Showing posts with label Apollo moonlandings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apollo moonlandings. Show all posts

Tuesday 17 March 2020

Printing ourselves into a corner? Mankind and additive manufacturing

One technology that has seemingly come out of nowhere in recent years is the 3D printer. More correctly called additive manufacturing, it has only taken a few years between the building of early industrial models and a thriving consumer market - unlike say, the gestation period between the invention and availability of affordable domestic video cassette recorders.

Some years ago I mentioned the similarities between the iPAD and Star Trek The Next Generation's PADD, with only several decades separating the real-world item from its science fiction equivalent. Today's 3D printers are not so much a primitive precursor of the USS Enterprise-D's replicator as a paradigm shift away in terms of their profound limitations. And yet they still have capabilities that would have seemed incredibly futuristic when I was a child. As an aside, devices such as 3D printers and tablets show just how flexible and adaptable we humans are. Although my generation would have considered them as pure sci-fi, today's children regularly use them in schools and even at home and consider the pocket calculators and digital watches of my childhood in the same way as I looked at steam engines.

But whilst it can't yet produce an instant cup of earl grey tea, additive manufacturing tools are now being tested to create organic, even biological components. Bioprinting promises custom-made organs and replacement tissue in the next few decades, meaning that organ rejection and immune system repression could become a thing of the past. Other naturally-occurring substances such as ice crystals are also being replicated, in this case for realistic testing of how aircraft wings can be designed to minimise problems caused by ice. All in all, the technology seems to find a home in practically every sector of our society and our lives.

Even our remotest of outposts such as the International Space Station are benefiting from the use of additive manufacturing in cutting-edge research as well as the more humdrum role of creating replacement parts - saving the great expense of having to ship components into space. I wouldn't be surprised if polar and underwater research bases are also planning to use 3D printers for these purposes, as well as for fabricating structures in hostile environments. The European Space Agency has even been looking into how to construct a lunar base using 3D printing, with tests involving Italian volcanic rock as a substitute for lunar regolith.

However, even such promising, paradigm-shifting technologies as additive manufacturing can have their negative aspects. In this particular case there are some obvious examples, such as home-printed handguns (originally with very short lifespans, but with the development of 3D printed projectiles instead of conventional ammunition, that is changing.) There are also subtle but more profound issues that arise from the technology, including how reliance on these systems can lead to over-confidence and the loss of ingenuity. It's easy to see the failure due to hubris around such monumental disasters as the sinking of the Titanic, but the dangers of potentially ubiquitous 3D printing technology are more elusive.

During the Apollo 13 mission in 1970, astronauts and engineers on the ground developed a way to connect the CSM's lithium hydroxide canisters to the LM's air scrubbers, literally a case of fitting a square peg into a round hole. If today's equivalents had to rely solely on a 3D printer - with its power consumption making it a less than viable option - they could very well be stuck. Might reliance on a virtual catalogue of components that can be manufactured at the push of a button sap the creativity vital to the next generation of space explorers?

I know young people who don't have some of the skills that my generation deemed fairly essential, such as map reading and basic arithmetic. But deeper than this, creative thinking is as important as analytical rigour and mathematics to the STEM disciplines. Great physicists such as Einstein and Richard Feynman stated how much new ideas in science come from daydreaming and guesswork, not by sticking to robot-like algorithmic processes. Could it be that by using unintelligent machines in so many aspects of our lives we are starting to think more like them, not vice versa?

I've previously touched on how consumerism may be decreasing our intelligence in general, but in this case might such wonder devices as 3D printers be turning us into drones, reducing our ability to problem-solve in a crisis? Yes, they are a brave new world - and bioprinting may prove to be a revolution in medicine - but we need to maintain good, old-fashioned ingenuity; what we in New Zealand call the 'Number 8 wire mentality'. Otherwise, our species risks falling into the trap that there is a wonder device for every occasion - when in actual fact the most sophisticated object in the known universe rests firmly inside our heads.

Friday 28 July 2017

Navigating creation: A Cosmic Perspective with Neil deGrasse Tyson


I recently attended an interesting event at an Auckland venue usually reserved for pop music concerts. An audience in the thousands came to Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Cosmic Perspective, featuring the presenter of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and radio/tv show StarTalk. The 'Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive' presented his brand of science communication to an enormous congregation (forgive the use of the word) of science fans aged from as young as five years old. So was the evening a success? My fellow science buffs certainly seemed to have enjoyed it, so I decided it would be worthwhile to analyse the good doctor's method of large-scale sci-comm.

The evening was split into three sections, the first being the shortest, a primer as to our location in both physical and psychological space-time. After explaining the scale of the universe via a painless explanation of exponents, Dr Tyson used the homespun example of how stacking the 'billions' (which of course he declared to be Carl Sagan's favourite word) of Big Macs so far sold could be stacked many times around the Earth's circumference and even then extend onwards to the Moon and back. Although using such a familiar object in such unusual terrain is a powerful way of taking people outside their comfort territory, there was nothing new about this particular insight, since Dr Tyson has been using it since at least 2009; I assume it was a case of sticking to a tried-and-trusted method, especially when the rest of the evening was (presumably) unscripted.

Billions of Big Macs around the Earth and moon

Having already belittled our location in the universe, the remainder of the first segment appraised our species' smug sense of superiority, questioning whether extra-terrestrials would have any interest in us any more than we show to most of the biota here on Earth. This was a clear attempt to ask the audience to question the assumptions that science fiction, particularly of the Hollywood variety, has been popularising since the dawn of the Space Age. After all, would another civilisation consider us worthy of communicating with, considering how much of our broadcasting displays obvious acts of aggression? In this respect, Neil deGrasse Tyson differs markedly from Carl Sagan, who argued that curiosity would likely be a mutual connection with alien civilisations, despite their vastly superior technology. Perhaps this difference of attitude isn't surprising, considering Sagan's optimism has been negated by both general circumstance and the failure of SETI in the intervening decades.

