I fixed it.

Lava cave - fixed!

Seriously, though…those sites are perfect premade Moon base locations. Imagine a team of astronauts putting an inflatable dome over the hole in the roof, belaying down there, putting inflatable endcaps a few tens of meters down the lava tube in each direction, spraying expandable foam sealant into all the crevasses, and using some ISRU atmosphere generators to pump the tube full of oxygen.

An image-of-the-day gadget on my iGoogle home page showed me this picture, which I subsequently spent about a half hour trying to locate at a primary-source web site. It is wicked cool.

Possible Cyclic Bedding in Arabia Terra (HiRISE/MRO)

Click to go to this image’s description page on the University of Arizona HiRISE site. (Be sure to bookmark the 2560×1600 wallpaper version!!!)

I really want to know how these terraced buttes got to be the way they are…it looks like they must have been eroded in stages, with each layer from the top getting peeled back successively, but somehow the individual layers hold together – those are some pretty steep walls. I can see in the southwestern portion of this image that some of the terrace walls are eroding away in chunks; there are a couple good fallen boulders over there. The layers might be some kind of sandstone, because they haven’t eroded away in lots of rocks and boulders, so they don’t seem very friable, but there’s obviously a lot of source material for dunes in this area so the butte walls might be getting ground down into very small grains. I’m not sure what the fluvial history of Arabia Terra is – on Earth, that would be bound to play an important role in creating landforms like this.

I also really love the expression of the more recent aeolian features in this area. Looks like there are prevailing north-south winds on the east side of this image (I’m going to say the wind blows to the north because the north sides of the dunes look more like slip faces to me), but from the east-moving dunes in the terraced valley-like feature at center bottom and the east-west oriented ripples on the larger dune field, the winds are apparently going in rather circuitous routes around these buttes. There are also some confusingly-oriented dunes and ripples in the southwest portion of this image, probably from the wind winding around all the rocky towers. (In my mind, I can hear it whistling.)

Looks like the valley from which the east-going dunes have traveled is an exposed outcrop of one of the terrace layers. This image can resolve objects less than a meter in size, so the various crisscrossing dark lines in the light-toned outcrop might be joints or something.

Anyway, this is not a new image and I haven’t studied or researched this stuff…I just saw it today and wrote a little stream of consciousness of geological ideas. I just think this image looks beautiful and I want to send some rovers/people there. Any planetary science guys want to comment?

Last, and just for grins, here are some goodies I turned up in my search for that image on the UA HiRISE site. Here we have some dramatic contrast between dunes and some lighter, rockier topographically high areas:

Pitted Layers Northeast of Hellas Region

Here’s some great layer exposures around some hills – and if you zoom into the large version of this one, you can find some wild and interesting ripple patterns:

Light-Toned Rock Exposures in Noctis Labyrinthus

Thus ends today’s amateur geology geekage.

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!

“The Space Program is the epitome of American aspiration and ability. NASA explores the universe with its telescopes, the planets and moons with its probes, and the Earth with its satellites. But nothing embodies NASA like the human space program. We still identify NASA intimately with the Space Shuttle, Space Station, and the Moon landings in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Americans owe a surprising amount of our modern national character and technical ability to NASA’s efforts.

“In the last few decades, NASA has proceeded on its missions without a clear goal. The Space Shuttle and International Space Station are incredible technical achievements, but humans have not set foot on another world – something which we are more than capable of doing – in almost 40 years. The 2004 Vision for Space Exploration, and the Constellation Program of vehicles that grew out of it, helped re-establish that missing goal by setting NASA on track to land on the Moon once again; this time, to stay.

“However, the progress on that program came in fits and starts. There were some major successes, some major failures, and overall the program moved more slowly than expected. So, I assembled a panel of technical experts, aerospace-industry insiders, astronauts, scientists, and analysts. They conducted a thorough review of NASA human spaceflight activities, and found that we were not on track to meet the 2004 Vision’s goal of landing on the Moon by 2020. In fact, we would arrive sometime around 2030, and in the meantime we would lose our ability to bring astronauts to and from the International Space Station. NASA was on an unsustainable and uninspiring course.

“I grew up in Hawaii, watching the Apollo astronauts come back to our shores after their epic journeys to the Moon and back. I know what a powerful human spaceflight program can do for our nation. And our space program is just as critical now as it was in the 60’s. Americans of all walks of life, and people the world over, depend every day on the technologies and capabilities of our space missions.

“That is why I am directing NASA to re-task the Constellation Program. America needs innovation, it needs ambition, and it needs commitment. So, I want to see our astronauts at Mars, no later than the year 2030. I want NASA to pull out all the stops and do everything it takes to meet that goal, so I am increasing the NASA budget by six billion dollars over the next five years.

“We will reach this goal in a series of incremental steps. Just as the Gemini program developed and tested the technologies and techniques that led to Apollo, and just as the early Apollo missions perfected those techniques before we could land on the Moon, NASA will develop a suite of pathfinder missions that will pioneer our exploration program. We will rendezvous with and put human boots on asteroids. We will learn not just to live and work, but to build in space. We will send human beings out to Mars orbit and back, and put outposts on Mars’ moons. We may even visit the other inner planets to demonstrate these new capabilities.

“The existing development on the Ares V heavy lifter will transition directly into research and development on heavy-lift rocket technologies. The new generation of Ares rockets will launch the fleet of crew capsules, landers, planetary habitats, and Earth-departure stages necessary to explore the other worlds in our Solar System.

“I am also extending the life of the International Space Station to at least 2020, and increasing funding for research on the Space Station – making it into the laboratory it was meant to be. I am directing the NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate to develop new technologies and capabilities for human trips to Mars and beyond. The new NASA budget sets aside billions of dollars for game-changing research programs. Our engineers on Earth and astronauts on the space station will work on new engines to get astronauts to Mars faster, inflatable structures that can be unfolded and assembled in space to provide comfortable living spaces, and centrifuge chambers for interplanetary spacecraft with artificial gravity.

“In order to better focus NASA’s resources on these exploration and development efforts, I have asked Administrator Bolden to cease development on the Ares I rocket and Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle. Those programs have not been as successful as they need to be in order to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020, and they do not fit into the roles of shuttling astronauts to ISS or bringing them to Mars. I applaud the efforts of all the engineers and technicians that have participated in work on those vehicles, putting in their sweat and labor to give NASA the launch of its first new rocket in over twenty years. These valuable efforts will lead directly into the new rockets and spacecraft that NASA will develop to bring humanity out into the Solar System.

“NASA has no choice but to retire the Space Shuttle, a venerable workhorse vehicle that has served America well since 1981. We will ensure that the last Shuttle flights are carried out safely and keep our international commitments to finish construction of the Space Station. Unfortunately, the Human Spaceflight Plans Committee found that the gap in American access to the Space Station after the Shuttle retires will likely be about seven years, even if we pursue development of the Ares I vehicle. We must rely on our international partners during the early years of this gap, but in order for the Space Station to be fully effective as a National Laboratory, we will need our own vehicles. For this purpose, NASA will rely on commercial providers; both using the proven vehicles that launch the satellites we depend on every day as well as spurring the development of up-and-coming launch systems. And I want NASA to carefully oversee the standards on these vehicles to make sure that our astronauts can get to and from Earth orbit in perfect safety.

“NASA is a tremendous symbol of American ambition, capability, and goodwill, and I support it wholeheartedly. With our international partners, the space program brings humanity to new heights of achievement. Our astronauts – scientists, engineers, and doctors – will go out into the Solar System. They will take with them new technologies and our best hopes. They will bring back new insights, new discoveries, and new stories that will benefit everyone back home on Earth. With this new program, we will go out across the Solar System, to the planets…and to the stars.”

STS-130: Endeavour

“Mike, if you’re CapCommin’ and you’re lookin’ for folks and you can’t find ‘em…they’re probably in here.”

That was a radio call from the STS-130 crew to Mission Control in Houston from early on Wednesday, after all seven windows in the ISS Cupola were opened for the very first time. I have been watching NASA TV and trawling their multimedia galleries all the time I’ve been at my desk today…the views out the Cupola – of Earth, the Moon, the Station, and the Shuttle – are simply spectacular. Here is a small selection of the currently available images, available here. (I can’t wait till they release some of the photos looking out at the Shuttle cargo bay and the Soyuz spacecraft on the ISS exterior. Future robot arm work is also going to look amazing.)

S130-E-007858 (14 Feb. 2010) --- NASA astronaut Robert Behnken, STS-130 mission specialist, participates in the mission

ISS022-E-067184 (17 Feb. 2010) --- NASA astronauts Robert Behnken (left) and Nicholas Patrick, both STS-130 mission specialists, participate in the mission

ISS022-E-066963 (17 Feb. 2010) --- This image is among the first taken through a first of its kind "bay window" on the International Space Station, the seven-windowed Cupola. The image shows the coast of Algeria featuring (in the Cupola's round window) an area between the cities of Dellys and Algiers. The image was recorded with a digital still camera using a 28mm lens setting. The Cupola, which a week and half ago was brought up to the orbital outpost by the STS-130 crew on the space shuttle Endeavour, will house controls for the station robotics and will be a location where crew members can operate the robotic arms and monitor other exterior activities.

ISS022-E-066964 (17 Feb. 2010) --- NASA astronauts Terry Virts (left), STS-130 pilot; and Jeffrey Williams, Expedition 22 commander, pose for a photo near the windows in the newly-installed Cupola of the International Space Station while space shuttle Endeavour remains docked with the station.

ISS022-E-066976 (17 Feb. 2010) --- NASA astronauts Terry Virts (left), STS-130 pilot; and Stephen Robinson, mission specialist, pose for a photo near the windows in the newly-installed Cupola of the International Space Station while space shuttle Endeavour remains docked with the station.

Go Endeavour!

]]> http://josephshoer.com/blog/2010/02/our-biggest-spaceship-now-has-an-observation-deck/feed/ 0 http://josephshoer.com/blog/2010/02/terrifying-influences-on-school-boards/ http://josephshoer.com/blog/2010/02/terrifying-influences-on-school-boards/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:00:43 +0000 Joseph http://josephshoer.com/blog/?p=462 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.

For example, here’s an excerpt from the article:

Maybe the most striking thing about current history textbooks is that they have lost a controlling narrative. America is no longer portrayed as one thing, one people, but rather a hodgepodge of issues and minorities, forces and struggles. If it were possible to cast the concerns of the Christian conservatives into secular terms, it might be said that they find this lack of a through line and purpose to be disturbing and dangerous. Many others do as well, of course. But the Christians have an answer.

