MarsBlog - Part 67

Joy!

Space luddite Bruce Gagnon now has his own blog: Organizing Notes. Nothing space-related yet, but plenty of chuckle-worthy moonbattery nonetheless.

Still No Names?

Despite all the rumor-mongering last week, we still don’t have a nominee for NASA Administrator. And with the President abroad, it’s unlikely we’ll get a name for several more days.

Resources and Development

Dennis Wingo argues in favor of resource discovery and extraction as the proper focus of space exploration efforts:

Starting with water and oxygen on the Moon and the exploitation of high value metallic asteroid impactors on the Moon, we can shift the economics of the hydrogen economy, lowering the cost of fuel cells and delivering thousands of tons of high quality metals for use in building up lunar and space based commercial operations. While Platinum Group Metals (PGM?s), indispensable for efficient fuel cell operation, are known to exist on the Moon in diffuse quantities from the Apollo samples, it is only through prospecting with the right sensors from orbit and follow up Landers that we will expand this resource base.

I’m currently reading John Steele Gordon’s excellent Empire of Wealth, which offers an interesting parallel from American Colonial history. According to Gordon’s account, the initial settlement of the Americas was clustered around three resources, and which resource and who exploited it had effects on the economic development of the hemisphere which linger to this day.

First was the purely exploitative colonial efforts of the Spanish and Portuguese, who — instead of PGMs — exploited the gold and silver of Central and South America.
Second were the French, who exploited the fur trade of what is now eastern Canada.
Third were the British — the second-son aristocrats and their dirt-poor indentured servants — who, having missed out on the gold, silver, and furs, founded the Virgina and Carolina colonies, whose resources were rich soil and a climate perfectly suited to tobacco, the then-new granddaddy of cash crops.

What is interesting to note about these three exploitative modes of settlement, with respect to the future settlement of the Moon and Mars, is that the exploitation of one or another natural resource is great for getting the colonization process going, but eventually the market gets saturated, driving down the price with often catastrophic economic results.

As with the Gold Rush, the real money (and long-term economic viability) is to be had in selling supplies and services…in Gordon’s example, in producing the tools and machinery required by those doing the exploiting, handling the trade in the commodities they produce, and working those commodities into finished goods for export/reexport — the path followed by the comparatively resource-poor “middle colonies” such as New York and Pennsylvania.

It’s not at all unusual to read an essay promoting this element or that isotope as the Sure Thing, the one resource whose exploitation will lead to the settlement of space. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly rare to read about what might come next — the creation of a stable, economically-diverse economy in space, versus colonies devoted merely to the extraction and exportation of raw materials to Mother Earth.

[Hat tip: Rand Simberg]

Lake Supreme?

Space Probe Finds Giant Frozen Sea on Mars

A European space probe scanning the surface of Mars has discovered what scientists say appears to be a giant frozen sea near the planet’s equator.

The discovery was the first of a body of what may be water that has been found away from the polar ice caps and was revealed by the Mars Express spacecraft that has been orbiting and photographing the planet for a year.

Although the high resolution images only cover an area a few tens of kilometers across, they are in what appears to be a flood plain measuring a massive 800 kilometers long by 900 kilometers wide.

Note that as an ellipse with those dimensions and a uniform 45m depth, the original flood could have contained around 6100mi³ of water, or approximately twice the volume of Lake Superior. That’s a lot of water.

[belated hat tip: Sven Knuth]

Dissing Microbes

Phil Bowermaster muses on the significance of the possible discovery of secondary evidence of life on Mars.

Okay, granted, it’s not a six-limbed furry creature or the ruins of some ancient temple. It’s methane signatures potenitally indicative of microbes. Big deal.

Well, yeah. It is a big deal.

If, like me, you suspect that there is probably life elsewhere in the universe, what does it say about how abundant life may be if we just happen to find some on, oh, you know…the next planet over? Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Or maybe it’s not that big a deal because both Earth and Mars are in the orbital sweet spot for life in this solar system.

Or maybe, if there is bacterial life on Mars, it’s the result of cross-contamination by meteorite impacts…we won’t know until we can test any critters we might find when we go there.

White Elephant Larger Than Previously Thought

Total Tally of Shuttle Fleet Costs Exceed Initial Estimates

As NASA and its industrial army march forward to this year?s return to flight of the space shuttle program, a new assessment has been made on the program?s overall price tag to the taxpayer.

