The end of the Space Age?

Wandering through airports this last week, I keep being confronted by the cover of the July 2 Economist magazine, which proclaims “The end of the Space Age.”

Even for the iconoclastic editors of the Economist, that’s a pretty jarring statement. I was born after the first satellite was launched into space and grew up watching first unmanned missions to the moon, and then Apollo 11 and the other five manned missions to the moon. After the American West was conquered, space (as William Shatner proclaimed every week) was the final frontier.

Tied to the last Shuttle launch on July 8, the Economist cover story is pretty unequivocal, suggesting that at most geosynchronous orbit (22,000 miles up) is as far as man will go from now on:

It is quite conceivable that 36,000km will prove the limit of human ambition. It is equally conceivable that the fantasy-made-reality of human space flight will return to fantasy. It is likely that the Space Age is over.

The sidebar notes that in dollar terms, NASA’s budget has been flat for 20 years, but as a % of Federal spending, it’s fallen from 4.4% in 1965 to 0.5% today. (Update, Sunday 1pm: Gary Robbins of the San Diego Union has an excellent story on the false promises and design tradeoffs of the shuttle concept, based heavily on interviews with former astronauts.)

Privatization has been the hope of American space fans, but the unnamed authors point to the Achilles heel of these plans: dependence on government contracts to bootstrap their businesses. As the lead article continues:

Today’s space cadets will … point to the private ventures of people like Elon Musk in America and Sir Richard Branson in Britain, who hope to make human space flight commercially viable. Indeed, the enterprise of such people might do just that. But the market seems small and vulnerable. One part, space tourism, is a luxury service that is, in any case, unlikely to go beyond low-Earth orbit at best (the cost of getting even as far as the moon would reduce the number of potential clients to a handful). The other source of revenue is ferrying astronauts to the benighted International Space Station (ISS), surely the biggest waste of money, at $100 billion and counting, that has ever been built in the name of science.

The reason for that second objective is also the reason for thinking 2011 might, in the history books of the future, be seen as the year when the space cadets’ dream finally died. It marks the end of America’s space-shuttle programme, whose last mission is planned to launch on July 8th (see article). The shuttle was supposed to be a reusable truck that would make the business of putting people into orbit quotidian. Instead, it has been nothing but trouble. Twice, it has killed its crew. If it had been seen as the experimental vehicle it actually is, that would not have been a particular cause for concern; test pilots are killed all the time. But the pretence was maintained that the shuttle was a workaday craft. The technical term used by NASA, “Space Transportation System”, says it all.

But the shuttle is now over. The ISS is due to be de-orbited, in the inelegant jargon of the field, in 2020. Once that happens, the game will be up. There is no appetite to return to the moon, let alone push on to Mars, El Dorado of space exploration. The technology could be there, but the passion has gone—at least in the traditional spacefaring powers, America and Russia.

Poster for Vienna art exhibit
Photo by Joel West, 3 July 2011

As the other sidebar notes, military forces (now including China) are actively investing and monitoring developments, but again for communications and observation satellites (or destroying same) in earth orbit.

Given the broad shape of history and economic realities, I think the Economist is more likely to be right than wrong, at least in my lifetime. I doubt I’ll see human beings again leave earth orbit. And with the Shuttle, a certain boyhood hope will die: of understanding God’s universe beyond this little speck where 6.8 billion of us live today.

I guess there’s always retreating to the imaginary worlds of exotic space travel — of Clarke and Heinlein, or Roddenberry and Lucas. Ironically, the science fiction of the 1900s and 1950s seemed impossible — travel to the moon — but the technical problems could be solved. The science fiction of today has the same technical optimism, but hasn’t figured out how to solve the business model issues. (No, Total Recall doesn’t count).

One of my favorite childhood stories was Clarke’s classic, The City and the Stars. In that world, people no longer explored but just lived in their cities and visited imaginary worlds through interactive holo-dramas. The book was set in a world millions of years in the future, but that scenario could be less than a century off: Clarke was pessimistic about the technology, but (alas) optimistic about society’s willingness to maintain its frontier spirit.

