Circular vs Linear accelerator for launch

Today I came across an article about Spin Launch , a secretive startup working on spinning a payload to supersonic speed to  get a ballistic first stage launch boost thus lowering the size and cost of the rocket booster needed to get to orbit.

Having seen other ideas of accelerating to orbit on a rail gun before, and knowing how huge centrifugal forces can be, I found the idea of spinning very disturbing due to the massive centrifugal force that will be created on the payload virtually crushing it or any delicate payload inside it.

So as I sat waiting for my dry cappucino, I decided to quickly do some math using the angular velocity vs force formula to see how big the diameter has to be of the spinner to make sure you get no more than 10 g of centrifugal force to accelerate to just about speed of sound of 333 m per second.

Shockingly that turns out to be a circle of 2 km (1.65 miles) diameter!

And if you want to accelerate 3 times that speed the diameter grows by square so 9 times of that !

This follows from the formula that the radius = velocity^2 / (Max angular acceleration allowed) - (1)

But here is the good news. Instead of trying to build a cyclotron if you simply had a straight linear accelerator rail that can accelerate at 10g, you only need 3.33 seconds to accelerate to speed of sound (approx 333 m /s) resulting in a rail of only 500 m or half a km in length! That's tiny! (S = 0.5 x a x t^2) - (2)

And if you want to go 3 times faster using this method you also need a length 9 times longer but it's only a manageable 4.5 km and no crazy circles. Moreover you can angle the ending part of ramp gently to make sure you release payload at an increasing altitude.

In many flat deserts this would be very easy to accomplish. And no crazy engineering to build a smooth circle !

So why is this company doing it the wrong way? Well my guess is they decided to only support payloads that can handle 1000 gs or more. Notice that in equation (1) one saving grace is that if you keep the velocity fixed and decide to shrink radius then 10 times smaller radius only increases force by 10 times.

So a 100 g would require only 200 meter cyclotron

And a 1000g limit would require only a 20 m diameter device to accelerate payload to 333 m/s.

So my guess is they are building this tiny centrifuge of few meters in diameter to launch tiny payloads that are really robust on crushing and launching them on tiny second stage rockets and letting their customers know to expect 500+ gs.

May work for some payloads but clearly they must be planning larger circles and straight lines in their secret roadmap to have any hope of competing with ever cheaper traditional launchers or even space ship 2.

The future of SETI is finally here, and why a Tech Plateu instead of a Singularity might help us detect Aliens!

It's unbelievable that soon we will have a SETI program running that can detect, within 200 light-years, any signal that was originally as weak as an aircraft radar ping is on Earth; it means that if there were such radars operating within 200 LY cube around these 10k normal stars (not counting brown dwarfs), they would be detected.

http://www.space.com/30566-alien-civilization-signals-ska-radio-telescope.html

Of course you have to keep in mind that most SETI researches now believe that a sentient civilization may only exist in our current post-industrial primitive form (before hitting singularity or death) for a short time, so a negative signal would actually tell us a lot on the upper bound for how many such transitional civilizations are out there. 

But there are couple of additional reasons why this may just work; the most important than any - singularity never happens and technology rapidly plateaus then we would find a signal! 

Recently scientists have started believing that the black-hole singularity is actually no singularity; it is just a breakdown of our current physics under such extreme conditions. Similarly, we now know now that there is a limit for how dense and big our biological brains can get before they stop getting smarter. The speed of light is a fundamental limit not just for space-crafts making star-trek difficult at best, but is also a major handicap for how smart an AI can be, due to literally a speed limit on how fast processors can run (true an optical processor will be 100 times faster than an electrical one due to speed of light being higher than electric current, but it is not that much more). The promise of quantum computers seems more like relegated to specialized computations. Moors law has also come to an end for chip-densities as we hit the scale of individual atoms.

There are signs everywhere that the universe does not like singularity. However, it does not mean that things will not get really advanced tech-wise, it just means that there will be no singularity, and technology will advance much more at star-trek pace than at a pace that destroys our world and causes singularity as recently warned by several influential thinkers, including Ray Kurzweil,  Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking. Though there have also been thinkers such as Carl Sagan, and Michio Kaku that probably would agree to this more hopeful view I am proposing here.

Why would a tech plateau be good for longevity of Earth-like civilizations? It may give the needed time for our brains and social fabric to mature with technology thus preventing us from destroying ourselves. Contrary to what scientists estimate right now (see article above), we may keep using radars for 1000s of years (albeit in more advanced manner), and their intensity might increase as every ship, air-craft, car, and space-craft starts using self-driving robotic tech. Additionally our populations would grow because of longevity and cure of aging (no singularity needed there as the tech is relatively simple), yet our not-so-advanced tech requires huge resources making us easily expand within our solar system. This would again dramatically boost the number of such weak signals emanating from millions or billions of devices.

One could even imagine a cacophony of passive signals being the first one detected as they might add up to detectable range if there is a narrow band of transmission from billions of devices. I am not sure those if this "long-exposure" is used for radio telescopes; a quick search on google did not reveal such tech. Hmm a good question to ask Seth Shostak :-)

More advanced SETI hopes to broaden searches to anticipate high bandwidth laser communications which we expect to become common between devices in space and that would not attenuate but I think such a search would come out empty because the lack of dispersion of the signal, which makes it stronger, also makes it less likely that it would be pointed towards us for very long time.

So if we do find negative signal, it can also mean that singularity hits and the type of communications after it is reached are difficult to detect.

How can we distinguish the absence of signal at such a huge scale of search to imply that (a) civilizations are rare and short-lived, (b) civilizations pass through singularity quickly as Ray Kurzweil suggests, and stop using low-tech such as radar as they don't need it.

This is all thanks to the donation from the Russian billionaire: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/russian-tycoon-spending-100-million-hunt-aliens/

Astronauts to enter Dragon in orbit soon- the world just changed!

At a significantly lower development cost, and per-launch cost than any government or government-funded program ever managed, Flacon 9's flawless launch today once again proved that under the right conditions, where engineers and entrepreneurs are allowed to focus on what they are best at (thanks to Elon Musk and helpful recent NASA policy on not blocking but enabling private launch development), wonders can happen to an area made inefficient for innovation by government bureaucracy and handicapped by a fickel-minded senate and congress.

