic Spaceman.

Hey, Toby. Thanks for joining me.

Toby Lockerbie: Hello. Thank you. Yeah. Lovely to be here.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: As someone who loves pretty space videos, can I just say well done? Wow.

Toby Lockerbie: Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much. I come from a cinematography background. It's perhaps, I think, an opportunity to have more beautiful cinematography and science content, and the mixture of art and sciences has a good history and should be embraced in as many areas as possible. So with each one, I try and improve my skills and make my videos a bit better, improve the VFX in each one as I've learned them myself. So, yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I think that's part of what's so impressive about it, right? You have this history, and photography, and cinematography, but when you began this journey, you didn't have any VFX experience at all. Now, look what you're producing. I mean, that's quite a journey.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah. Thank you. It's slightly unexpected. Before I made the channel, the YouTube channel, I was basically a filmmaker, independent filmmaker, videographer over in the UK, and I prided myself on being a one-man band that could act like a small production company, and I did a lot of a variety of different shooting for a variety of different people. The only thing I couldn't do was VFX, and there's a reason for that. It's quite hard to do, and it takes you a while to learn.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah. The only real reason I had the time to do that was because of COVID because of lockdown in the UK and my work just basically disappearing for a year, and so I had to find an opportunity to do something. It was either that or despair, I guess, and so I needed an outlet. I needed to do something positive.

The upside for me was that even if I couldn't make this channel work, I would learn this new skill, and I'd be able to, in the future, do videos involving VFX. So, yeah, I started teaching myself VFX. I got about halfway through one tutorial, and I was like, "This is moving too slowly for me. I need to actually start making my first video." So I tried to run before I could walk and just started making the first video, and then I just basically didn't release it until I was happy with it. So I spent about a year doing one video, which is not normally how you do YouTube channels. Normally, you're supposed to crank them out pretty quickly, but I took a slightly different approach.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I mean, honestly, everyone gets stuck on that first Blender doughnut. I did it too. You know?

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah, that's the one.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's a really interesting approach, because I've seen so many people who have these beautiful ideas, and they get bogged down in the tutorial part of the process, and they lose their vision. So I love that you took that chance after beginning and getting the initial skills to just jump right into the project that you loved in order to motivate yourself to keep going.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah. I mean, I would recommend it to most people, I think, trying to do a similar thing to me. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted my video to be in, I had a very clear project in mind, so that is a big part of it, but I do think it's... If you have a passion for something, the thing that will get you through it is enjoying the process. So if you have a very specific end goal in mind and you know what that looks like, and every time you work on it, you're getting closer, very slightly closer, it will motivate you to keep learning.

Yeah. I would recommend just, yeah, try and run before you can walk and just go for it. If you fail... The wonderful thing with Blender, this free 3D software is because it's free, because it's such a great company, it's got such a wonderful community, that, literally, any problem you will have in your beginner stages is one quick search away because there are a hundred people who've faced that same challenge.

There's other industry software that's potentially better. Most of them specialize in different areas. There's one called Houdini that specializes in simulations, and it's becoming an industry powerhouse, but Blender is a bit of a jack of all trades, and you can... There's a Oscar-winning film was made with it recently, Flow. You can do anything if you set your mind to it and you do enough Google searches.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I was on a similar process, right? I mean, it's not like I got into video and audio editing in astrophysics. This was something that just happened when I started working with free tools. So I used Blender, and I used DaVinci Resolve and a lot of the same tools that you use. I really appreciate that in the description under your videos, you add all the software, and the hardware, and the links to everything along the way. I think it makes it a lot more accessible, because there are so many people that are such wonderful, passionate science educators, but they just don't know how to turn that dream into reality. Seeing you on this journey and sharing the tools along the way, I think, makes it a lot more approachable.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah. Thank you. I think it's difficult if you're a science communicator or you want to become a science communicator. There's just a lot out there. There's a lot. It's quite daunting to be like, "Okay. I'm going to research how to become a video editor," because you will be overwhelmed by the information out there. It's a lot for anyone trying to embark on a different career or to try and do something different, and I'm happy to help explain how I make things.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: You could have used these skills to go a million different directions. Why was it specifically educational animations about space that you wanted to make your passion project?

Toby Lockerbie: I asked myself, this was going back to COVID, and I was going to start this channel. I basically asked myself, "If I could make a video about anything in the world, if I can make a channel about anything in the world, what would it be?" I gave myself a... There is no budget to this. It can be anything. It can be impossible. It could be something nobody's done before. Whatever it is. Really try to ask myself this question, and this is what I came up with, making something that could help people, something that I found important, something that has been in my life in the past.

