Quantum Rocketry

During a quick lunch break today, I read about H.R. 1641 on Bad Astronomy:

To direct the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to plan to return to the Moon and develop a sustained human presence on the Moon.

(Hilariously, this bill is titled the “REAL Space Act.”)

Like Phil, I think it’s interesting that this act puts a focus on national security issues. I think that’s a stretch – nobody today feels that China getting to the Moon would be as much of a threat as the Soviets getting there in the ’60s. Still, the military and security rationale for having a sustained presence in space is a powerful one. After all, while Armstrong’s first and Cernan’s last words on the Moon put peaceful exploration front and center, Kennedy’s original speech proposing the goal of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” contained, just a couple paragraphs previously, this:

Recognizing the head start obtained by the Soviets with their large rocket engines, which gives them many months of leadtime, and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes, we nevertheless are required to make new efforts on our own. … But this is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.

Got that? Free men must share! The Soviets will exploit space! As Neil deGrasse Tyson paraphrased in a speech, we chose to go to the Moon…in order to kill Commies. Beating the drums makes for a powerful emotional argument, and it’s how our government decides to do a lot of things, from Moon landings to interstate highways.

Personally speaking, I have mixed feelings about this “REAL Space Act.” On the positive side, I think bill represents the way Congress should be treating the space program: giving it lofty goals, and assuring it of funding to support those goals. Oh, what a lovely world that would be!

Still, I’m becoming more and more cynical about Congress and NASA. Congressmembers have fallen into the habit of treating NASA like a big, fat, popular-and-thus-untouchable pork barrel. For instance, in the most recent NASA authorization bill, Congress did not specify where NASA was to go…but they specified exactly what NASA was going to build to go there (a heavy-lift rocket), what technologies NASA was to use on it (solid rocket boosters), and which manufacturer was to supply them (ATK). Oh, that must have been a wonderful bill for ATK, but I have severe doubts as to how much good that approach does for the space program. Instead, I like the approach of giving the space program broad objectives and letting NASA’s engineers make engineering decisions, and this bill seems more amenable to that approach.

However, I’m not sure that going to the Moon in 10 years is a good enough objective. It took us about eight years to go from 15 minutes of human spaceflight experience to landing on the Moon…in the Sixties. With, you know, vacuum tubes and slide rules. My point is: if we really wanted to, I mean really wanted to, we could dust off old blueprints, pull out a big pile of money, and be on the Moon again two or three years from today. What this new bill lacks is something that makes it sound more like we’re going to be doing something that will qualify as a great achievement for the 21st century.

The key might be that “sustained presence.” If the goal is not just to put people on the Moon in 2022, but to have people there and keep going…

That needs to be spelled out. Congress might think it too science-fictiony, but I think words like “asteroid” or “Mars” or “colony” need to get top billing here.

I wish I were kidding. I really, really, do. I recognize that the way political parties supposedly work is to offer different solutions to problems – not “good” or “bad” solutions: they are all patriotic, and none of them are evil. They’re just different.

However, when it comes to things like this, I don’t feel like I’m exaggerating: Congressman Adrian Smith is launching a “citizen review” of “wasteful” NSF projects.

The way incoming Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s web site explains the idea is:

We are launching an experiment – the first YouCut Citizen Review of a government agency. Together, we will identify wasteful spending that should be cut and begin to hold agencies accountable for how they are spending your money.

First, we will take a look at the National Science Foundation (NSF) – Congress created the NSF in 1950 to promote the progress of science. For this purpose, NSF makes more than 10,000 new grant awards annually, many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences. Recently, however NSF has funded some more questionable projects – $750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.

(And, of course, Rep. Smith’s introductory video makes reference to those terrible “university academics” who receive this money. But the whole issue of why learning, academia, and universities are becoming more and more vilified in the political arena is a discussion for another day.)

At the bottom of the web site, there’s a form in which you can enter an NSF award number and comment on how that award is wasting your money. Anyone with an email address can do this. The thing is, while I do believe that transparency is a good thing, I don’t think that the average citizen is going to give any NSF grants the full consideration that they would need to devote to them before decreeing the grant a “waste” or not. They are more likely to make snap judgments based on descriptions like “$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players.”

What do I find so objectionable and anti-science about this?

First and foremost, this is a gross oversimplification. Scientific findings can have applications across many different fields that may or may not have anything to do with the original study or proposal. So, it’s entirely possible that the $750k grant had nothing to do with soccer, but the study turned out to have applications to analyzing soccer-player dynamics. And it’s entirely possible that a materials science group was interested in mechanical models of acoustic waves, but that research was more likely to be funded if done in partnership with a Hollywood effects studio than not, so they got $1.2 million to investigate the sounds of breaking objects. But even if the grants were explicitly for the study of soccer players or improved smashing noises in movies, they still might be worth doing because those findings might have applications to something that matters in our everyday lives, cures disease, enables new technologies, or opens up some other field of endeavor. In fact, every NSF grant proposal must include a substantial section on the “broader impacts” of the research in question, and many proposals get rejected for suggesting research that is too narrowly focused. Rep. Smith is asking people with a few minutes to kill to evaluate what NSF committees with many more qualifications have already evaluated and judged sufficiently broad-ranging.

