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.

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?

Ultramarine and ultraviolet: scientific theories and technological techniques in contemporary art

If one of your first thoughts when considering science is of a scruffy-headed physicist chalking equations on a blackboard - interactive whiteboards somehow being not quite the same - then it's easy to see how the subject might offer limited appeal to artists. So is it possible in our visually sophisticated society to create satisfying works of art that utilise elements of scientific thought processes, theories or techniques?

It's difficult to define what constitutes contemporary art, since the majority of people seemingly find it difficult to relate to installations, video art or ready-mades, never mind more traditional media. On the other hand, it can be argued that scientists might have a sense of aesthetic that differs profoundly from the mainstream. A well-known example of this was electro-magnetism pioneer James Clerk Maxwell's addition of a term to an equation in order to achieve an aesthetic balance, prior to him working out the actual meaning of the term.  Novelist and physicist Alan Lightman promotes the notion that scientists have a difference perspective on aesthetics, from the familiar consideration of particle symmetries to more abstruse mathematical harmonies. He describes Steven Weinberg's 1967 paper on the weak nuclear interaction in these terms: "to a physicist, (this) Langrangian…is a work of art." As someone of very limited mathematical ability like me it might as well be written in ancient cuneiform, but you can judge for yourself below:

But then aren't all aesthetic judgements subjective? One familiar chain of urban myths concerns art galleries who have suffered the embarrassment of finding their installations thrown out by over-zealous cleaners who were unaware the material was art. This leads to the interesting point that although much contemporary art is roundly ignored outside the cognoscenti, new technology and the social changes engendered by it, especially mobile communications and the World Wide Web, have been rapidly assimilated and rarely questioned. When it comes to the shock of the new, scientific ideas and the resulting technology appear much more comfortable than post-Second World War art. Or should that be qualified by the statement that if the technology is seen (albeit via persuasive advertising) as an improvement to everyday life, then it will be unquestioningly accepted, whereas art is ignored since it is rarely seen as serving a purpose?

At this point it might be good to consider two distinct approaches to how the two disciplines can be integrated:

1. visual representations of and/or responses to science
2. the use of scientific theories and methods to produce art

Approach 1:
In the Eighteenth Century Joseph Wright of Derby produced several atmospheric scenes of experiments, but the art history of the past century has made such clear-cut reportage unfashionable. The visual sophistication of our age would probably deem equivalent work today as both pedestrian and irrelevant to contemporary needs. After all, a straightforward painting of the Large Hadron Collider or a theorist lecturing in front of an equation-covered black board would hardly prove satisfying either from an aesthetic standpoint or as journalistic commentary. Changing technology has also eliminated the innate visual romanticism of peering through the eyepiece of a microscope or telescope; sitting at a computer screen is hardly inspiring material for the heirs to Wright of Derby.

Over the years I've attended several exhibitions that emphasised collaborations between both disciplines and have to confess I usually find the works have little depth beyond obvious, facile connections. Last year I saw a series of works reminiscent of my juvenilia (see the previous post). It consisted of a sequence of photographs of birds in flight, overlaid with the relevant motion equations. A slightly better result comes from the world of fashion, via collaboration between designer Helen Storey and her developmental biologist sister Kate. In the late 1990s they created a series of dresses elucidating the first thousand hours of human life, from fertilization through to recognizable human form.

One of my favourite examples is Yukinori Yanagi's World Flag Ant Farm, in which ants were introduced into a series of interconnected Perspex boxes containing national flags made of coloured sand. Once the human artist finished the initial setup, the wandering ants rearranged the pictorial elements as they used the sand to construct their colony. Yanagi stated his intention was to examine how much the animals rely on programmed instructions rather than free thought, but ironically the end result appeared far more expressive of individual freedom than the robot-like mentality considered essential for a hive mind.