I've had very few wow moments in my life. I think a lot of us hope to find awe and wonder in our lives in everyday life. We're also busy. We've also got so much going on. It's hard to stand cross and hard to find. A lot of the times, I have found it have been learning about physics, learning about the universe, learning about what's out there.

I've read a couple of wonderful books that have completely blown my mind. One of my favorite books is A Brief History of Nearly Everything. I always get that title wrong, but I think that's correct. There's four books with very similar titles, and they all use different adjectives. But I think A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, I think, is a wonderful science book. He has such a good layman's perspective on things, and he describes things really well, uses really good metaphors, and yeah, so many parts of it blew me away. If I could make anything, if there was no limit, there was no budget, I would try and make a video version of that.

So I made the decision. I thought, "Right, doing something on the universe, doing something on physics, on scale, on understanding the world better." That was my decision. I worked on what I wanted it to be called, and I had to think about how I would enjoy that being presented to me, and so I wanted a protagonist. I wanted an narrator that you could see. I got myself in the role because I was the only person available, and yeah, I just started teaching myself VFX that I could create this science superhero who would travel around and explain atoms or explain black holes generally to not super high level. Everything that I've done so far has been relatively bog-standard physics.

But there's so much wonder in just a rough understanding of the world, a rough understanding of what's out there in the universe, and there's so many amazing numbers that lots of people know but can't comprehend. They're too big. There's a lot of wonder in many numbers that we hear about, whether that's how many galaxies there are in the universe, or stars in the Milky Way, or whatever it is.

I particularly enjoy trying to use visual metaphors to show people some of this craziness and some of this wonder that's out there. Then, the cinematography comes in, I think, about like, "How would this be really beautiful? How would this be really memorable? How would an average person be able to connect with this? What metaphor should I use? What object should I use for them to compare it to that they would've experienced in everyday life?" This is why I always seem to put food in my videos, because I figure everyone knows how big cereal is, and experience it quite regularly, and things like that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But really though, it's so hard to grapple with the scale of these things and to visualize these numbers, right? So giving people a visual, something that's in their everyday life that they can compare it to is probably one of the most profound ways to explain it to people. Otherwise, it's just large numbers, and they're so far beyond our human experience that it's almost impossible to fully visualize what it means.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah. I'm absolutely with you. I think even if everyone in the world knew all the numbers for all the sizes of things, it wouldn't really change anything. The average person, I think, has absolutely no idea how big the solar system is. It's so ridiculously huge, and you could tell them the number in whatever unit you wanted, percentage of a light year or in kilometers or miles over in America. You could say it in miles. Really, it wouldn't make any difference, whatsoever. People would still have no idea how big that was. I mean, I think it's much more important that people have a rough grasp of the scale than actually know the numbers. You know?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Mm-hmm.

Toby Lockerbie: Lots of our pictures of the solar system... or when I say a lot, basically, every picture you'll ever find of the solar system is so wildly inaccurate in terms of scale because you can't put these things on a piece of paper, or in a book, or on a poster. So there's a lot of... not intentional misinformation, but there's a lot of misunderstanding out there about how far away the stars are, for instance, or how big the galaxy is, or things like that.

I think one of my first videos, I wanted to talk about the Milky Way, and I asked a few friends this, people who are pretty well-educated. The question I always asked was, "What's the name of the galaxy we live in?" They all said, "The Milky Way." Then, I say, "What's the name of that thing that stretches across the sky?" Then, they look at me like they're about to say the Milky Way, and then they think, "Oh, no. Hang on. That can't be right." You realize that they've never understood the connection, and so that was just one of the things I wanted to cover in the video very briefly, that we're inside that thing that we see and just that slight mental leap that we all have to take when that's explained to us or shown to us, that the Milky Way that we see is something we are inside, and the stars we see are just our local neighbors.

So, yeah. I really enjoy trying to find visual metaphors, because these are really profound and wonderful things that I would just love more people to understand. I want it to be as accessible as possible. I don't need to do any cutting-edge science. There's so much of science, and the universe, and the world under microscopes and behind telescopes that's so beautiful, and profound, and wonderful, and 99.9% of the population knows very little about it and has perhaps been intimidated and scared off by science. So if I can use cinematography, and videos, and things that can help make things go viral by making them... I don't know what the word is, slightly wacky, slightly silly sometimes, then that's the best idea I could come up with to make a video about.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. I think for a lot of the time in my younger years, I was really trying to grapple with this idea of like, "Why don't people care about space? Why don't they know these things?" Right? When I was younger, it made me upset almost as if it was intellectual laziness that people just didn't think about it. But then, I got older, and I started having conversations with people, and I realized what a profound privilege it is to not only have access to this information, but to be in a head space where I can begin to think about it and re-contextualize my life within that.