A great CSU success story

Until this morning, I didn’t realize that aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan was a graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the flagship campus of the California State University system (my employer).

At SJSU, we are proud of our alumni who achieve success in sports, business, and the arts; our greatest claim to technical success is that Intel co-founder Gordon Moore spent 2 years here (where he met his wife) before transferring to Berkeley. The distribution of famous alumni is similar at San Diego State, our sister campus and closest rival. The breakdown of famous Cal Poly alumni are also broadly similar, although they have two astronauts.

So Burt Rutan is a clear outlier. I learned a lot more this morning about Burt Rutan, the man, who is in the news as the technical brains behind Richard Branson’s efforts to create a commercial space travel industry.

Rutan came to fame designing the Voyager, which flew around the world without refueling during nine days in 1986. It’s one of five Rutan-designed planes held by the Smithsonian. Another is VariEze, an earlier kit plane that revolutionized home-built airplanes.

Also in the Smithsonian is his first spacecraft, SpaceShipOne — funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen — which won the Ansari X Prize for flying to 100km twice in two weeks in 2004. As intended, the X Prize award provided a stepping stone for commercial space development — in this case Sir Richard and the SpaceShipTwo unveiled Wednesday. (It was modestly termed the VSS Enterprise, presumably to suggest a fleet of 40-50 Virgin Space Ships to be operated by Virgin Galactic.)

Because of Sir Richard, the FT thought it newsworthy to publish an interview Saturday with the greatest aeronautical engineer of our generation. It alludes to his modest roots in central California, and his efforts designing and testing model planes as a kid.

Such modest beginnings are part and parcel of the California State University system, the largest university system in the USA. We take students who don’t have the grades or the money to go to the more prestigious University of California system, as well as those who can’t leave home to attend college. (My dad commuted from home to SDSU for the first two years before transferring to UC Berkeley; my mom started at SJSU before transferring to Berkeley a few years ahead of Gordon Moore.)

Rutan got his B.S. in aeronautical engineering from Cal Poly in 1965. His senior project won the national student paper competition from the AIAA, the industry professional society.

Apparently the mothership for SpaceShipTwo — called WhiteKnight Two — bears the Cal Poly logo. In a 2005 speech at his alma mater, he encouraged students to get involved in creating the next round of space exploration. He also called for students to demonstrate their passion to make things happen.

As a kid, I barely heard of Cal Poly, perhaps because most of its alumni end up living in the Bay Area or the Central Coast. I only knew of it at all because my older cousin left Gilroy to go to Cal Poly before moving to Alaska to build the first Alaska pipeline.

Today, I know from other parents that today Cal Poly admissions are tougher than several UC campuses. Cal Poly is one of the top US engineering program among teaching schools (i.e. those without a PhD program) — along with the service academies and the vastly under-rated Harvey Mudd (east of LA).

In six years, I plan to encourage my daughter to apply to Cal Poly along with the UC campuses, Harvey Mudd and perhaps the Air Force Academy. (This assumes she continues to be a math whiz who likes to make things — and thus an ideal candidate for engineering school). Let’s hope the campus continues to turn out bright engineers for California’s economy, despite the legislative mismanagement that is giving the CSU system a death by a thousand cuts.

Prize-making innovation strategies

Today’s news includes two examples of using contests with large cash prizes as a way to spur innovation.

Netflix today held a press conference to announce the winner for the $1 million winner-take-all prize. The NYT account notes the last-minute maneuvering by runners-up hoping to dislodge the winner.

I suppose (as the NYT argues) this fits under the rubric “crowdsourcing,” even though compared to many models (like Threadless) the potential “crowd” of contributors across the world could fit in a large college classroom (or perhaps a high school football stadium).

Certainly it counts as open innovation — or, as Hank Chesbrough wrote in his pathbreaking book of the same name “Open Innovation is based on a landscape of abundant knowledge.” Later that same year, he wrote (borrowing from Bill Joy)

Not all the smart people work for us so we must find and tap into the knowledge and expertise of bright individuals outside our company.