Congratulations to all of the Space-X team, look forward to the next stop (ISS), upcoming Dragon COTS launches, and tests of the human-rated Dragon, which, like SpaceX has made no secret about, can land on "any solid surface in the solar system".

See more on: https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=SpaceX

A shaded sun-powered future for Earth

The huge decrease in sun-spot activity for the next few decades will be a big savior for us. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NOAAsourcebutnotofficialsunclimate_3b.gif

and

http://www.space.com/11960-fading-sunspots-slower-solar-activity-solar-cycle.html

Nice ! I guess good timing. 70 years would be more than enough (if it lasts that long) for humans to get rid of fossil fuel burning. But I wonder if we become a Type 1 civillization and convert most of the solar power on Earth's surface to heat, would that not be identical to reducing Earth's albedo, and thus cause global warming any way?

Well, it depends on whether the new panels' albedo is lower than the average albeldo of the area on which they are installed, which will surely be the case since they will be installed in a lot in sunny, sandy places.

I can see us having to setup some really serious cooling solution for Earth then. Basically if you are consuming 40% of sun's light as a Type 0.4 civillizaion, and those panels an albedo of 0.2, i.e. only reflecting back 20% of light, then you will cause an albedo to reduce to 0.2 from present 0.3.

However, the reduction will be bigger if all the areas getting replaced are bright deserty land which is the case.

As you can see here, the people who answered this very good question just were trying to be politically correct here: http://askville.amazon.com/solar-panels-Earth-retain-heat/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=5919445

True, for our current energy consumption, we will actually end up cooling Earth by using solar power as the alternatives heat up Earth even worse (every ounce of CO2 released by burning fuel stays in the atmosphere for millenia before plants and rain can scrub enough out). But I am talking about Type 1 civillization. Of course all energy in the galaxy comes directly or indirectly from stars and our solar system is no exception; all secondary sources such as nuclear, coal, hydel, wind are derived either from out Sun's solar energy, from from the star that came before (in case of Uranium for example). So a Type 1 civillization has nowhere to go but to become a solar power behemoth, consuming all of the energy it can coming down to Earth, plus some more in Space (on Mars, Moon, orbital stations, nearby stars etc.)

So getting back to how to fix this albedo problem for a Type 1 solar power civillization, which would be us in 100 years, if Earth ends up say absorbing 10% extra heat from all it gets, you would have to shade 10% of Earth to cancel that effect out.

There are several creative early 21st century ways to cancel this effect:

- Zero Albedo Reduction law (ZAR law- OK I coined it firt here on this blog!) for solar panel install: Require the land where solar panels are installed to have 0 overall albedo change. How it is achieved is left to the installer to pick from, e.g.:

- (a) a checker pattern of highly refelective white mirrors (albeo close to 1) alternating the solar panels, in proportion of the ground's albedo.

- (b) shine electromagnetic radiation vertically up in the night in a non-visual but transparent spectrum. This could be radio waves and source for free SETI transmitters back up :-) just kidding- pointing it back at the Moon's poles where the new colony sits would be fun too (again kidding but this could actually work), just kidding. Why would you just not produce less using (a)?

- (c) albeo trading: you could simply install new shiny rooftops in areas of the world where you don't need as much power for other areas where u reduce albedo. Of course this would still cause local climate changes- heating up areas of product, cooling down areas reflected- in fact (a) and (c) together can provide a way to engineer climate.

However, by the time we become a Type 1 civillization, by early 22nd century, we would have a more advanced non-early-21st century way of doing the above :-) A checker pattern robotic self-maintaining and producing asteriod material based solar sun-screen parked in an orbit 1 million or so km away from Earth towards the sun (one of the lagrangian points I believe), and reduce solar insolation to Earth as needed.


Cheers,
Gunjan

Way to go Space-X: first wave of colonization of the solar system starts

I love the way they show Mars and then say: "This enables landing on any solid surface in the solar system.":



The future is (almost) here!

And this certainly helps complete the picture ;-)



The ability to abort launch all the way to orbit will change the way people go to orbit, and the way risk is perceived: this paves way for the first wave of colonization of the solar system. Finally!

Next Generation launch-abort system from SpaceX!

SpaceX has proposed a next-generation launch-abort system to NASA that makes the previous systems look primitive in comparison.

I have been following the COTS launch-abort system that got completed a year ago, and was always wondering why SpaceX did not just bid to use it, since that was the major thing needed for Dragon+Falcon9 to be human-rated. I always thought it was because Elon was interested in keeping their operations simple by keeping minimal dependencies to other agencies/suppliers - which he has repeatedly stated in several interviews,articles & presentations. One could also speculate that it was because Orbital, a competitor for Space-X, built it.

But turns out there was a much bigger reason, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that out the following from http://www.spacex.com/updates.php.

"SpaceX has proposed an integrated launch abort system design, which has several advantages over the tractor tower approaches used by all prior vehicles:

• Provides escape capability all the way to orbit versus a tractor system, which is so heavy it must be dumped about four minutes after liftoff.
  
• Improves crew safety, as it does not require a separation event, whereas any non-integral system (tractor or pusher), must be dumped on every mission for the astronauts to survive.
  
• Reduces cost since the escape system returns with the spacecraft.
  
• Enables superior landing capabilities since the escape engines can potentially be used for a precise land landing of Dragon under rocket power. (An emergency chute will always be retained as a backup system for maximum safety.)"
  

Another related note; recently in his post-mission NASA breifing after the Demo Flight 2 of Falcon 9, Elon Musk had mentioned that they were thinking of controlled landing for future versions of Dragon. I was wondering why they were adding this complexity and how would they actually do that without making the Dragon system heavier- now we know the answer :-) (see above). They are going to use the launch-abort rocket and fuel to do that, since the launch-abort system comes back with the mission- not only does that provide full launch-abort capability all the way to orbit, it provides a free controlled landing! Brilliant!

What a great day today- Space-X & Dragon in Orbit!

SpaceX's follow on launch of Falcon 9 was a big success, and so was the splash down. I got up in the morning on the west coast (Seattle) just in time (T-6 minutes).

Watching the solid take-off of the Falcon 9 on a bright morning in Florida was an awesome sight, and knowing what it had riding on the top (first commercial manned-capable orbital spacecraft), and having followed SpaceX closely for a few years now, even if just on live webcams, made it more beautiful and inspiring than any other launch I have seen in the past, on either high-d or low-d video, because of what was riding on it: the dawn of a new era.