So much of that for me was about the beautiful images from Voyager when I was a kid, and watching Cosmos and things like that, and taking that into the modern age, and making these beautiful visualizations, I think, is a wonderful way to give that access to people, because I've seen people's lives completely upended or even saved by simple space conversations that re-contextualize themselves. Have you had interactions with your fans where they've said these kinds of things to you?

Toby Lockerbie: I think the thing that surprised me the most... I mean, my channel has blown up beyond my wildest dreams, I suppose. I hoped it might get popular, and it really has. I'm so happy and thankful that people are really enjoying it. But from the beginning, I started actually... because I only had one video on YouTube. YouTube doesn't do anything if you have one video. There's probably millions of channels on YouTube, and so obviously, everyone starts with one video, and YouTube is not really going to share your single video too much. So the first place I really put it was Reddit actually on our space there, and I was 100% set on being decimated.

My first video was about how I would visualize the universe. When you think of the universe in your head, when you think of a galaxy, or planets, or a star, you have an automatic visual. But when you think of the universe, which is everything, there isn't... at least in my head, there's a gaping void there. There isn't really or at least there wasn't really an obvious visual, and so my first video was like, "What does the universe look like? How should you visualize it? What should it look like?" I conclude that the best way to think of the universe is to picture the local group and our local group of galaxies. It's a good snapshot of what the universe looks like.

So I was trying to show what the local group looks like, basically, and I turned it into cereal and had these bits of cereal floating around. I was set on making everything as accurate as possible, so all the bits of cereal are scaled perfectly to all the dwarf galaxies around floating around, but I was very much set on people saying, "You made this piece of cereal too big," or, "You got this name for this dwarf galaxy wrong," or just tearing anything apart and the visuals. This was my first time making a video with VFX, so some shots look really good, some shots look not really good at all, but I just received the support, basically.

Every time I've put them in places that I perhaps wouldn't expect support from TikTok to Reddit to YouTube, I just receive people being so happy and thankful that someone is making the kind of videos that you discussed before that have perhaps profoundly affected them previously, like Cosmos or something like that. It really profoundly affects me and massively motivates me to keep putting in the same effort that I put into that first video, which, admittedly, took me about a year to make. I have been making them slightly faster, but whenever I get better at making them, I just expand my expectations of how good they look and things like that. So they still do take me a long time, many months each. Yeah. It's wonderfully supportive has been the experience that I've received from other people. Yeah, crazy.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah.

Toby Lockerbie: This is the internet we're talking about, you know?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I mean, really though. I mean, Reddit one of the best places on the internet. I really love that the community is self-filtering by upvoting and downvoting.

Toby Lockerbie: Oh my God.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: So it's much different experience from all the other places on social media. So going to Reddit was so clever and validating. I've had that same experience there.

Toby Lockerbie: Whenever I've talked to friends who aren't on Reddit about Reddit, they have this strange perception of it, but I'm on Reddit all the time. I love it. I think they've got... They're the only social media that I think has found a good way to filter out the worst of humanity by having-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah.

Toby Lockerbie: ... and it's just so simple. It's self-regulation. You don't necessarily need a vast number of censoring bots or whatever that are monitoring everything and tweaking everything. Most social media works on, basically, promoting whatever keeps you on the channel. So whatever it is, if it makes you angry, if it makes you hateful, if it keeps you watching, then that's great because then you watch more adverts. So that's generally how social media works, and Reddit, I think, managed to find a formula where people spend a lot of time on it for a different reason, and it's because the information quality is relatively high and the top comments are usually quite funny and quite informative.

Whenever there's a good news story on there, if it's a science news story... Reddit is interesting because you still need enough people to have looked at it to get good information and good comments. But if it's a big news story, it will pass through millions of eyes, and there will be an expert in whatever that is talking about, and you don't get that from the news. You don't get that from most social media, I think. It's a really cool community.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: At this point, I mean, you've already gone over half a million followers. Each one of your videos gets millions and millions of views, and you won four Webbys this year. So, clearly, that old adage that sometimes less is more is true in this case. Sometimes you don't have to be pumping out content every single day. It's enough to just really focus in on getting something right and putting it out to the audience that matches your vision because it's working.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I could have predicted that success. It's like what I was saying, it's-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: No one does.

