Table of Contents

- Family Therapy: Learning To Love Mercury And Pluto

by William Ledbetter

- On the Road to the Brainships: A Look at the Current Science of Interfacing the Brain

by Tedd Roberts

- The Closest Extra-solar Planet to Earth: What's Alpha Centauri Bb Like and How Can We Get There?

by Les Johnson

- Siberian Dawn: Tapping Solar System Resources

by Dr. Greg Matloff

- Evidence of Things Unseen: Why Not dark matter?

by Les Johnson

- R.I.P., MOC

by Terry Burlison

- Fracking and the American Comeback

by J. R. Dunn

- A Terrible Thing to Lose: Zombie Science and Science Fiction in John Ringo's Under a Graveyard Sky

by Tedd Roberts

- Columbia's First Victims

by Terry Burlison

- On Training For War, Part 1

by Tom Kratman

- Becoming Martian

by Terry Burlison

- Training for War, Part II

by Tom Kratman

- The Exoplanet Hunters

by William Ledbetter

- Training for War, Part III

by Tom Kratman

Baen Books

Free Nonfiction 2013

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Family Therapy: Learning to Love Mercury and Pluto © 2013 by William Ledbetter

On the Road to the Brainships: A Look at the Current Science of Interfacing the Brain © 2013 by Tedd Roberts

The Closest Extra-solar Planet to Earth: What’s Alpha Centauri Bb Like and How Can We Get There? © 2013 by Les Johnson

Siberian Dawn: Tapping Solar System Resources © 2013 by Dr. Greg Matloff

Evidence of Things Unseen: Why Not dark matter? © 2013 by Les Johnson

R.I.P., MOC © 2013 by Terry Burlison

Fracking and the American Comeback © 2013 by J. R. Dunn

A Terrible Thing to Lose: Zombie Science and Science Fiction in John Ringo’s Under a Graveyard Sky © 2013 by Tedd Roberts

Columbia's First Victims © 2013 by Terry Burlison

On Training for War, Part 1 © 2013 by Tom Kratman

Becoming Martian © 2013 by Terry Burlison

Training for War, Part II © 2013 by Tom Kratman

The Exoplanet Hunters © 2013 William Ledbetter

Training for War, Part III © 2013 by Tom Kratman

A Baen Book Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

eISBN: 978-1-62579-094-1

Family Therapy:

Learning To Love Mercury And Pluto

by William Ledbetter

Most adolescents and teens spend a period examining their families, if not with outright horror, then at least with a cautiously raised eyebrow and quiet head shake. Some look around and see what they think are normal, stable families and wonder why they got stuck in such a weirdly dysfunctional mess, so they start looking for ways to get out. They spend more and more time with their friend's families, trying to wedge themselves in as a another sibling, hoping if they're around enough, the friend's parents will eventually forget they are alien spawn and raise them as their own.

We humans have been doing something similar in our own solar system family. The more we look around, the more despondent we get. There aren't really Moon Maidens living on Luna. Mars has failed to produce the canal riding Martians promised by Percival Lowell and Giovanni Schiaparelli, or even the cool, yet mortal bullies created by H.G. Wells. As we understand more about our stellar family we finally have to admit there are no planets where we can go and live comfortably and no other intelligences we can talk to, so like those embarrassed and eye-rolling teens, we look around for something better. Maybe if we're lucky, we can marry into a better family, like maybe 55 Cancri or Epsilon Eridani. Our human imaginations have conceived amazing interstellar families with Vulcans, Sandworms and Schlock Mercenary. They have to be out there, right?

Sure, they might be, but as we mature, we're also starting to see that no matter how horribly boring and strange our family is, we're probably stuck with it. Our so-far-unique combination of imagination and knowledge may yet deliver wonders like cures for cancer, nanotechnology, bioengineered body sculpting, flying cars, smaller bikinis, robot house keepers and space elevators, but not an interstellar empire. No matter how much we want it or how many sulking tantrums we throw, technologies that can sidestep or warp the physical universe enough to bridge the staggering distances between stars aren't even on the horizon yet. That doesn't mean it will never happen. I, for one, have great faith in human ingenuity, but like honest politicians and a three day workweek, hyperspace and warp drives will most likely remain bright and shiny fictions for a very long time.

So what do we do in the interim? Try to understand or at least accept the quirks and oddities of those we are stuck with? We actually have a great planetary family. Yes, the bigger siblings, Jupiter and Saturn, always get their way, but have used their impressive gravity to nearly sweep our Solar system clean of dangerous debris, making it a safer place for the little ones like Earth and Mars. Of course there is solemn and moody Venus who refuses to talk to anyone despite all of our efforts as well as distant twins Neptune and Uranus, who live lives that seem to have little to do with the rest of the family.

But we finally have the opportunity to get to know the two oddballs: Mercury, now the smallest, and Pluto who, like a surprise on a soap opera, is actually a distant dwarf cousin, not really a member of the immediate planetary family at all.

Earlier this year, Andy Calloway, Operations Manager for the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, invited me to tour the mission control center at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. I was more than excited and soon learned I was in for a double treat.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I'd known that APL also ran the New Horizons mission to Pluto, but was pleasantly surprised to find the control centers for both missions were right next to each other, sharing the same big room.

Just for the record, they even look like space mission control centers! No, not the kind with pipe smoking, lab-coated scientists and monstrous machines sucking information from herky-jerky tape reels. This was a modern, technological paradise with banks of computer consoles and huge colorful screens high on the walls, and streaming cryptic telemetry displaying orbital diagrams. The scientists now wear jeans, and instead of pipes they pawed through fast food bags while they instructed and monitored our distant robot explorer called MESSENGER.

The MESSENGER probe was launched in August of 2004 atop a Delta II booster. Normally, we have to use enormous amounts of fuel or gravity assists to build the speed of a probe bound for another planet, but since Mercury lies deep within the Sun's gravity well, the mission planners actually had the opposite problem. MESSENGER was going to speed up rapidly as it fell toward the sun. So instead of carrying enough fuel for prolonged deceleration burns, they needed an Earth flyby and two Venus flybys to bleed off speed. MESSENGER also used those flybys as opportunities to test its instrumentation packages, including the cameras. Andy played an awesome video that MESSENGER took during its 2005 Earth flyby, which shows a slowly spinning and beautiful Earth receding rapidly into the blackness. Check the link here. An odd detail that stood out for me was the way the Sun reflected from our little world, making it look like a bright light shining from a colorful balloon or cloud-shrouded number two ball on a pool table. And I couldn't help but think that if a manned ship were leaving Earth at 24,000 mph, its crew would see that same view, but they would be filled with entirely different emotions.

The conference room where we saw the video also contains a one-fifth scale model of the probe. One of the things that immediately stood out was the large sun shade. On the actual spacecraft, the heat-resistant ceramic cloth shade is two meters by two and a half meters and is kept constantly between the delicate scientific instruments and the brutal 850F sunlight. Though a very high tech material, it was a simple and elegant solution to the worst of the heat problems.

I'm glad we've finally sent a probe to study the smallest member of our planetary clan. Mercury has held a certain allure for me since reading about those feisty Hermians in Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. Humans colonizing a world made hellish by heat and radiation, to get access to its boundless mineral wealth, is reminiscent of the gold rush days and carries a certain heroic element that appeals to my love of exploration and adventure. But before we can expect to lure even greed-crazed miners to set up a colony there, we have to learn much more about Mercury. The MESSENGER mission is a major contributor to that goal.

MESSENGER isn't the only probe we've sent to Mercury. The Mariner 10 mission was launched in 1973 and performed the first ever gravitational slingshot maneuver when it used a Venus flyby to put it in an orbit that allowed three passes by Mercury between March 1974 and March 1975. During that period it took 1,200 photographs and mapped 40-45 percent of Mercury's surface. It also discovered a faint helium atmosphere and strong magnetic field that suggested a dense iron-rich core. After its maneuvering fuel ran out, the mission controllers turned off the radio transmitter and parked it in orbit around the Sun where -- barring an unknown impact with a foreign body -- Mariner 10 still remains today.

When asked about the most exciting moments for him so far in the MESSENGER mission, Andy said, "Two exciting points stand out. The first is when we received the first images in the control center in the middle of the night following Mercury flyby #1 – knowing I was the first human in history to observe these images and new terrain from the side of the planet that had never been seen before. The second was successful completion of Mercury Orbit Insertion, knowing that 6.6 years of cruise through the inner solar system were not for naught, and that we had a new mission with exciting science and mapping ahead of us. We were the first team to ever orbit a spacecraft around Mercury, and that is now permanently etched in history and cannot be taken away."

Steely eyed and stoic scientists be damned, this is exciting stuff!

Of these two strange planets, Mercury is by far the most innocuous; but even though at first glance it's rather benign, there are oddities that cause some head scratching akin to, say an adorable blond-haired, blue-eyed toddler brother who suddenly starts reciting poetry in a long extinct south Asian tribal language. One of the things we really wanted to know was how Mercury could have such a powerful magnetic field. It's the only rocky inner planet besides Earth that does. Sure, we already knew that it has a large mostly iron core, but that alone shouldn't have been enough. Earth's solid iron-nickel core rotates inside a sea of magma, which works like a gigantic electric motor. We thought Mercury might also have a molten core, but it was considered unlikely that such a tiny planet -- smaller even than the moons Ganymede and Titan -- could still be that hot after so long.

MESSENGER has now settled into an 8 hour orbit that is still elliptical, its distance above Mercury ranging from 172 miles to 6,000 miles. This odd orbit is necessary because even though the probe has that awesome sun shade, heat reflected back from the planet itself is enough to overheat the delicate instruments. The MESSENGER ops team actually had to come up with a rather intricate schedule of cycling instruments on and off, depending where they were in the seasonal period, to keep them within their heat tolerances.

The mission has already discovered several interesting things, the most amazing of which is a better answer to that magnetic field question. Mercury's iron core is closer to 85 percent of its entire mass instead of the long assumed 40-45 percent and does have at least a thin liquid layer. In this new orbital configuration, MESSENGER will also be able to complete the surface mapping, including the poles. This is important because Mercury has a surprising amount of water in its thin atmosphere and we expect to find significant water ice deposits in the deep craters at the poles. Why only the poles? Because Mercury does rotate. While it orbits the Sun every eighty-eight Earth days, it rotates around its own axis only once every six Earth months. The whole water vapor thing astounds me. If water ice is hiding on Mercury, it must be everywhere out there!

These are all things those crazy Hermian miners will need to know someday, but since Mercury's meteor and comet impact craters have remained fresh for millions of years, documenting the chaos from the early years of the solar system, our littlest brother's biggest treasure trove may actually be a better understanding of the origins for the whole family.

Odd as Mercury may be, Pluto still retains the title for weirdness. The New Horizons probe is our first major effort to understand that planetary equivalent to the strange relative who hides broken bricks in his room, has a hedgehog tattooed on his forehead and never stops singing ABBA's “Fernando.”

A few people are still sore about the whole Pluto demotion thing, but like any mysterious stranger who shows up and claims to be a long lost brother, his story is bound to be debunked as we learn more about him. To start with, when Pluto was added to the family back in 1930, we thought it was much larger. Early estimates for "Planet X" showed it equal in mass to Earth, but we now know its diameter is much smaller. Only 66 percent the size of our moon! We also didn't realize until recently that objects larger than Pluto lurk out there in the Kuiper Belt. Since the discovery of the more massive Eris in 2005, the International Astronomical Union has been under pressure to either demote Pluto, or add Eris and Ceres to the planet family. So the dwarf planet classification was established.

Pluto being revealed as a diminutive cousin, rather than eccentric brother, may not be the last surprise reclassification either. Cousin Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, are actually planetary conjoined twins. They orbit around each other. This isn't unusual. Earth and our moon do the same thing, only their mass's common point of rotation, or barycenter, lies within the Earth's circumference. But since Charon is over half Pluto's diameter, their barycenter lies in space between them, making it much more obvious. And also unlike the Earth-Luna pair, Pluto and Charon are tidally locked together, so no matter how long they dance, they can never check out their partner's booty.

We should all rejoice that Pluto was taken from the list of main planets. If the IAU ever agrees on the precise wording of the definition, the odd pair will eventually be classified as binary dwarf planets and most likely renamed Pluto/Charon. Third graders might be able to memorize that for tests, but many adults I know will never get it.

I didn't see a scale model of New Horizons probe while at APL, but one of the large screens in the control center showed a 3D animation of the spacecraft rotating on its axis. Since the probe was in "cruise mode" and sleeping while I was there, there wasn't much more to see, but another screen displayed a course plot with a progress marker. This really brought the scale of the whole mission into focus for me. Even though New Horizons holds the record for the greatest launch speed at 36,373 mph as it left Earth (not the fastest spacecraft ever -- that record is still held by Helios 2) in January of 2006, it's still only halfway there. By halfway, I mean in distance, not time. Since the massive boost away from Earth, a gravity assist from Jupiter increased New Horizon's speed to about 47,000 mph, but it's still three years away from the closest Pluto approach. And the Sun is actually slowing it down, trying to drag it back, so now out between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, its current speed has dropped to around 34,000 mph. It will be traveling at 30,000 mph when it passes Pluto.

Unlike the MESSENGER mission that will orbit Mercury, mapping and studying for years, the New Horizons probe will have one chance. A single high-speed flyby. The science mission to Pluto will begin in February of 2015, when they start taking regular long range pictures. The actual flyby will be the middle of the following July. They will be in range for most of the instrument package to work for only about six days. I won't list all the mission objectives, but they include high resolution mapping, multiple tests to determine exact size, mass and composition and a look for rings and more moons.

At the time of this writing, Pluto's fifth moon had just been discovered. This is exciting, but also raises some concerns for the New Horizons mission. There's no real chance of the probe colliding with these new objects, but each moon has the potential to increase the amount of Trojan asteroids and other orbital debris in the Plutonian system. The New Horizons probe impacting even a BB-sized object at such speeds would spell disaster for the mission, so -- depending on the analysis of these new moon orbits -- the team might need to increase the closest approach distance between the probe and Pluto, which would decrease the effectiveness of many tests by at least some degree.

Once the mission was approved, there was great urgency to get New Horizons launched on time. Pluto's highly inclined and weirdly elliptical orbit takes 248 Earth years to circle the sun. At its closest approach in 1989, it dropped closer to the sun than Neptune does. This approach heated Pluto and changed its atmosphere. We don't know how much of a change there was, but the atmosphere appears to be rather complex and deep, at least 62 miles thick. Some signs indicate that it is now acting as a cometlike tail pointing away from the sun.

Of course Pluto is currently on its way back out to deep space and speeding further away from us. Since the mission planned to use a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter to build speed, every day of delay put Jupiter in a worse position. The launch was delayed by two days -- if even a couple days had been added to that wait, it could have added years to the mission -- but now the spacecraft will arrive in plenty of time to analyze the atmosphere. We may not have another chance until it comes in close to the Sun again 200 years from now.

As if having a weird orbit and being a binary dwarf planet isn't enough, Pluto may turn out to be even more interesting. Scientists believe it might have a dense solid core surrounded by an icy mantle. If the heating at the core is still active, Pluto could actually have a liquid water layer 50-100 miles thick between the core and ice mantle. Who knows, we may have been looking in the wrong places for life in our solar system. Chances are slim, but there may just be colonies of sea monkeys living beneath Pluto's ice, waiting to perform their own rendition of Fernando for us.

Like a relative traveling cross country and stopping to see each cousin and widowed aunt, New Horizons is a good example of a multipurpose mission. On its way through the asteroid belt it flew within 102,000 miles of 132524 APL on June 13, 2006, taking pictures and confirming that it was an S-Type asteroid. The probe also made an intensive four-month study of the Jovian system as it passed by during the gravity assist. With the advanced cameras and instrument package, it took some of the best pictures and measurements yet of the big brother planet. The probe actually returned more information about Jupiter than it's expected to glean from Pluto. And New Horizons will still be exploring even after its primary mission of visiting Pluto. The mission planners intend to redirect the probe to make close passes near one or two Kuiper belt objects in the eighteen to thirty mile diameter range that lie near the probe's trajectory. So be expecting some out of town company, Uncle Alfonso.

Unless someone comes up with a warp drive in the near future, humanity will be stuck with the stellar family we were given. But maybe -- like many embarrassed teens from less than idyllic families -- if Earth gets to know little brother Mercury and weird cousin Pluto a little better, we may find that our family's quirks actually make it rather interesting. And who knows, with water ice on Mercury and a possible liquid water ocean under Pluto's mantle, we may not be as alone as we thought.

All images courtesy NASA – John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory – Carnegie Institution of Washington

William Ledbetter lives near Dallas with his family and too many animals. A Writers of the Future award winner, Bill is also a consulting editor at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Quantum Kiss ezines. He is the administrator of the annual Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest for Baen Books and is responsible for the contest’s affiliation with the National Space Society.

On the Road to the Brainships:

A Look at the Current Science of Interfacing the Brain

by Tedd Roberts

There are many science fiction (SF) stories in which the characters have some form of direct brain-to-computer connection, but none quite rivals the complete brain-to-starship interface of Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang and the subsequent collaborative novels. To mark this month's rerelease of The Ship Who Searched by McCaffrey and coauthor Mercedes Lackey, Baen Books has asked me to reflect on brain and machine connections in science fiction compared to the present-day neuroscience of brain interfaces. When I started my study of Neuroscience thirty years ago, my goal was to work in the field of bionics as envisioned in Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels (also known as The Six Million Dollar Man TV series). Little did I know that such a field did not exist at that time; likewise, little did I imagine that I would play a role in creating it!

Brain-to-machine, or brain-to-computer links in SF take many forms – from the full-body interfaces of the Brain Ships, to "simple" control interfaces as in the computer input device imagined by James Hogan in The Genesis Machine. Since it can be argued that all such interfaces require some form of electronic or computerized "decoder" to interpret brain signals and convert them to machine instructions or controls, we'll use the generic term "Brain-Computer Interface" (BCI) here, even though there are additional body-to-computer and instrumentation-to-body connections implied by many of the devices and stories discussed below.

From the start, it is very important to understand that most neuron (i.e. brain cell) activity is electrical. There is some chemical activity in there, too, but what we can most easily work with in terms of brain interfaces is the electrical activity. Since electrical technology is well within our current technological capabilities, we can assume the ability to both "read" and "write" neuron signals with the BCIs we'll discuss here (and get back to a discussion of the mechanism later). We'll first discuss types and examples of BCIs, then the current state-of-the-art in brain interfaces before moving on to use of these concepts in SF, and the future of both science and science fiction.

Types of Brain Interfaces

For my own purposes, I define three functional types of brain interfaces: Input, Output and Internal. Input Interfaces are those designed to bring information about the outside world to the brain, bypassing the respective sensory system. Frankly, any means of interacting with our environment is an "interface" –- so Braille type and sign language are "Input Interfaces" that allow visual or auditory information, respectively, to reach the brain via pathways other than the original visual or auditory mode. However, since we are specifically discussing direct interfaces, this section will focus on the state of the art examples of sensory replacement, i.e. cochlear implants and retinal implants, and then look into some current research into devices that directly connect to the brain.

Output Interfaces are those which allow brain signals to directly control a device either attached to, or separate from our bodies. On the low-tech side, mechanical legs and myoelectric prosthetic limbs (basically the claw-style prosthetic arm triggered by flexing back and shoulder muscles) have been around for decades. In the case of artificial legs, it's become pretty high art; however, these mechanical devices are not directly brain-controlled. We'll cover the latest science in brainwave and direct neural interfaces to control advanced prosthetic limbs.

Finally, brain-to-brain or Internal Interfaces incorporate those devices that do not connect outside the brain, but are specifically designed to replace or repair specific damaged areas of the brain. Interesting applications to enhance brain function will also be discussed in that section.

Input Interface BCIs

The cochlear implant dates from research at multiple institutions in the 1970s, and consists of a computerized sound processor linked to a long electrode implanted into the cochlea –- the primary sensory organ for sound. The cochlea is much like a coiled pipe or a seashell. The structure is "tuned" to respond to different sound frequencies, or pitches, at different distances along the "pipe." Neurons (in this case, sensory cells rather than generic brain cells) located at various distances along the cochlea are thus likewise "tuned" to respond to different frequencies of sound. The electrode of a cochlear implant is implanted lengthwise through the cochlea, so that different locations along the electrode can deliver precise electrical signals to the neurons at that point in the cochlea. The sound processor of a cochlear implant converts different types of sounds to a pattern of electrical signals distributed by time and space (distance along the cochlea) allowing the information about sound qualities to be picked up by the rest of the ear and brain's normal systems for processing sounds.

Cochlear Implant

Image courtesy of Advanced Bionics Corporation

Retinal implants work in a similar manner, in which video from a camera is processed into "pixels" which in turn are used to stimulate electrode sites placed against the back of the eye. Like the cochlear implant, a retina implant is designed not to replace the eye, but to activate the retinal tissue that remains after diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration have damaged the light-sensitive cells of the eye. Development of retinal implants has been ongoing since the 1990s, and as of today (2013) they are capable of mimicking up to 100 discrete "pixels," allowing patients to read (slowly – one letter at a time) and to see object shapes by contrast and edges. New electrode designs of up to 1000 pixels will be available within 5 years.

The Argus II retinal prosthesis

Image courtesy of Second Sight

While tens of thousands of patients have received cochlear implants, only a few dozen have been tested with retinal implants. Still, these are not the fully cybernetic "bionic ear" or "bionic eye" we may have expected. Such an interface requires connection directly to the part of the brain that decodes the signals from the retina or cochlea. We're still a long way from McCaffrey's Brain Ships or Caidin's Six Million Dollar Man. Prosthetic devices cannot yet be fully integrated with brain inputs, nor can they completely replace the role of the natural sensory organs. In many ways the science of "bionics," or more accurately neural prosthetics, is still quite primitive and will remain so until several very important factors are resolved.

These problems are, in no particular order, complexity of the signals that have to be interfaced with the brain, longevity of the electrodes then need to interface with the brain, complexity of the prosthetic (such as number of pixels in the visual field, or the multitude of movement possible at a single joint), powering the prosthetic, and weight of the prosthetic.

The issue of complexity is made rather obvious from the fact that current visual and auditory prosthetics are unable to render the rich diversity of sight and sound –- however this is primarily an issue for density of receptor and stimulation electrode.

While research is ongoing to develop means of putting signals into the brain, it is still much easier to read the signals coming from the brain. Both techniques require that scientists record and understand the signals and the "code" the brain uses to represent sight and sound. However, when it comes to artificial limbs, there are factors that must be considered that elevate the complexity of the code to many new dimensions: how many joints, the directions those joints can move, movement of joints in synchrony, and coordinating all of those movements. There is also the problem of appropriate electrodes to interface a prosthetic with the brain. While we as neuroscientists think we may have a good handle on the problem, we still don't have a reliable ability to insert electrical signals into the brain for a fully functional "bionic" eye or ear. As necessary as it would seem to provide prosthetics for vision and hearing, it is now even more important to repair or replace the sense of touch to allow for fully function prosthetic limbs... but more on that in the next section.

Output Interface BCIs

Some rather astounding work has been accomplished in the past five years toward developing a brain operated upper limb prosthetic –- in other words, a bionic arm. The defense research agency DARPA is considered by many to essentially fund "science fiction." DARPA funds a project called Revolutionizing Prosthetics to develop a brain interfaced upper arm prosthetic, essentially similar to the Six Million Dollar Man prosthetic.

One of the principal goals of this development was complex motions such as flexing fingers and rotating the wrist – with a device that was no heavier than a limb made of flesh and blood. Starting in 2007, the original project funded a company by the name of DEKA, founded by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. It was quite successful, and resulted in a follow-up program which began in 2009, to begin the first tests of interfacing the prosthetic with the brain. As of 2011, patients with brain-implanted electrodes were controlling limbs mounted to a supporting framework in the lab (Brown University and University of Pittsburgh). The limbs were not yet wearable; however, in 2013, the first patients will be fitted with wearable artificial limbs controlled directly by signals from the brain. This is a multi-institutional research project, spearheaded by Johns Hopkins University, and involving at least ten other universities and a similar number of foundations and private companies. For a short summary of the program and many of the reports from DARPA, click here and use search keywords "revolutionizing prosthetics.”

One question that may be asked is: "Why concentrate on just an upper limb or arm and hand prosthetic, and not a lower limb leg and foot prosthetic?" A major reason is that at present brain control is not necessary for effective prosthetics for lower limbs. Biomechanical devices that utilize springs, latches and pistons are quite capable of mimicking lower limb function provided some residual portion of the leg below the hip is present. (Note that even these biomechanical limbs still meet the definition of "bionic" or "lifelike" as first defined by Dr. Jack E. Steele, who coined the term in the 1950s.) The next revolution in lower limb prosthetics will be to provide self motivating legs to replace total amputation from the hip. However, the complex motions required to lift, twist, handle, and manipulate objects as required by fingers, wrists, and elbows has placed the current emphasis for bioelectronic prosthetics on the upper limb.

Even without direct control of a bionic limb, there is continued need for "output" BCIs to control external devices. We start to come very close to the situation of McCaffrey "shellpersons" when we consider patients with "locked-in" syndrome. Researchers at Brown University have developed the "BrainGate" BCI that potentially allows control of many different devices –- from bionic limbs, to power chairs to computers. The BrainGate uses implanted electrodes (see BCI Electrodes below) to control a set of on-off switches –- many on-off switches! –- which can then be translated to machine controls. Similar techniques can be applied using EEG, but implanted electrodes allow greater understanding of complex codes, as well as greater precision in recording those codes. Much of the work with output BCIs requires the recording of neural activity to be processed and/or modeled by computer, so much of this work is being done simultaneously in animals and humans to better design the BCIs for eventual human use.

With all of the wonderful progress that's being made on prosthetics with this program, a major hurdle is still providing sensory feedback from the limb to the brain. In many ways this becomes a problem very similar to advanced visual and auditory prosthetics. Several of the teams funded by the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program are working on precisely the issue of providing both tactile and proprioceptive feedback to the sensory cortex (“proprioceptive” means the sensory perception of motion found chiefly in muscles, tendons, joints, and the inner ear). However, as I said, direct sensory input to the brain requires developing interface techniques that have lagged behind the output techniques. Fortunately, the more recent developments in Internal BCIs are providing results applicable to both Input and Output BCIs.

Internal BCIs

While "brain-to-brain" interfaces may sound like something Commander Spock should do on Star Trek; in prosthetic terms, a brain-to-brain, or Internal BCI is simply a device which has both its input and output in the brain. There is much less development directed at Internal BCIs, mainly because they require a much more esoteric knowledge of the "codes" used by different regions of the brain. Nevertheless, Internal BCIs are extremely important as prosthetics, since they may eventually allow "replacement parts for the brain" as one of my colleagues likes to claim.

The most advanced work in this field has just been reported over the past eighteen months by researchers at the University of Southern California and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (as reported in Journal of Engineering -- Volume 9, page 056012, 2012 and Vol. 8, page 046017, 2011). My colleagues have built on thirty years' study of the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for recording memory, and developed techniques that will eventually result in the ability to restore functions that have been lost due to age, disease or trauma. While not yet a true "device," this research represents a true "neural prosthetic" since it can read neural signals "in front of" a nonfunctioning brain area, then "write" a corresponding signal "behind" the damage in order to bypass the damage while still providing the same function of the damaged brain area. With more development, such an Internal BCI may also be able to enhance function. Although we neuroscientists tend to shy away from the idea of "implanting" memories, this BCI may also be useful in improving the ability to learn and remember.

Other Internal BCIs are in development both for repair of the brain and as part of Input and Output BCIs. True bionic vision, hearing or the sense of touch and feedback necessary for prosthetic limbs will encounter many of the same challenges faced by Internal BCIs, and these challenges are not trivial. The Internal BCI must incorporate both the "reading" of brain information similar to Output BCIs, and the "writing" of information necessary for Input BCIs. In addition, the understanding of natural brain "codes" will be of benefit to true brain-to-computer links for command and control of external devices (and not just prosthetics).

The major challenges faced by all of these BCIs continue to be: (1) understanding the patterns of electrical signals that form information used by the brain, and (2) having the ability to record and stimulate neurons to produce those patterns. With current technology, it is very difficult to do so from outside the brain. For this reason, there is a lot of research into techniques and materials for creating the interface between brain cells and external electrical devices.

BCI Electrodes: Interfaces for recording and stimulating within the brain

Brain machine interfaces are important not just for "bionics" but also for interfaces that would allow quadriplegics and those with neurodegenerative diseases to interface with the outside world. In discussing those types of interfaces; however, it is necessary to first go into a bit more explanation about how neurons work. (I have explained neurons in much greater depth in an entry in my blog, found here, for anyone wanting more information.) In basic terms, neurons generate very small electrical signals - about 100 microvolts or about 10 nanoamps in current. It is quite easy to record these signals with very fine metal wires (electrodes) as long as we can get them very close to the neurons. Recording more neurons with fewer electrodes from greater distances is where it gets difficult. To get a neuron to become active on command requires a bit more voltage and current.

Given the ability to read electrical signals, one of the key questions in developing a brain machine interface then becomes understanding how the activity is combined or patterned: i.e. what is the nature of the (electrical) information that is to be interfaced? We need to know two things: (1) how much information do we want to input to the brain, and (2) what pattern does the brain expect to see? With a visual and auditory prosthetic, researchers and doctors utilize residual neural function in the eye and ear, respectively, and simply provide a pattern of electrical stimulation that is "mapped" in a manner similar to the normal input to retina or cochlea. Tactile and proprioceptive sensation, as required for an effective bionic limb, is a little bit more complex, since the inputs will likely need to be transmitted directly to the appropriate area of the brain that normally receives input from limbs. Likewise advanced improvements in visual and auditory prosthetics – the degree of sophistication required to truly replace sight and sound – will also need to provide inputs directly to the visual and auditory processing regions of the brain.

The second half, or second challenge, to developing BCI electrodes is in many ways much harder, even though it would seem to be the simpler problem. The type of electrode that is commonly used for recording neural activity is simply a wire – insulated along its length, with only a small area exposed at the tip. Sharpened tungsten electrodes may have an exposed surface of less than a micron, while stainless steel, nichrome, or platinum iridium wire typically have surface areas of about 20 to 50 square microns. Since the diameter of a single neuron is itself about 20 square microns, one would think that these electrode sizes would be adequate for recording single neurons. In fact, the larger surface area of nonsharpened electrodes is more appropriate for recording multiple neurons, requiring software that can separate the activity of more than one neuron. While smaller diameter electrodes would seem to be more precise, and more accurate, they do not remain effective as long as nonsharpened electrodes. The major problem with this type of electrode is that either the wire or the brain tissue itself can move, reducing the effectiveness of the electrode. Another problem is that the glial cells which provide metabolic support to neurons will tend to encapsulate and insulate foreign objects in the brain (this is termed "gliosis"). When this happens to electrode its ability to record neural activity is decreased and eventually eliminated. One way around the problem is to implant the electrodes outside of the brain, into the nerves that would otherwise connect to the limb being replaced by the prosthetic. These electrodes exist and are in testing, but there are additional difficulties in identifying which signals go where once we get outside the brain.

"Michigan arrays"

Image courtesy of NeuronNexus

A much more recent approach is to develop recording electrodes that resemble printed circuits, with recording surfaces, and structural materials, that are inert. Silicon and ceramic substrates, with printed platinum "wiring" provide many advantages for BMI. In the first place, silica and ceramic and platinum are much less likely to cause inflammation and gliosis. In the second place, the "printed circuit" process allows the exposure of only small regions of metal "recording surfaces" which can be manufactured in geometric patterns or grids that can record from or stimulate many neurons in many different areas and provides many orders of magnitude more information to be either recorded or stimulated. The "Utah Array" is one such array, while the "Michigan Arrays" represent a more classic printed circuit approach. It is still the case that implanted electrodes have a finite duration of function. We still don't know entirely how long electrodes of this type will remain functional when implanted into the human brain. Even the patients working with the bionic arm prosthesis will only have electrodes implanted into the brain for a few years. Research is ongoing to determine the "best" type of electrode that can remain functional for the lifetime of the patient.

Another form of "recording" has gained recent attention in which circuitlike electrodes are coated with chemicals that allow sensing of not just the electrical signals produced by neurons, but direct measurement of the flow of neurotransmitter chemicals between neurons. While most neuron activity is electrical, it is also partly chemical, and there is potential for chemical sensing to become as precise as electrical sensing. We do not yet know if these electrodes will last longer (or shorter) than electrodes with only electrical sensing capabilities, but the chemical sensing properties are very important in light of two new technologies that will be described in the next section.

Alternate Means of Interfacing to the Brain

In recent months I've seen developments that indicate that the field of neuroscience is not very far from developing effective bionics.  Sometime in the next year, the first patient will be fitted with an upper limb prosthetic and will wear it for six months to a year.  The means to record and decode the neural signals that control normal muscle movement have been around for at least two decades.  However, it has not been until recently that we have risked implanting recording electrodes in humans to do this task.  One of the great drawbacks of bionic interfacing is that we still don't have a very good technique for creating a two-way connection and allowing the patient to actually "feel" using a prosthetic limb.

One of the biggest drawbacks to the implantation of recording electrodes has been that they eventually become encapsulated by glial cells and scar tissue, the electrodes become less capable of recording, and the recordings become less precise.  This is one of the major reasons why the patients who initially test our new bionic limbs will only have the use of them for very short period of time.  However, some remarkable new techniques have been developed over the past several years which may make metal recording electrodes obsolete.