Prizes work for a number of reasons. As Netflix did, at least until prizes become commonplace the sponsors can milk the contest for free publicity, both reducing search costs and increasing visibility of the brand. Also, the sponsor only has to pay one winner, not all the losers who (like most lottery ticket buyers) spent a lot of money and end up with nothing.

In this vein, the folks who administer prizes for space exploration — the X Prize Foundation — brag about all the free labor by losers:

In its first three years, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge has helped to demonstrate why NASA’s prize program – Centennial Challenges – is one of their most innovative and efficient programs. To date, only $350,000 of the initial $2,000,000 in prize money has been awarded, yet a dozen teams of spectacular engineers and innovators have already devoted more than 70,000 working hours toward building new technologies to win the competition. The Challenge has also demonstrated the connection between first generation lunar exploration, including the Apollo Lunar Modules built in the 1960s by Northrop Grumman, and the next generation vehicles being designed today.

NASA is putting up $2 million in prize purses for the Centennial Challenges, while Northrup Grumman (whose predecessors built the original Apollo lander) and a New Mexico spaceport are giving operational support.

According to stories today, Armadillo Aerospace is the first team to qualify before an Oct. 31 deadline to demonstrate a credible 21st century lunar lander. The team is led by John Carmack of id Software (best know for the Quake shoot-em-up videogame).

After the NGLLC is awarded, Armadillo and others hope to win the Google’s $20 million prize for landing a robot on the moon by 2012. Unlike others, Google will give a second prize.

Younger people forget that NASA was once an energetic, can-do government agency — before endless budget cuts and tragic deaths made it a lumbering risk-averse bureaucracy. Prizes are among the most efficient ways for the government to spur innovation, and so I have to hand it to whoever at NASA came up with this approach. As the NASA website explains:

Centennial of Flight
In December 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright, two bicycle mechanics working with no government support, initiated the age of powered flight with their success at Kitty Hawk. NASAs Prize Program honors the spirit of the Wright Brothers and other independent inventors by acknowledging the centennial of the first powered flight in 2003. The NASA Centennial Challenges program also recognizes that the rapid and dramatic progress in aeronautics in the early years of the first century of flight was often driven by prize competitions.

So in that regard, crowdsourcing technological innovations is an example of back to the future — a decidedly 18th century idea. Suzanne Scotchmer’s faith in prizes as an incentive for innovation is being born out.

Losing Gravity: ABC is out of this world

Finally there is something worth watching on ABC every Sunday. No, not This Week Without David Brinkley.

It’s called Defying Gravity, a sci-fi series that’s a pleasant surprise from the network that gave us Boston Legal, Brothers & Sisters, and of course Desperate Housewives. The series began last week and the third episode is on tonight.

Of course, as with modern sci-fi shows, this is less space western and more space soap opera. It’s like 2001, remade with the cast of Gray’s Anatomy — with traces of Red Planet and Armageddon thrown in.

This is not the futuristic technology of Star Wars or Star Trek, but instead today’s NASA astronauts with (more or less) today’s technology. The first two episodes hint at the stifling NASA bureaucracy — the bureaucratic mindset any organization develops when the key form of accountability is punishing failure rather than rewarding success.

While the production values are not at the level of the final Star Wars movies, they still have the feel of 2001 rather than the typical low-wage CTV production. (Admittedly Vancouver is hard to pick out when all the scenes are a Mission Control or aboard the spacecraft.) The cast is also solid. The perky Candian Laura Harris (aptly cast as “Zoe”) seems worlds apart from Kate Warner’s evil little sister in 24 Day Two.

Beyond the soap opera, my only concern from first two episodes aired last week is that the key obstacle facing NASA’s finest will be some supernatural more akin to Lost rather than a cybernetic villain as in 2001 and so many movies since.

Still, a show (even a soap opera) about NASA in the 21st century has a chance to remind mankind of the importance of the greater sense of hope that it won from explorers challenging the unknown — whether Columbus, Magellan or NASA’s earliest decades. Arthur C. Clarke captured this sense in his book 2001, a vision that Stanley Kubrick realized with first-class visuals in the movie that was my all-time favorite until the 1977 opening episode of the Star Wars saga.