I was also glad to find out today that my predictions from June 2006 (see Slide 139, on the presentation in this related blog from 2006)
are still resembling reality 4 years later, given how hard it is to predict anything in this domain :-)

From that slide written in June 2006: "2021: Spurred by X-prize, NASA prizes and heating market competition, cost of large launcher that can launch humans to Moon and Mars drop radically with large, cheap private spacecrafts and launchers from many players from US, China, Russia, India. SpaceX is a prominent one among them. US scraps NASA launcher developments for Moon and Mars."

I can see now all that happening in 2021 more easily than even when I wrote it 4 years ago. Some of that is happening now, with the COTS missions in 2011.

Btw, Space-X now has Bigelow's inflatable habitats (Sundancer) on their launch schedule for 2014 on Falcon 9. And Bigelow is building 2 even much bigger ones. When they go up, in the next 10 years, the majority of the habitable volume and most of human launch capability into space would have both moved to just these two companies; Falcon 9's 9 engines are produced assembly-line style in very large numbers and Space X's factory is built to scale that up easily with demand. And Bigelow's plan is to move these stations into orbit around the Moon after that, or even to land the modules on the Moon for an instant base.

So yes, there is a real Version 2 Space Race on; not between India/China/US, but between goverment funded platforms (India and China) vs. commercial programs (US) where the government and private orgs are just launch and habitation buyers.

Way to Go Elon Musk and SpaceX. A hearty congratulations to the whole team!

I am excited and look forward to the COTS missions, and the coming into existence of the Flacon Heavy and even bigger boosters from SpaceX. They can realize their dreams now from the revenue that SpaceX generates from the NASA and other missions over the next 5 years.

Gliese 581g: the first Earth-like habitable planet found around another star!

This is a big day. Mark the date Sep 29,2010 - for the history books!

Space.com news link is here, and here is a link to the original paper announcing this discovery.

Over the next 3 to 10 years (thanks to Kepler and improving Earth optics), we should expect to hear more details about this one, and 100s more like this one, but with lots of variations (e.g. dwarf habitable moons- which CAN be easier to detect, by looking at secondary wobbles of the primary planet, but this is the first real one with just the right temperature, mass and everything.

Now we can finally start pointing our SETI telescopes in the right direction :-) Confirmation of life-signs might take another few years, using spectrometer and interferometer combinations, but the fact that Gliese 581g (look forward to a more personal, official name soon for this first habitable planet :-)), is smack in the middle of Gliese 581's habitable zone is awesome- no debates about habitability on this one, only the question about how much water is going to be there. That would determine whether it's a water-world with higher phase ice at the bottom of its oceans that completely block continental minerals from mixing, so that it turns out to be a water desert (also see http://www.egy.org/files/cloutier.pdf), and where water dominates so much that life occurs in islands and pockets of minerals left over by asteorid impacts an dusts only), or whether it's an Earthly desert (where life has adapted to dewdrops and oases). In either case it would be awesome, and leave a lot of possibilities for a complex biosphere, and we should soon know which of the two scenarios is the real one, when we get measurements of this planet's atmosphere content (how much water vapor). If it has less water, that is probably better for this planet, as too much water can be a very big problem for advanced life to evolve in the 7 to 11 billion years current age for this planet. However, note that since the parent Sun can live virtually forever (this star is 50 times dimmer-than-our-sun red dwarf even though it has 30% of Sun's mass, which gives it a very long life), even if there is too much water, eventually enough water-loss because of the solar wind would cause Gliese 581g to have just the right amount of water eventually to have continents protruding out. I am really hoping it has some water though :-) and conditions point to that being the case , when combined with the fact that it is much heavier than Earth, and is smack in the middle of the habitable zone.

Regarding verification of how much water it has, and the atmospheric composition (which would hugely increase our confidence in imagining specific forms of life there), I predict that the discovery of this planet is going to motivate lot of smart astronomer-engineers to come up with ways to measure the atmosphere ASAP, even if TPF-I does not launch for another decade or two. I also believe that these discoveries, as they mount over the next 2-5 years, will force the urgency in funding for such a telescope, just like the Mars exploration program got a huge boost from the discovery of recent volcanism, rivers, oceans on Mars, and even more- the recent discovery of liquid water, water-runoffs, and methane on Mars.

Obama needs to define concretely the next destination for NASA's manned missions

More water confirmed by radar data coming from NASA's instrument on Chandrayan 1. See this link.

The important note in that article: “According to NASA, the ice would have to be relatively pure ice and at least several feet thick to give this signature.”

This would be cool as it makes the water usable by manned missions, unlike the last discovery where it was in minute amounts. Not sure the quotation above is true or just exaggerated by the Wired reporter.

Two important uses of setting up a base on the moon are (1) testing hardware for Mars, especially rovers and dust protection suits etc. (2) setting up a large array of radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon which is shielded from Earth transmissions. Because of moon’s low gravity that telescope can be periodically serviced by manned missions (just like the way Hubble has been serviced) that could be based on the polar region where there is water.

I hope that Obama removes the fog soon and declares that the Moon is going to be the testing location. Right now there is no destination for NASA’s manned space program. I don’t like the intermediate asteroid mission that Planetary Society is lobbying for as that does not test any hardware needed for Mars, not to mention being an even less interesting destination than the Moon.

Buzz Aldrin is suggesting Phobos as the intermediate mission instead of the Moon. I think Phobos would definitely serve as a good test for the orbital hardware for Mars and it should be a destination along with the Moon, which can be a good testing place for the surface Martian hardware. But they HAVE to declare Mars as the concrete goal instead of beating around the bush. Otherwise nothing will happen and the “private enterprise” such as Space-X will be left with low-earth-orbit missions for another few years until the next president. I think this last scenario is most likely and the way we will break out of it will be when Space-X and Bigelow Aerospace use low-earth orbit revenue and experience to strike out to the Moon, 10 years from now. Together they have more than all the necessary technology (or in the process of building so) to get there.

I am predicting a race between Space-X+Bigelow group (partially funded by a sub-section of NASA after their next two efforts to build hardware directly fail, and they completely give up building or owning flight hardware by 2017) vs. ISRO vs. Chinese Space agency to the Moon around 2020.