Their answer is rather specific. Merely weaving important religious trends and events into the narrative of American history is not what the Christian bloc on the Texas board has pushed for in revising its guidelines. Many of the points that have been incorporated into the guidelines or that have been advanced by board members and their expert advisers slant toward portraying America as having a divinely preordained mission. In the guidelines — which will be subjected to further amendments in March and then in May — eighth-grade history students are asked to “analyze the importance of the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and the Virginia House of Burgesses to the growth of representative government.” Such early colonial texts have long been included in survey courses, but why focus on these in particular? The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut declare that the state was founded “to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.” The language in the Mayflower Compact — a document that McLeroy and several others involved in the Texas process are especially fond of — describes the Pilgrims’ journey as being “for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith” and thus instills the idea that America was founded as a project for the spread of Christianity.

That’s right…American history needs a “controlling narrative” – controlled, specifically, by the Christian God who is running America as a little pet experiment to see how rapidly that particular religion can cover the globe. (That is not an experiment I want in the hands of a nation that can incinerate the world three or four times over.) This idea continues, here:

One recurring theme during the process of revising the social-studies guidelines was the desire of the board to stress the concept of American exceptionalism, and the Christian bloc has repeatedly emphasized that Christianity should be portrayed as the driving force behind what makes America great. Peter Marshall is himself the author of a series of books that recount American history with a strong Christian focus and that have been staples in Christian schools since the first one was published in 1977. (He told me that they have sold more than a million copies.) In these history books, he employs a decidedly unhistorical tone in which the guiding hand of Providence shapes America’s story, starting with the voyage of Christopher Columbus. “Columbus’s heart belonged to God,” he assures his readers, and he notes that a particular event in the explorer’s life “marked the turning point of God’s plan to use Columbus to raise the curtain on His new Promised Land.”

Again – “American exceptionalism,” with “Christianity as the driving force,” and a divine hand steering (causing?) American history. According to the article, one preacher even “recommended that textbooks present America’s founding and history in terms of motivational stories on themes like the Pilgrims’ zeal to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the natives.”

It’s when I read things like that very last phrase that I really start to bristle. In this case, nobody could have put my feelings any better than George Carlin did on the inaugural “Saturday Night Live” episode.

Religion … is like a lift in your shoe. If you need it for a while, and it makes you walk straight and feel better - fine. … Religion is like a lift in the shoe, and I say just don’t ask me to wear your shoes. And let’s not go down and nail lifts onto the natives’ feet.

The one profession that I have no respect for is the missionary. (I don’t mean humanitarians, or aid workers, or charitable doctors and nurses. The people who bring help and support to the impoverished regions of the world do great work. But when they come with all sorts of Jesus merchandise, and start to push it on those vulnerable people coming to them for basic needs, then I start to shudder.) The missionary ideals of “[bringing] the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the natives” involve some extremely harsh value judgments. These are people who advocate going to another land and telling the members of the established culture there, “We don’t know your ways, but we can tell you that we’re right and you’re wrong. Your belief systems are completely incompatible with our belief systems, and ours supersede yours. You can’t even integrate our system into your own frameworks; you must replace your beliefs with ours.” It’s sheer arrogance. These judgments border on flat-out racism; if you read some of the primary sources from missionaries in the American colonies, they talk about how “backward” and “inferior” the “heathen” “savages” are. (The parts about incompatibility and non-integrability gave Christian missionaries in the Americas particular trouble; one reason why they found the natives so “difficult to convert” is that, when presented with the idea of Jesus, many of those cultures responded by saying, “Okay, we’ll add him to the list.” At which point they were usually labeled blasphemous and targeted for burnings.)

You may have noticed that I do have a bias here in my mental image of missionaries. I grew up in New England, went to Williams College in New England, and took a class on colonial-era Native America. I wrote some reports that required reading some of those primary sources. Those missionaries were generally terrible in their tolerance and attitudes towards the Native American cultures – almost surprising, since the Pilgrims, as an example, were trying to escape religious persecution, but then I remember that, to them, religious tolerance extended no further than tolerating different brands of Christianity. Well, maybe also the Jews, for historical reasons. So, when I picture a “missionary,” I tend to see a guy wearing gray wool and big black boots, trudging through a snowy forest to an unfamiliar village where he will try to convince the inhabitants to let him smear ash on the foreheads of their smallpox-ridden children before they die unbaptized. (Bonus points for guessing where the smallpox came from. Besides Lord AmHerst, of course.)

This arrogance is a dangerous attitude that has no place in rational politics and should not be present on the national or international stage. I do not want to live in a nation that believes that its has the single best way of life, because there is always room for improvement. I do not want to live in a nation that believes itself to be inherently culturally superior to other nations or belief systems. I do not want to live in a nation that believes its purpose is to impose its culture and beliefs on others. And I especially do not want such a nation to have cruise missiles and fusion warheads.

One of the major currencies of international politics is respect. Respect for the abilities of other nations, respect for the people of other nations, respect for the needs of other nations, respect for the histories of other nations, and respect for the cultures of other nations. That respect is how countries develop and exercise soft power – the capability to accomplish their international objectives without application of threats or force. Without respect, a nation loses this capability. Think about North Korea or Iran: they have no respect for the international community, and with rapidly waning soft power, they must rely on farcical military parades, missile tests, and uranium refinement milestones to try and get attention on the world stage. Even Iran’s trade connections with Russia and China may not be enough at this point. So, in the future, even if the United States’ diplomats act respectful towards other nations, if they ever go on record as saying things like, “The United States of America is God’s New Promised Land, and its Divine Mission is to advance the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ across all Creation,” then this country will see its soft power evaporate. Perhaps quickly, perhaps slowly, but disappear it will, and then those fanatical leaders will find themselves with hard power as the only way to “advance” Christianity. To stave that eventuality off, we must maintain our respect for other nations and cultures, and the only effective way to do that is to have leaders who do respect other nations and cultures. There might be fundamentalists and fanatics in the United States – and I will respect their right to hold those beliefs, even if I do not personally agree with their choices and goals – but we cannot have such fanaticism built into our national principles. (Another semantic note: yes, I will respect fundamentalists’ right to hold their beliefs. I will even go so far as to respect their beliefs. But I will not respect pushing their ideology on other cultures or the children of our own culture.)

Within our own borders, a national focus on spreading religion – one religion – is not only fundamentally at odds with the founding principles of our country, but would directly damage America domestically. By prioritizing religious concerns over worldly ones, we would be obstructing or delaying solutions to problems ranging from hunger to poverty to disease. I’d rather have a little human-driven social work at the national level than national prayer breakfasts or divine missions – providing tangible solutions to real problems, which does not require religion. By pushing a single belief system, we would be actively shutting out and repelling those citizens or potential citizens who may have a great deal of value to add to our country. One of the things that makes America great, in my opinion, is that we will let a guy with a name like Wernher have free reign over our technological and industrial capabilities. That sort of thing got us to the Moon. And finally (in this list, at least), by placing a very specific religious worldview at the forefront of our national consciousness, we would be rejecting scientific methods, theories, and all the potential benefits they would derive. If, for whatever reason, you worry about Chinese flags appearing on the Moon next, then you ought to be petrified of writing Christianity into the Constitution.

One of the most difficult and frustrating things about this whole history-textbook issue is that people like me, who advocate a rational, precise, fact-based approached rather than some ideological, doctrinal crusade is that we have to make allowances for the views of the other side while they do not. From the NYT magazine article,

The idea behind standing up to experts is that the scientific establishment has been withholding information from the public that would show flaws in the theory of evolution and that it is guilty of what McLeroy called an “intentional neglect of other scientific possibilities.”

…

Ask Christian activists what they really want — what the goal is behind the effort to bring Christianity into American history — and they say they merely want “the truth.”

Sure, they want “the truth.” Stress on “the.” In fact, it would probably be best to replace the “the” with an “our.”

The problem is that I want the truth. But, since I don’t believe that there is any source of Inerrant Truth available to me, I must determine the truth from available data. I must also use the scientific method: propose a hypothesis, and test it. So, I must allow these revisionist historians to propose their hypotheses, and I must allow them to test those hypotheses. And if the results of those tests are reproducible, I must accept their results.

The problem is that, politically, this looks like what we now know as “waffling.” I’m somehow not sticking to my guns, and somehow that is B – A – D bad.

Here’s another example of this principle at work. My girlfriend reported to me that she saw some protesters on her university campus recently; one of the demonstrators was carrying a sign that read, “Do you have the courage to question evolution?” He may not have realized it, but that question pretty much defines any science/religion debate. Do scientists question evolution? Sure they do. That is how science works. We question our theories, propose other possibilities, suggest alternatives, produce contradictory data. But then we synthesize all the available data into the existing theories, mutating them into new theories, which we test again. (Hey, look at that. Scientific theories evolve through selection.) But does that protester question his bible? Does he test it against available data? Most importantly – does he try to synthesize it with current understanding, to generate a self-consistent model of the universe?

If he can start from nothing but his bible and get to a functional explanation for why his flu vaccine works that is consistent with all observed data to date, my hat is off to him.

But, politically, in making the above statements it looks like I’m giving creationists room to advance their ideas. It looks like I’m giving fundamentalists the go-ahead to write creationism into science texts. Because I’m not rigidly sticking to a dogma. (And if I do, the creationists will rightly call me on it. But they usually take it too far – That’s what they’re trying to do when they append “-ism” and “-ist” to “evolution:” equate evolution and creationism as belief systems, because they cannot be equated as science and it is not meaningful to compare them independently with no common frame of reference.) No, I’m not adhering to a dogma, I’m allowing room for questioning and I’m integrating new findings into my previous theories. The ideologues have no such limitations; they quote doctrine mindlessly without the critical thinking skeptics advocate. To the modern political drama machine, for which the world is Black or White, Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, that makes me automatically lose the debate.

A really intelligent and forthright conversation or education about evolution and creationism would require a full understanding of the scientific method. Which brings me back to this history-textbook issue: a full discussion of American history, and the role religion plays in that history, requires an understanding of the historical contexts, data, and methods. What we find, in the case of science, is that creationism does not hold up under the lens of rigorous investigation. So far, evolution is the best theory available to us. What we find, in the case of history, is that events were driven by human beings with human concerns – sometimes expressed in terms of religion or integrated with religion. “Divine missions” can often be analyzed in terms of the characters of the people supporting them, or in terms of prevailing socioeconomic conditions. Religion is not a negligible force, but it is by no means “the” driving force of America.