My appreciation to ABC for carrying on this vision, particularly now that the SyFy cable channel has given up on sci-fi in favor of lame X-Files knock-offs.

40 years ago today...

I was sitting in the dining hall at Bob Mathias Sierra Camp. (Bob Mathias was like Bruce Jenner, except younger, less blond, and pre-television). All us boys (I think the girls had a separate camp) were looking at a small TV with barely visible pictures of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin making history.

EE Times, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic and of course NASA have websites marking the anniversary. Popular Science claims 10 things that I didn’t know about the landing (actually, only 8 were new to me.) A new book, Voices from the Moon, collects interviews from all 12 men who walked on the moon.

In his book Timeline, the late physician and novelist Michael Crichton wrote that 19th century scientist would be amazed “that humankind [sic] would travel to the moon, and then lose interest.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer cites Crichton favorably in lamenting the loss of political will since the last human being left the moon [on December 14, 1972.]

The reasons to return, Krauthammer (and I) would argue, are about the human spirit, not finding more velcro or Tang®:

Why do it? It's not for practicality. We didn't go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.
…
We are now deep into that hyper-terrestrial phase, the age of iPod and Facebook, of social networking and eco-consciousness.

But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated.

Don't try suing the Russians

While there is a question of culpability, the fallout continues from Tuesday’s collison between the Cosmos 2251 (dormant for the past 10 years).

Aviation Week and Space Technology included this speculation:

James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he is “interested to know, does Iridium have a case against the Russians?” Clearly, he said, there was some negligence involved on someone's part. “I don't think we want this one to go away quietly, like ‘Oops, this was just a natural event.’ ”

I would advise Iridium LLC CEO Matt Desch not to file suit, since enemies of Russia have a tendency to be assassinated, even overseas.

Predictably, the Russians are blaming Iridium:

Igor Lisov, another prominent Russian space expert, said he did not understand why Nasa's debris experts and Iridium, the owner of the American communications satellite, had failed to prevent it, since the Iridium satellite was active and its orbit could be adjusted.

Interestingly, a Google news search for the satellite collision brings up a video from the government-sponsored Russia Today. The network promises a Russian perspective, but the Google-indexed report (on its YouTube channel) includes only information from its US correspondent. A second report is also based on US interviews, with only a brief interview with a civilian Russian scientist near the end. People are still asking whether the Cosmos had a nuclear reactor, like other Russian satellites.

So the Russian government isn’t talking, even to its own house organ. It appears that glasnost was rejected as an alien concept by Soviet leaders and their Russian successors.

Russians destroy Iridium satellite

On Tuesday, a Russian Cosmos satellite ran into an active Iridium communications satellite, at an altitude of 491 miles over northern Siberia. Both satellites were totally destroyed.

This is not a problem for geosynchronous satellites (22,000 miles up) because they stay in one place. But for LEO (low earth orbit) communications satellites — which provide lower latency and polar coverage — such risk has always been there.

Iridium Satellite LLC (successor to the bankrupt creator of the sat phone network) has some spares so presumably this will only shorten its lifespan slightly. Wikipedia reports that the last failure was July 2008, and that it had 7 spares after that. (As with anything else, take it with a grain of salt).

It's kinda strange how little coverage there is of such an unprecedented event. (Admittedly I’m more into satellite stories nowadays than I was a few years ago). There is nothing on the Iridium website. One story quotes “Nicholas Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris,” but there nothing on the NASA website.

It looks like the story was broken by the CBS space “consultant,” who didn’t even put it up on his news page. ABC doesn’t seem to have a space reporter, and nothing is yet on the MSNBC space page.

One blogger ties the space disaster to the imminent bankruptcy of Sirius XM. Certainly both Sirius and Iridium (and Globalstar) have suffered from losses in space.

The Iridium satellite was operational at the time, but the Russian Cosmos satellite was believed defunct. That’s a lucky break for Iridium, which otherwise might face civil or military threats from the Russian regime for destroying an important piece of state property.

Remembering the planet Pluto

On Monday’s Tonight show, Jay Leno interviewed the man he said was the smartest guest he’d ever had. (Given he normally interviews starlets, TV actors and politicians, that wouldn’t be hard.)

