Robots Rule

There was moaning at the bar when the last NASA Space Shuttle returned to Earth, destined to become a museum exhibit, but the sentiment that it was all over for our geriatric space program may have been misplaced.  Yes, the shuttle was a flawed compromise and would never be designed in such a configuration today, but the real flaw was that it was designed to transport and support human beings and the need safely to do that dominated the design.

Enter the X-37B.  It looks a bit like the old shuttle, but without the crew, it's smaller, lighter and cheaper.  Because it rides on the nose of a Delta rocket, we don't have to worry about junk falling off some giant fuel tank and best of all, if we lose one, we only lose some money and not men and women.

It's the 21st century and robots rule.  Robots don't breathe, don't care much about the temperature or the quality of the food or need to use a toilet or to sleep.  They don't even get nervous. The experimental US Air Force X-37B or at least its successors has a robot arm to be used to fix or dismantle or refuel satellites and can transport objects to and from orbit - just like the old Shuttle fleet, but the crew stays safe at home.  It's scheduled to be launched today, weather permitting, from Patric Air Force Base, near Cape Canaveral.  A larger X-37C space plane will follow.  After that, who knows? 

Mars needs women

It's an odd fact that, for some male astronauts like former Space Station resident Mike Barratt, spending 6 months without gravity produces changes in vision that often are irreversible. He went up nearsighted and needing glasses for distance and came down eagle eyed and needing reading glasses. His condition seems permanent. The phenomenon is under serious study at NASA which is concerned that the possibility of a long trip to Mars might just carry the risk of blindness. Just why it happens and whether or not it can be prevented may be, according to CNN.com, the determining question as to "whether he or any other astronaut ever journeys into deep space or sets foot on other worlds."

Prolonged weightlessness causes papilledema -- a swelling of the optic nerve for about half the male astronauts, some of whom recover and others, like Barratt do not. Women seem to be immune. Of course another question that doesn't seem to be addressed here is why we don't just hire more female astronauts? Sometimes we obsess so much about a puzzling matter that we neglect to look at obvious alternatives.

Dawn patrol

The last time I watched the movie Spirit of St Louis, about Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight across the Atlantic, I wondered what he would have done if someone had told him: "hey wait, in a few years you'll be able to do this in a few hours while drinking champagne and watching this movie. That's not how the human ego operates however. We take huge risks to be the first. Risks that would be far, far smaller if we waited a while for technology to catch up.

Of course if it weren't for the Cold War we might never have gone to the moon or built a space station or have our hopes for a verdant Mars dashed in the 1960's and 70's. Sometimes you are better off taking the risk, spending the money; but is that an argument for not moving on with the times?

While the press and much of the public is lamenting the end of the seriously flawed shuttle program, the real science of space exploration is continuing to produce astounding advances that dwarf the advancements to knowledge produced by our manned program. With the rapid advance of semi-autonomous robotics and miniaturization, it's foreseeable that the huge risk and titanic expense of sending people around the solar system and returning them alive and sane may be less and less worthwhile.

What have we learned from the shuttle experience? That space travel is still very risky, still vastly more expensive and difficult than we imagine when we design these things. Expensive enough that we will always make serious compromises in design that eventually make things even more expensive when we have to work around them. The shuttle is a textbook lesson in the perils of design by committee and politicians. It's catastrophes result directly from design decisions driven by economy.

If we are to continue the Space Station project for a while, perhaps there will be sufficient motivation to develop a smaller, lighter, truly reusable, economically sound and more modern supply vehicle, but the Space Station, if it has any justification, is all about practice in sending people to places to do what robots will probably be able to do much better before we get there.

Yes, perhaps we'll be able to support some sort of human existence on Mars for a period of time and perhaps construct a moon base that could, for a time, house humans, but it wouldn't be much of a life and it certainly shouldn't be called a "colony" in the way European settlements in the Americas were colonies. We still lack the money and the technology as well as a reason to develop them. In that respect science fiction tends to be a somewhat cloudy fun-house mirror of the past more than a window into the future.

