Quantum Rocketry

Well, by all accounts the TV episode went well! I’m headed away for my college reunions this weekend, but I promise to post about doing the show when I get back!

If Randall Munroe has any kind of message here, it must be that predicting the future is hard. The mix of dire and hopeful predictions he pulled together is really entertaining.

In case you’re wondering, this lame entry is my attempt to get the ol’ blog going again. I just finished my Ph.D., moved to Pennsylvania, and started a new job as a spacecraft software engineer. Things are calming down a little bit now, though. (I had time to rebuild my Lego Millennium Falcon yesterday!)

Babylon 5

Don’t watch the first or last seasons. Also don’t watch the season 4 finale.

Battlestar Galactica

When they escape from the planet at the beginning of the third season, HUMANS WIN. End of show.

Doctor Who

It’s supposed to be cheesy, but whenever you see something so stupidly cheesy that it totally rips apart suspension of disbelief (e.g. main characters getting abducted onto 2000s reality TV shows, ’60s robots chanting “DELETE DELETE DELETE,” etc), hold “fast forward” until it looks like something serious is happening.

Farscape

Put up with the first season until it gets under your skin. John Crichton is just as confused as you are. 4th season is optional.

Firefly

Fortunately, it got cancelled before it had a chance to go bad! Movie very optional.

Futurama

Watch it all a zillion times.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Pay attention after Riker grows a beard. (This is a well-known effect.)

…and, because I got my girlfriend a giant Lego space shuttle for her birthday, I got a Lego catalog in the mail… This is totally my gift list this year! Read the rest of this entry »

Asteroid bases in our future?

We’ve discussed President Obama’s plans for NASA in my research group. Things look good for us: as a team working on spacecraft technology research, looking for things that will make construction, maneuvering, and other activities in space easier, cheaper, and better, we are very happy to see the technology research arm of NASA finally getting the funding it deserves. (It’s amazingly ironic that “space age” technology means thirty-year-old tech.) However, one grad student in my group questioned the value of targeting asteroids, specifically, for exploration. Is it worth it to send people to asteroids? Do we gain anything by doing so?

I think we do, and I’m going to explain why here. But first, I want to make clear two things I am not going to do. I am not going to make a scientific case for going to asteroids. The reason why I’m not going to use science to justify asteroid missions is that we can gain scientific knowledge wherever we go. We can learn new things anywhere. I’m not going to try to prioritize that knowledge, because in the end, it’s all valuable and it’s likely that there will be breakthrough theories germinated from any field of endeavor. In addition, I am not going to make a case against returning to the Moon or going directly to the Martian surface. I am not going to list reasons opposing either of those destinations simply because I don’t think there are any. Rather, I am going to focus on the reasons why I think asteroids are exciting destinations.

Reason one: Operations on and around asteroids are extremely challenging.

On the one hand, anything in space is challenging. But asteroids may be especially tricky, mostly because we don’t yet understand what being around an asteroid would be like. We have only a few close-up pictures of asteroid surfaces, and have only touched the surface of asteroids with two robot spacecraft that I can think of. As far as we can tell, their surfaces are covered with fine regolith, perhaps like the Moon, but their odd shapes give them very strange (micro)gravity fields. Imagine you’re standing on the “side” of a tiny, potato-shaped world like Ida. Which way is down? Harder question than you might think!

243 Ida and Dactyl

NASA can simulate operations on planets and moons by visiting “analog” sites on Earth, trying out procedures in mock space suits and pretend capsules. NASA also has a wealth of free-fall experience from its operations in low Earth orbit with the Space Shuttle and Space Station. But no space agency has any experience with or ways to simulate environments like asteroids. So, not only are asteroids tricky places to be, but the only way to learn about being around asteroids is to go to an asteroid. We’ve never done or thought about this stuff before, at least not in detail. I think that’s exciting!

In particular, I think the challenge of operations around asteroids demands that we send people there. There has been a lot of talk about how the new NASA plans will leave our astronauts without jobs and focus entirely on robotic missions. Whether you think that is a good thing or not, I think it is untrue. While robotic precursor explorers will give us some inkling about what to expect, figuring out how to actually do things on asteroids (science, construction, etc) may be better achieved through an in-situ human learning process. The closest analog we have to asteroid operations is work around the outside of ISS, which we do not yet trust to robots and have tremendous experience with. Astronauts around asteroids could rapidly tell NASA Mission Operations analysts what the major differences are between an ISS spacewalk and asteroid spacewalk. At the same time, a human’s ability to learn on-site, manipulate four limbs in a coordinated manner, and perceive situations clearly and directly would be desirable qualities.