Here’s an example of research that sounds crazy but has useful applications: a group of collaborators in Canada published a paper on the mathematical modeling of a zombie outbreak. (The paper is available online here, and is a hilarious read for anyone familiar with scientific writing!) Your first thought might be that this is a terrible waste of money, effort, and university resources; or perhaps that the journal ought to be discredited for publishing such a paper; or perhaps you think that this was a total failure of the peer-review process and that all scientists have lost their sense of perspective. But here’s the thing: the zombie modeling research actually has real-world applications. From the paper’s discussion section:

The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.

This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first mathematical analysis of an outbreak of zombie infection. While the scenarios considered are obviously not realistic, it is nevertheless instructive to develop mathematical models for an unusual outbreak. This demonstrates the flexibility of mathematical modelling and shows how modelling can respond to a wide variety of challenges in ‘biology’.

[Munz, Hudea, Imad, and Smith, "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection," Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, 2009]

So, yes: these scientists recognize that they worked on a project that is, on the face of it, somewhat silly. The important thing, though, is that these researchers got together, thought it would be interesting to apply their methods to a problem, and got results that have multidisciplinary impacts.

Another great example is the study of synchronicity. Scientists in the fields of mathematics, biology, physics, engineering, and computer graphics have been interested in synchronicity among many discrete entities and how it could arise without central control, just from a few simple rules that each entity follows. An example is “flocking” behavior, exhibited by groups of birds or fish. A computer graphics expert named Craig Reynolds published a paper in 1987 explaining how three simple rules could explain how birds flock together. One of the dramatic consequences of this research was better computer modeling of large groups of animals, which, of course, found its way straight into the special effects industry. Here’s a famous example that uses computer simulation of flocking behaviors to make more realistic animated animals:

So, by Rep. Smith’s logic, if any synchronicity research received NSF funding, he could put it up on the Republican Whip’s web site and say, “university academics got hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to develop computer graphics of a wildebeest herd for a Disney movie.” Shameful, right? The thing is, this application is one aspect of the research. There are many more, ranging from behavioral biology to architecture to sociology to crystallography. Yes, applications include better computer renderings of schools of fish in “Finding Nemo.” Yes, applications include being able to explain how humans at a concert can all clap in time with one another. But this research also gives us better bridges, self-assembling chemical structures, and more capable robotics. You don’t have to take my word for it – here’s a fantastic TED video of Cornell Prof. Steve Strogatz, a gifted communicator, talking about the study of synchronicity and its many applications.

Second, people submitting NSF awards to the Republicans through this program are going to end up nominating as “wasteful” awards that have to do with policies they disagree with. One of the tricky things about science is that scientists don’t get to choose what results they get; sometimes they get results that they – or politicians – don’t like. But that doesn’t mean that those areas of study aren’t deserving of scientific attention!

Anyone with an email address can submit an NSF award to this Republican web site. It would take about 30 seconds for a lobbying corporation to get a Hotmail or Gmail address that wouldn’t be traced back to the company and submit all kinds of grants that have the potential to damage them politically. How many fast food chains do you think will nominate NSF-sponsored studies relevant for obesity prevention? How many oil and gas companies will nominate research into solar cell technologies or further confirmation of climate change? How many religious nutcases will nominate research that impacts evolutionary biology? How many companies will use this as a means to try to shut down research that might make their products obsolete or less desirable?

Humans have a natural tendency to try to ignore problems unless they pose a clear and present danger. This is probably a survival instinct: focus on what’s in front of you, solve the problems you can, and whatever goes on over there is someone else’s issue. However, at some point, we do have to recognize when an issue goes from “not our problem” to “we need to solve this.” Climate change is a perfect example: among the scientific community, there is no doubt that it is happening (though there may be disagreements about the details). But for a politician, it would be unwise to say, “yes, climate change is real; no, I don’t think we should do anything about it.” A statement like that would run the risk of sending voters the message, “I don’t care about you.” Much easier (and safer at the polls) to say, “no, it’s not happening at all.” As such, these politicians will latch on to any tiny weakness in the scientific work, so that they don’t have to commit to a course of action. So how many NSF-sponsored projects into determining what the impacts of climate change might or might not be get submitted to this web site, not because we shouldn’t find out about those impacts, but because some people don’t want to know that a problem exists?

Asteroid impact!

On a related note, one thing that NSF does is fund some of our programs to identify near-Earth asteroids. These are the kinds of asteroids that we have to worry about – the kind that could crash into our planet and destroy things in a cataclysmic way. What are the chances that that could happen? Any astronomer will tell you that they are, well, astronomically tiny. Still, there is value in the search – because if an asteroid is on its way to impact the Earth, we had better know about it! If we ignore the problem, then there’s a large chance that nothing happens but a small chance that we all die. If we address it, then we can try to mitigate the issue. But how many ordinary citizens will look at these programs and think, “I don’t even know what asteroids are. Are they real? What is this? My tax dollars are paying for this. Why should they?”

Third, NSF-funded research pays for graduate students! We cost money – not just our meager stipends, but also our university tuition, university overhead, and mandatory health insurance for those of us who work in labs. We also need capable computers and precise equipment to do our research. And we need to present our findings to the scientific community at research conferences. Even if our current project happens to be on better modeling of the sound things make when they break, and even if the obvious applications are in the movie and gaming industries, that’s not what we’re going to spend our whole career on. We’re learning advanced skills – skills this country desperately needs to develop. We’re pushing the boundaries in advanced fields – fields that are relevant to a wide range of applications.