Dr Tyson also had a few gibes at the worrying trend of over-reliance on high technology in place of basic cognitive skills, describing how after once working out some fairly elementary arithmetic he was asked which mobile app he had used to gain the result! This was to become a central theme of the evening, repeated several times in different guises: that rather than just learning scientific facts, non-scientists can benefit from practising critical thinking in non-STEM situations in everyday life.

Far from concentrating solely on astrophysical matters, Dr Tyson also followed up on topics he had raised in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey regarding environmental issues here on Earth. He used Apollo 8's famous 'Earthrise' photograph (taken on Christmas Eve 1968) as an example of how NASA's lunar landing programme inspired a cosmic perspective, adding that organisation such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency were founded during the programme. His thesis was clear: what began with political and strategic causes had fundamental benefits across sectors unrelated to space exploration; or as he put it "We're thinking we're exploring the moon and we discovered the Earth for the first time."

The second and main part of the event was Tyson's discussion with New Zealand-based nanotechnologist and science educator Michelle Dickinson, A.K.A. Nanogirl. I can only assume that there aren't any New Zealand astronomers or astrophysicists as media-savvy as Dr Dickinson, or possibly it's a case of celebrity first and detailed knowledge second, with a scientifically-minded interviewer deemed to have an appropriate enough mindset even if not an expert in the same specialisation.

The discussion/interview was enlightening, especially for someone like myself who knows Neil deGrasse Tyson as a presenter but very little about him as a person. Dr Tyson reminisced how in 1989 he accidentally become a media expert solely on the basis of being an astrophysicist and without reference to him as an Afro-American, counter to the prevailing culture that only featured Afro-Americans to gain their point of view.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Cosmic Perspective

Dr Tyson revealed himself to be both a dreamer and a realist, the two facets achieving a focal point with his passion for a crewed mission to Mars. He has often spoken of this desire to increase NASA's (comparatively small) budget so as reinvigorate the United States via taking humans out from the humdrum comfort zone of low earth orbit. However, his understanding of how dangerous such a mission would be led him to state he would only go to Mars once the pioneering phase was over!

His zeal for his home country was obvious - particularly the missed opportunities and the grass roots rejection of scientific expertise prevalent in the United States - and it would be easy to see his passionate pleas for the world to embrace Apollo-scale STEM projects as naïve and out-of-touch. Yet there is something to be said for such epic schemes; if the USA is to rise out of its present lassitude, then the numerous if unpredictable long-term benefits of, for example, a Mars mission is a potential call-to-arms.

The final part of the evening was devoted to audience questions. As I was aware of most of the STEM and sci-comm components previously discussed this was for me perhaps the most illuminating section of the event. The first question was about quantum mechanics, and so not unnaturally Dr Tyson stated that he wasn't qualified to answer it. Wouldn't it be great if the scientific approach to expertise could be carried across to other areas where people claim expert knowledge that they don't have?

I discussed the negative effects that the cult of celebrity could have on the public attitude towards science back in 2009 so it was extremely interesting to hear questions from several millennials who had grown up with Star Talk and claimed Neil deGrasse Tyson as their idol. Despite having watched the programmes and presumably having read some popular science books, they fell into some common traps, from over-reliance on celebrities as arbiters of truth to assuming that most scientific theories rather than just the cutting edge would be overturned by new discoveries within their own lifetimes.

Dr Tyson went to some lengths to correct this latter notion, describing how Newton's law of universal gravitation for example has become a subset of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Again, this reiterated that science isn't just a body of facts but a series of approaches to understanding nature. The Q&A session also showed that authority figures can have a rather obvious dampening effect on people's initiative to attempt critical analysis for themselves. This suggests a no-win situation: either the public obediently believe everything experts tell them (which leads to such horrors as the MMR vaccine scandal) or they fail to believe anything from STEM professionals, leaving the way open for pseudoscience and other nonsense. Dr Tyson confirmed he wants to teach the public to think critically, reducing gullibility and thus exploitation by snake oil merchants. To this end he follows in the tradition of James 'The Amazing' Randi and Carl Sagan, which is no bad thing in itself.

In addition, by interviewing media celebrities on StarTalk Dr Tyson stated how he can reach a far wider audience than just dedicated science fans. For this alone Neil deGrasse Tyson is a worthy successor to the much-missed Sagan. Let's hope some of those happy fans will be inspired to not just dream, but actively promote the cosmic perspective our species sorely needs if we are to climb out of our current doldrums.

Friday 26 August 2016

The benefit of hindsight: the truth behind several infamous science quotes

With utmost apologies to Jane Austen fans, it is a truth universally acknowledged that most people misinterpret science as an ever-expanding corpus of knowledge rather than as a collection of methods for investigating natural phenomena. A simplistic view for those who adhere to the former misapprehension might include questioning science as a whole when high-profile practitioners make an authoritative statement that is proven - in a scientific sense - to be incorrect.

Amongst the more obvious examples of this are the numerous citations from prominent STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) professionals that are inaccurate to such an extreme as to appear farcical in light of later evidence. I have already discussed the rather vague of art of scientific prognostication in several connected posts but now want to directly examine several quotations concerning applied science. Whereas many quotes are probably as deserving of contempt as the popular opinion of them, I believe the following require careful reading and knowledge of their context in which to attempt any meaningful judgement.

Unlike Hollywood, STEM subjects are frequently too complex for simple black versus white analysis. Of course there have been rather derisible opinions espoused by senior scientists, many of which - luckily - remain largely unknown to the wider public. The British cosmologist and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle has a large number of these just to himself, from continued support for the Steady State theory long after the detection of cosmic microwave background radiation, to the even less defensible claims that the Natural History Museum's archaeopteryx fossil is a fake and that flu germs are really alien microbes!

Anyhow, here's the first quote:

1) Something is seriously wrong with space travel.

Richard van der Riet Woolley was the British Astronomer Royal at the dawn of the Space Age. His most infamous quote is the archetypal instance of Arthur C. Clarke's First Law:  "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Although a prominent astronomer, van der Riet Woolley had little knowledge of the practical mechanics that would be required for spaceflight. By the mid-1930s the British Interplanetary Society had developed detailed (although largely paper-only) studies into a crewed lunar landing mission. In 1936 Van der Riet Woolley publically criticised such work, stating that the development of even an unmanned rocket would present fundamental technical difficulties. Bear in mind that this was only six years before the first V2 rocket, which was capable of reaching an altitude of just over 200km!