Gunjan

The best evidence so far for recent (and future) water flows on Mars

These gullies have been involved in an ongoing debate over the past few years. Now with higher resolution images from MRO, it is becoming almost certain that some of these were formed by recent liquid water:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090302-mm-mars-gullies.html

And that such water on Mars is cyclic in nature- and will return again in the (geologically speaking) near future.

A connected picture is emerging where Mars's huge axis tilt variation causes liquid water regions (and habitable zones) to form on Mars every few 100k years- kind of the opposite of ice-ages on Earth; we get ice-ages every few 10k years, whereas Mars gets water-ages every few 100k years!

Phoenix results are also showing similar evidence of more watery past for some of the stuff found in the north-polar region. Along with the recently cofirmed localized yearly release of Methane on Mars, this bodes well for finding some biological hotspots in the next few years.

Space X's Falcon 1 reaches orbit!

This will be remembered as the dawn of the era of fast, cheap and reliable commmercial space launch availability:

http://www.spacex.com/F1-004.php

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iF-6npNsKa0n_7aLm8tJvuHWt4JgD93G1LC00

Awesome job Space-X. Congrats! There are many more great moments to come. Falcon 9, COTS demo, first mission to the Space Station, first manned mission to the Space Station, and then ofcourse missions to Mars. The odds of those happening have suddenly increased a lot today.

Comment: Has Space-X already shown that they can provide a reliable, fast availability and low-cost orbital launch system?

With this successful launch, they have already proven the cost effectiveness and speed to a great extent and silenced the naysayers- in a couple of 100 million dollars, 500 people (only now they have hit a strengthof 500) and 6 years, they have developed and built two rockets from scratch (Falcon 9 is being manufactured right now), designed Dragon, and launched Falcon-1 4 times. Also note the fast turnaround time forFalcon-1 launches. For the same scale of development and testing effort, NASA would have taken 10 billion dollars or more and 10s ofthousands of employees. Just to make minor modifications to the existing tanks and engines to transform them into Ares 1 and 2 has already cost NASA a few billion dollars, and is expected to take almosta decade. All the other supposedly private companies in orbitalspace services such Sea Launch, Mir Corp, SpaceAdventures, Orbital Sciences, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Arianne, have been doled out billions of dollarsand/or massive man-power and logistics suppor from the government to develop what they did, or have reused previously existing government-funded infrastructureto provide their "new" service.

Only two other companies come close to Space-X in the area of space services: Bigelow Aerospace and Space Dev- and they both are NOT working on orbital launch capabilties (as of now). They both do complement Space-X's launch capabilties - and hopefully will one day provide cheap space stations and a large group of paying astronauts (respectively) to Space-X.

The Clarke in the Multiverse

I read Childhood's End the first time when I was maybe 12. Another great novel of his was A Fall of Moon Dust- it was so full of suspense that I finished it in one sitting :-)

The strange thing is that I was watching Space Odyssey 2001 on Comcast in high-def just the day Sir Arthur C. Clarke died, and was mentioning to my wife how glad I was that he was still around.

Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan made me into what I am today. Clarke was the last living guru from my childhood. The three inspired me to work hard in science and maths and to get a PhD in Machine Learning (AI). Motivated by Isaac Asmiov's positronic brain, many scientists have been working on ideas that can bring AI brain-power closer to human-level intelligence, or even surpass it. Even if I personally don't succeed in something that big (though I am surely inspired enough to try), I believe one or more of the thousands of others inspired by the same great people will soon succeed in bringing about a new millenia-level shift for humanity; which breakthrough will be the first to affect us all is unknown, but that's what makes it exciting to live today - a Space Elevator, SETI discovering an alien signal from a nearby star, human-level AI, warp drive, unlimited human hibernation, ability to repair frost damaged cells, a cure for human aging, expansion of humanity on to Mars, terraforming of Mars, discovery of complex life-forms in the Europan ocean - the list is pretty long...

Here is another nice tribute article on Space.com for Clarke.

Another interesting idea: long live Arthur C. Clarke in our Multiverse; in some other Universe of our Multiverse, where longevity was discovered earlier than in ours (thanks again to one of his inspired pupils), he is still alive and kicking. Perhaps one day, from that Universe, he will figure out a way (with help from some other advances in physics and technology) to send a copy of himself back into ours. If it does not sound familiar, read Space Odyssey 3001 :-)

All our achievements can dissipate, the Indus Valley way

The Indus Valley Civilization is a classical example of an extremely advanced urban meritocracy that had all the signs of leapfrogging into the future, but which instead just dissipated over time as the climate changed.

It shows that the future is not guaranteed, no matter how promising everything looks at any moment in time.

Unless we use the current opportunity to expand beyond Earth soon, we might meet the same fate, and our descendants a few 1000 years later might wonder why we never moved on to the stars. Or worse, they may forget about us. Or there may not be any descendants, and the people examining our ruins might be aliens from a nearby system.

How unimportant can lost greatness become? Interestingly, most people outside India don't seem to have read about the Indus Valley Civilization in their school books, despite it being one of the pinnacles of the ancient era. There may yet come a day when no one will learn about the Apollo missions or the Hubble Space Telescope- if we give up our current chance to reach the stars, and get bogged down in inconsequential bickering.

Imagine where we would be if the Indus Valley Civilization had gone into the industrial age in 3000 BC, over 2000 years before the classical Greek civilization got its chance, 3000 years before the Romans got their chance, and 5000 years before the Europeans finally got their oppurtunity and used it.

There are other examples of lost "almost there" civilizations in human history, but Indus Valley was the first that came so close to the threshold and then dissipated.

Our current "Space Age" is the first threshold towards reaching the stars. Are we going to be one of the many in our galaxy that get this oppurtunity but never quite make it? Don't be so sure of the answer; but it is up to you, me, and all of us to make sure that it does happen!

Mars: The Foundation for an Interplanetary Civilization

I made a presentation recently to the local Austin Mensa chapter on behalf of the Austin Mars Society. Here is an html version of that presentation online. I suggest going through the whole presentation, in case you are interested to know more about where the future of space exploration is headed. However, do not miss the really nice part about the future of human society beyond Earth that starts from slide 124.