What if the grad student modeling the sounds of breaking objects goes on to develop software that can analyze a terrorist’s tape of demands to determine what other activities are going on in his cave, and lets us pinpoint him and stop him? (Yeah, that’s right, I just called House Republicans soft on defense because of this NSF-skewering project!) What if the grad student modeling soccer players is talking with a friend who is doing medical research, and finds out that his soccer-player algorithms could help his friend develop a cure for cancer?

Even if our research project has limited applications, it still has the function of giving us grad students the skills, tools, and abilities that we need to become fully-functional scientists and engineers in our own right. Today, I work on algorithms to control reconfigurable modular spacecraft. But if I never touch another spacecraft-related problem again in my life, I have still learned a lot about computer programming, mathematical modeling, control strategies, physics, critical thinking, project management, systems engineering, technical paper-writing, and communication. Whether or not I keep working on spacecraft, all those things will continue to be useful. Maybe someday I will even become a professor and start making little baby scientists of my very own. And regardless of what research projects they work on, no matter how silly it seems, there is value in simply teaching them to be scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and thinkers.

For science to work properly, scientists need to be able to proceed with free and open inquiries. They need to be able to exercise their wits and apply their knowledge to all sorts of problems. Science is about looking at something in the world, watching it, and thinking, “if I put my mind to it, I can figure that out!“ It doesn’t matter if the phenomenon in question is how soccer players move on the field, why things make the sounds they do when they break, why fish school together, or even how hypothetical zombies spread their infection. It also doesn’t matter if the research has immediate applications to movies, video games, sports, or anything else. We can explain the phenomena of the universe. Working to expand the scope of our knowledge enriches us, little by little, for as long as the human race exists.

That is a philosophy that the House Republican leadership opposes with this NSF review site. If your congressperson has anything to do with it, I urge you to write them about it.

Jon Stewart, and the 215,000 ± 10% people who came with him, make me very happy for America.

This clip was a desperately needed break from the political cycle that has been going on since the 2008 election season.

These are hard times – not end times.

…

If we amplify everything, we hear nothing. There are terrorists, and racists, and Stalinists, and theocrats – but those are titles that must be earned.

- Jon Stewart

Embedded in his comedy shtick, Stewart has made a tremendous point: that Americans do not fit the description of the polarized picture of “Americans” that we’ve seen on TV – because, of course, reasonable Americans do not make for good TV ratings.

This is a country that has come together to do tremendous things. Thirteen completely different states, founded on different principles, banded together in a revolution that founded a country we called a “Great Experiment.” The American people have united to accomplish the defeat of fascism. They have founded institutions and established conventions that govern the way the world operates today. They have united to put human beings on other worlds.

Our differences enrich us and empower us to do great things. And our enemies are not those different from ourselves – they are those who would exploit those differences in order to divide us.

Remember that.

So, there’s been another explosion on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. This got me thinking about risk and risk management.

In the engineering sense, “risk” refers to the chance that a particular system will fail and how heavily we weight the consequences of such failures. Risk is present in any design, any system, any process. There’s no way anyone can drive risk to zero, because nobody has perfect knowledge of any system and nobody can predict the future with 100% accuracy. The question is how unlikely and how inconsequential a failure must be to represent an acceptable risk. A complimentary question is how well we plan to deal with those failures when they happen.

BP undoubtedly performed some sort of risk analysis on the Deepwater Horizon platform before it began operations. Engineers must have, at some level, looked at the drilling hardware and procedures and decided that the chance of a catastrophic failure was such-and-such percent. They must also have looked at the cost of dealing with those failures, and come up with so many billion dollars. But all this gets weighed against the potential benefits: if the Deepwater Horizon platform brought in revenue of only a thousand bucks a year, but had an chance of failure of 50%, and the cost to the company of that failure is $20 billion, then BP probably would not have set up the platform the way they did. But if the calculation came out with a one-in-a-million chance of failure, a $20 cost of failure, but revenue of $50 billion per year, then of course they’d go ahead with the project.

The failure of the actual Deepwater Horizon system could mean any one of several things. It could mean that all BP’s risk estimates were correct, and they just got supremely unlucky with that one-in-a-million chance: unlikely, but possible. It could also mean that their analysts made some error: they may have put the chance of failure too low, or the consequence of failure too low, or the potential benefit of success too high. The real trouble with this sort of thinking is that we can’t know for sure where the analysis went wrong, if it did.

However, when we look at BP’s horrendous safety record, the facts that came out about how blasé other oil companies were about drilling, safety, and cleanup in the Gulf, and this second explosion on a platform owned by another company with a dubious safety record (at least, so I heard on NPR), I tend to think there was a problem with the risk analysis. These companies are engaging in higher-risk behaviors in order to get higher payouts. In short: they are getting too greedy. This might not be a problem in some industries, but here, the cost of failure isn’t just borne by the risk-taking companies, but also by the residents of Gulf Coast states (along with the rest of us taxpayers). I hope that these incidents cause the companies in question to revise their risk analyses to be more conservative, especially now that there is wider recognition in our society of the costs of such risky behavior to the wider economy, environment, and climate.

