Greetings from the frontiers of science! Today’s assignment is a thought experiment involving “Active SETI” (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) which entails beaming powerful radio signals containing unmistakable proof that they emanate from an intelligent civilization out into the great void of space. The point of the exercise? To light earth up like a Christmas tree across the Milky Way galaxy so that any technological civilizations out there would have no trouble seeing us.

This method of actively seeking out intelligent life in our galactic neighborhood is the opposite of our SETI efforts to date where we use “Passive SETI” to try and listen for a message or beacon from another civilization. These passive programs date back to the 1970’s and have benefited from massive increases in our abilities to scan the radio spectrum for hints of life. Multi-channel spectrum analysis that allows us to listen to millions of “channels” from specific stars at one time has dramatically increased the chances of success – someday.

Alas, to date there has been no indications that anyone in the cosmos is interested in communicating with anyone else. We have found no beacon, no messages inviting us to make contact. And we haven’t stumbled across any inter-planetary communications networks that would prove the existence of alien life beyond earth.

But take heart. We have explored only a small piece of the sky so far and there are several good reasons why we may have even missed a message in past sweeps. We may not be technologically advanced enough to decode it. We may lack the imagination to recognize a message even though it’s been right in front of us. But the most likely reason we have yet to achieve success in our SETI efforts is that there just aren’t that many civilizations transmitting.

Does this mean that there are fewer advanced civilizations than we thought? This is a definite possibility. It could very well be that the deck is stacked against any intelligent civilization reaching our level of sophistication. Rouge asteroids or comets, an unstable sun or moon, a nearby supernova not to mention the possibility that the denizens of any technologically advanced society could blow themselves up all make it a distinct possibility that while intelligent life is abundant in the universe, it doesn’t necessarily stand to reason that it survives long enough to reach out and try and touch someone.

Then again, there could be another explanation for our failure to make contact with an alien race. And this reason is at the heart of the debate over the passive vs. active SETI programs.

Perhaps those alien civilizations know something about the neighborhood that we don’t; that calling attention to ourselves by lighting earth up like a flare in the blackness of space might bring unwelcome – indeed catastrophic – attention to our planet.

The question isn’t so much are there evil alien monsters out there bent on death and destruction of any planet luckless enough to come to its attention. The question is why take the chance?

Should it be our position that all alien races are benign and would mean us no harm? The more I think about that the less I agree with it. Not necessarily because aliens would be hostile. They may have the best of intentions. As Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel points out in his book The Third Chimpanzee that any contact with an alien race is likely to resemble the contact made here on earth between advanced civilizations and primitive ones to the catastrophic detriment to the primitives. It may be best that until we have reached a level of technology more equal to our neighbors, we remain passive observers of their civilization.

And beyond that, there is the question of who decides whether escalating our SETI program to include active measures to make contact should be our policy?

Author, lecturer, scientist David Brin has thought about these issues of First Contact and other SETI matters for many years. He serves on a SETI subcommittee of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) charged with developing protocols and policies regarding our SETI efforts. It was this subcommittee that came up with the very First SETI Protocol: “Declaration Of Principles Concerning Activities Following The Detection Of Extraterrestrial Intelligence” – a great read if you are at all interested in this stuff.

This is from a piece Brin wrote two years ago about the controversy of active vs. passive SETI:

With that success behind us, we on the IAA subcommittee turned to a Second Protocol dealing with Transmissions from Planet Earth. The widely accepted draft contained articles asking that all of those controlling radio telescopes forebear from significantly increasing Earth’s visibility with deliberate skyward emanations, until their plans were first discussed before open and widely accepted international fora.

It seemed a modest and reasonable request. Why not present such plans, openly, before a broad and ecumenically interested community of experts in fields like exobiology, sociology, history and biology, at a conference where all matters and concerns could be honestly addressed? If for no other reason, wouldn’t this be common courtesy?

At first, the subcommittee drafting the Second Protocol deemed this to be obvious. Moreover, the core group at the SETI Institute seemed to concur. Indeed, this was not even a new document, but rather a revision of one that the Instituter’s own Jill Tarter presented to the UN six years ago — confirming that they once favored restraint and consultation before transmission. They are the ones who have changed their minds.

But recently… and after a draft appeared ready for submission to the IAA… several members of the IAA SETI Committee, including chairman Seth Shostak, abruptly balked and demanded alterations, abandoning even a collegial and moral call for pre-transmission discussions.

Indeed, suddenly all notions of pre-consultation or discussion — before making Earth dramatically more visible — were derided as paranoid, repressive of free expression and nonsensical. Almost no discussion of the matter was brooked; no questions were answered.

I should add here for clarity that most of the scientists at the SETI Institute favor holding discussions on placing more emphasis on active search protocols. The balkers are a group of Russians for the most part who apparently have ideological reasons – among others – for not even allowing a forum for all interested scientists to participate.

Brin points out that the ideology grew out of the old Soviet model. The Russians believe any aliens receiving an active SETI message would be benign because they would be socialists! They figure any advanced intelligence would have developed along the socialist model of governing and would therefore, by definition, be peaceful.

On such stupidities might the fate of the world hang.

As I said, the question of whether or not to engage in active SETI research should hang on erring on the side of caution. This is especially true since what is driving the active SETI movement is impatience at the lack of progress in the passive SETI program. One can certainly understand the desire to reach out and attempt contact. But without examining all the ramifications by failing to invite other scientists and researchers into a debate before starting any active SETI search is not only foolhardy but unscientific.