Toby Lockerbie: ... beyond my wildest dreams that it could be so well-appreciated. Yeah. I was a bit worried that there wouldn't be enough people watching it. But going back to Reddit again briefly, I looked at our space and how many people are in that community, and I looked at how many people were in the biggest fictional communities on Reddit. Reddit has the largest online communities in the world. So if you're a fan of whatever it is, Star Wars, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, if you're a fan of those things, then those are the biggest communities for you. So I added up the number of... and obviously, some people will be in more than one, but I added up the number of people that are on Lord of the Rings, Marvel, Star Wars, a couple of others, and adding them all up together was less than the ones that are on space. You know?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Wow.

Toby Lockerbie: So I hoped... I should say I knew, but I feel like there's so much more support for space, and education, and science than is generally portrayed in media or generally that people are given access to. I guess they're underserved is what I feel like. They're underserved in so many different ways. I think the reason big franchises like Marvel and Star Wars do so well, particularly, ones like that, is because there is this internal thing within many of us that we want to see science, we want to see space. So the only way we're getting it at the moment, really, is science fiction, which is wonderful.

I love science fiction, but I feel like there's a reason, and it's because we also want the science. It's not just the fiction that we like. We love the space, the adventure into the unknown, the understanding the world around us and exploring it. I feel like the average person who loves that is underserved in terms of options and availability of documentaries, and entertaining documentaries, and TV shows that aren't just fictional.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, I agree. It's probably why I get so absolutely fired up when I start talking about the TV shows and movies that I love with my friends because it's one of the only ways that we have to experience space. Therefore, I'm sitting here having arguments about the way that this spaceship works in this particular Star Wars movie or whether or not that representation of a black hole is accurate when, really, I should be able to suspend my disbelief for two seconds and enjoy those things. But it's because of this lack of content for the things that I'm wanting.

We'll be right back with the rest of my interview with Toby Lockerbie after this short break.

Kate Howells: Hi. I'm Kate Howells, Public Education Specialist for The Planetary Society. It's time to celebrate the most inspiring space moments and missions of 2025. Every year, we invite space fans around the world to help decide The Planetary Society's Best of the Year Awards, honoring the discoveries, missions, and images that made us all look up and wonder. Now, it's time to pick your favorites from 2025. From daring new spacecraft to breathtaking cosmic images, your votes help celebrate the people and projects pushing the boundaries of exploration. Cast your vote today at planetary.org/best-of-2025. That's planetary.org/best-of-2025.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I love that you've inserted yourself into these videos as a character unto yourself. For the longest time, I was trying to figure out how you were doing this because you represent yourself as an astronaut, the Epic Spaceman within this universe.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I was wondering initially if it was just you were animating the body and using some motion capture for the face. But as I was watching this longer, I realized you have a whole motion capture suit. At what point in your process did you decide to get that motion capture suit and go for that extent of work? That is a whole other level of learning.

Toby Lockerbie: My first video, I basically stand still like a statue pretty much, and my face doesn't really move either because I didn't really have a solution to making my face move around, let alone my body. I think I hand animated some slight movement a couple of times, which... For anyone who knows about VFX, knows that hand animating a human is not fun. For people who don't VFX, it's just a bit like Wallace and Gromit having an actual model of something, and you just move a finger here, then move a hand there, and stuff like that. So it's not very fun. It doesn't work very well. It doesn't look very good.

So I bit the bullet and got a low to medium-end motion capture suit. It's the only affordable one for an indie developer, indie filmmaker from a company called Rokoko. Basically, that just gave some life to my avatar, my narrator, and it meant I could move around a little bit. But because I'm just standing talking to the camera, I don't really need to do too much, and so it just adds a little bit of micro movements that make a human being look realistic.

But yeah, it was a bit of a step-up to get a motion capture suit. I did feel a bit ridiculous standing in my office in a motion capture suit making the next video when I had... I think I had 500 subscribers after a few months of my first video. So there I am betting on the future of this channel with a motion capture suit.

I feel like the most engaging thing you can see in a video is a human face. If you are going to understand the black hole, you've got to start with someone's face, which is a very strange sentence, but most videos about the universe are in the cold blackness of space, and there's an object in there. You have no sense of scale, and it's very hard to relate it to your everyday life when you're worried about whatever else is going on, worried about paying the rent or whatever else is going on in your life, and you are looking at just blackness and some swirly thing out there.

So I knew from the beginning that if I really wanted to engage people in a similar way to Cosmos, I needed a character who was Carl Sagan walking on a beach describing something interesting. I think you really do need a human connection to understand something that's cosmic. You need someone to draw you through it. Also, to provide a sense of scale, it's very useful to have a human being of a known proportion to be next to things when you're shrinking, and growing, and making things different sizes. It just grounds everything in reality and grounds everything in the worlds that we all live in.