Now, there are good reasons to pursue more high-risk activities, if the potential benefit is high. For instance, there’s my favorite kind of engineering: spacecraft engineering! I would love for NASA to take much greater risks than it currently does!

Current NASA policy, for instance, dictates that any mission should present zero risk to the safety of astronauts on board the Space Station. This policy, which appeared after the Shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry, makes little sense. Remember what I said before about zero risk? It does not and cannot exist. Yet, that’s NASA policy – and the policy has caused NASA to nix some pretty exciting missions for posing, for example, a one in 10⁸ chance of collision with ISS. The chance of Station astronauts getting fried by solar flare radiation or baking when ISS refrigeration units fail or losing their air from a micrometeoroid are likely to be much higher than 1 in 100 million – so what’s the problem? These missions don’t add any danger compared to the dangers that already exist.

Besides, we’re taking about spaceflight. It’s not safe. I mean, we’ve made it pretty safe, but still – it involves strapping people on top of tons of high explosives, pushing them through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, jolting them around repeatedly as rocket stages separate and fire, and then keeping them alive in a vacuum for days, weeks, or months at a time. Honestly, it’s astonishing that we managed to pull off six Moon landings with only a single failed attempt – and a nonfatal one at that!

I would argue that those tremendous successes in the early space program came from high-risk activities. For the first American manned flight into orbit, NASA put John Glenn on top of a rocket that exploded on three out of its five previous launches. The Gemini Program pioneered the technologies and techniques necessary for a lunar landing (and that we now take for granted in Space Shuttle activities) by trying them out in space to see what happened – that program nearly cost Neil Armstrong and David Scott their lives on Gemini 8. The Apollo 8 mission, which was supposed to orbit the Earth, was upgraded to a lunar swingby – the first time humans visited another planetary body – mere months before launch. But these days, to hear NASA brass and Congressional committee members tell it, no such risks are acceptable. NASA must use “proven technologies.” NASA must accept no more than bruises on its astronauts when they return from missions. NASA must not chance any money, material, or manpower on a mission that might not succeed, even if such success could give us the next great leap forward. And so we end up with manned “exploration” of only low Earth orbit for thirty years, an Apollo reimagining to succeed the Space Shuttle, and, if the House has its way with President Obama’s proposed NASA budget, a space program dedicated to building The Same Big Dumb Rockets That It Already Built for the forseeable future.

Fortunately, we still get to see some envelope-pushing on the robotic exploration side of things. Missions to Mars have only recently broken through to a cumulative success rate greater than 50%, thanks to a string of high-profile successes, and that’s partly because of the ambition involved in landing something on another planet. It’s wonderful to see the progression from the Sojourner to Spirit and Opportunity to Curiosity rovers – but remember that the Beagle rover, Mars Polar Lander, and Mars Climate Orbiter all crashed into the Red Planet. These failures cost money and effort, and perhaps a direction of research in a few academic careers, but not lives, which makes them more acceptable to bear back on Earth. Even if the risk is high, the cost of failures is acceptable compared to the benefits.

Still, there could be more room for audacity (is audacity = 1/risk?) in robotic space exploration. Take the MER mission, for example: a pair of vehicles designed to last for 90 days have been operating for over six years – and counting. In one sense, this is a great success. But in another, it shows that spacecraft engineers are far, far too conservative in their designs. Imagine if they had actually designed the MER rovers to run for 90 days: everyone would have been happy with the mission, and the rovers would have cost less and taken less development time to the tune of something like the ratio between ~2200 and 90 sols. Or, conversely, consider if NASA had been ambitious enough to design a five-year rover mission from the start. That might have seemed laughable when the MERs were launched, but now we know that duration to be well within our capabilities. Because, in fact, we design space missions that rarely stretch those capabilities, since we do not tolerate risk.

This risk aversion in spacecraft engineering is one reason why I (and so many other people) are excited to see companies like SpaceX and Scaled Composites – which aim to turn a profit, something NASA doesn’t have to do! – doing the things they are doing. SpaceX, especially, which had to launch its Falcon 1 rocket several times before it succeeded, but used that experience to pull off a big Falcon 9 launch and secure the largest commercial launch contract ever. It’s also one of the reasons I was so excited about President Obama’s plan for NASA: it looked like NASA would be sticking its neck out for unproven technologies again.

How is it that we as a society tolerate tremendous risk when it comes to activities that affect thousands or even millions of lives on Earth, but we balk at the slightest chance of failure when considering space travel? It’s a puzzle to me.

I don’t often put up posts about non-space politics on this blog, especially now that I have a smidgen of internet fame to my name. However, there’s something going on now that is both important and something I feel strongly about. I’m talking about all this manufactured controversy in the punditry surrounding the Islamic community center in New York City, and I am putting this post up because I strongly support the center’s construction. I have three main reasons for supporting the community center.

Reason numero uno is that there is no rational connection between this community center and the terror attacks of 9/11. Protesting its construction is pretty much equivalent to protesting the construction of churches south of the Mason-Dixon line because the KKK used to lynch people down there. The protesters and pundits are committing the logical fallacy of the sweeping generalization: the 9/11 hijackers were Muslim, therefore all Muslims are potentially to be feared. This is an extremely dangerous attitude, and it brings me to…

Reason number two: I was raised Jewish. My temple Hebrew school curriculum devoted a full year to education on the dangers of bigotry, prejudice, and otherwise singling out any ethnic, racial, or religious group. Certainly, that education focused on the experiences of Jewish people, but the lessons we discussed were broadly applicable. I have internalized many of my experiences from growing up and living as a member of a cultural minority, and I respect the needs for other minorities to practice their beliefs and gather as a community. Such things should not be made unpleasant by the actions of the cultural majority. More than that, the cultural diversity of our country should be celebrated – it is what makes us great!