In 1956, only one year before Sputnik 1 - and thirteen years prior to Apollo 11 - the astronomer went on to claim that near-future space travel was unlikely and a manned lunar landing "utter bilge, really". Of course this has been used as ammunition against him ever since, but the quote deserves some investigation. Van der Riet Woolley goes on to reveal that his primary objection appears to have changed (presumably post-V2 and its successors) from an engineering problem to an economic one, stating that it would cost as much as a "major war" to land on the moon.

This substantially changes the flavour of his quote, since it is after all reasonably accurate. In 2010 dollars, Project Apollo has an estimated budget of about US$109 billion - incidentally about 11% of the cost of the contemporary Vietnam War. In addition, we should bear in mind that a significant amount of the contractors' work on the project is said to have consisted of unpaid overtime. Is it perhaps time to reappraise the stargazer from a reactionary curmudgeon to an economic realist?

Indeed, had Apollo been initiated in a subsequent decade, there is reasonable evidence to suggest it would have failed to leave the ground, so to speak. The uncertainty of the post-Vietnam and Watergate period, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, suggest America's loss of faith in technocracy would have effectively cut Apollo off in its prime. After all, another colossal American science and engineering project, the $12 billion particle accelerator the Superconducting Super Collider, was cancelled in 1993 after being deemed unaffordable. Yet up to that point only about one-sixth of its estimated budget had been spent.

In addition, van der Riet Woolley was not alone among STEM professionals: for three decades from the mid-1920s the inventor of the vacuum tube Lee De Forest is said to have claimed that space travel was impractical. Clearly, the Astronomer Royal was not an isolated voice in the wilderness but part of a large consensus opposed to the dreamers in the British Interplanetary Society and their ilk. Perhaps we should allow him his pragmatism, even if it appears a polar opposite to one of Einstein's great aphorisms: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. .."

Talking of whom…

2) Letting the genie out of the bottle.

In late 1934 an American newspaper carried this quotation from Albert Einstein: "There is not the slightest indication that (nuclear energy) will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." This seems to be rather amusing, considering the development of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction only eight years later. But Einstein was first and foremost a theorist, a master of the thought experiment, his father's work in electrical engineering not being noticeably sustained in his son. There is obviously a vast world of difference between imagining riding a beam of light to the practical difficulties in assembling brand new technologies with little in the way of precedent. So why did Einstein make such a definitive prediction?

I think it is possible that it may also have been wishful thinking on Einstein's part; as a pacifist he would have dreaded the development of a new super weapon. As the formulator of the equivalence between mass and energy, he could have felt in some way responsible for initiating the avalanche that eventually led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet there is no clear path between E=mc2 and a man-made chain reaction; it took a team of brilliant experimental physicists and engineers in addition to theorists to achieve a practical solution, via the immense budget of $26 billion (in 2016 dollars).

It is hardly as if the good professor was alone in his views either, as senior officials also doubted the ability to harness atomic fission for power or weaponry. In 1945 when the Manhattan Project was nearing culmination, the highest-ranking member of the American military, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, apparently informed President Truman that the atomic bomb wouldn't work. Perhaps this isn't as obtuse as it sounds, since due to the level of security only a very small percentage of the personnel working on the project knew any of the details.

Leahy clearly knew exactly what the intended outcome was, but even as "an expert in explosives" had no understanding of the complexity of engineering involved. An interesting associated fact is that despite being a military man, the Admiral considered the atomic bomb unethical for its obvious potential as an indiscriminate killer of civilians. Weapons of mass destruction lack any of the valour or bravado of traditional 'heroic' warfare.  Is it possible that this martial leader wanted the bomb to fail for moral reasons, a case of heart over mind? In which case, is this a rare example in which the pacifism of the most well-known scientist was in total agreement with a military figurehead?

Another potential cause is the paradigm shift that harnessing the power of the atom required. In the decade prior to the Manhattan Project, New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford had referred to the possibility of man-made atomic energy as "moonshine" whilst another Nobel laureate, American physicist Robert Millikan, had made similar sentiments in the 1920s. And this from men who were pioneers in understanding the structure of the atom!

As science communicator James Burke vividly described in his 1985 television series The Day the Universe Changed, major scientific developments often require substantial reappraisals in outlook, seeing beyond what is taken for granted. The cutting edge of physics is often described as being ruled by theorists in their twenties; eager young turks who are more prepared to ignore precedents. When he became a pillar of the establishment, Einstein ruefully commented: "To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."

Perhaps then, such fundamental shifts in technology as the development of space travel and nuclear fission require equally revolutionary changes in mind set and we shouldn't judge the authors of our example quotes too harshly. Then again, if you are an optimist, Clarke's First Law might seem applicable in this situation, in which case quotes from authority figures with some knowledge of the subject in hand should take note of the ingenuity of our species. If there is a moral to this to story, it is other than the speed of light in a vacuum and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, never say never...

Thursday 31 January 2013

Profiling the future: science predictions of a bygone age

I recently heard a joke along the lines of: "Question: What would a scientist from one hundred years ago find most disconcerting about current technology? Answer: whilst there are cheap, mass-produced, pocket-sized devices that can hold a large proportion of mankind's knowledge, they are mostly used for viewing humorous videos of cats!" The obvious point to make (apart from all the missed potential) is that the future is likely to be far more unpredictable than even the best-informed science fiction writer is capable of formulating. But if SF authors are unlikely to make accurate predictions, what are the chances that trained scientists will be any good at prognostication either?

As a child I read with breathless wonder various examples of mainstream science prediction delineating the early Twenty-first Century: flying cars, underwater cities, domestic robots and enormous space colonies; after all, I did grow up in the 1970s! Unfortunately I wasn't to know that these grandiose visions were already fading by the time Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. Yet if this was caused by a decline in the Victorian ideal of progress (or should that be Progress) why didn't the authors of these volumes know about it?

