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ALMOST THERE: I went to see the new IMAX space film, “Space Station 3-D” last week.
Wow. Now I understand why the space tourists are willing to shell out $20M to spend a week there — I suspect many viewers will have a similar reaction, which will only generate more interest in space tourism. NASA (despite itself, one imagines) could hardly have come up with a better sales pitch for the budding industry.
I had some bad moments with the 3-D (a couple of eye-crossing jump cuts, ouch, hard on the eyes), but overall the depth element is a useful addition to the film. For example, the shot from “above” looking down on the ISS and the Earth looked much more realistic than any equivalent photograph, conveying some of the sensation of scale that astronauts often try to describe in their accounts of the “space travel experience” — you know about how big the station is, but with the 3-D element, you can somewhat feel how fast everything is moving and how big the planet is.
As far as subject material, it is inclined towards the general/layman audience (as one would expect), but if you know what to look for it’s chock full of interesting technical detail. For instance, in the scenes where Destiny and Raphaello are extracted from the Shuttle’s cargo bay, and where racks are transferred through Unity and into Destiny, you can see a lot of the hardware, mounting fixtures, grapple fixtures, etc. — even the interior of the RMS end effector — to a level of detail that you normally do not see even in official reference materials.
One of the more entertaining parts of the film is the launch of the Proton rocket carrying Zvezda, which was filmed by an IMAX camera located on the launch platform, perhaps ten yards from the rocket itself. This is perhaps the best IMAXed launch I have seen, even if it isn’t as loud or as fiery as the Shuttle launch in, say, Destiny in Space. Another very entertaining (and shocking) part of the film is the sendoff for the Expedition One crew, in which hundreds of workers and well-wishers thronged around the launch pad when the crew arrived for launch — while the Soyuz rocket was fully fueled and ready for launch, with ice on the loaded LOx tanks not ten feet away. Compare this with procedures for the Shuttle, where you have perhaps two dozen people within three miles of the launch pad while the vehicle is tanking and the crew is being strapped in. Seeing this, one can understand how something like the Nedelin Catastrophe might have occurred.
The film is well worth seeing.
PLAYING IN SPACE: Eric Hoffer’s book The Ordeal of Change contains an interesting essay entitled “The Playful Mood”, in which the author explains that much of the innovation which has gotten our species to where it is very likely had its origin in play, rather than the directed application of accumulated knowledge to solve immediate and pressing problems.
The urgent search for the vitally necessary is likely to stop once we have found something that is more or less adequate, but the search for the superfluous has no end. Hence the fact that man’s most unflagging and spectacular efforts were made not in search of necessities but of superfluities. It is worth remembering that the discovery of America was a by-product of the search for ginger, cloves, pepper, and cinnamon. The utilitarian device, even when it is an essential ingredient of our daily life, is most likely to have its ancestry in the nonutilitarian.
It’s hardly a startling argument — after all, a trip through the timekeeping exhibit at the American History Museum in D.C. (if that exhibit is still there) reveals numerous examples of the clockwork “automata” to which Hoffer refers in the essay, elaborate mechanical toys which adorned the tables of the aristocracy before anyone had worked out the more practical application of the relevant technology to things like, well, clocks, for example. Such things clearly illustrate to even the cursory observer the point that the new technology was used for frivolous (“fun”) purposes before it found its world-changing “practical” applications. With regards to space, any space enthusiast can tell you about the uses to which solid rocket motors were first put, adding further evidence in support of the argument.
What is particularly interesting here is the application of this idea to an activity in the news: space tourism. Despite justifications for the flights of Glenn, Tito, and (currently) Shuttleworth on the grounds of the scientific experiments they will be performing (or subjected to) while in space, every one of us knows that what it’s really about is fun. It may be very expensive and somewhat dangerous, but the fact remains that the individuals involved are using the highest expression of modern technology more for “superfluous” pleasure than for any of the purported “utilitarian” benefits.
If this is so, the real utilitarian benefits may come in the form of unexpected discoveries and side-effects and technological development pursued to facilitate increasing nonutilitarian use of space (e.g.: space tourism).
