I have a bit of an opinion on this, since I went to the best liberal arts college in the nation and I found gainful employment in my field immediately after I finished with graduate school.

To me, the argument about the value of a liberal arts college seems a bit silly. After all, a huge percentage – if not the majority – of the members of my Williams class majored in physics, biology, chemistry, math, psychology, computer science, or economics – all very practical things that translate directly to various industries and enterprises. A liberal arts college is a tremendous place to study those disciplines: science is a collaborative and inquisitive endeavor, and learning to work with an expert to thoroughly understand scientific principles gave me a much better experience than I think I would have received in the back of a hundreds-seat auditorium getting lectured by a TA.

But Williams did more than give me an incredibly solid grounding in physics, which I could then take towards a doctorate and career in spacecraft engineering. While I studied physics, in very demanding and rigorous classes, I also studied linguistics. And studio art. And history. And even political science. All these things did more than make me a “more well-rounded person.” Study of these subjects gave me exposure to ideas, concepts, and frameworks to help me put all sorts of things in context. So now, when I hear political candidates talk about America’s founders, or invading Iran, or health policy, I have a relevant understanding to evaluate their statements against. When I read about the economy, I have a basic understanding of the principles that govern the situation we face. When I read a good book, or see an engaging film, or view a piece of artwork, I can appreciate the efforts the artists put into those things and understand how they have the effects they do on me. In short: I have gained more than a narrow, vocational perspective on the world – I can approach many subjects from many angles. This is not merely a good thing for its own sake, but it also helps me in my chosen vocation. I’ve used my rudimentary skills as an artist and my experience with writing (Williams grads know what I’m talking about!) quite frequently as an engineer. If this also means that I have a few still lives and unfinished manuscripts in my apartment, well, that’s just icing on the cake.

For the same reasons that I appreciate having a liberal arts background in my academic training, I also appreciate that we have “pure” liberal arts majors in our society. We need historians, writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians in our society. We need them to remember, curate, create, and teach their liberal arts so that we can keep churning out well-rounded, multi-talented workers instead of narrowly focused drones.

Now before you go scoffing (or wondering how to “greatly enable” things) – this is by no means a crazy idea. Many of the technologies one might want to prospect asteroids are not difficult to conceive of today. Commercial launch services seem to be on the brink of an explosion. And, yes, there certainly are resources on asteroids! I’m eager to welcome to the space community a group that is willing to embrace greater risk in order to reap greater rewards.

I’d like to point out just a few of the challenges Planetary Resources will face, and why asteroids might be an interesting target for resource exploitation.

First of all, asteroids boast uniquely available resources, if only we can get to them. Some classes of asteroids are wholly or partially composed of metals – or even other useful substances, such as water or carbon compounds. It might be easier to access those resources on an asteroid, if it has a “rubble pile” structure, than it would be if we have to drill down into the surface of a planet or moon. We are also not likely to have to drill or dig as far. Once we get our precious asteroid resources in hand, it’s also much easier to move them to another space destination than it would be from the surface of a moon or planet: we just have to give the blocks of metal a shove to push them out of the asteroid’s wimpy gravity well!

Second, having resources available to us in space would be a tremendous boon. The biggest obstacle to the commercial, industrial, scientific, academic, Starfleet, or any other kind of development in space is straightforward to identify: launch costs. What if we could take that all or part of the way out of the equation? What if, instead of building spacecraft on Earth and launching them into space, we instead build them right where we need them, and shuttle asteroids or special components up as necessary?

The challenge preventing us from jumping right on a von Neumann-style space exploration architecture is that we will have to develop this remote-controlled manufacturing base. Figuring out how to steer robots in space is not an unsolved problem, but figuring out how to control a robotic mining and fabrication facility is something else. I don’t think it’s intractable – but there are going to be a lot of difficulties with reliability and robustness. I don’t think Planetary Resources has self-replicating machines on its immediate business plan, but it is going to face some similar obstacles: how does the robot (or human miner, even) dig into the asteroid in microgravity? How does the miner get ore to the surface? What other processing has to happen?