The first technique uses a system very similar to that which I reported previously, as a future direction for developing a prosthetic for the retina.  Healthy retina cells contain a pigment called "rhodopsin" which changes its shape when exposed to light.  The rhodopsin embedded in cell membranes of a "rod" or "cone" causes the cell to react to light by opening molecule-sized chemical channels and generating small electrical signals, much the same way neurons react to chemical and electrical stimuli. The new field of "optogenetics" inserts chemicals similar to rhodopsin (collectively termed "opsins") into cells to make them sensitive to specific wavelengths of light.  In the retina, this technique can be used to rebuild the light-sensitive cells that have been damaged by disease.  However, in other brain areas, it can also be used to insert the capability of stimulating cells using light instead of electricity.  The advantage to using optogenetics as a means of providing an interface from the machine back to the brain, is that the fiber-optic implants used to present the light stimulus are much less likely to produce inflammation and lead to scar tissue formation and gliosis of the electrode.  The disadvantage is that multiple electrodes using fiber optics do not yet exist, and the technique for inserting the opsins into brain cells is still subject to some controversy.

On the other hand, the second exciting new technique still uses light, but instead of requiring a specialized molecule inserted into the neuron, it relies on infrared wavelengths, which produce a very small amount of heat focused on single neurons.  The amount of infrared energy required to activate a neuron is considerably less than what would produce a measurable heating of the tissue around the infrared light source.  Thus, it may turn out to be possible to stimulate neurons using light, with or without specialized opsins.  With these two techniques at our disposal, what is needed now is a better way to record neural activity, and many of the same scientists using both optogenetics and infrared stimulation are looking for alternative recording techniques.

Electrode-less Interfaces

Not all BCIs require a direct interface with neurons.  Quite frequently in scientific literature, the interfaces based on electrodes implanted into are typically termed "brain machine interface" or BMI, while interfaces that operate "noninvasively" are called BCIs in contrast to the convention I have used in this article to call all interfaces BCIs. This is one reason why, when looking at the scientific literature, it can be a bit confusing to see reference to BMI versus BCI, without realizing that they are referring to essentially the same thing.

Noninvasive BCIs typically involve recording electroencephalograph information from the scalp, and using special amplifiers and processors to identify specific frequency components, and use that identification to drive a computer interface. The simplest such connection, is somewhat reminiscent of the "biofeedback" devices popular in the ‘70s. A biofeedback monitor is simply a single channel EEG amplifier connected to a filter for the "alpha" frequency waveform of EEG. Using a technique called fast Fourier transformation, the relative power or quantity of waveforms that fall in the alpha frequency band between 8 and 12 Hz is represented with a simple analog meter. The alpha frequency is associated with meditation, relaxation, and quiet concentration. The commercially available device from NeuroSky was originally designed to measure increases and decreases in alpha frequency, and provides a simple on-off switch for computer interface. Their current devices measure five different frequency ranges, and can produce differential outputs to a computer based on the ratio of EEG frequency. Like many brain machine interfaces, an EEG frequency-based BCI requires the user to train themselves to alter their EEG frequencies. As with biofeedback training, users learn how to produce active and quiet EEG through a process very similar to meditation.

More sophisticated BCI's are being developed, that use more than just the frequency of EEG to drive a computer interface. Increasing sophistication of a device such as NeuroSky, and the BCI2000 system pioneered by Gerwin Schalk, have begun to take multiple channels of EEG and look for the much finer detail which represents movement intention, and focused attention. The two processes are very similar. Research in the 1980s and ‘90s demonstrated that prior to an actual limb movement, areas of the brain involved in planning of movement became active several seconds before the movement. By mapping this activity, researchers could correlate the neural activity with the actual muscle activation, and control a robotic arm by "thought" alone. Such a finding is very important for developing a prosthetic to replace an amputated limb, since prosthetic movement needs to be controlled by the "intention" to move. On the other hand researchers also found that by focusing one's attention on the type of movements that they wish to make, they can also correlate brain activity with movement.

Difficult as it was to perform these analyses with electrodes implanted directly into the brain, it is even more difficult to select the information-containing components from EEG recorded from outside the skull. The more distant an electrode is located from the neural activity that it is to record, the weaker the signal, and the more noise or unrelated information can be recorded at the same time. EEG is a form of recording known as "volume conduction" in which the sum of all of the neural signals from a large volume is combined onto each electrode. The intervening skull and scalp also contribute to attenuation of the signal from specific brain areas. The best way to correct for these effects is to use multichannel EEG in which a dozen or more electrodes are placed onto the scalp, and signals can be localized by comparison between pairs of electrodes with different spatial orientation with respect to the brain area being recorded.  While this enables a finer detail and recording, it still does not compare to the detail that can be obtained with implanted electrodes. Neuroscience as a field is quite familiar with this problem. It is typically referred to as "the inverse problem" in that it requires reverse engineering the inputs (neural activity in specific brain areas) from the EEG output. It is a computationally intensive effort that has not yet been solved. However in the interim, devices such as that produced by NeuroSky and analysis platforms such as BCI 2000 to allow for derivation of information from the EEG Tech and be used to drive a computer or device.

Science, Science Fiction and BCIs

Brain computer interfaces of all types have application not only in bionics and prosthetics, but in providing communication and device control for quadriplegics and those suffering from debilitating neural diseases such as ALS. They are an important component not only of neuroscience but of rehabilitative medicine, and have the potential to teach us much more about the brain, than we have already learned in the process of developing these devices. Thus, the current state of the art in bionics, prosthetics, and brain machine interfaces is still fairly crude. This is not to say that it is not effective, or that it does not provide sufficient information to drive a prosthetic or an interface. It is simply that we are still a long way from the "Six Million Dollar Man" ideal of an interface directly from machines to the brain and from the brain to machines.

So what will it take to get to Brain Ships and bionic individuals? The simple answer is time-plus-money, but the more realistic answer is that the field needs more breakthroughs in means of recording from and stimulating neurons without wires. In The Ship Who Searched, there was little doubt that Hypatia Cade's "shell" and Doctor Kenny's "half shell" were extensively wired into the patient. SF in general has been much less squeamish about the idea of wires and electrodes than the general public, but then the advantage of writing (and reading) SF lies in not having to worry about gliosis and the useful lifespan of wires in the brain!

The wireless BCIs of James P. Hogan's The Genesis Machine or Realtime Interrupt represent the ultimate goal of neural prosthetics –- inductive or "noninvasive" connection between instrumentation and neurons. Current research using optical interfaces (optogenetics and infrared) have shown some ability to both record and stimulate, but often do not have the "bandwidth" to convey much information. Refinements of both our electronic and optical capability will certain accelerate progress. Other approaches, using magnetic resonance (similar to MRI machines) or direct measurement of minute magnetic fields may also lead to substitutes for "wiring" of electrodes into the brain. There is certainly a lot of information available either on the surface, or immediately outside the body, that could be read if we had the technology. Electroencephalography reads signals from the scalp that represent all of the activity in the brain. Unfortunately, it truly is all of the information at once, and we do not yet have the means of calculating just which portions of the EEG correspond to each desired brain area. Fortunately, this is primarily a matter of computer and information processing, and we twenty-first century humans excel at that!

How far are we away from true BCIs? From shellpersons? From the full-body interface of The Ship Who Searched? For that matter, virtually every "advanced" technology of the past century has turned into entertainment (laser cat toys, virtual reality, computer games, 3-D TV, wireless networks, smartphones, etc.) – so how far are we away from direct neural interfaces for entertainment? The first wearable bionic limbs are probably being tested even as I write –- and you read –- this article. I predict we will see the same time-scale for prosthetic limbs that we have seen with cochlear and retinal implants, that is, we will see fewer than one hundred patients over the next ten years, but hundreds of thousands over the next forty years.

Advancing beyond single limb prosthetics to a half-shell (exoskeleton) or a full shell prosthetic will require much more than the interfaces described in this article. A life-support shell will have to do just that – support the life of the subject but I predict we will have that capability before the end of the century. Broadband full-sensory interfaces will likely develop in parallel with life-support shells, but I predict they will probably take about 25 percent less time, since an interface will not require the life support of a shell. Thus, a half-shell or full-body interface will likely take about 70 years starting from current technology. Of course, as with any good SF, a radical scientific breakthrough would certainly trash my time-scale and speed things up!

I know the gamers among you are still wondering when we can use direct neural interfaces to play Halo 10! Well, the truth is that brain-controlled interfaces for computer "games" already exist in the form of the NeuroSky and Mattel Mindflex interfaces. In 2010, musician Robert Schneider created his "Teletron" to synthesize music using a BCI. BCIs as computer and game control devices are already here; however, inputs back to the brain may take a bit longer. The first sight and sound inputs will likely be reminiscent of Atari graphics, but my prediction is that we will start seeing BCIs for entertainment in 20-30 years.

Science fiction is around us every day. Neuroscientists are probably halfway to the technology required for BrainShips and Cyborgs. Fortunately for those of us in the field, we have both the optimistic and cautionary tales of SF to guide us. Once we accomplish these goals, we'll just have to rely on SF to establish the next set of goals – a bit further out!

Dr. Tedd Roberts, known to many science fiction fans as "Speaker to Lab Animals," is a research scientist in neuroscience. For the past thirty years, his research has concentrated on how the brain encodes information about the outside world, how that information is represented by electrical and chemical activity of brain cells, and the transformation of that information into movement and behavior. He blogs about his work here.

The Closest Extra-solar Planet to Earth:

What's Alpha Centauri Bb Like and How Can We Get There?

by Les Johnson

Alpha Centauri. For science fiction fans of a certain generation, and you know who you are, these two words evoke a sense of wonder and excitement at the prospect of traveling to another star. This is due primarily to one of the more campy television shows we watched in our youth – Lost in Space. Yes, for another generation there was a motion picture reboot of the same name for which I served as a technical consultant (no comments on the science in the movie please – the director simply ignored my advice) but it was not enough of a success at the box office to warrant a sequel.

For the more literary, there have been few extra-solar destinations that have inspired so many excellent science fiction novels as does the Alpha Centauri system. Here are but a few that make this author’s “best of Alpha Centauri” list and adorn the book shelf in my home library:

- Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov

- Encounter with Tiber by Buzz Aldrin

- Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh

- The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

- Voyage from Yesteryear by James P. Hogan

- Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

- The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino

- The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

- Factoring Humanity by Robert Sawyer

- Revolt on Alpha C by Robert Silverberg

- Starfire by David Weber and Steve White

And these are just the ones I’ve personally read in my years as a fan!

For those who are both fans and followers of science and astronomy discoveries, the news that an Earthlike planet has been found in the Alpha Centauri system probably sent chills down your spines. It certainly did mine. To understand and fully appreciate the significance of this discovery, some technical background is required.

Artist impression of the planet around Alpha Centauri B.

Image courtesy of European Southern Observatory.

First of all, despite the name, Alpha Centauri is not a single star. It’s a binary star with the official name of “Alpha Centauri AB.” A binary star is exactly what its name implies: two stars that are located close together, relatively speaking, and are gravitationally attracted to one another. Astronomers estimate that single stars, like our sun, comprise about two-thirds of all the stars in the galaxy with the remaining one-third being multiple stars, including binaries like Alpha Centauri AB. This is important because scientists once thought that it would be nearly impossible for binary stars to have planets in stable orbits due to the changing gravity they would feel as they orbited – one star would tug more on the planet at times than the other, causing instabilities that would prevent the planet from remaining in a single orbit for any significant length of time. They were wrong.

But wait, the star system gets more complicated. There is a third star, Alpha Centauri C, which appears to be connected gravitationally with Alpha Centauri AB. Alpha Centauri C is a red dwarf (meaning that it is much smaller and cooler than our sun) and although it is gravitationally bound to Alpha Centauri AB, it is some distance away. And Alpha Centauri C just happens to be the closest star to us. Astronomers now talk collectively about the entire three star system as Alpha Centauri AB-C.

Alpha Centauri A and B are particularly interesting for astronomers and science fiction writers because they are both very similar to our sun. If Sol, our sun, is “just right” for producing planets with life, then it would make sense that other similar stars could do the same. And since they are close, at least in astronomical distances – I wouldn’t call being ~25,278 billion miles away “close,” – any planets found there would be exciting and hugely significant. After all, if we ever achieve the ability to travel between the stars, Alpha Centauri AB-C would be our likely first destination and wouldn’t it be great if we found life there?

The relative sizes of the stars that make up the Alpha Centauri system.

Image courtesy of David Benbennick.

Astronomers have been detecting planets outside of our solar system since 1992 and there are now about eight hundred confirmed extrasolar planets and several thousand more found by NASA’s Kepler mission that are awaiting independent confirmation. I wrote about this topic in a recent Baen essay called “Rediscovering the Universe,” where you can learn about the various methods used to find these other worlds. If the discovery is independently confirmed, then we can add the planet Alpha Centauri Bb to that list.

The discovery of a planet circling one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri AB-C system was reported in the Journal Nature on October 17, 2012. The European Southern Observatory’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) project found the planet using their 11.8 foot telescope in Chile. Four years of measurements found that Alpha Centauri B is wobbling – wobbling regularly and in such a way that indicates it is being orbited by a planet. But don’t get too excited, Alpha Centauri Bb doesn’t sound like a nice place to visit.

Alpha Centauri Bb is just a little more massive than the Earth but it orbits way too close for life as we know it to exist. The Earth orbits the Sun at an average distance of 93 million miles. Alpha Centauri Bb is only 3.5 million miles from its parent star so the discovering science team estimates that its surface temperature is about 2240 degrees Fahrenheit. Another interesting bit of data is the length of its year, or the amount of time it takes to go around its parent star one time. For the Earth, one year is 365 days; for Alpha Centauri Bb one year is only about 3 days. Unless you are a Horta, you won’t find Alpha Centauri Bb a nice place to live – but it would still be a way cool place to visit.

There is a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. What do we do about it?

We go there, of course!Unfortunately, Alpha Centauri AB-C is about 4.3 light years distant. A light year is the distance light travels in one year; light travels at ~186,000 miles per second. The Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, is one of our fastest spaceships and it is on its way out of the solar system and into interstellar space. If it were pointed in the correct direction, which it is not, then it wouldn’t arrive in the Alpha Centauri AB-C system for another 74,000 years. Chemical rockets, the primary method we currently use to explore our solar system, are incapable of reducing the trip time to anything reasonable. We clearly need a new type of space propulsion. Fortunately, nature has provided us with some possibilities and none will require us to rewrite the laws of physics: matter/antimatter annihilation, nuclear fusion, solar and laser sails, and nuclear pulse propulsion systems. All are physically possible but they will be very, very hard to engineer.

A fusion driven starship enroute to Alpha Centauri Bb.

Image courtesy of Adiran Mann.

Matter/Antimatter Annihilation: Antimatter is real and is produced regularly by nature and by humans in our nuclear research facilities like the European’s CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). If large quantities of antimatter can be created, stored and safely controlled, then it could be used to propel a spacecraft to the stars. The annihilation of matter and antimatter is the most energetic reaction known and converts all of the reaction products’ mass into energy according to Einstein’s famous E=mc^2 equation. Unfortunately, it is beyond our current engineering capability to do any of these three so the total global production of antimatter remains under one nanogram or ~0.000000000002 pounds (yes, that is a lot of zeros!), it isn’t stored at all, and we have no idea if we can actually control it in any safe way. And, oh yes, to propel a starship to Alpha Centauri AB-C would require thousands of pounds of antimatter.

Nuclear Fusion: The Sun is powered by fusion, we can cause atoms to fuse in the laboratory, and fusion is what powers a hydrogen bomb. Several countries have been working for years to develop fusion energy for use in power plants and progress is being made. Unfortunately, as of this writing, we’re currently not getting more energy out of these fusion reactions than we put in to cause the reaction in the first place nor are the research facilities designed to lead to the compact fusion reactors that might actually be launchable into space someday. Nuclear fusion as an interstellar space propulsion system is closer to being real than antimatter based devices, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Solar and Laser Sails: A solar sail reflects light and gains momentum, hence velocity, from the interaction. They are typically made of large, lightweight reflective materials and many countries are working to develop the technology for robotic interplanetary travel. IKAROS, the world’s first interplanetary solar sail, was launched by Japan in 2010. If a very large solar sail (the size of Texas) were to be deployed very close to the Sun (inside the orbit of Mercury) in order to capture lots of light and get a big push, then it might make the trip to Alpha Centauri in a thousand years. If we were to put huge lasers into space (think the Death Star), then we could continue to push the sail as it departs our solar system, accelerating it to the point where a trip to Alpha Centauri AB-C might be possible within a hundred years of launch. Unfortunately, we don’t have the materials that are light enough, strong enough or temperature resistant enough to fly one of these sails; we don’t know how to make one the size of Texas and launch it; and we certainly don’t have any Death Star lasers ready to put into space. Alas.

Nuclear Pulse: Now this is a propulsion system we could probably build and use it to travel to Alpha Centauri Bb within only a few hundred years of launch. Originally known as Project Orion, the idea is simple: detonate small nuclear bombs underneath a very large ship equipped with radiation shields and a pusher plate (beneath which we would detonate the bombs) and off you go. The idea was actually studied extensively in the 1950s and ‘60s before it was canceled. To launch the starship, we’d likely end up trashing and radioactively polluting a large part of Earth. One could build it in space, but getting all that mass off the Earth in the first place would be a huge challenge. Nuclear pulse is an idea whose time has come – and gone.

So, without a breakthrough, we’re centuries away from having the technology to actually go there and check it out for ourselves. What else can we do?

A picture is the next best thing to being there, right? So why don’t we build a telescope to observe Alpha Centauri Bb and any other extrasolar planets of interest? Can we just point the Hubble Space Telescope toward it and take a look?

Despite being one of the brightest stars in the sky, without a telescope there is no way to see that the Alpha Centauri AB-C system is actually three stars. And, even if it were possible and if you are a reader in the northern hemisphere of the Earth, then you’d be out of luck anyway. Alpha Centauri AB-C is only visible from the southern hemisphere.

The Hubble is great telescope but it simply isn’t designed to see a relatively tiny planet orbiting another star, let alone image it with the kind of clarity we’d like to have. We’d like to use a telescope to not just glimpse the planet, but also to image it like we do the other planets on our solar system to answer some of these questions: Does it have an atmosphere? Are there oceans? What gases are in its atmosphere-- if it has one? And are there any signs of life?

Aside from having optics large enough to gather the light reflecting from the planet and traveling the immense interstellar distance to Earth, the telescope would have to see the planet’s reflected light without the glare of the star itself blinding it. Remember, from Earth, Alpha Centauri B and its planet are very close to each other and resolving them in the bright light of the star would be like trying to see a firefly flash while staring at a spotlight. To do this would require a telescope at least four times larger than the Hubble with a mirror several orders of magnitude more precise. Telescopes with this capability were assessed by NASA in their Terrestrial Planet Finder mission studies. Various ideas for blotting out the starlight have been proposed, including flying a large occulter that would block the light and cast a shadow on the telescope that is performing the imaging. These telescopes would help us find and study extrasolar planets, but they would not give us the view we’re really like to have.

My personal favorite approach is known at the Focal mission. The idea is to use an interesting aspect of Einstein’s General Relativity Theory, known as gravitational lensing. Light is constrained to move in space-time and space-time can be bent by the presence of mass. The larger the mass, the more the bending. Bending light is exactly what lenses do, using a different physical process, but the end result is the same – bending light can produce focused light. The mass of our Sun can bend light with a focus about 550 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun – or at about 51 billion miles. If we were to place a powerful telescope near this focus, then we could use the gravity bending of light by our sun to image the surface of Alpha Centauri Bb with unprecedented clarity. This mission would be challenging with today’s technology, but it is certainly far from impossible.

Artist concept of the Focal mission that would place a telescope beyond 550 Astronomical Units from the sun in order to image distant objects taking advantage of the Sun's ability to bend light.

Image courtesy of Adrian Mann.

Scientists and science fiction fans should be excited about the news that a planet orbits a star so close to home. Will we be able to go there in our lifetime to check it out? Unfortunately, barring a breakthrough, the answer is no. Will we be able to look at the planet? Perhaps, but not unless it becomes a higher priority on the agenda of space scientists. Will there continue to be exciting and thoughtful new books and movies that have setting on or near this nearby alien world? I certainly hope so!

Suggested Reading:

Deep Space Propulsion: A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight, by Kelvin Long

The Starflight Handbook by Eugene Mallove and Gregory Matloff

Going Interstellar edited by Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt

“The New Age of Exploration: Crazy Far,” National Geographic Magazine, January 2013

Copyright © 2013 by Les Johnson

Baen author Les Johnson is Deputy Manager for the Advanced Concepts Office at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Johnson is the coeditor of science and science fiction anthology Going Interstellar, and the coauthor with Travis S. Taylor of science fiction novel Back to the Moon, and of the forthcoming Rescue Mode, with Ben Bova.

Siberian Dawn:

Tapping Solar System Resources

Dr. Greg Matloff

Introduction: The Cosmos Comes to Earth

Modern civilization has many advantages. People live longer and are generally healthier than in past eras. Infant and child mortality are greatly reduced. More information is available than in any past century. And this can be accessed at the click of a mouse. In the not-too-distant past, most people never traveled more than a few miles from their place of birth.

But the inertia of the modern world is quite frustrating. Getting complex and sophisticated societies to change their ways apparently requires a present danger or visible catastrophe. The promise of eventual catastrophe or the lure of eventual riches just does not seem to work.

Such was the case a few weeks ago. Many people were aware that Near Earth Objects (NEOs)—celestial objects of asteroidal or cometary origin—occasionally strike the Earth. In parts of the world, some people followed the progress of asteroid 2012 DA14, which was scheduled to pass within 27,000 kilometers of the Earth on February 15, 2013. Only a small segment of the populace actively followed plans to divert Earth-threatening NEOs or mine them for their vast resources.

Peril or Promise? Space is big, but it’s not empty. Space mountains and icebergs also circle the Sun. Sometimes these comets and asteroids strike the Earth. One destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. A far smaller one struck Siberia in 1908 with an H-bomb’s force. We can protect our Earth from cosmic impacts. One approach is the Solar Collector. A mirror-like solar sail concentrates sunlight on the surface of the asteroid or comet. For comets and certain types of asteroids, a jet is energized. Reaction to this exhaust jet changes the solar orbit of the object. A catastrophic impact is averted. Small space objects could even be steered into high Earth orbit where they can be mined for their riches.

Copyright C Bangs.

All this complacency was about to change on February 15. We were due for such an event. At intervals of tens-of-millions of years, really large celestial objects—perhaps 5 -10 kilometers across strike the Earth. One of these struck in what is now the Yucatan about 65 million years ago. The horrendous environmental consequences resulting from the near-instantaneous release of the energy equivalent of a million thermonuclear bombs contributed to the extinction of many terrestrial life forms, including the non-feathered dinosaurs. The ascendancy of feathered dinosaurs (birds) and mammals (including humans) might never have occurred without this celestial visitation.

Smaller celestial objects strike the Earth at greater frequencies. City-killers, such as the one that struck Tunguska Siberia in 1908 with the force of a 5-megaton hydrogen bomb, reach Earth’s surface about once every century. In early 2013, we were overdue for another. By an amazing celestial coincidence, this one also targeted Siberia.

If the Feb. 15 meteorite that exploded above Chelyabinsk, Siberia had been much larger than 20 meters across, it would have reached the ground with devastating effects. As it was, the 500 kilotons of energy released in the sky during the air burst of this object (about 20 times the energy equivalent of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945).

As the celestial visitor streaked across the sky, thousands rushed to windows to view the fiery spectacle. What it the end of the world? Or was it an American secret weapon? Or perhaps it was the first stage of an alien invasion.

When the small asteroid vaporized, a shock wave was generated in the upper air. Broken window glass resulting from this pressure front was the cause of most property damage and injuries. Remarkably, although 1,200 were injured, no fatalities were reported.

One result of this widely publicized incident was the slow realization in US governmental circles that the NEO threat is real and immediate. With an interplanetary capability under development, perhaps we can practice our fledgling NEO diversion techniques in the near future. And this could lead to commercial application. The NEO threat might be converted into an activity that could improve the life of all terrestrials and assist in the development of an off-planet civilization.

In early March 2013, I was contacted by Les Johnson, who is affiliated with the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville Alabama. In 2007, I had participated in a study performed by Les’ team on how we might use our nascent interplanetary capabilities to divert an Earth-threatening asteroid or comet of moderate size—perhaps a few football fields across. Suddenly, the study was sprouting wings. The often-derided US House of Representatives was requesting input from the relevant agencies on how we might meet the NEO threat. Perhaps our early human ventures to the NEOs in around 2020 might even test some of these concepts. In these deficit-ridden times, Congress is to be encouraged and congratulated for rising to the challenge of protecting the home world from these celestial intruders.

Preventing NEO Impacts

In considering suggested approaches to diverting NEOs on Earth-threatening trajectories, it is worthwhile to first consider the classes of objects that might threaten our planet. Most or all solar system objects that might threaten our planet are classed as comets or asteroids.

Comets: Icebergs of the Sky

One celestial beast that could take us out, or at least cause serious damage, is a comet. Comets far from the Sun consist of a porous rocky nucleus perhaps a few miles across that is coated with layers of water, ammonia, and methane ice and dust. Close to the Sun, some of this stuff melts and forms the tenuous coma that surrounds the nucleus and the even more diffuse tail, which always (due to the pressure of sunlight) points away from the Sun. The coma might be ten thousand kilometers in diameter and is often visible from Earth. The tail is frequently tens of millions of kilometers long. But the tail is so diffuse that if were very patient and obsessive, you could probably pack it in your suitcase and carry it along on your next trip!

Our solar system may contain as many as a trillion comets. But luckily for Earth, most of them spend their entire existence in the frigid wastes beyond Neptune. Only a comparatively few are disrupted from their stable orbits on this so-called “Oort Comet Cloud” by passing stars or close planetary alignments to venture on elliptical paths into the inner solar system.

Although comets (because of their mass and high velocity) create quite a wallop when they strike a planet, they are actually quite fragile. One class of comets that closely approaches the Sun, the so-called Sun grazers, sometimes break apart or entirely evaporate during close solar approaches. In 1994, comet Shoemaker/Levy 9 became a temporary satellite of Jupiter. Before it impacted that giant planet’s atmosphere, it was observed to split into many smaller fragments (Fig. 1). The scars in Jupiter’s atmosphere from the impacts were visible for years.

Figure 1. Shoemaker/Levy 9 after its first Jupiter Encounter

Image courtesy of NASA.

Although ancient people considered a comet in the sky to be a bad omen and a comet might well have been the dino killer, there is a good side to these sky denizens. The oceans and atmosphere of our Earth are thought to be largely due to comet impacts early in the history of the solar system.

Deflecting an Earth-threatening comet will be challenging. Unlike asteroids that are mainly concentrated in or near the ecliptic plane, comets can approach from any direction and at any inclination. Impact warning time might be limited since an Earth-threatening comet might not be detected until it is close to our planet.

Asteroids: Threat and Opportunity

Figure 2. Asteroid 253 Mathilde photographed by NEAR probe in 1997

Image courtesy of NASA.

As is true for comets, asteroids have been explored by spacecraft and observed through telescopes (Fig. 2). We have learned that there are at least four classes of asteroids: iron-rich objects, stony asteroids, extinct comet nuclei and rubble piles. The dividing line between comets and asteroids seems very diffuse. At least one object, usually classified as an asteroid, occasionally displays a cometlike tail. Most meteorites in museum and university collections tend to be iron-rich, largely because these objects tend to survive the rigors of entry into Earth’s atmosphere and erode slowly in Earth’s atmosphere.

Most asteroids safely orbit in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Some have been captured as satellites of Jupiter and the other giant planets and others lead or follow Jupiter (and other planets) in their orbits at the gravitationally stable Lagrange-4 or Lagrange-5 points. But those of most interest to humans either to explore, defend against or for resource utilization, are the Near Earth Objects or NEOs.

Many government-funded and private searches search for and track NEOs. An up-to-date survey of this material is available on-line at a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/.

As of March 16, 2013, 10:30 AM Eastern Daylight Savings Time, a total of 9,688 NEOs were included in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory data bank. Of this sample, 434 are listed as NEOs that are potentially hazardous to the Earth, with impact risks over the next few centuries tabulated.

Because NASA and other space-related entities plan human missions to NEOs in the near future, 24 NEOs are listed as NHATS (Near Earth Object Human Space Flight Accessible Targets). These must have low inclinations to the ecliptic plane to reduce fuel requirements. All have, for a launch time in the interval 2015-2040, flight durations under 360 days with stay times greater than 8 days and velocity increments less than 6 kilometers per second.

The JPL NEO website also includes some discussion of the potential value of minerals in the asteroids. If we can economically tap the main-belt asteroids, the estimated cumulative mineral content of these objects could enrich every human by about $100 billion! More will be said about such forecasts later.

NEO searches are increasing in frequency and accuracy. Probably, we have reliable orbital information on most NEOs of ~1 kilometer dimension and many smaller ones. But small objects such as the Feb. 15, 2013 Siberian visitor, cannot be readily detected and tracked using today’s equipment. It should also not be assumed that published trajectory elements for small NEOs are accurate over the long run. Orbital perturbations including differential solar radiation pressure can result in small trajectory changes. So even though an Earth impact by a city-killer does not seem likely in the next few decades, the possibility cannot be ignored. For that reason, studies of methods of altering NEO orbits are receiving higher priority. Some of these may be tried in forthcoming robotic and human space missions to accessible NEOs.

Altering Asteroid & Comet Trajectories to Prevent Earth Impacts

Hollywood special effects experts like pyrotechnics, possibly because simulated explosions are exciting and they increase profits. For that reason, cinematic versions of human missions to divert Earth-threatening comets and asteroids usually feature the biggest bangs of all: thermonuclear weapons (often called “devices” in this era of political correctness).

The reader might initially suspect that this fictional approach is quite reasonable for application to a real-world situation. But nature is not always so agreeable. The following sub-sections consider advantages and disadvantages of nuclear device application to NEO solar-orbit modification as well as some of the suggested less dramatic alternative techniques. As the reader will see, some of the suggested approaches are also applicable to resource retrieval from NEOs

The Nuclear Option

The destructive potential of nuclear weapons is well understood. Even a relatively small thermonuclear weapon, detonated over a major city, will result in millions of deaths and immeasurable property damage. A larger device, such as the 20-30 megaton H-bombs tested by the US and USSR during the Cold War, could render much of a continent uninhabitable.

But a nuclear or thermonuclear detonation in space would be a totally different matter. There will be no mushroom cloud or shockwave in the airless vacuum. Instead, there will be a wave front containing gamma rays, followed by an intense flux of neutrons and electrically charged sub-atomic particles.

If the target object is a fragile comet, as was the case in the Hollywood film Deep Impact, the comet might fragment or “calve” into two or more smaller objects that still target the Earth. And these fragments would now be intensely radioactive! The same might be the result if the Earth-threatening object were a rubble pile.

Let’s say instead that the offending object is an asteroid composed of pure iron. Iron, like most metals, is a good conductor. The melting and boiling points of iron are respectively 1535 Celsius and 2750 Celsius. So much of the energy released in the nuclear blast might go to heat the NEO rather than altering its orbit or fragmenting it.

The nuclear option might be most effective in diverting a NEO with a dense nucleus that is coated with a dust layer. In such a case, the photon and particle flux might energize the dust layer and raise it in an escaping, high-velocity plume. By Newton’s Third Law, the reaction to that plume would alter the NEO’s solar trajectory.

Most of the alternative NEO deflection schemes discussed below require long impact warning times—years or decades. But if we discover a massive comet targeting the Earth, the warning time might be a lot shorter. Nukes might be the Earth defense of last resort.

Kinetic NEO Deflection

On January 12, 2005, NASA launched the Deep Impact probe towards Comet 9P/Tempel. After a successful injection into its interplanetary trajectory, the probe separated into two sections. One would crash at high velocity into the nucleus of the comet on July 4 of that year; the second would photograph the event.

The main purpose of this experiment was to gain additional understanding of the physical and chemical composition of comets. But a secondary benefit was a demonstration of a possible NEO deflection technique: kinetic deflection.

Imagine a solar sail spacecraft injected into a solar orbit near the Earth. Given a period of 1-2 years, it is possible to “crank” the sail’s orbit without the expenditure of fuel so that it is in a retrograde (reverse) solar orbit. If it encounters an Earth-threatening NEO in an orbit similar to the Earth’s, the relative velocity of the two objects will be about 60 kilometers per second!

It the sail is directed to smash into the NEO, both the linear momentum and energy transfer will be enormous. Provided that the Earth-impact warning time is sufficient, the alteration in the NEO’s orbit could convert and Earth impact into a near miss.

As with all suggested NEO deflection schemes, there are issues with kinetic deflection. Aim must be perfect, as must be our knowledge of the NEO’s solar orbit. And it won’t work with all classes of NEOs. A very loosely bound NEO, called a “rubble pile” would likely be fragmented, not diverted by the encounter. But kinetic deflection is conceptually simple and is certainly worthy of further study.