It’s very easy for hate speech to come out of this, as the protesters stir up emotions. After all, their entire argument is based on emotion: even when the pundits backpedal as hard as they can to avoid sounding bigoted, they end up calling the community center’s location things like “tasteless” – forgetting that, in this sense, “taste” varies from person to person and is based on emotional responses. Even such mild-seeming criticism can lead to prejudice and bigotry. Now, I’m certainly not saying that I think the United States is on a slippery slope to an imitation Holocaust. I don’t think that is true at all. But I know that pogroms and bigotry happened well before that, and what some of the protesters are saying while assembled in a mob near the Islamic center makes me nervous. As a Jew, when I say “never again,” I don’t just mean myself.

Reason Number Three is that I am an American. I am patriotic. I believe in the American system of government and American ideals. I also think about those ideals. The founders of this country were products of the Enlightenment and the internecine prejudices of Europe; they were wise enough to know that their new country should be established without a single state religion and with built-in acceptance of all the various faiths in all the original thirteen colonies. (Remember that, in those days, the various strains of Christianity were considered as disparate and irreconcilable as Hinduism and Judaism. The colonists came from a Europe that periodically tore itself to pieces over differences between Catholic and Protestant groups – and that was between faiths that agree on basic things like who’s a god and who isn’t!) If the framers of our Constitution had wanted America to be a Christian nation, I’d think they would want to be much more obvious about it, to make sure that their intentions were clear as time passed: while Judeo-Christian philosophy certainly influenced the Constitution, that document contains exactly zero references to God, Jesus, or Christianity.Nor does it refer to any other religion.

Even a general lack of endorsement of one religion over another wasn’t enough for the newly founded states, though. Think back to high school history classes: the states refused to ratify the Constitution before the inclusion of a Bill of Rights, and the very first amendment that they demanded specifically prohibits the federal government from establishing a state religion. Not only that, but it grants individuals the right to practice any religion they like, and to assemble together for any purpose, including practice of religion. So not only is the community building this Islamic center well within their rights to do so, but we ought to celebrate what they are doing – they are exercising rights that do not exist in many countries but that we, as Americans, gladly extend to our citizens. We ought to give thanks to the founders of our country and the legislatures of the original thirteen colonies for giving us so many rights, rather than protesting the exercise of these Constitutional rights!

As a final note, let me mention that other supporters of the community center include the mayor of New York City and the families of 9/11 victims. You know, the people actually affected by the presence of the community center, and the people most likely to have a negative emotional response to it. The pundits on Fox News are using the Islamic center as a political football to try and drum up support for reactionary candidates, and I think they ought to be ashamed of their actions. Not only do they come across as prejudiced, but they seem very un-American to me. Of course, this is America – so they can keep right on saying what they’re saying. That’s one of the sticky points about any debate like this. At the very least, though, I can hope that with all the information available out there, the general populace will think critically about what’s going on before succumbing to emotional reactions.

Depending who you ask, freshman Senator Scott Brown got himself elected on a platform of populist rage against health care reform, a reaction of populist frustration with the health care reform process on Capitol Hill, or a flood of insurance-company money. In those two cases that involve Bay Stater constituents, Sen. Brown styles himself as a faithful representative of his people. In all three cases, he is an elected representative of Massachusetts to the national government. He has constituents. And he styles himself as a leader in Washington.

However, Sen. Brown has made it very difficult for his constituents to contact him. His web site, which despite being up for a month still says “temporary” on the front page, lists no email address for him, and some Boston Globe readers have in the past written letters to the editor on how hard it is to contact his office by other means. Now that health care reform is safely passed his vote – and the Democrats are not likely to bring the issue up again – I suspect that his Senate email address will magically pop into existence in short order.

Sen. Brown has certainly made his priorities in Washington very clear. One of the first things he did was get campaigning for Sen. John McCain’s reelection. And he spent some time with Republican leaders getting cushy committee appointments. And he went to extra effort to look immediately like a leader in Congress. But for his constituents in Massachusetts, no email address. (Message to American voters: “I’m a Washington outsider!” is campaign code for “I want to be a Washington insider!“)

It took me, oh, about a week to code up my own personal web site from scratch. That’s me, one person, working in my off hours. I’m guessing Sen. Brown hired someone to make his Senate web site, so there’s no reason it should still say “temporary.”

I worked for the federal government over the summer, and it took them one day to give me a working email address. (Pretty funny IT training, too: “When you get your email, please don’t go emailing all your friends and relatives because it says your name @nasa.gov.”) Does he really not have an address for voters to write to him yet?

It’s the Internet age, Senator Brown, and you have constituents. Time to give up the campaign truck and get on the ball.

This *almost* made me register for Twitter, just to respond. But I am still resisting the “service that nobody knew they wanted!” I hope a pingback goes through…if not, I bet I can rely on a retweet from @aerognome.