So I knew that from the very beginning, that I needed a person in the videos, and so I've... Yeah, the body is controlled with motion capture, and then the face, I've done it in different ways. I don't actually motion capture my face. I just use footage of my face. So I film myself. I actually don't wear a motion capture suit now. I've moved on to a different system that uses cameras that track my movements, multiple cameras in different corners of my office.

I film my face, and I project my face onto a 3D model of my face, and that gives me the ability to make something that looks just like me. I've only done this since the last video. So if you could just go two videos back, my face looks a bit weird because I used a slightly different projection system, and I'm slightly in the uncanny valley a little bit. But since my last video, I'm out of the uncanny valley again, and it actually looks like me.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But over the last year, you've started working with the Planetary society and putting some little embedded ads for our organization into your movies. How did you end up working with us, and why are we an organization that you decided was worth sharing the message of in the middle of your videos?

Toby Lockerbie: Well, I feel like I have an obligation to find a good partner that represents the values of truth, and science, and honesty, and stuff like that. I'm unusually attached to my videos, and I want someone to represent that community well. When The Planetary Society got in contact, I was like... I barely believed it, that a non-profit partly founded by Carl Sagan would be interested in sponsoring one of my videos. My answer was, "Of course. Yes. Regardless of what any offer would be from other people, my answer would always be yes. It's The Planetary Society." So, yeah. It's been wonderful to have you on the last couple videos. I'm so, so proud that you'd get in contact in the first place and asked to be on it. It's great. I support what you guys do. I think you're very important part of science and space advocacy. Yeah. It's wonderful. Very happy.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Honestly, thank you from us. I mean, as much as it blows your mind, your work, especially as a one-person team, it's just such a beautiful example of what space fans can accomplish when they're passionate enough, when an artist invests enough time, and your community is so motivated and so passionate about not just loving space, but engaging with it and doing something about it. So I think it's a very nice symbiotic relationship, right? Especially when you can make videos about, say, the search for life. I loved your most recent video. It was also your longest video. For people who haven't seen it yet, I'll link to this video on the web page for this episode of Planetary Radio, but you-

Toby Lockerbie: Oh, thank you.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: ... you try to explain how many habitable worlds are inside of our galaxy by putting marbles in the Colosseum in Rome.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: What a stunning visual. That is absolutely... Even as someone who works with the numbers and fundamentally understands. It comes back to that idea that when you have a scale representation, you can really understand. It completely re-contextualizes everything.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah. The marbles in the Colosseum is, obviously, the wacky idea that entices people into watching the video. It sounds a bit crazy, but I spent a while thinking about how to visualize how many... because the Kepler space telescope gave some incredible, profound information that basically nobody in the world knows anything about, and there's so much... Yeah. It's just so incredible how many planets there might be in the habitable zone with the potential for water on the surface.

Now, there are lots of caveats to that. Obviously, a lot of them are red dwarfs, and they face problems being so close to the sun. They're bombarded by energy. Perhaps they're not able to... Even though their surface might be at a temperature where the liquid water could exist at, they may have no atmosphere. It might be impossible. But I try to present the raw numbers in a way that's understandable by putting the marbles in the coliseum and just seeing how far they would go, how high up that pile would be, because it's very... Marbles in a jar, marbles in your hand, marbles on the floor. A lot of people have experienced that kind of scale.

Most people haven't been to the coliseum. But if I can show enough images of it, show enough video footage I can give with enough scale of reference, and again, this is where a protagonist comes in standing in the middle of the arena like Russell Crowe. Basically, it's just me living my Gladiator dreams standing inside the coliseum. Then, you can contextualize it. You can get to grips with how big that number is.

Then, I talk about the caveats. I talk about the red dwarfs and what might make life less likely in those habitable worlds. But then, I also talk about the things that will actually make things more likely as well and how some planets, some moons wouldn't even make it into this list, but could have life on. I think for me at least, making it and researching it, because I go into all these things as a bit like Bill Bryson as a... My education is not in astrophysics. I have a computer engineering degree. The important thing for me is to get the numbers right and get the science right, and so I have to do a lot of research on all the topics as does Bill Bryson. He needs to talk to the right people to be able to come up with the right analogies to explain to a lay person like himself.

I feel like an advantage I have in some regards is that I'm not an astrophysicist, and I can perhaps have a slightly better grasp of what a less-educated person will connect with than someone who is really well-educated on the subject and perhaps might have a few misconceptions about what the average person knows about things. So, yeah. I spent a lot of time researching the possibilities of life on all these planets that might be... well, that are in the habitable zone based on Kepler's numbers and statistics, working off that.