The data show that over the entire lifetime of the the space shuttle program the cost has been $145 billion, and about $112 billion since the program became operational.

Furthermore, the average cost per flight has been about $1.3 billion over the life of the program and about $750 million over its most recent five years of operations.

Figuring in estimates of the cost of the Shuttle program through its expected termination in 2010 brings the total lifetime cost to $173 billion. We could have had quite a few additional Apollo missions with that kind of cash. Good thing we scrapped that program to pay for Shuttle…who knows what we’d be doing in space today if we hadn’t!

Of course, some of the reasoning behind the total seems a bit…arbitrary:

Because NASA has costs for the shuttle program that are not reflected in its budget line, Pielke said it is appropriate to add 10 percent to these totals and also to adjust those expenses to common year dollars.

Ten percent may be accurate (who knows? who can know?) but it appears arbitrary since its basis is not explained in any detail in the article.

?There is no reason to expect that public support will diminish,? Pielke concluded. If that?s the case, then what might be the best use of $150 billion to $200 billion dollars in a space program?

Is that a rhetorical question? Because, I could think of lots of ways to spend that $150-200 billion in space funding effectively…

?Above all, we should make sure that promises and commitments of performance are realistic and achievable. The history of the shuttle and the International Space Station gives us a lot to learn from,? Pielke stated. ?One is not to plan for big future budget increases as the basis for future successes.?

Which, coincidentally, is a key element of the VSE policy, one which sets it apart from prior civil space plans.

Martians Underground?

Hmm… NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars

A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA?s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

Stoker and other researchers have long theorized that the Martian subsurface could harbor biological organisms that have developed unusual strategies for existing in extreme environments. That suspicion led Stoker and a team of U.S. and Spanish researchers in 2003 to southwestern Spain to search for subsurface life near the Rio Tinto river?so-called because of its reddish tint?the product of iron being dissolved in its highly acidic water.

Life? Maybe. I guess we’ll just have to send people there and have a firsthand look…it’s the only way to be sure, you know…

Fast Boat to Mars

Dr. Benford has come up with an improvement on the solar sail.

Unexpectedly, the sail experienced a force considerably greater than predicted. They theorized that the heat from the microwave beam was causing carbon monoxide gas to escape from the sail’s surface; the recoil from the escaping molecules provided what could be a useful adjunct to the propulsive force experienced by light sails.

They believe that by beaming microwave energy up from Earth to boil off volatile molecules from a specially formulated paint applied to the sail will provide enough added force to propel a spacecraft to Mars in record time.

Record time: ~1 month. Sounds good to me.

Unfortunately, the author of the article makes a small error at the end:

As science fiction readers know, this topic was explored in the 1974 novel Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. They used the idea of laser cannon from Robert L. Forward’s 1961 paper Ground-Based Lasers For Propulsion In Space to bring an alien spacecraft to our solar system. Readers may also wish to explore early sf looks at solar sails.

Actually, it was the New Caledonia system (and one hopes that sail travelers to Mars wouldn’t share a fate similar to the Moties).

O’Keefe out, Crippen In?

Keith Cowing is reporting a rumor that Dan Crippen (of the Columbia accident investigation, not to be confused with astronaut Bob Crippen, pilot of Columbia‘s maiden flight) may be nominated as the next NASA Administrator.

The (Too) Long Goodbye

Mark Whittington notes that the new Battlestar Galactica has been picked up for another season, while Star Trek: Enterprise has been canned.

The former development is most welcome. Having had no access to SciFi Channel at the time, I missed the original miniseries, and was somewhat lost when the series started up last month. Nonetheless, I was hooked on it from the first episode and have watched it religiously since (and have also now watched the miniseries on DVD). To say that it is better than the original series from the 1970s (which is presently running on SciFi on weekday mornings) would be a great understatement, but in watching bits and pieces of the old series, one can see that they have not only adopted the principal characters (though in some cases heavily altered) and the overall premise, but also some of the special-effects camera angles and other small touches of the “look-feel” of the old series. In watching the miniseries, I couldn’t help but laugh at the use of the old show’s theme song as the background music for the decommissioning ceremony (a scene which also featured visual elements from the old series as part of a “museum display”). While the old series seems to be “juvenile” (ie: directed at kids), the new series is clearly directed at an adult audience — not just in the risque nature of some of the scenes (specifically those involving Cylon fembot Number Six…rowrrr), but in the sophistication of the overall themes and in the fact that the writers endeavor to follow those themes and their interweaving in a consistent manner.