Why do we care about learning how to operate crewed missions around asteroids? Well, Reason Two is that these asteroid operations skills are transferable.

Buzz Aldrin likes to talk about Phobos. Well, if we want to go to Mars, then the first question we must answer is exactly what sort of mission profile we want to use. Options include a Moon-landing-like sortie mission, in which we put boots on the planet, bounce around picking up rocks for a couple weeks, plant a flag, and then take off for home. We could also send a mission that lasts a year or two and involves building a temporary (or permanent) base, establishing laboratories, and zipping around in rovers; this probably involves multiple launches to and from the Red Planet. Or we could go for the interesting option of picking 50 or so people and sending them to Mars, in one launch, with everything they need to be self-sufficient. The point of all this is that, depending on the mission, it might be valuable to use Phobos as a way station. And if we want to be around Phobos, we have to learn how to be around Phobos. More than that, we have to learn how to be around Phobos and be very, very far from and out of reach from Earth.

Moreover, microgravity operations around small bodies are exactly the kinds of operations that would be relevant in the asteroid belt. Or around the Jupiter Trojans. Or in Jupiter’s moon system. Or Saturn’s moon system. Or near comets. Or by near-Earth asteroids. You get the picture: small-body operations will be important for the manned exploration of the Solar System beyond the Moon and Mars, and the more capabilities we develop, the easier it will be to get to and function in exotic places.

Next, reason three: not only is there science to be done, but around asteroids, we could learn techniques that may be necessary for Earth defense.

Yeah, I’m talking about defending the planet from rogue asteroids. We certainly won’t be doing this by launching a team of misfit miners and Bruce Willis. Now, the asteroid deflection techniques we develop may or may not involve manned missions, but when we’re talking about the survival of a city – or the entire human race as we know it – why remove any tool from our kit?

The fourth reason is one that ought to appeal to space technologists out there: asteroids could provide resources for construction which are much easier to get into orbit than the resources on Earth.

Asteroids are made of useful things. Nickel-iron asteroids are composed of metals, both common and rare. Carbonaceous asteroids contain other materials. Some even have organic compounds. There is even recent evidence that many asteroids have water! These potential resources may be easy to get to, if the asteroids are rubble-piles, or the useful materials are in the asteroid regolith, or if the asteroid is entirely made of metals that can be melted or dissolved for processing.

Budding space industrialists may be disappointed, but mining asteroids for rare metals to sell on Earth isn’t likely to be economically viable. (It’s too hard to safely get those metals from the asteroids down to Earth’s surface – for instance, we would have to spend more money to launch a Space Shuttle than we would get for the mass of materials that Shuttle could bring down from orbit – a launch costs roughly $450 million, and at current prices, the Shuttle could bring down $15 million in pure silver if filled to the brim. We’d have to find asteroids made of pure gold and platinum and cram the Shuttle to make that come out positive.) However, what could be viable is mining and processing the resources on asteroids into spacecraft bodies, components, consumables, and fuels, which could be jettisoned from their parent asteroids with very little effort. This is simply because asteroids have very small escape velocities compared to planets and moons. If we could get ISRU going, it could be the great moneysaver of the space industry!

ISRU, or in-situ resource utilization, is already a hot topic of research; applications include processing lunar regolith into bricks or reacting chemicals with Martian soil to produce rocket fuels. This would be the next level of complexity: imagine landing a facility on an asteroid that grapples to the rock, bores its way down, processes the metals in the asteroid, and extrudes spacecraft pieces that are ready to assemble. Or perhaps a spacecraft that can land on an asteroid and scoop up material to refill its fuel and consumables. These abilities would let humans build whole new classes of spacecraft, capable of going further than any before. And, given the complexity of building the International Space Station, many of these activities will probably require the involvement of astronauts.

The last reason I can think of – at least, right now – why asteroids make very cool targets is that the asteroids themselves could be used as spacecraft.

The science-fiction way to do this is to find an asteroid and hollow it out with tunnels, crew compartments, fuel tanks, or big, cylindrical chambers. The excess rock and metal from the digging can be fed to mass drivers (or combined with antimatter) to propel the asteroid.