Foil Wrap and Paintballs

If the offending NEO is small or if Earth-impact warning time is measured in decades, Earth defenders might try a gentler solar sail approach. An astronaut crew or intelligent robot could place a reflective coating around the NEO in the form of wrapped foil or reflective paintballs. The increased reflectivity of the originally dark NEO would result in a higher linear momentum transfer from impinging solar photons. This solar reflection increase would gradually alter the NEO’s solar orbit and hopefully reduce the chances of an Earth impact.

This is not an ideal approach for larger NEOs or in the case of short warning times. But the technology is very simple.

The Gravity Tractor

Physicists have known for centuries that the Earth’s gravitational field produces an acceleration towards Earth’s center that is a constant and is independent of an object’s composition and mass. Anything with mass will produce a similar effect on other objects.

Consider a solar sail orbiting the Sun and using solar radiation pressure on the sail to maintain a constant distance from an Earth threatening NEO. According to Newtonian gravitational theory, the NEO will be attracted to the sail with an acceleration that is directly proportional to the Universal Gravitational Constant and the sail mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the sail and the NEO’s center of mass.

The gravity tractor will work with any type of NEO. Another advantage is that low-mass and high-mass objects will “fall” towards the sail at identical accelerations. But years or decades will be required to divert an Earth-threatening NEO. Since we have thus far only flown two solar sails in space, we need to know how rapidly a sail’s thin reflective layer will degrade in the interplanetary environment.

Mass Drivers and Rotary Pellet Launchers

During the 1970s, engineers considered a class of solar-powered machines that could be placed on the surface of a NEO and used either to alter a NEO’s solar orbit or launch NEO material towards Earth for industrial processing and application. The mass driver is a kind of electromagnetic catapult in which pellets of NEO material are magnetically levitated and accelerated to velocities in excess of 1 kilometer per second. Rotary pellet launchers accomplish the same task in a spinning mechanical object reminiscent of a huge slingshot.

Although these ideas have merit for NEO resource retrieval, they both require that an industrial infrastructure is established on the surface of the NEO. Also, it would likely be necessary to cancel NEO rotation for optimum operation. The first human visits to NEOs will probably not be able to test these concepts in practice.

Solar and Laser Collectors

If the threatening object is resource rich, such as an extinct comet and the Earth-impact warning time is at least a year, the solar and laser collectors are candidate NEO-deflection schemes. Both use a modified solar sail to collect lots of solar energy. The solar collector concentrates this energy in a “hotspot” on the rotating NEO’s surface in a manner analogous to a child using magnified sunlight to burn a hole in a sheet of paper. The laser collector uses sunlight to energize a laser that is directed towards the NEO.

In the case of a volatile-rich NEO, both devices will energize a jet of material from the NEO’s surface. By Newton’s Third Law (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) the energized jet will result in an alteration of the NEO’s solar trajectory.

For a volatile-rich object, Earth-impact warning times are not as stringent as for some other approaches. It is also possible that solar or laser collectors could be used to steer certain types of NEOs into high-Earth orbit for resource retrieval. If it is installed on a NEO’s surface, a solar collector could also be used to boil off material for separation and collection in a resource-mining process

But there are concerns regarding degradation of collector objects caused by the energized jet. And this approach will be useless in diverting large, iron-rich NEOs.

Robotic and Remote Exploration of Comets and Asteroids

Regardless of the method(s) we ultimately apply to divert and mine offending asteroids and comets, astronomers and planetary scientists use a number of tools to detect and explore them.

Most detection schemes involve small or medium size telescopes. Essentially, a star field is photographed at two different times. Objects that have shifted their location are likely asteroids or comets and are studied further with higher resolution equipment.

More than a few NEOs have been investigated using planetary radar. A collimated radio signal is transmitted from the aperture of a large radio telescope (such as the 305-meter dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico). The reflected radiation from the NEO is intercepted by the radio telescope and analyzed. A fair amount of information regarding rotation rate, large surface features, and basic composition can be obtained in this fashion.

Starting in 1986 when a flotilla of robotic spacecraft originating in Europe, Japan, Russia and the US flew near or through Halley’s Comet, the major space agencies have launched many probes to the vicinity of these small solar system bodies.

As of March 2013, probes from the aforementioned nations and China have flown by, orbited, landed upon, or impacted seven main belt asteroids, two NEOs, two Mars-crossing asteroids, and seven comets. In 2001, the US Near probe accomplished the first soft landing on a NEO, 433 Eros. In 2010, the Japanese Hayabusa returned a small sample of material from another NEO, 25143, to Earth. Samples were returned from a comet’s coma in 2006 by NASA’s Stardust probe.

In 2014, NASA’s Dawn probe is scheduled to orbit 1 Ceres, a large main-belt asteroid. Also in 2014, the European Rosetta probe is scheduled to land softly on the nucleus of a comet.

But a few years after these milestones are accomplished, the nature of deep-space exploration is scheduled to take a dramatic new turn. Starting around 2020, NASA and several private entities plan to conduct human visits to suitable NEOs. These flights and practice missions to lunar space will be the first time since 1972 that humans have ventured above near Earth orbit.

Humans to the NEOs: Two Scenarios

Sky Gems: We can sail to the asteroids, explore and map them, survey their resources. But asteroids have already reached the Earth, classified as meteorites in our museums. Under high-energy ultraviolet light, meteorite segments glow brilliantly. No longer dull, mineral deposits in minerals emit green, yellow, and red light.

Copyright C Bangs.

With the retirement of the NASA space shuttles some months ago, many believe that human interplanetary aspirations have become moribund. These beliefs are far from the truth.

Recently, a number of options have appeared for human exploration and exploitation missions beyond the confines of the Earth-Moon system. Some are government-sponsored programs; others are privately funded initiatives. Before we consider two of these approaches, it is worthwhile to consider why we seem to be bypassing the Moon.

In the 1960s, many US and USSR robots explored the surface of our planet’s natural satellite. Three Apollo crews circled or orbited the Moon and six of these missions touched down on the lunar surface. Hundreds of kilograms of lunar samples were returned to Earth and much scientific data were collected. It would seem that a natural follow-on to this Cold War effort would be the partial colonization of the Moon and exploitation of lunar resources.

But there are a number of problems with this. One is the lunar day-night cycle. Unlike the 24-hour Earth day, our satellite experiences 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness. A solar-powered lunar power grid would be difficult to develop and maintain unless it were located in certain polar regions of perpetual light. So unless nuclear fission plants were incorporated into a human infrastructure on the Moon, Lunarians would have to adjust to long distance power transmission.

Another problem is water. Although we now realize that there is a great deal more water than originally suspected to exist on our planet’s natural satellite, most of this is concentrated in polar craters perpetually shaded from the Sun. So either we locate our lunar colony close to the poles or we arrange for transport of water as well as transmission of electricity.

Humans living on the Moon must also contend with the fact that lunar gravity is about 16 percent that experienced by terrestrial life forms. We simply don’t know how well people would readjust to terrestrial gravity after living in a lunar domed city for a period of years.

In addition, there is the economics of lunar settlement. As well as developing heavy lift launch vehicles and spacecraft qualified for interplanetary flight, agencies seeking to develop the Moon must also develop spacecraft capable of descending to and ascending from the lunar surface. Also, habitation modules and lunar rovers must be constructed and maintained on the lunar surface.

Finally, if lunar mining is attempted for the benefit of the Earth, lunar resources must be rocketed, catapulted or in some other way lofted into space from the lunar surface. Even though a lunar round trip takes less than two weeks, as opposed to the many months required to visit and return from a NEO, expeditions to appropriate near Earth asteroids and extinct comets require less propulsive energy in many cases than lunar ventures. When this is coupled with the fact that we must begin to alter the orbits of Earth-threatening NEOs if our global civilization is to survive, advocates of early NEO missions seem to have the upper hand in their competition with those who favor lunar development.

Human-occupied spacecraft visiting a NEO will dock with rather than land upon the low-gravity object. Unlike lunar explorers, they will live aboard their interplanetary spacecraft during the NEO visit rather than requiring a surface habitat. The solar panels of their spacecraft combined with on-board fuel cells should be adequate for electricity requirements on the NEO since the rotation period of many NEOs is measured in hours. But unlike lunar explorers, astronauts exploring a NEO will have to take care that a false step does not propel them to a velocity sufficient to orbit or escape the low-gravity object. In many ways, exploring a NEO will be a logical outgrowth of our experience constructing and living aboard the International Space Station.

The Government-Sponsored Option: NASA’s Planned NEO Visits

Figure 3. Two Configurations of the Space Launch System

Image courtesy of NASA.

We first consider NASA’s current approach to NEO visits by astronauts. Even though other space agencies have interplanetary plans, it must be admitted that NASA should be considered first since after all, NASA astronauts of the Apollo program are the only humans to date who have actually visited a solar system object other than the Earth. But in this era of large deficits and political dysfunction, we must all realize that NASA’s interplanetary ambitions will not necessarily come to pass.

The NASA plans to venture beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) depend upon the Space Launch System (SLS), a two-stage, shuttle-derived heavy-lift launch vehicle currently under development (Fig. 3). According to Wikipedia, the SLS will have several configurations and be capable of placing 70,000-129,000 kilograms in LEO.

Human crews numbering 2-6 per space mission will ride aboard a Multi-Purpose Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) capable of a mission duration of 21 days, if extra supply modules are not attached to the core spacecraft. Unlike the space shuttle, the partially-reusable CEV is designed to perform an ocean landing using parachutes.

A number of CEV/SLS missions are under consideration including visits to Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO), lunar fly-bys and orbits, visits to Earth-Moon gravitationally stable Lagrange points and trips to nearby NEOs. NEO trips under study include two that could be launched in 2026. One would entail a 155-day roundtrip to NEO 1999 AO10 with a 14-day stay time. The other would be a 304-day mission to NEO 2001 G82.

In collaboration with Boeing, NASA is also considering a 2024 mission to NEA2008 EV5. This mission would require 100 days for the outbound flight, 30 days for exploration and 235 days for the Earth return.

The CEV is designed to be at least ten times safer than the space shuttle. The capsule, which is manufactured by Lockheed-Martin, has a mass of about 8,900 kilograms. The service module is supplied by the European Space Agency (ESA) and is based upon the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) that has been used to resupply the International Space Station. The mass of the service module is about 12,000 kilograms. The service module rocket motor is equipped with about 7,900 kilograms of fuel and is capable of a velocity increment of about 1.6 kilometers per second.

Falcon-9 Heavy, Dragon and Mr. Bigelow: A Non-Governmental Alternative

As NASA (and other US government agencies) have encountered funding issues in recent years, NASA has off-loaded its ferry service to resupply (and eventually recrew) the International Space Station to several private corporations. The most successful of these efforts to date is the Dragon capsule, which is orbited by the Falcon-9 booster. Both have been developed by the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (more commonly referred to as Space-X).

Figure 4. A Space-X Dragon at the International Space Station

Image courtesy of NASA.

The Dragon spacecraft is currently used for operational, unscrewed resupply missions to the International Space Station (Fig. 4). According to Wikipedia, it has a dry mass of about 4,200 kilograms and can carry a payload of 3,300 kilograms. Dragon is designed to endure the space environment for 1 week to 2 years. Currently equipped for parachute-aided water landings, future variants may use retro rockets to accomplish landings on the ground. Future crewed versions will be capable of accommodating as many as seven astronauts.

The booster for the Dragon is the very reliable, two-stage Falcon-9. Falcon-9 can place up to 13,000 kilograms in LEO. Partial reuse is possible since future versions of the first stage will be equipped with parachutes.

Space-X is developing a heavy lift launch vehicle based upon the Falcon-9. Called the Falcon-9 Heavy, this rocket will be capable of launching up to 53,000 kilograms to LEO. It will consist of a standard Falcon-9 first stage with two additional Falcon-9 strap on boosters.

If Falcon-9 Heavy is as reliable as Falcon-9, this Space-X booster could project a modified Dragon on an exploratory mission to a suitable NEO. Probably two Falcon-9 launches and rendezvous in orbit will be required for a mission to a NEO. The Dragon would require a more elaborate heat shield because of the higher reentry velocity experienced by an interplanetary-capable craft. A habitat/service-module might be based upon one of the Bigelow inflatable modules and an additional propulsive stage is necessary.

Other private space companies will almost certainly announce NEO-visit plans in the near future. Certainly, one of the government-sponsored or private interplanetary concepts will be ready for application before 2025.

Resources in the NEOs

Robotic probes of increasing sophistication will visit selected NEOs in the not very distant future. Within perhaps as little as a decade, these probes will be followed by the first human explorers. The first priority of these missions will be learning about aspects of NEO composition of interest to designers of impact mitigation and prevention schemes. But if we have to divert some of these celestial objects to protect the Earth, we can certainly steer them into high Earth orbit where they will be more readily accessible to astronaut teams. A survey of NEO resources is in order.

The first resource of interest is rock, which may serve to shield orbital and deep space outposts and human-occupied spacecraft from galactic cosmic radiation. There is certainly an abundance of this material in even a small NEO. Consider a spherical NEO with an average density of 2,000 kilograms per cubic centimeter and a radius of 50 meters. The mass of this object is about a billion kilograms!

Another in-space resource of great interest is water. This will be of use for life support (drinking, agriculture and hygiene) and can be dissociated using solar energy into oxygen and hydrogen. The resulting oxygen will find application in life support since humans and other animals consume this gas in respiration. The oxygen and hydrogen can be used to store energy in fuel cells and recombined as the most effective known chemical rocket fuel combination.

As discussed in the following section, there is at least one terrestrial application for raw asteroidal rock. Many studies have been performed of the material composition of meteorites in museum and private collections. Since it is likely that many of these objects originated among the NEOs, silicon will be another major expected constituent of NEO material. And NEO-derived silicon has application to electronics both in space and on the Earth.

The Earth and other major planets are differentiated, meaning that heavier metals tend to be rare near the surface and more common in lower layers. Since asteroids have lower interior pressures and probably coalesced by collisions of smaller bodies early in the history of the solar system, rare and valuable metals such as platinum may be more common in certain NEOs than in Earth’s crust. Diamonds are precious because of their rarity and formed deep beneath Earth’s surface when graphite and similar forms of carbon are compressed under high pressure. The same process may have occurred when carbon-rich NEOs collide and coalesce with other asteroids.

Some have suggested that early NEO miners may become rich by steering diamond- and platinum-rich bodies to impact the Earth in desolate, remote locations (perhaps Siberia?). There seems a bit optimistic regarding the operation of national and international commodities markets demonstrated in these suggestions. If markets were suddenly flooded by a million kilograms of platinum and/or diamond, these resources could no longer be considered rare and precious. Their value would crash almost immediately unless new applications were developed at about the same rate that resources become available.

It might make more sense to remove the precious commodity from the NEO in space and return it to Earth’s surface in a controlled and gradual fashion. Much thought has been devoted to the extension of terrestrial mining techniques to the NEOs.

The mineral wealth soon to become available in the NEOs is enormous. It will be interesting to see whether a “NEO-rush” analogous to the Gold Rush of 1849 develops as human capabilities to reach and exploit these objects improves.

What Might We Do With These Resources?

Cosmic Factories: In all the solar system, only the Earth lives. There may be simple life on Mars, beneath the hydrocarbon clouds of Titan, or the frozen oceans of Europa. But the Moon is sterile, as are the comets and asteroids. Can we move polluting industries to space? Can we mine the near cosmos for raw material? Can we build space factories to process the stuff, and protect our Biosphere from industrial pollution? The answer is YES. If we have the will, if we have the vision.

Copyright C Bangs.

Almost certainly, the availability of NEO resources will begin to affect economies and lifestyles within a few decades. Can we predict likely applications?

Although new terrestrial applications for NEO material will certainly arise as this stuff becomes available in quantity, some possibilities have been explored. Most of these deal with energy production and climate control.

Space-Based Solar Power

The best explored terrestrial application for NEO material is space-based solar power. Let’s say that the Global Power Authority of the late 21st century desires to supply a substantial fraction of human energy requirements using solar power beamed from space, say 1.4 X10 to the thirteenth watts. One way to do this would be to construct a huge, thin-film array of silicon photovoltaic cells in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) above the equator. Energy would be beamed down using microwaves or laser wavelengths that readily pass through the Earth’s atmosphere.

The solar constant, or solar power per unit area striking an object facing the Sun near Earth is about 1,400 watts per square meter. If the efficiency of the energy collection and transmission system is 10 percent, 1.4 X 10 to the fourteenth watts of solar power are required, which implies an array area of 10 to the eleventh square meters. A square array in GEO would have a dimension of about 300 kilometers—large but not beyond the bounds of reason.

The specific gravity of silicon is about 2.3. If the array thickness is a conservative 10-4 meters, the volume of the array is 10 to the seventh cubic meters and its mass is about 2.3 X 10 to the tenth kilograms.

Gerard K. O’Neill is his classic The High Frontier estimates that about 20 percent of typical Moon rock mass is silicon. If this is true for typical NEOs, we require a NEO mass of about 10^11 kilograms to support this energy program. Assuming that the NEO’s specific gravity is 2, the NEO’s radius must be a bit more than 200 meters. There are very many NEOs in this size range and more than a few of them approach the Earth.

Economics and advances in launcher technology might put a damper on the prospects of large-scale application of NEO resources to construct solar power satellites in GEO. It is not impossible that advances in reusable heavy-lift launch vehicles and photovoltaic cell efficiency, lifetime and mass reduction might make Earth-launch of these huge satellites competitive with space manufacture.

Helium-3 for Thermonuclear Fusion Reactors

A second potential energy-related application of NEO resources relates to controlled thermonuclear fusion. Early fusion reactors that might come on line within the next few decades will probably burn a combination of two heavy hydrogen isotopes: deuterium and tritium. Although this fuel mixture is relatively easy to ignite, it has a major drawback. Lots of thermal (high-speed) neutrons are emitted in the process and these result a great deal of radioactivity.

The neutron flux from a fusion fuel mix composed of deuterium and a low-mass form of helium called helium-3 would be greatly reduced and second-generation fusion reactors may be capable of burning these reactants efficiently. The drawback is that helium-3 is exceedingly rare on Earth.

Some authors have suggested that we could obtain this isotope in sufficient quantities by strip mining the Moon, since helium-3 nuclei are present in the flux of electrically charged sub-atomic particles emanating from the Sun (the solar wind). As John Lewis suggests in Mining the Sky, another possible source is the atmospheres of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The NEOs are closer to home. Since we have to move some of them to protect the home planet, it is worth checking the dust and soil that may shroud some NEOs to determine the concentration of helium-3 deposited by the solar wind.

The L-1 Sunshade

Blocking the Sun: Climate change is real. We may argue about how much is caused by humans and how much is caused by nature. But we are not helpless. One option is the Sunscreen. Since we may move asteroids to prevent Earth impacts, could we disassemble one and locate it appropriately to block some of the sunlight striking Earth? We might reduce erosion in this way. We might save the polar caps. But will people never change their ways? If a technology is developed to reduce global warming??

Copyright C Bangs.

Almost all climatologists agree that Earth is warming and that human activity is a significant contributor to this climate change. Much of the public discourse seems to center upon what to do about this problem.

Although it is true that the United States has been a major consumer of fossil fuels and a producer of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, the major climate problem for the future may not rest with the US and other developed nations. Instead, much of the future consumption of fossil fuels may be by citizens of developing economies such as China and India. Even if the US, Europe and Japan become totally green energy consumers, the problem of global climate change may be with us for decades.

For that reason, planetary engineering concepts have been proposed. These include seeding our planet’s upper atmosphere with aerosols (small particles) to block some of the incoming sunlight. Such geo-engineering proposals are quite controversial, largely because they would be difficult to terminate if things went wrong.

One possibility that could utilize NEO resources and be easier to control is the L-1 sunshade. Lagrange-1, or L-1, is a gravitationally stable location about 1.5 million kilometers closer to the Sun than the Earth. Objects at L-1 in the Earth-Sun system tend to maintain their position with a minimum of course adjustment.

A proposed method of alleviating climate change is to disassemble a NEO, convert it into a thin-film hundreds or thousands of kilometers across and place it at L-1 to partially reduce the amount of sunlight striking the Earth.

This sunshade could be moved if it were required to stop or reduce the climate-cooling process. Also, the sunshade could be coated with photovoltaic cells constructed using NEO material and beam copious quantities of solar energy to Earth.

Although the sunshade sounds like a win-win proposition, it does have its critics. If citizens of our planet become convinced that a technological fix such as the L-1 sunshade can solve the global climate-change problem, they may elect to continue consuming fossil fuels at a prodigious rate.

Conclusions: Risks of Developing a NEO-Based Civilization

To preserve and expand our global civilization, it is imperative that we alter the solar trajectories of Earth-threatening NEOs. We cannot do much to prevent Earthquakes, tsunamis, super volcanoes, cosmic gamma-ray bursts and other catastrophes that might threaten civilization. But preventing NEO impacts will soon be feasible.

If we can visit and divert these celestial bodies, it is inevitable that some public or private agency will steer one into Earth orbit and begin to tap its resources. Using NEO material for cosmic-ray shielding, habitat construction and rocket fuel, a NEO-based civilization may develop.

This may have a character not unlike Larry Niven’s “Belters” from his future-history stories. Raw materials may come in such a scenario from the NEOs. These might be traded for luxury items produced on Earth.

The downside to this might be conflicts between terrestrials and NEO-dwellers in which the principal armament would be small NEOs engineered as kinetic weapons. In such an unpleasant scenario, the February 15, 2013 Chelyabinsk event would pale into insignificance. Let us hope that human wisdom keeps up with human technology!

Further Reading

The results of the 2007 NASA Marshall Space Flight Center study on NEO deflection have been published in R. B. Adams, J. W. Campbell, R.Hopkins, S. Smith, W. Arnold, M. Baysinger, T. Crane, P. Capizzo, S. Sutherlin, J. Dankovich, G. Woodcock, G. Edlin, J. Rushing, L. Fabisiniki, D. Jones, S. McKamey, S. Thomas, C. Maccone, G. Matloff, and J. Remo, “Continuing efforts at MSFC to develop mitigation technologies for Near Earth Objects”. Presented at the AIAA/Aerospace Corporation 2007Planetary Defense Conference, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., March 5-8, 2007.

A classic source on the prevention of NEO and comet impacts is T. Gehrels, ed., Hazards Due to Comets & Asteroids, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ (1994). For additional information on impact prevention and mining techniques, another source is J. Remo, ed., Near-Earth Objects: The United Nations International Conference, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 822, (1997).

One excellent source on solar system resource availability is J. S. Lewis, Mining the Sky, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA (1996). To check out early research on space habitats, mass drivers and space based solar power, see G. K. O’Neill, The High Frontier, Morrow, NY (1977).

The possibility of diverting Earth-threatening NEOs using foil wrap, from which the paint ball concept is derived, is discussed in G. L. Matloff, “Applying International Space Station and Solar Sail Technology to Explore/Divert Small, Dark NEOs,” Acta Astronautica, Vol. 44, 151-158 (1999). For more information on the gravity tractor, the reader is encouraged to consult E. T. Lu and S. G. Love, “Gravitational Tractor for Towing Asteroids,” Nature, Vol. 438, 177-178 (2005).

A recent paper on the solar collector that cites earlier work on this NEO-diversion technique is G. L. Matloff, “Deflecting Earth-Threatening Asteroids Using the Solar Collector: An Improved Model,” Acta Astronautica, Vol. 82, 209-214 (2013). A less technical; review of this approach and other NEO-deflection schemes by the same author is in the April 2012 issue of IEEE Spectrum.

Three of the scientists who have investigated the L-1 sunshade concept are K. Roy, T. Kennedy and D. Fields. They contributed a chapter to L. Johnson, G. L. Matloff and C Bangs, Paradise Regained: The Regreening of the Earth, Springer-Copernicus, NY (2010). A recent paper of theirs on this topic is in the February 2013 issue of Acta Astronautica.

Copyright © 2013 by Dr. Greg Matloff

Non-NASA art, Copyright © 2011 C Bangs and Dr. Greg Matloff

Dr. Gregory Matloff is Associate Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of Physics at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. He is a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, a Hayden Associate of the American Museum of Natural History, and a Full Member of the International Academy of Astronautics. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 research papers and nine books, and is known for his pioneering theoretical work on the concept of solar sails. His most recent popular science essays can be found in Baen Books’ Going Interstellar, edited by Jack McDevitt and Les Johnson. Featured art images are from artist/scientist collaborative book Biosphere Extension: Solar System Resources for the Earth. This book is included in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum’s artist books.

Evidence of Things Unseen:

Why Not dark matter?

by Les Johnson

Figure 1. Shown are the galaxies making up galaxy cluster 1E 0657-66. On either side of the center, the pink clumps show hot gas detected by NASA’s Chandra x-ray observatory. Just outside this gas are regions where the bulk of the matter resides (shown in blue). This matter, detected via gravitational lensing, shows where the dark matter that makes up most of the mass of the cluster lies.

(Image courtesy of NASA.)

In the “eye” of a hurricane, the sea level rises precipitously. Your ears “pop” as you rapidly rise in the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building in New York City. Air pressure.

The compass needle spins and settles pointing north – an unseen force acts to align the iron-containing needle in a northerly direction no matter where you are in the northern hemisphere. Magnetism.

The water runs down the hillside toward the pond below. The Earth flies through space at about 67,000 miles per hour tracing a circular path around the Sun and doesn’t fly off into deep space. Gravity.

Two pieces of uranium are brought together under controlled conditions and they begin to grow warm and give off heat. They are brought rapidly together in a unique geometry and they explode, producing a “nuclear” explosion. Radiation.

The velocities of stars orbiting the centers of galaxies, rather than decreasing as a function of distance as would the velocities of planets orbiting a star, remain constant out to the edge of the galaxy. Gravity bends space-time, causing light to focus when it passes by a massive object, allowing scientists to measure of the mass of the object bending the light in a process called Gravitation Lensing; The bending of light is much, much larger around celestial objects than expected. dark matter.

In our everyday lives we are used to working with things our senses don’t directly perceive. You don’t have trouble believing that the lights will come on in a room when you enter and flip a switch on the wall. Do you see the electricity flow through the wires to the light over your head? Or do you see the effects of the electricity acting on the components in the fixture that produces the light? You get in your car and expect it to move once the engine is started and you press the gas pedal. Do you see the chemical bonds in the gasoline breaking and reforming into carbon dioxide and water as they release energy? No, you see the effects of the chemical reaction as heat and motion. I could go on and on. We directly perceive very little of the physical world around us, yet we have a fairly good understanding of it by observing the secondary or tertiary effects of its interactions with the parts of the world we do perceive.

So why should it be different with dark matter? Is it because of its unfortunate name? “Dark” implies mystery and, perhaps something evil and malevolent. Would we have the same visceral skepticism of its existence if it had been originally steeped in scientific sounding jargon and called “non-baryonic matter?” Or is our reaction to the currently ill-understood science of dark matter rooted in the fact that is not yet fully understood nor easily explainable? After all, in our everyday lives, modern science and engineering has done a pretty good job of explaining and making use of gravity, air pressure, magnetism and electricity to give us the modern conveniences that define the 20th and 21st centuries: air travel, computers, medicine, cell phones, etc. and we don’t yet have a link between dark matter and the latest gizmo that someone is trying to sell us? Personally, as a physicist, I think my initial skepticism of the existence of dark matter is rooted in the sheer amount of the dark matter thought to exist and a faint hope that perhaps we don’t yet have a good understanding of physics. Perhaps explaining dark matter will turn our understanding of physics on its head and allow us to find a way to cheat the laws of physics and travel faster than light. Yes, that is a stretch and a faint hope, but it was nonetheless at the core of my initial skepticism.

Scientists now believe that dark matter accounts for about 84 percent of the matter in the universe. In other words, when you look into the sky and add up the mass of the planets, the Sun, all the stars (many of which, we now know, have planets circling them), the black holes, pulsars and quasars you will have only accounted for about 16% of the mass that should be there – if our understanding of gravity and its effects are correct. Something different (not made of protons, neutrons, electrons and their subatomic constituents) and unseen appears to be here with us normal matter types. We cannot see it, hear it or touch it, but we can see its effects just as we can see the effects of magnetism and radiation – though we cannot see them directly either.

Before delving into the history of dark matter, I would like to address the caveat I made above, “– if our understanding of gravity and its effects are correct.” There is always a chance that our understanding of gravity is fundamentally wrong. The history of science is one of ‘final theories’ being found to be incomplete or incorrect and a new “final Theory” coming along to explain what others before had failed to explain. It would be arrogant to say that we know, beyond a shadow of doubt , that we now have a final-for-all-time theory and understanding of anything, let alone gravity. What we can say is that in virtually all other areas where gravity’s effects are measureable, our current theories seem to explain them very well and there is no other reason (other than the observation of dark matter, that is) to doubt that our understanding of gravity is either or wrong or incomplete.*

Being in the “space business,” I of course look toward our experiences in spaceflight to find evidence of in support of my assertion that we really do have a very good practical understanding of how gravity works. We’re able to launch spacecraft from the Earth and successfully have them land on other planets within a few miles of where we intended – across distances of hundreds of millions, if not billions of miles between launch and landing. For example, the Mars Curiosity Rover launched at 10:02 am Eastern Standard Time on November 26, 2011. It then flew approximately 350 million miles to reach Mars and landed at 1:31 Eastern Daylight Time on August 6, 2012 -- within 1.5 miles of where it was supposed to land. Another example is the Gravity Probe B mission, launched into Earth orbit in 2004, which successfully measured predictions resulting from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. To do so, it measured very small changes in the spin direction of four gyroscopes resulting from the Earth warping space-time and the planet’s rotation ‘dragging’ space-time around with it.

On a more everyday level, we demonstrate a thorough understanding of gravity’s effects in the way we build houses, skyscrapers, bridges and just about every other construction in the world. It affects our choice of building materials, overall design and the way we landscape so as to avoid flooding (water runs downhill – due to gravity – after all!). Physicians model the effects of gravity on the human body, and NASCAR drivers must take it into account when they decide to accelerate on the racetrack. There is scarcely an activity performed by humans that doesn’t rely on an implicit or explicit understanding of gravity’s effects. Our science and engineering seems to work pretty well here on Earth and, by extension, to the rest of the universe we observe when we look through our telescopes. And then there’s the problem of the missing mass…

Figure 2. The Coma Cluster consists of thousands of galaxies within a 20 million light year volume of space.

(Image courtesy of NASA.)

In the 1930s, an astronomer named Fritz Zwicky noted that the velocity of the outermost galaxies in cluster of distant galaxies was much higher than it should have been. So high, in fact, that the galaxies should have long-ago broken free of their gravitational orbits around the central galaxies and flown off into space. When he looked at the brightness of the stars in the cluster and estimated the amount of mass within them, it didn’t add up. He estimated that there must be at least four hundred times more mass than was visible to account for the velocities he measured. We’ve since narrowed the gap by taking more accurate measurements and by taking into account the black holes, neutron stars and other exotic objects unknown in Zwicky’s time – and the discrepancy is now down to a factor of five. A factor of two could just be the result from a measurement or calculation error. A factor of five is simply too large to ignore. Since then, there have been numerous other measurements of many different astronomical objects and all of them show a discrepancy between the amount of matter this is directly observed and what must be there according to the observed gravitational effects. The plot has thickened as scientists looked in other ways for the missing mass.

While dark matter does interact gravitationally, its effects are not noticed unless we are making observations on scales the size of galaxies or larger. It is thus either so diffuse that the effects are not noticeable on the scale of a single solar system (not to mention the scale of a planet), or it represents some phenomenon which comes into play on a galactic scale, or some combination of the two. The plot thickens.

Most regular (non-“dark” matter interacts gravitationally and electromagnetically. We’ve discussed how dark matter’s existence is inferred by its gravitational effects, so the obvious next question is “can we see it in other ways?” Regular, everyday matter is observable electromagnetically, especially in large quantities. It reflects, absorbs or alters in some way the electromagnetic radiation that impinges upon it. When I say electromagnetic radiation, it is okay to think of ordinary light, though I am referring to frequencies of light across the spectrum, including not only visible light, but also radio, microwaves and infrared. Usually, indeed almost all the time, matter will affect electromagnetic radiation in some way. You’d think that if there were five times the mass in a galaxy or group of galaxies out there, we would see it. We don’t. The light of more distant galaxies isn’t dimmed as it passes by, as it would be if it were passing through clouds of gas in deep space. The light from the galaxies themselves appears unattenuated, and it most certainly would be reduced in brightness if it were passing through that amount of ordinary matter. Clearly, dark matter is radically different from the matter than that we used to seeing and working with. What’s up with that?