Since 2005 Princeton University has been holding an irregular Art of Science competition, but again the resonance of the work varies enormously. Many entries are photographs of experiments or equipment, frequently at nano- to microscopic scales: good to look at but nothing that could not be faked by a skilled Photoshop user. However, a few submissions have proven to be the ultimate achievement of an aesthetic work integrated within an active experiment, including how computer memory degrades following power loss and a study of individual ants within a colony by painting unique patterns of dots on them. By and large though, most examples I have seen are woefully inadequate attempts to combine art and science.

Approach 2:
Originating with Hamlet's dictum to actors, it has been said that art's task is to hold a mirror up to nature. There have been concerted efforts by artists to deconstruct the world by adapting scientific knowledge, from the Impressionists attempt to understand how objects are modelled by light (consider Monet's haystacks and Rouen cathedral at different times of day and year), via the Pointillist's experiments to understand how the eye builds an image from minute elements, to the Futurists and Vorticists attempts to create apparent movement in a still image. Now that science shows us brave new worlds (apologies for mixing my Shakespeares) via electron microscopes, telescopes in numerous wavelengths, etc., what attempts have been made to illustrate this?

Luke Jerram is a colour-blind artist who has created glass sculptures of viruses at approximately one million times life size. What is so interesting apart from the novelty value of the subject matter is that unlike most representations in popular science books, the sculptures are transparent and therefore colourless. The works therefore immediately impart useful knowledge: viruses exist at a scale below the wavelengths of visible light and so cannot be the beautiful if  randomly-hued images we see in computer-generated illustrations. In fact, the only direct visualisation of viruses is produced by high resolution, transmission electron microscopy, the results being monochromatic, grainy and from the layman's point of view, distinctly samey. Jerram's works are not only a complex example of art meeting science, but in a tribute to their accuracy, have been used in medical texts and journals.

American artist Hunter Cole has created interesting works using techniques derived from her geneticist background, such as drawing in bioluminescent bacteria. At an even more experimental level, Brazilian Eduardo Kac has not just used life forms as media but has created novelty organisms as the artworks themselves, such as a fluorescing rabbit courtesy of a jellyfish protein gene; Doctor Frankenstein, come on down! Finally, at yet another step, Luke Jerram's 2007 Dream Director installation even made the viewer the subject of an experiment, although not exactly under laboratory conditions: visitors could stay in the gallery overnight, sleeping in pods which played themed sounds trigged by their own rapid eye movement.

If there is anything the recent history of science, especially cutting-edge physics, has taught us, it is that we need metaphors to visualise ideas that cannot be directly observed by our limited senses. But as astrophysicist and science writer John Gribbin has frequently pointed out, linguistic metaphor is often inadequate to the task, causing the analogy to return upon itself. Thus without help from the visual arts, anyone who isn't a maths genius has little hope of understanding the more arcane aspects of post-classical physics. Both art and science challenge perceptions, but it is likely that the latter will increasingly need the former to elucidate novel facts and theories. So any artist seeking a purpose need look no further: here's to many a fruitful collaboration!

How to be cyantific: connecting the laboratory to the artist's studio

Moving house - or more broadly speaking, hemispheres - last year was a good excuse for a spring clean on an epic scale. One of the items that didn't make the grade even as far as a charity shop was a framed painting I created several decades' ago, a clumsy attempt to describe scientific imagery in acrylics. In front of a false colour radar map of the surface of Venus was the head and neck of a raptor dinosaur above a bowler-hatted figure straight out of Rene Magritte. You can judge the work for yourself below; I seem to remember the bemusement of the framer but as I said at the time, it wasn't meant to be to everyone's taste...

But if my daub was rather wide of the mark, just how successful have attempts been to represent the theory and practice of science in the plastic, non-linear, arts such as painting and sculpture? Whereas musical and mathematical ability seem to readily connect and there has been some admirable science-influenced poetry, by comparison the visual arts are somewhat lacking. Much has been written about the Surrealist's use of psychoanalysis but as this discipline is frequently described as a pseudoscience I've decided to cut through the issue by ignoring it and concentrate on the 'hard' sciences instead.