It reminds me of the global warming debate. Scientists who will brook no opposition to their cherished beliefs vilify their colleagues who think differently. They are simply frozen out of the discussion, marginalized in the community. This has proven to be a huge mistake as more and more information challenging climate change orthodoxy is either dismissed out of hand or tainted with charges of coming from biased sources. It has had a deadening effect on scientific debate and thus has done a disservice to policy makers and the public who are groping for answers on who to believe and what to do – if anything – about climate change.

Recently, Brin updated his 2006 article with ominous news:

As of Summer 2008, Retired senior US diplomat Michael Michaud has resigned from the IAA SETI Subcommittee in protest over what he sees as continuing efforts to repress open discussion of these issues, and to disparage those who see anything wrong with METI. He was recently joined by Dr. John Billingham, one of the founding fathers of SETI and director of NASA’s long-running SETI program.

Work on the Second SETI Protocol should continue and a consensus reached. For if we can’t come together on these basic questions regarding our potential role in a crowded universe where contact with other civilizations becomes a reality, we will be unprepared for any consequences that might arise from this success.

No, my politically inclined friends not those kind of aliens. The kind of alien I’m talking about does not cut a hole in a border fence and sneak across with the help of a “coyote,” settling down in LA and immediately becoming a drain on government services.

At least, there’s no evidence to the contrary. Especially after reading this today:

The Denver man who is pushing a ballot measure to have the city form an “ET Commission” showed video of what he says is an alien Friday morning at a news conference. Reporters were allowed to view the video, but only a still image of it was released to the media.

Jeff Peckman said aliens visit his friend Stan Romanke all the time.

Romanke, who lives in Colorado Springs, allegedly recorded the alien video while living in Nebraska.

The pair has a deal with a documentary company for the rights to the video.

“Not all wrinkly like ET, the extraterrestrial, just youthful, smooth skin, large wide kind of eyes,” said Peckman.

Romanke has posted drawings of the aliens he reportedly sees on his Web site.

This is the sort of alien you will be reading about today. It is the kind that many gullible people (and many who should know better) think visits the earth all the time and mingles with us earthlings, always managing to avoid the authorities who, we are told, are eager to get their hands on ET to perform all sorts of deadly experiments and autopsies.

These folks from another planet also seem to have a tremendous knack for avoiding cameras, DVR’s, and other recording devices. They are extremely adept at not leaving one shred of proof that they were ever here and wouldn’t you know it, instead of alighting here on earth and being eager to talk to scientists who would give their right arm to sit down with one of the beings for 15 minutes, these aliens always seem to end up talking to ordinary folk who, we are further told, wouldn’t lie or try and carry out a hoax to save their life.

Now, I should say at the outset that I believe there are intelligent civilizations somewhere out there. I also believe there are space faring beings whose civilizations are so old that they have probably toured the universe at least once.

I am also quite certain that there are many, many more of the former than the latter. So do the folks at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) who have been searching nearby stars in a so far fruitless quest to glean an intelligent signal from a civilization that may also be looking for some company. But their quest is a longshot at best given all the variables that must be met and no one is very optimistic that they will succeed.

The question isn’t whether or not there is intelligent life in the universe. The question is has it ever visited earth. The idea that one necessarily follows the other is absurd. There are many forms of intelligence as we know from just studying the animal world here on earth and it could very well be that other intelligent species either have little interest in what’s beyond their little world or are simply incapable of grasping the complexities of the universe the same way that we do.

Perhaps they aren’t toolmakers. Perhaps their intelligence is of a collective variety and original thought is something rare. There are a thousand reasons an intelligent society would not be reaching out to us and few reasons why they would.

And what about an alien race taking a cosmic jaunt in a spacecraft to visit earth? The question is not how arrogant you think I am for not believing but rather how arrogant you are for thinking there is anything a civilization hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of years more advanced than we would find remotely interesting enough to expend the huge effort it would take to build a ship that could traverse the stars. If nothing else, these advanced aliens would be eminently practical beings and the return on an investment of that size would be so extraordinarily small if they came to places like earth that they would have to be crazy to undertake such folly.

The fact is, all this speculation is, in and of itself, ridiculous. There’s a very good chance, exo-biologists tell us, that we wouldn’t even recognize alien life as being alive. Their thought processes would be so, well, alien that communication would be extraordinarily difficult. Our problem is that our imaginations are limited to our earthbound experiences. We simply can’t picture what a real alien would look like because it is probable that the way life developed on other planets would be radically different than the way it developed on earth.

But what about UFO’s? Clearly, there are unexplained sightings of flying objects tha cry out for investigation. But as the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) – a “scientific” group that has lost much of its standing among skeptics in recent years due to its slipshod methods and “UFO’s are alien spacecraft” boosterism – tells us, more than 93% of these sightings are easily explained and credible, earthbound explanations are usually available for those few incidents where proof is scant. If people realized how few of these sightings weren’t hoaxes or meteors, or the planet Venus, the idea that we are being inundated by aliens and that earth is some kind of Grand Central Station for extraterrestrial spacecraft would disappear.

There are many explanations for why there may be space travelling civilizations in the universe but never make it here. The biggest obstacle is time – not just the journey itself but the ticking clock of extinction that faces all species we know of. How long do intelligent civilizations last? How many succeed in not blowing themselves up or poisoning themselves? How many avoid being pulverized by asteroids or comets? There are a million ways for a civilization to die and the law of averages says that precious few would advance far enough and fast enough to be capable of building a ship to the stars before being destroyed.