We absolutely should teach the role of religion in the Enlightenment, the role of Judeo-Christian values in shaping the philosophies of our Founders, and the role of the Great Awakening in shaping our Revolution. Those are historical facts. But we should also teach that several of the Founding Fathers were Deists, that they left the word “God” out of the Constitution on purpose – and the Declaration of Independence only uses the word once, crucially embedded in the phrase “Nature’s God,” that the Pilgrims came to the New World to escape religious persecution, and the role of Christian missionaries in the destruction of existing American cultures. We must remember that it is our diversity which makes America great – our ability to confront the unknown and face it, understand it, and even absorb it into ourselves. We must remember the protections of the First Amendment, and why the states, with their varied religious backgrounds, refused to ratify the Constitution without protections such as those. And all the while we must remember that a full investigation of history and politics, with a rejection of ideology, does not reveal weakness, but gives us a stronger, more integrated understanding.

So history textbooks can have some bits on the religious beliefs of America’s Founding Fathers. But they absolutely should not portray America as a “Christian” nation and definitely should not assign a divine mission to its history or future.

/ / /

Channel Anchor at The Twins. (Hacked-up Hubble images, a Google SketchUp model, and GIMP)

The numbers just don’t match up. Ceren Aydomi taps her desk irritably, staring at the resonance spectra glowing before her. The projections cast pale purple and green light over Ceren’s face, spilling down the front of her body, glinting from the polished glass surface of her desk with its embedded displays and gesture-sensing planes. The peaks of each spectrum march onward from the previous plot, but rapidly deviate from her calculations. And the Three-Hundred Seventy Eighth Channel Interstice Studies Meeting is only two days and a few hours away.

She sighs, covering her eyes with one hand, and hunches back, considering. Her experiment packages sit on small devices carefully positioned midway along six of the Channels and have been collecting data on the resonance effects each time a ship passes through the Channels for the better part of a year. She has already managed to squeeze some publishable results out of the resonance dynamics, but if she can make her new theory match up with this data, she thinks her tenure at the Republic Institute will be assured.

Ceren sweeps a hand over a gesture-plane. The spectra slide over in midair to make room for her calculations and a copy of Farok’s paper from CISM 374. Her scratchy, webby handwriting shines in the space in front of her, groping through interstitial algebra and annotating Farok. Scratchouts and strikethroughs glow angelically everywhere, but at the far right of the workspace Ceren has underlined, circled, boxed, and scribbled exclamation marks around one equation; a new perturbation term on Farok’s fundamental expressions. She feels more confident than ever that her math is correct; this term should allow her to extrapolate Channel resonance data beyond the six Channels with her equipment, and on into the wider galactic Channel Network. But the spectra simply won’t match her expressions, no matter how clever she is when ordering the processor to reduce the data. Ceren stares at the spectra, then at her algebra workspace, then at Farok’s paper, then back again.

Now CISM 378 is two days away, exactly.

*

“Corresponding analyses in Rither and Poramanuod [27k473] and Subatrey et al. [27k469] show agreement with Plate 6,” says Farok [27k477]. “The spectra are consistent with resonance phenomena that correlate strongly with passage mass in adjacent Channels. The correlation obeys a parameterized law given by Equations 36-37. Plate 7 shows the behavior of these laws when applied to the data from Aydomi, Shef, and Crisped [27k476]. That paper provides novel methods of resonance data collection and ingenious analysis that may be used as a calibration for Equation 36. This new parameterized law provides an improvement in fit accuracy of 13.7 percent.”

Ceren has checked over her five-year-old paper, back from her early studies at the Seventh Great Fields Observatory, more times than she can count. Farok’s work did indeed provide a solid framework for interpreting her data – and then Farok himself gave Ceren the basics of her new theory. If it would only work consistently, she thinks to herself.  Her algebra predicted all the resonance drifts in her 27k476 data, but not in all the spectra she collected over the past year. A difference of five years should be nothing at all to the Channel Network – the spatial interstice phenomena themselves defy any known dating methods, and the Channel Anchor structures apparently undergo periodic self-rejuvenation processes, but at the very least, the whole system is more than forty thousand years old.

Still… “novel methods of resonance data collection and ingenious analysis.” Ceren embarrassedly wonders how often she has idly read over that phrase, so in character for Farok to drop a comment like that occasionally in the midst of his paper. She pictures a roundish old man wearing out-of-fashion clothes and with wispy-white hair, grinning and chuckling over some bright young student’s work and eager to share his approval with his venerable research community.

She has written to Farok several times over the past five years, but so far, this one paper is his only acknowledgment of her existence.

Ceren sighs. She sets up her processor to run through a few more analysis techniques overnight, but is not hopeful. She slashes her hand through the projections and they vanish. She strides out the open door into the dimly-lit hallway, quietly snicking the door shut behind her.

*

The next morning, Ceren comes into the building a bit earlier than usual. The light of Yama’s sunrise is still spilling in through the tinted glass in the spacious Institute atrium as she walks through and heads up the stairs, satchel over her shoulder and a cooling recyclable mug in one hand.

She is on her way to her office when she passes Krivo in the hall. He is normally here at some abusively early hour. Sometimes she feels bad about her own work ethic when she sees him leaving in the late afternoon, though she knows she shouldn’t. “Hey, Cere,” he says, unnecessarily shortening her name.

“Morn, Kriv.” Ceren makes to walk past him, but he isn’t finished yet.

“Did you hear that the transit company Magd booked this time had some kind of maintenance issue?”

“No…”

“Yeah, it was on this morning’s dispatch. I checked, and they’ve grounded their af-Yama fleet.”

“Shit!”

“Yeah.”

Ceren looks around despairingly. “Have you told Magd? Does he know?”

“I’ve been checking his office every couple minutes. He’s not in yet.”

“Course not.”

An innocently inquiring look comes over Krivo’s face. “I don’t have Magd’s home reference. Actually, I was kind of hoping you did, but I couldn’t remember.”

Ceren starts walking again. “You bastard, of course you could,” she says, in a tolerantly exasperated tone. “I think I’ve got his ref somewhere in my desk. Come on.”

They proceed around the gentle curve of the corridor, walking past alternating wide windows and potted plants on the outer wall; alternating office doors and research posters on the inner. Krivo asks Ceren how her work is coming and she complains about the new spectra not fitting her theory. Sympathetic, Krivo asks why she can’t build time variance into her equations. Ceren launches into a discussion of how old the Channel Network is and the incredible minuteness of the probability that any change has occurred in the time her experiments have been active. She is in the middle of making a particularly vociferous point, involving lots of expansive gestures with her mug in hand, when they arrive at her office door.

“Anyway,” she says, “it’s unreasonable. Let’s get this transit thing done with so I can go back to the spectra.”

Ceren opens the door and wakes the desk processor. It projects the default status display before her; a small winking indicator in the corner shows that the overnight analysis has not turned up anything new. Ceren ignores it for now and pokes at the section of the surface devoted to personal information; she speaks Magd’s name and the desk surface glitters with a summary page of information. Krivo sidles into the tiny office as Ceren flicks her hand over the desk, each flick rotating the display to a new page.

“Here it is,” she says, after finally finding what she has been looking for. She looks at Krivo, who is staring absently at some trinkets she has on a shelf. Ceren taps the ref and speaks: “Hi Magd, it’s Ceren Aydomi. Krivo says there’s some problem with the transit company; we probably have to find someone else for passage to the conference center.” She pauses for a moment, thinking of what else to say, and then simply shrugs and taps the desk again. She looks at Krivo.

“Okay,” he says, and steps sideways out the office door. “See you.”

Ceren puts her mug down on a blank surface of the desk, unslings her satchel, and spins the chair around. No sooner does she flop into it and reach for the results of the overnight analysis than a corner of the desk pings and she hears the senior researcher’s voice. “Ceren, will you talk to Uvalid in Department Travel and see if she can make the necessary arrangements? Thanks, Magd.”

“Aaahh,” groans Ceren.

*

It turns out that getting the transit issue sorted takes Ceren half the day. She runs downstairs to the Institute café for lunch, a palm-sized slate in hand. She stands in line, manipulating the terms in multivariate equations with her fingertips while the others around her gape at the menus mounted over the servers’ heads. At the front of the line, she glances up to mumble a standard order and then goes back to the slate, standing aside until her food comes out on a tray. She stuffs the edge of the slate in her mouth to hold it, takes the tray, walks to an empty table, and sits down, setting the device beside her food. Now, it shows a miniature version of the spectra hovering over her office desk.

Ceren eats mechanically, so absorbed in her analysis that she doesn’t notice Krivo come by and stop at the empty seat on the other side of her table. He looks for a moment as if he is going to sit down, opens his mouth, then closes it again and walks away.

Seeing this, an attractive young researcher who has been eyeing Ceren from across the café shrugs and turns back to the conversation his two buddies are having.

*

Ceren arrives with Krivo and Magd at the planetary port. They haggle at the ticket counter about their itinerary; Magd has to bluster a bit, but finally they board the shuttle, toss their baggage in storage compartments, sit down, strap in, and the vehicle lifts off.  Yama slowly transitions from surface to horizon to globe out their windows. Krivo gazes out the window and then opens up a book. Magd is asleep instantly. Ceren remains buried in the graphics projected by her slate. It is connected to the processors in her office desk, with full access to all her data and algorithms.

She has been going in circles all the previous day and all last night, but still she cannot use her new theory to account for the resonance spectra.

Finally, she thinks back to her conversation with Krivo the yesterday morning. It is a relatively simple matter to identify the time-varying terms in her equations. Five years’ evolution in the Channel Network between her 27k476 resonance spectra and now; five years out of forty thousand. Well, she thinks, I might as well give it a shot.

She retypes the terms, requests the fit again. A little animated “please wait” symbol appears in the middle of her slate. Thanks to the processing power of her desk, it is quickly replaced by a summary report of the data analysis.

The spectra fit her theoretical calculations. The error is less than a few tenths of one percent.

Ceren is stymied. She looks over to Magd, almost shakes the senior researcher awake, then thinks better of it. He doesn’t like to do anything but sleep on shuttles.

She shows Krivo. He hands the slate back, saying, “good fits.” No comment on the obvious implications.

Huh. Feeling rebellious, Ceren says to herself, so what? I might as well stick my neck out a little. I can always just put this forward as an interesting solution to the data. But if this fit is correct….

What? She pulls up Farok’s 27k477 and her notes on the time-varying resonance theory. Does some scratch calculations with the fit parameters. If this is correct….