One of the most difficult issues to resolve (especially for those who accept C.P. Snow's theory of 'two cultures') is that whilst most science books for a general readership describe a linear progression or definitive advancement to the history of science, art has no such obvious arrow of change. After all, a century has passed since the early non-realist movements (Cubism, les Fauves, etc.) but there are plenty of contemporary artists who avoid abstraction. Granted, they are unlikely to win any of the art world's top prizes, but the progression of science and its child technology over the past three or so centuries clearly differentiates the discipline from the arts, both the sequential schools of the West and the 'traditional' aesthetics of other cultures.

Of course, it's usual to differentiate the character of scientists and artists about as far apart as any human behaviour can get, but like most stereotypical ideas it doesn't take much to prove them wildly inaccurate. Anyone aware of Einstein's views ("Imagination is more important than knowledge") or his last unsuccessful decades spent on a unification theory that ignored quantum mechanics will understand that scientists can have as imaginative and colourful personality as any artist. Indeed, the cutting edge of theoretical science, especially physics, may rely on insights and creativity as much as advanced mathematics, a far cry from the popular image of dull, plodding scientists who follow dry, repetitive processes.

Another aspect worth mentioning is that our species appears unique in the ability to create representations of the world that can be recognised as such by most if not all of our species. Despite Congo the chimpanzee gaining enough kudos in the 1950s for Picasso and Miro to buy his paintings, as well as more recent media interest in elephant art works, there is no evidence that under controlled experimental conditions non-human artists can produce obviously realistic images unaided. Then again, could it be that we are so biased in our recognition patterns that we do not identify what passes for realism in other species? Might it be possible that other animals interpret their work as representational when to us it resembles the energetic daubs of toddlers? (This suggests shades of Douglas Adams's dolphins, who considered themselves more intelligent than humans because rather than build cities and fight wars, all do is muck about in water having a good time...)

So where do we start? Firstly, what about unintentional, science-generated art? Over the past decade or so there has been a spate of large format, text-light, coffee table books consisting of images taken by space probes, telescopes and Earth resources satellites. A recent internet success consisted of time lapse photography of the Earth taken by crew aboard the International Space Station; clearly, no-one spent a hundred billion US dollars or so just to make a breath-taking video, but the by-products of the project are a clear example of how science can incidentally create aesthetic work. This isn't just a contemporary phenomenon either: the earliest examples I can think of are Leonardo da Vinci's dissection drawings; in addition to being possibly the most detailed such illustrations until today's non-invasive scanning techniques they are also beautiful works of art in themselves. But then Leonardo's intentions appear to have been to both investigate the natural world for the sheer sake of learning as well as improve his painting technique by knowledge of the underlying anatomy. I wonder if there are any contemporary artists who use MRI technology or similar as a technical aid for their draftsmanship?

At the other end of the spectrum (groan), mathematician Marcus du Sautoy's 2010 BBC TV series The Beauty of Diagrams was an interesting discourse on how certain images created for a scientific purpose have become mainstream visual symbols. From Vitruvian Man, da Vinci's analysis of ideal human proportions, to the double helix diagram of DNA (incidentally first drawn by Odile Crick, an artist married to a scientist), these works integrate the transmission of information with a beautiful aesthetic. The latter example is particularly interesting in that the attempt to illustrate complex, miniscule structures in an easily understandable format has since become a mainstay of science diagrams, shorthand that is frequently interpreted by the non-specialist as a much closer representation of reality than the schematic it really is.

Physicist and writer John Gribbin has often stated that the cutting edge science of the past century, especially physics, has had to resort to allegory to describe situations at scales far removed from human sensual experience. This implies that an essential method by which science can be conveyed is via the written metaphor and visual symbolism. As we delve further into new phenomena, science may increasingly rely on art to describe ideas that cannot for the foreseeable future be glimpsed at first hand. But ironically this could have a deleterious effect on public understanding if the model is too successful, for then it becomes difficult to supplant with a more accurate theory. An obvious example is the architecture of the atom, with the familiar if highly inaccurate classical model of electrons orbiting the nucleus like a miniature solar system prevalent long after the development of quantum electrodynamics.