Another problem with time is that our universe is 13 billion years old and that during that time, millions of civilizations would have risen capable of space travel. But the earth is only 4 billion years old with intelligent life an incredibly recent phenomena. It is a given that only a certain number of space faring civilizations exist at any single point in time so the chances are that relatively few star ships are traversing the universe as I write this. This is assuming that the problem of special relativity effects can be overcome – a given for practical space travel.

This means that in all the tens of billions of galaxies with uncounted numbers of stars, these comparatively few spacecraft would need to 1) Discover that there was intelligent life on earth; 2) Have a reason to travel to the boondocks of our galaxy to see us; and 3) visit us without leaving a single piece of credible evidence of their coming here.

This goes beyond longshot and enters the realm of fantasy.

I would love to believe we are being visited on a daily basis by beings from another world. But common sense and the evidence doesn’t support that theory. Couple that with the quaisi-religious aspect to UFOology – that the aliens will come and save us from ourselves, clean up the planet, get rid of nukes, and bring peace and harmony to mankind – and what you’re left with is a bunch of silly people making equally silly claims that aren’t supported by the facts.

There is as much evidence that UFO’s are from the future or from another dimension or some place of which we are totally unaware as there is evidence that they are from another planet. And that evidence is zero. Until there is credible evidence to the contrary, UFO’s and alien visitation will fall under the rubric of faith and not of science.

                                 NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration may have had to endure some justifiable criticism for its shortsighted and unimaginative manned space exploration program. But when it comes to its unmanned planetary exploration achievements, the scientists and engineers at JPL and their affiliate programs at universities and other space agencies around the world can still “Wow!” us all every once and awhile.

The Phoenix Mars Lander successfully touched down in the north Polar region of Mars at 6:53 central time today as scientists and engineers at JPL and the University of Arizona cheered the culmination of ten years of enormously stressful work. The spacecraft landed after a harrowing re-entry where a 60 feet per second nose dive is cut by two thirds less than 300 feet above the surface of the red planet by 6 small rocket thrusters.

The last Mars lander to try this trick – the Mars Polar Lander – didn’t make it and plowed ignominiously into the surface. The descent engines cut off too quickly when a sensor in the landing bag was jarred loose and mistakenly told the rockets they had already landed.

Phoenix was put through the wringer with as many tests as the engineers could think of throwing at her. In the end, the ship proved herself tough enough and the landing couldn’t have gone better.

Now comes the fun part. The Phoenix is not a rover so it won’t be wandering around looking for interesting things to examine. The Phoenix is a stationary scientific lab encompassing several disciplines including chemistry, biology, and geology. Having made a jaw droopingly accurate landing (like aiming an arrow from the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and hitting home plate at Wrigley Field in Chicago was the way it was described on the Science channel), Phoenix is positioned to do a little digging into what we think is the tundra region of Mars.

It may be too much to ask of luck that we have landed within reach of some Martian snow. If so, call it Jackpot and celebrate our good fortune. More likely, we’ll have to find some moisture in the form of frost or permafrost below the surface. The experiments on board the lander are incredibly sophisticated. While searching for life is not the primary concern (past life on Mars is considered much more probable) the hard, permafrost will be ground down by a special tool attached to a scoop on the robotic arm. The loose material will be heated and a very sensitive gas spectrometer will determine the chemical makeup. In addition, a small but very powerful microscope will examine the contents for micro-fossils and other information.

Phoenix will not last long in the super cold. Within a few months, she will be covered in carbon dioxide ice and stop working. But as long as she is sending pictures back with her stereoscopic camera, the view should be awesome.

So credit where credit is due – to the engineers and scientists at NASA who once again have shown the remarkable reach of the human spirit and its ability to overcome almost any obstacle to satisfy our thirst for knowledge.

UPDATE

Rand Simberg drolly observers “The Cosmic Ghouls Missed One” referring to several Russian and American planetary missions that have come a cropper in one bizarre way or another. The Russians especially have been plagued with bad luck on their Mars landers. Just goes to show how far we are from being able to hurl ourselves out into the void and not ask for volunteers for a suicide mission.

Bob Zubrin’s infectous enthusiasm aside, we ain’t going any time soon so you can cancel your reservation at the Mars Hilton. Until we can figure out how to bring live human beings back from Mars and not dead or half dead boneless (long term space exploration may take up tp 80% of our bone minerals making them as sturdy as balsa wood), heartless (perhaps 80% of the heart muscle gone), kidneyless (ditto kidneys), and God knows what the psychological problems of living and working with 5 or 6 other humans for 3 + years in an extraordinarily small workspace/habitat – until the problem of living without gravity or creating artificial gravity can be overcome, we are stuck here.

So pass the popcorn. Watching from a distance is the best we can hope for – at least in my lifetime.

Rand Simberg has a great, must read piece in TCS Daily looking back on 50 years of man in space beginning with the Soviet launch of Sputnik.

The psychic shock to America when we realized that the Soviets were “ahead” in missile technology (they weren’t) gave a tremendous impetus to not only our own efforts to get into space but also several innovative and important government programs that sought to create more scientists and engineers by encouraging schools at the primary and secondary level to place more emphasis on those subjects while pouring money into college and university research facilities to fund post-graduate work in a variety of fields.