For a while, some scientists thought that the missing mass might be in form of neutrinos. Neutrinos are exotic particles to be sure, but there simply aren’t enough of them to account for the missing mass of the universe. Neutrinos are very small particles (small meaning that they have a very small, nearly unmeasurable mass) that travel near the speed of light and don’t interact with matter electromagnetically. It is the last feature that had some thinking they might account for the missing mass. dark matter doesn’t interact electromagnetically and neither do neutrinos, therefore they must be the same thing. They were wrong. Neutrinos do interact with matter via the weak nuclear force and it is through this interaction that they have been detected and counted. Deep underground (about 8600 feet down) in Canada, researchers at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory measure the flux of neutrinos coming from the Sun and other, more distant objects. Since they only interact with matter in one way, and since the likelihood of a neutrino interacting with the detector is very small, researchers had to place the detector deep under the mass of the Earth in order to reduce the background signals from cosmic rays – which are comprised of normal matter and would overwhelm their instruments as noise. Based on measurements from Sudbury and other, similar observatories, we now know that about 65 billion solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of space near the Earth each and every second. The key here is that though neutrinos only weakly interact with normal matter, they do interact with it. If you then add up the estimated number of neutrinos in the universe and add their mass to the balance sheet, you still come up five times short of what must be there to account for the gravitational observations. Even the exotic neutrino is, in fact, made from normal matter.

dark matter isn’t made from protons, neutron, electrons or the myriad subatomic particles from which they are made (neutrinos, muons, quarks, gluons, etc.). No, dark matter must be something else entirely – something that we cannot see in any way other than through its interaction with normal matter via gravity.

But, isn’t it also possible that our understanding of how nature works is flawed? After all, prior to the twentieth century, some scientists thought they understood most things fairly well. Then along came the weird world of the atom and its constituents, leading to the development of quantum theory – a radically new way of understanding nature that appears to explain far more than could ever be explained using the theories that pre-dated it. At about the same time physicists were grappling with the very small using quantum theory, astronomers were trying to understand seemingly inexplicable things about the very large (the universe!) using the laws originally formulated by Isaac Newton – they were many times unsuccessful. Along came Einstein with his theories of Special and General Relativity. Now, almost all of those pesky observations that they couldn’t quite understand were no longer mysterious. Except, of course, for dark matter and Dark Energy (the subject of a future essay). So, yes, it is possible that we’re missing something in our scientific theories of the universe. If so, then whatever we’re missing would have to be able to explain the dark matter problem and not significantly alter anything else – after all, our understanding of “everything else” is pretty good and there doesn’t seem to be much else out of line.

What next? Are there experiments planned that could help us better understand dark matter? Yes, as a matter of fact, there are.

Figure 3. NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) onboard the International Space Station may detect dark matter.

(Image courtesy of NASA.)

Like the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, Italy’s Xenon100 dark matter experiment is looking. The Xenon100 is a steel tank containing liquid xenon that is constantly observed for a telltale flash indicating that a particle of dark matter has interacted with the xenon therein. With a density of about three times that of water, liquid xenon is ideally suited to stop an atom of dark matter, if it exists. Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will also be used in the hunt. The LHC consists of a 16.5 mile ring of superconducting magnets used to accelerate charged particles, atoms, to near the speed of light. Two beams of atoms, traveling in opposite directions, are then made to interact with each other, causing the atoms to smash into each other with collision energies not seen since the Big Bang. Any dark matter particles created at the accelerator might be visible as the collision products are studied and categorized. Finally, NASA’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, now flying onboard the International Space Station (ISS), is catching and characterizing cosmic rays – looking for signs of dark matter as it does so. Despite recent press releases touting possible dark matter detection, none of these experiments or facilities have yet produced a compelling scientific case supporting their claims.

Something massive, unseen and nearly undetectable is all around us and acting on us gravitationally. We see its effects. We measure them. But we don’t have a clue as to what this “dark matter” actually is. I suspect that in a hundred years we’ll have solved the problem and uncovered equally enigmatic new ones to be solved. That’s the history of science and, as a scientist, that’s what makes it all worthwhile.

To learn more about the search for dark matter on the International Space Station: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/14apr_ams/

Several teams are taking their detectors deep underground in their search for dark matter. Among them are the Cryogenic dark matter Search (CDMS) and the Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics.

Other researchers are looking at common, everyday objects, like the Sun, for evidence of dark matter: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100721132407.htm

*I should comment here on quantum gravity. Virtually all areas of physics, except gravity, are very nicely explained using quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics assumes that every facet of nature is ultimately composed of small, discrete elements – including the particles associated with the fundamental forces of nature such as electromagnetism (the photon). Our current best theory of gravity, General Relativity, is not “quantized.” This causes many scientists pause for thought. How is it that every fundamental force and element of nature is discrete (broken down into very small, single parts and not continuous) yet gravity is not? Nature seems to be consistent in this regard and many therefore believe there is something fundamentally incomplete in our theory of gravity.

Baen author Dr. Les Johnson, coauthor with Travis S. Taylor of Back to the Moon, and coeditor of science and science fiction anthology Going Interstellar, is also Deputy Manager for the Advanced Concepts Office at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

R.I.P., MOC

by Terry Burlison

We're all familiar with the heroism of astronauts and how they risk, and sometimes sacrifice, their lives to explore space. Stories have recently emerged about NASA's flight controllers: the men and women of Mission Control who kept those spacecraft flying and ensured their safe return to Earth. But laboring tirelessly below them all, figuratively and literally, was the Mission Operations Computer—the machine that for four decades ran Mission Control. Here is the story of the MOC, and how a machine with far less computing power than a cheap cell phone once enabled us to walk on the moon.

On a blistering Houston summer day in 2002, a legend of the manned space program retired. The ceremony took place in the Mission Control Center, where the retiree had labored tirelessly for nearly four decades. Few people attended. No cake or ice cream was served, no gold watch or plaque presented. Indeed, most NASA employees took no notice at all, because the retiree wasn’t a person.

It was a machine.

For nearly forty years, the Mission Operations Computer was the electronic heart of the MCC. The MOC, or “mock” as it was lovingly (and sometimes not-so-lovingly) called, drove the console displays and indicators, calculated orbits and trajectories, and enabled men and women to fly in space, build space stations, and land on the moon. It was alternately the object of admiration and annoyance, of fondness and frustration, but without it America could not have had a manned space program.

The Birth: Project Gemini

The MOC was born in the early 1960s, as NASA prepared to fly the Gemini program. Prior to this, flight controllers monitored the Mercury flights from ships and ground stations scattered around the planet. Tracking data was sent back to the main computing complex at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and forwarded to the primary control center (“Mercury Control”) at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Deploying flight control teams around the world created nightmarish problems of logistics, training, and communication. Medical care sometimes bordered on barbaric. Travel or living arrangements could get fouled up, leaving controllers scrambling for a room—or a ride home. Communication was so primitive that flight controllers wrote spacecraft data down on paper and then sent it back to Mission Control by teletype.

This ad-hoc situation, designed in the heat of the Cold War battle to put men in space, worked for the simple Mercury flights, but for upcoming Project Gemini, NASA needed a better system.

Gemini was a much more ambitious project, its goal to teach NASA how to work in space—indeed, how to perform nearly all the functions required to land on the moon. This required a centralized location for the flight control teams, with vastly more computational power at their disposal. Thus, in 1962 ground was broken outside Houston, Texas for the Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed the Johnson Space Center).

The nerve center of the MSC was Mission Control, a massive three-story windowless concrete box known as Building 30. In the middle of the top two floors sat identical Mission Operations Control Rooms, or MOCRs (pronounced moh-kurs). These are the control rooms television made famous during Gemini and Apollo—dark, cold rooms with a dozen or so crew-cut flight controllers huddled over their consoles while astronauts soared through space. Dual MOCRs enabled NASA to control two vehicles at once, a task required for Apollo lunar missions.

Figure 4: The first computers arrive at the MSC in 1963

(Photo courtesy of NASA)

Small “back rooms” surrounded the twin MOCRs and housed the support teams for the front room controllers.

And on the first floor dwelt the MOC.

The MOC was the central component of the Real-Time Computer Complex (RTCC), a system of computers for designing missions, testing software, running simulations, and, of course, controlling the space flights.

Figure 5: The IBM 7094—Yes, everything in the photo!

(Photo courtesy of Paul Pierce)

When Mission Control “went live” for its first mission, Gemini IV in 1965, the RTCC housed five state-of-the-art IBM 7094 computers, each composed of several cabinets the size and bulk of large refrigerators and filling the cavernous computing room. Two of the machines were reserved for software development, where programmers tested new code. Another ran simulations, enabling flight controllers to practice missions. The fourth was the Dynamic Standby Computer, a back-up to be used in an emergency.

The fifth was the Mission Operations Computer. The MOC handled all computing requirements during space flights, such as displaying telemetry—information sent down from the spacecraft that essentially tells ground controllers, “Here’s how things are going.” The MOC also enabled controllers to send commands to the vehicle, such as turning on equipment. Most challenging, the MOC computed the spacecraft orbits and maneuvers, tasks that required tremendous capability because of the complex math involved. To accomplish these tasks, the MOC drove some 40 displays and 5,500 event lights on consoles throughout the MCC.

Figure 6: The RTCC in 1966

(Photo courtesy of NASA)

The vast majority of the MOC’s code (ultimately, some 17 million lines) was written in IBM Assembler Language, an arcane computer language one step removed from binary machine code and best understood by human/machine cyborgs. (These programmers sometimes refer to themselves as “assembly lizards.”) The rest, primarily the trajectory code for launch, orbit/rendezvous, and entry was coded in FORTRAN due to the intense mathematics required. (The complexity of this code would haunt future upgraders and keep the MOC online years after it was scheduled for the scrap heap.)

The MOC’s original IBM 7094 was the fastest, most powerful computer of its day. It sported a whopping 64K of main core storage, the area of a computer where programs actually run. To get a sense of scale, consider that a modern laptop has about the same memory capacity as 100,000 MOCs. (Playing my copy of Angry Birds would require the memory of 500 IBM 7094s. And while fast for its day, the machine would require several months of 40-hour weeks to play a single minute of the game!)

Since this paltry memory storage was not remotely enough to hold those millions of lines of code, any of which a flight controller might need at a moment’s notice, a system needed to be devised to preload anticipated functions flight controllers might need.

Hard drives were neither reliable nor capable enough at this time, so the blocks of code were stored on tape drives: half-inch-wide magnetic tape spooled onto reels the size of dinner plates. Each tape, nearly a half-mile in length, held only a few megabytes of data—roughly a millionth the capacity of a modern hard drive. Since a flight controller could grow old, retire, and die waiting for information to load from the slowly spinning tapes, IBM added something called Large Core Storage (LCS), a form of magnetic-core RAM. This acted like additional core storage, enabling programs to be pre-loaded from the glacially slow tapes to the LCS, where they could be quickly loaded into the MOC when requested.

This required ballet like choreography between the flight controllers and the keepers of the MOC. A space mission is broken into phases, for example, Ops 1 for launch/insertion, Ops 2 for on-orbit/rendezvous, and Ops 3 for entry/landing. As a mission transitioned between phases, computing personnel (sometimes called “tape apes”) mounted the appropriate tapes and transferred the needed functions to the LCS, where they waited to be fed to the MOC.

This lead to problems, as I discovered shortly after coming to work as a Flight Dynamics Officer (Fido), one of the front-room positions. It was July 10, 1979—aka The Day I Crashed the MOC.

Skylab, America’s abandoned space station, was clawing its way through the upper atmosphere on its final orbits before plummeting to Earth. NASA was carefully tracking the station, using Mission Control to monitor its demise. I had been at JSC for only a month. I’d sat behind the Fidos and Trajectory officers at many simulations, but since this was the “real thing,” I was not allowed in the front room. So I found an empty console in one of the back rooms, opened my Fido Console Handbook, and began monitoring Skylab on my own.

After a couple hours of watching it “bore holes in the sky,” I got bored myself and started punching up different mission phases on my console’s Display Request Keyboard: Launch. Orbit. Entry. Rendezvous.

Rendezvous sounded interesting, so I requested a display. Instantly, all the data froze on my screen. Moments later, the call came over my headset, “We’ve lost the MOC.” During simulations, that meant the MOC had crashed and it would take a half-hour or so to resuscitate it. Essentially, the entire Mission Control Center was now offline.

I unplugged my headset and returned to my office, thinking what an odd coincidence that the MOC crashed the moment I requested the display. Casually, I asked my office mate, an Apollo/Skylab veteran, about the rendezvous displays.

“Don’t request one of those,” he warned. “You’ll crash the MOC!”

“Well,” I replied, “I’m glad I asked!” I never again requested a display unless I knew exactly what the hell it did!

The Glory Years: Apollo

During the stand-down between Gemini and Apollo (which got extended 18 months after the tragic Apollo 1 fire), the computing complex was upgraded to new IBM 360 computers. Apollo would push the boundaries of real-time computation far beyond Gemini, and required faster, more robust hardware. The 360s had a million bytes of core memory, but the code had also grown in size and complexity. Tapes were still used (and would be well into the Shuttle era) for “checkpoints”: backup snapshots of the system that could be loaded into the MOC to restart a simulation or to recover from crashes. Flight functions, such as computing orbits or solving rendezvous problems, were still pre-loaded onto the LCS. At times the workload became too much for the solitary MOC, laboring as fast as its data buses would allow, and the Dynamic Standby Computer would be called into service to offload computations for some mission phases.

Despite the fact the IBM machines were never designed to support real-time operations—and had less memory and slower processors than some modern wristwatches—the MOC performed brilliantly for both Gemini and Apollo. But it wouldn’t be able to handle what came next.

The Space Shuttle

During the six-year hiatus between Apollo and Shuttle, the computer complex was upgraded yet again. New IBM 370 computers boasted 8MB of storage. The Large Core Storage machine disappeared; hard drives now spun in Building 30, though due to their limited capacity they were still loaded from tape drives. The consoles hadn’t changed: flight controllers still risked their eyesight staring at grainy, low-resolution monochrome screens, old-fashioned nixie-tubes still counted down mission events, and hardcopies were still printed on greasy thermal paper and sent in metal cylinders via pneumatic tubes to the various stations (along with the occasional banana, bagel, and other items best left unmentioned). But the machine driving it all was once more state-of-the-art.

Figure 7: The Mission Operations Control Room. Note the P-tube canisters in foreground.

(Photo courtesy of NASA)

The shuttle was the most complex machine ever devised. Unlike Gemini and Apollo, which were built for specific objectives, the shuttle was designed for flexibility, with missions ranging from simple orbital test flights to multiple-rendezvous and satellite deployments to space station construction. Missions might be scientific or military, and could involve delivering satellites or retrieving and servicing them.

Consequently, the mission operations computing requirements were not only ambitious in scale, but also in scope, and required flexibility never before seen in real-time operations. Further, once the shuttle flew and NASA gained flight experience, the trajectory code often changed. This put more and more pressure on the MOC and its personnel as all functions grew in complexity: real-time operations, simulation/training, and mission planning and flight design. The MOC was once more bulging at its digital seams.

Then tragedy struck. In 1986, Challenger exploded and NASA faced another stand-down. A five-year plan to gradually upgrade the MOC got compressed into the thirty-two month hiatus after the disaster. Programmers and engineers labored long hours to upgrade the Mission Control computers (including the MOC) again, this time to IBM 3083s.

The task was complete by the next flight, STS-26 in 1988, but the relief was once more temporary. A few years later the MOC was upgraded a final time, to IBM ESA 9000s. Memory was no longer a problem. Tape drives disappeared. MOC crashes became the stuff of legend, stories told by graybeard flight controllers to scare new-hires.

However, by this time the world was moving away from mainframe computers and into distributed, networked architectures. Rather than a single machine driving many terminals, individual workstations—often much more powerful than the mainframes they replaced—were now being used by businesses, the military, and the government. To support the International Space Station, a new annex was added to Building 30. Sexy new Flight Control Rooms housed networked UNIX workstations boasting high resolution color displays and laser printers instead of Ford-Philco consoles with grainy black-and-white screens and p-tubes. The time had come to replace the venerable MOC.

But it didn’t quite work out that way.

Figure 8: The new Flight Control Room

(Photo courtesy of NASA)

The MOC’s Finale

The MOC performed several key functions. Telemetry handling showed downlinked data from the vehicle such as cabin temperature, acceleration levels, switch settings, and thousands of other items. Transferring this function to workstations was fairly straightforward since it primarily meant taking a piece of information and displaying it.

The MOC also provided Command capability—the ability for flight controllers to uplink orders to the spacecraft computers, such as resetting software flags, turning on or off specific functions, etc. Again, this transition was relatively easy.

So why did moving the trajectory functions prove so nightmarish?

To figure out the shuttle’s location, and guide it to its destination, the MOC had to combine radar, telemetry, and its own estimation data about the spacecraft’s position, velocity, and acceleration, and then employ sophisticated gravity, atmosphere, and vehicle models to predict where the shuttle was heading and what actions needed to be taken. These included launch trajectory and abort calculations, orbital mechanics and rendezvous computations, and deorbit maneuvers and atmospheric flight predictions.

Consider for a moment the scope of this problem. During ascent, a launch vehicle burns thousands of pounds of fuel each second, meaning it is constantly changing mass which in turn changes how it responds to any force acting on it. Its acceleration continuously changes as it plows through layers of atmosphere with winds coming from different directions and at different speeds. Engine nozzles swivel; valves change fuel flow; control surfaces like elevons and rudder are flexing, changing the ship’s aerodynamics. Gravity weakens as it rises. Air is vented overboard from inside the payload bay and crew cabin. Engines may not perform as expected or might fail completely, triggering an abort. Now the guidance software must quickly recompute a new, safe trajectory: a different orbit, a path to an emergency landing site, or even an immediate turnaround and return to the launch site.

Once on orbit, things are hardly simpler. The shuttle is constantly maneuvering or venting gases and liquids, all of which change its mass and orbit. The tendrils of the upper atmosphere claw at it with unpredictable force which varies with latitude, sunspot activity, time of year, even time of day. The earth’s very shape is complex and its crust varies in density, defying efforts to accurately model gravity. Now add another vehicle, like the International Space Station, also flexing, venting, maneuvering. The moon’s location—even the pressure of sunlight—changes their orbits. And despite all these math models and decades of experience, the estimate of the ISS or shuttle’s position could still easily be off by several miles in just a few hours. Now, try to predict where the two craft will be days in advance and bring them safely together, at 18,000 miles per hour, with limited fuel onboard.

And finally, at the end of the mission, comes entry: an airliner-sized vehicle plummeting at twenty times the speed of a bullet through an atmosphere that changes density, temperature, winds, and barometric pressure with each passing second. The shuttle might enter the atmosphere at night over a southern hemisphere locked in winter and land in Florida in the middle of summer—in less than an hour! All while performing sophisticated maneuvers to bleed off excess speed (while not overheating the tiles), and then arriving at the landing site at exactly the right altitude and velocity.

Orbital mechanics, vehicle dynamics and mass properties, thermal models, atmosphere models, gravity models . . . the list of problems to be solved seems endless, and entire books have been written about each. None of these things, or hundreds of others, is perfectly understood or predictable, yet they all must be mathematically modeled—accurately—for flight controllers to do their jobs. And a mistake in any of them could destroy the vehicle and kill the crew.

This was the MOC’s job.

Engineers made several efforts to move these sophisticated, highly critical and time-sensitive functions to the workstations. The requirement for speed and absolute accuracy is greatest during these highly dynamic mission phases. If the MOC doesn’t display a cabin fan setting, there’s plenty of time to realize and correct it. Not so if the MOC fouls up the abort computations during the 500 seconds of explosive mayhem known as launch and ascent.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” held true for years after the telemetry and control functions had been transferred. Hundreds of thousands of lines of trajectory code had to be rewritten into C and C++ for the new workstations, then exhaustively tested, simulated, and verified before it was finally deemed right. Eventually, the changeover was approved and the new Flight Control Room began performing the trajectory computations, but even then only as backup: The MOC—some of its software now older than the people running it—still acted as primary.

Eventually, however, youth won out, as in most things. Once the new distributed system had performed flawlessly (as backup) during several flights, it was finally brought off the bench for STS-110 in June 2002, with the MOC now riding the pine as backup.

The STS-110 mission was an outstanding success. The new Flight Control Room with its distributed workstations performed flawlessly through all mission phases. The end of an era had arrived.

On August 12th, 2002, a handful of NASA employees—mostly engineers, managers, and programmers who had worked on the handover—gathered in the depths of Building 30, in a room that helped fly Neil Armstrong to the moon, return Apollo 13 safely to Earth, build the ISS and repair Hubble. With no fanfare, but with a few tears, the Emergency Power Off switch was thrown.

And the MOC fell silent for the last time.

Legacy

While the MOC enabled America to accomplish legendary feats, its legacy extends far beyond the walls of Building 30. To support NASA’s real-time mission control demands, IBM pioneered new techniques of configuration control and program management as well as revolutionary new hardware and software, including multi-tasking processors, asynchronous communications, multi-channel processing, and real-time operations support—developments that flow through the computing industry even today.

So, the next time you power up your PC, play a game on your cell phone, or just glance at your digital watch, take a moment to appreciate one of the true, yet unheralded, heroes of the Space Age:

Mission Control’s MOC.

Terry Burlison graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering: the same school/degree as Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, the first and last men to walk on the moon. He then worked for NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Trajectory Officer for the first space shuttle missions. After leaving NASA, Terry spent ten years at Boeing, supporting numerous civilian and defense space projects. Until recently, he was a private consultant for many of the new commercial space ventures. Terry is now a full-time writer, or maybe just unemployed. His web site is http://www.terryburlison.com

Fracking and the American Comeback

by J.R. Dunn

DEMOCRACY AND TECHNOLOGY

Technology and democracy go hand in hand. Technology thrives in the democratic context far more than in other political systems, while at the same time protecting democratic societies from their own errors, particularly as regards foreign policy.

For a number of reasons, all of them inherent—and it seems, unavoidable—democracies tend to fumble foreign policy, particularly the political-military aspect. Democracies continually throw away positions of advantage, abandon useful alliances, assist their own enemies, and forego military readiness. The end result of this syndrome, without notable exception, is that democratic states are commonly taken by surprise by their adversaries, suffer horrible military setbacks, and require unnecessary time and effort to recover, at terrible cost in national treasure and human lives.

This process is not debatable. It has occurred four times in the past century to the United States, and is recurring even now. Following WW I, the U.S. abandoned its European alliances and dumped its laboriously established military in pursuit of an illusory “isolationism.” One major result was that a revanchist Germany burst out of its restraints under the guidance of a murderous barbarian/modernist ideology to ravage Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. After WW II, in the face of a belligerent Soviet Union, the U.S. repeated the process, reversing it only at the last possible minute after jolts provided by the Berlin blockade (1948) and the invasion of South Korea (1950).

The Cold War resulted in two such episodes, the first taking place in the 1970s as a consequence of the Vietnam War. An interlude of defeatism in the war’s aftermath effectively disabled the U.S. both diplomatically and militarily, enabling communist forces to run riot globally during the latter part of the decade. This trend was reversed by Ronald Reagan, and led to the collapse of Soviet hegemony in 1989. But then the U.S. reverted to type, taking a decade-long “holiday from history” during the ‘90s even as militant Jihadis murdered Americans and attacked U.S. installations and interests worldwide. The U.S. collectively shrugged, convinced that an ephemeral and unsupported “new world order” would take care of everything. We know how that worked out.

A pretty sorry record, on the face of it. But as one master of foreign policy once put it, “God looks after drunks, children, and the United States of America.” It seems that one of the tools the Almighty uses for this task is technology. The beneficial aspects of democracy—individual empowerment, a consistent legal system, and free markets—enable technological advancement that allows democracies to dodge the expected results of their errors—absorption, enslavement, or extinction. (Whether the beneficial aspects of democracy are the flip side of its drawbacks, with one unable to exist without the other, is a question worth asking, but one we won’t get to in this space.)

AMERICAN TECHNOLOGICAL DOMINANCE

During WW II the U.S. went from the near-zero of the Great Depression to a technological dominance over its enemies previously not witnessed in history. The list of technical innovations created during the war is staggering and ended with two atomic bombs that curtailed hostilities in short order and with only a fraction of the casualties expected during the endgame against Japan. (Anyone doubting this is invited to glance at the casualty list of Okinawa, the war’s final battle.)

In 1948, Stalin’s attempted checkmate at Berlin, which would have been unanswerable only a decade previously, was met by an airlift of thousands of aircraft which fed the besieged city for nearly a year until the Soviets at last admitted defeat. Similar technological knight’s moves were carried out repeatedly over the ensuing four decades until a corrupt and exhausted USSR at last collapsed.

Following 9/11, the U.S. deployed its technologically unmatchable military along with intelligence assets such as advanced data mining and armed drones to both roll up shadowy Jihadi networks and destroy several of their national sponsors.

So commonplace have American technological end runs become that they have generated something on the order of institutional terror on the part of America’s enemies. When in 1983 Reagan proposed his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), domestic critics dismissed it as “Star Wars” (forgetting that it was the title of a really popular movie). The Soviets, on the other hand, were driven to near-hysteria. They had seen Uncle Sam pull too many technological rabbits out of his hat to doubt this one. Abandoning their efforts to outflank the U.S., they turned to desperate diplomatic measures, far too late to save their empire.

The cycle continues today. Weary of a seemingly endless war against Jihadi terrorists, the U.S. is drawing back much as it did in the early 1920s. American military efforts are slowly being curtailed, in many cases without tangible results. Military procurement is in a state of free-fall, with major programs being constricted or shut down completely. (Little of this can be blamed on the so-called “sequester,” which is in fact merely a rollback of scheduled increases in spending, and not a decrease at all.) Emblematic is the July 2009 cancellation of the F-22 Raptor, a fighter aircraft beyond anything even envisioned by foreign air forces. Further programs will disappear in the near future. Talk is being heard of unilaterally abandoning nuclear weapons, even as rogue states such as a North Korea and Iran achieve nuclear breakout.

This pullback is occurring during the watch of the strangest foreign policy/national security team on record, one that (particularly with the recent appointments of Samantha Power as UN ambassador and Susan Rice as chair of the National Security Council) is motivated by a bizarre mix of idealism and cynicism, with the idealism directed at our enemies and the cynicism at our allies, in particular our oldest democratic friends, the UK and Israel.

Since troubles come in battalions, it is no surprise to note that the U.S. military as a whole is going through a massive internal metamorphosis on behalf of various ethnic and social/sexual minorities. Whatever side one takes in this debate, it must be admitted that the process is lacking due attention to the traditional military virtues. Among other things, we are in short order going to learn whether transsexuals can command large military units. (The only historical example we have for this is Narses, and that’s not quite the same thing.) And that may not be the worst of it.

THE CYCLE TURNS

All things being equal, and in light of the historical record, the U.S. is headed for serious military setbacks in the near future. From what direction these will come is anyone’s guess—as ever, we live in a world overstocked with predators. Whether we will be beaten down to the level of the first half of 1942—the worst period for the country since the Valley Forge winter of 1778, with catastrophic defeats at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, the Java Sea, and the Atlantic coast—also remains to be seen.

But we can hope that the cycle will remain true and that the U.S. will recover and prevail with the aid of its technical prowess. When good sense, experience, and rationality all fail, the U.S. falls back on its ingenuity.

While the nature of these breakthroughs remains a matter of speculation, one of them may already be in place—the process of hydraulic fracturing, popularly known as fracking.

Technical advantages are not limited only to combat. They may in fact lack any direct connection to the battlefield. One of the major factors in Allied victory in WW II was American manufacturing. U.S. industry came out of the Great Depression (another crash had occurred only a few years before, in 1937) to break all known production records in the space of a few short years. American industrial production became a key factor even before the U.S. was directly involved in the war itself, in large part through Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease policy. An effectively gratis provision of goods, equipment, and weapons kept Great Britain afloat for a year while facing the Third Reich essentially alone. After Pearl Harbor, American industry was loosely organized under the guidance of Robert Patterson, FDR’s chosen production chief (today we’d call him a “czar”). Lend-Lease was extended to the USSR in amounts that dwarfed the aid sent to England. Hundreds of thousands of trucks, countless tons of supplies and food, no less than nine million pairs of boots, and entire production runs of aircraft were sent east. It’s no exaggeration to state that the Soviets would not have survived without this assistance. (For their part the Soviets carefully painted over, filed off, or peeled away any sign that this material had come from the U.S.)

Apart from the UK and the USSR, the United Stated armed, equipped, and clothed large units of French and Polish troops and entire Chinese armies, as well as its own men fighting in a half a dozen theaters around the globe.

Clearly, American productive capacity—an outgrowth of democratic capitalism—was a crucial element in the course of WW II. Some historians have gone so far as to claim it is the sole crucial element, that victory emerged simply from a pack of ignorant backwoodsmen commanded by halfwits and lunatics drowning the Reich and Imperial Japan in floods of weapons, supplies, and ammunition. This is going way too far. But it can’t be denied that industry was of coequal importance with armed force during the conflict. Without American industrial superiority, WW II might have bogged down into one of those multigenerational nightmare conflicts so common to European history. The course of the last global war establishes that in a democratic/technical culture embodies military superiority as a matter of course. (While the Nazis made a number of technological breakthroughs involving weaponry, including the Me-262 jet interceptor, the Arado-234 Blitzbomber, the V-1 cruise missile and V-2 ballistic missile, they were able to get virtually none of them into production soon enough to affect the course of the war.)

TECHNOLOGY AND RESOURCES

Industrial superiority implies control of natural resources. It is with this factor that things began to go wrong in the postwar period. Rather than leverage its position at the end of the war into a global hegemony comparable to that of Rome or the British Empire, the U.S. was hard-pressed to exercise any form of control at all and at times could scarcely get its influence felt. This was in large part due to the collapse of the European colonial system following the war, along with the peculiar distribution of terrestrial natural resources.

It goes without saying that a technological society is reliant on energy. The cheapest, most transportable, and most compact current form of energy are the hydrocarbons, in particular oil and natural gas. The problem, from theWestern point of view, arises with the distribution of these energy resources. While substantial deposits of free-standing oil occurred in Texas and California (along with later discoveries in the North Sea), far larger deposits were found either in the Middle East, the most culturally isolated and regressive area in the world, or a collection of barely operative states such as Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria. As for natural gas, it turned out that the largest easily-extracted deposits occur in Siberia, controlled first by the Soviet Union and later by Russia.

This distribution proves that the Almighty has a sense of humor, and a sardonic one. The problems—political, military, economic, and social—created by this uneven distribution of energy resources in the late 20th century are so great and varied that they can only be touched upon. Oil has been the cause of near-infinite corruption in Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria, but this is trivia. The vast deposits in the Middle East served to validate, extend, and empower a medieval social and political system whose leaders loathed the West on virtually every possible grounds. Natural gas provided necessary foreign currency to the Soviet Union, enabling it hang on for decades after it should have collapsed under its own weight.

Neither the Arabs nor the Soviets showed an ounce of hesitation over utilizing these windfalls as weapons—usually with the United States and its allies as targets. During the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Soviets attempted to carry out a long-range plan to neutralize an energy-hungry Europe by supplying cheap natural gas and then manipulating the supply to guarantee support of Soviet interests. So fearful was the U.S. of this program that in 1982 it sabotaged the Siberian pipeline in what may well have been the first cyber attack. Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin has revived a more limited version of this plan.

But that too is nothing compared to the Arabs. With their lengthy cultural inheritance combining bazaar haggling as merchants and conspiracy in personal vendettas, the Arab oil states knew exactly how to take advantage of a resource like oil.

Although OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), a resource cartel effectively run by Saudi Arabia, was founded in 1960, its first real impact occurred in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Angered at Western support for Israel, the Arab states in control of OPEC decided to punish the West by weaponizing oil production. OPEC simultaneously cut production and raised prices, causing an “oil shock” that soon deteriorated into an “energy crisis.” The United States in particular was thrown into panic, with de facto rationing and long lines at gas stations occurring across the country. The situation was complicated by environmentalist claims that the crisis had been triggered by an “oil shortage,” which was pure misrepresentation, and by accusations that “Big Oil” was conspiring to keep prices elevated.

For a number a reasons, including war weariness over Vietnam (the Paris treaty had been signed only months before), and the fact that the Nixon administration was enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, no response was forthcoming. Scarcely as much as a sharp diplomatic note was sent to the oil states, with no further action taken either by the U.S. or Europe.

The oil states got clean away with it—and had seen an impressive increase in income as well. For the rest of the 1970s, the process was repeated, with the OPEC states tightening the oil faucet for any reason or none—anger at Western actions, a need for the kingdom’s budget to be balanced, a favorite dancing boy run off. The process became a brutal gavotte with a distinct resemblance to an abusive domestic relationship. The oil states would punish the West, which would come crawling back full of apologies and pleas, to be “rewarded” with a slight lowering of prices—though never permanent and never to the previous level.

Some sanity returned with the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980, which demonstrated to the Saudis and the Gulf emirates and they needed the West—the U.S. in particular—to provide protection against local prowlers such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Prices continued rising all the same, particularly after both sides embarked on the “Tanker War,” attacking third-party tankers carrying the enemy’s oil across the Persian Gulf and forcing NATO navies to provide escorts.

The situation in the Gulf grew even more fraught when Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait in a naked attempt to exploit its oil resources. A spectacular American-led campaign successfully ejected Iraqi forces from Kuwait, securing the Gulf’s oil supplies.

But the overall situation remained pathological, with the oil states—primarily Middle Eastern and Islamic—continually gouging the West for as much as they could take. There is reason to believe that Gulf state rulers view this as a “dhimmi tax,” the tax required of “kaffirs,” that is, non-Muslims, living under Islamic dominance. Prices increased inexorably, crossing the milestone $100-a-barrel mark (up from $3-5 dollars a barrel in the early 1970s) in January 2008. It’s difficult to view this as anything other than banditry on the grand scale. In recent years, the Gulf states have pocketed over a trillion dollars a year from international oil transactions. This has caused untold economic damage. It is part of the explanation as to why the 1970s were a “lost decade” economically throughout the West, with many of the major economies mired in “stagflation”—a combination of stagnation and inflation. At one point late in the decade, the oil states had amassed so many dollars that it distorted the international money supply, threatening a liquidity crisis on a scale never before seen. The Saudis had to be persuaded to reinvest much of their “petrodollars” in Western economies. The price was even higher in poor nations, raising food, fuel, and fertilizer costs for the earth’s most unfortunate fifth. Many countries still mired in underdeveloped status would have broken out decades ago if it hadn’t been for fuel costs.