But in this case, the guest was Neil DeGrasse Tyson who holds a PhD in astrophysics from Columbia. Maybe not a rocket scientist in the literal sense, but in the figurative sense.

Tyson has served on presidential commissions — including the NASA Advisory Council, writes popular and scientific articles, and is director of the Hayden Planetarium in NYC. He was also named the “Sexiest Astrophysicist” by People magazine in 2000.

As is often the case, Dr. Tyson was there to flog his latest book, in this case The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet. In recalling his own role in fueling the controversy (and Pluto’s demotion to planetoid) he mentioned that there was a Facebook group entitled “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet”:

This is a group dedicated to the kids who were taught that Pluto was the 9th planet from the sun!!!!

Pluto, we salute you. (February 18, 1930 - August 24, 2006)

I checked it out the next morning, and I’m proud to say I’m now member 1,546,518 — the first group I’ve joined since joining Facebook over the weekend. The group doesn’t seem to do anything other than collect members, but I imagine it’s not the only group like that on Facebook.

The City and the Stars

Science fiction novelist Sir Arthur C. Clarke died Tuesday in Ceylon, where he moved more than 50 years ago. (In the meantime, island renamed itself Sri Lanka). The various obits (such as the NYT and Wired) covered a lot of familiar ground (his RAF job), but also a few tidbits that I (as a 40+ year fan) didn’t know.

Everyone knows Clarke “invented” (or popularized) communications satellites, and certainly NASA gives him full credit. I did not know that in 1965 (as part of a collection of his essays), he published a book chapter called “A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time,” explaining why lawyers said it was too impractical to patent.

All the obits talked about his most successful novel, the one that created the first big-budget science fiction movie, 2001. As a kid, I recall seeing the week it came out, and being blown away by the special effects and the visual representation of an imagined future. Alas, when 2001 came around, a few ideas turned out to be dated — PanAm, AT&T, PicturePhones, ubiquitous space flight — but that’s the risk of any prediction. (I own a copy of the movie, which I should show my daughter, but I’m not impressed enough to pay $30 for the Blu-ray version).

However, nearly all of the obit writers had little understanding or appreciation of how Clarke changed the craft science fiction. Of the big four of his era — Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke and Heinlein — he was the best novelist and the only one able to carry a long and complex story through to conclusion. (Unless you want to clam that Asimov’s three part Foundation series of books was really one book).

My favorite childhood book was The City and the Stars, written a few years before I was born. The poignant story of Alvin winds through two highly detailed imaginary worlds — Alvin’s own time, set in a period of decay millennia in the future, and the past, more advanced society that Alvin discovers in his explorations. The main theme was the importance of curiosity and striving for achievement, but in retrospect it was also remarkable in its portrayal of the technology and social impacts of virtual reality.

The only place I saw his fully body of work (including his 1956 opus) mentioned was in the Telegraph obituary, which also gave his middle name (Charles), the date of moving to Ceylon (1956), and the delay in his knighthood due to false claims of sexual abuse.

The Telegraph reported that Clarke was hoping that resurrection comes some day: “cloning by highly advanced aliens being, predictably enough, his favoured method.” Not where I’d put my money, but I think also logically flawed.

If aliens did show up, and decided to resurrect some small fraction of the billions of dead humans, where would they start? I’d guess someone like Napoleon, Shakespeare, Einstein, Churchill or da Vinci. (Sure, there’s the issue of DNA availability, but for this thought experiment that’s not a dealbreaker). Clarke would have a hard time standing out from the clutter of 20th century novelists: in English alone, there’s Joyce, Steinbeck and Faulkner among others. There’s also a narrow time window: if the aliens show up In the Year 2525, then most of these 19th and 20th century novelists are going to be long forgotten, and I presume that the list will be more heavily weighted towards Chinese.

Perhaps if Virgin Galactic (or Sir Richard) names their spaceport after Sir Arthur, the aliens or humans of the 26th century will be curious enough to investigate who this Clarke character was. But I’m guessing that the British citizen is more likely to get that honor in the UK or Sri Lanka, should the opportunity present itself.