Coffee & Geography Podcast Season 6 Episode 16
Meganne Christian has lived in Australia, Italy and the UK, spent a winter isolated on the Antarctic Plateau, and if that wasn’t ‘out-there’ enough, she has also been selected for the European Space Agency’s astronaut reserve.
Meganne and I met through Project Earth’s Pitch for the Planet, where young people were presenting ideas intended to make the world more sustainable. We were both involved in supporting participants, and I had gone into the event knowing a little something of Meganne’s background. Hearing her speak about Antarctica, engineering and space definitely made me want to continue the conversation.
Her career looks remarkable when compressed into a biography, but hearing it unfolded through a conversation made it obvious that it wasn’t a pre-planned route and more like a series of choices, opportunities, disrupted plans and interests that gradually connected. It’s something important to highlight because young people are often presented with careers as though everybody else knew the destination from the beginning, or that it’s some kind of conveyor belt.
Meganne studied industrial chemistry in Australia, carried out doctoral research into materials for hydrogen storage, moved to Bologna for research work, studied graphene and tested materials during parabolic flights. She then spent extended periods at Concordia Station in Antarctica, including a full winter, before being selected for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) astronaut reserve in November 2022. She now works as Mission Manager for In-Space Manufacturing at the Satellite Applications Catapult.
A geographical identity with several homes
Meganne was born in Kent to New Zealand parents, moved to Australia as a child, studied in Sydney and later spent nine years living in Bologna. She holds British, New Zealand, Australian and Italian citizenship.
Australia was where Meganne spent most of her formative years, while Italy had shaped habits and gestures. She said that after nine years in Bologna she spoke much more with her hands, which seems a pleasantly tangible way for a place to travel with someone.
We also discussed Christmas in Australia because my kids had recently asked whether Australians celebrate it at a different time of year. I had explained that the date stays the same while the seasonal experience changes, and Meganne confirmed the seafood, beaches and outdoor summer celebrations, alongside Christmas trees, fake snow and other traditions imported from colder Northern Hemisphere winters.
It is a small example of how cultural traditions travel but change when they meet a different physical geography.
Harwell and a landscape built around science
Meganne is now based at Harwell Campus near Oxford, which looks fascinating from above. The Diamond Light Source forms a large circle within the site, while roads are named after scientists including Fermi, Rutherford and Becquerel.
The campus began as an RAF airfield and later developed into a major science and innovation centre. Parts of the old spatial layout remain visible, while laboratories and research organisations now occupy the site.
Harwell also made a neat geographical starting point before we travelled, conversationally at least, to somewhere far more remote.
Arriving at Concordia
Concordia Station sits on Dome C in East Antarctica at an elevation of 3,233 metres. Because the atmosphere is compressed towards the poles, the physiological experience can resemble being at an even greater altitude elsewhere. The station is jointly operated by France and Italy and is one of the few research stations occupied throughout the Antarctic winter.
Meganne first travelled through the coastal station at Mario Zucchelli before flying inland. The coastal summer temperatures around -10°C didn’t feel especially alarming by Antarctic standards. The flight to Concordia took several hours, and stepping out of the aircraft brought the first encounter with the cold of the Antarctic Plateau.
The average summer temperature is around -30°C. Wind chill can take the experienced temperature much lower. During winter, Meganne experienced conditions that fell to around -104°C with wind chill. I have experienced -25°C in Minnesota, which was cold enough. -104°C is well beyond anything I can imagine!
Antarctica is also extremely dry, which changes how cold conditions are experienced compared with a damp continental winter. While that doesn’t make -104°C comfortable, it does indicate that temperature alone does not describe thermal experience. Humidity, wind, altitude, clothing, activity and exposure are also important.
The same principle applies at the opposite end of the temperature scale. A hot, humid day affects the body differently from the same measured temperature in dry air. Weather is experienced through such combinations.