Here are my answers:

1) Should Constellation be saved?

No; at least, not without a lot of major changes. CxP is drastically underfunded, horribly over budget, way behind schedule, and myopically limited in technology and innovation. It wasn’t going to get us to the Moon before 2030 and wasn’t even going to get us to ISS before 2018. I’d very much like to have Mike Griffin’s Constellation fetters come off.

2) Should Shuttle be extended to close the gap?

No. Not only is that infeasible (there are no more STS external fuel tanks left, and we cannot make more) and uneconomical (due to high launch and recovery costs), but the Shuttle is thirty years old. It was never designed to fly for this long and should have been replaced in the early 90′s. In what other industry do people go around with 30-year-old vehicles and devices, still saying that they are the cutting edge? In what other industry is the 30-year-old vehicle the cutting edge? This is your own damn fault, Congress. Where’d the X33 go when we had the chance?!

3) Should NASA perform exploration missions while developing new R&D technologies that will get us to Mars?

Yes, and I don’t think this point is at issue. The problem is that the Obama administration chose to release their NASA budget without a corresponding space policy speech – it’s not that exploration missions have been cancelled, it’s that we don’t have any information on exploration targets and goal dates. I suspect that Obama’s rumored speech in April will remedy this. At least Charlie Bolden thinks we’re going to Mars!

It is important for me to say that there is a corresponding question, “should NASA develop new technologies while performing exploration missions?” The answer to this question is also “yes,” and critically, it was “no” under Constellation.

4) Is a heavy-lift vehicle required to leave LEO?

Let me instead answer a more general question: “Are new technologies or vehicles required to leave LEO?”

To that, I say yes. Either that means we need an economical heavy-lift capability, or tech development related to in-orbit deploying and assembling of large structures from small components. A detailed trade study should show which of those options to pick.

5) Why is inspiration important to the future of NASA?

Our nation is increasingly facing challenges that must be approached by scientific or engineering methods, and so it is generally in our national best interest to get students studying STEM fields. One way to keep them interested in science and technology is to make sure that there are really high-profile science and engineering project being done on a national level – the kinds of projects that happen at NASA. Even if those who pursue STEM fields don’t work for NASA itself, they may tackle related problems that have national repercussions, from more efficient solar cells to better medical technologies to indefinitely preservable foods.

And of course, NASA needs a pool of motivated, educated, capable recruits in order to pull off such projects. So NASA itself has a vested interest in inspiring students to remain interested in STEM fields during and after their educations.

I was very encouraged to read that Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) expressed some thoughts on the new NASA budget this past week that agrees pretty well with my own view. I’ve generally been worried about the Senators and Representatives from Florida, Alabama, and Texas; since I am very much a proponent of the new NASA programs, I don’t want to see politicians trying to drag out the generally defunct Constellation program just to get some pork for their districts.

Some of Sen. Nelson’s comments:

“I think they made two tactical mistakes that gave everybody the wrong impression,” the Florida Democrat said. “The first one is that the president didn’t set what the goal is, and everybody knows the goal and that’s to go to Mars.

“The second mistake was that they said they are canceling the Constellation program. That sounds like they were canceling the manned (spaceflight) program, when in the same breath he said we’re doing the research and development for a heavy lift vehicle, and they were putting all their eggs in the same basket of getting to the space station with the commercial boys.”

The most frustrating thing to me about the general space-blogger explosion in response to the new NASA budget and programs is that they all seem to have been screaming, “Obama cancelled the manned space program!” That has never been true; he cancelled the already-way-behind-Constellation program. Cancelling the human spaceflight program would look something more like erasing NASA’s Exploration Systems and Space Operations Mission Directorates. ESMD is, in fact, getting the large bulk of the new NASA money, and it’s earmarked specifically for new human space programs and technology. I have even seen news reports that talk about the NASA “budget cut,” when in fact the budget is increasing by a phenomenal $6 billion in the next five years.

What gives? Why do all the commentators think that what’s going on is the exact opposite of what’s actually happening? It could just be the people at Marshall SFC and the fans of Mike Griffin (who frequently pontificates that CxP’s thrown-together-knee-jerk-Columbia-reaction approach is the best and only way to get into space) don’t want to see Constellation’s vehicles go, but that is hard to understand given how far behind schedule Ares I is, how Ares V and Altair don’t exist yet, and how Orion keeps shrinking in capacity and capability. They’re also not everybody in the space community…and I’d expect the rest to be excited about the expanded budget and the new mandate for NASA to go ahead and put modern technologies on their vehicles, instead of sticking to Shuttle-era (that’s the 70′s, folks) stuff. I think Sen. Nelson hit the nail on the head – most of the media have conflated “Constellation Program” with “Human Space Program,” and the lack of an explicitly articulated space goal direct from the President is hurting right now. NASA Administrator Maj Gen Charlie Bolden clearly thinks that the goal is to get people to Mars by about 2030, and President Obama even asked, in his call to ISS astronauts last week, what it would take to get to Mars and beyond.