Then, once the resources are in hand, what will Planetary Resources do with them? It is very tempting to make statements about the value of those materials to the global market…but, remember, it’s always harder to send a spacecraft to a destination and back than it is to send it one-way. If we want to return asteroid mine products to Earth, we will have to boost them with delta-vee of the same order as that we used to send the miners on their way – which means we need to send return vehicles with the miners. Perhaps the mining can solve its own problem by providing fuel for its return rocket, but still, the cost and complexity of the mission will mount up. On top of that, once the resources get to Earth, we will have to decelerate, capture, and eventually do-orbit them. All that takes energy: de-orbiting, in particular, is tricky because we often rely on ablation to carry away the energy from an object moving at 7 km/s…and we don’t want to burn up the resources we just spent all that time and effort extracting. For that reason, I think it may make more sense to keep those resources in space and find ways to use them there.

From Planetary Resources’ descriptions of fuel depots and expanding the exploration of space, that may be what they intend.

I’ve like to contribute just a couple things to the wild speculation at this point. The MIT Technology Review article concludes that asteroid mining is the only possible thing of interest in space – but really, that is just one writer’s blog. I want to point outthat there are other possibilities:

• Space-based solar power systems: either a constellation of satellites or a system of stations on the lunar surface that collect solar energy and beam it back to Earth, with the potential to provide inexpensive (after the initial investment!), reliable electricity to anywhere on the globe. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy correctly identified this as a possibility. Tom Jones’ involvement makes me think this possibility less likely, though.
  
  
  
  
  

• Lunar mining: not only are there potential resources on asteroids,  but there are some on our nearest planetary neighbor! While the Moon had higher gravity than an asteroid – requiring a little more than a token kick to lift return vehicles – its proximity makes it a more reachable target.
  
  
  
  
  

• Water mining: outer solar system moons are often covered with water ice laced with minerals or organic compounds. A robot could land on the surface, cut out blocks of ice, and thenshove them Earthward.  I’m not sure there is an economic case for this activity, but I wouldn’t rule it out as a bad idea for all time.
  
  
  
  
  

My bet is that they are going for asteroids or the Moon, but I think space power systems are a potential line of business for Planetary Resources. Maybe they plan on becoming a general space-based utility company! 

I’m a big fan of the idea that our space programs should embrace smaller missions: spacecraft that are less expensive and have a faster development cycle can explore higher-risk, higher-reward technologies and mission architectures than can monolithic “heritage” programs. I want to see technology demonstrators in space, and I want to see the fruits of those programs feeding into a robust research and development effort that pushes our space program where it has truly never gone before: robots to sail Titanian seas or burrow into Europan ice, observatories to unveil Earthlike planets in other star systems, and ships carrying humans to our neighbor worlds.

When I was three years old, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. This is not the kind of diabetes that correlates with lifestyle choices. Its causes are not fully known. And there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it. Now, I need an external source of insulin to survive. I need to monitor my blood glucose religiously to properly tune my insulin dosage. My choice is pretty stark: get insulin and glucose testing supplies, or die.

Well, maybe not die. Not right away. I’d be in for a lot of nasty complications and time at the hospital first.

This is one reason why health-related commerce does not take place in a free market, and why it would be completely inappropriate for it to do so. It’s also why the term “insurance” is a total misnomer in the phrase “health insurance.”

So: I’m a fan of Obamacare. It means that insurance companies cannot drop my coverage because I have this “preexisting condition.” It means they can’t jack up my rates because something random happened when I was 3. It means that I don’t have to worry that if I lose my job (for instance, let’s say our society stops investing in high-technology infrastructure…) that my savings will evaporate and my life will be at risk. I am 27, which means I should have a lot of life ahead of me – which means there’s a long time for things like those to happen. I’d like to prevent them, if possible – but the health insurance industry is set up to obfuscate and avoid paying out. If insurers had their way, they’d drop me in a moment. I think there’s a clear case that we need strong legislation to regulate health insurance providers.

To me, Obamacare means peace of mind. It also means that I don’t have to pay for people who rely on the ER for health care, which means my own costs will go down. I get more and I pay less: sounds like a good deal to me.