Yeah. I think the big takeaway for me is that... I think it's very difficult to talk about alien life in a scientific way because there are no points of data on it. A good scientist will be like, "Well, we don't know anything, so we can't extrapolate." But as I'm not a scientist, I feel like I can be a little bit looser with that. Even then, I don't really say, "I believe this, and I believe that." I still try and just present the data. But speaking just for myself and not as Epic Spaceman or as someone presenting a nonpartisan video about the information, I feel like I just want to get inside. I want to get inside Europa.

If we can understand planetary science, planetary weather, the composition of atmospheres, of the planets and our solar system, we should be building bigger telescopes that have the resolution to be able to look at the atmospheres in exoplanets, but there's so much information on our back doorstep. Is that the right words? In our backyards? But we can do it. We have proven we can send probes to planets in our solar system. We can get a lot of information from them.

One of the craziest bits of information was that there is a chance, however small, that there's life in Venus' atmosphere, which I would've thought would be one of the last places life might be able to exist. But in the upper atmosphere, I can't remember how high off the surface, but 50 kilometers off the surface or something, the pressure is one bar, and the temperature is between 35 and 45 degrees Celsius or something like that. I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit. Apologies. We have so much information so close to us that I wish we were burrowing under Europa's icy surface right now, but these things take time. I do understand that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, time and investment. I mean, you point out in that video that society spends more money on pet costumes every year than the entire 10-year budget of the Kepler mission.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's part of why I'm so passionate about talking about these things, because what's holding us back isn't our capability, it's our investment and willingness to put the money and the people behind making these discoveries. It's all right there just waiting for us.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah. In a way, that's actually the conclusion of my video, really. I talk about it. I talk about where life might be. I talk about how we might be underestimating how much life there might be and try to give scientific and statistical reasons for that. But also, the conclusion is we can build these telescopes, and we can find the stuff out, and we can visit these moons, and we can go under the surface, and we can find what's in there.

Every time we try and do something like this, we tend to increase the expectations and the numbers. If we did do that, it wouldn't surprise me that those expectations and those numbers increase again and again. But you've got to pay for it, and we as a society, the more we talk about it, the more we clamor for it, the more it's on our radar, the more it becomes household conversations, the more pressure we put on politicians on either side of the pond.

I fully accept that the European Space Agency isn't doing as much as NASA. They're still doing some really interesting cool stuff, but I would love to live in a world where we were funding space. I mean, I'd love to live in a world where funding science in all sorts of different ways better than we are, but I think space is a gateway science to people interested in STEM and interested in getting into science and engineering in lots of different ways.

When you lead the world in technology and exploration beyond earth, you become a hub of expertise for science. I hope America can continue with that. We certainly look up to America and NASA. Speaking on behalf of the rest of the world here. It's quite big on my shoulders there. I would love for Europe to do more as well and the rest of the world. I would love to see much more collaboration between different continents as well on space and space exploration, and investments into telescopes.

I know there is a lot already, but like you said, we spend more on pet costumes just as a society than we did on Kepler's 10-year mission, which is slightly disturbing. Like I say in a video, I have nothing against pet costumes. That's totally fine and legitimate. If you want to dress your cat up, that's wonderful. But I think we can afford to do some crazy stuff in the solar system. Enceladus, Europa are two of the ones that I particularly think are fruitful expeditions.

I mentioned in a video going to Mars is certainly profound, and wonderful, and interesting, but this is as in sending people there. It is also very expensive and very difficult. I think we still have a lot of... so much we can learn from sending robots and probes to places. Having a robot car on Mars drilling and finding stuff out is pretty incredible. I think equally, if you can market it well and promote it well... This sounds really weird. But if you can have really good videos and photos because the thing... People care about Mars, really, because of the curiosity, because of curiosity, and because of Rovers, because the stuff we put on there, it takes videos and takes pictures, and you can see it, people can see it. You can have a news report.

Every time someone talks about something on Mars, there will be someone in a news station, and behind them will be something like one of the rovers, and you'll be able to see Mars. Part of the reason I make my videos is because I want to connect with people visually on topics that are difficult, and you need that stuff. You need so much multimedia to convince people that something is a good idea and something is impressive. If we can get something to somewhere like Europa and be on an ice moon, have something on the surface of Europa, and you can see a Jupiter rise or whatever it is, that image, that video, that 360 image. One of the other missions is sending a mini helicopter to... I don't know if it's Titan or something like that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Dragonfly to Titan.