As big a fan as I would be of asteroid colonies or arkships to the outer Solar System and beyond, that’s a pretty farfetched idea at this point. However, an interesting possibility if we want to get to far-flung destinations is to locate an asteroid in an orbit that starts somewhere easy to get to and goes somewhere we want to go, and then hitch a ride. There’s an interesting class of resonant orbits called “cyclers,” which have the property that they rendezvous with two bodies of interest at least once per synodic period. For example, the so-called Aldrin cycler is an orbit trajectory that matches up with the Earth and Mars, with a travel time of 146 days between planets. All we’d have to do is get there and grab on!

We’re not likely to find an asteroid that is naturally on such an orbit, but we may locate asteroids that are on other potentially useful orbits. If we learn enough about asteroid deflection from our planetary defense studies, we might even be able to nudge asteroids onto such orbits, on purpose!

The Moon is a cool place to go. Mars is a cool place to go. Jupiter is a cool place to go. But, you know what? Asteroids are cool places to go, too. We will learn and benefit from any exploration destination. Small bodies, which come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and compositions, may be very, very different from planets and moons. If we can learn how to use them as platforms for exploration, then perhaps we can jump off them to explore all the far reaches of the Solar System.

STS-131 / Exp 23 group photo

The Space Shuttle mission which just undocked from the International Space Station, STS-131, has beamed down from orbit some great photos of astronauts in space. This is a wonderful chance for us stuck planetside to remind ourselves that we have people living and working in spaceships!

The Discovery crew in the Cupola

And, of course, this mission is historic for having the largest number of women simultaneously in space – four out of the thirteen total crew. Considering small-number statistics, that is pretty close to a fifty-fifty split! Here is the orbiting Bay Stater, Stephanie Wilson:

MS Wilson in the Kibo laboratory

And here’s JAXA’s Naoko Yamazaki in the Destiny laboratory at a robotics console made of lots of ThinkPads taped to the ISS wall,

MS Yamazaki in Destiny

although I think this is my favorite picture of Yamazaki!

In the Cupola!

That’s where JAXA astronaut Soich Noguchi has been taking and Twittering down amazing Earth-observation and Space Station photos. (That is the single best application of Twitter I have ever seen, and is not likely to be surpassed, ever.)

Finally, I will leave you with astronaut family dinner!

I love astronauts (PS - obey the speed limit: 28,000 kph!)

This is somewhat of a personal note, but every now and then being a type 1 diabetic really frustrates me and I just have to unload a bit.

Don’t get me wrong, medicine has made great strides in managing diabetes. If you observe me for a randomly selected 1% of every day, I will seem fine. And I can for the most part do anything that a healthy human being can do. I can go hiking, or waterskiing, or kayaking. I can go out in the heat and out in the cold. I can fly or ride in airplanes.

But catch me during the wrong 1%-of-the-day sample, and this crap can be really annoying to me.

I’m on an Animas IR1250 insulin pump. Every three days, give or take, the reservoir in the pump runs out of insulin and needs to be replenished. I also have to replace the infusion set where the pump’s tubing goes into a subcutaneous cannula, to avoid picking up any infections where the cannula pierces my skin. This process usually takes me 15-30 minutes, and involves sticking myself in the abdomen or hip with a 1″-long needle. This needle goes in at an angle and is supposed to end up just below the skin; then I take out the needle and leave the cannula in place. Sometimes this is fine and simple.

Saturday I go to do a normal change, and encounter a couple problems that I have to deal with on a regular basis. First, I weigh 142 pounds. I don’t have a lot of padding or extra skin. The infusion sites aren’t supposed to get clustered up too densely, so I kind of end up struggling to find a place to put them sometimes. Second, this injection isn’t exactly like going to a nurse and having her stick a needle in your arm; she doesn’t feel what you feel, she just goes ahead and pokes you. In, out, bam, done. It’s better that way, at least, on an intellectual level. But when I’m doing this to myself, I tend to go really slowly sometimes. Especially on those occasions when I don’t miss all the nerve clusters on the way in. When something hurts, reflex tells me to either stop what I’m doing or pull back, not keep going.

So anyway, on Saturday I’m looking at my hip for a place to put this infusion set, and I ended up choosing wrong or going in at too steep an angle, because pretty quickly I get this really weird twinge and all my reflexes scream HALT. But I try to override that, because that’s what I have to do, and I end up with HALTHALTHALTSTOPOUCH and my hand practically jerks away on its own. I figure I was probably getting into muscle tissue rather than skin and fat. So I yank the needle out and SURPRISE out comes a bunch of blood. Great for improving my disposition, you know. Standing with my weight on one leg, twisting around to see my hip better, holding a needle that I have just used to wound myself, looking around for some kleenex and neosporin, and knowing that I have to do it again in order to stay alive.