A new Channel Anchor has opened.

Some more scratchwork, some extrapolations of the fitted data, and works some other numbers through her new time-varying equations. The new Anchor would have to be somewhere in the Far Reaches. All her experiments were placed in Channels near the Republic Institute, near the border between the Crown Jewels and the Court of Lords. Ceren just predicted the opening of a new Channel Anchor tens of thousands of light-years away from her resonance experiment sites!

Either this fit is a fluke, or her theory is more powerful than she could possibly have imagined.

Ceren accesses a few other papers by Farok and his colleagues, desperately trying to work out the corroboration she needs before CISM 378 starts tomorrow. Her presentation is on the second day of the conference, but she knows that she won’t get any good work done after she arrives. “What would you think of this?” she whispers to herself, imagining the genial old scientist grinning encouragement at her. But that image is only in her mind; he might not be genial or encourage her at all.

The shuttle, lazily spinning about its axis, flares its engines and dives through the Channel Anchor in trailing orbit around Yama’s sun. The huge circle of space in the middle of the massive construct shimmers an energetic light black, there is a corresponding languid flash of dark white from the inside of the metal ring, and the shuttle vanishes into the Channel Network.

Hours later, it reappears at a Channel Anchor hanging in space near the nebular Twins Formation.

*

Ceren gives the travel information Uvalid provided to the receptionist, who then assigns their rooms. She takes the key and drags her luggage to the lift, leaving Krivo and Magd to explore the resort and conference center.

Her room is spacious and open, draped with colorful fabric hangings and overlooking the clear turquoise ocean. It has a desk. Ceren throws her things onto the floor and drops into the chair, waving the desk awake. She enters her Institute account number and syncs in to her office processor. Information – sometimes as photons, sometimes encoded in gravity waves, sometimes embedded in electric currents – flows from a desk in the Republic Institute on Yama, through space and over Channels to a polished business-style desk in a one-bed resort room on Heliast Major.

I have it, Ceren thinks. She runs a more careful calculation on her data with the time-varying formulae; a new Anchor opening in the Far Reaches and the closure of an existing Anchor among the Mariner Worlds match her data nicely. Now she just has to integrate this result into her presentation.

The view out Ceren’s window is staggeringly beautiful. Heliast’s sun sinks below the calm oceanic horizon, its reflected light split into a billion scattered fragments by the ripples of the sea. The vividly colored water laps at a white beach below with soft, languid rushing sounds. As the sun sets, the fading light reveals the towering, convoluted red-purple emission nebulae that are the Twins, stretching from the edge of the ocean high up to the zenith. Stars begin to wink into visibility throughout the velvet reaches of the sky. There are a few wispy clouds to obscure the stellar spectacle, still lit in ruddy oranges from the now-disappeared sun.

Ceren closes the blinds to free herself of distractions.

*

“…that’s the first glaring error,” Ceren says, swiping a hand decisively through the air. Krivo walks next to her as they and a few dozen other attendees spill out of the meeting room into the wide, carpeted hall. A low buzz of conversation fills the air. “Grephor and Oewi did not formulate their expressions for such cases. One of their explicit assumptions states that there cannot be a dependence between gamma sub two and the first resonant coefficient. Second, she showed a graphic indicating a correlation in the forcing modes…”

Krivo rolls his eyes and picks up an hors d’oeuvre from a serving station in the hall. Ceren is still complaining about the last presentation (not a great speaker and, yes, technically flawed material, Krivo thinks to himself) when a man interrupts Ceren’s monologue from the other side of the serving station.

“Pardon me, but I believe you may be critiquing that presentation a bit too harshly.” Ceren stops and looks at the man. He is wearing a trim, deep purple, high-collared tunic with buttons up the right side; Ceren judges him to be just a few years older than she (and attractive, in a studious, somber sort of way). “I have several issues with the derivation,” he continues, “but I believe Oewi’s later work with Jiladaben and Coombs corrects the earlier theory to allow some room for interpretation. I have a copy of their 27k451 paper, if you would like to review it.” He lifts a slate halfway out of his shirt pocket, lets it fall back.

“I’m not familiar with that work,” says Ceren, a note of dismissiveness in her voice.

“It’s fairly obscure,” replies the man. “Not many pay attention to Oewi’s work after his seminal paper with Grephor – and why not? That was more than enough scientific progress for a lifetime! Those who do know of his post-440 research hold divided opinions. He went down some funny avenues from time to time, but I think that occasionally he might have glimpsed something that he and Grephor missed.”

Intrigued, Ceren decides to be more gracious to the stranger. She reaches into her satchel and pulls forth her slate. “Well, you’ve got me curious. I’ll take a look at that paper.” As the man produces a projection of the file’s title page and waves it over to Ceren’s slate, she smiles sheepishly and says, “I’m sorry, I worked late into last night finishing up my own presentation. Some of my results are only a day old.”

He smiles back. “I know exactly what you mean. That’s how it is sometimes.”

The title page glows in the air above the slate in Ceren’s upturned palm. Through the translucent projection, she sees Krivo going into a meeting room for another session. Some keywords in the abstract catch her eye. “Huh…”

“It has some interesting promises, doesn’t it? I’m not sure it really delivers on all of them, but I wouldn’t discount Oewi without giving him a good read.”

Ceren nods and replaces the slate in her satchel. A soft tone murmurs through the hall, calling attendees to the various conference sessions. Magd has strongly urged her to sit in on this next one…she is about to detach herself from the stranger with this explanation when he says, “I’m sorry, but there’s a presentation now that I simply cannot miss. I’m sure we’ll run into one another later; what was your name, again?”

“Ceren Aydomi, from the Republic Institute,” she answers. “And you?”

“Ah, Miss Aydomi! I very much enjoyed your recent work with Magd.” As he starts to turn away, he states, “I am Dellas Farok.”

*

Ceren sees Farok again across the terrace at lunch. He is casually eating a sandwich, legs crossed, his slate propped up on one knee, but he is looking out over the narrow white beach to the ocean. She recognizes him from the distinctive tunic; the air by the beach is cool. She takes her lunch basket over and asks if she may join him.

“Please do,” Farok says.

With her mind still considering what to say to this man whose work has been instrumental to her own, Ceren blurts out, “I collected some new data that only fits your 27k477 equations with the introduction of time-varying terms.”

Farok moves his slate onto the table and places his feet flat on the ground, facing her. “Now that is interesting. These are your mid-Channel collectors, from the paper with Magd?”

“Yes – I had no idea you knew about that!” Ceren realizes how naïve her remark sounds the moment it escapes her lips; the paper was published.

“Of course,” says Farok, kindly. “I must admit that I followed your papers closely after that one with Shef and Crisped. That data was invaluable.”

“I’m sorry – I wrote you about so much of my work!”

“And it is my fault that you received no response,” Farok admits. “Perhaps that was a mistake. But, you see, I felt that there was little I could add to your analyses. My career had just begun; my 27k477 paper brought me into the resonance studies community. I was busy establishing myself. I think,” – here he looks a little quizzically at Ceren – “that you read a bit too much into my capabilities and experience from that one paper.” She manages to keep from blushing, imagining the misconceptions she had of what Farok would be like. His overly formal attitude is in keeping with the tone of his writing, she thinks defensively to herself.

“Perhaps,” she admits. “Though I am still interested in your opinions.”

Farok touches the dark, glassy surface of his slate and gestures through the file system with his fingertips. An aquamarine projection of a paper’s first page appears horizontally in the air over the slate. He spins his hand in the air over the projection, and it rotates to face Ceren. She recognizes Aydomi and Magd [27k480]. All around the manuscript and in among the figures and equations, handwritten notes glow in orange. The handwriting is neat and precise. Ceren notices that the notes are written in a conversational tone.

“You assumption here has some interesting implications that I don’t believe you fleshed out…” he begins, indicating one of the notes.

*

After lunch, Ceren and Farok go their separate ways to different technical sessions; she has chosen Channel Anchor Internal Structures, while he has picked Interstice Mechanics and Energetics. They agree to meet at the Field Lecture in the early evening. Magd comes into Internal Structures for a few presentations. While the presenter speaks from the center of the circular auditorium, strolling around the three-dimensional projection located there, Magd whispers with Ceren over a few notes about their upcoming presentations.

“What do you think of the time variance idea?”

A pause, filled by the drone of the speaker.

“If you present it as a possible fit to your data. I am skeptical, but you are correct; it improves the fit error. Maybe this accounts for temporal variation in your instruments?”

Magd ducks out before the session ends. The last speaker leaves Ceren puzzling over the internal workings and function of the enigmatic Channel Anchors. After a few disastrous incidents shortly after the Advent of Spacefaring, none of the spacefaring races are willing to conduct potentially damaging tests on the devices, left by ancient Architects, which hold open the Channel Network interstices that link the races in commercial, political, and cultural contact across light-years.

She walks through the opulent, scientist-filled resort halls, following Field Lecture notices to the ground shuttle station. She stands in a milling group, craning her neck about, and soon sees Dellas Farok approaching. Ceren waves, greets him, and they board the ground shuttle. It takes them a few minutes to get to the spaceport. The shuttle takes them to a charter craft, which they board. They stand with other attendees in the observation gallery as it lifts off into Heliast orbit.

While the craft Trajects from Heliast to the nearest Anchor, the lecture chair introduces the speaker.

“Each year,” she says, “the CISM Field Lecture Committee sponsors a talk that brings researchers out to the objects of study. This year’s Lecture will be given by Vice Curator Witara Jumet, of the Shobah Library Central Collections and Archives.”

“Not a Librarian…” groans Ceren under her breath. She glances apologetically at Farok, knowing he will disapprove of her reaction, but he frowns in agreement and shakes his head a little, then indicates the speaker by a small motion of his eyes. All the researchers of the spacefaring races acknowledge that the ancient Architects’ knowledge was certainly far more advanced than any of the currently leading theorists, and many study the hulking relicts of the Architects to advance their own scientific state of the art. The Librarians take this archaeological approach to its extreme, maintaining that the Architects made all possible discoveries about the physical Universe and that study of their artifacts was the most efficient way to uncover (or perhaps recover) them.

The lecture chair finishes her introduction. “Our final Trajection is coming up in a few minutes, at which point we will emerge alongside Channel Anchor One Five Three Eight, ‘VacLora.’ Curator Jumet?”