The result? A veritable explosion of scientific creativity with a savvy, market oriented engineering expertise to turn discovery into commerce. The key was Eisenhower’s decision to take the space program away from the military and make it a civilian agency. Since the creation of NASA in 1959, the billions poured into the space program have translated into trillions in gross domestic product returns. So many of the technological and scientific wonders of our modern world can be traced to the basic research done with space dollars that it is impossible to quantify. Breakthroughs with direct applications to civilian use or that inspired multiple levels of creative exploitation beyond the original use of the technology have enriched our lives beyond measure. And we have the space program to thank for it.

But as Simberg points out, lost in this outpouring of commercial success was the utter and complete failure of the space program to follow a logical path to the stars, substituting what was known at the time as the MISS program – Man In Space Soonest:

In the mid-1950s, many science fiction writers, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, were predicting that men would walk on the moon. But none of them were so bold in their predictions as to claim that it would happen in the coming decade. It made no sense—there was a logical progression to such things. In 1958, we could barely toss a few pounds into orbit, and in the first year of launch attempts, three out of four had failed. The notion that we would be sending people into space, in a couple years, let alone all the way to the moon within a few more, seemed like too far out a prediction even for a visionary writer of fiction.

But what would have seemed even more fantastic was the notion that, having landed men on the moon in the late sixties, the last one would trod on the regolith a few years later, and there would be no return for half a century. That was beyond science fiction, into the realm of dystopian fantasy.

Yet, in part because of the Sputnik panic, that’s exactly what happened. In our rush to regain the technological lead over the Soviets, we took what tools we had at hand—ballistic missiles (expendable by their nature) and converted them to space transportation vehicles. Very expensive, very unreliable space transportation vehicles. It established the paradigm for how we would get into space with which we live to this day, as demonstrated by the fact that NASA is going “back to the future,” developing yet another expendable launch vehicle family to take us back to the moon.

Back in the 1950’s when Sputnik was unheard of, the US Air Force was experimenting with rocket planes. The X-Plane Program was envisioned as the primary means by which man would conquer space – taking off from a runway and powering into orbit using hyrbid engines that would be air breathers while still in the atmosphere and switch to rocket engines to boost the ship into orbit. Each vehicle in the X-series went higher, faster, and farther with the last two piloted vehicles exploring ways to maneuver an aircraft at the boundary of space. There was even a piloted aircraft in production – the X-20 – that would have gone into orbit eventually.

But the X-20 program was cancelled and NASA decided to go with its “down and dirty” option of adapting existing American ICBM’s by slapping another stage on them, placing a small capsule on top, and blasting it into orbit. Even the massive Saturn V rocket (37 stories tall, 7 million pounds of thrust) that boosted the Apollo moon missions off the ground was not much different in technology than the V-2 rockets that Werner Von Braun designed for Hitler back in the 40’s.

The problem then and now with relying on these rockets is that they are incredibly inefficient and expensive not to mention dangerous as hell. Consider that we launched a 37 story rocket toward the moon and what came back could fit in the living room of most American homes. We will never make space accessible to commercial exploitation or human habitation until we can lower the cost of putting people up there from thousands of dollars a pound to perhaps dozens of dollars per pound.

For in the end, this reliance on rockets has totally skewed the space program away from exploration and discovery and toward gimmicks and spectaculars. If we had followed the logical progression into space that the X-Plane series was promising back in the 1950’s, we wouldn’t have gotten to the moon by 1969 or perhaps even 1979. But you can bet we would have gotten there while establishing a permanent presence in space that would have led eventually to manned bases on the moon and perhaps even missions to Mars by the time we are supposed to get back to the moon under NASA’s current plan; 2018 if all goes well – something that hasn’t happened at NASA in a long, long time.

Simberg concludes wistfully:

But if we had taken a more measured, systematic, natural approach to the development of space, unhurried by the Sputnik panic, while there are no guarantees, we might today have the spinning orbital space stations of the movie 2001, affordable transportation in cis-lunar space, the bases on the moon that NASA currently plans for the third decade of this century, perhaps even trips to, and bases on Mars.

We will never know, of course—history doesn’t allow do overs. Or at least, not in any exact form. But it’s not too late to decide whether our current approach is as flawed now as it was then, at least with regard to opening the high frontier. On the fiftieth anniversary of the dawn of the old space age, it’s perhaps time to think about ushering in a new one.

There is hope. Dozens of private space company start-ups are finally starting to attract the attention of serious investors. Although the original efforts will be geared toward space tourism, it is only a matter of time before the cost to boost people and equipment into space will tumble as market forces initiate a race among the best of these companies to see who can build the most efficient, the least expensive means to get us into orbit. When that happens, “the sky’s the limit” will cease being a cliche and become a rallying cry for the private conquest of space.

I have a bet with myself as to who will get back to the moon first; NASA or some private space company eager to exploit several different commercial possibilities there. Given NASA’s track record over the last few decades, don’t bet against the entrepreneurs.

UPDATE

Mr. Simberg wishes all “Happy Sputnik Day” on his personal blog, Transterrestial Musings and has some excellent links.

Does anyone care anymore?

In 10,000 years that garbage you’re taking out today after the little woman nags you about it long enough will become priceless artifacts. Future archaeologists will puzzle over that broken coffee mug with the picture of a naked woman on it and wonder if she was some kind of goddess or perhaps a representation of your wife.

Maybe you should leave a note.

It won’t matter because the paper your note is written on won’t survive. Nor will 50% of the rest of our bio-degradable garbage which will leave a lot of real nasty stuff those future scientists will have to go through in order to extract a few nuggets of history that will tell future humans all about us.