It took me a lot of time to bring this together- I have yet to find a presentation on the web that covers so many issues in combination; it is important that any prediction about the future incorporates the network of events that influence each other, and hence the future. Things do not happen in isolation. If I were to ignore all the non-NASA related changes happening in our World- political, economic and cultural, I would come up with a depressing, quixotic and grossly incorrect estimate of the future of Mars and Space exploration- something that would resemble what many of the traditional American media and this ex-NASA guy have done. Instead, I have tried to imagine what would happen because of these interacting World-changing shifts happening, especially: (1) massive growth in economies of India, China and a resurgent Russia, (2) major and ongoing advances in biotech, robotics, AI, electronics, material science (3) increased private entrepreneurship in space exploration; both manned and unmanned, (4) a revolution in SETI, telescopes and planet discovery that is only going to get bigger because of (2) and, (5) major findings on Mars making it more attractive than we could have ever imagined.

Hope you enjoy the ride! Any feedback is welcome. Click here to start the presentation.

Dumb & Dumber?

Being an engineer, a researcher and a technologist, I am often surrounded by a multitude of people with the same type of background wherever I go. Some individuals from this group of sucessful people from my age-group (20s and 30s), most of whom have never had to struggle in their life (the way a substantial fraction of humanity is still struggling) like to reason that a large number of people who appear lower-class and "not-so-smart" (such as many of the low-education migrant workers in USA, or the poor and illiterate in India) are somehow denstined to grow up poor and disadvantaged. And I feel a larger fraction of them who don't actually talk about it, probably feel that way privately. I have come across this attitude in multiple places and countries I have worked at; some even hint that the plight of these poor workers or their lack of success might even have something to do with their genetics. I find this attitude almost on the verge of being facism or xenophobia; and such a patronizing attitude comes from people who have never had to struggle in their life- they pretty much got every oppurtunity they could get thanks to their parents/upbringing- all they had to do was play the game to success. These people also point out that for this reason humanity is doomed; its being overtaken by poorer and less smart people who leave more descendants behind.

Whenever I hear such stuff, it makes me feel incensed, and instead of going through a discussion with every such person I come across, I thought this blog might help express what I feel, and perhaps change the mindset of some; if I do succeed in doing so, perhaps that would help make our society a bit more caring, and a bit more united. After all- how can humanity graduate from its womb and expand beyond Earth, if we harbor such selfish and "tribal" viewpoints?

There is a vast amount of scientific, social and historical literature out there that would show that such a class phobia is completely unjustified, but I would try to summarize the point here in a few lines. The question is, is it a less rich (politically correct way of saying it) or a dumber environment which causes people to grow up having a lower standardized IQ and a lower skill job? Perhaps a small amount of brain-speed variation is there on taking an exam that someone is born with, and perhaps there are a few savants and prodigies who are outside the distribution of the general population, but in general, we know now that the environmental factor dominates and not genetics; most of the humans who survived the evolutionary squeeze and near-extinction (when at one time just a few thousand homo sampiens were left behind), were extremely smart, and all of the human beings in the World today are pretty much copies of this small group of super-smart ancestors.

Two things to point out: (1) the social factors for increased intelligence are still at work, and (2) these poor workers are genetically as smart as any of us. Now there is more evidence from orangutans supporting this hypothesis. This should allay any xenophobia less dumb people might have against more dumb people leaving more descendants behind, and at some basic level we are all much more like each other than it may appear superficially; it also points to the amazing plasticity of the human brain. The huge gaps in individuals today are mostly an artifiact of the huge gaps their respective societies historically contained, and which might take another few generations to slowly go away.

This also means that the days of antisocial relics such as N. Korea, Burma and others are numbered; they will either evolve into more socially tolerant (and consequently more intelligent) societies, or will slowly decline into oblivion. Being an optimist, I believe in the former; the most decadent societies of today are still progressive enough, and have enough external World-view filtering in (compared to say 12th century Europe) that their own people will force the countries out of the social (and consequently an intellectual and technological) stagnation they are currently in. This theory also explains why grafting open societies (such as the war in Iraq right now) can at best act as a catalyst (and at worst a failure)- most of the work of building a rich and open society out of a decadent one has to be done by the local people gradually, and would require at least one generation to become self-feeding and stable, even with massive external support (as a younger, smarter and more socially rich generation grows up and takes the reins of the society from their decadent ancestors).

Small Islands in a Vast Ocean: Moon or Mars?

(I wrote this story originally on May 2, 2004)

Imagine you are an alien species that has evolved on a small green island somewhere on a very large planet, whose surface is mostly water with a sprinkle of small islands, most of which are either frozen or blazingly hot, or for some other reason, inhospitable. With recent advances in technology, your species is beginning to discover other islands nearby, and a realization is starting to dawn among the intellectuals in your society that your island is perhaps too good to be true - lush forests with eternal streams of fresh water surround fertile farms that produce plentiful and a wide variety of crops every year. Over the last few centuries, your species has mastered enough technology, and with technological and social advancement, the population of your Island called Earland, has now stabilized to a densely populated but an efficient and culturally enriched civillization. Most individuals of your species are preoccupied with living on this beautiful island, and they do not understand why anyone would look for more space to live.

In spite of these gains, some of your species, including you, are extremely curious, just like your nomadic ancestors who eventually expanded and settled the whole Earland island. You want to find out what other kinds of islands are out there, and if there is anyone like you out there, also wondering about you. You are also worried about the future. Your scientists have found archeological evidence that many other species existed on your island long before your species came along, that have long since vanished without a trace. Evidence has also been found for others that went extinct because of disease, and that at certain prehistorical times, large Tsunamis and volcanic events destroyed virtually all complex life on your island. You believe that all the eggs are in one basket. For your species to survive, a second island is needed as a home.

This is the first time your group is trying to set up a permanent base on another island to save your species from the virtually guaranteed long-term extinction. Not surprisingly, the general lack of awareness among most members of your democratic society has resulted in only small amounts of public resource being allocated for this task, which is a lot less than the amount your society spends on football games. Assuming no major technologicalbreakthrough, for the next 20 years there is only going to be enough money and resource to perhaps explore and settle just one new island. Maybe after 20 years, if you can prove to your society that all the eggs do not have to be in one basket, and that there is really an alternative, they will allocate you more resources for further exploration. If you fail, perhaps the current trickle of funds will also dry up, and perhaps it would be too late for the next Tsunami, the next eruption of the dormant volcano on your island, or the next big plague. With the increasing integration in the recent years of people from various parts of your island, the risk of a disease wiping everyone out has becoming more likely.