You might ask how difficult would it be to describe probabilities and world paths in conventional art media, but Cubism was a style attempting to combine different viewpoints of a subject into one composition. If this appears too simplistic, then it may seem more convincing once you know that physicist Niels Bohr was inspired by Cubist theories during the development of the Complementarity Principle on the wave-particle duality. Cubism is of course only one of the more obvious visual tricks but even the most photo-realistic painting requires techniques to convert three dimensional reality (well four, if you want to include time), into two dimensions. How often do we consider this conversion process in itself, which relies on a series of visual formula to produce the desired result? It may not be science, but the production of most art isn't a haphazard or random series of actions.

It's easy to suggest that a fundamental difference between science and the plastic arts is that the former is ideally built of a combination of method and results whilst the latter is firmly biased towards the works alone. An exception can be seen in abstract expressionism, a.k.a. action painting: at art college we were taught that to practitioners of this school the moment of creation was at least as important as the final result. To this end, Jackson Pollock was filmed painting from as early as 1950, with numerous other artists of various movements following suit soon after. In general though, the art world runs on the rich individuals and corporations who buy the works, not the theories of critics.

And what of art theory? Most of it isn't relevant here, but one of the fundamentals of composition is the harmony and rhythm generated by the use of mathematical ratios and sequences. The Golden section and Fibonacci series are frequently found in organic structures, so in a sense their use is a confirmation of that old adage that the purpose of art is to hold a mirror up to nature. If that sounds trite, why not examine works by contemporary artists inspired by scientific theories or methodologies? That's coming in the next post...

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.

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...

Predators vs poisons: the ups and downs of biological control

Ever since Darwin, islands and island groups have been known as prominent natural laboratories of evolution. Their isolation leads to radiation of species from a single common ancestor, the finches and giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands providing a classic example. But a small population restricted in range also means that many island species are extremely susceptible to external factors, rapid extinction being the ultimate result - as can be seen from the dodo onwards. Living as I do on an island (New Zealand counts within the terms of this discussion, as I will explain) has led me to explore what a foreign invasion can do to a local population.

Either through direct hunting or the actions of imported Polynesian dogs and rats, almost half the native vertebrate fauna was wiped out within a few centuries of humans arriving in New Zealand; so much for the myth of pre-technological tribes living in ecological harmony! But the deliberate introduction of a new species to pray on another is now a much-practised and scientifically-supported technique. One of the late Stephen Jay Gould's most moving essays concerned the plight of the Partula genus of snails on the Society Islands of Polynesia. The story starts with the introduction of edible Achatina snails to the islands as food, only for some to escape and become an agricultural pest. In 1977 the Euglandina cannibal wolfsnail was brought in as a method of biological control, the idea being that they would eat the crop munchers. Unfortunately, the latest wave of immigrant gastropods ignored the Achatina and went after the local species instead. The results were devastating: in little more than a decade, many species of Partula had become extinct in their native habitat.

(As an interesting aside, the hero of Gould's Partula vs. Euglandina story is gastropod biologist Henry Crampton, whose half century of research into the genus is presumably no longer relevant in light of the decimation of many species. Yet Crampton, born in 1875, worked in typical Victorian quantitative fashion and during a single field trip managed to collect 116,000 specimens from just a single island, Moorea. I have no idea how many individual snails existed at the time, but to me this enormous number removed from breeding population in the name of scientific research was unlikely to do anything for the genus. I wonder whether comparable numbers of organisms are still being collected by researchers today: somehow I doubt it!)