In 10,000 years, no one will remember Nancy Pelosi. No one will remember George Bush either. They may rate a line or two in some obscure scholar’s dissertation on primitive nation-state politics but I doubt it. History will lose track of them as she forgets so many others. Clio is really quite selective about what people and events are clasped to her bosom and carried through the centuries to be examined and debated by those in the future whose calling is to explain the past to their contemporaries.

The millions of words spoken and written in anger or passion or to persuade others over Iraq these last years will have completely disappeared, are already disappearing as the relentless march of time burns away all but the most influential or seminal of events and people. What’s left is in turn ground to powder and the remainder sifted through the ages until the essence of an entire century or more will be distilled for consumption.

This doesn’t make what’s happening today any less important. But it does give us a sobering perspective on how, in the long, tangled skein of people, events, and ideas that make up the history of the last 100 years – the wars, the ideology, the clashes of civilization and wills, – almost all of it will be seen as nothing more than sound and fury signifying nothing if it is remembered at all.

Except for the moon landing, of course.

You can’t find much in newspapers or on the news nets about the 38th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon which was actually yesterday, July 20th (The moonwalk occurred early on the 21st.). Bloggers desperate for something to write about contributed more than a thousand posts to the historical discussion with an unknown number reminding everyone that the landing was a hoax, that all the moon footage was shot on a Hollywood backlot.

I have no doubt that for the foreseeable future, this kind of ho-hum reaction will greet subsequent anniversaries marking the achievement of Apollo 11. It isn’t that the event has lost its importance as much as its distance in time allows for a diminishing in the importance of the actual memory of the occasion. So much has happened between then and now that even though the moon landing may be the only thing remembered about the times in which we live 10,000 years hence, Apollo 11 today has a lot of competition when it comes to available space in our brains for recalling the past.

Then there are those who don’t see what all the fuss is about, that the accomplishment was a waste of resources that could have been better spent or not spent at all. From a purely rationalist point of view, there may be something to that argument – especially given the fact that NASA failed miserably in following up on its achievement in landing on the moon to go on to bigger and better things. No permanent space station – unless you include that over priced, over sold, under performing piece of space junk called the “International Space Station” we have orbiting now.

No trip to Mars. Not even a trip back to the moon to set up some kind of base of operations for future exploration. Only a fairly dangerous, earth orbit bound space truck called the Shuttle whose life has been extended because the NASA bureaucracy can’t figure out how to dream big dreams anymore. Apparently, there is no manual or position paper on how to capture the essential hunger felt by most people for human exploration of the universe to be found in any of the offices of NASA’s top bureaucrats.

A pity. Their predecessors who cooked up the Apollo program in response to a challenge from our ideological opponents in the old Soviet Union were, if nothing else, dreamers. They were also inveterate gamblers. There may never have been nor will there ever be any project undertaken so fraught with danger and risk for the participants as the Apollo program.

Think of it. In 1962 when the program was just getting underway, America had put exactly 3 men into space, only one of them into earth orbit. By making the decision to land on the moon and return safely by the end of the decade, NASA had its work cut out for it. Not only new technologies would have to be developed but entire industries would have to be created in order to meet Kennedy’s ambitious goal. There has never been an effort in peacetime like it in history. More than $24 billion would be spent (about $120 billion in today’s dollars) to make that dream a reality.

Nearly 500,000 human beings would lay their hands on at least one of the millions of parts that made up the Apollo 11 spacecraft. This dwarfs the number of people who worked on the Manhattan Project to build the A-Bomb, the Panama Canal, and the Pyramids put together. A study done in 1972 revealed that more than 25% of all the man hours worked on the project were in the form of unpaid overtime. This is because by 1968, after the fire of Apollo 1 that killed 3 astronauts along with subsequent delays in the delivery of the Lunar Module (LM), Congress was threatening to cut the program off at the knees.

In effect, NASA was launching a 37 story building, aiming it at a moving target orbiting the earth at more than 2200 miles per hour, 240,000 miles away with a spacecraft travelling more than 19,000 MPH. Some engineers in the early days of Apollo privately believed that the feat would be impossible, that the astronauts were doomed. The technical challenges were enormous. The Saturn V booster would have to generate more than 7,000,000 pounds of thrust to get the behemoth off the ground. The Lunar Lander, the first vehicle designed to be used exclusively in space, was the size of a mini-van and contained two stages.

The second stage was supposed to lift the astronauts off the surface when they were ready to leave and on Apollo 11, it had never been tested in space before. If it failed to work, there was no back up, no rescue plan. President Nixon was told that given all the uncertainties, there was a one in five chance that the astronauts would be left stranded on the moon unable to return (Neil Armstrong gave himself a 50-50 chance of coming home). He even had Bill Safire write a speech in case the mission failed.

Why should this date in history lose its significance as the years pass? There has never been an achievement in the history of mankind that summed up all that is good and noble in the human soul as Apollo 11. Yes the reasons for going to the moon may have been petty and selfish. But the achievement itself represents the best of what we are – thinking, rational animals with an insatiable curiosity of what is beyond the next horizon. NASA may have forgotten this. But the dream itself is alive and well thanks to a small group of outriders on the very frontiers of science who have started their own private space ventures. In the next decade, the novelty of space tourism will dominate this industry. But eventually, the drive for profit will send people hurtling into the void to exploit the resources and raw materials found on other heavenly bodies in our solar system.