Coooooooooool

I put together my gaming computer and got everything up and running the way I like it over the last week. It’s been a satisfying experience – planning it all out, assembling it, and working out the little kinks. (I got a few taken care of; I’ll see how many more I hit.) The result is a computer that has been able to handle everything I’ve thrown at it so far in good form!

This contraption is running off an Intel Core i5-2500K processor, which seems plenty fast enough to eat up some games while also not costing me $1000, like the higher-end Core i7′s do. I have it in an Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 motherboard, which offers not only compatibility with all the other hardware but also sufficient expansion capabilities for me to upgrade a few times over the coming years. There are two 4 GB sticks of 1600 MHz RAM in there from G.Skill, and room for two more DIMMs up to 8 GB each. I sprang for a Sapphire Radeon 7950, which is a GTX 580 competitor that’s only about a month into its product life, giving me plenty of usable time on this graphics card (and the option to pair it up with a second one when we hit the end of the Radeon product cycle). That graphics card also has some nifty power-saving features to keep from hogging all the electricity in my apartment all the time. I put Windows on a 64 GB solid-state hard drive, and have two 7200 rpm, terabyte-sized hard disks in a mirrored RAID configuration for data. It’s all running from a Cooler Master Silent 700 W power supply in an Antec Three Hundred Illusion case. (I am fantastically happy with this case/power/cooling situation, by the way.)

Now I can run around feeling like I’m inside a Lord of the Rings movie.

Preeeeeeeetty

As a guidance and control engineer, a lot of what I do requires a solid grasp of the motion of a spacecraft; the orientation of various sensors, thrusters, solar arrays, and transmitters; and the geometry of the spacecraft, the Earth, the Sun, and other things in the space environment. Some of the control algorithms I work with, for example, might be designed to point the solar panels at the Sun while a camera or transmitter stares at a spot on the Earth – all while the satellite zips along its orbit at several tens of thousands of miles an hour. Visualizing all this stuff going on can be tricky. We have some 3D graphical tools (a few written by me, as I was trying to puzzle all this stuff out). We do a lot of vector math and look at plots of vector components in various reference frames. But, often enough, we just can’t beat a good, solid, hand-held model of the spacecraft to swoosh around and help us try to picture what’s happening on the real thing.

As a result, just about everybody in my group has a little cube made out of paper, or cardboard, or foam board, that is labelled with relevant features of the satellite. I have this:

I used the free Design by Me software from Lego to design myself a model of our spacecraft, and then order all the parts I would need. (I was sure to get myself lots of extra doodads to be antennae, reflectors, sensors, thrusters, and other such stuff!) What you see in the picture above is a generic configuration of the spacecraft, representative of the class of satellites that I work on, rather than a specific spacecraft. Of course, at work I have lots of extra flat plates which I have labelled with various details!

While it’s certainly not to scale or completely accurate, it’s about the right shape and size and – important for visualization – I can move the solar panels around. It’s pretty easy to think to myself, “okay, the Earth is down there and the Sun is over there, so my satellite is doing this…” Legos give the model just the right amount of heft. And they are just plain fun!

This model is not just helpful at work, but it’s also a tremendous attention-getter. I find it valuable to make my work more concrete. So I certainly made sure to bring it with me on that school visit.

~

The Kite stretches his solar wings wide, spanning over five hundred meters. He fans out his array of electromagnetic membranes, thermal structures, transceiver antennae, and weapon emitters, flourishing. The Kite’s voice booms out over the electromagnetic spectrum, mingling with the others in the Coliseum, as they announce themselves to the assembled spectators:

“In salute, we die and live by the will of the Imperium!”

The Kite pulls one solar wing out from the light flux to tack. He wheels around, scanning and assessing his competitors. He catalogues their capabilities but pays special attention to their faces – distended from all the grafts and alterations, stone-gray and glassy-eyed from the environmental treatments, yet still faces. The younger competitors growl and sneer at him, while the more experienced repay his cool appraisal in kind. Today, The Tiger and The Worm worry him.

Silence falls across the EM bands, leaving The Kite with only the intermittent discharges from the Coliseum walls. His stomach (though no longer really a stomach) lurches in anticipation. A moment drags on in the flickering silvery shell of the Coliseum, buried in the sparse mist of an orange nebula. This could be the day, thinks The Kite, when I die. Again.