So I think President Obama desperately needs to give a Space Address, in which he articulates The Goal and expresses American spaceflight ambitions in a way that deals with the issues that Sen. Nelson identified. I think I know, from the budget documents, Bolden’s remarks, and what little we’ve heard from the White House, what would be in this address (again, see my post “NASA, unleashed!“). So, here’s what I think he should say. Everything here is factually accurate, based on the budget numbers and Bolden’s statements. The dramatic difference is that it leaves no ambiguity as to the positive position of our human space program. Obama could give this speech, or something like it, tomorrow. And he should! Read the rest of this entry »

I am reluctant to bump “Conference” down on my front page with this can of worms, especially now that my readership has been on the up-and-up, but hey, it’s my blog….

Yesterday I made the mistake of trolling around the New York Times web site for a few minutes between a lunch meeting and getting back to work. It was a mistake because I discovered this magazine article on the influence of religion in textbook revisions. It caught my attention with its headline, but it’s not really about how Christian the American Founding Fathers were. It’s about how Christian the Texas state school board thinks they were.

It’s a long article, and it covers a lot of ground. And I find a lot of it, honestly, terrifying.

I’m not just talking about the despicable attempts to get Christian creationism into science classrooms. (Side notes on semantics: “intelligent design” is a form of creationism, so I will not distinguish between the two; also, I will generally use the word “creationism” as a shorthand for “Christian creationism” – a necessary distinction, as there are hundreds of religions, each with their own creation story, to choose from.) Nor am I talking about the insidious efforts to insert the beliefs and practices of specific Christian sects into our government. I am talking about the repeated references to concepts like manifest destiny – the idea that American history has been guided by divine providence, that westward expansion was an effort to bring the One True Religion to the inferior heathen natives, that God has chosen America for divine purpose. It’s the divine right of kings all over again. And it’s the very reason why we have the First Amendment. A lot of that article made me so angry that I couldn’t do any useful work for about half an hour. Read the rest of this entry »

Pre-State of the Union buzz is that NASA’s Constellation program is dead.

Now, I haven’t really seen the White House rationale for this, but I suspect it goes something like this: “This country is in a pretty crappy economy right now. We’re bogged down with health care policy in Congress. And global climate change will be a more pressing problem in the future. We don’t have the time, money, or resources to devote to something like space exploration that doesn’t return any direct benefits.”

If you’ve been reading my blog since my time at NASA last summer, you know that I am a big fan of manned space exploration, but not necessarily a fan of the current Constellation architecture. I’m fine with seeing Constellation go, but only if we replace it with something gutsier. So I am not okay with axing Constellation and flatlining NASA’s budget. (Though Constellation was pretty much crippled in the first place by the “do it on the existing budget!” directive in 2004.)

The argument against NASA will likely be one of limited resources and the perception that space exploration doesn’t return anything for the average US citizen. As a counter, let’s start writing the White House and our legislators in the Senate and House, and ask them which terrestrial problems can NASA solve for us? The answer is a laundry list – and a compelling one, just off the top of my head!

• Want to grow the US economy and create jobs?

– Give NASA a strong mandate and plenty of resources!

Funding NASA is one of the very few sure-fire ways for this country to glean direct economic benefits. For every $1 that the United States government puts into NASA, the US economy grows by as much as $8. (One source here). This makes it one of – if not the – most effective ways for the federal government to have a positive effect on the economy. That’s a gain of 800%. Compare that to the ambiguous and uncertain economic growth from bailouts, tax cuts for the richest 2%, two wars, unspent stimulus funds, or Congressional shenanigans. NASA creates high-tech jobs, administrative jobs, IT jobs, engineering jobs, research jobs, custodial jobs, manufacturing jobs, analysis jobs. NASA creates technologies, hardware, and software, and puts out contracts for the development of more technologies, hardware, and software. Money going to NASA boosts the economy of every state in the union, some by hundreds of millions – or even billions – of dollars.

Economic growth by state from federal NASA funding (click for full size)

NASA can best provide these economic benefits if it has an ambitious, driving goal – pushing it to turn out as much of a return on the investment as it can – and sufficient resources to pull it off. If it’s the economy we’re worried about, we should be afraid of not funding NASA enough!

• Want to keep this country competitive in technological development and scientific progress?

– Fund NASA!

The White House web site recognizes that “the United States is losing its scientific dominance.” Are iPod apps and Twitter really going to carry the tech sector of the US economy in the future? Especially when we are exporting a lot of tech jobs and highly educated workers to other countries? If we want to secure our national future, we need to make sure that we produce plenty of high-powered brains in our own country, and that we work on the latest in science and technology in the research labs and R&D centers available to us. Down the line, if Americans stop caring about science and technology, we are going to be producing smaller quantities and lower quality goods and services. Our development will stagnate when compared to other countries. We will have to look abroad for solutions. Even if that’s not a bad thing outright, why wouldn’t we want high-tech developments and cutting-edge science produced close to home?

We can only derive so much benefit from all the MBAs and lawyers we churn out. But technological and scientific fields develop whole new markets and whole new disciplines that we can use to create better products, better services, better knowledge, and a better society. Remember that when President Kennedy directed NASA to land on the Moon, we had a grand total of 15 minutes of human spaceflight experience. New industries, spun off by fields from specialized materials science to computer technology, that had not even been conceived yet had to be invented. The very foundations of the US manufacturing industry had to be advanced forward a decade to meet the tolerances required for the Apollo vehicles. Imagine what could come out of a similar program today!