Which is precisely what the critics of space tourism fail to understand. And to explain such critics, who in our case explain their opposition in terms of a preference for “serious science” and a belief that “space travel is for trained professionals”, Hoffer continues:
One suspects that much of the praise of seriousness comes from people who have a vital need for a facade of weight and dignity.
Sound familiar?
TRANSLIFE IN THE NEWS: Via SpaceDaily — New Biosatellite To Study Life In Martian Gravity.
The Society has chosen three universities its partners for the project, and is moving forward with fundraising efforts to support it.
Note that the design has evolved somewhat from that presented at last fall’s conference.
RAGIN’ CAJUN? OR BLITHERING IDIOT? Noted space expert James Carville takes on future space tourist Lori Garver on CNN’s Crossfire (via NASA Watch):
GARVER: Well, the bottom line is is the space station is really our foothold to the cosmos. We are going into space. We are explorers just like we were in the west.
CARVILLE: We ain’t going anywhere. You may be going, but we is staying right here on old terra firma, I’ll guarantee you that right now!(emphasis added)
Please do, James! And while you’re at it, stay the hell out of our way.
Screamfest hosts rarely seem to allow a total lack of knowledge on a topic to deter them from making asses of themselves by pontificating on it, but Carville truly goes out of his way here. He seems to think very little of the Russian space program, or Russian industry in general:
CARVILLE: How about — you couldn’t pay me $20 million to get on something Russian-built and go into space. I bet you couldn’t pay me $20 million to get on Russian-built elevator.
And which manned spacecraft built in which country had the most recent fatal launch failure?
And sure, I’m as surprised as anyone to learn that a Soyuz spacecraft only costs $3 million, but Carville places great emphasis on this fact, suggesting that the price alone determines the safety, etc., of the vehicle:
CARVILLE: I think a commercial airliner costs like $30 million. And you’re saying the Soyuz craft costs $3 million? So, wait, if I go from Washington to New York, I’m on a $30 million airplane. And you’re going up in space on the $3 million craft?
That’s like comparing a tour bus with a racing bike. Only, here, you can only use the racing bike for one trip, to the grocery store and back, whereas the tour bus can take many more people on longer trips in relative comfort, again and again, until the structure begins to degrade and it has to be retired from service. If you look at the economics of it, the tour bus (ie: the commercial airliner) is actually vastly cheaper than the single-use racing bike (ie: the Soyuz spacecraft), simply by having a larger passenger capacity and a longer service lifetime. Any high-school economics student should be able to see that.
Not to mention that comparing a spacecraft and a commercial airliner is ridiculously inapt.
But perhaps an understanding of even high-school level economics is a bit much to expect from a leftie like Carville, who (predictably) goes on to drag tired class-warfare hot-buttons into (what passes for) his argument:
CARVILLE: But say if we need money for drugs. Should rich people be allowed to pay their way into trials?
CARLSON: Huh?
CARVILLE: If we need money for pharmaceutical research — so a guy is sick. He says, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you $20 million, but I want first crack at this drug when it goes to trial. They have drug trials.
Should you be able to buy your way into that, because clearly we’re going to need money for prescription health care benefit for our seniors. Should you be able to say, elk season starts on November the 15th. If you’re rich enough, should you be able to pay and start hunting on November the 12th?
Perhaps those questions reveal what it is that opponents of space tourism are really, at root, opposed to — namely, the idea that someone is (in their eyes) squandering a great deal of (their own) money on pursuing happiness through something that is merely “selfish fun”, rather than on some more “responsible” (ie: Comtean) end. But notice that for all the bluster from Carville and Park about these space tourists paying their own way into space but using taxpayer-funded facilities while they are there, John Glenn and his fully taxpayer-funded vacation in space, on a vehicle nearly a thousand times more expensive than a Soyuz spacecraft, was never mentioned. Where is the outrage, James? Or is space tourism only a “bad” thing when private citizens use their own money to pay for it?
(Park’s comments are also foolish, but they are of the usual “Just send robots!” variety, which misses the whole point of human exploration. Seen it before, shot it down already, who next?)
Rand Simberg has a great rebuttal on FoxNews.com to the inane “Red”/luddite arguments that we humans shouldn’t pollute Mars (or anywhere else) with our presence, until we develop “character”.