Nine months without a route out
From February to November, Concordia is effectively isolated. Aircraft cannot safely reach the station, so the overwintering community has to possess enough food, fuel, equipment and contingency supplies to survive without outside access. Meganne explained that supplies are generally sufficient for much longer than a single winter in case the following summer season can’t proceed as expected or planned.
This is one of the connections between Antarctic research and astronaut selection. A person spending winter at Concordia lives in a small, isolated community under extreme environmental conditions, with a limited possibility of evacuation and a responsibility for maintaining scientific work created by researchers elsewhere.
The ESA uses Concordia for research into some of the physical and psychological effects of isolation, confinement and extreme environments because certain aspects resemble the challenges of long-duration space missions.
Meganne enjoyed the role of custodian for other people’s experiments. Instruments had to continue working, data had to be collected and transmitted, and problems had to be solved locally. That experience encouraged Meganne to apply when ESA opened astronaut recruitment in 2021.
Weather balloons and katabatic winds
Meganne was responsible for observatories covering meteorology, radiation, aerosols, clouds and atmospheric physics. Part of the work involved launching weather balloons.
At Concordia, the wind conditions were generally calmer than on the Antarctic coast because the station sits high on the plateau. Even so, Meganne occasionally came close to being carried along by a weather balloon during stronger winds.
This brought us onto katabatic winds, which I’ve always found fascinating. Cold, dense air forms over the high Antarctic interior and flows downhill under gravity towards the coast, accelerating as it descends. Coastal Antarctica can therefore experience extremely powerful winds, while locations on the plateau sit closer to where the air begins its descent.
Meganne did not experience the most extreme coastal katabatic winds at Concordia, but had travelled between Antarctica and Tasmania by ship. The Southern Ocean and the waters around Antarctica have a formidable reputation, shaped by powerful winds, waves and the lack of extensive land masses to interrupt atmospheric and oceanic circulation.
Much of Antarctica’s history of exploration consists of many tales of people discovering what happens when plans meet those hostle conditions.
Ice containing the atmosphere of the past
One of the most important reasons for working at Dome C is the climate record preserved in Antarctic ice.
Snow accumulates, compresses and gradually becomes ice, trapping small bubbles of the atmosphere present at the time. Scientists can analyse the gases in those bubbles and reconstruct changes in atmospheric composition over hundreds of thousands of years.
The original EPICA project drilled more than three kilometres into the Antarctic ice at Dome C and produced a climatic record extending back around 800,000 years. The newer Beyond EPICA project has now recovered an ice core containing at least 1.2 million years of climate history.
These records allow researchers to compare greenhouse-gas concentrations, temperature proxies and natural climatic cycles over periods far longer than direct instrumental observations.
It’s one thing to show learners a graph of carbon dioxide and temperature through time, but it’s completely another to explain that the evidence includes air physically enclosed inside ice, preserving a sample of an atmosphere breathed by no human society known to history.
I had the privilege to see ice cores while working with NOAA in Boulder. They used a section under glass for public engagement, inviting visitors to look for trapped bubbles and consider how old the enclosed air might be. That physical encounter made the timescale feel different.
Meganne then took this several steps further by explaining that old ice from past coring projects has occasionally been used in celebratory drinks at Concordia.
At Christmas, Meganne had a drink cooled by ice dating from around year zero.
I needed a moment to absorb that!
I used to teach a unit about Antarctica to Year 9s (13-14 year olds), and one of the resources I used was a debate about the future of Antarctica. It involved a fictional advocate of commercial development imagined expensive drinks served over ancient Antarctic ice. I had always treated that line as deliberately absurd. Apparently, in a very limited scientific-station context, it was!less fictional than I had assumed.
Understanding the pulse of the planet
When I asked why people should spend so much money, effort and personal risk carrying out research in Antarctica, Meganne’s answer began with understanding the planet well enough to protect it.
Antarctica provides a baseline because direct human influence around the research sites is limited. The atmosphere, ice sheet, ocean and ecosystems also form important parts of the global climate system.