Not even the oil states themselves profited from the influx of treasure. While some worthwhile investments were made—the spectacular architecture of Dubai is one example—much of it was wasted. Little money was spent on developing industry, education, scientific research, or infrastructure. The bulk of it went to royal families, who spent it on toys, luxuries, sprees (like the Saudi prince who spent $20 million at Disneyland Paris last May) and the like. The military soaked up much of what remained. What did trickle down to the commoners largely resulted in a dependent class living on what amounted to welfare. Like the Spanish gorging on New World gold and silver in the 16th century, the oil states have discovered that a viable way of life cannot be based on windfalls.

Even more sinister was the money spent by the Saudis to bankroll the spread of Wahhabism, a throwback interpretation of Islam emphasizing many of its worst features, including xenophobia, torture, and degradation of women. Among other programs, the Saudis spent vast amounts building mosques in areas of the world where there was no appreciable Islamic presence. Once limited to the Arabian peninsula, Wahhabism is now the dominant form of Islam. Comparable amounts were spent to support terrorist and anti-Israeli groups (though for various reasons, the Arabs were never successful at preventing Israel from buying oil). The Saudis and the emirates supported the Muslim Brotherhood, the PLO, and Al Fatah. The Iranians supported Hezb’allah and Hamas. Oil money effectively locked the Arabic oil states into permanent hostility against the West, with vicious consequences for both sides. (19 out of 20 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.)

As the third millennium progressed, the oil pathology was viewed by most in much the same way that the USSR had been viewed in the early 1980s—an unpleasant reality that little could be done to improve. But such situations tend to carry the seeds of their own resolution.

FRACKING—A NEW DECK OF CARDS

Fracking was first developed in the late 1940s. For decades, it was considered an esoteric technique too expensive for widespread use. There were plenty of accessible oil pockets available to be drilled—who needed fracking? But as oil prices broke the $100 a barrel milestone late in the last decade, fracking (admit it—you keep thinking of Battlestar Galactica) began looking more attractive.

The problem with shale formations is that the rock is not porous enough to allow the flow of fluids even under enormous pressure. The shale must be fractured into small pieces over a large area to enable fossil fuels to be extracted.

Hydraulic fracturing is accomplished by pumping fluids at extremely high pressure into shale beds. Fracturing fluids consisting of 90 percent water, 9.5 percent sand, and a pinch of various chemicals are mixed in a blender on site before being injected at pressures of over 9,000 pounds per square inch into a shale formation. The water breaks up the shale, the sand holds the fractures open, and added chemicals aid extraction. Guar, an organic gum, assists water in penetrating the shale. Dilute hydrochloric acid then clears away the guar and prevents bacteria growth. Diesel oil helps stimulate flow. The amount of water used in the process is prodigious—up to seven million gallons for a single well. The bulk of the fluid is extracted after the well is finished and is often recycled for further drilling.

Completing a well requires seventy to a hundred days—four to eight weeks of preparation, four to five weeks of rig work such as casing and cementing, and four to five days for the fracking proper. The process is highly industrialized, featuring large amounts of auxiliary equipment and a lot of truck traffic. But once complete, the site is no more intrusive or unsightly than any other drilling operation.

Horizontal drilling, in which a vertical well can be “turned” and drilled sideways, is another technology that has come into its own in the age of shale. Originally a specialty technique utilized only in limited circumstances (e.g., when it was necessary to reach a target located underneath a city or other obstacle), horizontal drilling has become standard in shale operations. Horizontal wells can hit pockets impossible to reach by conventional drilling, increase productivity by lengthening the “pay zone” from a few feet to over a mile, and allow dozens of wells to be drained by a single drill pad, dramatically reducing the surface impact of extraction operations.

Horizontal wells are first drilled vertically to a certain precalculated point, when the drilling pipe is pulled out and a hydraulic motor powered by pressurized drilling mud is attached to the drill bit. The well can then be oriented in any direction. This is of particular value as regards shale formations, since the well can be drilled to precisely intersect the fractured area. Horizontal drilling is up to three times as expensive as conventional drilling, but the cost is more than covered by increased production.

Fracking has been used in drilling over a million wells in this country. It is estimated that 80 percent of wells drilled in the next decade will utilize the process. Most of these wells involve natural gas. Shale gas has exploded from 1percent of natural gas production in 2000 to nearly 40 percent today. In the past five years, the U.S. has gone from importing close to 90 percent of its natural gas to taking steps to become an exporting nation.

Formations opened up by fracking include the Bakken Shale in Montana and South Dakota, which at 4.3 billion barrels comprises the largest oil find in U.S. history. (One peculiarity of shale formations is that they tend to produce oil or gas but not both.) The Barnett Shale in north-central Texas holds over 43.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Eagle Ford Shale in southwest Texas, discovered in 2008, is unusual in producing both oil (3.35 billion barrels) and gas (21 trillion cubic feet). The Haynesville Shale, sprawling across east Texas, Louisiana, and southern Arkansas, may contain up to 251 trillion cubic feet of gas.

Other shale beds include Michigan’s Antrim Shale—unique in that it has already been fractured, possibly by ice age glacial action; it now supports over 9,000 wells—and the Fayetteville Shale of Arkansas. But it’s the Marcellus Shale that dominates American fossil fuel production. One of the largest shale regions in the U.S., it stretches across New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, with outcroppings in Ohio and Maryland. It represents the second largest natural gas find in the world, containing an estimated 410 to 1,300 trillion cubic feet of gas, along with billions of barrels of ethane, a basic plastics industry feedstock. The natural gas alone accounts for up to two centuries of consumption at current rates.

Over the past year new shale beds have been discovered in California (though these are unlikely to be exploited any time soon), with further possibilities in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. It is conceivable that the majority of shale beds contain recoverable hydrocarbons. But even a fraction will push back the depletion horizon by a matter of centuries. All talk of “peak oil,” and “energy crises” have been rendered quaint, of a nature similar to bell-bottoms and paisley ties.

It has been so long since the U.S. has experienced a resource boom that we have largely lost sight of the potential benefits. Plans for increased oil drilling are commonly dismissed with the assertion that such a program would do nothing to improve current economic conditions since it would require years for new energy supplies to reach the market. But markets operate through anticipation—any sign of changing conditions generates an immediate response, either positive or negative. Changes brought about by the shale revolution have already become apparent.

This is clearly the case in Pennsylvania. Exploitation of the Marcellus Shale in the state’s north-central region protected it from the more brutal ravages of the Great Recession. In 2010, economic activity due to shale gas operations amounted to $11.2 billion, with state government collecting $1.1 billion in taxes. Drilling created 140,000 jobs, not to overlook those in related industries such as specialty steel manufacturers in the Pittsburgh area—drilling operations use a lot of pipe. (South Dakota, home of the Bakken Shale, has benefited as much or more than Pennsylvania.)

Objections by environmentalists include fears that fracking could pollute groundwater or trigger earthquakes. Poor operational management in Pennsylvania resulted in spills that temporarily fouled several creeks, while drilling in the Bristol area of the English Midlands caused several small but detectable earthquakes. The answers to these objections appear straightforward: don’t drill near aquifers, don’t drill near faults. (It’s reasonable to suspect that the actual problem that greens have with fracking is that it clearly forecloses on various renewable programs such as solar and wind power—hydrocarbons gained through fracking are substantially cheaper than such methods.)

Largely due to environmental objections, several northeastern states have failed to follow Pennsylvania’s lead. New York, under Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has effectively banned the process, even though the state was one of those hit hardest by the recession. New Jersey has done the same, even though no detectable shale deposits exist within the state. Delaware governor Jack Markell went so far as to interfere with Pennsylvania’s fracking industry through the Delaware Water Gap Commission, which provided him with veto power over fracking in the Delaware watershed. Ohio, which shares several shale beds with Western Pennsylvania, played a stop and start game for several years before finally settling on a workable set of regulations allowing industry exploitation.

The benefits of fracking unquestionably outweigh any drawbacks. A stable energy market cannot help but boost the economy over the long term. Industry observers are predicting effective American energy independence by 2020. A national energy economy in which the bulk of industrial processes and home heating have switched to natural gas, along with domestic oil supplies supplemented by the Alberta tar sands, would be insulated from market shocks caused by speculation, Mideast wars, and the whims of OPEC. In the past, electrical utilities have hesitated to switch from coal to natural gas for fear of instability in price and supply. With a secure source, these utilities should be less wary, which will lead to cuts in electricity costs. (They may not have any choice, considering that the Obama administration moved to effectively shut down the coal industry in June 2013.) Natural gas prices have dropped by half in the past five years even though demand has risen by over 40 percent. We can look forward to further cost decreases as more shale gas reaches the market.

Over the longer term, the dream of natural-gas fueled automobiles could be revived, particularly in the light of the market failure of recently introduced electric models such as the Tesla and the Fisker. Since over half of American homes are heated by natural gas, a potential fueling infrastructure already exists. It would require a compressor and a safe and dependable fueling system to convert home gas heating systems into private auto fueling stations.

A natural gas economy would be environmentally cleaner. Well-informed environmentalists welcome the prospect of natural gas replacing coal. Burning gas releases only half the amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, an important consideration to those who take anthropogenic global warming seriously. Although methane leakage during drilling reduces those benefits, this is an engineering detail. Improvements in design and execution can seal wells tight as a drum, cutting methane leaks to next to nothing.

In a few years, the rest of the country will begin to enjoy the benefits already visible in Pennsylvania and North Dakota. Nor is the promise of fracking confined to the United States alone. The UK has been neck and neck with the U.S. in exploiting the new technology with shale beds in the Midlands and Scotland. China, at the end of a long and vulnerable oil lifeline to the Middle East, is moving to open its own shale beds. Even Israel, long the Mideast orphan as regards hydrocarbons, has discovered large shale deposits of keroten, a pre-petroleum resource that requires extra refining. The old joke about the Lord giving Moses the only spot in the area without oil is no longer operative. It is within the realm of possibility that every large nation on earth will soon be able to tap its own energy supplies. (Eager to maintain its reputation for absolute mulish contrariness, France has banned the fracking process completely.)

FRACKING AND GRAND STRATEGY

The impact of fracking has been largely overlooked by political commentators, generally not a group with much in the way of technical educations. One example is Mark Steyn, the acerbic Canadian-American analyst, who has been preaching the imminent collapse of the United States for several years. Asked about fracking, he replied he hadn’t heard about it and wasn’t interested in it. Much the same can be said of most other pundits. Left-wing thinkers have been happy to follow the environmentalist lead, attacking the technology as another threat to Mother Gaia. The right simply stares in open-mouthed puzzlement before returning to earnest discussions as to what James Madison would make of Lady Gaga. Only a handful see the golden opportunity that fracking represents.

Fracking’s greatest impact will involve international relations. As we have seen, the current status quo is based largely on control of energy resources. It is overdue to be shaken from top to bottom. The end of U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources—predicted for 2020—will create a booming economy, with more jobs and a far healthier balance of payments than the country has seen for decades, translating into greater freedom of action in the international plane.

But even more important is the effect on the oil and gas-producing states. Fracking will put an end to the oil weapon. Though not quite visible in recent years, with the U.S. acting as the direct protector of the Gulf States, the potential for dropping the oil bomb still exists. A change in regime or a fit of pique could once again lead to Arab pressure on the markets with the full intention of modifying Western behavior. At this point it would still have a small effect on the U.S. After 2020, any effects would be minimal. The emirs and kings could press the button as much as they liked and the oil bomb will simply not go off. (The oil kingdoms appear to be well aware of this. The Matt Damon film Promised Land, a ham-handed attempt to undercut fracking, was bankrolled by the government of Abu Dhabi.)

Once the vast flood of oil profits are cut down, things will get tight in the kingdoms rather quickly. Oil comprises close to 100 percent of the income of the Gulf States—a few the emirates also act as financial centers—and the royal families have shown little aptitude for money management. Two elements will require full funding—royal incomes and social welfare subsidies to the commoners. Any attempt to cut either will result in internecine slaughter among the nobility or mass popular uprisings. All else—terrorist subsidies, military purchases, payoffs to various anti-Israeli political factions, and grandiose Wahhabi expansion schemes around the Indian Ocean littoral—will have to go by the board. The processes set in motion by these actions are difficult to anticipate. The end result could vary from a general takeover by radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda type, a breakout of the currently threatening Sunni-Shiite civil war, or should the kingdoms luck out and avoid open chaos, a more conciliatory Arab leadership (who will still require Western assistance against radicals and other threats), a dramatic easing of hostility toward Israel, and a generally far more cooperative attitude overall. The one thing we can be certain of is that nothing will be the same.

Unfortunately, fracking has not appeared soon enough to deprive the Iranians of a nuclear weapon—but it will deprive them of everything else. David Goldman (“Spengler”) has long argued that Iran stands of the brink of a demographic catastrophe, with its replacement rate of 1.6 the lowest in the Middle East. Within a generation, the elderly will nearly outnumber the rest of the population. Any move the mullahs intend has to be made soon. Cutting off oil money would deprive the ruling “Council of Experts” and their puppet president (it’s amazing how few members of the Western media can’t get this simple fact of Persian civics straight) of funds at just the wrong time, leaving them a choice between pensions for a growing elderly cohort and funding for the military. The best use of a nuclear armory is as a shield for conventional activity—a country with nukes can simply get away with stuff that a nonnuclear power cannot. This is exactly how the Soviets operated for decades during the Cold War, interfering with smaller countries, funding revolts and civil wars, and blatantly murdering or attacking opponents (up to and including the Pope) while rattling their nukes at anybody who gave them a cold eye. North Korea has proven to be an apt student of this school of diplomacy, and Iran is about to graduate. But an Iran deprived of oil money will no longer be able to fund its massive military and intelligence establishments, along with the allowances sent to Hamas and Hezb’allah (Iranian relations with Hamas are dismal as it is). The mullahs will be left with very few pieces on the board and very few moves to make. In short order, hunger and discontent on the domestic front will leave them with their hands full.

The effect on Russia would be similar. Control of Siberian natural gas has paid serious dividends to the Putin dictatorship. European reaction to the regime’s campaigns against everyone from female punk rockers to businessmen, the assassinations of reporters and activists, and military atrocities in Chechnya and Georgia have been muted, to say the least. Natural gas and oil account for 58 percent of Russia’s foreign trade. A fuel-independent Europe might not bring down the squalid Putin regime, but would cut its freedom of action considerably.

Other benefits on the international front may also accrue. A lot of the pressure forcing events in the South China Sea, where China is claiming vast areas as “blue territory,” that is, its historical property, stems from potential undersea oil and gas deposits. If the Chinese are encouraged to exploit their shale resources, this will certainly ease tensions and prevent possible confrontations with Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, and Taiwan.

So far, prospects look entirely beneficial. Can that possibly be true of a technical process such as fracking? Skepticism is certainly justified. But at this point, drawbacks are not apparent, and fracking certainly offers an improvement over the current situation, with an insolent Russia, a messianic Iran, and spoiled and bloated Arab states slugging it out at the edge of the abyss.

The major goal at this point should be to dry up the excess funds being used to carry out vicious policies such as terrorism and military adventures. At this point, it is the three chief democracies that hold the lead in fracking technology—the United States, the UK, and Israel. It should be relatively simple to formulate a strategy to take the best advantage of the technology as, for all practical purposes, the fracking weapon. Fortunately, third parties such as France, with a tendency to interfere and undercut the efforts of Anglophones and Jews, have pretty much dealt themselves out of this hand.

We should continue pegging the price of hydrocarbons lower, on a gradual basis to avoid panics and dislocation. While it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see $5 a barrel oil ever again (although natural gas exploration is undergoing an industry-wide hiatus due to the fact that too great a supply exists, bringing prices almost down to the loss-leader point), cutting hydrocarbon prices to a substantial fraction of where they now stand should be a straightforward process. All things being equal, prices on most forms of energy should also begin to drop.

With the funding spigot to the Persian Gulf shut off, terror financing will dry up. This will have disadvantages—attempted hijackings, robberies, and kidnappings by terrorist groups are likely to increase as a result. But at the same time this will force these groups out into the open where they can be easily picked off.

Prospects for Iran are more shadowy. By the time the effects of fracking hit, it is likely that the mullahs will possess several primitive nuclear weapons and will use them to extort aid and concessions much as North Korea does today. But the challenges facing Iran are far more than a throwback theocracy can handle. Eventually, Iranians can look forward to a successful overthrow.

Russia is equally problematic. Putin is essentially a gangster and can simply shift his efforts. But fracking can heavily reduce his income and influence, which would be a beneficial outcome in and of itself.

A bold policy utilizing fracking resources can substantially undercut two of the four most serious threats facing the West—radical Middle Eastern terror groups and a resurgent Russia. It can seriously disrupt Iran’s current schemes, and can depressurize mounting tensions with China. The rogue states that have depended on control of hydrocarbons to fund malicious national policies can be isolated and controlled, without heavy investments in military hardware or risky confrontations.

A NEW AMERICAN HEGEMONY?

It’s important to keep in mind that these processes are already taking place, set in motion by the simple existence of fracking. For one example, fracking appears to have added some element of stability to energy markets over the past year and a half. Energy prices that gyrated wildly for a decade have settled down. We need to contemplate giving the process more direction to assure beneficial results.

This does not mean replacing OPEC with OFEC. Shale is a nearly universal component of the earth’s crust, and a large amount if not most shale beds contain recoverable hydrocarbons. Within short order, every nation that can afford the technology (except France) will be able to produce its own energy supplies. It should be a priority for the U.S. to assure that fracking technology is as widely distributed as possible, particularly to developing and third-world states. Universal access to energy resources would dramatically lower the threat of resource conflicts and ensure a real basis for global economic stability. The small states cheated for decades by the oil kingdoms will at last have their chance.

This is as close to an energy utopia as can easily be imagined, and the exact opposite of the current situation. Concentration of energy resources in the hands of a few corrupt and ideologically unbalanced countries has resulted in untold evil over the past forty years, not only in the obvious sense of airliners and bombs destroying lives throughout the world, but in the nearly invisible damage of families impoverished, infants starved to death, and societies allowed to stagnate. Much of this can be overcome through intelligent strategic use of the fracking weapon.

So it’s painful to admit that the current administration will very likely not take advantage of the technology. The West as a whole appears to regard its liberation from oil entanglement much the same as the Bastille prisoner who sat staring at his open cell door, unable to grasp what it meant. Despite soaring rhetoric, the Obama administration has proven to be almost pathetically dull-witted and unimaginative, content to push “reforms” that were current in the 1960s or even the 1930s rather than looking ahead into potential of the new millennium. In the international arena, administration figures were badly burned by their last large-scale initiative—encouraging the internal “liberation” of the North African littoral states in the “Arab Spring.” The effort has resulted in near-anarchy along with the empowerment of extremely unsavory radical figures, at last culminating in the deaths of innocent American under appalling circumstances in Benghazi. The administration is likely to limit its foreign activity to badgering Israel to make concessions that no sane government would contemplate.

Barack Obama wants so transparently to become a world-historical figure on the level of a Roosevelt or Lincoln, even as he watches his policies unravel before he so much as leaves office. The pity of it is that the opportunity is sitting right before him in the form of the fracking revolution. But he appears blind to it. Instead he encourages his EPA to delay the process as much as possible.

Eventually, some president—or British prime minister, or other capable and visionary leader—will make that move. Then we may well see a breakup of the logjam left by the 20th century, the destruction of the power of the bandit states, and a fulfillment of the promise made by democracy and capitalism to the peoples of the world.

A Terrible Thing to Lose:

Zombie Science and Science Fiction in John Ringo's Under a Graveyard Sky

by Tedd Roberts

We've seen it on the screen or in our mind's eye – the ravening hordes, the animalistic sounds, the hunger that cannot be sated – zombies! I was recently on a panel at a science fiction convention that discussed the transition from prior popularity of vampire stories to the current fascination with zombies. The moderator put forth the premise that vampire novels and urban fantasy are products of affluent societies with strong economies, while zombie novels and apocalyptic fiction are more representative of economic downturn and uncertainty. It is an interesting premise, given that the "classical vampire" is hundreds of years old, has amassed wealth, power and prestige... while zombies represent death and destruction that cannot be stopped by conventional means.

If I were a psychologist, I might mention that zombies represent fear of "The Other" - the foreign, even alien, presence that steals away our home and family; or that zombies represent fear of death or ending. On the other hand, as a firearm collector, Eagle Scout and member of Zombie Squad, I would bring up the fact that preparation for The Zombie Apocalypse is preparation for any disaster: natural or man-made. It only makes sense that a story-line which involves preparing to defend against the loss of all we hold dear would be popular in uncertain times that threaten jobs, homes and our very lives.

Whatever the appeal, zombies and the zombie apocalypse are prevalent in modern fiction—from Max Brooks' World War Z (and the movie of the same name, but derivative story) to the popular TV show The Walking Dead. The modern zombie story/zombie movie genre owes a lot to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead—but it can easily be argued that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein founded the concept of the metaphysically reanimated corpse. In Baen's own fiction, Larry Corriea's Monster Hunter International novels invoke (and dispatch) zombies by the hundreds and thousands. In fact, the image of seasoned Monster Hunter Earl Harbinger chopping and puréeing zombies through use of industrial snow-clearing machinery has led to a popular convention panel "Messiest Ways to Kill Zombies." The launch of a new Baen series – and the motivation for this post – is John Ringo's upcoming Under a Graveyard Sky, which follows a family escaping a zombie apocalypse and dealing with the aftermath.

It is notable that many present day zombie stories (Monster Hunter excepted) have departed from the Haitian voodoo concept of magical reanimated corpses and skeletons. Instead, the modern zombie story often focuses on a bacterial or viral source of infection, and that infection can either reanimate a corpse, or transform a living human into a ravenous, brainless creature. Such is the premise of Ringo's Under a Graveyard Sky, and we'll explore theories that could provide a scientific basis for zombies as we progress through this article. However, first we'll set the stage by looking at different types of zombies as represented in science fiction and fantasy.

Zombie History—a Taxonomy of Zombies in Fiction

In movies and novels, zombies are either mindless horde animated by evil magic, or "animalistic sub-humans created by evil technology."  They may attack under funny circumstances, as in Bruce Campbell movies or the campy classic Shaun of the Dead. On the other hand, the zombies may be coming at you in an unstoppable or as in The Night of the Living Dead.  Anyway you look at it; the zombies are the enemy and are out to get… you!

Zombies in TV film and literature fall into approximately four categories with some overlap between them:

1. Zombies are magically animated dead creatures.

2. Zombies are dead creatures that have been brought back to life through a combination of science and/or mysticism.

3. Zombies are essentially living creatures that have been infected with a disease, virus or spell which turns them into a basically dead creature.

4. Zombies are living creatures that are "hag-ridden" by parasites that over-ride the host's consciousness and take control of the body.

Interestingly, the current pop-culture concept—insatiably hungry, killing machines—is a fairly recent development in literature and can largely be attributed to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968).  This movie clearly falls into Category One above. In this instance, the zombies are corpses which have been reanimated; however, there is a considerable element of the "ghoul"—a creature which may or may not be dead, but which inhabits graveyards and eats human flesh.  In contrast, the classic movie monster, Frankenstein, is basically a zombie, in that it is composed of cadaver parts and animated by a mad scientist, but lacks the modern concepts of hunting and feeding on humans.  Consider, for example, the humorous zombies of Piers Anthony's Xanth series:  The Zombie Master is a human sorcerer who reanimates corpses as servants.  The corpses are constantly losing parts, and present no real danger to humans, but only one individual can repair or even create zombies in the first place.

The hybrid crossover produced by Romero in Night of the Living Dead is very important to the more modern notion of a zombie craving brains or feeding off of human flesh.  The "Resident Evil" video games and movies feature Category Two zombies which are dead humans brought back to life after being infected with a virus. Max Brooks's World War Z, and of course the "Infected" of Ringo's Under a Graveyard Sky are examples of Category Three, in which the victims of the mysterious virus first fall into a fever or coma and seemingly "recover" hours later, but as a mindless, virtually unkillable creatures (largely because they feel no pain, and are thus not stopped until they can no longer move. Likewise, Category Four zombies need not start out as corpses—they may be perfectly healthy humans prior to infestation—but the sentient, infesting agent such as The Flood in the game Halo, takes over the bodily functions and effectively kills the body and/or human consciousness. In many ways, Category 4 zombies are a variation of Category 3 except for the implication that rather than a virus, the infection is by a symbiote or parasite that has its own consciousness (e.g. Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters).

A feature of many zombie stories both in film and print is that the "zombie infection" is spread by a bite, causing crossover between different categories of zombies, as in the Will Smith movie I Am Legend in which it's not clear whether the zombies were precisely dead creatures reanimated or living creatures infected with the zombie virus.  Of course there's always fun movies such as Bruce Campbell's Army of Darkness, which to be honest, is not really a zombie movie, since the primary creatures are reanimated skeletons (of the Ray Harryhausen Jason and the Argonauts style) and not corpses per se.

While it is not my intent to go into a full analysis of horror movie psychology, the essence of a zombie movie is to play on both fear of the unknown, and fear of that which cannot be (easily) killed. The basic concept of a zombie is a creature that can be hit, shot, sliced, or even set on fire, without stopping it.  In Larry Correia's recent book Monster Hunter Alpha, the reader comes face-to-face with the rather infamous character Joe Buckley, who survives being shot, sliced and even blown up and still comes back to menace the protagonist not once but three times. The idea of a creature that can be run through with a sword, and still keep advancing means that most means of defense would not work. Hence the appeal of "preparing for a zombie apocalypse" implies preparing a defense that can deal with situations that are seemingly indefensible. Again, psychologically this plays into combating the helpless feeling of nightmares.

A discussion of zombie books and movies is not complete without discussing speed of zombies.  The classic shambling (barely) animated dead—or shambler—is the most scientifically logical based on the idea that the an animated corpse has no source of energy, no way to recover from broken bones, amputations, and no mental facility.  On the other hand, if one allows magic, the animation need not concern itself with such mundane matters (i.e. Harryhausen's animated skeletons).  No, it is the fast zombies that are problematic—the ones in Zombieland which chase down their prey, or the "Ax-man" in Resident Evil: Extinction [Once you get to the horror-movie elements of the transformed creatures in Resident Evil, you're really not talking about zombies at all]. For a zombie to exhibit strength or speed, we must posit an energy source, and the most likely explanation is that the zombie virus or drug consumes the remaining tissues of the body. However, that is a discussion for later as we discuss zombie infection.

Zombie Origins – How to Create Zombies

So what makes a zombie (scientifically speaking)?  In the particularly Haitian voodoo mythology, voodoo priests could turn living humans into mindless servants through their magic, which in reality consisted of a combination of pharmaceuticals, which suppressed higher thought functions.  One of the chemicals used, traditionally, was tetrodotoxin or TTX.  TTX is well known in neuroscience: it is a chemical which blocks sodium channels, preventing the depolarizing sodium entry into neurons necessary for the formation of an action potential.  In the presence of tetrodotoxin, neurons are unable to receive and transmit the neural signals which underlie information processing of the brain.  TTX is an extract from puffer fish, fish used in the risky Japanese dish known as fugu.  Fugu is a dish for risk takers and adventurers. The chef must take great care not to break the poison gland, which contains the TTX, and would kill anyone who consumes the dish.  On the other hand, just the smallest amount of TTX will cause a slight numbness to the tongue and lips and give the sensation of daring and risk to aficionados.  A dosage high enough will block all nervous system and muscle activity, while moderate doses will block some brain activity, but not all.  The use of neurotoxins is hardly unknown, considering that the neuromuscular blocker curare was first discovered in use by native tribes on their blowgun darts to disable large prey.  So is not unheard of that primitive medicine and ritual may very well have developed the use of tetrodotoxin as a medicine for suppressing violent and aggressive behaviors.  It is that only a small step from such use too much more serious case of deliberately suppressing higher mental function, leading to legends of the voodoo zombies who functioned as slaves for their evil masters.

On the other hand, there are a number of other possibilities from a scientific perspective for the classical "mindless, reanimated dead."  Aside from the fantastical gimmick of magical reanimation, science fiction authors have toyed with the idea of zombies created by alien organisms, viruses, stem cells, and nanomachines.  I mentioned the latter in a recent blog post, in conjunction with the web comic Schlock Mercenary.  Science fiction author Larry Niven postulated an alien virus that could reanimate bodies of dead soldiers on battlefield.  In the short story "Night on Mispec Moor" Niven's protagonist finds himself the only survivor as night falls after a brutal battle.  Unable to leave the scene as the bodies of friends and enemies begin to reanimate, he seeks high ground where he can make his own defense, only to discover that his medical kit holds the secret to survival.  Surmising that an alien virus or microorganism is reanimating the bodies, he sprays them with a broad spectrum antiviral/antibiotic, causing the bodies to collapse and return to the fully dead state.  Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters provides a similar cautionary tale in which aliens are able to control the bodies of humans, whether those humans are in fact alive or dead.

Yet the most intriguing notion comes from recent studies with stem cells.  As medical research increasingly looks to the possibilities of stem cell therapies for tissue regeneration and growth, one question that is often asked is what will happen if the stem cells begin to grow in a manner that was not planned for?  While the most obvious result would be cancerous tissue, another possibility is that stem cells could result in a restoration of dead, necrotic tissue.  If enough of this tissue is restored to a near living state, would this not make zombies?  Still, the problem is one of reanimation of the brain tissue, but even that seems to be yielded to modern medical findings of patients "brought back to life" after many hours as long as the body and brain are kept very cold (but not frozen) and well oxygenated. We'll explore these consequences as a well of possibly explaining the mindlessness of zombies in the next section.

Zombie Behavior

It is an interesting contradiction in fictional literature that zombies are essentially brainless, yet the only way to effectively defeat a zombie is to destroy the head and brain.  Reanimation of neural tissue should require the ability to not just provide glucose, oxygen and other essential nutrients to the neural tissue, but also a way to restore the electrochemical activity.  Perhaps it is most telling that what we think of as memory and personality is primarily the result of the synaptic connections that our neurons make with each other.  Once an organism is killed, the once living cells undergo a process of necrosis.  Essentially what that means for our zombies, is that the cells no longer have intact intracellular mechanisms, nor do they have the same connections between cells.  If we extend this now to the brains of humans, we begin to understand the very soon after death the synaptic connections between neurons would break down.  With the loss of synaptic connections, the knowledge, skills, memory, and personality of that human would also be lost.  Thus, if we reanimate the body, the "mind" would still not be functioning.  Nonetheless, control of the muscles which allow the zombie to moving walk would still reside in spinal cord and brain stem with some residual signal coming from the motor cortex.

Thus, the idea that zombies represent some form of reanimated corpse, necessarily brings with it the idea that brain function could or would not be restored, and reanimated corpses would be able to do little else than lurch and moan.  On the other hand, transfer of pharmacological or infections agents could very well affect living humans to the point that they exhibit the same characteristics as the living dead.

Ringo's Under a Graveyard Sky will be in public circulation around the time this article is published, however, advanced reader copies have been out for a few months, and John has been publishing snippets of his writing for a few months before that. What I find most amazing about the early reader comments is all of the people who criticize the idea that "a mere infection" would result in the animalistic, primitive behavior of the Infected. Furthermore, this complaint typically takes the form of "nothing would change the behavior/personality so radically and not kill the subject." Really? I invite those same readers to investigate the case of Phineas Gage (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Phineas-Gage-Neurosciences-Most-Famous-Patient.html).

In 1848, railroad construction foreman Phineas Gage suffered an injury from a premature blasting powder explosion. An iron tamping rod more than an inch thick, was propelled by the explosion, striking Gage in the face, passed through his skull, and landed on the ground several feet away. Miraculously, Gage survived, although he lost an eye and had extensive damage to the left frontal lobe of his brain and moderate damage to the right frontal lobe. At first he seemed to recover, but over the next year, his personality changed – instead of the model foreman, he became violent, profane and unable to hold a steady job. Gage's case was the first to suggest a link between personality and the structure of the brain—particularly the frontal lobes.

Furthermore, John Ringo has stated that he conceptually modeled his H7D3 virus after rabies (for the blood-borne phase) which also infects the frontal lobe of the brain and produces anxiety, depression, hallucinations and mania. In yet another parallel with zombie lore, the pharmacological agents used to produce "voodoo" zombies—tetrodotoxin and solanum—have their primary effect to reduce the function of the frontal lobe and are known to produced not just a "mindless" state, but one characterized by "base" emotional reactions and loss of self-control. Thus, whether viral or pharmacological, the characteristic of zombies having no conscious control over violent emotion and physical action is scientifically valid.

While popular fiction and movies often include the concept of a few rare individual zombies able to plan, use tools, and organize their fellows into the pursuit of living prey, this is not really consistent with the "scientific" views presented here. Such traits may require one to accept either the inclusion of a few "voodoo zombies" or that there may be humans with more or less intact cognitive facilities who somehow choose to behave as zombies—perhaps to avoid the attentions of the mob!