Your recently developed telescopes have revealed a nearby island called Marland which is barely habitable, but which can be easily improved within a few decades to become lush and green like your island, and support a large population - it has large amounts of fresh water and land that could be made arable, and is only a bit colder than Earland. In fact there is some evidence of existing and past greenery on it. Discovering these organisms would reveal answers to your own origins. Did you come to Earland from another island, or did you evolve independently.

The other options are extremely hot, cold, or very far away islands that could be habitable - no one even knows for sure that another fertile island exists. It might be 50 to 200 years before your technology will allow visiting one of these farther, potentially habitable islands, and without technology to visit the nearby Marland, such technology will never develop. You will have to develop ships that can travel 10,000 times or more faster than current ships, and then travel to these distant dreamlands over many years. And once you reach there, for all you know it might be already occupied by other people, who may not welcome the colonization effort. You are also scared that they might be having the same ideas. For now, your species is trying to build stronger telescopes to find if there are any other fertile islands at all.

There is also a nearby extremely barren land, called the Moonland, where you can only live inside caves, and it has perhaps a tiny amount of fresh water frozen deep inside one cave. There is no life on this island, and can never be. You enjoy looking at the strange desolate landscape of Moonland from your island; the contrast with the lush greenery around you is bewildering and a bit disorienting. Someone has to be crazy to want to settle down on the Moonland, although there are a few astronomers who would love to be under the clear sky of this dry island. The promising island of Marland is reachable in 6 months with your boats. Now the dumb question is- where should your species go first?

1. Distant frozen islands. Not reachable for another 50 to 200 years.
   
2. Marland: a large island that could be easily made habitable, and that can support a large population. 6 months trip.
   
3. Moonland: the barren nearby island that is 2 days trip but has nothing on it. You have explored it before and found nothing too interesting on it, besides a base for astronomy.
   
4. Camp in the open sea nearby.
   

The answer is trivially obvious to you, but unfortunately there is politics involved, and people are still arguing about which island to visit first. Many are not even aware of the differences between the islands' habitability and are clamoring for setting a big camping site on the nearby barren island first, and then trying to grow food in caves by using a complex set of mirrors to get sunlight in. And even more amazingly, there are people who have been camping a few 100 feet out in the Sea for months and years, in open, unprotected boats. It takes them a few minutes to get to this 100-feet-off-the-shore camp, and these campers keep coming ashore for food and your society keeps sending them everything they need, although support has recently been declining after a few fatal accidents in which some people drowned trying to make this back-and-forth trip for more food/relief. This has been going on for over 30 years now, and it has been 35 years since your people last camped on the barren Moonland.

The campers are being funded by many groups in your island, and they claim their camping in the open, nearby water is justified because they are trying to figure out the effects of spending many years in the ocean on members of your species - especially the effect of open sun, wind, and saline water. You try to tell them that we could design enclosed vessels to go to Marland, so they don't have to waste time figuring out the long-term effect of open weather on travellers, but all goes down a deaf ear. Obviously you cannot deprive them of the only argument they have for their existence; a large number of people are employed by your government to keep these camping trips going, and these people are scared of losing their jobs. It is a political hot-button issue, but the utter wastefulness of the whole situation is very evident to exploration-minded people like you. What should you do (besides writing and reading this blog)?

Connection with reality:

I guess at this point, to anybody who is interested in space exploration, it must be clear that this story was a metaphor to demonstrate all sorts of issues with (1) exploration focussed either on low-Earth-orbit, or (2) on the Moon, or (3) no exploration and colonization at all. The large open ocean is our solar system, camping in space is bringing all your consumables along and throwing the unprocessed trash out. The open-camping is worse and corresponds to a space-station with no gravity- it is somewhat trivial to create artificial gravity by spinning a habitat on a long tether with a counterweight on the other end. There are ways to get around radiation problem similarly with just water and fuel surrounding you! The main motivation people give for the space-station is: "We are trying to figure out the long-term effects of zero-gravity and radiation exposure on human beings and how to mitigate it before we can go to Mars!"

Exploration of other places for the sake of exploration is good and I support that, but until we learn to live as a separate colony on the most hospitable planet outside Earth i.e. Mars, it would be pointless to try to develop a base on all the more inhospitable places using more exotic technology. It is equally pointless to camp in space where there are no resources, or to try to design near-100% recyclable systems- if you are on the surface of a planet, the system does not have to be closed, as you can draw in resources (air, water, soil), use it to generate useful materials, and then dump the treated waste out- similar to the process used by responsible but densely populated countries such as Belgium, Germany or Japan (a popular misconception is that US is good at this just because it is a developed country. Ask yourself if you live in USA- how do you dispose off your AA batteries and plastic wastes?).

There are very few locations in our solar system which will support more than just a camping mission in the foreseeable future. One such planet is Mars. It has all the raw resources that Earth has in a readily usable form- water, minerals, soil, air and last but not the least, protection against cosmic rays and solar wind in large areas of the planet (see my earlier blog on this issue). It is the stepping stone to exploring and colonizing the rest of the Universe. That is what all the fuss is about!

The Planetary Society represents the largest public space advocacy group, and it has made an official policy over the last few years that the manned exploration of Mars should be THE next goal for us. Unfortunately, soon after the big Moon-Mars initiative was announced by President Bush in 2004 (which prompted the original version of this story), the implementation got bogged down in petty politics and it has now become mainly a Moon initiative, with a use-and-throw program that provides the capability to camp on the moon for a few days by 2018, with hardware that will be hardly of any use beyond that. Things are already starting to break down as the political support for even the Moon program has started to waver, and the funding is once again not being given to the point needed- NASA is slowly shrinking the Moon program by throwing out critical pieces that would have made the program usable for Mars missions. All this is happening even though the Moon manned program is supposed to be a rehearsal for the eventual colonization of Mars. Tens of billions of dollars are still being wasted on keeping the camping in the low-earth orbit going, in spite of the fact that if this money was diverted on developing systems for a robust and permanent settlement of Mars, we would get the low-earth camping (by 2010) and the Moon-base (by 2012) for almost free, and we would reach Mars by 2016 rather than in 2036 (A date 30 years in the future means that for all you know, it will not happen).