With a discharge of crystalline capacitors, the bulbous triangular shape of the charter craft winks into existence a thousand kilometers from VacLora. Its two oval sublight engine bells fire up, streaming plasma. Out the observation windows of the craft, the Anchor subtends almost four degrees of arc. The hooplike structure is not quite edge-on, and grows larger by the minute as Curator Jumet steps up to the speaker’s podium. His image is projected such that each observer on the deck sees him as if he is standing just outside the craft’s windows, next to the Channel Anchor.

“Thank you, Chairwoman,” he begins. “Channel Anchor One Five Three Eight, which you see before us, is the prototypical example of the second of the three classes of Channel Anchor. It has been shown that the third class of Anchor functions on entirely different operating principles from the first two classes while Classes One and Two differ mostly in scale and sophistication of construction. In fact, the reduced scale and much higher fitting tolerances observed in Class Two Anchors suggest a growing Architect focus on exacting precision in the Middle Archaeastric period. This inference corroborates well with other artifacts dating from the same period, and provides a striking contrast to High Archaeastric Architecture…”

As the Curator continues with his introductory remarks, the Anchor swells before the assembled researchers. Ceren and Farok stand halfway between the center and perimeter of the observation deck, and have been craning their necks to see the Anchor around the heads of all the other researchers, but now its structure arcs into clear view. It is not a perfectly unbroken ring; bent cylindrical segments make up the bulk of its structure, with complex joints binding them to one another or to geometrically shaped stations spaced evenly around the ring. The segments are middle gray in color while the polygonal stations are a metallic light brown. From two of the stations, not quite opposite one another across the ring, huge antenna struts project forward and back for tens of kilometers. Now the Anchor has an apparent angular size over twenty degrees, and is beginning to ponderously revolve as the charter craft curves toward its face.

Curator Jumet describes the physical properties of the Anchor: its reflection spectrum and albedo; gravitational, electric, and magnetic field; inferred chemical composition; neutrino diffraction properties and measured internal acoustic modes. He details its function: observations of its distortion field; characteristics of the gauge undulation between VacLora and the adjacent Channel Anchors, internal resonances of the spatial interstices binding them together. He summarizes archaeological work on this Anchor. He refers to a paper dated 18k014.

Despite her initial skepticism, Ceren takes her slate out and jots notes to herself as Jumet speaks. Corellation between internal Anchor neutrino diffraction features and second interstice resonant modes? – Hafqua, et al. [26k262]. Distortion terms NOT NEGLIGIBLE in presence of Type-6 electrical anomaly. Check Arben and Talivetta [24k990] – [25k002]. Inferred interstice worldline diameter consistent with Magd? From time to time, Farok indicates one of her notes and nods agreement or silently circles one finger around some item he thinks merits further attention. Several times he looks at her notes quizzically; once, she is able to clarify her intent with gestures alone and he smiles contentedly in understanding.

All the while, the charter craft lazily circles and swoops around VacLora. Its angular stations swing by in the observation windows, the antennae sweep across the portals, and the great empty expanse in the middle of the ring wheels about the craft like a colossal celestial mandala. The vivid reds and sumptuous purples of the Twins smolder behind the gargantuan structure, sparsely speckled with blazing blue-hot stars.

Curator Jumet points out features of the artifact as they swoop past; the charter craft’s trajectory has been carefully planned to match his oration. Occasionally, there is a flicker as if out of the corner of Ceren’s eye, a slight perceptual shift like the snap of an optical illusion, when a vessel crosses into or out of the ancient gateway, leaping across thousands of light-years. The arrival of a particularly large convoy, a formation of flat ovoid ships centered on a several-kilometer-long craft shaped like torus encircling a sphere with a trailing hexagonal boom, provides the Curator with his final point.

“This Channel Anchor, colloquially known as VacLora, is a testament to the lasting science of the Architects. Now, when the materials of the Low Archaeastric have degraded and many of the hubristically large High Archaeastric structures have collapsed into ruin, not only do the exquisitely fashioned Channel Anchors persist, but they form the very foundation of our galactic societies.” Jumet gestures expansively at the carrier and attendant vessels exiting the Channel interstice, dwarfing the charter craft as they pass overhead relative to the researchers on the observation floor. “Though we have come far in the millennia since the Advent of Galactic Spacefaring in understanding the properties of these venerable devices, we do not yet apprehend the mechanism of their formation or the full purpose of their construction. These secrets elude us still, and suggest just how much remains to be learned from the study of the Architects’ works. Thank you.”

The projections fade and the Field Lecture Chairwoman comes back to the podium as the gathering of researchers dutifully applauds, and the charter craft moves off from the Anchor structure. Soon, it reaches sufficient range to safely Traject back to Heliast.

Ceren makes her way to the edge of the observation chamber and leans on the railing. Her eyes are on the receding Anchor until the Trajection takes it from view, leaving only the Twins visible.

Farok says, “You know, as much as I disapprove of the fundamental beliefs of the Librarians, Miss Aydomi, they usually give me much to think about.”

“I think,” replies Ceren, thoughtfully tapping her slate against the observation window, “that I agree with you, Mr. Farok. And you may call me ‘Ceren,’ if you like.”

“’Dellas’ will do, as well.”

*

They return to the island resort on Heliast. Ceren takes her leave of Dellas Farok, finds a restaurant, and orders a cheap meal to go. She takes it back to her room and, crumbs spilling from wrappers, syncs her slate up with her office processors on Yama again. She makes minor tweaks to the prompts she has written in her slate until late at night. She calls up her presentation, taking herself through the images, spectra, and plots another few times before falling into bed.

She sleeps fitfully, tossing the bedsheets about as she dreams.

Ceren wakes to the sounds of gentle surf outside and the insistent chiming of her slate, which is also projecting alternating colors about her in an effort to catch her attention. She squints at the rising sun, makes an unseemly little slurping noise, and moans groggily. For a brief moment, she wonders how she got so twisted up in the sheets. With a lot of shaking and tugging, she extricates herself and waves at her slate to stop bothering her. “All right, I’m up, I’m up! You blasted—”

She fishes in her luggage for the self-heating breakfast packs and cracks one open, leaving it on her desk while she stumbles into the bathroom. Ten minutes later, she emerges toweling her face dry and looking halfway presentable. Ceren goes straight to the desk, digs out the warm meal with one hand, and flips through the presentation again. Every now and then, she mumbles around a mouthful of food, gaze turned towards the ceiling, experimenting with new wording and trying to remember the best turns of phrase.

Twenty minutes later, she is out of her room. She meets Krivo almost immediately. “Hi, Cere,” he greets her brightly. “Good luck this morning, huh?”

“Thanks,” she acknowledges. “You, too. It’s too bad our sessions are simultaneous, I’d like to see the reception you get.”

“That’s fine.”

They walk together to the lift and take it down to the main resort floor, where the first CISM attendees are meandering among service carts taking the opportunity before sessions start to fill their mugs with various steaming liquids and hands with doughy confections.

Krivo wishes her luck again when he spots his session chair and must leave to deal with the logistics of his presentation. Ceren waves to him. He won’t have any problems with his presentation, she thinks. Nothing controversial to say, and a very thorough researcher.

She wanders through the miasma of service carts, picking up a pastry and warm mug of her very own, towards the meeting room she has been assigned. A flicker of rapid motion jolts her attention to Dellas Farok – he is standing back in the thickening crowd from her, but he is waving a projection of the conference program from his slate. He points to the section for this morning and gives her an encouraging smile. Ceren cheerfully waves back.

Feeling much better, she reaches the meeting door and cautiously inserts herself through the tall double doors. By coincidence, this is one of the larger meeting rooms: circular, with tiers of chairs facing the central podium on which sits a glassy hemispherical projector. The lights are dim right now, but faint primary-colored radiance leaks out from a console at the projector and silhouettes the shape of a man. Ceren calls to him.

“Ah, hello.” His tone is welcoming. He looks somewhat like her imagined (oh, that seems so long ago!)  picture of Dellas. “Are you speaking here this morning?”

“Yes. Ceren Aydomi, on Experimental Determination of—”

“—Secondary Interstice Resonances from Primary Measurements. Excellent! I am looking forward to this one. Since you’re here early, would you mind syncing your slate with the projection system?”

She steps forward, puts her slate in receptive mode, and holds it over the hemisphere, her presentation open. The projector recognizes the file and synchronizes. Ceren chooses a chair in the first tier and sits, setting her satchel and mug on the floor and leaning back for now.

The other speakers for the session trickle in, and a few minutes before the session starts the meeting room rapidly fills with attendees.

At precisely the scheduled time, the session chair stands. Beginning the traditional slow, clockwise walk around the projector, he greets the assembled, hushed crowd with the ceremonial opening words: “Well, it looks like it’s about time to start. I’d like to get things moving right away so that attendees have time to make all the presentations they would like. Welcome to ‘Experimental Measurement of Channel Interstices.’ Our first speaker this morning will be Fe Icun Poramanuod of the Shaleh Memorial Observatory at Isis. He will tell us about ‘Viewpoint Dependence of Optical Distortion upon Channel Entrance and Exit.’ Please keep your presentation to twenty minutes, Researcher Poramanuod, and then we will have five to ten minutes of questions.”

Ceren dutifully sits straight-backed through the first presentation, calmly sipping from her mug. She hardly pays attention to the speakers’ technical material, however, as she mentally reviews her own. After twenty minutes, she respectfully applauds with the rest of the attendees, listens to the speaker field a few pointed and subtle questions, applauds again, and then moves to the edge of her seat. There is a brief hustle of movement as some researchers exit the meeting room and others enter to find seats. Once again, the chair stands and moves to the projector.

“Next we have Researcher Ceren Aydomi, who has been working with Eathen Magd at the Yama Republic Institute. She will be talking to us about some new results on secondary interstice resonances that she obtained from primary mode measurements. Researcher Aydomi?” He gives her a sweeping open-handed gesture.

Ceren stands, smoothes some wrinkles from her shirt, and steps up to the central podium. “Thank you very much. I’m Ceren Aydomi, and my presentation title is ‘Experimental Determination of Secondary Interstice Resonances from Primary Measurements.’” She touches her slate; the first graphic of her presentation is writ large in the empty central space of the auditorium. “I’d like to begin with a quick overview of developments in interstice resonance experiments from the last decade. The current state of the art in interstice data collection is the correlated cavity-mode diffractor. This clever device can indirectly measure variations in the quantum field gauge near a Channel. In 27k475, Urwyn and Cjullzah published a paper proving that…”

Now, her experiments. “My first experience with CCM diffractors was working with Malli Crisped. I’m sure you all know that, while we perceive passage through a Channel as instantaneous, in fact the Channel Anchors cannot collapse the intervening distance between them to exactly zero. Munovera et al. provide the formulae for the interstice’s factor of collapse. In general, it is very difficult to set up the initial conditions of a Channel entry such that the passage is amenable to interruption, and there is very little time in any reference frame for a craft within a Channel to maneuver. However, thanks to Crisped’s pioneering work, we have the means to suspend CCM diffractors – or other instruments – at the geometric center of a Channel interstice.”