Despite the apparent decline in mega-budget projects over the past forty years - Large Hadron Collider and International Space Station excepted - popular science and technology exposition continued to promote wild, wonderful and occasionally downright wacky ideas into the 1980s. One of the best known examples of the genre is Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future, originally published in 1962 but with updated editions appearing in 1973, 1983 and 1999. As a leading SF writer and 'Godfather of the Communications Satellite' Clarke seemed better placed than most to make accurate predictions, and thus making him a suitable example with which to explore this theme. Indeed, the first edition of Profiles… contains what was to become his First Law, a direct reference to one of the dangers of prophesizing developments in science and technology: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Unfortunately, by always following this notion Clarke's prognostications frequently appear overly optimistic, utilising a schoolboy enthusiasm for advancement that downplays the interactions between science and society.

Interestingly, this optimism appears in exact opposition to earlier generations, wherein scientists and pioneer SF writers were frequently pessimistic as to the impact that new science and technology would have on civilisation. Whilst some of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells' fictional predictions have been realised their most negative visions have yet to occur, unless you consider the West's current obsession with witless celebrities and consumerism as a veritable precursor of Wells' post-human Eloi. (Note: if you enjoy watching TV shows such as Celebrity Chefs' Pets' Got Talent you should probably read Wells' The Time Machine as soon as possible…)

While the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century equivalents of Michael Crichton were raising the possibility of technologically-led dystopias, their scientific contemporaries frequently abided by a philosophy antithetical to Clarke's First Law. The likes of Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford and even Albert Einstein opposed theories now part and parcel of the scientific canon, ranging from black holes, meteorite impacts on Earth and quantum electrodynamics to the ensuing development of heavier-than-air flight, atomic bombs and even commercial radio transmission. Given how quickly advances in science and technology occurred during Clarke's first fifty years, perhaps he and his fellow prophets could be forgiven for thinking progress would remain on a steady, upward path. After all, in terms of astronautics alone, the quarter century from the V-2 to Apollo 11 vindicated many of their ideas and at the same time proved that some of the finest scientific minds of the early Twentieth Century - Rutherford, J.B.S. Haldane, various Astronomer Royals, et al - had been completely wrong.

However, even brief analysis of recent history, say the post-Apollo era, shows that scientific developments are subject to the complicated interactions of culture, economics and leadership; and of course, simple serendipity. The first edition of Profiles of the Future stated that the Ground Effect Machine (A.K.A. hovercraft) would soon become a prominent form of land transport. In the context of the time - the SR.N1 having only made its first 'flight' three years earlier - this would seem to be a reasonable proposition, but once you stop to consider the invested interests in the established transport sector it is readily apparent that such a new kid on the block could not get established without overcoming major obstacles (of a non-technical variety). As Stephen Jay Gould was fond of pointing out, it is exceedingly difficult to replace even suboptimal technology once it has become established, the QWERTY keyboard layout being a prominent example.

As a converse, pioneers such as British jet engine inventor Frank Whittle found themselves snubbed by an establishment that failed to see the advantages of disturbing the status quo. Another issue concerns how theories can easily get lost and only later rediscovered, such as the work of genetics pioneer Gregor Mendel. By failing to take enough notice of these issues, Clarke's generation watched their predictions fall out of synchronisation after what appeared to be a promising start. In contrast, futurists with a keen interest in the sociological implications of new technology, Alvin Toffler perhaps being the best known, have long noted that progress can be non-linear and subject to the vagaries of the society in which it develops.

Although Arthur C. Clarke is remembered as a 'prophet of the space age' it is interesting to ask how original was he: inventive genius, smart extrapolator from the best of H.G. Wells (and numerous pulp SF writers) or just a superb mouth piece for the cutting edge technologists? The Saturn V architect Wernher von Braun for example wrote The Mars Project, a 1948 detailed study for a manned mission to Mars that showed parallels with Clarke's writings of the period. Bombarded as we are today by numerous examples of space travel in fact and fiction, it's hard to imagine a time when anyone discussing the possibility was deemed an eccentric. For instance Robert Goddard, the American pioneer of liquid-fuelled rockets during the 1920s and 30s, faced enormous criticism from those who considered his physics flawed. Only with the development of the V-2 rocket (again, involving von Braun) was there some science fact to back up the fiction and the start of the change in public perception of astronautics from crackpot to realisation. Ironically, the new advances also provided fuel for a moral opposition, C.S. Lewis being a prominent example, who argued that humans shouldn't develop space travel until their ethics had improved. Clarke may be known for his anti-nationalistic stance concerning space exploration, but during the late 1940s and early 1950s even he wrote both fact (The rocket and the future of warfare) and fiction (Earthlight) discussing its military potential.

Just because some of Clarke's ideas - in distinct opposition to all the naysayers - came to fairly rapid fruition doesn't make him a genius at prediction; in the broad sweep of developments he was frequently correct, but when it came to the details there are marked differences. His landmark 1945 paper on global communications from geosynchronous orbit also suggested that atomic-powered rockets would be commonplace by the mid-1960s, a topic elaborated on by his British Interplanetary Society (BIS) colleagues several years later. Whilst Project NERVA did test such systems during that decade, various factors put this line of development on indefinite hold. Clarke also thought the orbital communications system would consist of three, large manned stations rather than dozens of small, unmanned satellites. But then, the development of the microchip in 1959 led to a paradigm shift in miniaturisation largely unforeseen by any prognosticator. It's interesting that although Clarke was postulating remote-controlled war rockets by as early as 1946 he didn't discuss automated space probes until much later: is it possible that the fiction writer within him wanted to downplay the use of dramatically weak unmanned missions? Also, in an unusually modest statement, Clarke himself claimed that he had advanced the idea of orbital communications by approximately fifteen minutes!