Both Robots and Humans needed on Mars

Originally written on May 10, 2004
Updated: Feb 8, 2006

A couple of points before we delve into the details -

• Point 1: It's not about whether Robots or Humans should explore Mars - Robots and humans will have to work together on Mars to have a productive mission, doing what each one of them are best at doing. Humans with their immense creativity and ability to improvise on-the-spot when things fail. Robots, in their ability to do boring stuff accurately again and again without getting bored or making mistakes, or forgetting (assuming your robot software does not have too many bugs !).
  
• Point 2: Often many people don't realize that you cannot do tele-robotics (remote controlled robots) on Mars from Earth. But you CAN do tele-robotics with robots on Mars, if the human operator is also on Mars. Light takes anywhere between a few minutes to half-an-hour for one interactive command from Earth to Mars! This is the reason the robots Spirit and Opportunity sitting on Mars are so slow - their decision makers and controllers are sitting on Earth. And it takes days for the Humans to plan a few seconds of work on Mars, since it cannot be interactive, as opposed to operating a crane or a dump-truck on Earth. Any amount of AI cannot remove the human decision from the loop besides reducing it, unless the robot is as smart as humans. Geologists and biologists need to hold rocks and fossils in their hand to be sure.
  
• Point 3: Given 1 and 2, the cost of per unit exploration by robots is significantly more expensive than humans, because of their (lack of) speed, crudeness in mechanical dexterity, and intelligence smaller than a cockroach. The fact that you have team of 100s of people (400 to be precise for the current mission) support 2 tiny robots on Mars just tells you that it will be hard to scale the exploration up. Any improvement in the speed/efficiency/cost of robots also makes the human missions cheaper by the same amount, since more automation will allow people on Mars to spend more time on exploration than maintaining the robots and machinery. The ratio of the cost of the two mission converges not diverges - the human mission costs converge to the robotic mission costs as robots become infinitely as advanced as humans - in such a situation you could let the robots do everything on Earth - design the spaceships, build them and launch them - no PhDs, scientists, engineers or human workers needed! In fact no humans needed! And once you train a single robot to do rocket science, you can make a million copies of it. The additional cost soon approaches zero. Sending a few humans along is practically free, since the food and material consumed by them is being produced by other robots. Contrary to this super-robotic scenario NASA currently spends most of its money paying salary to people to develop the hardware and software (and so does all the other companies in the world)

Here is an email I wrote in response to a well-known "anti-manned-space-exploration" personality. One cool thing about having humans on Mars is that you don't need to have an army of 400 engineers operating one robot on Mars remotely. According to the latest plans, having humans on Mars, 21st century automation (unlike 60s and 70s technology in the Apollo and Space Shuttle), and the minutes of communication lag will lead to a model of "Mission Support" not a "Mission Control" thus requiring a relatively small number of engineers on Earth.

This article also contains some rough cost comparisons I did for humans vs. robots.

Current Human exploration cost: 3,25 million dollars per man-day of exploration. Current Robot exploration cost A (200 times slower than humans): 400 million dollars per man-day !!

Current Robot exploration cost B (10,000 times slower than humans): 20 billion dollars per man-day = 20 billion for one days work ! Wow, even Bill Gates will go bankrupt paying someone like that for 3 days! Note: if Spirit and Oppurtunity survive 4 years with declining productivity these numbers will only change by a factor of 3 or so, still making them super-expensive compared to humans.

Finally, any manned exploration will extensively use robotics and automation to explore Mars enough to answer the big questions. Without humans, you get only "teaser" exploration and high costs per unit work. Humans and robots working together on Mars is the key - as it lowers the cost while still giving us the flexibility and speed of the human brain. Robots can also help prepare a site for human missions without having the humans worry about the preparation. Read Mars Direct and NASA's reference plan (derived from Mars Direct) for more info on how this will work.

100 billion Earthly Super Europas?

Imagine a planet submerged in a permanent night for a human visitor which is you - but a planet far from being dark with glowing streams of lava flowing in many places as you fly over it's surface, violent lightning storms in the sky surrounding each of these massive volcanoes, and the non-stop, cold (but liquid water) rain falling back to the surface all the time. Huge oceans 10s of times deeper than on Earth, and massive watery environments teeming with complex life and giant predators. As you soar higher in the complex, seething atmosphere, you encounter heavy snowfall of a freezing atmosphere falling back to the ground below, only to evaporate back up from the hot surface. And up in the sky on one side of this strange, restless, heaving World, you see something very strange - a third of the sky with no stars, forming a silhouette of a large, dark orb, with flashes of distant lightening that are not coming from this World, but from the mother gas giant. But this World is not so dark for the strange large-eyed beings who live on the surface of this planet - and they see a huge glowing orb in the sky - bathing them in a warm light - for this dark orb, the mother "Sun" still glows in the infra-red light. With a diameter of 16000 km to go around, and a density only 2/3rd of Earth, this planet is heftier than Earth, orbiting a gas-giant 6 times the mass of Jupiter. This world is 8 billion years old, and one of it's intelligent species has been watching us in our own backyard, for over 300 million years since they developed the ability to do so. Their system has been temporarily locked with our passing Sun and they have seen the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. They started receiving the television signals 60 years ago, but from our transmissions and their orbiting super-telescopes, they know we are not looking at them yet. Welcome to this strange but surprisingly earth-like world that is an Earthly Super Europa. We do not see it because we have not tried to look for their transmissions in this dark direction, only 0.6 light-years from our Sun! They have left their dark, water-world and have even spread across the other large "moons" of their system. They have had robotic observatories near Earth for a long time now, and have even sent probes and members of their species into our oceans - environments very comfortable for them.

Here is a description of a drake-like equation
to estimate their numbers in our galaxy. Now let us look at these Mars or bigger planets around dark, mostly Super Gas Giants (since some might form around smaller Saturn sized systems, especially in older, inner regions of the galaxy where the ratio of heavy elements is much larger) that have heavy warm liquid oceans, large amount of hydrothermal tidal heating, and if we believe J. Marvin Herndon, a huge nuclear fission core that has kept the tectonic plates and a strong magnetic field going for billions of years into the present. These planets would be very watery and will have a thin coating of ice on their oceans- and can be considered to be mega versions of Europa, and I theorize on the basis of the potentially large number of brown dwarfs and Super Gas Giants that might be out there, might outnumber terrestrial planets bathed by warm solar radiation. The forms of life that might evolve in such a harsh, changing but also well-protected environment is unimaginable- especially since many such systems would be much older than our Sun. The strong magnetic field of these Super Earth Europas would also protect them from any radiation belt of the mother gas giant (which would actually be quite weak and even absent because these planets are far from any major star). It is important to note that once our Sun dies, Europa and yet undiscovered worlds around gas-giants in or beyond Kuiper belt might continue to remain warm and hospitable just below the surface because of a strong tidal effect supported by their large parent and the accompanying siblings.