Like NASA of the 1960’s, their reasons may be selfish and petty. But the very act of exploration will once again confirm the fact that regardless of politics or economics, the destiny of man is out there somewhere and everywhere in the universe. And it won’t be the ossified bureaucrats in governments who will lead this quest. It will be the dreamers and the risk takers whose own small steps will turn into giant leaps for all of us in the not too distant future.

This is way cool:

Built for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Orbital Express vehicles are aimed at demonstrating autonomous spacecraft refueling and servicing techniques [video, image].

For military uses, such capabilities would allow reconnaissance satellites to keep station over specific areas of interest and tank up on vital propellant later, though the technology could also aid general-use spacecraft in need of periodic equipment repairs, replacements or an orbital boost, mission managers said.

“I think it’s extremely valuable for the entire space arena,” Kennedy said of Orbital Express’ goal, adding that the mission could help ease the stringent requirements of long-life satellites. “Maybe you can accept a level of imperfection that will allow you to go up later and perform upgrades and perform repairs, and put more propellant onboard to get the job done. That will be a sea change in the way we do business.”

Need to clean a little space debris off the camera lens of a reconnaissance satellite? Call in the Orbiter Express and have them fill ‘er up and check the oil while they’re at it!

And if the Orbital Express carries some decent road maps with it, they can franchise the damn thing and make billions.

Actually, I said this is way cool. It’s actually super way cool. This is from the Orbital Express website:

The goal of the Orbital Express Space Operations Architecture program is to validate the technical feasibility of robotic, autonomous onorbit refueling and reconfiguration of satellites to support a broad range of future U.S. national security and commercial space programs. Refueling satellites will enable frequent maneuver to improve coverage, change arrival times to counter denial and deception and improve survivability, as well as extend satellite lifetime. Electronics upgrades on-orbit can provide regular performance improvements and dramatically reduce the time to deploy new technology on-orbit. The Orbital Express advanced technology demonstration will design, develop and test on-orbit a prototype servicing satellite (ASTRO) and a surrogate next generation serviceable satellite (NextSat). The elements of the Orbital Express demonstration, coordinated with Air Force Space Command and Air Force Space and Missile Command, will be tied together by non-proprietary satellite servicing interfaces (mechanical, electrical, etc.) that will facilitate the development of an industry wide on-orbit servicing infrastructure. NASA will apply the sensors and software developed for autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations to reduce risk for collaborative human-robotic operations in space for the NASA Exploration Initiative.

The proto-type did indeed launch this week, rocketed into orbit with 4 other satellites on a gigantic Atlas V booster. ASTRO represents an extraordinary leap in our space capability. And, an ironic twist to the saga of the Space Shuttle.

It was the Space Shuttle that was supposed to be able to go up on a regular basis and service satellites. This was back in the 1970’s when it was thought the Shuttle would be carrying out about 30-35 missions a year including the civilian and military shuttles.

Many people forget that the Air Force was supposed to be a partner with NASA in the Shuttle program. From 1984-92, 14 of the 57 Shuttle missions had military payloads, some of them top secret. But the Air Force found it was much cheaper to launch their satellites using our conventional boosters, leaving NASA as the sole proprietor of what most experts consider a most inefficient system to launch satellites into space.

The Orbital Express promises to alter the way we build and maintain satellites – commercial and military. This will lower costs while allowing for continuous upgrades. Apparently, future versions will be able to rendezvous with orbiting supply satellites, take what it needs for servicing be it fuel, electronics, or whatever and then make its way to the bird that needs work. It’s equipped with a sophisticated robotic arm that can carry out repairs or replace components – all directed remotely from earth.

In a few years, it will be hard to imagine how we ever got along without it…

This is one of those stories that, if you’re a science buff whose enthusiasm far outstrips your actual knowledge of the subject matter, makes the hairs on the back of your head stand up and goose pimples appear.

Apparently, one of the great mysteries of the universe is being unravelled as I write this – and in spectacular fashion:

One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is about to be unravelled with the first detailed, three-dimensional map of dark matter – the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos.

Astronomers announced yesterday that they have achieved the apparently impossible task of creating a picture of something that has defied every attempt to detect it since its existence was first postulated in 1933.

Scientists have known for many years that there is more to the universe than can be seen or detected through their telescopes but it is only now that they have been able to capture the first significant 3D-image of this otherwise invisible material.

Unlike the ordinary matter of the planets, stars and galaxies, which can be seen through telescopes or detected by scientific instruments, nobody has seen dark matter or knows what it is made of, though calculations suggest that it is at least six times bigger than the rest of the visible universe combined.

The significance of this is absolutely startling. And like all other scientific discoveries I’ve tried to understand over the years there is a terrific detective story at the heart of it – a story that reveals the best of who we are as a species as individual scientists, struggling to understand what was previously unknowable, shine a light into the darkest places of the mind to illuminate the fundamental mysteries of the universe.

The search for dark matter began in earnest once scientists realized that all the matter in the “visible” universe – including objects and phenomena not only open to study in the range of visible light but also x-rays, gamma rays, radio waves the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums – made up only a small portion of the mass of the universe. Something else was there – something exotic and mysterious. It’s existence was inferred in a variety of way but most importantly, by a phenomena known as “gravitational lensing.” Basically, this effect is achieved as very, very distant light is “bent” when it passes through a large astronomical body like a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies. The image behind these bodies appears much bigger and a variety of observations can be made that led scientists to the belief that the visible matter in the lensed object couldn’t account for all the “bending” in the light. Something else was at work, something unseen.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope and a bit of creative thinking, scientists have actually been able to “map” an area of space and image dark matter:

A team of 70 astronomers from Europe, America and Japan used the Hubble space telescope to build up a picture of dark matter in a vast region of space where some of the galaxies date back to half the age of the universe – nearly 7 billion years.