Which brings us to the latter development, the cancellation of the latest product from the Star Trek franchise. I’ve never been a strong fan of the various Trek series, at least not to the degree I was with, say, Babylon 5. Partly this is due to the preachy utopian moralizing exhibited throughout the franchise’s incarnations, a legacy of its formation in the late 1960’s when it was actually “cutting edge” and topical to deal in such things, and partly to the thoroughly lousy storytelling exhibited throughout the franchise’s run.

I’ve always been struck by how the Star Trek universe reflects a prepubescent idea of what adult life is like. No one important dies — unless they want off the show, and even then they invariably come back from the dead from time to time. Romance is of the shallow “playing house” variety…the roles are there, but there is rarely any indication of anything deeper or of serious, long-term commitments. Within the ensemble, there is no real conflict, as though it is an idealized family where everyone gets along. Any material wants are fulfilled instantly, just for the asking. Life is a game — no consequences for mistakes or failures, every problem has a simple answer, and after each episode life goes back to “square one”.

The problem with depicting a shiny happy future where everyone gets along and no one suffers any material want or oppression and any seemingly insurmountable problem can be conquered in forty-five minutes with a deus ex machina stream of technobabble is that…it’s just plain bad fiction. The knowledge that the characters and their situation will never change in any significant way destroys any dramatic tension the premise of the episode might create. After a while it becomes clear that there will never be any consequences to the events of a given episode — none of the ensemble cast will ever be put in jeopardy, and after the technobabble has saved the day, the fictional universe resets to zero for the next episode, as if nothing had happened. Who cares if so-and-so faces some ostensibly life-threatening situation, when they will come up with some half-baked way out of it at the last minute, emerging unscathed by the experience and promptly forgetting it ever happened? For the characters, the situation is the flip-side of Groundhog Day — the situation of each episode may be different, but the people and the parameters of their existence and interaction are exactly the same, as if they are unaware of anything that has happened prior to the teaser segment. (The one series which is an exception to this particular complaint is Deep Space Nine, which did at least attempt to break out of the range-of-the-moment episodic format of the other Trek incarnations.)

Worse, the miraculous new science or engineering whipped up in the final act of each episode is itself forgotten the next week, and is rarely recalled when a later situation clearly cries out for its use — never mind that such developments in the real world would have profound effects and wide-ranging applications, and wouldn’t be so casually tossed aside. There is also no consistency among the technobabble interventions — each seems to come out of nowhere, unconnected with previous applications of what one would expect to be related technologies (to the extent that one is even able to decipher the ludicrous gobbledegook being slung around by the characters).

While the non-TOS series are to be commended for their production values, the music throughout these four series has always been bad…nowhere more noticeably than in Enterprise itself (other than, perhaps, the martial-themed music of the notoriously awful first season of Next Generation). In TV and film, the music should reinforce the mood of the action, but in the Trek franchise, the music seems determined to drive the mood. There is rarely a quiet moment, free of intrusive and bombastic “background” music, and the music often seems to be a substitute for good acting, good characterization, and good writing (which should set the mood).

It’s not a fair comparison to put Enterprise or Voyager up against Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5, however, as the latter two are not episodic. A more fair comparison would be between the episodic Trek series and Stargate SG-1, a show I have taken a wholly unexpected liking to. SG-1 is episodic, but the characters have grown over the run of the series and actually seem to be changed by their life-changing experiences from week to week. Plus, the show stays fairly consistent with its fictional technology — technology-driven plot resolutions follow from the descriptions and applications of the relevant technologies used in previous episodes. Over the run of the series the technologies discovered along the way have seen new applications and elaborations…the advanced hardware available to the characters in season 8, for example, is very much different from that of season 1, having in between followed a natural development path one might expect to see in an analogous real-world situation (complete with industrial espionage).

Suffice to say that I won’t be all that disappointed to see the Trek franchise without a vehicle for the first time in eighteen years. Whatever virtues the franchise ever had have long been spent, or have been rendered obsolete by the march of history. As with any television series, there comes a time when the creative well goes dry and it’s time to bring things to a close, and the Trek franchise passed that point many, many years ago.

UPDATE: Mark, I might have mentioned Firefly too, but sadly I know of it by name only. Judging from the lamentations over its cancellation, it must have been pretty good.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Green posts on the same topic…with priceless suggestions for ways to revive the Trek franchise.

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