As she speaks, Ceren moves slowly around the projection, giving even eye contact to the audience arrayed about the central podium. From time to time she moves ahead, or doubles back a bit, or stops her incremental orbit to point out features of the projected graphics, equations, tables, and references.

“A CCM diffractor so located can measure the resonant mode of a hundreds-of-light-years-long Channel,” she continues. “In fact, since each Channel Anchor has two links to other Anchors, Farouth’s famous field equations from 19k098 provide that the diffractor can pick up on the resonating modes of adjacent Channels – even Channels two- or three-times removed from the data collector.”

She displays some of her raw data. “Tracking the time variation of the field gauge value inside the interstice turns up the frequency content of the modes. We know that spacetime is funny in there; I have chosen to use the ‘time’ coordinate as my independent variable by convention. Here is an example of an interstice frequency spectrum.” Ceren manipulates her slate, and one of her spectra appears. She pans and rotates the plot to explain some of its particular features to the audience, and how Equations 36 and 37 in Farok’s 27k477 paper are the best extant model for these features. She can see members of the audience nodding along with her explanation.

Now Ceren introduces some of her new spectra. She explains the most recent experiment; collecting data from several adjacent Channels over the course of a year. She describes subtracting out the effects of Channel passages, and how much remnant error she expects from uncertainties in the ships involved. Then she shows the spectra evolving through time. Here comes the juicy bit, she thinks.

“The fundamental equations in Farok’s paper provide for periodic evolution of the resonance modes due to the natural properties of the interstice. These are very well-characterized. However, the fitting error becomes extremely large for some of the more recent spectra in this time series.”

She takes a deep breath, chooses her words carefully.

“I have found that Farok’s equations do fit this data with fraction-of-one-percent errors if they are augmented with a few perturbation terms. Here,” she indicates the display, “and here. These terms govern the structure of the local Channel Network. The perturbations are small, but…they vary with time. I propose these equations as an interesting possible fitting model to this spectral data.

“I do not have a favorite interpretation of the high quality of a time-varying model. However, one intriguing possibility is that the Channel Network structure has changed during the year when I collected this data. Specifically, the time-varying perturbations are consistent with the closure of a Channel Anchor at these galactic coordinates,” – here Ceren shows a Standard Galactic Map with two labeled sets of coordinates – “and the appearance of a new Anchor at this position.”

A few murmurs from the audience. Ceren can see some heads moving about in the dimness.

The bombshell dropped, Ceren goes through some statistical analysis of her spectral model fits and discusses the probabilities of various alternative scenarios. The session chair catches her eye on her next circumnavigation of the projector and gives her a subtle signal; Ceren blows through this analysis quickly. She reaches her concluding remarks. She thanks Magd and Krivo, acknowledges Shef and Crisped. She thanks the audience.

They reply with dutiful applause.

The chair hops to his feet and calls out, “Are there any questions for Miss Aydomi?” He raises the lights halfway, so that the audience is more visible.

There is a small pause, and then the chair turns to one side and indicates someone halfway to the far wall of the room. A gaunt woman stands a looks towards Ceren. She asks, “Can you go back to that Galactic Map?” Ceren twiddles her slate, zooming the presentation back to the Standard Map with two lines of coordinates suspended above it. “So, if true,” continues the researcher, “your equations indicate that the ‘closed’ Channel is one of the more highly trafficked passages in the Mariner Worlds. That would have substantial repercussions for those worlds. Have you investigated the state of that Channel to corroborate these rather startling predictions?”

No, thinks Ceren, I just got this solution to work the day before yesterday. I haven’t had time to travel ten thousand light-years since then. She tries a standard deflection from the researcher’s repertoire. “That is an interesting question that must be addressed if I pursue this line of research. However, it is outside the scope of my immediate work, which was simply to fit these spectral models to resonance data.”

Unsatisfied, the woman responds, “Surely a theoretical departure with implications of this magnitude requires substantial corroboration.”

“Umm,” Ceren stalls. “Ah, well, as I said before I showed you this map, the Channel closure is only one possible explanation for my time-varying perturbations.” She adlibs a few ideas, some that she considered when she finished her models on the flight to Heliast and a few that occur to her now. “Or it could be something else,” she finishes lamely.

The researcher in the audience resumes her seat.

The chair, cheerful as ever, pivots on the ball of one foot and extends both arms towards a spot perhaps one quarter of the way back from the front tier of seats, next to one of the radial aisles. “Yes, Curator Jumet!”

Ceren keeps her face rigidly controlled, resisting an urge to groan, sigh, roll her eyes, bite her lip, or any one of the other possible reactions she feels the Librarian deserves. She does not feel on solid footing here, and she can imagine what Jumet will say to the idea of changes in the galactic web of interstices.

“Neither the Channel Network nor individual Channel Anchors have exhibited any changes in the past forty thousand years,” he starts in, “except those wrought by foolish attempts to manipulate them. Even natural events seem to have no effect on them; the observations of Delarin and Reoahl from 06k294” –the Curator stresses the first two digits of the date – “of the Anchors’ mechanisms for averting impending catastrophic collisions, and the landmark 12k007 Humark et al. paper relating the Anchors’ extraordinary resilience to small impacts show this beyond doubt. Though the cavity-mode diffractor is a very recent rediscovery, the field of modern interstice resonance studies is approaching six thousand years old and clearly recognizes the stability of the Channel Network.” Ceren wonders idly if he will be asking a question, but Curator Jumet clearly has a point to make.

“Since your fitting models fly in the face of so many thousands of years of established research precedent, do you suggest any possible mechanisms for alterations to the Channel Network? Have you any supporting research suggesting changes in the past?”

Ceren stands still for a moment, playing over possible responses mentally. The silence stretches to become uncomfortable. She knows she must say something. She opens her mouth to reply. “No, I—”

Curator Jumet actually interrupts her. “No? After all, Researcher Aydomi, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. How can the interstice studies community accept your purported findings, or yourself as a thorough researcher, if you have no backing information to suggest that the Channel Network, forty thousand years old, could possibly change on a timescale less than a single year?”

Some mumurs of assent come from around the room. The chair stands, graciously. “Excuse me, but I think perhaps—”

“That is quite all right.” The Librarian dusts off the front of his jacket and sits.

Now, under her professional attire, Ceren is shaking. Her slate slips in her now-sweaty grip; she fumbles to keep it from falling to the floor.

The chair looks to Ceren; apparently, her composure is better than she believes, because he glances back out at the filled auditorium and calls, “We have time for one more – brief – question. Yes?”

Ceren has to take a step around the projector to see the audience member who stands up at the chair’s prompt. He comes into view around the Galactic Map still hovering in the center of the room. It is Magd.

Oh, thank you, Magd! Ceren thinks. Please put me on better footing.

“With regard to the time-varying perturbations to Farok’s expressions – did you check for time variances of the data collectors in mid-interstice that would account for the perturbation?” he asks.

“I haven’t – ” Ceren stutters. “N-no.” She stands stock-still and mute.

“Okay,” says the session chair. “Let’s thank our speaker again.” The applause seems perfunctory at best. “Next, we have a talk on….”

Ceren closes down her slate, picks up her satchel from beside her chair, and walks up the aisle and out as the lights dim for the next presenter’s projections.

*

Dellas Farok finally finds Ceren Aydomi on the bare beach just outside the resort compound. She is sitting alone on the finely ground, bleached-white sand. Her arms are wrapped around her knees as she stares absently over the placid ocean into the purpling evening sky. Her slate sits partially buried in the sand, next to her satchel, which is half-open and nearly spilling its contents.

She cannot see Dellas behind her. He reaches down to put his hand on her shoulder, hesitates, and withdraws. “Ceren?” he gently inquires.

She draws a shuddering breath and looks to either side until she spots Dellas just behind her. She looks away. Then she puts her face in her hands, looks up again, and meets his eyes. “What?” she asks, her voice a low whisper.

“Well, I – ” he says, then stops. “I thought….”

“I don’t know if I want to know what you think about me.”

He sighs. “Okay. Come on. It’s time to do something else.”

Ceren gives him a little snort, but lets Dellas take her arm and pull her to her feet. With one hand still on her elbow, he bends down, picks up her fallen slate, replaces it in the satchel, and shoulders the bag. Dellas starts her walking down the beach, towards the resort’s dock platform.

There is a sign by the dock, reading “CISM 378” in small letters, with “Tours start at Six” below that. Dellas leads Ceren down the whitewashed deck planking towards a midsize floatcraft. It is an open-topped vehicle with pairs of seats running down its length on either side of a central aisle. He shows the attendant their conference attendee badges. The attendant waves them onto the floatcraft. Dellas walks down the aisle and chooses a seat in the middle of the vehicle, gesturing for Ceren to take the seat closest to the rail. Many of the seats are taken; a few other attendees percolate onto the floatcraft from the main resort before the attendant closes the small gate. The floatcraft glides away from the dock, coming up in a gentle climb until it has reached a few tens of meters altitude. The resort island slips away behind them.

The tour guide explains how Heliast is an ancient world with a single moon nearly half its own size, and how that has dominated the history of the planet and made it ideal for resort paradises. A billion or so years ago, the planet spun many times under one orbit of the moon, and the energy input of ocean tides among all the planet’s archipelagoes – Heliast is over eighty percent water – gave rise to life. But nowadays, the moon orbits in tidal lockstep with one Heliast day, the prime factor contributing to the perpetual calm of its seas. The small radius of Heliast’s solar orbit leaves the planet with a reasonable day length, while the dimness of its sun places it in the liquid-water zone. Without tides, with a massive moon helping to protect the planet from asteroid impacts, and with barely any eccentricity in its orbit to create seasons, there have been few selective pressures on Heliast’s life forms. Life on the planet thus failed to diversify much, and after millions of years of evolution with few external stressors, there are now only a few ecological niches on the world. Three or four avian species, eight or ten surface-level swimmers, two or three land animals, and about six land plants are all most tourists have the chance to interact with. The rest of the planet is geological beauty for visitors to enjoy.