So where does that leave us with respect to other "zombie traits" such as slow, shambling movement, animallike vocalization, attacking/biting other people and the supposed craving for brains? The first two are fairly easily explained by brain damage. Ability to make precise, definite movements, to speak, or exercise any conscious activity requires a lot of mental ability. Any damage to the dorsal premotor area or primary sensory and motor cortex will impair the ability to make any movements with a purpose—leaving only the ability to stagger or crawl. Speech requires not just the speech center of the brain termed "Broca's Area," but also the motor cortex areas responsible for mouth, tongue, throat and diaphragm control as well as the language areas of the brain. Impair any of all of these and the best a victim can manage will be grunts, howls and hissing.

Aggressive actions toward other humans will result from suppression of higher cognitive facilities (i.e. frontal lobe suppression). Recent examples in the popular news have reported "drug zombies" who have ingested multiple abused drugs, including "bath salts" (not salts at all, but dangerous chemicals called "cathinones"), and attacked other humans using biting and feeding behaviors. Humans can (and will) eat anything if they require the sustenance—small animals, birds, snakes, rats, etc. With suppression of the "executive functions" of the brain, the victim is left only with the basic needs—chief of which is to feed. Without cognitive facilities to identify what is and is not acceptable food, attacking humans can be expected—especially if that human does not run away as quickly as cats or dogs. Of course craving for brains is largely a product of fiction, but rest assured, if a zombie were to attempt to eat a human, the brains would not be spared!

Zombie Infection: Spreading the Disease

Communicating the zombie condition from one individual to the next is quite frequently central to the zombie story—although not strictly essential. While arguably not "zombie" stories, any "mummy" tale is essentially a Category 1 zombie produced by a mystical curse. In particular, with mystical/magical zombies, the originals must be cursed or subject to mystic forces, even if the subsequent spread is via scratch, bite or simple contact. Most zombie stories, however, treat the "zombie curse" as a simple disease, even if we never learn much about the infectious agent. In the Will Smith movie I Am Legend (from a 1954 book of the same name, written by Richard Matheson) the infectious agent is a virus supposedly developed to cure cancer. In Shaun of the Dead, the agent is an extraterrestrial virus, and in Under a Graveyard Sky, it is a unique "dual-expressing" virus. As is rather typical for John Ringo, he treats us to considerably more background on the origins of the "Infected" in his novels; thus we have a bit more to work with when it comes to real science ideas regarding zombies.

Most readers will have no problem with the concept of an infection spreading from person-to-person via contact. However, the remaining criticisms of the approach amount to one of two issues: (1) how to get the disease to spread rapidly enough to reach epidemic (infecting people faster than it can be treated) or even "pandemic" status (epidemics not limited to a single location), and (2) why should a disease affect behavior? We already addressed issue #2 in the previous section, so we'll concentrate on concentrate on transmission of the disease in this section.

Infectious diseases can affect behavior if either the infectious agent directly affects the cells of the brain, or if the infectious agent produces a toxin. Examples of the former include rabies virus or the bacteria (spirochetes) which cause syphilis and Lyme disease. Likewise, bacterial or mold toxins (such as the ergot alkaloid Lysergic acid—similar to LSD) can alter behavior by substituting for normal chemical "neurotransmitters" of the brain. Bacteria and molds can easily spread through the air, water, food and via contact on surfaces, but they are not very good at spreading from person-to-person. The best means to spread infection rapidly is by virus, and the best way to spread a viral infection to a large number of people at the same time is via airborne viruses such as the ones which cause various forms of flu. Viruses that work best for spreading via direct contact (especially by blood or saliva) are blood-borne. Further, while rabies can affect the brain, the viruses with the greatest affinity for infecting brain tissue are the viruses associated with herpes, smallpox, chicken pox, and shingles. Unfortunately for zombie purposes, those viruses are structurally very different from either rabies or most airborne viruses. Influenza viruses are "RNA viruses" meaning that the infection really consists of a small piece of RNA-based genetic code that enters a host cell and starts making the components of more viruses. Herpeslike viruses are "DNA" viruses in which the genetic code uses the normal cellular machinery in order to replicate, since they "hide" in normally present genes of the cell.

To understand why this is important, consider how DNA and RNA normally operate: Normal cell function is to use DNA as a master copy as if it were a template. DNA consists of two strands, and each strand is a mirror image. When DNA is "copied" into RNA, it can form two new strands—a "positive" copy, and a "negative" copy (from the mirror image strand). The positive RNA contains the actual code for making proteins, while the negative RNA likely has no function. Positive RNA is then used as the template for assembling whatever a living cell requires. When a DNA virus such as Varicella (chicken pox) infects a cell, the viral DNA substitutes for normally present DNA, and fools the cell into making more viruses instead of healthy cell parts. There is some new evidence that the complete code of human genes actually contains inactive pieces that were picked up from some prehistoric viruses! With an RNA virus such as West Nile, the virus contains a single strand of positive RNA that can be immediately used to make more virus copies. However, viruses such as Influenza A (the HxNx flu viruses) have negative RNA that has to be copied into a positive RNA strand before it can start making more virus. Retroviruses such as HIV (AIDS virus) have both strands of RNA, and use them to reverse-engineer the original DNA and insert into the genes of a cell (like those prehistoric viruses above). Negative RNA viruses and retroviruses can only make their copies because the respective viruses also carry along an enzyme called "transcriptase" which makes the positive RNA, or "reverse transcriptase" which makes DNA.

The surprising twist of Under a Graveyard Sky is that some bright, yet currently unknown, villain, has found a way to pack in not just the reverse transcriptase, but another enzyme that causes cells to stop making the airborne RNA viruses, and make bloodborne DNA viruses instead. This is the part where science becomes science fiction since such a method has not yet been discovered in real life, but is not so far beyond current science as to be unimaginable. The theoretical mechanism is fairly simple—influenza viruses such as Ringo's putative H7D1 are negative RNA viruses and still have to include transcriptase enzyme. Once inside a cell, if the positive RNA produced by the transcriptase also codes for reverse transcriptase, the virus may additionally shift from producing more RNA copies, to producing DNA virus copies. With a wave of an author's hand, we now have a bloodborne infection that can spread via bites, punctures, scratches and other forms of close contact. Thus, we have an infection which can spread rapidly and with little notice among a population until it transforms itself into the form which attacks the brain of its victims. Make no mistake, these are two very different viruses, and each can spread independently of the other form. In addition, the new virus form also sets up another key plot point of the story—making the vaccine!

Curing Zombies

Most protagonists in a zombie story would rightfully argue that the only way to truly cure a zombie… is to kill the host, thereby also destroying the disease. Yet no matter whether we hypothesize a mystical or disease source for the zombie "curse" (and provided the victims are actually alive, and not walking dead), there should be some means to "cure" those zombies. If the zombie condition is indeed a magical curse, finding and eliminating the source of that curse should be sufficient to restore the zombie to humanity. Surprisingly, the scientific approach to a zombie "disease" starts much the same way, although it will require additional steps to apply and spread that cure.

The previous section postulated a viral source for our zombie infection. Human science has become very proficient at identifying both bacterial and viral sources of infection. It may take a bit longer to trace the origin, but as long as medical facilities survive long enough to examine the Infected, it should be possible to prevent the disease via vaccine, even if it cannot be cured outright. If the infection is one that causes simply suppression of higher cognitive functions (as would be caused by a toxin of pharmacological agent) then removing the source of that suppression should allow the victim to return to normal. However, if any permanent damage to the brain cells or connections has occurred—even with identification of the infection source, it may not be possible to restore normal brain or body function.

The best way to cure or prevent any disease is to let the human immune system take care of the job for you. When bacteria, viruses or alien organisms invade the human body, it forms antibodies which assist in destroying the foreign tissue. Often, however, it can be a race between creating enough antibodies to cure the infection before the foreign material replicates enough to seriously sicken the host. Thus, a mechanism is required to produce antibodies prior to infection—in other words, a vaccine. Antibodies do not have to form in response to the exact infectious agent, as discovered by Edward Jenner in 1796 when he discovered that milkmaids contracting cowpox appeared immune to the much more deadly smallpox. A human patient injected with a much milder form of either the same or a similar disease have the opportunity to develop antibodies with either no symptoms or much less severe symptoms. For the greatest effectiveness, the actual viral/bacteriological agent must be used, but in an inactivated or attenuated form. When there is the luxury of enough time to create the vaccine, scientists use the fact that viruses mutated, and breed the virus in culture for many generations, hoping for a less severe version for their vaccine—this is what Will Smith's character is doing in I Am Legend.

When time is critical, however, the potent virus can be "inactivated" or killed by chemical or radiological means, and still be used for vaccine production. In Under a Graveyard Sky, the Smith family gets ensnared in a scheme to (illegally) produce vaccine using virus harvested from live Infected. The question of exactly what tissues to use for harvesting virus could easily have been handwaved away by the author, but Ringo chose to use rabies as a model, and have the blood-borne "zombie-making" virus concentrate in the spinal cord. While brain tissue (particularly frontal lobes of the brain) would also make sense based on the site of action of the virus, Ringo's choice is consistent not only with rabies, but also with the aforementioned Varicella and herpes viruses which concentrate in spinal cord and in the ganglia lining the spinal cord. It is certainly likely that any virus seriously affecting the brain can be found much more readily in the spinal cord than in other parts of the body, and with good fictional plotting, that point alone sets up more of the drama and conflict of the story!

There is always a question of whether a vaccine will provide any protection from a disease once the infection takes hold in a victim. For greatest protection, the immune system needs to start producing antibodies before the infection can reproduce. If a person is already fully infected, a vaccine may at best cause a milder form of the disease. Then again, there is always a statistical chance that a person develops sufficient antibodies (or contracts a mild/mutated disease) to be immune already. Survivors in close contact with infected may have their own antibody—or they may just have never gotten the most potent form of the disease. From a medical perspective, it would certainly be interesting to test the survivors for antibodies in Under a Graveyard Sky—from a purely fictional perspective—to see if their blood could have been used to produce the needed antibody.

Defeating Zombies

No description of "curing" a zombie plague would be complete without at least a passing discussion of defeating and killing zombies in combat. The best answer I can give to "how" is—from as far away as possible. John Ringo, Michael Z. Williamson, Larry Correia, Sarah A. Hoyt and I have all participated in a fun convention panel entitled "Messiest Ways to Kill Zombies" in which our first assumption is that no contamination occurs from contact with blood and tissue. However, isolating from contact—what medical professionals call "universal precautions" should be the first "realistic" preparation for combat. Zombie Hunters should be very careful not to become victims themselves.

The next step involves knowing exactly which "injuries" will stop a particular type of zombie. It has always amused me that the traditional attack on "undead" creatures, is always to go for portions of the body which are supposedly lacking or nonfunctional—the brain in zombies, the heart in vampires. Given a mystical zombie curse, the only defense is typically to render the zombie into small enough pieces that it is no longer a threat. For reanimated corpses, it makes as much sense to target the brain as any other body part, since the reanimation force likely substitutes for brain activity—separate that from the rest of the body and again, it becomes no threat to the hunter. For "living" zombies and Infected, brain and heart become the major targets, since the lack of higher thought processes means that pain or any lesser injury would not interrupt the zombie attack. Once the brain or heart are severely disrupted, the zombie should finally cease the attack, unless one is very, very unlucky (or in a Larry Correia novel). In the process, though, a good hunter remembers to use a caliber sufficient to incapacitate the Infected—a lesson largely lost on Max Brooks when he incorrectly assumed in World War Z that a mere .22 caliber round would penetrate the head from more than a few feet away. Hunters! Be like Faith Smith and insist on large caliber ammo!

Final Thoughts on Scientific vs. Fictional Zombies

A friend of mine likes to jokingly respond on panels at science fiction conventions: "No, we're talking about real zombies." In this article, we've treated zombies as a real, scientifically based phenomenon. There are many historical (and hysterical) reports of zombielike behavior that can be attributed to natural causes, and those causes are extrapolated here to speculate a scientific basis for a zombie plague. By extension, we also speculate on how to deal with such a plague using a similar scientific rationale. There are many questions we have not addressed: such as how zombies coordinate swarms, why they howl, why they don't attack each other… but many of those questions really result from how an author/screenwriter chooses to write their zombie universe. Until we are truly faced with a zombie apocalypse, we can only speculate …

… and prepare.

Dr. Tedd Roberts, known to many science fiction fans as "Speaker to Lab Animals," is a research scientist in neuroscience. For the past thirty years, his research has concentrated on how the brain encodes information about the outside world, how that information is represented by electrical and chemical activity of brain cells, and the transformation of that information into movement and behavior. He blogs about his work here.

Columbia's First Victims

by Terry Burlison

On the morning of Feb. 1, 2003, the world watched in horror as the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated re-entering Earth's atmosphere. Over the ensuing months, investigators pored over NASA's management practices, engineering decisions, and launch footage to determine the cause of the tragedy. Eventually the investigations ended, the families began the process of healing, and the names Rick Husband, Willie McCool, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon were engraved on the Astronaut Memorial Wall at Kennedy Space Center.

But few people remembered that the crew of STS-107 were not the first to lose their lives aboard Columbia.

“In his blood”

Rockwell technician Nicholas Mullon was a child of the space age.

Nick's father worked for Boeing at Cape Canaveral during the 60s, as NASA drove hard for the moon and “space fever” burned throughout eastern Florida. Young Nick grew up around astronauts, engineers, and other space workers, and dreamed of making his own contribution. After graduating Cocoa Beach High School, Mullon volunteered for the U.S. Army. Upon leaving the service in 1977, he followed his father's path, working on the new space shuttle program as a technician for Rockwell International. The space program was “in his blood,” according to Denise Mullon, who married Nick in 1975.

Mrs. Mullon describes Nick as “hard-working, loved by everybody, the kind of guy people gravitate to . . . and handsome as a movie star.” A man who enjoyed playing guitar and working with his hands, Nick began taking night classes in mechanical engineering while working as an aft fuselage wiring technician on the shuttle. Like thousands of others, Mullon worked tirelessly through long days and weekends toward the moment Columbia would roar into the heavens.

After nearly two years of delays, launch day finally approached. The morning of March 19, 1981, Mullon and his fellow workers stood watch at Launch Complex 39A, awaiting the conclusion of Columbia's final Countdown Demonstration Test (CDDT), the last major milestone before flight. After the test, they would enter and inspect the orbiter. Liftoff was less than a month away, and the future burned bright for the 25-year-old father of two.

Countdown

Launching a manned spacecraft is extraordinarily difficult, especially for the maiden flight of a vehicle as complex as the space shuttle.

During the launch countdown, the shuttle's huge external tank held millions of pounds of super-cooled liquid hydrogen and oxygen. As the count approached zero, thousands of pounds of those propellants poured through the orbiter's main engines. The engines then ignited and ran for a few seconds while the shuttle remained bolted to the pad. If any engine was not operating properly, the launch sequencing computer commanded a shutdown prior to liftoff, when the massive solid rocket boosters would ignite. In the case of such a launch abort, gaseous hydrogen and oxygen remained hovering around the pad, posing a fire risk to the shuttle and the launch complex. (On a later shuttle flight, that exact scenario resulted in a brief hydrogen fire on the pad.)

To mitigate the risk of gaseous hydrogen or oxygen seeping into access compartments inside the aft end of the orbiter, gaseous nitrogen (GN2), an inert gas, was pumped through those areas prior to the end of the countdown. During ascent, the nitrogen vented out of those unpressurized areas. If the launch was scrubbed, launch controllers purged the GN2 from the orbiter with breathable air so that workers could safely enter the compartments to inspect the vehicle.

In February, a month before the CDDT, the shuttle's three main engines were tested in a 20-second, full throttle burn while on the launch pad. The Flight Readiness Firing, or FRF, went perfectly and the GN2 purge was executed as planned. However, tests of the crew compartment atmosphere indicated a slight increase in nitrogen, leading officials to suspect a GN2 leak. Although the leak was not thought hazardous, test teams requested a deviation from the usual procedures for the March Countdown Demonstration Test to investigate. Even though the engines would not fire—indeed, the shuttle would not even be fueled—a longer GN2 purge would give engineers more time to assess the possibility of a leak.

Figure 1: Flight Readiness Firing

(Official NASA photo, courtesy of the author)

Since nitrogen is inert and was not considered dangerous, certainly not when compared to other liquids and gases onboard Columbia, the change was not marked as hazardous. Ideally, safety committees reviewed all changes before being implemented, but for the CDDT over 500 deviations had been ordered. Only “hazardous” changes were reviewed.

Therefore, Deviation 13-20 was approved without full review and inserted into the countdown schedule. But due to a communications breakdown, the time now required to complete the longer purge did not get inserted into the integrated timeline. Test controllers in the Firing Room would be conducting the longer purge, but workers at the pad, operating off an inaccurate timeline, knew nothing of the extension. Since the change had not been properly reviewed, the discrepancy went unnoticed.

On March 19, as the countdown test neared completion, the extended GN2 purge began.

“Pad clear”

By 8:50 am, the CDDT had finished, astronauts John Young and Bob Crippen had left the orbiter, and the test director gave the pad clear announcement for workers to return to their tasks. Across Launch Complex 39A, contractors swarmed back to the shuttle. By now, the nitrogen purge would normally have ended and breathable air would be flowing into the shuttle. But under Deviation 13-20, GN2 still filled the aft compartments of the orbiter.

Shortly after 9 a.m., Nick Mullon headed for the launch pad to resume his duties in the shuttle’s aft compartment. A few minutes ahead of him, fellow Rockwell technicians John Bjornstad, Forrest Cole and William Wolford had already arrived at the pad and ascended the Rotating Service Structure (RSS), the massive steel framework that surrounded the shuttle and provided access for workers.

Figure 2: Rotating Service Structure, 130-foot level

(Illustration from official accident report)

Red lines indicate path victims took to work station

At 9:15 a.m., when they reached the 130-foot level of the RSS, Bjornstad, Cole and Wolford logged in, walked across the access ramp to the shuttle, then climbed down the four-foot ladder to the platform outside door 50-1 of the orbiter. Their task was to inspect and “close out” equipment in the back of the vehicle, near the main engines. The access door had been replaced by a curtain to provide easier access. According to their timeline the aft GN2 purge was complete, and the compartment was now filled with breathable air.

Bjornstad crawled past the curtain into Columbia and worked his way through the cramped quarters to his right; Cole followed, turning to his left and climbing deeper into the vehicle. The curtain fell shut behind them.

Nitrogen: “non-hazardous,” but deadly

Nearly 80 percent of the air we breathe is nitrogen, a virtually inert and usually harmless gas. Most of the rest is oxygen, which causes the release of carbon dioxide from our bloodstream into our lungs. This CO2 build-up triggers our sense of breathlessness, the need to inhale. But when breathing pure nitrogen, no CO2 is released into the lungs, and victims have no idea they are suffocating. They breathe normally until unconsciousness strikes.

And it strikes within seconds.

Twenty-two minutes of terror

Moments after Forrest Cole disappeared behind the curtain covering door 50-1, Bill Wolford followed. Crawling through the entrance, he turned to find Bjornstad lying on his back, unconscious. Yanking the curtain aside, Wolford called for help, then turned to assist his friend. As he reached for Bjornstad's hand, darkness swept over him and Wolford passed out, falling atop Bjornstad's body.

The three men had been inside Columbia for less than a minute.

At 9:20, a Rockwell quality inspector, Jimmy Harper, logged in at the work station. Harper proceeded to the orbiter to find Wolford lying unconscious on Bjornstad. Harper rushed forward to help. Wolford briefly regained consciousness, tried to rise, but collapsed again. As Harper struggled to free Wolford, dizziness overcame him and he also collapsed, falling backwards through the door and onto the metal grating outside.

Figure 3: Position of Victims in Aft Compartment

(Illustration from official accident report)

Moments later, Nick Mullon, Robert Tucker, and another quality inspector, Don Corbitt, signed in at the same work station. Mullon headed toward his work assignment in the aft compartment, unaware of the crisis. When he reached the orbiter, he saw Harper collapse onto the platform and, inside Columbia, Wolford passed out atop the unconscious Bjornstad. (Mullon could not see Forrest Cole, who had collapsed out of sight within the orbiter.) Rather than returning to the safety of the emergency station and calling for help, Mullon rushed forward.

Yelling behind him to Don Corbitt for assistance, Mullon grabbed Jimmy Harper and pulled him onto the access ramp away from Columbia. Taking a deep breath, Mullon then crawled into the deadly compartment where he grabbed Wolford and dragged him outside to safety. Corbitt arrived and he and Mullon re-entered the compartment to try to rescue Bjornstad. Corbitt grabbed Bjornstad’s feet; Mullon squeezed farther inside to push Bjornstad out by his shoulders. As they dragged and pushed the unconscious man through the doorway, dizziness overtook Mullon; he collapsed, falling unconscious onto the access platform outside.

A few feet away on the access ramp, Jimmy Harper, the first man Mullon had pulled to safety, regained consciousness and staggered back to the 130-foot level of the RSS and called for help. Quality inspector Bob Tucker rushed to his aid and began assisting him while other workers put out emergency calls, including a page throughout the launch complex calling for assistance. Emergency crews scrambled to the launch pad to help.

It was now 9:22. Bjornstad and Mullon lay unconscious on the access ramp near Columbia. Unknown to anyone, Forrest Cole still lay trapped inside the orbiter.

Three miles away at the Launch Control Center, the Firing Room engineer controlling the GN2 purge heard the emergency call and asked for permission to immediately end the purge and switch back to air. In the confusion, he did not receive a response; a minute later he initiated the changeover anyway. Unfortunately, the automated process of opening and closing all the proper valves took time: another 90 seconds passed before breathable air flowed into Columbia and began to push out the deadly GN2.

Back at the pad Jimmy Harper now appeared stable, so Tucker grabbed a five-minute emergency breathing unit and raced back to the orbiter where he found Corbitt struggling to pull Mullon and Bjornstad onto the access ramp. He and Corbitt managed to lift the unconscious men up the 4-foot ladder to the ramp and away from danger. Tucker then looked into the aft section, searching for other victims. As he peered around the crowded, dimly-lit compartment, his face mask began to fog and he failed to see Cole's body lying deeper inside the orbiter. He left.

At 9:23, eight minutes into the disaster, a fire chief at the pad responded to the emergency calls and arrived wearing self-contained breathing apparatus. Entering the aft compartment, he discovered Cole passed out under the cables and pipes within the crowded compartment. He tried to pull him free, without success. Another fireman arrived and joined the chief, who was still struggling to free Cole. Together, they managed to drag Cole from the orbiter and onto the access platform.

It was now 9:28. Forrest Cole, the last worker to be removed, had been trapped without oxygen for over 12 minutes. Nick Mullon, John Bjornstad, and Cole all lay unconscious on the access ramp fighting for their lives. Workers raced to find emergency air bottles and began administering oxygen to all five victims.

A call to the Launch Control Complex Dispensary requested every available ambulance at the pad. Within minutes the first responding unit, ambulance KSC-4, roared down the 3-mile gravel drive to Launch Complex 39A. At that time, emergency responders were unclear of the nature of the emergency and feared the presence of hazardous materials. In fact, one of the frantic calls had suggested the possibility of an ammonia leak. Consequently, the pad Security Control officer erroneously ordered guards not to allow any emergency vehicle through the gate that did not have the proper emergency breathing apparatus. Ambulance KSC-4 arrived at the pad's security gate at 9:29 only to be denied entrance because it did not have such equipment. From his position at the pad, a security sergeant (call sign Badger 15) witnessed the delay and immediately radioed the guardhouse:

9:30:19: Badger 15—“Do not hold anybody in emergency traffic at Pad A gate!”

No reponse. The ambulance was still being held.

9:31:07: Badger 15—“Let the ambulance come up here! Let the ambulance come up here! I need 'em at the top!”

Still no response. Frustrated, the sergeant ran to his car and raced to the ramp to discuss the situation personally with the pad guards. At 9:31:40, the pad safety chief chimed in over the communication loop, ordering the guards to allow the ambulance in, stating that they did not need the breathing apparatus.

Finally, at 9:32:18, after a nearly three-minute delay during which Bjornstad, Cole and Mullon lay unconscious or dying, the guards cleared the ambulance to the pad. KSC Medical then ordered all ambulances to proceed directly through the guard gate to the pad without stopping.

Figure 4: Launch Complex 39-A and the guard gate where ambulance was held.

(Photo courtesy of Rick Banke)

At the pad, emergency workers administered oxygen to the five men, but supplies quickly ran low. At 9:37, two minutes after ambulance KSC-4 finally arrived, a NASA safety officer placed another 911 call, demanding more oxygen bottles.

Mullon regained consciousness at the pad; Bjornstad and Cole did not.

Finally, rescuers were able to remove the men from the launch complex and rush them to the on-site medical facility. From there, the critically injured were airlifted by helicopter to area hospitals. For two of the victims, it was too late: John Bjornstad died enroute; Forrest Cole, now in a coma, succumbed to his injuries on April 1, without ever regaining consciousness.

Nick Mullon, who saved Harper and Wolford's lives by pulling them to safety, was flown to Jess Parrish Hospital in Titusville. His wife, Denise, was working at her bank when she got the call that there had been an accident involving her husband. She was told to go home, but not to speak to anyone. Word had already spread, however, and friends from around the community joined her while she waited for word of her husband’s safety. Finally, Denise got word that Nick had been admitted to Parrish and rushed to her husband’s side.

Findings

NASA immediately assigned a board to investigate the Launch Complex 39A “mishap.” For three months, the board pored over transcripts, work logs, and documents, and conducted scores of interviews. On June 19, 1981, they released their findings in a 476-page document entitled, “LC-39A Mishap Investigation Board Final Report.”

The “proximate cause” of the tragedy was clear enough: hypoxia caused by workers breathing a pure-nitrogen atmosphere. The men were exposed to this hazard because of failed communication between the test conductors and pad workers. As is often the case, however, many factors contributed to the accident.

The investigation pointed to the failure of the Deviation documentation to specify the length of the extended GN2 purge, the decision not to tag the Deviation as “Hazardous,” and even to the signage at the access ramp: access to the orbiter was controlled by a simple chain with a sign reading “Area Closed,” which can be (and was) removed without Safety Personnel concurrence.

Figure 5: Restricted Access vs Hazardous Area signage

(Photo courtesy of NASA)

Additionally, the board found that the breathing apparatus lockers were too far away for immediate responders, such as Mullon and Corbitt, to use. Even the access platform's design was cited as a hindrance to rescuers trying to assist the unconscious victims (see Figures 2 and 6).

Figure 6: Access Platform for Door 50-1

(Illustration from official accident report)

The board cited organization problems, as well. Test controllers at the Firing Room three miles from the launch complex wanted full authority over all test procedures. However, the on-site workforce at the pad saw this oversight as cumbersome in their efforts to perform their work. This led to the situation during the CDDT: Firing Room personnel running the extended GN2 purge while unaware that workers had been cleared at the pad to resume work.

Investigators compared the LC-39A Mishap, as it was called, with the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, which killed astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee. In both cases, a dry countdown test resulted in deaths because dangerous atmospheric situations were not tagged as “hazardous” (in the case of Apollo 1, the pure oxygen atmosphere in the crew cabin), contingency plans and equipment were inadequate or non-existent, emergency teams weren't prepared, and structural designs inhibited effective response. In fact, the board found that NASA had failed to comply with a 1967 Congressional request to establish procedures to review such operations in a timely and effective manner.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) also investigated. In November, OSHA found both Rockwell International and NASA at fault in the accident. For failing to prevent employees from entering the aft access compartment during a nitrogen purge, OSHA fined Rockwell $420. NASA received no fine at all. “That would amount to the government paying the government,” said OSHA officials.

In 1982, Barbara Bjornstad and Nancy Cole filed lawsuits against NASA, Rockwell International, and three other companies. According to newspaper reports in 1984, several of the suits representing the dead and injured were combined into a single settlement for three million dollars. In reality, neither the Mullon nor Wolford families was included in such a settlement.

“A Real Hero”

When Nick Mullon raced to help his fallen colleagues, he did so with no thought of his own safety. Even for this “dry” countdown test, the shuttle was loaded with many poisonous liquids and gases; the aft compartment could have been filled with hydrazine, ammonia or other deadly fumes. Knowing that literally every second counted, Mullon chose to plunge into the aft compartment to help, rather than lose precious moments by going back for breathing gear.

He paid a terrible price for his heroism.

The Nicholas Mullon who returned to his family appeared unchanged, physically. But the husband and father they knew—the laughing, energetic man with dreams of a better future—did not return from pad 39A. Nick now suffered from sleep disorders, severe anxiety, and physical problems. His ability to remember things was “gone.” He suffered from severe post-traumatic stress. His wife recounts that she would awaken at night to find him elsewhere in the house, hiding from his nightmares.

Unable to work, Nick began receiving workers’ compensation at a fraction of his lost salary. According to Mrs. Mullon, Rockwell and NASA offered the Mullon family no financial assistance. In fact, from the moment Denise was notified of the accident, the Mullons were instructed not to discuss it with anyone, including the press. Finally, in 1982, with looming medical expenses and Nick unable to work, the Mullons filed their own lawsuit, citing Nick's severe brain damage, sudden personality changes, and other psychological disorders.

Mark Horwitz, who represented the Mullon family, says Nick struggled daily with memory and emotional issues resulting from his hypoxia and nitrogen ingestion. One recollection still haunts Horwitz: Nick would be driving and suddenly stop the car, unable to remember how to get home—he would have to call his wife to come help him find his way back. “It’s bad enough to lose your mental faculties and not know it’s happening. But to realize your mind is damaged, to not be able to remember things you know you should, that’s,” he pauses, “that’s tough.”

Yet despite those struggles, Horwitz remembers Mullon as “a pleasant young man.” His associate in the case, Clifton Curry, agrees, saying “Nick was a great guy, just a hard-working family man . . . He was a real hero, and it was an honor to represent him.”

Also in 1982, William Wolford, one of the men Mullon saved, filed his own lawsuit.

Wolford, who was rushed into the hospital on a gurney bleeding from his nose and ears, was declared dead before being revived. “They had even tagged his toe,” says his wife, Susan.

Although Wolford was soon released, Mrs. Wolford says the accident “totally altered our lives. Bill suffered from non-stop severe migraines, I mean 24 hours a day, for three and a half years. He still suffers constantly from terrible back pain.” (While removing Wolford from the site, rescuers accidentally dislodged metal pins in his back from a previous injury.) According to Mrs. Wolford, even specialists at Duke University had no idea of his prognosis. “They had never heard of anyone surviving that much exposure to nitrogen.”

Yet according to both families, neither Rockwell nor NASA provided any emotional or financial support after the accident. “Nothing,” says Sue Wolford. “To this day, not one person from NASA or Rockwell has ever said one word to us about it. I had to find out what happened to Bill on the eleven o’clock news.”

In 1984, the defendants in the suits, Rockwell International, Pan American (who provided medical support at the pad), and Wackenhut Security (responsible for “protection of life and property at Kennedy Space Center”), settled with the victims’ families out of court. After paying off their attorneys and other debts, plus reimbursing the State of Florida for their workers' compensation (including medical costs), Nick and Denise Mullon cleared less than $60,000, the Wolfords somewhat more.

In 1996, Rockwell International was acquired by the Boeing Company. Representatives at Boeing did not return requests for comment.

Peace, at last

Over the next 11 years, Nick Mullon's health and mental faculties continued to deteriorate. In addition to the physical and emotional damage he suffered, survivor's guilt consumed him. “He would lock himself in the garage for days at a time,” Mrs. Mullon says. “He would disappear and I would find him practically anywhere. I might find him wandering on the sand dunes along the coast.” Another time, Nick fled to Washington D.C. in his effort to escape the daily torment his life had become. Denise found him living in a parking lot with other homeless men; Nick's guilt had driven him to believe this was where he belonged.

His physical condition continued to worsen, as well. Nodules appeared on Nick's lungs; even with oxygen, breathing became a daily struggle. Finally in April, 1995, after 14 years of battling the medical and psychological trauma—and only weeks before his son's high school graduation—Nick passed away, finally succumbing to the injuries he suffered on pad 39A.

Figure 7: (L to R) John Bjornstad, Nick Mullon and Forrest Cole in the aft compartment of Columbia.

(Photo courtesy of Denise Mullon)

Not Forgotten

Less than a month after the accident, while orbiting the earth on the first space shuttle flight, commander John Young paid a personal tribute to the victims of the LC-39A tragedy. “I think it is only right that we mention a couple of guys that gave their lives a few weeks ago in our countdown demonstration test: John Bjornstad and Forrest Cole. They believed in the space program, and it meant a lot to them. I am sure they would be thrilled to see where we have the vehicle now.”

Thirty years later, the Space Walk of Fame Museum in Titusville, Fla., erected a monument “to honor those space workers who died in the line of duty.” Engraved along the top are the names John Bjornstad, Forrest Cole and Nicholas Mullon.

The memorial stands in tribute to those unheralded men and women who also made the ultimate sacrifice to explore the heavens, and reminds us that not every hero wears a pressure suit.