Would we ever send; would we ever expend the huge resources to send men and women to Vesta, or Ceres much less to the vicinity of the outer planets with their monstrous radiation belts and no resources -- a journey that would force the new Conquistadors to live in conditions we now reserve for pickled herring -- and keep them in constant danger and deprivation for years? No, but we can send and have sent patient, unemotional and replaceable robots whose capabilities are expanding as fast as the universe itself. Would we spend trillions and ask a crew to take a decades long trip in a stinking tin can without a shower, drinking recycled urine and eating horrible food just to orbit Pluto? Will we ever travel to the nearest star? I doubt it, but the technology to send an unmanned vehicle is at least a real possibility, even if we won't live to see the pictures.

Robots can be sent in small vehicles; can be small vehicles, powered by small efficient ion motors and won't suffer from emotional problems or long for the cool, green hills of home. A cheap cell phone now has more computing power than existed anywhere when we first walked on the moon and high resolution video cameras are smaller than the human eye. (remember when color TV cameras were the size and weight of refrigerators and required a two man crew?) The rate of change is accelerating. Think of what we'll be able to do in the 20 or 30 years it would take to build manned rockets and ancillary equipment for a very risky Mars mission.

The shuttle was a 1970's design loaded with so much design compromise that it was obsolete before it got off the ground. Robotic missions on the other hand can go from the drawing board to landing on Jovian moons in fairly short order. The real science is done on places that would incinerate, irradiate, freeze and squash an astronaut, even if he survived the mind numbing confinement and squalor needed to get there and back.

Not so with the Dawn mission, now as of yesterday in orbit around the asteroid Vesta; an object so small and distant that even the Hubble telescope can't see anything but a featureless smear. Expect a flood of hi-res images in the next few weeks. In time it will move on to Dwarf Planet Ceres and surely gain some insight into the formation of planetary systems. That may be less a thing of dreams than small boys and Sci-Fi fans like to imagine but much more of a thing of science. We've already seen the sunset on Mars and watched dust devils cross the endless desert. We've heard the wind blow on Titan and seen its methane rivers and lakes and there's more to come as the technology improves.

It's impossible to do more than guess, but I'm guessing that long before we discover bug-eyed monsters on alien worlds, we'll be building our own in Pasadena and sending them there. You and I can see the dawn rise on worlds more alien than we can imagine and we can do it poolside with a glass of lemonade.

Rising star.

There's a 25 foot observation tower in the Hobe Sound Federal Wildlife preserve about 150 yards from my house. I took flashlight and binoculars up the steep stairs at about a quarter to 8 Friday night. The night was beautiful and I had a full 360 degree panorama at above treetop height. The full moon was up about a hand's breadth above the mangroves to the east and reflected off the water of the intracoastal waterway below.

As my watch closed in on 7:55, I began to wonder if I could actually see anything through the haze on the horizon, if the launch would go off on time (I forgot to bring a radio) and whether I was being silly for braving the mosquitoes to try to see something over a hundred miles away. I didn't bring a compass either and wondered if I would miss the whole thing because the tower's roof blocked the North star.

Then the sun began to rise in the North, the few clouds traversed the spectrum from a dim, hardly perceptible red glow, to a brighter orange, to yellow as silently, majestically, the long trail of flame rose above the sunrise like a comet.

At about 30 degrees above the horizon, the solid fuel boosters dimmed, separated and fell, leaving only an ever-rising blue-white star climbing and arching over until it appeared finally to be falling as it made it's way across the Atlantic. By the time I got back to my house they were over Africa and half way to dawn.

Shot in the dark

The Governnment raised holy hell when the Chinese shot down one of their non-functional satellites last year. Of course the fact that it was in a 600 mile orbit and the debris will scatter all over the place to become a permanent hazard to other space vehicles is a legitimate complaint, but the story was played as a hostile move. If they can shoot down one of theirs, they can shoot down all of ours was the scenario squeezed out of the hypothesis. Indeed it was a feat that demonstrates China's growing prowess in Space technology which challenges the American sense of ownership.

Of course we will be very offended if anyone complains about our attempt to shoot down a spy satellite of ours that's already on a decaying orbit and should otherwise re-enter the atmosphere some time around March 6th. That there is a hydrazine tank aboard that might actually make it to the surface is the stated motivation, despite the really tiny chance that it might cause any harm to any one or any thing, but one wonders whether the chance to experiment with anti-missile technology isn't the real basis for the shot. The Earth is a relatively big place after all and the chances of a tank full of hydrazine hitting a populated area is remote.

It's not that I oppose the attempt; it's just that the crisis of confidence in our Government has become so severe that the assumption of dishonesty is always the safest bet.