Over the background of the tour, Dellas Farok talks to Ceren about anything that might keep her mind occupied. He comments on the dynamics of the Heliast system. He points out the birds and fish visible from the floatcraft. He describes how the resort island looks like a nebula he saw once. Ceren stays mostly silent, looking out to sea.

The floatcraft takes the conference attendees on a wide, sweeping course around the resort island with its flat white windswept beaches and clumps of deepest-green vegetation laden with chlorophyll to absorb the wan sunlight. The always-gentle warm sea breeze brushes over the researchers-turned-tourists and ruffles the ocean below into ranks of ripples. The setting sun, a wide hanging orb in the sky, descends below the pacific, oceanic horizon. The nebula comes out in splendor. It reflects off each ripple in turn.

Dellas tells Ceren about himself. He is from a world in Harrow’s Core. He is an only child. His mother moonlights as a sculptor. One of his childhood friends died in an accident. His academic advisor at the Technical University of Geshabar habitually mixed up his first and last name. He doesn’t subscribe to the prevalent religion of Harrow’s Core, though he finds interesting parallels between that philosophy and his own methodical interpretation of the scientific method. The facts about Dellas Farok roll through Ceren’s mind like the waves below.

The sun is now only a sliver against the horizon, its bulky disk taking a long time to disappear. As the floatcraft wheels around for the return trip to the resort, colored lights wink on around the rails. The attendant strolls down the aisle, offering snacks and beverages. Dellas orders cocktails for both of them. A moment later, the attendant hands him two glasses. He passes a tall, green-tinted glass with a garnish of spicy bright orange and red leaves to Ceren. She sniffs appreciatively at it as Dellas takes his first sip from a much more conservative clear glass.

“You know, I used to play avour quite a bit at the Technical University,” Dellas says, continuing a previous thought.

“I had apedh avour lessons for three years as a child,” says Ceren, breaking her long silence. “I think I lost my avour table when I moved to Yama, though. The container just didn’t come through in shipping.” She takes another sip of her cocktail. “I miss some of the things I had in that box.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, a shell collection, some small paintings my brother gave me, hmm….”

“Sometimes I am amazed at how the Architects left us these tremendous constructs, and we can find no other use for them but to lose packages and find ways to make instantaneous travel inconvenient.”

Ceren’s sudden laugh echoes out over the water.

*

They return to the dock platform and disembark. The attendant thanks them for coming.

“You haven’t eaten anything since this morning, have you?”

“No,” answers Ceren. Then, a note of surprise in her voice: “I’m starved!”

They meander through the resort grounds, past stately straight-sided columns and through open-air verandas, to the strip of restaurants and shops fronting the compound. Ceren points curiously at a grill offering genuine Delasite cuisine. They enter, find a booth, and immediately order a round of appetizers before making a closer inspection of the menu.

At one point, Ceren says, “You never answered my letters.”

“Maybe I was too nervous.”

Neither of them is familiar with Delasite foods. Dellas picks something with ingredients he knows. Ceren finds two items on the menu with nothing she can recognize and flips a coin.

After the empty appetizer plates have been cleared and they are waiting for the main course, Ceren looks up at the ceiling and asks, “Why did they do it?”

Dellas sits calmly, twiddling a utensil around on the tablecloth with one finger. He watches Ceren’s face warily.

“While I was sitting on the beach, I heard a group walking behind me. Someone said something about ‘she was suggesting that the Network has changed’ and something about the quality of research at the Institute.” She looks down, straight at him. “Why did they do it? Him especially. And Magd didn’t even help.”

“I expect,” Dellas says in measured tones, “that they don’t like changes to the accepted order of things.”

“But they are researchers. Scientists.”

“They are people like any other. They have traditions. Sometimes even the most compelling evidence doesn’t sway people.”

“…And I did not have the most compelling evidence,” she sighs.

“I think you did a good job with what you had,” Dellas tells her, honestly. “If not for several thousand years of tradition, they might have been ready and willing to think that Channel Anchors pop up all the time from the models you presented.”

Ceren cracks a wry smile. “Several thousand years, and one Librarian.”

“He did put rather a lot of stress on the millennial prefix of that one date, didn’t he?”

“Oh, you noticed?”

Their food arrives. The waiter places the wide plates, each with a narrow spire of dinner in the middle, carefully before them, asks if they would like anything else, and vanishes.

“Let’s eat, huh?” says Ceren.

They eat. Both dishes are delicious.

*

Dellas walks Ceren back to the resort and accompanies her up to her room. “You really think it won’t hurt me?” she asks.

“Yes,” he states. “It’s just one conference presentation. You can refine this work substantially before you publish, if you choose to do so. Your tenure at the Institute will be decided based on the entire body of your work, and I think you had the idea right in your presentation this morning: you have discovered a possible model to fit your data.”

“Thank you, Dellas.”

“My pleasure, of course.”

They reach the door to Ceren’s room. She pulls out the resort key, unlocks the door, and pushes it open. Dellas hands her satchel back. She thanks him. “We should play some avour tomorrow,” he suggests. “I have a table projection program on my slate.”

Ceren nods.

“Are you sure you will be all right?”

She closes her eyes and nods again.

Dellas smiles and holds out his hand. Ceren takes it. He opens his mouth to say something, but lets his breath out without any words.

She pulls him closer, into an embrace. Kisses him, and he does not turn away.

Ceren slips her hand between the buttons of his shirt. After a moment, he leans back from the kiss. “Don’t you think…maybe we should keep our relationship, ah, professional?”

She thinks over the events of the day. The presentation, the beach, the cruise, the dinner. She reaches her hand up to his face and asks him, sincerely, “Do you want us to keep it professional?”

He sighs a little, almost as if consigning his composure to defeat.

“Well?” Ceren asks, looking up at him.

Dellas slides his hands around behind Ceren and down her back. “No-o….”

The door closes. Once again, the spectacle of the nebula goes unnoticed.

*

Thousands and thousands of light-years away from Heliast, a tramp freighter navigates the Mariner Worlds, approaching a Channel Anchor orbiting a star at the Trojan point of a massive ice giant named Caermus. The captain transmits all the proper recognition codes through the gateway, the traditional warning signals to vessels on the other side of the bizarre, distorted blackness filling the circular construct.

The freighter’s plasma drive engages with a great ball of glowing gas escaping its magnetic bottle. The plasma burst settles down into a steady stream trailing behind the freighter, accelerating it towards the Anchor. The captain nods and turns away from his monitor. He picks up a slate containing his trade manifest. This looks to be a lucrative trip, he thinks.

“Huh…” says his astrogator, puzzled.

The captain looks up. “Is there somethin’ gone wrong?” He knows his crew well enough to register a problem in the astrogator’s voice. But there is no impending danger on the monitors. No system alarms, no proximity warnings, no power surges, no incoming transmissions. Everything is nominal.

The captain directs the ship’s bridge processor to take the monitor through a standard inspection sweep. The freighter exterior looks good. The drive plasma stream is clear. There is the Channel Anchor, behind them. There is—

“Get a stellar fix on our position,” orders the captain.

The astrogator manipulates a processor interface. He turns toward the captain, confused. “The same. Tha’s still Caermus ou’ there. We oughta be well into the Traders’ Rim now…”

*

The span called the Far Reaches is one of the more desolate regions of the Galaxy. The stars are metal-poor and the planets lack the kinds of incentives required for diverse higher life forms to evolve. Even the Architects left the Far Reaches largely untouched; the concentration of their spaceborne edifices is much lower here than average.

Of course, the ancient Architects did get everywhere in the Galaxy. Even the Far Reaches contain some evidence of their presence.

Mere hundreds of light-years into the Far Reaches from The Bastion, an Architect construct occupied by the Sector Republic on the border of the Crown Jewels region, a hulking ring floats in orbit around an unremarkable white dwarf. The dwarf has a few planets, all of which cooled and died millions of years ago.

The ring is over two hundred kilometers in diameter. It is made of a faceted, angular tube bent around in a perfect circle. Its surface is pitted and scarred on all the facets that faced the star when it was a red giant. It has been here since before the planets cooled. Before the star collapsed to a dwarf. Before the star inflated into a giant.

There is an imperceptible flicker of cosmic proportions. For a brief instant, an entirely different planetary system is visible through the ring. There are spacecraft actively moving about in that system. In a few seconds, the vision fades, and all that remains is inky blackness and stars.

Until, with an indistinct spark, a small probe flashes into being from the other side of the gateway.

Cook the onions, peppers, and carrots in a pan over medium heat until the onions start to turn translucent. Throw in the ham and let that cook for a bit. At this point, I put some water on to boil for the pasta. I then added:

• about two teaspoons chopped garlic (though I would have liked sliced fresh garlic)
• about one to one and a half tablespoons parmesan cheese
• a bunch of basil
• some crushed red pepper
• some oregano
• a dash of paprika

Cook that while the water boils. When its time to put the pasta in, throw it in the water and then pour some white cooking wine over the veggies and ham. Turn the heat down to low and simmer until the pasta is done. (I left mine a little al dente.) Drain the pasta, then combine everything, cover it, and shake it all up.

or, President Obama Comes Through On Space

I am simply thrilled at the prospects offered by the NASA budget released earlier today. In that budget, President Obama directed that NASA’s mission shift in scope in a dramatic way – a new paradigm, as all the media proclaim. That paradigm is this: NASA is going to stick its neck out. The space exploration business has grown to become incredibly risk-averse. NASA is now going to start experimenting more, trying new technologies, pushing the envelope, and playing with new strategies while leaving the more conservative aspects of spaceflight to others. NASA is going to lead while others follow. This ends a decades-long effort in which NASA was, essentially, playing catch-up with itself.

There’s a pretty good article about this on SpaceRef, and NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden’s statement on the NASA budget is available online. The new budget also comes Buzz-approved! I read through Bolden’s statement carefully, and I think it has some very, very exciting things to say about the future of the space program.

(Full disclosure: I was recently accepted as a NASA Student Ambassador. I’m all for positive outreach on behalf of the space agency. But the opinions you read here are my own!)

First and foremost:

President Obama today has given us a bold challenge — to become an engine of innovation, and the catalyst for an ambitious new space program that includes and inspires people around the world. With this budget and the steps it lays out, the United States and its partners in other nations, in industry, and in academia will pursue a more sustainable and affordable approach to spaceflight through the development of transformative technologies and systems. We will blaze a new trail of discovery and development. We will facilitate the growth of new commercial industries. And we will expand our understanding of the Earth, our solar system, and the universe beyond. To accomplish these objectives, the president has increased NASA’s budget over the next five years by 6 billion dollars, an extraordinary show of support in these tough budgetary times.