Figure 8: In the Line of Duty

(Photo courtesy of Jeff Jackowski)

Terry Burlison graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering: the same school/degree as Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, the first and last men to walk on the moon. He then worked for NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Trajectory Officer for the first space shuttle missions. After leaving NASA, Terry spent ten years at Boeing, supporting numerous civilian and defense space projects. Until recently, he was a private consultant for many of the new commercial space ventures. Terry is now a full-time writer. His web site is www.terryburlison.com.

We begin a multipart series on training for war by retired Army lieutenant colonel Tom Kratman, creator of the popular Carrera military science fiction series, with latest entry Come and Take Them. Does it seem as if the United States land armed forces have lately been training to be cadres of world policemen and social workers rather than soldiers prepared to win a war? Here Kratman distills lessons from years as a commanding officer in the U.S. Army, where he retired a colonel. Kratman’s argument: an army is for winning wars. And to win wars, you have to train men (and some women) to be warriors.

ON TRAINING FOR WAR, PART 1

by Tom Kratman

Dedication: For Lieutenants Bill White, Lee van Arsdale, Mike Smith, Terry Jones, Jorge Garcia, Ken Carter, Steve Reynolds, Rich Hayes, Tom Dubois, Phil Helbling, Steve Natschke, Jaime Bonano, Scott Fitzenreiter, Mike Cook, Scott Brown, Chad Snyder, and Tom Matte

It’s hard to serve two masters, or two audiences, with a single paper. I’m going to give it a try, anyway, because the subject matters to most of the things I care about, in this case my army (and her sister services), hence my country, and (this being the other master) my current job, which is writing science fiction, hence my family. Interestingly enough, while one might normally think of military training in science fiction as totally at odds with military training in life – and it often is – I’ve seen at least as much fantasy and wish fulfillment in Army training as I have in some science fiction.

Then, too, I’ve been with an army that had just come out of a losing counter-insurgency campaign. Leaving aside the racial tensions, which were, at the private soldier level, amazingly ferocious, what was perhaps still worse was the company grade leaderships’ almost complete lack of understanding of our primary mission, which was how to train for the next war, or any conventional war. I can’t fault them for their devotion to duty, nor for their character, which was properly hard and harsh. But, when the Army and Marine Corps outside of Vietnam had become little but replacement depots for Vietnam, when that same leadership had been given nearly back to back tours there, interrupted only by short tours in dysfunctional units, when large chunks of the NCO Corps, which was even more put upon than the Officer Corps, left en masse, the ones remaining could hardly be criticized for not learning something the Army and Corps either just weren’t teaching or had spent a decade teaching the opposite of.

We trained hard, to be sure, miles on thousands of miles of marching with heavy packs (where “heavy” could and often did mean more than body weight), and still more awkward loads, alternatively freezing and roasting, bleeding and blistering. And doing not very much, really. As a character development tool the program had much to recommend it. As a training regimen, it left something to be desired.

“Left something to be desired?” Ummm…Kratman, old boy, just what exactly?

And awayyyy we go! But ere we do…

Caveat One: Most of what follows is non-doctrinal; it’s either just me, my approach, or the approaches of some other good military trainers from whom I learned a great deal. Some of this will be presented as axioms, some as vignettes, and some as illustration or speculation. Rather than say, “I did this,” or “Carter did that,” or “Smith thought this was a good idea,” or “White used to push this” or “van Arsdale suggested that,” the vignettes will be presented in the person of Private, Corporal, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Major, and Colonel Hamilton. Why him? Easy; Hamilton was one of my more likeable characters in my books. There’s a little of all of those in Hamilton, anyway, plus quite a few others.

Caveat Two: It would be nice to be able to say that everything here will apply as much to women as to men. Sadly, I’d be lying if I said I believed that. I don’t. I do believe that it might, if we approached the subject of women in combat with half a grain of sense (see, e.g., my previous article for Baen, The Amazon’s Right Breast, as well as my novel, The Amazon Legion). But c’mon, that’s not going to happen, not with the PC lunatics having control of the keys to the asylum. What I rather expect to happen, though, is that woman are going to volunteer to stay away from combat arms in huge and overwhelming numbers, that most of those very few who do go combat arms will be – shall we say, charitably – a bit on the masculine side, and that they might well become just one of the guys, with as much interest in, say, chasing girls are any male grunt, ever.

Caveat Three: Eventually, Inshallah, I intend to turn this into a book. I retain the right to change the number and numbers of the axioms, vignettes, and rules, or any other thing I damned well feel like, at that time, and said book will be the definitive edition. Until then, this will have to do.

I

Axiom One: The functions of training, the reasons we train, and all training can do for us, boil down to five things: Skill Training, Conditioning, Development, Selection, and Testing of Doctrine and Equipment.

The armed forces have a serious doctrinal lack when it comes to explaining why we train and how we do. Since they can’t articulate things like, “No, Doctor, Ranger School sucks in the way it does because we are conditioning and selecting, not merely teaching skills,” we get changes demanded from unqualified amd ignorant people, with credentials that bear no particular relationship to train for war.

I’ve spent, by the way, a number of decades since I first floated this axiom around, looking for a valid argument against it from anyone entitled to an opinion. I still haven’t gotten one, beyond the merest quibble. Every practicing trainer would probably recognize these as valid, even if they wouldn’t necessarily articulate them in exactly the same way.

The five functions should not be looked at as things that can be added up, to come to an approximation of a unit’s or individual’s training status. To even hope to do that you would have to be able to measure some immeasurables. Forget it; all the really important things can’t be measured, while all the really measurable things aren’t very important.

But if you could measure everything, trying to add their values together would still be the wrong way to look at it. After all, a soldier or a battalion, be they ever so skilled, are still worthless if they lack the courage to stand in line of battle, or to press the assault home. Instead, the proper way to look at them would be as things that must be multiplied by each other, with any factor being a zero causing the total to be worth zero, even if one approached infinity. Of course, again, since most of these are anywhere from difficult to impossible to measure, you’re not going to get a true value. The important thing to remember is that a zero in one is a zero overall, and even a serious weakness is one means weakness overall.

It’s also worth remembering that there is crossover. Better shooting ability, a skill, requires a degree of physical conditioning, but also conditions greater confidence, for example. Greater confidence develops greater trust and unit cohesion. I will treat these functions as distinct, for the most part, the better to illustrate them. But they are actually much fuzzier, with much more crossover, than that. They also apply in different ways at different levels, while some are appropriate to leaders, not so key to followers, and still others are collective, applying not just to everyone but to everyone in a unit together.

Axiom Two: Skill Training is the easiest.

Skill training is pretty obvious stuff: shoot, move, communicate, repair, account for, manage, request, fill out the form, clean it…there are thousands of tasks, but under a thousand for any given MOS (Military Occupational Specialty, that’s “job” for you non-cognoscenti). If in doubt, there are manuals to tell one how to do everything. A man or woman of average intelligence could learn to do most of them, and some could probably be done by a docile chimpanzee. Even fairly poor armies can do a fair job at skill training. They may not, of course, but they can, if only by sending people off to better armies to be trained. Of the five functions, skill training is the easiest, hence not necessarily the most important, for any given set of skills.

Among the reasons skill training is the easiest is that almost all skills are pretty measurable: hit the target, prepare and send the proper call for fire to the mortars or artillery, do the recon, write the operations order, analyze the map with regard to the enemy, camouflage the position so it cannot be seen from in front, drive the track without wrecking it, blow up X. Etc. Etc. Etc. You usually know when your troops have a skill down as good enough. You can tell when you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, the point at which trying to get the task which must be done in thirty seconds done in twenty-nine just isn’t worth it, given how much else there is to do.

Axiom Three: Conditioning refers to the molding of non-conscious, instinctive, or non-intellectual characteristics, and the body. It is hard, not least because the mental and emotional aspects of it are nearly impossible to measure, objectively.

Science fiction often touches on conditioning, and sometimes with a certain amount of insight, albeit generally of the negative kind or by omission. Think here, Warren Peace in the late Bob Shaw’s book, Who Goes Here. Or Keith Laumer’s Boloverse. What do those two have in common? That the minds of the combatants can be directly programmed, or obedience unto death can be directly programed, easily and reliably, thus obviating the time consuming and incredibly iffy task of conditioning the combatants directly. Somewhat similarly, John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War provides artificial bodies tuned to perfection, thus eliminating the need to train those bodies.

In other words, no, we can’t do any of those things, now, and must rely on more traditional methods which are, again, iffy. They will remain iffy, too, for the foreseeable future. The trainer has to do the best he can, even knowing that he’ll never know for certain if that best was good enough.

So what do we condition for? We condition for group solidarity and for an innate sense of right and wrong or, maybe better said, to uphold the innate sense of right and wrong the troops bring to the colors. We condition for courage (even though we also develop courage) for, as Aristotle observed, we become brave by performing brave acts. In practice, that means that by overcoming fear once, and then again and yet again, we acquire the habit of overcoming fear and we acquire the non-conscious presumption that we can overcome fear without necessarily having to think about it very much. You might say that, since fear is an emotion, we combat it emotionally.

There are also physical skills that fall under conditioning. For example, shooting a rifle; we drill getting into firing position, the (formerly eight, last I checked three) steady hold factors, so they are done automatically, without thought.

That short list hardly touches on the subject of positive conditioning. Suffice to say that if something desirable in human character is non-intellectual or emotional or physical, we will for the most part work on conditioning it. And, if we have two brain cells to run together, we’ll realize how uncertain is our success, and how likely it may be that the troops, being human, are simply faking it, for anything non-physical and possibly even for the physical. Conditioned responses – conditioned in peace – to do things dangerous or unpleasant in war, will always be problematic.

Another area of conditioning, one highly pervasive in most western armies and in the Russian Army, involves battle drill. This, however, is a subject worthy of its own entry, below.

Conditioning is not only conditioning for something, it is also conditioning against something. For example, modern Outward Bound began life when it was noticed that young British sailors, with their ships torpedoed and sunk from beneath them, would very often simply give up and die in circumstances where they could have saved their own lives fairly easily. Why? Because they’d never been exposed to hardship and took even fairly mild hardship as too much to deal with. Outward Bound, among other things, conditioned sailors against giving up to hardship so easily, by exposing them to hardship. It saved lives, for a certainty. And, if it cannot be said that Outward Bound won the war, it can be said that it helped.

Vignette One: Even a goddamned horse knows enough to come in out of the rain.

Fort Campbell, Kentucky, late 1975.

The troops – they were a mortar section, rather badly understrength – staggered along the ochre-hued firebreak under painful, exhausting, and demoralizing loads. The least burdened of them was still humping well over a hundred pounds, and some of the more heavily laden bore half again more than that. They were soaked from the outside by rain, from the inside by sweat. There were no vehicles; this was the middle of the gas crunch when enough gasoline was simply not to be had. Worse, it was raining, that miserable Fort Campbell rain that came down lightly but steadily all day, then turned freezing at night. Worse than that, the mortars were last in order of march, meaning that a hundred and fifty-odd grunts had tenderized the dirt of the firebreak for them, turning it into a knee deep morass.

“Even a goddamned horse,” says Spec-4 Shipley, who, like the rest, has been transformed into a two legged pack mule, “has sense enough to come in out of the rain.” Shipley’s voice carries and is met by a chorus of approving grunts, spiced with a few poignant curses at the idiots in charge who don’t have sense enough to get them in out of the rain.

Private Hamilton isn’t so sure. He’s at least as miserable as anyone else. But the question in his mind is Kipling’s, “Knowledge unto occasion, at the first far view of death?” In other words, Ship, do you really think we’d do this in war, without just falling apart, if we hadn’t gotten used to it in peace? I have my doubts. And we’re not, loads notwithstanding, horses.

Axiom Four: We develop more intellectual faculties – or moral faculties that require thought – needed by the soldiers and their leaders.

Development is probably not as hard or iffy as conditioning, in the sense that, at least, the truth can be known, success can be, to some degree, validly measured. Still, it remains harder than skill training, and it is time consuming. It is mostly about leadership, yet not entirely, except insofar as every man under fire must often lead himself, make himself do some things he’d really rather not. That, and insofar as the moral echo of troops who have been well developed can sometimes reverberate in their leaders, giving those leaders a little more support in doing their jobs.

All the services share the same fourteen leadership traits. For the most part, we try to develop these in all the troops, at all ranks. Some we condition. And some partake of both. Feel free to argue with the categorization of the list below; I toss it up more for illustration than as prescription.

But how do you know how you’re doing? It’s a toughie, but something hard training can do is give you some hints.

Axiom Five: We subject the troops to hard, dirty, and dangerous training to select from among them.

What are we selecting for? We’re selecting leaders. We’re looking for people who might do well with special training or in particular jobs. (Sometimes that’s negative: “Schmidlap has proven worthless as a rifleman and machine gunner; let’s try him out as a driver.”) We want to identify and eliminate from service the stupid, the selfish, the treacherous, the unethical, the cowardly. If we’re from a culture like most of those in the Middle East (more on this later), we might try to select for people who can overcome their cultural conditioning and accept non-blood relations as quasi family.

Ranger School would be an excellent course for selection, though we really don’t use it for that. Especially valuable would be the peer evaluations which, unlike OERs and NCOERs [1], tend not to be inflated. The big thing though is that traditional Ranger School provides warlike levels of hardship and stress, which allows us to evaluate who does, and who does not, have what it takes to command in war.

Axiom Six: Without subjecting our equipment, and at least as importantly, our doctrine, to realistic testing, we can never identify our intellectual-doctrinal, moral, and materiel weaknesses, nor fix those.

That seems to me so self-evident that I’m loathe to add to it. That said, I probably have to. Why? Because that need to test doctrine and equipment to the point of failure comes with a price tag. Men die. Still, the adding can be done later, in a better place. Read on.

1 Officer Evaluation Reports and Non-Commissioned Officer Evaluation Reports

This series continues with “Training for War, Part Two.” Tom Kratman is a retired U.S. Army colonel and the author of many science fiction and military adventure novels including Carrera series entry Come and Take Them.

Becoming Martian

by Terry Burlison

Dr. Leila Zucker plans to leave her husband.

She hasn’t fallen out of love with Ron, whom she still she considers not only “damn sexy” but her best friend. She’s not leaving him for someone else, nor to take a job in a different city. But if all goes well, in April of 2022, the happily-married ER physician will say goodbye forever, with no hope of ever seeing him again.

Because Leila Zucker hopes to live—and die—on Mars.

Mars, the elusive goal

For over a century, human exploration of Mars remained only within the realm of science fiction. That seemed destined to change after Project Apollo. Since 1969, numerous policy commissions and presidential administrations have identified Mars as a national objective, including the U.S. Space Task Group in 1969, the “Ride Report” in 1986, George H.W. Bush's Space Exploration Initiative in 1989, George W. Bush's Constellation Project in 2004, and more recently, the 2009 Augustine report which stated that “Mars is the ultimate destination for human exploration of the inner solar system.” Despite repeated recommendations, over 40 years have passed since humans placed footprints in the lunar soil.

After President Obama cancelled Constellation in 2010, the administration and Congress struggled to find common ground for NASA exploration. Currently, NASA plans to complete construction of the heavy-lift Ares V booster (now renamed the Space Launch System) and the Orion crew capsule. The SLS will enable NASA to launch heavy elements to orbit, and the Orion is designed for long-duration space missions.

But even with these capabilities, is NASA any closer to a Mars expedition?

NASA currently is not working toward a manned expedition to Mars. Congress and the administration bicker over objectives, as does the space fan community. U.S. space policy mentions Mars only in broad terms, as a general objective sometime in the undefined future. (In a 2010 address at Kennedy Space Center, Obama said only it would be after an orbital mission in the mid-2030s.) So despite the development of deep-space capabilities, seeing human footprints on Mars seems further away than it did when Neil and Buzz stepped onto the lunar surface.

At least by NASA.

Mars or bust

In 2011, Bas Landsdorp, a Dutch entrepreneur with a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering, co-founded the Mars One Foundation, a not-for-profit private venture to send human colonists to Mars by 2023.

Mars One intends to launch robotic missions beginning in 2016, establishing a communications and life-support infrastructure for the explorers while training private citizens for arrival several years later. The colony will consist of landers launched every two years and configured for different purposes: Life Support Units, Supply Units, and Living Units (with inflatable habitats). As each lander arrives, a rover/trailer, launched in 2018, will transport it to the colonization site. According to their website, the Rover will also unroll and lay down thin film solar panels, extract and inflate the Living Units, and other tasks prior to the first human arrivals.

The Mars One rover

(Credit: Mars One Foundation)

According to the Mars One website, “No new major developments or inventions are needed to make the mission plan a reality. Each stage of the Mars One mission plan employs existing, validated and available technology.” They intend to launch their vehicle atop a derived Falcon 9 booster under development by SpaceX, which recently began cargo resupply flights to the International Space Station. The capsule will come from “one of the experienced suppliers in the world.” Other components, they contend, are either off-the-shelf or extrapolations of current technology, and they already list several major aerospace companies among their potential suppliers.

To reduce cost and complexity, the mission is one-way, eliminating the need to develop an Earth-return vehicle. The applicants must be willing give up everything—friends, partners, family—to risk the perilous nine-month flight to Mars, and then spend the rest of their lives scratching out a desperate existence in the most remote and inhospitable place ever walked by humans.

Despite that, 200,000+ people registered on the Mars One website, and a few thousand were serious enough to produce an introductory video and pay their application fee, which ranged from five to seventy-five dollars, depending on their country of origin. (Although Mars One has not released the actual number of paid applications, 2,782 application videos are publicly posted at http://applicants.mars-one.com.)

Mars One Habitat, with Life Support Units and inflatable Living Units

(Credit: Mars One Foundation)

The first crewed flight has been deemed a “suicide mission” by some in the media, a term abhorred by the community. “It's not a suicide mission,” says Mars Society president Robert Zubrin emphatically. “It's a settlement mission. There’s a difference.”

For Dr. Zucker, the one-way mission is the ultimate adventure. She grew up in the Panama Canal Zone, spelunking, rappelling, hiking in the jungles, even “swinging from one tree branch to another on vines.” But to her, reaching Mars means more than exploring a new world: it can ensure the survival of the human species. She points to an XKCD comic (#893) that reads: “The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." Dr. Zucker does not want to see human culture end up in such a “one-planet grave,” and is willing to risk her life to change that destiny.

Two of the loves Leila Zucker must leave behind: husband Ron and skiing

(Photo courtesy of Leila Zucker)

“I have to try not to be angry”

Diary of Kristen Anders, December 12, 2015:

I can't believe I'm in! We first four explorers will be remembered with Columbus, Lewis & Clark, and Armstrong and Aldrin. While the fame thing is pretty cool, that's not why I'm here. I know I'll die on Mars, but what is life without meaning? And what greater meaning can there be than the future of humanity? At least, that's what I've been telling everyone.

But when I came home and told Randall that I had been chosen, he didn't smile, laugh, or celebrate. He just turned and walked out. It broke my heart. But it's going to break more when I tell Tabitha. She’ll be only nine years old when I leave. How will she ever understand why Mommy is going away?

Am I doing the right thing?

Leaving the earth will mean not only giving up blue skies, ocean beaches, forests and fields, but shattering every emotional and physical bond with family, friends, and loved ones. Some of those to be left behind accept the sacrifice; many don’t understand how husbands and wives would be willing to leave their families forever.

Becky Sullivan, wife of helicopter pilot Ken Sullivan, admits struggling with Ken's decision. "If I am truly honest, I have to try not to be angry. I know that it is exciting to want to be a part of this historical and amazing adventure. But I can't help but hope that he doesn't get picked. Knowing that there is such a high probability that he will never come back is frustrating. I find myself asking, 'Why does your family not mean more to you?'” She also wonders what their (currently) three-year-old son and four-month-old daughter will think, once they're old enough to understand. “I can imagine that even though there would be some pride, they will still probably take it personally.”

Ken Sullivan, wife Becky, and son Kaunner

(Photo courtesy of Ken Sullivan)

But for Ken, the opportunity is worth the sacrifice, however painful. “There are times when you just know what you want to do. Mars One is such a tremendous opportunity that I have not hesitated to accept the challenge. My wonderful children, I love you so very much, and always will—but I am going to Mars.”

Bill Dunlap, a 45-year-old cook from Alabama, and his wife Anita still struggle with his decision. “[Anita] understands what I feel like when I talk about going to Mars. She doesn't like it, but she doesn't actively oppose my going through the process because she knows how miserable I'll feel if I don't try.

“I know that if I do get to travel to another planet, millions of people watching will think that I'm the most selfish jackass who ever ripped another person's heart out, and they may be right to think that. I have to ask them, though: Have you ever had a dream? . . . I am a dreamer, and I'm chasing a dream that I've had for my entire life and maybe, just maybe I can do this and in the end, whatever history may say and whatever anyone else may say, there is no price too high for a dream like this.”

Mars One applicant Bill Dunlap

(Photo courtesy of Bill Dunlap)

Man or machine?

Diary of Kristen Anders, July 10, 2016:

Well, I survived the first crew cuts. The comsat and demonstration lander are on their way. That’s the good news. However, our sponsorship numbers aren’t as high as we’d hope. That’s going to mean some cuts, I guess. Some of the spares and the backup comsat are already on the cutting board.

I hope the cutbacks don’t come back to bite us in the ass.

The first Mars One flights, planned for 2016 launch, will include a satellite to enable high-bandwidth transmission of reconnaissance (and later, communications) data back to Earth. Mars One also intends to send a small, unmanned lander to demonstrate key technologies for later crewed missions. The main rover, to follow in 2018, will not be for scientific purposes, but to assist with construction of the colony.

A constant and fractious debate in the space community is the role of robots vs. humans in space exploration. Robotic probes are cheaper and safer than manned spacecraft. In 1997, Pathfinder became the first probe to explore the surface of Mars in over 20 years, thrilling millions with the images returned from its microwave-sized rover. The more capable rovers Spirit and Opportunity have spent 10 years crawling over the dusty landscape, sending back images and data about Mars. Most recently, the rover Curiosity survived its “seven minutes of terror” to land on the Red Planet and send back stunning images.

Mars, as seen by the rover Curiosity

(Credit NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

If Mars One already plans to send rovers, why risk humans?

Dunlap says, “Sending robots out does nothing to spread mankind's habitat . . . In fact, I think that sitting comfortably behind while our robots go could make us too complacent and stifle our urge to explore.”

Paul Leeming, a 31-year-old Australian filmmaker, agrees. “We need to inspire people to greater things. A machine does not inspire. It does not create art, or see through the lens of experience and wisdom mixed with art and creativity. It cannot convey a feeling: awe, wonder, humility—these things are unknown to it. It is us—our shared experiences and memories—that ultimately show what we are capable of, if only we seek to push ourselves to the limit and beyond.”

Television that is literally “out of this world”

Diary of Kristen Anders, October 3, 2021:

I hate this television shit, especially the public voting, which seems to be trying to keep as much drama as possible. Yeah, that makes good TV, but that's not what we need on the mission! They voted off Ramon, because he's “too accommodating,” but they kept Tyler, that back-stabbing bastard. Hopefully, the Foundation will have the final say in crew selection. If Tyler and I are chosen, he might just accidentally fall out of the airlock enroute.

How can the Foundation raise the estimated six billion dollars to pull of this ambitious project?

Zubrin believes the financial issues will prove more difficult than the technical. “From a technical point of view, there's nothing impossible about sending people one-way to Mars and then resupplying them. It's not so much a material question . . . we need someone to get people mobilized. We have the forces to do this.”

To “mobilize those forces,” the Foundation intends to use sponsorship and broadcasting revenue to raise this money—much like the Olympics, which raises a similar sum every four years. For example, the astronaut selection process will be broadcast as a kind of reality show, complete with audience participation to vote members off the team. Despite assurances from founder Bas Landrop that the show will be more like Coast Guard Alaska than Jersey Shore, few of the applicants seem to be looking forward to this part of the project, but accept it as necessary.

Twenty-year-old applicant Patrick Ford says, “Although Mars One's ideas of making this a global event is good, I feel like the result will just be people watching it for the conflict, for the drama, and that's ultimately what will drive the show's structure. I fear that it will end up like those pointless TV shows centered around drama and it will no longer be about the great things we are experiencing.”

Perhaps because of his background, filmmaker Paul Leeming isn't concerned about the media. “With regard to the reality TV aspect, I don't think it need be 'endured.' I think it is a unique opportunity to interact with a global audience to show first hand what we are undertaking and also to inspire people. As such it is essential that we be happy to be the spokespeople for all of us. If anything, it would be an honor to hold such an important and pivotal role for the future of humanity.”

Filmmaker Paul Leeming isn't worried about being on-camera

(Photo courtesy of Paul Leeming)

Dr. Zucker doesn't like the idea, either, but is willing to endure it to raise the money. In fact, she's willing to go even further. “Ugh. I hate reality TV. It's a scourge on humanity that lowers our collective IQ by double digits. I prefer to think of this as documentary TV, like the Olympics. Bas Lansdorp has made it clear that this is the Mars One plan. But I'd have an ad tattooed anywhere on my body (and I don't even have pierced ears) if a company would donate a billion dollars to Mars One. So yeah, I don't much like the idea of being on The Truman Show, but if that's what it takes to put humans on Mars, then I'm ready for my close up, Mr. Lansdorp.”

No turning back

Diary of Kristen Anders, August 17, 2022:

We're in orbit, and I should be thrilled beyond measure. For a while I was. The launch and ascent were terrifying and thrilling: the best rollercoaster ride times a thousand. And zero gravity was amazing. (Well, not for Hari, poor guy. But let's not go there! The air filters still haven't gotten rid of the stink.)

But I keep seeing Randall and Tabitha in my mind, standing at the launch site, Randall staring through tears as I boarded the van, Tabby in his arms clutching him and crying her eyes out.

Last night was the worst. Randall had been so supportive, but he finally broke down. How could I do this terrible thing? How could I leave him and our little Tabby, never see her graduate college or get married, never hold my grandkids? How could I leave them behind for the TV crews and slobbering reporters and go off on this great adventure? He asked me how he could explain to Tabby that Mars was more important to me than our family. I had no answers.

Launching in 2022, the crewed vehicle will begin the long, nine-month journey to the Red Planet. Robotic probes launched in 2018 and 2020 will already have landed and begun preparing the landing site for the colonists.

Mars One insists that some of the physiological risks have been overstated, especially radiation exposure. But the psychological effects of an isolated, long-duration flight have never tested. ISS astronauts are rotated every few months. They can speak to friends and family with no discernible time lag. And of course, they can look down upon the earth, less than 400 kilometers away, any time they wish. The first Mars explorers may not find their isolation so easy. Some applicants have suggested a controversial method for dealing with the separation.

Love the one(s) you’re with?

Diary of Kristen Anders, January 13, 2015:

We've been in space for about six months now, counting the time we spent in Earth orbit. Romance wasn't on anyone's mind—certainly not mine!—until recently. I miss my husband and Tabby so much my heart feels like it's going to rupture. But they're gone, lost to me. I can't live the rest of my life alone; Randall wouldn't expect me to. We talked about it. That's why we got divorced once the trans-Mars injection was over.

I find myself paying more attention to Hari and Paul. Actually, I also find myself noticing Sheryl more, too. Funny thing; it seems we're all kind of open-minded when it comes to sex. I wonder if the Foundation used that as one of the criteria for selection? I suppose mixing up the possible couplings might help keep things defused. Whatever. The loneliness sucks, and I think it's time we all did something about it. My feelings haven't changed for you, Randall, and I miss you terribly. But I need to feel loved again.

On their Facebook page, the Mars One applicants have discussed the emotional issues that might arise. Some applicants have discussed the idea of sending only married couples. However, this could lead to very difficult situations should one of the couples break up. Similarly, sending unattached men and women opens the door for competition and jealousy.

For at least a few applicants, a possible solution is polyamory: open romantic relationships between multiple members of the crew. While generally condemned on Earth, some potential colonists think it might be necessary for the mission to succeed. “Successful relationships are critical to the success of any mission to settle Mars,” observes Ryan Brockey, a 27-year-old math and science tutor from Oregon. “The small initial crew will have to trust each other, identify with each other, be able and willing to clearly communicate with each other about their needs. Close, personal relationships are going to be both necessary and inevitable with a life-long mission. Pair-bonding seems divisive.”

(L to R) Ryan Brockey with girlfriend Zooey and boyfriend Joseph

(Photo courtesy of Ryan Brockey)

Dr. Zucker agrees. “Humans have a great capacity for love. You can love and be truly happy with more than one person. We have several friends in long-lasting polyamorous marriages. The important thing is honesty and open discussion with your partner or partners.”

Home for life: Mars One interior

(Credit: Mars One Foundation)

“Ready or not, here we come!”

Diary of Kristen Anders, April 18, 2023:

Today, Paul, Sheryl, Hari and I stood together on the landing pad, in our Marssuits. We decided that we would step onto the soil as one, representing the peoples of Earth, whom we so humbly represent. I don't even remember who said the first words!

The landing terrified me. After no gravity, the push and power of the craft seemed to shatter my bones. And the noise! But then the engines cut, and we were down! We hugged and kissed, of course, and thanked everyone who made it possible. For the first time since leaving Earth, I really feel like this is worth the sacrifice.

The Marssuit isn't comfortable. I thought I'd feel so light on the surface, but the suit restricts everything I do, and with the extra weight I really don't feel much different from walking on Earth. But once you strip down in the Life Support Unit—then you know you're really on another world! I keep thinking, am I dreaming?

When asked what their first thoughts would be upon stepping onto another world, most applicants gave the same answer: Please don’t let me screw up! For example, Kevin Riff, a Seattle software developer hopes not to be “the guy who went to Mars and forgot my speech!”

Paul Leeming expects to feel, “awe, elation and . . . responsibility that we now carry the hopes and dreams of our species into the cosmos. Future decades of spacefaring will surely be determined by whether we survive or not.”

Dr. Zucker believes her first thought would be, “I'm about to take the first human step on Mars—watch out universe, ready or not, here we come!”

“Space is dangerous”

Diary of Kristen Anders, June 12, 2023:

It didn't take long for a crisis to strike. We've been here less than two months. The plants are dying. The dust is worse than we expected—we spend more time doing maintenance than sleeping. And Paul has developed some kind of cough that won't stop. This morning, he hacked up some blood. Not good. It figures that the first person to get sick would be our doctor, and we're nearly two years away from getting any help. Every time he coughs, the rest of us look at each other, thinking the same thought: What if it's contagious?

Not everyone shares Dr. Zubrin and Mr. Landsdorp’s optimism. Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson supports private space enterprise, but believes leading-edge exploration must be left to governments. In his podcast, Star Talk Radio, Tyson says, “We should have had private initiatives going into space decades ago. I’m embarrassed it’s taken this long.” But he continues, “That being said, private enterprise will not ever lead a space frontier. . . .They can’t. It’s not possible: space is dangerous, it’s expensive, there are unquantified risks. Combine all those under one umbrella, [and] you cannot establish a free-market capitalization of that enterprise. . . . Those are the kinds of frontiers that governments have undertaken.”

Dr. Zucker believes many of the risks portrayed by the media are overblown, such as radiation, pathogens, and insanity. But she goes on to list other life-threatening situations that could arise: tuberculosis, anaphylactic shock, appendicitis, stoke, heart attack, decompression, poisoning, and major trauma. “But I think the most likely things to kill us would be related to failure of life support such as malnutrition, starvation, vitamin deficiency, asphyxiation, or dehydration.”

Possibly even the environment itself. “It is impossible to know how or if the dust will cause any problems. If it is extremely fine as many believe, it could cause significant irritation of skin or airways. It is always possible someone will be allergic to it. A severe anaphylactic reaction would kill someone unless we were able to isolate them completely from the allergen, which would be unlikely.”

“NASA does not provide opinions . . .”

Diary of Kristen Anders, June 18, 2023:

Paul died two days ago. We don't know why. At least no one else seems sick. The dust storm that moved in a week ago still rages. We can't see a damn thing outside the windows; it's like we're lost, floating in a pink cloud. It's better at night, when everything's black. Not so unreal. But the dust scraping on the hull gives me the goddamn creeps. The solar arrays barely produce enough power to keep us alive. Condensation creeps down the windows; my hands are shivering so hard I can hardly write.

We need to bury Paul, but we're all worried about what the storm will do to our suits. Finally, we sealed him into one of the Life Support Units and evacuated the air. That's right: a “Life Support Unit” is now our morgue. How fucking ironic is that? When the storm clears, we'll retrieve him and try to lay him to rest somewhere. Meanwhile, the rest of us just sit and stare, waiting.

Some critics believe the private sector is ill-equipped to launch such an ambitious plan, that it borders on the irresponsible.

Dr. Zubrin’s contention that we are technologically closer to being able to go to Mars today than we were to go to the Moon in 1961 is probably correct. In the 1960s, we had to develop a vast array of new technologies in fields of navigation, computing, life support, guidance, propulsion, communications, and many other areas. However, the race to the moon consumed nearly $30 billion dollars (over $150 billion today), and required the efforts of over a half-million engineers, scientists, machinists, and scores of other skills. Can the private sector take us to Mars in a decade, for only a few billion dollars?

Officials at NASA refused to comment, stating, “NASA does not provide opinions regarding the activities of private space enterprises such as these.”