So if the technological aspects of Profiles… are reasonably unimpeachable, the failure to consider the infinite complexities of human beings and the societies they build mean that many of Clarke's ideas remain unfulfilled or have been postponed indefinitely. Even for those examples that have been achieved such as the manned moon landings, albeit some years ahead of Clarke's most optimistic timeline, the primary motivations such as the Cold War overshadowed the scientific aspect. Clarke admitted in later years that Project Apollo bore an uncanny resemblance to the first South Polar expedition, the latter being largely motivated by national pride. Indeed, Amundsen's 1911 expedition was not followed up for almost half a century. Clarke even suggested that had he and his BIS armchair astronaut colleagues known the true costs of a lunar landing mission they would probably have given up their feasibility studies in the 1930s! So when as late as 1956 the then Astronomer Royal Richard van der Riet Woolley stated that such an expedition was impractical on grounds of cost alone, he was not far from the truth. As it was, even with a 'minor war'-sized budget an enormous amount of largely unpaid overtime - and resulting divorce rate within project staff - were key to achieving President Kennedy's goal.

Unfortunately, it was a long time before Clarke admitted that non-technical incentives play a key role and he seems to have never fully reconciled himself to this. Although he occasionally promoted and inspired practical, achievable near-future goals such as educational broadcasting via satellite to rural communities in the developing world, his imagination was often looking into deep space and equally deep time. Yet his prominent profile meant that the ethos behind Profiles of the Future was frequently copied in glossy expositions by lesser authors and editors. When in his later years Clarke delineated specific forecasts using his standard criteria, they almost entirely failed to hit the mark: his 1999 speculative, if in places tongue-in-cheek, timeline for the Twenty-first Century has to date failed all of its predictions, with some unlikely to transpire for some decades or possibly even centuries to come. That's not to say that we couldn't do with some of his prophecies coming true sooner rather later: even relatively small advances such as the paperless office would of enormous benefit, but how that could be achieved is anyone's guess!

As a writer of both fact and fiction, Clarke's works have a complex interaction between the world that is and the world as it could be. Many space-orientated professionals, from NASA astronauts to Carl Sagan, claimed inspiration from him, whilst the various Spaceguard surveys of near-Earth objects are named after the prototype in Clarke's 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama. One of his key ideas was that intellectual progress requires a widening of horizons, whereas a lot of contemporary technological advances are primarily inward-looking, such as electronic consumer goods. But as I have mentioned before, won't we require thought leaders to share something of Clarke's philosophy in order to limit or reverse environmental disasters in the near future? Stephen Hawking for one has stated his belief that the long-term survival of humanity relies on us becoming a multi-planet species sooner rather than later, as unforeseen natural or man-made disasters are a question of when rather than if. Naïve they may appear to be to our jaded, post-modern eyes, but as a visionary with realist tendencies Clarke had an enormous impact on succeeding generations of scientists, engineers and enthusiasts. But to see how Clarke's successors are faring in our relatively subdued times, you'll have to wait until the next post…

Monday 30 July 2012

Buy Jupiter: the commercialisation of outer space

I recently saw a billboard for the Samsung Galaxy SIII advertising a competition to win a "trip to space", in the form of a suborbital hop aboard a Virgin Galactic SpaceshipTwo. This phrase strikes me as highly interesting: a trip to space, not into space, as if the destination was just another beach holiday resort. The accompanying website uses the same wording, so clearly the choice of words wasn't caused by space issues (that's space for the text, not space as in outer). Despite less than a dozen space tourists to date, is space travel now considered routine and the rest of the universe ripe for commercial gain, as per the Pan Am shuttle and Hilton space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or is this all somewhat premature, with the hype firmly ahead of the reality? After all, the first fee-paying space tourist, Dennis Tito, launched only eleven years ago in 2001.

Vodafone is only the second company after Guinness Breweries to offer space travel prizes, although fiction was way ahead of the game: in Arthur C. Clarke's 1952 children's novel Islands in the Sky the hero manages a trip into low Earth orbit thanks to a competition loophole.  However, the next decade could prove the turning point. Virgin Galactic already have over 500 ticket-holders whilst SpaceX, developer of the first commercial orbital craft - the unmanned Dragon cargo ship - plan to build a manned version that could reduce orbital seat costs by about 60%.

If anything, NASA is pushing such projects via its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme, including the aim of using for-profit services for the regular supply of cargo and crew to the International Space Station (ISS). The intention is presumably for NASA to concentrate on research and development rather than routine operations, but strong opposition to such commercialisation comes from an unusual direction: former NASA astronauts including Apollo pioneers Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan deem the COTs programme a threat to US astronautic supremacy. This seems to be more an issue of patriotism and politics rather than a consideration of technological or scientific importance. With China set to overtake the USA in scientific output next year and talk of a three-crew temporary Chinese space station within 4 years, the Eclipse of the West has already spread beyond the atmosphere. Then again, weren't pre-Shuttle era NASA projects, like their Soviet counterparts, primarily driven by politics, prestige, and military ambitions, with technological advances a necessary by-product and science very much of secondary importance?

Commerce in space could probably be said to have begun with the first communications satellite, Telstar 1, in 1962. The big change for this decade is the ability to launch ordinary people rather than trained specialists into space, although as I have mentioned before, the tourist jaunts planned by Virgin Galactic hardly go where no-one has gone before. The fundamental difference is that such trips are deemed relatively safe undertakings, even if the ticket costs of are several orders greater than any terrestrial holiday. A trip on board SpaceShipTwo is currently priced at US$200,000 whilst a visit to the International Space Station will set you back one hundred times that amount. This is clearly somewhat closer to the luxury flying boats of the pre-jet era than any modern package tour.

What is almost certain is that despite Virgin Galactic's assessment of the risk as being akin to 1920s airliners, very few people know enough of aviation history's safety record to make this statistic meaningful. After all, two of the five Space Shuttle orbiters were lost, the latter being the same number intended for the SpaceshipTwo fleet. Although Virgin Galactic plays the simplicity card for their design - i.e. the fewer the components, the less the chance of something going wrong - it should be remembered that the Columbia and Challenger shuttles were lost due to previously known and identified problems with the external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters respectively. In other words, when there is a known technical issue but the risk is considered justifiable, human error enters the equation.