They used a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein, to investigate an area of the sky nine times the size of a full moon. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from distant galaxies is bent by the gravitational influence of any matter that it passes on its journey through space.

The scientists were able to exploit the technique by collecting the distorted light from half a million faraway galaxies to reconstruct some of the missing mass of the universe which is otherwise invisible to conventional telescopes.

“We have, for the first time, mapped the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe,” said Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, one of the lead scientists in the team. “Dark matter is a mysterious and invisible form of matter, about which we know very little, yet it dominates the mass of the universe.”

And in what surely must be considered a moment of triumph for cosmologists, this study’s observations have confirmed the theoretical – a red letter day in any theoretician’s life:

One of the most important discoveries to emerge from the study is that dark matter appears to form an invisible scaffold or skeleton around which the visible universe has formed.

Although cosmologists have theorised that this would be the case, the findings are dramatic proof that their calculations are correct and that, without dark matter, the known universe that we can see would not be able to exist.

“A filamentary web of dark matter is threaded through the entire universe, and acts as scaffolding within which the ordinary matter – including stars, galaxies and planets – can later be built,” Dr Massey said. “The most surprising aspect of our map is how unsurprising it is. Overall, we seem to understand really well what happens during the formation of structure and the evolution of the universe,” he said.

Now the challenge will be to figure out what dark matter is made of. Already, these observations are being put to good use:

“Now that we have begun to map out where dark matter is, the next challenge is to determine what it is, and specifically its relationship to normal matter,” Dr Massey said. “We have answered the first question about where the dark matter it, but the ultimate goal will be to determine what it is.”

Various experiments on Earth are under way to try to find out what dark matter is made of. One theory is that it is composed of mysterious sub-atomic particles that are difficult to detect because they do not interact with ordinary matter and so cannot be picked up and identified by conventional scientific instruments. Comparing the maps of visible matter and dark matter have already pointed to anomalies that could prove critical to the understanding of what constitutes dark matter.

If the past is any guide, what we find will elicit more goose bumps as discovery by discovery, the universe gives up her secrets to the inquisitive minds of scientists.

I have always found it laughable that there exists a school of thought that mankind’s greatest achievements were actually the result of intervention by aliens from another civilization. The pyramids, the Nazca lines, even Stonehenge, according to this “theory,” were all built by aliens because we humans just aren’t clever enough to have done it ourselves.

Discoveries like this prove that the alien hunters consistently sell our species short. We have in the past and will continue in the future, to use our minds and imaginations to the utmost to solve the riddles of our existence – without the help of anyone else.

This picture and what it represents gives me goosebumps:

TO A casual observer it could be the psychedelic creation of a mischievous puppy that has dipped its paws in paint. But it may be one of the most extraordinary pictures ever snapped.

It is, scientists said yesterday, the glow from the first things to form in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago. Snapped by NASA’s Spitzer space telescope, the bizarre objects must have existed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

An Australian astrophysicist, Ray Norris, said the NASA team may have found “the holy grail” of astronomy.

What the ancient objects are remains a mystery. One possibility is stars, the first to light up after the dawn of time. They would have been “humungous”, said NASA, “more than 1000 times the mass of our sun”. Or they may be “voracious black holes”. While black holes are invisible, heat emitted by matter plunging into them can be detected.

“Whatever these objects are,” said Alexander Kashlinsky, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, “they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today.” The image was made by Spitzer shooting pictures of five areas of the sky. All light from stars and galaxies in the foreground was then removed, leaving only the ancient infrared glow.

Those photons of light in the above picture travelled 13.7 billion years to end up on my little old blog. To someone like me, a scientific dunce but an enthusiast nonetheless, it’s things like this that make me wish I worked harder in school and applied myself more – especially in math. If you’ve ever read Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time or Timothy Ferris’ The Whole Shebang, you realize just how extraordinary the universe really is. And judging by this picture, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s out there and what awaits us as we begin in earnest to reach out and touch the face of eternity.

If you are interested in history, or manned space flight, or both, you owe it to yourself to tune in tonight as the National Geographic Channel presents Space Race: The Untold Story.

Based on Deborah Cadbury’s “Space Race : The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union for Dominion of Space,”, this is a NG special that goes far beyond the documentary format and enters the realm of drama.

In fact, there is so much interaction and dialogue between the characters that the narration almost seems superfluous at times. The special effects are awesome and interspersed into the narrative are actual photographs and film of what’s took place.

This is truly a unique documentary format and makes for some absolutely riveting television.

The story follows the two titans of the space age; America’s Wernher von Braun and the Soviet’s mysterious “Chief Designer” whose name was unknown for nearly 40 years, Sergei Korolev. Von Braun, who designed and built the V-2 rocket for Hitler, was a childhood hero of mine – until the release of World War II era documents that showed he knowingly used slave labor in building his rockets. A complex character, realistically portrayed – warts and all – von Braun was one of the true geniuses of the 20th century. It is not an exaggeration to say that if he had been captured by the Soviets rather than deliberately surrendered to the Americans, it is unlikely we would have made it to the moon at all.