The Society Islands is not the only place where the deliberate introduction of Euglandina has led to the unintended devastation of indigenous snail species: Hawaii and its native Achatinella and Bermuda's Poecilozonites have suffered a similar fate to Partula. Gould used the example of the Partula as a passionate plea (invoking 'genocide' and 'wholesale slaughter') to prevent further inept biological control programmes, but do these examples justify banning the method in totality?

The impetus for this post came from a recent visit to my local wetlands reserve, when my daughters played junior field biologists and netted small fish in order to examine them in a portable environment container (alright, a jam jar) - before of course returning them to the stream alive. The main fish species they caught was Gambusia, which originates from the Gulf of Mexico but was introduced to New Zealand in the 1930s as a predator of mosquito larvae. However, akin to Euglandina it has had a severe impact on many other fish species and is now rightly considered a pest. In fact, it's even illegal to keep them in a home aquarium, presumably just in case you accidentally aid their dispersion. Australia has also tried introducing Gambusia to control the mosquito population, but there is little data to show it works there either. The latter nation also provides a good illustration of environmental degradation via second- and third-hand problems originating from deliberate introduction. For example, the cane toad was imported to control several previously introduced beetle species but instead rapidly decimated native fauna, including amphibians and reptiles further up the food chain, via toad-vectored diseases.

Gambusia affinis: a big problem in a small fish

This isn't to say that there haven't been major successes with the technique. An early example concerns a small insect called the cottony cushion scale, which began to have a major impact on citrus farming in late Nineteenth Century California. It was brought under control by the introduction of several Australian fly and beetle species and without any obvious collateral damage, as the military might phrase it. But considering the extinction history of New Zealand since humans arrived, I've been amazed to discover just how many organisms have been deliberately introduced as part of biological control schemes, many in the past quarter century. For instance, twenty-one insect and mite species have been brought over to stem the unrestrained growth of weeds such as ragwort and gorse, although the rates of success have been extremely mixed (Old man's beard proving a complete failure, for example). As for controlling unwelcome fauna in New Zealand, a recent promising research programme involves the modification of parasites that could inhibit possum fertility. This is something of a necessity considering possums (first imported from Australia in the 1830s and now numbering around sixty million) are prominent bovine tuberculosis vectors.

Stephen Jay Gould was a well-known promoter of the importance of contingency within evolution, and how a re-run of any specific branch of life would only lead to a different outcome. So the question has to be asked, how do biologists test the effect of outsider species on an ecosystem (i.e. within laboratory conditions) when only time will show whether the outcome is as intended? No amount of research will show whether an unknown factor might, at an unspecified time during or after the eradication programme, have a negative impact. It could have been argued in the past that the relative cheapness of biological control compared to alternatives such as poison or chemicals made it the preferable option. However, I imagine the initial costs, involving lengthy testing cycles, mean that it is no longer a cut price alternative.

Considering the recent developments in genetic modification (GM), I wonder whether researchers have been looking into ways of minimising unforeseen dangers? For example, what about the possibility of tailoring the lifespan of the control organism? In other words, once the original invasive species has been eliminated, the predator would also rapidly die out (perhaps by something as simple as being unable to switch to an alternative food source, of which there are already many examples in nature). Or does that sound too much like the replicant-designing Dr Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner?

One promising recent use of GM organisms as a biological control method has been part of the fight to eradicate disease-carrying (female) mosquitos. Any female offspring of the genetically altered male mosquitos are incapable of flight and thus are unable to infect humans or indeed reproduce. However, following extremely positive cage-based testing in Mexico, researchers appear to have got carried away with their achievements and before you could say 'peer review' they conducted assessments directly in the wild in Malaysia, where I assume there is little GM regulation or public consultation. Therefore test results from one location were extrapolated to another with a very different biota, without regard for knock-on effects such as what unwelcome species might come out of the woodwork to fill the gap in the ecosystem. When stakes are so high, the sheer audacity of the scientists involved appears breathtaking. Like Dr Tyrell, we play god at our peril; let us hope we don't come to an equally sticky end at the hands of our creation...