In addition, human error isn't just restricted to the engineers and pilots: anything from passenger illness (about half of all astronauts get spacesick - headaches and nausea for up to several days after launch) to disruptive behaviour of the sort I have witnessed on airliners. Whether the loss of business tycoons or celebrities would bring more attention to the dangers of space travel remains to be seen. Unfortunately, the increase in number and type of spacecraft means it is almost certainly a case of when, not if.

Planet Saturn via a Skywatcher telescope

Location location location (via my Skywatcher 130PM)

But if fifteen minutes of freefall might seem a sublime experience there are also some ridiculous space-orientated ventures, if some of the ludicrous claims found on certain websites are anything to go by. Although the 1967 Outer Space Treaty does not allow land on other bodies to be owned by a nation state, companies such as Lunar Embassy have sold plots on the Moon to over 3 million customers. It is also possible to buy acres on Mars and Venus, even if the chance of doing anything with it is somewhat limited. I assume most customers treat their land rights as a novelty item, about as useful as say, a pet rock, but with some companies issuing mineral rights deeds for regions of other planets, could this have serious implications in the future? Right now it might seem like a joke, but as the Earth's resources dwindle and fossil fuels run low, could private companies race to exploit extra-terrestrial resources such as lunar Helium 3?

Various cranks/forward thinkers (delete as appropriate) have applied to buy other planets since at least the 1930s but with COTs supporting private aerospace initiatives such as unmanned lunar landers there is at least the potential of legal wrangling over mining rights throughout the solar system. The US-based company Planetary Resources has announced its intention to launch robot mining expeditions to some of the 1500 or so near-Earth asteroids, missions that are the technological equivalent of a lunar return mission.

But if there are enough chunks of space rock to go round, what about the unique resources that could rapidly become as crowded as low Earth orbit? For example, the Earth-Moon system's five Lagrange points are gravitationally stable positions useful for scientific missions, whilst geosynchronous orbit is vital for commercial communication satellites. So far, national governments have treated outer space like Antarctica, but theoretically a private company could cause trouble if the law fails to keep up with the technology, in much the same way that the internet has been a happy harbour for media pirates.

Stephen Hawking once said "To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit". Then again, no-one should run before they can walk, never mind fly. We've got a long way to go before we reach the giddy heights of wheel-shaped Hiltons, but as resources dwindle and our population soars, at some point it will presumably become a necessity to undertake commercial space ventures, rather than just move Monte Carlo into orbit. Now, where's the best investment going to be: an acre of Mars or two on the Moon?

Sunday 1 April 2012

A very special relationship: NASA, BIS and the race to the moon

More years back than I care to remember I met a British satellite engineer who was part of a team investigating a loose component rattling around its latest project...which unfortunately was already in Earth orbit. By rolling the satellite via its attitude thrusters they hoped to discover the nature of the problematic item, which I glibly suggested might have been an absent-minded engineer's lunchbox. I don't believe my idea was followed up and as it was, I never did find out the outcome. Answers on a postcard, please!

The relevance of this anecdote is that as discussed in an earlier post on boffins, it's often been said that Britain stopped technologically trailblazing some decades back. Now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, newly-released material suggests the pipe-smoking 'backroom boys' might have played a more pivotal role in astronautics than has been generally made public. Some aviation experts consider the fabled TSR2 strike aircraft (envisioned in 1956 and cancelled a decade later) as the last project where Britain took the lead, but the most recently released FoI records offer tantalising evidence otherwise.

I realise this idea requires concrete evidence, but we have to remember that despite tiny budgets by American standards, Britain is the original home of numerous technological advances, from the Hawker Harrier 'jump' jet to the hovercraft. And never forget that the USA has never developed a supersonic airliner in the forty-plus years since Concorde first flew. One reason the UK has apparently failed to keep up could be that transatlantic politics have overridden the applied science. For example, the satellite engineer mentioned above also worked on the 1980's fiasco known as Project Zircon, a British military satellite that was cancelled allegedly due to skyrocketing costs (there's sort of a jest in there, if you look hard enough). But what if an additional, if not real primary reason, was pressure from the US Government? There have been hints over the years that the European Launch Development Organisation, a predecessor of the European Space Agency, was forced to cancel its remote-controlled space tug project as NASA (and therefore the White House) deemed it too advanced and therefore a potential competitor. So if post-war British technology has been deemed a commercial or security risk to the USA, might the latter have applied pressure to cancel the project or even take over the research, lock, stock and blueprint?

This might sound far-fetched, but many a former British security officer's memoirs have mentioned that the 'special relationship' between the two nations has led the UK to kowtow to the USA on numerous occasions. This ranges from automatically offering new military-biased technology such as signals intelligence software to the US, through to diverting national security listening resources to US-specified targets at the drop of a hat. So might it be possible that political pressure rather than rising costs and technological failures has caused the cancellation of advant-garde projects, or even that the US has unfairly appropriated British high-tech wizardry?

The main thrust of this post (pun on its way) concerns the Apollo/Saturn spacecraft and rocket system (geddit now?) and how the US apparently single-handedly managed to achieve a moon landing less than a decade after the start of manned spaceflight. After all, if you consider that the Saturn V was a completely reliable, purpose-built civilian launch vehicle, unlike earlier manned spacecraft which had relied on adapted ballistic missiles, and in addition was far larger and more powerful than any previous American rocket, it seems incredible how quickly the project came together. Also, one of the chief designers was Wernher von Braun, an idealistic dreamer whose primary life-long interest appears to have been a manned mission to Mars and who a decade before Apollo had been developing plans for 160-foot long rocket ships carrying crews of twenty astronauts! Even the doyen of technology prophets Arthur C. Clarke was sceptical that NASA could achieve President Kennedy's goal for a manned moon landing before 1970.