Research there contributes to weather and climate understanding, sea-level projections, atmospheric observations and models that support practical decisions far beyond Antarctica. Farmers, communities, governments and emergency planners all depend on understanding environmental change.
Meganne described it as understanding “the pulse of the planet”.
The polar regions are not remote in the sense of being disconnected from everybody else. Changes in ice, oceans and atmospheric circulation connect Antarctica with weather, sea level and climate elsewhere.
Ice also creates an important feedback. Bright snow and ice reflect a large proportion of incoming solar energy. When ice melts and exposes darker ocean, soil or rock beneath, more energy is absorbed, adding further warming. This is one reason the loss of ice can contribute to accelerating change.
Why look outward when Earth needs help?
Earth has climate change, poverty, wars, loss of species and many other serious problems. Why spend money sending people and machines into space?
Meganne first explained through Earth observation. More than half of the factors we use to understand Earths climate can only be tracked properly from space. Satellites give us information about weather, sea level, air quality, forests, plants, ice, oceans and changes in the land. The satellites above Earth are therefore part of the system that helps us understand and take care of life on the planet below.
Human and robot exploration bring reasons. The exploration efforts of the created abilities that now help with navigation, communication checking the environment and many everyday parts of modern life.
Meganne also made sure not to use unexpected benefits as a reason. Exploration is about the need to learn about the universe look at nearby planets and try to find out if life exists elsewhere.
Robot missions can do things but people still offer flexible thinking, instinct and the ability to react quickly to new discoveries. The Moon is also a place to learn how people and machines might work away, from Earth before trying longer trips.
The laboratory created by weightlessness
The International Space Station provides a microgravity environment unavailable on Earth for sustained periods. Materials behave differently and so researchers can grow larger and more uniform crystals, including protein crystals that help scientists study disease and develop pharmaceuticals.
Advanced materials may also be manufactured with fewer defects under microgravity conditions. Semiconductors, optical fibres and other high-value products could benefit from production processes that are difficult to reproduce on Earth. The example that surprised me most was bioprinting.
Researchers are exploring how human tissue can be printed in microgravity. On Earth, soft biological structures can collapse under their own weight during printing and may therefore require a supporting scaffold. In microgravity, layers can remain in position while a more complete structure is formed.
Meganne explained that knee meniscus tissue has already been printed during space-based research, while the longer-term aspiration is to produce increasingly complex tissues and perhaps eventually whole organs.
This remains a developing field, and bringing safely functioning organs from an orbital manufacturing process to routine transplantation would involve enormous scientific, medical, regulatory and logistical challenges. Even so, it is a striking example of gravity being not merely something we overcome to reach space, but an experimental variable that space allows us temporarily to remove.
The Moon as a historical record
Meganne described the lunar surface as a museum for the history of the Solar System. Without weather, flowing water or active plate tectonics erasing and recycling the surface in the way they do on Earth, much of the Moon’s geological history remains visible. Craters, deposits and impact records preserve evidence reaching back billions of years.
Exploring the Moon can therefore reveal information about the early history of both the Moon and Earth, as well as the wider environment in which the planets developed. This is exogeography in the fullest sense. Place, landscape, process, scale, resources, movement and the connections between one world and another.
It is also where my own professional seriousness begins to collide with a geeky tendency to imagine Starfleet Academy courses!
Being selected for ESA’s astronaut reserve
ESA opened astronaut applications in 2021 for the first time in thirteen years. More than 22,500 valid applications were submitted, with the selected class announced in November 2022. Meganne became one of the members of the astronaut reserve.
The selection process took around eighteen months and reduced a huge applicant pool to seventeen people across the career astronaut corps and reserve. Five career astronauts entered full-time ESA employment and basic training. Reserve astronauts remained in their existing work while receiving training and becoming eligible for future opportunities.
Reserve status does not guarantee a flight. Missions depend on agreements, funding, national priorities and opportunities emerging through ESA, commercial providers and programmes such as Artemis. Reserve members have already flown on nationally supported short-duration missions, and Meganne described the prospects as reasonable if the UK chooses to support an appropriate mission.