And she’s concerned that we will attack some “unsuspecting ecosystem.” Here’s a newsflash, Lori ? not only are ecosystems off the earth “unsuspecting” ? they’re non-existent, as far as we know. There is no solid evidence for life in the universe anywhere other than on our planet (which isn’t to say with any certainty, of course, that it doesn’t exist).
If this remains the case, our role in expanding into the universe will not be to ravage ecosystems, but to create them. We can, and will, make our dead solar system flower, overbrimming it with life (and not just human life), and consciousness, and love, and beauty, and laughter. And we will help it in knowing itself in a way that it cannot without sentience as represented by ourselves.
Take that, Kim Robinson.
LAND RUSH: The Space Settlement Initiative is encouraging the development of a property rights system for the Moon and Mars, as a way to encourage exploration and settlement.
It’s an idea floated for some time by Alan Wasser. The site describes the plan and deals with a number of basic questions and objections to it (including the primary question I had while reading it: why base this whole arrangement around a Cold War-era treaty?).
The idea sounds like it has potential, but I see a major practical hurdle in the form of the “international community”. It is hard to imagine other countries going along with the plan, purely because it may be predominantly U.S. companies and individuals who carry out the required activities and therefore reap the rewards:
Some third world countries have claimed that the “common heritage” doctrine would mean that anyone wanting to establish a lunar settlement might have to pay off the leaders of every nation on Earth.
Hardly surprising. And that was in 1979 — it’s doubtful such redistributive thinking has dulled in the intervening two decades.
Nonetheless, it’s great food for thought.
COMMERCIAL SPACE SAMPLER: Forbes has an article out which touts the various possibilities and benefits of space commercialization. It’s really just a review of what should and could be done with privatization of launch and on-orbit services and infrastructure, nothing space advocates aren’t already familiar with, but it’s a great, brief summation of these ideas that one could use to “sell” them to the uninitiated.
It’s also worth noting that the author of the article, Edward Hudgins, is the Washington Director for The Objectivist Center, the more open and, er, “progressive” (so to speak) of the two primary Ayn Rand/Objectivism schools. He is the author of the forthcoming book Space, the Free-Market Frontier (available in June), which considering the company he keeps should be quite interesting.
ARCHITECTS OF MARS: John Carter McKnight takes on…Martian architecture?
No, it’s more than that — it’s about the rigid application of familiar memes in very different environments. While he uses aesthetics as an example, the same principle can apply to just about any ideas, cultural elements, or social arrangements we take with us to Mars. Early martian settlements will be caught between the desire to pioneer the new and the urge to reestablish the old and familiar in a new place.
It’s an interesting argument, but hardly one that is new to Mars settlement. After all, we in the United States owe our form of government to just such a struggle between experiment and tradition, one which sought to replicate the rights and forms of English governance in the Colonies and ended up as a novel form of government composed from the best ideas the Old World had to offer. And we are today witnessing another instance of this struggle in the ongoing evolution of the internet, where the old forms of information sharing (newspapers, magazines) were stovepiped into the new medium like Midwestern houses in the Rockies, but are gradually being supplanted by new forms, such as….well…blogs, which better exploit the nature of the new environment.
MORE BORING CANADIANS: Another article on Canada’s efforts to develop a robotic drilling system for use on a future mission to Mars.
I sat in on a presentation on a similar topic (surface core samplers) at the 2001 Convention. It’s truly impressive what the folks involved have managed to squeeze into such compact spaces, and how they’ve designed single tools that can perform a half-dozen different operations (for instance, the surface sampler can take core samples, or score a rock to examine what’s beneath the exposed surface, or drill out material and sample the dust, etc.).
Note that the Canada drill is designed to work without the use of water for cooling and lubrication purposes. It’s hard to imagine that that kind of technology wouldn’t find a use in drilling operations on Earth, particularly in remote or arid locations — one more spinoff from space.
MORE ON MARS BUGS MarsDaily has the links I was looking for when I posted the earlier link to the RoboCup article:
construction robots that work cooperatively, swarms of bug-like robots, and looking to crabs for martian robot design inspiration.
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