In which case, I hear you ask, how did Project Apollo succeed so magnificently, especially when the N1, the USSR's equivalent, pretty much failed to escape the launchpad? It wasn't with the help of alien technology, that's for sure. At this point it is worth going back into Clarke's past. In 1937 the Technical Committee of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), of which Clarke was twice chairman, began a study for a manned moon landing mission. The launch vehicle was comparatively modest compared to Saturn V and the N1, utilising tiers of several thousand small solid-fuel rockets, each step being akin to the later real-life launch vehicle stages. Then in 1949, knowledge of the German V-2 rockets (in which Wernher von Braun had played a key role) led the BIS team to switch to liquid-fuelled engines.

But if the rocket seems highly impractical to modern eyes*, the manned component of the BIS scheme was remarkable for its similarity to NASA hardware, being a combination of the Apollo CMS and LM craft. Many of its features are fundamentally identical to the real thing, from carbon dioxide scrubbers to landing parachutes. Even the EVA suits bear a striking similarity to the NASA design, albeit using less advanced materials. The only big difference I can see was the lack of an onboard computer in the BIS design: hardly surprising, considering the first programmable electronic computer, the room-sized Colossus at Bletchley Park, didn't become operational until 1944 (beat that, ENIAC!) I assume the poor navigator would be stuck with a slide rule instead, provision having been made in the ship's larder for coffee to keep them awake.

*Since then, real launch vehicles have used the modular approach, including the private company OTRAG in the 1970s and '80s and even the Saturn V's predecessors, Saturn 1 and 1B, which used a cluster of eight boosters around the core of the first stage.

But the moon landing project wasn't totally restricted to paper: several instruments were actually built, including an inertial altimeter and a coelostat that was demonstrated at the Science Museum in London. The competence of the Technical Committee members shouldn't be underestimated, as in addition to Arthur C. Clarke they included A.V. Cleaver (another sometime BIS chairman) and R.A. Smith, both of whom later worked on British military rocket and missile projects.

British Interplanetary Society moon lander
The British boffin's ultimate pipe dream

It might not appear convincing that these British speculations could have been converted into NASA blueprints, but a combination of carrot and stick during the dark, paranoid days of the Cold War might have been enough to silence the BIS team's complaints at the appropriation of their work. After all, the project generated a lot of attention even before the Second World War, with coverage in Time Magazine and a visit from a presumed Nazi agent in 1939.

What's more, by the early 1950s Clarke was communicating with now US-based ex-V-2 rocketeers von Braun and Hermann Oberth, whilst R.A. Smith's son later worked for NASA on the Apollo programme! There is even an intriguing suggestion that the very idea of launching early satellites on adapted military missiles (a technique utilised by both the USA and USSR) was promoted in the former country by Alexander Satin, then chief engineer of the Air Branch of the Office of Naval Research, US Navy, after he witnessed a satellite project at the 1951 Second Astronautical Congress in London. And of course, that project's team included Clarke and Cleaver; the space community in those days must have been rather on the small side.

Despite the organisation's name, there have been many American BIS members over the decades, including senior NASA figures such as Dr. Kurt Debus, Director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center during the 1960s; and Gerald Griffin, a Lead Flight Director during the Apollo programme. NASA's primary contractors for Apollo were equally staffed with BIS members, including Grumman's project manager for the Lunar Module (LM), Joseph Gavin Jr. I'm not suggesting that every blivet and gubbins (to use Clarkian terms) on the BIS lunar ship was directly translated into NASA hardware, but the speed with which Project Apollo succeeded, especially compared to the USSR's failure despite its' initial head start, smacks of outside assistance. For an example of how rapidly NASA contractors appear to have cobbled together their designs, Thomas Kelly, Grumman's LM Chief Design Engineer, admitted he was one of only two employees working on LM designs for several years leading up to the NASA-awarded contract in 1962.

In addition to the BIS material, there are X-Files style hints that the British Government was making strides of a more nuts-and-bolts nature with its own lunar landing programme. In 1959 the UK's rocket launch site in Woomera, Australia, appears to have begun construction of a launch pad capable of handling the two- and three-stage man-rated rockets then under development by various British aerospace consortiums, the most prominent of which included winged orbiters akin to more recent NASA lifting body designs. (Incidentally, five UK companies at the time were involved in spacesuit development, with the final Apollo EVA suit owing a lot to the undergarment cooling system developed in the UK.)

Just to put a spanner in the works, one negative piece of evidence for my technology censorship hypothesis is that NASA clearly took no notice of the BIS crew menu. Even after Apollo 11 large strides in technology continued to be made, but the work of the food technologists was not amongst them: all Apollo astronauts lost weight and suffered electrolyte imbalance, which clearly would not have happened if they had stuck to the wholesome fare - ham and cheese sandwiches, porridge, and the like - envisioned by the British boffins. It's a shame that their health temporarily suffered, but at least Neil Armstrong and co. could take music cassettes of everyone from Dvorak to the Beatles on their journeys; imagine being stuck in a small cabin with scratchy recordings of Flanagan and Allen or Vera Lynn...

Friday 1 April 2011

Moonage daydreams: lunacy, conspiracy and the Apollo moon landings

It's astonishing to think that in less than two weeks' time it will be half a century since Yuri Gargarin slipped the surly bonds of Earth in Vostock 1. Although a generation has grown up since the end of the Cold War, any study of early astronautics cannot exclude a major dollop of politics. This is particularly true of the Apollo moon landing programme and President Kennedy's commitment to achieve this goal by 1970. Now as much a part of history as a fading memory, a small but significant number of theorists doubt the veracity of the missions. But are they just the same crackpots/misguided types (delete as required) who claim to have been abducted by aliens, or is there anything more concrete to go on?

A wide range of conspiracy stories has been circulating since rocket engine company employee the (now late) Bill Kaysing self-published his 1974 opus We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Of course conspiracy was very much in the American psyche during that period: the Watergate affair had occurred 6 months prior to the final moon landing mission in December 1972 whilst President Nixon's resignation followed the release of the crucial audio tape evidence in August 1974. In a sense, the world was ready for Kaysing's theories, but can an impartial assessment show how accurate they are? Much of his thesis can be dismissed with a little application of the scientific method: the alleged problems on photographs and movie footage such as disappearing cross-hairs or incorrect shadows and lighting are easy to resolve. In another vein, the waving of the US flag on the lunar surface, attributed to wind in an Earth-based moon simulator, is just foolish. Why would such amateur mistakes occur if an elaborate cover-up were true?