Korolev on the other hand was purged by Stalin in the 1930’s and spent several years in Siberia until the Russians realized they needed his expertise to steal the rocket technology invented by von Braun. Rehabilitated, his work spurred the Americans on during the entire space race.

The documentary is making a big deal about the fact that the reason the superpowers were so desperate for German rocket technology was not for peaceful purposes but rather for a platform to deliver nuclear weapons. Um…this is a surprise? To whom? Ten year old children perhaps.

That said, this is a crackling good documentary. The four hour show airs in two parts tonight at 6:00 PM central time. Check your local listings and set your Tivos.

This was to be expected:

Some of the most notable missions on NASA’s scientific agenda would be postponed indefinitely or canceled under the agency’s new budget, despite its administrator’s vow to Congress six months ago that not “one thin dime” would be taken from space science to pay for President Bush’s plan to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars.

The cuts come to $3 billion over the next five years, even as NASA’s overall spending grows by 3.2 percent this year, to $16.8 billion. They come against a backdrop of criticism over efforts by White House appointees to mute public statements by NASA’s climate scientists.

Among the casualties of the budget cuts are attempts to look for habitable planets and perhaps life elsewhere in the galaxy, an investigation of the dark energy that seems to be ripping the universe apart, bringing a sample of Mars back home to Earth, and exploring for life under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa — as well as numerous smaller programs and individual research projects that astronomers say are the wellsprings of new science and new scientists.

Ever since the Bush Administration charged the space agency with getting back to the moon by 2020, scientists have been waiting for the other budget shoe to drop. While going to the moon and establishing some kind of permanent presence there is a noble goal, if we’re not willing to fund other, equally ambitious unmanned projects, NASA’s reason for being in existence in the first place evaporates.

It used to be that major breakthroughs in science could be accomplished by the lone researcher, plodding away for years in his basement lab using makeshift tools with only his brain and the powers of reason that God gave him as his guide. His “funding” would come from rich friends or perhaps the researcher himself was independently wealthy.

Even the spectacular breakthroughs in uncovering the secrets of the atom by Ernest Rutherford at the beginning of the 20th century were accomplished in an old, drafty manor house in the English countryside with most of his funds coming from private donors and grants from the Royal Society. Rutherford’s secret weapon was the cadre of some of the most brilliant young scientific minds in history who helped him build the first complete atomic model but whose methods of experimentation were remarkably simply and inexpensive.

No more. Today, in order to unlock the secrets of the universe – both the very large and very small – governments must contribute billions of dollars to fund the enormous projects that drive scientific inquiry. The $12 billion dollar fusion reactor called Iter which could produce the long-sought clean energy created by atomic fusion is funded by a consortium of a dozen countries. And the cost of the Webb Space Telescope (replacing the Hubble) has already almost doubled from its original estimate of $2.8 billion to its current bloat of $4.5 billion. Private industry couldn’t possibly come up with this kind of money nor would they want to. These kinds of projects are pure science with little or no immediate commercial value. Only governments can lay out these kind of expenditures.

But by funding the $104 billion dollar Return to the Moon program, NASA is finding that the high profile mission is sucking up precious funds, causing the cancellation or delay of some of the most exciting and worthwhile exploration programs on the boards. The James Webb Space Telescope that would have to be delayed if we go ahead with the moon mission (and necessitate another Shuttle repair mission to the Hubble costing $300 million or more), is being designed to blot out the light from stars with planets circling them so that we would actually be able to see if the extrasolar bodies were capable of sustaining life. And the mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa may have been the most ambitious and interesting space effort in history.

Plans called for an unmanned probe to land on Europa’s surface where many scientists are convinced a vast ocean lies underneath a 1-2 mile icecap. The probe would have released a heat generating, sensor-filled wire extension which could have melted through the ice and explored the ocean underneath to search for possible signs of life.

Other delayed or cancelled missions include a Mars Sampling mission and a cancellation of a plethora of smaller missions that come under the rubric of “The Explorer” program:

Much of the concern among scientists is for the fate of smaller projects like the low-budget spacecraft called Explorers. Designed to provide relatively cheap and fast access to space, they are usually developed and managed by university groups. Dr. Lamb referred to them as “the crown jewels in NASA’s science program.”

In recent years, one such mission, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, produced exquisite baby pictures of the Big Bang, while another, the Swift satellite, has help solve the a 30-year-old mystery, linking distant explosions called gamma-ray bursts to the formation of black holes.

Explorers, Dr. Lamb said, are where graduate students and young professors get their first taste of space science. Until recently about one mission was launched per year, but under the new plan, there will be none at all from 2009 to 2012. In a letter to Dr. Cleave last fall, 16 present and former Explorer scientists said, “Such a lengthy suspension would be a devastating blow to the program and the science community.”

Where do you suppose our scientific leaders are going to come from in the future? Not from the Explorer program.

One would think that NASA would get input from those most affected by these cuts before announcing them. Guess again:

Dr. Griffin and his colleagues, the scientists agree, haves tough choices to make, but the so far, the space scientists complain, the choices have been made in a vacuum, without input from the community most affected, namely them. Last year NASA dismantled a longstanding network of scientific advisory committees, and while a new network of committees is in the works, it is not yet in place.

As a result, Dr. Beichman said, “Scientists feel very much left out of this process. You could have involved the community and said “here’s what we have to do.”

He added, “In the end, even scientists can be responsible.”

If scientists can be responsible, why not the bureaucratic Scrooges at NASA?