The call:“Begin!”

The Kite pulses an electromagnetic field, launching himself away from the spherical inner surface of the Coliseum. The others do the same.

Two of the newest competitors, starting near one another on a sector of the Coliseum wall, immediately clash. The Kite watches their fiery exchange: blinding, cutting lasers; immolating jets of plasma; grappling, interfering electromagnetic fields; slashing membranes. One of the fierce combatants twists his shape around and manages to set up a gravitational gradient that draws the other into an unfavorable position. He sweeps one solar wing edge-on into the fragile structure of the other’s wing. The gossamer half-kilometer structure strains, distorts, fractures, and finally breaks under the impact. Shattered photocells spill out into the abyss, shimmering in the wan light of the Coliseum’s central star. Screeches in the radio spectrum. A purple flare: the coup de grace of a plasma jet, and now there are eleven combatants in the Coliseum.

The Kite’s receivers pull in transmissions of appreciative applause.

Now The Kite watches as the young gladiator, flush with victory, turns towards him. The Kite drifts for a quarter orbit, keeping the other competitors within his expanded senses, then angles his wings into the stellar flux to slow his orbital rate. He stretches forth with an electromagnetic field, pulling on the closest Coliseum wall segment. It sparks and snaps in response as The Kite’s perturbed orbit drifts towards the Archaean sphere. His opponent sees the maneuver, adjusts, closes the distance. A challenge rings in The Kite’s receivers.

The Kite remains silent. He counts down mentally, waiting for the attacker to bring his weaponry to bear before springing his trap.

A violent electromagnetic pulse lashes the artifact wall. The responding flash of energy erupts from the metal sphere segment. The Kite furls his solar wings: he knows how to protect himself from the wash of energy, deflecting and directing it. He flutters his wings, cunningly crafted electric currents jetting plasma towards the younger gladiator. The young competitor flinches, writhes – tries to shield himself, tries to keep The Kite in his senses – overcompensates. His radio challenge trails off into a scream of frustration.

Frustration turns to fear and pain as The Kite expertly fillets his quarry with a razor-sharp appendage.

“Next time,” broadcasts The Kite, “don’t take on more than you can handle.”

He waggles his wings, extending his senses out for—

The Worm! She crashes into The Kite at full force, her many magnetic booms working to propel herself at high speed along and away from the metal inner surface of the Coliseum. The Kite shudders, quickly folding his wings back to limit the stress on them. The Worm’s face is directly against his own; the leathery, slate-gray countenance snarls silently into The Kite’s eyes.

The Kite struggles, pushing back with his own magnetic fields, slapping at The Worm’s booms with cutting surfaces, and trying to keep his delicate solar wings out of reach. The Worm tries to entwine her long body around The Kite, but he sweeps away. The Kite forces an electrically charged bayonet toward his adversary, trying for an arc.

The Worm struggles, shaping her magnetic fields to deflect the dangerous probe. She retaliates, trying to attract The Kite’s delicate solar wings with her powerful magnetism. The Kite manages to get an appendage onto The Worm’s structure to apply physical force. The Worm sputters a laser beam at The Kite’s face in an attempt to blind him.

They struggle in a deadly dance, slowly tumbling about near the Coliseum wall. From a quarter orbit away, there is a radio scream. With half his senses, The Kite sees The Tiger and a pack of other combatants. The Worm sees them, too.

The younger, more inexperienced competitors have banded together; they are attacking and dismembering The Tiger. Two dead bodies drift nearby. The disparity in experience is matched by the difference in numbers. The Tiger falls, the frantic motions of his slashing membranes and arcing cutters shuddering to a stop.

The pack turns toward the Coliseum wall. The Kite and The Worm share a glance and disengage from one another. They face the onslaught.

More than two months after combat began, The Kite and The Worm coast across the bodies of their adversaries, failing systems straining their power budgets. They refuse to engage one another. The Annunciator declares an end to combat with a rare joint victory, and the tugs appear to claim the gladiators. The spectators cheer, as if they had always rooted for the small alliance of Kite and Worm.