However, new evidence recently made public from former Soviet archives hints that the conspiracy theorists may be on to something after all. Telemetry tapes from the USSR's land- and ship-based deep space network suggest that there was an additional signal hidden, via frequency division multiplexing, underneath transmissions to the Apollo craft. This implies that what actually went to the moon were pairs of empty spacecraft: a robot version of the lander (or LM); and a command module (CSM) with an automated radio system. This latter set-up would isolate the hidden transmissions received from Earthbound astronauts and beam them back to fool the world into thinking the spacecraft was manned. The crew themselves would divide their time between Apollo mock-ups built inside a weightless training aircraft or 'vomit comet' (ironically also the technique used in the 1995 film Apollo 13) and a recreation of the lunar surface in the infamous Area 51 complex in Nevada. Of course the associated activities of sending robot sample-return missions to bring back massive quantities of moon rock (the same method used by the Soviet Luna missions from 1970 onwards) would presumably have eaten so deeply into NASA's budget as to be responsible for the cancellation of the last three moon-landing missions (or fake missions, as perhaps we should refer to them).

The obvious question is why go to all this length when the programme's fantastic achievements – the rockets, spacecraft, and their entire cutting-edge infrastructure - had already been built? Again, the USSR can add something to the picture. Fully six months before the Apollo 11 flight, the Soviet Union officially announced it was pulling out of the moon race and would not even attempt a manned flight to the moon. Then the month after Apollo 11's splashdown, the Soviets launched Zond 7, an unmanned variant of their Soyuz craft (a design still in use today to ferry crew to the International Space Station), on a circumlunar trajectory. What is interesting is that the craft carried 'special radiation protection'. Had they found a fundamental obstruction to a manned lunar landing mission? Less than one month prior to Apollo 11, when you would have thought NASA would have been completely focussed on that mission (and bearing in mind the massive amount of unpaid overtime required to maintain schedules), the US launched a pigtail monkey called Bonny into orbit aboard Biosat 3. This almost unknown mission was terminated more than twenty days early, with Bonny dying 8 hours after landing. What was so urgent it needed testing at this crucial time? In a word: radiation.

The Van Allen Belt consists of two tori (basically, doughnuts) of high-energy charged particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field. After its existence was confirmed by the USA's first satellite, Explorer 1, continuous observation proved that the radiation intensity varies over time as well as space. Unfortunately, 1969-1970 was a peak period in the cycle, in addition to which it was accidentally augmented by artificially-induced radiation. In 1962 the USA detonated a 1.4 megaton atomic weapon at an altitude of 400 kilometres. Although by no means the largest bomb used during four years of high-altitude testing, Operation Starfish Prime generated far more radiation than any similar US or USSR experiment, quickly crippling a number of satellites, including some belonging to the Soviets.

The theory holds that this additional radiation belt would have had a profound effect on manned spacecraft travelling beyond low Earth orbit. An additional whammy would be the danger of deep-space radiation once away from the protection of the geomagnetic field. The BBC's 2004 docudrama series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets showed this quite nicely when the interplanetary Pegasus mission lost its doctor to cosmic radiation. There is also speculation that the impact of cosmic rays on the lunar surface generates a spray of secondary particles that would prove hazardous to astronauts. Although it's not clear if the Russians were sending animals into space during the late 1960s as per the Biosat series, Bill Kaysing claimed he had been given access to a Soviet study that recommended blanketing lunar surface astronauts in over a metre of lead!

The Apollo missions of course utilised what was then cutting edge technology, but even so the payload capacity of the Saturn V rocket did not allow for spacecraft with anything but the lightest of construction techniques. Indeed, the Apollo lunar module had outer coverings of Mylar-aluminium alloy – a substance that appears to be a high-tech version of baking foil. In this instance it seems rather apt, in the sense that it may well have lead to self-basting astronauts, had they actually been on board. In all seriousness, the heaviest of the fuelled-up CSM-LM configurations was around 40 tonnes (for Apollo 17), only five tonnes short of the maximum lunar transfer trajectory capacity. Since it took an 111-metre tall Saturn V to launch these craft, it is clear that lead shielding wasn't really an option.

Some conspiracy theorists have argued that Stanley Kubrick, coming directly from four years of making 2001: A Space Odyssey, was involved in the hoax filming, but this seems rather ridiculous (although another irony is that 2010: Odyssey Two director Peter Hyams had earlier made the Mars mission conspiracy film Capricorn One, the film's hardware consisting of Apollo craft...) A far more plausible candidate to my mind is Gene Roddenberry, the originator of Star Trek. The Apollo 8 circumlunar flight over Christmas 1968 (including a reading from Genesis, no less), the 'happy' (from a ratings point of view) accident of Apollo 13, even the use of America's first rocket-launched astronaut Alan Shepard as commander of Apollo 14, hint back to the homely yet patriotic heroics of Kirk and co. As for the photographic effects crew, my money would be on one 2001's effects supervisors, namely the engineering genius Douglas Trumbull. Today even amateurs like myself can attempt to replicate their brilliant work: here's my take of Armstrong and Aldrin, done many moons ago, courtesy of Messer Airfix and Photoshop (shame you can't see the cross-hairs at this size):

Apollo lunar lander
As for how all those involved have managed to maintain silence over the decades, Neil Armstrong's publicity shyness is about the only example I can think of that bolsters the argument. Except there is also the curious case of Britain's own "pretty far out" David Bowie, who somehow seems to have been in the know. It sounds bizarre, but if you examine his oeuvre from Space Oddity onwards ("your circuits dead, there's something wrong") to the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (complete with a cameo from Apollo 13 commander James Lovell as himself) you begin to find a subliminal thematic thread. For me, these culminate in the 1971 song Moonage Daydream, with the deeply conspiratorial lyrics "Keep your mouth shut, you're squawking like a pink monkey bird...Don't fake it baby, lay the real thing on me..."

Couldn't have put it any better myself!