Toby Lockerbie: Yeah. I mean, the footage from that. Can you imagine? I mean, so many people love science fiction, and you can give them something that's science fiction, except it's real, so obviously even better. That's within our fingertips if we invest in it for a small percentage of a manned mission to Mars, which I also fully support, but we have so many cool destinations in the solar system to send stuff to, "stuff."

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Okay.

Toby Lockerbie: We just need to get on with it, and that requires advocacy. That requires pressure on politicians. That requires people talking about it. Yeah. Et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, but yeah, it's really important.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, it's one more reason why making these kinds of videos and making it more accessible to people around the world is going to help us advance these causes. Right? You never know who you might inspire, who might go out there and advocate or go into this kind of science themselves. As with large numbers, because your audience is so huge, there's no way for you to ever really know how many people you've inspired through your work. Right? Similarly, here at The Planetary Society. So I just keep that in my heart, that if we keep communicating about these things, ultimately, that means someday we're going to see those visions of Titan, and we're going to see people walking around in other worlds.

Toby Lockerbie: I think so. Yeah. I mean, like you say, I don't know if I've inspired anyone. I wouldn't know what any numbers were. All we can do is do our best, and try and be a positive force in the universe.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, thanks for doing what you're doing, and sharing this with people, and for the amazing amount of effort it has taken to do it. I'm absolutely in awe. You did it right-

Toby Lockerbie: Thank you.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: ... but in awe of what you've accomplished. So thanks for doing what you do and for taking the time to share it with us here on our show.

Toby Lockerbie: Thank you. That's very kind. Really appreciate it.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Toby mentioned in our conversation how excited he is about the prospect of learning more about potential conditions for life on other worlds, like Venus. Today, we're saying goodbye to the last ongoing mission that's studying that planet. Japan's Akatsuki spacecraft launched by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency in 2010 spent more than a decade orbiting Venus. It studied its mysterious atmosphere with its thick clouds and powerful winds. After a heroic recovery from a failed orbital insertion, which we'll talk about more in a moment, Akatsuki became a long-term explorer of Earth's twin, giving us our best look yet at that planet's turbulent weather and even possible lightning. Now, as JAXA marks the end of the mission, Venus waits once again for its next visitor. Here's Dr. Bruce Betts, our Chief Scientist for What's Up?

Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hello, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Okay. So we haven't had a chance to talk about this, but this actually happened a little while ago, actually, the end of the Japanese Akatsuki mission. I only just heard about this fairly recently. I think it was in September that they declared it officially dead.

Bruce Betts: Yeah. Yeah. They lost contact a few months before that and then declared it dead, as you say. But they'd been in orbit taking data for many years, and Akatsuki was basically, in the end, a successful study of the Venus atmosphere. Lots of different wavelengths. One of the amazing things about it is orbital dynamics is fairly unforgiving on... at least on short-time frames. If your engine doesn't fire and fire the right amount, you don't go into orbit around a planet, and that's what happened to them when they first tried it in 2010 with Akatsuki. They basically missed Venus. They just kept going.

Then, what's amazing is they figured out, with great study and great patience, that they could try to get back into a different orbit, but still a Venus orbit five years later. So they were supposed to go into orbit in 2010. They successfully went into orbit in 2015. They were in a different higher orbit, but they adapted and were able to carry out a successful science mission. So it's an amazing recovery. Side note, JAXA also did with Hayabusa, their asteroid sample return, which had-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Really?

Bruce Betts: Yeah. A different problem, but same concept. They ended up having to delay it, so it came back a few years later, but they figured out something that could make it work. So they've had two amazing saves of missions and basically, engine problems or firing timing engine, and so it didn't do what you wanted it to do, but they made successful missions in the end.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That is absolutely wild. I knew the comeback story of Akatsuki, but I did not know that happened for Hayabusa. That's a lot of dedication, a lot of time it would take to figure out how to correct for that, and what kind of instrument on board or what kind of jet or thruster you actually have available to actually make that work? What was the mission actually doing during the time that it wasn't in orbit around Venus during that five-year period?

Bruce Betts: Well, the technical term is chilling hard, just kicking back and watching the space go by.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Chilling out.

Bruce Betts: No, I actually don't know. I mean, they were designed to study Venus, so I'm sure they tried to extract what they could out of it scientifically, but their instruments were not designed to be flying around in deep space without a planet next to them.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I mean, the thing that makes me a little sad, I mean, whenever a mission ends, it's a little sad, but this is the last dedicated Venus mission that we currently have out there. So Venus is officially a world that doesn't have a mission that's alive in orbit around it right now. So it's all the more reason why we need to work to get these other Venus missions out there.