Well, after stomping around my room in consternation for a bit to cool off, and developing a bit of ache in some hip muscles, I decided to move to a different site in my rotation and put a new infusion set in my abdomen, instead. This one seemed to go okay, so I pack things up and go do whatever it was I thought I would be doing an hour previously, before this happened.

Today, that infusion set totally failed. My blood sugars had been running in the high 200′s (yours is probably 100, maybe 120 if you just ate) and wouldn’t come down in response to extra insulin. So I watch the infusion site while I’m trying to give myself a correction bolus and find that, hey, look, insulin is just pumping out and pooling on the surface of my skin. Fat lot of good that does. This sometimes happens, and someone explained to me that it’s because insulin can act like a growth hormone, so sometimes a little knot of tissue forms right at the end of the cannula where insulin is going into my body, and that knot can plug up the cannula and the insulin from a bolus just ends up forcing its way back out the hole in my skin and onto the surface. Anyway, this is supremely annoying, because then I have to change the infusion set again. This wastes insulin (which is expensive), pump cartridges (which are highly specialized and therefore expensive), and infusion sets (which are also highly specialized and therefore expensive). It also causes physical pain and emotional stress, for obvious reasons. Did I mention that I hate needles? IV’s make me squeamish. It is for this reason, basically, that an anomalous high blood sugar is a way to make me instantly aggravated. It’s more effective at that than a bad grade, or a rejection letter, or Fox News.

So today it was time to leave work and change the infusion set early. This one also seemed to go okay, except that when I pulled the needle out of the cannula, it hurt like CRAP. And when I gave myself the first bolus a minute ago, it burned. So now I might have fixed the previous problem, but I face the prospect of burning pain every time I want to eat any carbohydrates and have to bolus again.

FML. I’d like some stem cells, please.

I spent a bunch of today snazzifying JosephShoer.com. I think I even got the IE and Chrome hacks right. If anything looks funny for you, leave me a comment.

Here’s a quick paraphrase of how a typical Apple Mac ad goes:

Cut to a white background. John Hodgeman, dressed in a suit nobody’s worn since the 90′s, is on the left. Justin Long, looking like he’s about to audition for the guy in ‘Best in Show’ who met his wife when they were in adjacent Starbucks, is on the right.

Hodgeman: I’m a PC, and Windows 7 just came out.

Long: Well, I’m a Mac. Wait a minute, PC, isn’t Windows 7 a kind of Windows?

Hodgeman: Uh – you – uh – yes, Mac. I suppose so.

Long: And isn’t Windows inherently bad?

Hodgeman: I guess you’re right. That means Windows 7 is inherently bad.

I can’t begin to tell you how sick I am of these TV spots. They are just so…spiteful. They rarely ever have anything positive to say about Macs, and they never have anything substantive to say about PCs. They just say, over and over again, “Macs GOOD, PCs BAD!”

Particularly the Win7 ads. The whole campaign seems to revolve around the assertion that Windows is just bad in general, and therefore Win7 is bad. So far as I can tell, the writers and directors of these ads never laid their hands on Win7. I’ve been using it since early October, and I have yet to even press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, let alone see it crash or even bog down.

It’s really telling to compare this style of advertising to Microsoft’s Win7 ad campaign. First, they showed cute kids, unicorns, and puppies, played over glowing quotes from reviews. (Wait – you mean they showed evidence for their claims?!) Then, they showed short TV spots focusing on some new feature on Win7 and how it’s useful, presented by a normal, average-looking person. It just shows how militant Mac is, iwth their tiny minority market share.

I think this mirrors the contrast between Steve Jobs’ and Bill Gates’ characters perfectly. Apple hasn’t produced anything new in years (Apple today = OSX + iPods), while MS has been evolving new features and putting forward new services. MS has even been opening up a bit, while Apple’s business practices are all about locking their devices down to prevent anyone from doing anything that rubs their snootily discerning noses the wrong way. While Jobs is just full of vitriol at his competitors and tries to survive on hero worship from his devoted minority, Gates just doesn’t care. He’s off filling impoverished schools with computers and trying to cure AIDS in Africa.

Fortunately, one of the Discovery Channel “Boom-dee-atta” ads came on immediately thereafter and made me feel better!