For Meganne, commercial opportunities around in-space manufacturing could offer a compelling scientific and economic purpose for a future UK mission.
Manufacturing, repairing and refuelling in orbit
Meganne now works within the Satellite Applications Catapult’s Beyond Earth mission, supporting in-space manufacturing. The Catapult is not, actually, a device designed to fling Meganne into orbit!
Instead, it helps UK organisations develop technologies and business models around satellite applications and the growing in-space economy. The Beyond Earth programme covers in-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing. This includes refuelling satellites, repairing or upgrading spacecraft, assembling structures in orbit and manufacturing materials or pharmaceuticals in microgravity.
At present, many satellites are effectively disposable. When fuel runs out or a component fails, a functioning asset may become another piece of orbital debris. Servicing and refuelling could extend mission lifetimes, reduce waste and change how spacecraft are designed.
The Catapult’s ISAM facilities allow technologies to be tested on Earth using robotics, gravity-offload systems and digital simulation before they are risked in orbit.
Near-Earth space is becoming a more intensively used environment, occupied by infrastructure belonging to governments and commercial organisations. Questions of access, regulation, waste, collision risk, ownership and responsibility increasingly follow human activity beyond the atmosphere.
We can’t really claim to have managed those issues well on Earth, so we best not the mistakes in orbit.
Crocheting in space
Despite the Antarctic isolation, extreme sports and astronaut ambitions, Meganne also enjoys activities that keep her closer to home: singing in a women’s barbershop chorus, knitting, crochet and sewing.
I suggested that if she does fly, she should crochet in space. Meganne says she certainly plans to do that.
There will be practical questions. Loose fibres and equipment do not behave in a spacecraft as they do in a living room, and anything taken aboard has to meet safety and payload requirements. If it happens, however, I would very much like evidence.
We also briefly considered the possibility of an orbital barbershop performance. Chris Hadfield’s performance of Space Oddity from the International Space Station provides precedent for music in orbit, although arranging a full chorus across the communications delay may present some difficulties.
What I took away
Both Antarctica and Space require people to work in environments where ordinary assumptions no longer hold. Both depend on international collaboration, careful preparation and systems that cannot easily be repaired from outside. Both create opportunities to observe processes that are difficult to isolate elsewhere. Both can help us understand Earth, even when the work takes place far from most human settlement.
Meganne’s route also showed how skills travel between disciplines. Industrial chemistry led into nanomaterials and hydrogen storage. Materials science led into graphene and parabolic flights. Antarctic science developed experience of isolation, operational responsibility and maintaining other people’s experiments. Those experiences supported an astronaut application. Space exploration then connected back into materials, manufacturing, climate observation and practical benefits on Earth.
Careers are often presented to young people through job titles, but the more useful story may be how capabilities accumulate. Meganne said that the more she learns, the more interested she becomes because there is so much still to discover.
🔗 Meganne Christian: European Space Agency profile – https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Astronauts/Meganne_Christian)
🔗 ESA Astronaut Class of 2022 – Meganne Christian – https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/11/ESA_Astronaut_Class_of_2022_Meganne_Christian
🔗 How Meganne Christian became a reserve astronaut – https://www.ingenia.org.uk/articles/qa-meganne-christian-reserve-astronaut/
🔗 Concordia Station, Antarctica – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordia_Station
🔗 Beyond EPICA: Earth’s oldest ice – https://www.bas.ac.uk/project/beyond-epica/
🔗 NASA Spinoff – https://spinoff.nasa.gov/
🔗 Beyond Earth: Satellite Applications Catapult – https://sa.catapult.org.uk/missions/beyond-earth/
🔗 In-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing facilities (ISAM) – https://sa.catapult.org.uk/facilities/isam/
🔗 Earth Nullschool interactive map – https://earth.nullschool.net/