Open waters in the dark sky?

Some with tidal effects strong enough might even have localized liquid water surface environments: imagine a moon close to the mass of Earth around a solitary gas giant, say 10 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting it at the same distance as Io is from Jupiter. A large amount of intense radiation from the mother gas giant from the first few million years of their existence can blast off much of the highly volatile gases and material give such a planet a density substantially higher than that of Io or Europa leaving behind a much more Earth like system, with continents, a huge warm ocean, open waters in many regions, and lots of lightening, snow-storms and rain driven by hundreds of active volcanoes distributed on the surface, and the parent somewhat warm gas-giant covering a large part of the sky on one side of the planet. The global ocean would be much larger than that of Earth kept liquid because of tidal heating and a huge amount of tectonic activity, and strong sources of both radiative and heat energy near hundreds of ever erupting volcanoes. A thick atmosphere- perhaps mostly of nitrogen, methane and other gases spewed by the volcanoes. Such large volcanoes would even create small continents. Such a dynamic habitable system full of fresh nutrients would be very suitable for evolution of complex, fast-adapting and perhaps even intelligent life- compared to the much slower changing environment in the oceans of Earth- one argument for why land animals on Earth got smarter faster. On Earth we know of at least one hydrothermal species that uses the volcanic radiation for photosynthesis! It would be such a surreal environment; on many such worlds where the right combination of mass, density and parent gas giant creates an atmospheric pressure not too high; in some warmer volcanic regions a human could scuba dive naked or walk in shirt sleeves on a planet with no Sun! A planet far from being dark with glowing streams of lava dominating the scenery and lighting in many places, massive lightning storms visible both from the atmosphere of the dark gas giant and the local storms brewed by the volcanoes. If such a world does exist in large numbers, the possibilities are just mind-boggling, especially since such worlds can remain habitable for a long time. Even if 1 percent of Super-Europas are so hot, that would count to potentially tens of millions to a billion Worlds. Since the numbers are so unknown, and these worlds can exist in our backyard, it becomes imperative as we develop better infrared and imaging capabilities to try to find such large, dark gas giants in our neighborhood. Another important point is that SETI researchers should perhaps not be surprised if they cannot find a visible source for an apparently alien signal. With Jupiter still radiating (40% more?) a lot more energy than it receives from Sun, an object the size of Jupiter or bigger would still be relatively visible in the infrared, especially if it happens to be within a light-year from Earth. Once we detect such very nearby potential habitats, they should be potential SETI search targets and the first "stars" that robotic probes might be able to reach. But more than that, this idea highlights one important range of habitable worlds that might be as big if not bigger than habitable worlds around visible stars.

Big Mars News: Strong Natural Magenetic Sheilds against Solar Wind found on Mars

A major discovery on Mars has suddenly made perhaps the issue of radiation shielding for human explorers on Mars (at least in some major regions of Mars) a non issue, or at least very trivial. Before we discuss the significance of this discovery, let us first review the types of radiation threats faced by any future human Martian explorer:

Types of Radiation Threats

There are three major types of radiation threat faced by any human space traveler:

• Cosmic rays: very high energy particles that bombard us from all directions, this type of radiation is stopped partially by Earth's atmosphere.
  
• Solar Wind: charged, high speed particles are mostly stopped by Earths magnetic field that acts as a natural shield, except when periodically Earth's magnetic field disappears when it flips it's poles, potentially caused by a huge nuclear reactor at it's core (see this Discover issue). For someone standing on the Moon, or any other planet without a magnetic field, when the Sun is not shining on you, there is no Solar Wind hitting you. This type of radiation can deliver lethal doses (large enough doses to severely damage DNA leading to death buy radiation burn or cancer within a few years) to an unprotected astronaut in a very short period of time.
  
  
• Ultraviolet light: Earth's high-altitude atmospheric Ozone provides us some protection against UV; humans still have to watch out for the danger- contrary to a popular misconception, even a substantially dark-skinned person can get a bad sun-burn on a typical sunny day on the beach. Without the Ozone this problem would be much worse. The good news is that the UV light reaching Mars's upper atmosphere is already half of Earth, and there is some Ozone on Mars. Due to the very low density of the atmosphere, currently it is impossible for people to walk on Mars without a spacesuit, so getting a burn because of lying naked on a Martian beach is impossible - you will die because of lack of pressure and oxygen before that. With minor UV shield on their spacesuit face-plates, this type of radiation is really not an issue on Mars. Even greenhouses can be designed to have UV shielded plastics.
  

Vast naturally magnetic shielded regions found on Mars

It was known before Mars Global Surveyor reached Mars, that Mars lacked a strong magnetic field, and people kept gloating about how the solar wind creates a "sterile super-toxic environment" on the surface of Mars making any surface life impossible, and why unless we solve this issue, this was at least one major unsolved problem for long-term manned missions on the surface of Mars.
Here is an interesting discussion from three years ago posted on Austin Mars Society's mailing list.

Since 1997 Global surveyor has found vast regions of strong magnetic fields on Mars.

The most IMPORTANT piece of detail in this news is that large swath's of Mars have magnetic field with strength comparable to Earth's, thus are likely to provide strong natural protection against Solar Wind to astronauts in these regions of Mars. In fact the fields are so powerful that they actually cause auroras on Mars just like on Earth. This is amazingly good news for mission planners currently planning manned missions to Mars - a solution to a major issue that even we could not have imagined, at least for some regions of Mars :-)

Titan vs. other Biggies of Jupiter

In our solar system (often called Solar System) Titan is one of the biggest moons, and the only one with a significant atmosphere, and has the largest atmospheric column of ANY terrestrial World. Click here to look at a cool visual comparison with Earth. You can see that thick parts of Titan's atmosphere rise hundreds of kilometers above it's surface.

Here is a nice set of images comparing the relative sizes of some of the other big Moons in our Solar System (note that Venus is almost exactly the size of Earth):