NASA is a leading agency in funding both basic science research and technological development. The conclusions from this research percolate into the biotech, electronics, computer, aviation, communications, materials, chemical, defense, and medical industries – just to name a few! The science funding goes to universities and research labs all over America. Technologies developed in the course of pursuing the space program find their way into cars, airplanes, traffic control systems, manufacturing, construction, the food services industry, and even the average American home. If that money keeps flowing, those industries keep growing – and new industries sprout up!

• Want to keep the next generation interested in science and technology, so we – and they – invest in their education?

– Give NASA an exciting mission and the money to pull it off!

President Obama has made appreciative statements in the past about the role NASA plays in inspiring American youth to pursue higher education, especially in challenging scientific and technical fields. This must continue. We cannot let children think of science and engineering as the sole domain of nerds and geeks, unpopular kids or unrelatable kids. For the US to be competitive in science and engineering, we need scientists and engineers. That means we must have children who develop and maintain an interest in science and engineering. So we need to make science and engineering, and education in those fields, popular. Fun. Invigorating. Sexy.

But NASA can’t simply “inspire the youth” just by its mere existence. It needs to be in the news. In the news, doing cool things. In the news, doing cool things, constantly. For that, NASA needs a really high-profile, risky-yet-achievable, demanding, sense-of-surmounting-the-impossible mission. As if this nation had dedicated itself to a goal, before this decade is out, of something on par with landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. Something that captivates a youth with an Internet-induced, ever-shrinking attention span. I propose establishing a permanently crewed base on Mars within the next 15 years, by 2025. Such a mission will not only keep the young scientists and engineers of our nation rooting for the space program, and interested in the space program, while they are learning – it will also give them something productive to work on when they finish! NASA is both a means and an end, but only if it has sufficient resources and a mission far more ambitious than the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration.

• Want to find ways to feed the hungry?

– Tell NASA to put a permanently crewed base on Mars!

If we try to establish a self-sustaining colony on the Moon or Mars, we need to feed the crew. And if we go for Mars, a self-sustaining base is pretty much a requirement to make the launches feasible. The astronauts would not be able to rely on regular resupply missions.

This means taking what we know about how things live and grow, and finding a way to develop food sources in a space outpost. We would have to leverage everything we know about hydroponics, algae growth, genetic engineering of bacteria, nutrition – the alchemy of turning raw materials into nutritious, palatable food for humans. And since launches to Mars would have severe mass limits, all this will have to be packed into as lightweight and small a package as possible.

Once developed, those technologies would be perfect for taking to the Third World, to the deserts, to impoverished nations and soup kitchens on Earth. We could solve global hunger once and for all, by finding ways to provide families with self-sufficient food-generating equipment. The kind of equipment that comes from NASA ingenuity and NASA money – but it will only do so if the government directs NASA to tackle the problem!

• Want to get medical care to as many people as possible in poor, remote countries with little infrastructure?

– Send NASA astronauts to Mars!

If we send astronauts to Mars, they are going to be completely out of reach of medical care. The nearest emergency room will be – at minimum – 45 million miles and half a year away. The Mars base crew are going to have to take care of themselves. This means that, not only is at least one of them going to have to be an ER surgeon or something, but they are going to need medical equipment. Not just any medical equipment, either; ultra-rugged equipment that functions on little to no power with near 100% reliability. Equipment that gives fast, comprehensive test results. Equipment that is easy to use and understand. Equipment that is, or folds up to be, very small and ultraportable. You know – tricorders.

The Mars base is also going to need treatments. Treatments that are easy to administer. Patches, drugs, capsules, ultra-miniaturized subcutaneous infusion pumps, and the like. But again, getting things to Mars requires that they be small and low-mass – five years’ supply of daily vitamins for a dozen or so astronauts would hardly fit the bill! So, they are going to need rugged, reliable equipment to manufacture those drugs on Mars with super-limited resources.

Imagine if Doctors Without Borders could get their hands on all that. Or the Red Cross. Or the Peace Corps. They could…but only if we tell NASA to go to Mars and give it the means to do so!

• Want to solve global climate change?

– Tell NASA to keep people permanently in space!

Yeah, that’s right – I didn’t say “mitigate” or “delay.” I said solve.

NASA drives innovation in batteries, photovoltaic cells, Stirling converters, fuel cells, and nuclear power. NASA has to squeeze every last drop of electrical power out of every battery on every spacecraft. NASA has to build their electronics to take meager power supplies.

Crewed spacecraft are closed environments that must support human life. They have to recycle, to reuse, to be careful what they bring in and out. They have limited supplies, limited fuel, limited electrical power, and they must accomplish ambitious science and exploration goals.

Send astronauts to Mars, and they will have to make more use of the scarce resources of the Red Planet than even Space Station astronauts do on ISS, because they will be so far from assistance. They are going to have to maximize what they can do for any input of solar power or raw material. Everything that comes from Earth is going to be incredibly precious, and will have to stretch out its useful lifetime for months or years. The astronauts are going to have to recycle their air. And they’re not going to be able to rely on taking their equipment to the shop every few months or replacing it every few years – it’s all got to work reliably for decades.

Those high-efficiency solar cells, low-power electronics, extreme-reliability equipment, 100% recyclable materials, CO2 scrubbers and chemical recyclers are sure going to come in handy for replacing coal and oil here on Earth.

So let’s solve some problems here on the ground. Let’s go out into space!