A six billion dollar increase, just after Obama announced a freeze on discretionary domestic spending. That is amazing news. It says, loud and clear, that the President believes that NASA is essential to our national economy, reputation, and technical ability. And that increase comes with directives to vigorously pursue “transformative” technologies.

The Constellation Program (CxP, in NASA parlance) was hamstrung from its very inception by two key points. CxP was suppose to put men on the Moon again, by 2020, but “using only existing technologies” and “within the existing budget.” The new NASA budget rejects both these fetters: it unchains NASA from the decades-old technology of the past, and it gives the agency the resources needed to pursue ambitious new exploration goals. Constellation was, in many ways, a reaction to the Space Shuttle disasters – a misguided thought that, since we lost astronauts on those storied vehicles but not on any capsule-based spaceflights, capsules are inherently safer. In fact, I feel that Constellation was one man’s reaction to the Space Shuttle disasters (former NASA administrator Michael Griffin), and the reason the Shuttles have become unsafe is that they are based on 30-year-old technology and were never meant to fly as long as they have. I’ve been confounded by that ultra-reactionary “with existing technology” constriction for some time now. Space flight is, and ought to be, adventure!

Let me say here that CxP was effectively dead before President Obama proposed cutting it from the budget. Hard as Constellation proponents may have found it to accept, the Augustine Commission did a solid, thorough fact-finding job. They determined, through painful examination, that schedule and budget overruns meant that the combination of the Ares I rocket and Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle would not be ready to service to International Space Station until 2018, at the earliest, and even with full funding. That means that ISS would likely not exist for very long, if at all, when Ares I would be ready to go there. Furthermore, they found that Ares V would not be ready to launch humans towards the Moon until 2028, well beyond the Vision for Space Exploration’s original goals. So all this buzz about Obama “killing” Constellation…is really old news. It’s simply a flat-out statement of the hard reality, and a re-introduction of pragmatic thinking.

Bolden had some good things to say about the existing work done on the Constellation Program, and his words should not be ignored:

With my deepest gratitude, I commend the hard work and dedication that thousands of NASA and contractor workers have given to Constellation over the last few years. Their commitment has brought great value to the agency, and they will have a pivotal role to play in our future path. Many of the things we’ve learned will be critical as we move forward.

The SpaceRef article I linked to above makes a similar point, specifically citing the Desert RATS program, which developed key exploration architectures and methods that could apply equally well to the Moon, Mars, asteroids – and hostile environments on Earth. I completely agree that the “exploration mindset” established by Constellation is a tremendous success for NASA, which has spent the last several decades dithering around in orbit. It was practically as Apollo 11 touched the Sea of Tranquility that President Nixon directed NASA to can the last couple Apollo missions and develop the low-orbit Space Shuttle. The Shuttle program has been punctuated by many major successes in orbital operations throughout the years – including satellite deployments and captures, the Hubble Telescope repair missions, EASE/ACCESS, and ISS construction. Yet it is difficult to sell these missions to the public as “exploration.” Science, yes. But we’re not expanding any frontiers. The Constellation Program at least gave NASA a sense of momentum again, and as Bolden said, that is a success that NASA needs to capitalize on.

We must now say goodbye to the Space Transportation System vehicles, venerable craft that served as extremely capable in-orbit workhorses but do not bring us beyond the influence of the Earth. Still – let us not forget that while Apollo gave us the image of Spaceship Earth

Earthrise

the Space Shuttle gave us the image of Spaceship Man!

Bruce McCandless floating farther away from his spacecraft than anyone ever has before or since

I’m very excited to see that not only will we be honoring our commitments to NASA’s international partners and extending the lifetime of ISS to 2020 (and beyond?!), but NASA will also have a 40% larger budget for the International Space Station to conduct science as a national laboratory! Now we can see the orbital facility really take off in new discoveries, whether we must buy access from the Russians or not! The research possibilities are exciting – particularly because they will supposedly have a focus on enabling technologies for exploration, like new propulsion systems. Bolden mentions inflatable habitats and centrifuges explicitly – those are things that enable really long-duration missions, orbital space colonies, and large-scale space construction and operations!

Technology research like this forms the centerpiece of the new NASA budget. Bolden says:

Next, the president has laid out a dynamic plan for NASA to invest in critical and transformative technologies. These will enable our path beyond low Earth orbit through development of new launch and space transportation technologies, nimble construction capabilities on orbit, and new operations capabilities. Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year…. Imagine enabling hundreds, even thousands of people to visit or live in low Earth orbit, while NASA firmly focuses its gaze on the cosmic horizon beyond Earth.

New launch technologies? “Nimble” in-orbit construction techniques? Thousands of people living in space?! Hell yeah! Let’s take our ISS construction experience and supersize it. It sounds to me like Bolden is talking about setting up some space colonies – or at least the technologies for them. He’s talking about researching technology in such a way as to enable some real science-fiction-like prospects for human space exploration. “Trips to Mars that take weeks” probably means something really cool like solar sails or ion engines. It looks like they may be setting a lot of store in the VASIMR engine concept (though it’s currently unproven). So now we’re literally and seriously talking about assembling inflatable centrifuge habitats in orbit and sending them to Mars with plasma engines.

VASIMR test in a lab

Pardon me while I wipe my slobber off the keyboard…

There are several specific research programs to be implemented under this budget plan. First is what I call a spaceflight systems architecture program, with 7.8 gigadollars attached to it. (Reminder: giga = 10^9 = billion!) Compare that to the entire cost of the Constellation Program to date at ~$8-9 billion! According to Bolden, this program

will invent and demonstrate large-scale, new and novel approaches to spaceflight such as in-orbit fuel depots and rendezvous and docking technologies, and closed-loop life support systems.

Just to remind you all, “rendezvous and docking technologies” is a fairly good keyword category for my research. And “closed-loop life support” would be jargon for a self-sustaining space habitat, that recycles all its wastes and produces food for its astronauts!

The second research program is $3.1 billion for “aggressive” research and development into a heavy-lift capability. This is clearly geared towards filling the gap between the Shuttle and the previously envisioned introduction of the Ares V – which the Augustine Commission found would not likely enter service until the late 2020’s or 2030’s! It also may help mitigate some of the concern from the shift to private contractors for ISS launch services, and provide NASA’s Ares workforce somewhere to go. It’s a bone thrown to Marshall Spaceflight Center, but a very necessary one – private corporations aren’t going to develop a heavy-lift capacity unless they have a really lucrative return in mind.

Finally, there are almost 5 gigadollars for flight demonstrations of space technology in the research and development stage. I’ve seen mention of flagship-class missions devoted entirely to technology demos. This is incredible; and incredibly important. A great example of the success of a flight demo mission is Deep Space One, which established the ion engine as a viable and useful means of spacecraft propulsion. That was a small-scale mission, though. A “flagship” mission is something the size of Cassini or Galileo. Image one of those designed entirely to testing out new engines, new habitats, new power systems, new payloads – just for the sake of trying something new. These would be a shot in the arm for the risk-averse spacecraft industry, as NASA takes on the mantle of developing and proving new technologies that bring us ever-further into the new Space Age.

Bolden also mentions $3 billion earmarked for robotic “exploration precursor” missions. These are not just robot explorers like the Mars Exploration Rovers. They are robotic missions dedicated specifically towards paving the way for human exploration: finding new exploration targets, testing experimental approaches towards getting to destinations, building on successes, perhaps even establishing infrastructure for and cooperating with crewed missions.

Now, I’d better devote some mention to these destinations.

Obama will probably articulate his NASA vision more clearly in a speech later this week, but it looks like he’s bought the Augustine Commission’s suggestion of a “flexible path” for the space program. In Bolden’s words,

Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year; people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the Moon, asteroids and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of “firsts;” and imagine all of this being done collaboratively with nations around the world.

…while NASA firmly focuses its gaze on the cosmic horizon beyond Earth.

In the “flexible path” exploration architecture, NASA does not explicitly set landing on the Moon or Mars as a goal. Instead, the agency sends crewed missions to live and work away from Earth at the Lagrange points, prospect on near-Earth asteroids, set up observing stations on the moons of Mars, or even drop in for a visit to the inner Solar System.

The criticism I have heard of this path is that planetary landings are much more exciting and feel much more like an “end goal.” Does the public really care about an astronaut getting into a halo orbit about an imaginary point in space?

Here is why I think this “steady stream of ‘firsts’” matters a great deal:

My generation, and whatever we call the generation after mine, has grown up with the legacy of the Moon landings. As much of a technical achievement as I realize a lunar return would be…I want to see something else. But more important than maintaining my interest is maintaining the interest of all the people Twittering over celebrity gossip. NASA needs public interest to keeps its missions going, and my Internet-induced-ADD generation requires that NASA be constantly churning out achievements in order to maintain that public interest. The flexible path gives NASA that ability – while still maintaining the option and ability to land on the Moon and Mars when the opportunity arises.

Another good reason to pursue this path is that it would highlight the actions and achievements of small crews of astronauts at unprecedented distances from home. It could make astronauts heroes again. With social media connecting those astronauts to people on Earth in near-real-time, while they shoot back pictures of a thumb-at-arm’s-length-sized Earth and deal with the challenges of spaceflight, NASA could have all the public relations goodwill it could ever want! Remember how John Glenn, Al Shepard, and Gus Grissom were household names? Remember how we celebrated the achievements of the first spacewalk, the first docking, the first time two manned missions flew simultaneously?

Following the flexible path architecture would also require a suite of new vehicles. I find that idea fantastically exciting. From 1961 to 1973, NASA developed and flew five totally different crewed spacecraft with totally different missions: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo CSM and LM, and Skylab. What if we could do the same again, for interplanetary operations, asteroid landings, and planetary flybys?

I do have some apprehensions about the new budget and new plans. I’d feel much better about the ISS-access and heavy-lift gaps if SpaceX was a lot closer to launching the Falcon 9. All in all, though, I’m really excited about all the technology R&D, the new focus on science, the relaxation of the “existing technology” restrictions, the expanded budget, and the thought that now NASA will be the trailblazer for space operations – again! We might call this the “Columbus Model:” private enterprise won’t do something as costly as exploration without a guaranteed dividend. It requires the investment of a national government to get things started, develop the infrastructure and technology, and demonstrate the resources to be had before entrepreneurs will risk their own dollars. I sure hope it works, and I sure hope that we weather the gap between launch vehicles.

But as a space exploration technology research and development kind of guy, I am pretty excited about all this!

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!