Bruce Betts: This is true. There are fewer and fewer planets or objects with orbiters around them at this point. Although you got... Mars is a party, and Jupiter's got Juno, but things are thinning out. Poor Mercury. It's just... Well, no, it's getting some stuff. I forgot. Mercury is a party as well, so it's all good.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, BepiColombo. We're getting there.

Bruce Betts: They're getting there. They're getting there, and Magellan, of course, revolutionized our understanding of Mercury now. But anyway, we're not talking about Mercury right now. Why did you bring that up?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Man, that means that Akatsuki was out there 15 years, is that right? I mean, only functioning around Venus for almost 10 years, but-

Bruce Betts: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. Wow.

Bruce Betts: Also, on their way to Venus, they launched with IKAROS, which was the Japanese solar sail mission. The first successful solar sail, but fairly big beast. Anyway, fascinating mission, and we followed along a few years later with a much smaller solar sail mission.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I mean, real talk, I love that both of these solar sailing missions were out there. But anytime I talk about LightSail, I always have to stop myself and be like, "But the award actually goes to IKAROS first." Does that sting just a little bit?

Bruce Betts: Yes and no. I mean, yes. We tried to be the first in 2005 with Cosmos 1, and it successfully explored the Northern Ocean of the earth before ever going to space. So, yes and no, because we... One, the Japanese did an amazing job, and they had very clever things as they always do, basically, literally using origami folds and then spinning the sail out, having LCDs that change the... They had a very subtle method to change direction. On the other hand, they couldn't do direction changes very fast, and there were 300-plus kilograms.

So what we then were focused on LightSail was saying, "How can we still contribute to this field in a significant way?" It was doing it using the new CubeSats, the small spacecraft, which can piggyback on launches and have a lot more flexibility to go places. Basically, could you shove a big sail in a tiny box the size of a loaf of bread, and deploy it, and have it work, and actually, do solar sailing, use solar pressure? So we did do that. I've thought about this a little bit, and you can probably tell.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Probably tell. Well, seriously, good job, JAXA. This mission has been awesome. If anybody out there who's listening hasn't seen the images of Venus from this mission, because of the wavelengths of light that it's looking in, the image is just absolutely stunning. Every once in a while, I've actually seen people online say that these images aren't real because they're so different from the way that we usually see Venus.

Bruce Betts: Let me mention one other thing, Akatsuki, because we, The Planetary Society, were involved with Akatsuki, and we, along with JAXA, collected names and messages that flew aboard Akatsuki and edged onto an aluminum plate. 260,000 people submitted names and messages for missions, and they're still hanging out around Venus.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. Even when the mission is gone, we're still out there as part of that mission, so I don't know.

Bruce Betts: It's true. At least for some period that I don't know what it is, they're still in orbit. You have to work to not be in orbit, especially in a big distant orbit like that. They probably have a long lifetime there.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. Maybe one of these days, we'll snag a photo of that with our new Venus missions.

Bruce Betts: Venus.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Venus.

Bruce Betts: Venus. [inaudible 00:56:25] rewind. That's so good. We're revisiting them. Hey, Venus. Venus surface pressure is like being about one kilometer or about 3,000 feet under the Earth's ocean. Serious pressure down there. There you go. There you have it.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Ugh, man. It's like one of those numbers that you can try to wrap your head around, but it's so far outside of human experience that it's still really impossible. The headache I get at the bottom of a pool is enough for me. Seriously, I could never go free diving.

Bruce Betts: The point is it's really hot and really high pressure on the surface, and that's why we haven't had a bunch of landers, especially ones that lasted more than an hour or two, which the Soviets succeeded in doing. So it's a tough, tough environment on the surface.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. It still weirds me out that they were able to do that at all. Just imagine the weird chambers you would need to internally pressurize that contraption, whatever it is you're sending down on the surface of Venus just to test it. I mean, the fact that they managed to pull that off that long ago for even the amount of time that the Venera missions survived is just a testament to the dedication of space people.

Bruce Betts: Yes, it is, and the solidness of a good piece of spacecraft that are these-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right. Chonky.

Bruce Betts: Chonky. They're chonky spacecraft. All right. Everybody, come out there, and look up the night sky, and think about dimming light switches. Thank you. Good night.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week with more space science and exploration. If you love the show, you can get Planetary Radio t-shirts at planetary.org/shop along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise.

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Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by our members, space fans all around the world. You can join us as we support space content creators and the sharing of all at planetary.org/join. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers. Casey Dreier is the host of our monthly Space Policy Edition, and Mat Kaplan hosts our monthly Book Club Edition. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Pieter Schlosser. My name is Sarah Al-Ahmed, the host and producer of Planetary Radio. Until next week, ad astra.