Former NASA manager Ken Young is under no such restriction. Young, a mission analyst, rendezvous specialist, and systems integrator and management consultant, started at NASA in 1962 and has worked on every manned U.S. space program. According to him, while the basic technology for deep space flight exists (or is in development), adapting, upgrading, testing, and perhaps most importantly, integrating that technology into a man-rated vehicle is far beyond the scope of any private venture, financially or technically, in the time required. Young lists the current lack of readiness of a vast array of engineering elements: environmental and life support, heat shields, propulsion, communications systems, guidance, navigation, controls, and others. Every one of these issues, says Young, requires a massive effort to update, integrate together, and then test. Each demands a team of specialists and extraordinary amounts of money—and each is required for mission success.

One example is the heat shield, a necessary component for landing on Mars. NASA is currently developing a new heat shield for the Orion spacecraft. Although NASA developed and flew lunar-return heat shields decades ago, upgrading that technology for Orion has consumed five years of development and many millions of dollars. And this shield still might not be ready for its scheduled 2014 test flight—on an unmanned vehicle. This is only one of hundreds of technical issues and systems integration problems in developing a new manned spacecraft. And once those challenges are solved, spacecraft systems typically then require massive weight-reduction efforts to literally get off the ground.

Young concludes, “Even if all these challenges could be designed out and tested—they could not integrate, [then] test and launch it in time.”

Why Mars?

But for the Mars One applicants, the issues ultimately aren’t technical or financial. To them, exploration is something inherent in the psyche, and to ignore it would be to make us a little less human, regardless of the risks.

When asked “Why Mars?”, science fiction author and three-time Hugo winner Allen Steele (who is not an applicant) explains, “Mars attracts me the same way, I think, that it has attracted everyone who has written about it: it's a nearby world that appears to be capable of supporting human life, albeit by artificial means, and which would be an incredible place to explore. Whenever I see the ground-level photos sent back by the rovers, my feet begin to itch. The hell with robots . . . I want to go hiking there! And if I can't do that, then I want someone else to be able to do so for me.”

Applicant Vinod Kotiya, a 41-year-old computer programmer from New Delhi, expresses it this way: “I believe that the purpose of humankind is to spread their horizon across the universe to know the truth of our existence; that's the question in my heart.” He adds, “Humankind is destined to explore and invent. The men who did not explore did not survive in history. . . . Think about it: a self-sufficient colony working towards a mutually beneficial goal for all of humanity, people from all walks of life, freely providing their expertise. Something truly wonderful could come out of this!”

Even if it includes leaving behind his wife and daughter?

“The hardest thing to leave would be my little princess, Jeannie. Maybe someday after reaching Mars, after losing my family, I may think I have done terribly wrong. But I [will] have to cope with it, have to take the pain . . . and do what I have been destined for.”

Vinod Kotiya, wife Priyanka, and daughter Jeannie

(Photo courtesy of Vinod Kotiya)

“As it should be”

Diary of Kristen Anders, April 22, 2024:

We just passed our first year on Mars. Well, a year back on Earth. The days are always out-of-sync, of course, and we're only about half-way through our first Martian year. Food supply is sufficient, since Hari figured out some botanist voodoo for the plants. Especially since now there are only three of us.

Still, the loneliness is almost intolerable at times. We each have taken over a different Life Support Unit as our “room” and don't really interact much any more. I run experiments on the soil and rocks we gather (no, no life yet), Hari stays in the greenhouse, and Sheryl spends much of the day outside, exploring, walking, gathering samples. She shouldn't; we're all safer from radiation inside. (No one goes in Paul's Life Support Unit.) The comsat went down and, since the funding didn't turn out, we don't have a back-up. That means we're only in touch with Earth a few hours a day. But that’s more than enough; none of us feels much like talking anymore.

An entire generation of young people grew up with the space program, their imaginations fueled by writers and ignited by the space program. Many became inventors and entrepreneurs, founding Fortune 500 companies and creating new technologies. The private sector is already launching satellites and resupplying the International Space Station; other companies are looking to the moon or asteroids. Perhaps, despite all the financial and technical hurdles, it will someday be an international private venture that finally places the first humans on the Red Planet—people going to plant crops, not flags.

Although the Mars One applicants were born and live on different continents, come from widely varied backgrounds and beliefs, the vision they share far outweighs their differences. Each is passionate about the future of humankind. Whether ER doctor, filmmaker, cook, or pilot, each believes in something greater than themselves and is willing to sacrifice everything they've ever known and loved to be among the first to place humanity's mark on another planet.

When asked if the first footprints on Mars would come from the private or public sector, if they would be American, Chinese, or European, they all gave the same answer. As Leeming expressed it:

“The first footprints on Mars will be human. Nothing more and nothing less. As it should be.”

Diary of Kristen Anders, December 12, 2025:

We made it! The resupply ship has arrived, the new comsat is in orbit, and tomorrow the second crew lands. We've learned so much over the last two years, and the new team is bringing us badly needed spares and some new fabricating tech that will make our lives so much easier.

Would I do this all again, leave everything behind for this mission? Hell no! The glamour, such as it was, wore off longer ago than I can remember. The excitement, the novelty, all long gone. Now it's just survival. I still cry every time I see how Tabby's growing up without me. But for better or worse, I'm here. And now we have new companions, new hopes, and we're all going to do the best we can for as long as we have left.

What else is there?

Terry Burlison graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering: the same school/degree as Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, the first and last men to walk on the moon. He then worked for NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Trajectory Officer for the first space shuttle missions. After leaving NASA, Terry spent ten years at Boeing, supporting numerous civilian and defense space projects. Until recently, he was a private consultant for many of the new commercial space ventures. Terry is now a full-time writer. His web site is www.terryburlison.com.

We continue a multipart series on training for war by retired Army lieutenant colonel Tom Kratman, creator of the popular Carrera military science fiction series, with latest entry Come and Take Them. Does it seem as if the United States land armed forces have lately been training to be cadres of world policemen and social workers rather than soldiers prepared to win a war? Here Kratman distills lessons from years as a commanding officer in the U.S. Army, where he retired a colonel. Kratman’s argument: an army is for winning wars. And to win wars, you have to train men (and some women) to be warriors.

Training for War, Part II

by Tom Kratman

Axiom Seven: “Training is everything and everything is training.”

That’s an old saying. It’s a true saying, too. There is training value, though not always positive value, in everything we do, every day. And training is all we have to work with. The problem is that people sometimes take it to mean that everything is possible with training, that we have an infinite ability to make infinite silk purses out of any number of sow’s ears. Sadly, it’s just not true, no matter how much we might like to, or self-congratulate about having done so, and no matter how much certain quarters may envy the military’s ability to mold people into any given form. Here’s why:

Axiom Eight: All the really important training the soldier either gets more or less with mother’s milk or he is most unlikely ever to get it.

I often criticize liberalism and leftism for their fixation (often denied, in an attempt at intellectual sleight of hand) on the presumption of easy, reliable, certain malleability and perfectibility of man.[1] I suspect that’s the big reason for the fascination they often show with the military. To them it must seem that by making people willing to kill, which surely must be unnatural, and making them willing to die, which surely is still less natural, the military is demonstrating a skill at changing, forming, and reforming people the left can only admire, and desire to control.[2]

The problem is that that doesn’t really happen by anything we can deliberately do. We can’t change anyone profoundly. We can sometimes maybe change a little around the margins. We can occasionally get someone to reveal something – not always something good, either – that was already inside them that they didn’t know about.

It’s easiest to see this when you go to a military course with foreigners. No matter how good the training, they leave as almost exactly what they came to the course as, with maybe a plus up in a few skills. Some are great; they arrived great. Most are well-connected military trash when they leave, just the same as they were when they arrived.

I tend to be most interested in military problems, be they tactical, operational, strategic, administrative, logistical…you get the idea; if you want my attention, make the problem a military one. That’s one of the reasons why I object so strongly to the left’s conflation of racism and cultural bigotry or cultural discrimination, or even objective cultural analysis. It’s even worse with the more recent conflation of those with sexism or bigotry against gays.

Example; Arab armies, with only a few exceptions – exceptional because of a peculiar make up in those few cases – stink. I mean they just suck. They’re awful. Why the hell do you suppose half trained Israeli citizen soldier militia have routinely beat them like they owned them for decades? It’s because they’re militarily rotten. And they’re militarily rotten because of the outlooks, values, and beliefs they acquired as young boys, as mentioned, more or less with mother’s milk.

Now one might – and surely someone will – take the preceding paragraph as racist. And the problem with that is it’s not only no solution, the claim deflects even the possibility of a solution. “Their culture makes it impossible to trust anyone not a blood relation.” “Racism!” “They’ve got a tendency to leave maintenance up to God.” “Racism!” “Their leaders routinely extort money from the rank and file because said rank and file are not blood relations.” RRRaaaccciiisssmmm!!!”

Vignette Two: Me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger.

Wadi Natrun, Egypt, Summer, 1985

Lemme tell ya a story, true story as it happens.

Some twenty-eight years ago, during Bright Star 85, the Egyptian Army – clearly one of the better Arab armies – set up some tents for us not around Wadi Natrun, generally northwest of Cairo. The Egyptian lieutenant in charge of the detail looked at the Americans, looked at the tents (which were, by the way, better than ours), looked at the Americans...

Plainly he was thinking that an American's signature on a hand receipt would do him no good if one of those tents grew legs. He put his platoon in formation and announced, "I need three guards".

Every man reached into his back pocket, pulled out a wallet and began peeling off notes. The three who came up with the smallest bribes were picked to guard the tents. These three then proceeded to hold hands (this doesn’t imply gay in Arab cultures, though there is a homoerotic tendency there) and squat by the side of the road, crying like babies. And it is understandable that they cried because for the next four days they got no food or water except what our men gave them out of pity. Their officer didn't care; they weren’t blood, after all.

See, the Arabs are what the sociologists like to call, "amoral familists." This means that they are usually incapable of forming bonds of love and loyalty with anyone not a blood relation. Even there, degree of blood relation determines where loyalty legitimately lies. The saying in the area is, as written above, "Me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the world." This not only allows one to extort baksheesh from non-relations, but clouds every military unit that is not blood/clan based.

Picture the poor Arab private. He knows no one in his unit gives a shit about him; after all, he doesn't give a shit about any of them, either. They're not family. What happens when that private is placed in the loneliest position in the world, the modern battlefield? He runs at the first sign things are going badly. (He'll be fine as long as they are going well, though. Note: things rarely go well.)

Add in the fantasy mindset. Don't forget "Insh'allah", (which is like "mañana," but without the sense of urgency) which makes it somewhat impious to train really well since it is all the will of God anyway. Add in a set of social values that despise and loathe doing physical labor.

Militarily, they've got nothing going for them, as long as they insist on following western models of non-blood based military organization. However, if one can escape from the “Raaccciiisssmmm!!!” meme, and think about the problem objectively, there is a way to make better Arab units. This is to base them around blood: Their families, clans and tribes.

There are still at least two problems with this: The clans tend to be internally hierarchical. This means that the military chain of command may not be the real chain of command as in when the battalion commander's driver is his uncle, hence senior in his clan. Trust me, this happens.

These sorts of units – think the Saudi National Guard or the Jordanian Arab Legion (meaner than weasel crap, the both of them, tough, hard as nails, and brave) – have anything from a fair amount to an extraordinarily high degree of trust in and loyalty for each other. They can and will fight and fight hard. The problem is that they have a very finite tolerance for casualties because at some point those losses endanger the standing, power and security of the clan. Then they'll break off the fight, too. Even then, though, they won't usually simply drop their weapons and run, but will retire in good order.

But for the more mundane Arab units, are they rotten because they’re mentally genetically inferior? No; they’re about as bright as anyone, despite a penchant for first cousin marriage in many places. Is it because they’re natural cowards? Oh, puhleeze! Sorry, but no; cowards don’t don and use explosive suicide vests or fly airplanes into buildings or drive bomb trucks into barracks. If anything, they may be gutsier than the human norm. Is it because of all the wonderful high tech weapons the Jews get from America? No, myths aside, the half trained Israelis’ citizen militia were stomping the largely professional, western trained and equipped Arabs when the Jews had almost nothing beyond home-made armored cars, rifles, and a few machine guns, while the Arabs had the best the west was producing at the time. No, the Arab problem is cultural, assimilated so early that they really cannot be trained out of it. That said, some are off key notes in their own cultural symphony; I’ve met a handful, here and there. With these, something can sometimes be done, if they can be selected out from the ruck and muck. Usually, though, these guys are not well connected, which counts there, and so are selected against.

Conversely, we – military leaders – sometimes take credit for things we have had little or nothing to do with.

Vignette Three: Though I be the lone survivor

Fort Stewart, Georgia, April, 1986.

The problem, an attack on an enemy strongpoint, was a toughie. First, there was an anti-tank ditch to get the tracks though. Then were was a broad and deep low density minefield. The defenders had out extensive barbed wire obstacles, tactical, supplementary, and protective.[3] On the plus side, at least the weather was nice, with a pleasant breeze wafting somewhat unevenly from the south.

There were gaps in the tactical and supplementary wire, but the protective wire was solid. That is to say, it was solid except that at five or so spots the triple standard concertina wire was assembled such that it was held together with smooth poles assembled from the camouflage and radar scattering screens’ support systems. This was so that a gap could be created quickly by the evaluators, almost as quickly as it could be with a Bangalore torpedo, if the attacking platoons managed to insert and “detonate” their simulated Bangalore torpedoes. Blow the simulator; pull the poles out; the wire would separate leaving a gap. (Note: this technique would not work with Soviet concertina, which is under compression and fills gaps. Then again, neither do Balganlores work for beans against Soviet type concertina.)

The “Bangalores,” in this case, were more pole sections, though almost filled with concrete to simulate something like the weight of a real Bangalore while allowing Bangalore-like assembly, and with a grenade simulator taped to the friendly side for reasonably realistic “signature.” (This was consistent with a) Range Control’s anal retentiveness about setting off large explosions away from the ranges and, it must be admitted, b) not getting anybody killed.)

Once through the final wire, the platoon’s problems were just beginning. Not only was there a trench system, with solid bunkers, defended by a reinforced squad, but there were booby traps., some of which shot flames a few feet, grenade simulators were flying, wads of barbed wire were tucked into cut outs in the sides of the trenches so they could be released to block the trench, and people were shooting at each other with blanks at a range that would have given the safety folks the vapors.

The first platoon went through with no real problem, some burns, some cuts, some bruises, and a couple of only just averted fistfights. Same with second. The last platoon, however, had a visit from the dangling dong of destiny (hat tip, Joel Rosenberg, RIP).

There they were, the smoke screen from a couple of smoke pots covering them, the Bangalore set off, the retaining pole pulled out, and the damned concertina was tangled. One man couldn’t get it apart. Two couldn’t. Eventually everybody is clustered pulling at the wire, barring only the crews of the M113s and a couple of guys, PFC Searles and PV2 Benson, out on flank security. And then the wind shifted, the smoke lifted, and there was a machine gun facing right at the breach.

Ratatatatat! Whinewhinewhinewhinewhine from the MILES.[4] Everyone –except the track crews, Searles, and Benson – is hit. “This exercise is over,” mutters Captain Hamilton; “time for a redo. NH%$&BFTE!!!”

Hamilton, however, is wrong, dreadfully wrong. From off on the flanks, Searles and Benson, neither of them quite out of his teens, both crawl inward to where the rest of the platoon’s dismount squads, plus the platoon leader and platoon sergeant, are laying there, silently. The wind shifts back, laying the smoke screen that shouldn’t have shifted in the first place.

As senior man among the survivors on the ground, Searles takes charge. The two privates then proceed to loot the bodies for ammunition, to include several dozen grenade simulators. They wrench the wire apart, then rush through for the friendly side of the smoke screen. The pair then pass through the smoke on the bellies, before beginning to leapfrog – taking turns with suppressive fire – to the trench system. There, they grenade their way in, and proceed to clear it bay by bay, even though outnumbered six to one. Neither the OPFOR’s fire,[5] nor the booby traps, nor even the trench blocks slow them more than incrementally.

In the end, is it Hamilton’s or the Army’s training program that caused or allowed this? No, or, at least, not exactly. Yes, their technical and tactical skill came from their training. And apparently nothing in their training had destroyed their individual initiative. (One might be surprised at how often military training does just that.) Those, clearly, were good and commendable things, and Hamilton was right to be pleased with the boys’ performance. But there was something else going on, something that no military training can give.

Those two boys grew up with their parents driving determination into them. They grew up with people – teachers, religious leaders, Mr. Martin down the street who lost a leg in Korea – telling them what’s right and wrong. Everything on that list of military leadership attributes that could be and was demonstrated on the exercise – courage, decisiveness, dependability, endurance, enthusiasm, initiative – those kids got from Mom and a host of others back home.

Vignette Four: “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” ― Albert Einstein

Hamilton, then a captain, was new in command. And, as the pulsating prong of perversity (again, hat tip, Joel Rosenberg, RIP) would have it, the Annual General Inspection was coming…yes, the dread IG…and in about three days. There were some problems, too. One of those involved a fairly hefty amount of excess property on hand but not accounted for. He knew it was there, too, but wasn’t too worried about it since he wasn’t missing anything. He’d have the supply sergeant pick it up gradually, over the next couple of months.

Less easy to deal with was the state of the orderly room, the company headquarters. The things – there was a row of five of them in a single building, divided by brick – had been subdivided sometime in the past into supply rooms, NBC rooms, various offices, and the arms rooms. They were due to be refurbished soon and it was forbidden to spend any money on them, not so much as a can of paint, because of that.

Unfortunately, all those dividers were in pretty bad shape. I’m talking holes in the walls, rips, tears…just a mess.

So Hamilton is walking from his office to the loading dock in back and sees the company armorer (who also took care of repair and utilities) taping Army posters over the holes, to give a nice impression to the IG. He stops and watches the armorer work at it for a while.

The problem is that the armorer isn’t fixing a deficiency; he’s covering one up. And there Hamilton made such a big deal in his opening talk with the troops about personal integrity, honesty, courage.

“Harrington,” asked Hamilton of the armorer, “is it true that we can’t fix these walls because the whole thing’s supposed to get refurbished?”

“Yessir.”

“And is it also true that we’ve requested they be repaired, more than once.”

“Yes, sir, and they always tell us to pound sand. I’ve got the work order numbers to prove it, too.”

“I see…here’s what I want; I want you to put a three by five card up next to each of those posters, detailing the damage they’re covering and giving the work order number where we’ve requested repair and why the work order was refused.”

“Siiirrr…???”

“You don’t understand?”

“No, sir.”

“Okay, it’s like this. To hell with the IG. But damage invites more damage. The appearance of worthlessness and ruin suggests nobody cares. Nice things, however, that are undamaged, get taken care of. It’s very human. That’s what’s behind the Montessori school idea, actually.

“But covering up can become a habit. Bad precedent can be an awful thing. So I want you to cover the damage, for the sake of averting any more damage, but I want to admit what we’re doing, for the sake of not doing damage to our – the whole company’s – integrity.”

Fortunately, the IG took it in the spirit in which it was done.

That was a pretty direct approach to something. But there are also indirect approaches.

Vignette Five: “Disciplined in the school of hard campaigning…”

Fort Sherman, Canal Zone, 1977

Dressed in black dyed jungle fatigues, Sergeant Hamilton had a squad out busily portraying communist guerillas for a battalion of the 82d Airborne, going through the jungle school. The 82d was not having a particularly happy time of it, either, whether from Hamilton’s squad or from any of the other squads.

One of the nightly events, for Hamilton’s crew, is to walk through ambushes, four a night. He does that, for sixteen renditions. Every one of them but one stinks. Hell, it’s preposterous; he can usually hear them in the ambush position, slapping at bugs or just fidgeting. He can smell the insect repellent. Moreover, their noise is disturbing the wildlife, which is further warning to Hamilton’s squad of OPFOR.

But there was one ambush that was just perfect. The only way he knows they’re there at all is because it’s one of the standard ambush positions. They are utterly silent. The animals don’t even notice them. And when they spring the ambush? It is a glorious dance of precision and perfection. It is violence personified.

All Hamilton and his men can say is, “Wow! That was great!” But they don’t know why this one was different.

“The Old Guard,[6] ” says the lane walker from the Jungle Operation Training Center, wonderingly. “That was a platoon from the Old Guard that tagged along with the 82d.”

Hamilton: “You’re joking, right?”

“No,” says the lane walker. “I’m as shocked as you are. I guess all that drill and ceremonies, and standing at attention in the cold, must build some awesome discipline. I was right there with them while the bugs lunched them. You know what the insect life is like out here, but never a twitch. And they never snivel.”

The upshot of which is that training – especially training about a matter of character, as discipline is – can sometimes cross over from one area to another.

1 See, for example, Lenin’s New Soviet Man, the initial draft of the SDS’s Port Huron Statement, the liberal penchant to go into education, their faith – not universal but widespread – in counseling and psychonalaysis. For a good book on the subject, and why they’re wrong, see Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate.

2 This has been going on for centuries. See, eg, the Babeauvists in revolutionary France.

3 From FM 3-21.8, The Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad

Protective Wire

8-58.    Protective wire may be a complex obstacle providing all-round protection of a platoon perimeter, or it may be a simple wire obstacle on the likely dismounted avenue of approach toward a squad position (Figure 8-6). Command-detonated M18 Claymore mines may be integrated into the protective wire or used separately.

Tactical Wire

8-59.    Tactical wire is positioned to increase the effectiveness of the platoon's direct fires. It is usually positioned along the friendly side of a machine gun FPL. Tactical minefields may also be integrated into these wire obstacles or be employed separately.

Supplementary Wire

8-60.    Supplementary wire obstacles are employed to break up the line of tactical wire to prevent the enemy from locating platoon weapons (particularly CCMS and machine guns) by following the tactical wire.

4 Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System. For any non-military readers, thin: A system of laser tag on steroids.

5 Opposing Force

6 The Old Guard, the Third Infantry Regiment, is the Army’s ceremonial organization in the Washington DC area.

This series continues with “Training Part for War, Part Three.” Tom Kratman is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and the author of many science fiction and military adventure novels including Carrera series entry Come and Take Them.

The Exoplanet Hunters

by William Ledbetter

Image courtesy of NASA

I was ten years old during the summer of 1972 and since my cousin Scott lived on a farm, we spent many summer nights in his back yard, wrapped in popcorn-filled and cream soda-stained sleeping bags under a brilliant star-filled Indiana sky. Sometimes we'd take a small battery-powered radio out with us, more to ward off unidentified night sounds than to appreciate the music, but there was one night when David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust started playing. To eight and ten year old boys, and probably quite a few adults, David Bowie was just weird, but our Star Trek and Lost in Space primed imaginations couldn't help but run wild hearing someone sing about "Spiders from Mars" while we were staring into a thick field of stars. There could be extremely strange aliens on thousands of distant worlds looking up at their night sky with the same awe and curiosity we had. And of course I knew it wouldn't be long before we found out. The summer of 1972 lay between the April Apollo 16 and December Apollo 17 Moon landings, so like almost everyone else, I believed the moon was just the beginning. We would no doubt be on Mars or beyond by the time I was actually old enough to be an astronaut, so I planned to eventually go to Mars and find out for myself.

We all know how that turned out.

Some tiny space science saplings did manage to blossom and thrive in the open meadows left by the felled sequoias of the Apollo program and the starved, blighted attempts to grow a manned Mars mission. We built a space station that taught us valuable lessons about construction in space and expanded our understanding of micro gravity on the human body. Robotic missions abounded, giving us astounding images and increasing our knowledge of the outer planets exponentially. In a federal budget environment that sees space exploration science as a resource to be plundered and in a society that is much more interested in the plight of reality show stars than potentially life supporting oceans under the ice of Europa, our space sciences community has learned to do amazing things with the meager resources they have at their disposal. Nowhere is that more evident than those crafty magicians who are finding planets circling other stars.

Doppler Shift and Radial Velocity

The most common method for finding exoplanets, accounting for about 85 percent of the confirmed planets found so far, fall into the Doppler Shift or sometimes called the Radial Velocity category. For those of you who didn't pay attention in physics or don't read nearly enough science fiction, a Doppler shift is generated when an object reflecting or generating light moves relative to an observer. Moving away causes its light to shift in the longer or red wavelengths and moving toward the observer shows up in the short or blue wavelengths.

In recent years our measuring instruments have increased in sensitivity to the point where we can not only detect the wobble an orbiting planet imparts upon its star, but get an estimated minimum mass as well. When the planet swings around the back side of its star, it pushes the star toward us, giving it a slight blue shift and then away when the planet is between us and the star. By carefully measuring the shift in the star's color and period of the planet movement, we can determine its mass. This method works well for large bodies orbiting close and fast around their parent stars, because shorter observation periods are needed and higher mass creates more easily noticeable Doppler shifts. That's why most of the planets found this way fall into the "hot Jupiter" category. Our best instruments can detect radial velocities of about one meter per second. Jupiter shifts our sun twelve meters per second and the Earth moves it only a tenth of a meter per second. Until we get more sensitive spectrometers, smaller Earth-sized planets in more distant Goldilocks zone orbits will be harder to detect because they disturb the star less and could have an orbital period measured in multiple Earth years.

The Transit Method

The next most common, though less precise way to find planets, is called the Transit Method. A planet moving in front of its parent star blocks out a measurable amount of visible light. If this slight dimming repeats on a regular basis, then it could be a planet or a binary partner to the star. Once observation shows something is there, then the Doppler method is used to find the mass of the body to determine if it's a planet or partner star.

The Kepler Space Observatory employed this approach to add more than 3,500 candidate worlds, 647 of which are Earth-sized, to the list before a pair of faulty reaction wheels shut down its precision pointing ability. At the time of this writing, there is some consideration of a possible "K2" mission to utilize the telescope's reduced capacity, but nothing definite yet.

Another version of the transit method is to measure the total infrared light output from a star system. Planets radiate little energy in the visible spectrum compared to their host star, but show up well in the infrared, so the total amount of radiation observed can drop by a measurable amount each time the planet moves behind the star.

The Kepler Space Observatory

Image courtesy of NASA

Direct Observation and Direct Imaging

Direct observation using ground based telescopes and the Hubble space telescope have also tallied a few exoplanet finds, but optical telescopes work by amplifying light and the light reflected by a planet is faint and too easily swamped by the glare of its parent star. Current systems can pick up light source one millionth as bright as the star, but have to employ special devices like a coronagraph and wavefront control. The coronagraph simply blocks out the star making dimmer light reflected from the planet easier to see, but even then the starlight diffracted around its edges can still wash out fainter light sources and requires complex optics to direct that glare away. Wavefront controls are needed on ground based telescopes to compensate for imperfections and to automatically adjust for atmospheric distortion. This almost sounds like too much trouble to bother when we have easier and more reliable ways to find exoplanets, but unlike the transit and Doppler methods, direct imaging gathers light from the planet itself. When astronomers can do that, they have a spectrum and are able to determine the planet's temperature, see atmospheric composition and actually look for signs of life.

Gravitational Microlensing

Gravitational Microlensing is also an interesting, if less used way, to find extrasolar planets. When a small star passes in front of a larger star, its gravity works like a magnifying glass, warping and brightening the farther star's light. If a planet is orbiting the nearer star, that planet will also warp the light from the distant planet, causing it to brighten even more and for a measurable period of time.

The transiting and Doppler methods rely on planets passing in front or behind a star to create a wobble or make a measurable difference in the radiation output, so they tend to find mostly high mass planets in close orbits. Gravitational microlensing can see planets regardless of their orbital inclination or mass, making it a better option for discovering smaller, Earth-sized worlds that orbit out in the 1-4 AU range.

The drawback to this approach is that it's a one-time shot. Once the stars move out of alignment, the show is over. The method is also a time and resource hog. Since these alignments are hard to predict, astronomers survey potential stars every few days for several years. When a microlensing event happens, special programs are used to watch for deviations from the expected light curve. If they catch the deviation early enough, they can track the entire event and determine the mass and distance from the parent star.

This may sound like a rare occurrence and hardly worth bothering, but it is far more common than one might think, with some nearby dwarf stars passing in front of other stars as often as once per year. If an automated system were set up right and pointed at the Magellanic Clouds, it could watch nearly 200 dwarf stars as they pass in front of hundreds of stars.

Astrometry

Astrometry is also a proven, yet lesser used, technique that measures the wobble generated in a star by its unseen companion. Instead of tracking a Dopplerlike effect, astrometry precisely measures the location of the target star in space, then can detect the wobble. This works well for high mass companions such as brown dwarfs and even smaller partners in a binary system, but as with the Doppler and transit methods, small Earthlike planets in a Goldilocks zone orbit don't perturb the mother star enough for our instruments to measure.

Hot Jupiters

Finding that planetary systems are common is really more of a relief than a surprise, but it's good to finally know for sure. Perhaps one of the most profound things we have learned is that exoplanets can be quite different than what we expected. Consider hot Jupiters. These types of planets were so unexpected that when the first one was found back in 1995, it was assumed by most scientists to be a freak or anomaly, but they kept finding them. Of the thousand exoplanets found so far, more than half are hot Jupiters.

Our tools are best suited to finding this kind of planet. Infrared telescopes find them because they have a large heat signature; Doppler and transit methods find them because they are in so close and are so large, they have short orbital periods and make a big difference in the wobble or change of light levels. So it's not strange that we would find them, what baffled researchers are that they exist at all.

Image courtesy of NASA

The only explanation they have so far is that the planet forms further out in the system, like our Jupiter and Saturn, then for some reason migrates inward until it gets locked in the death dance with the mother star. And a terrible death it will be. Most of these monsters are closer to their sun than our Mercury, are tidal locked and their atmospheres are constantly boiling away. As a result they have some really bad weather. Temperatures can vary by a thousand degrees between the day and night sides, causing upper level winds estimated to top out at 6,000 miles per hour.

Lonely Planets in Deep Space

Another surprising find was the vast number of free-floating planets in our galaxy. Unlike hot Jupiters, we've actually suspected these lonely planets existed for a long time, but just recently confirmed it. The previous assumption was that an occasional planet would be flung free of its parent star and then wander the cosmos forever or until it was dragged in by another stellar body.

What has surprised astronomers is the vast number of them. They are popping up everywhere and if these finds are a truly representative sample, then there could be as many as 200 billion of these rogue planets in the Milky Way. And our understanding of their origin may be skewed as well.

Astronomers from Sweden and Finland have been observing the Rosette Nebula and found over a hundred small gas clouds they call globulettes. The clouds are very dense and compact, with masses equal to a planet. Unless physics in that part of the galaxy is different than here, they should eventually collapse under their own weight and form planets or brown dwarfs without the help of a stellar accretion disk. These lonely planets may provide researchers with interesting targets for a long time, because unlike those found in a typical system, these planets can be viewed directly without the glare of a nearby star.

Help from Amateur Astronomers

So while astronomers worldwide have come up with some ingenious ways to search for and learn about exoplanets. Another program recently announced by NASA will give them a little more help. It's called Open Source Differential Photometry Code for Amateur Research or OSCAAR (and thank the stars for acronyms).

The Kepler mission photographed thousands of stars repeatedly over an extended time period enabling programs to note changes in the star's light output. These same differences in brightness can be measured by commercial grade detectors already used by amateur astronomers and small university observatories. This technique is harder to use with Earth bound telescopes, but NASA's new program will measure the light changes for all the stars in a given viewing field, then null out the fluctuations caused by the atmosphere that would be common to all the stars, leaving only the changes caused by a planet transiting in front of star.

Also like Kepler, this method will only find candidate planets that will have to be verified by other means at a later date. It's unclear at this early stage how effective and useful the program will actually be, but it's almost sure to launch an entire generation of astronomers who will have hands-on experience looking for exoplanets.

Research Databases

If you've been paying attention to space news you've probably heard that the number of confirmed exoplanets has passed 1,000 in two of the five largest databases. Do your curiosity and intellect a favor and go check out these sites. For my research on this article I actually found The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia at Exoplanet.eu to be the easiest to use since I could break down confirmed planets by the method used to find them. For more detailed and scientific study the NASA Exoplanet Archive may be more useful because the data can be filtered and sorted in multiple ways.

Current Tools

I've talked mostly about techniques up to this point, so since I'm a hardware and engineering geek, I'd like to at least touch on some of the current tools in our kit. Many ground based telescopes have contributed to the exoplanet search, but the HARPS and HIRES projects have several hundred detections each. The HARPS or High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher group is from Geneva University and uses the 3.6 meter telescope at La Silla in Chile. The HIRES project or High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer is run by the University of California, Berkeley and uses the Keck I telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Both of these use the radial velocity or Doppler effect to find planets, but in recent years have spent most of their time confirming new planet candidates found by the Kepler space telescope.

The MEarth project uses the transit method, is run by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and consists of eight remote controlled telescopes that observe nearby M dwarf stars in search of new Earthlike exoplanets. The MEarth team discovered the first super-Earth orbiting a red dwarf about 40 light years away.

MOA or Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics uses a 1.8 meter telescope at Mount John University in New Zealand and the Optical Gravitation Lensing Experiment based at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chili uses a 1.3 meter telescope. Both of these teams have been successful in finding exoplanets using the microlensing technique.

The Kepler space telescope uses the transit method and was designed to look at a fixed point in the Milky Way and repeatedly photograph tens of thousands of stars in order to find a lot of exoplanet candidates. To date it has scanned more than 150,000 stars and found 3,500 exoplanet candidates, 167 or which have been confirmed by other sources. It was launched in 2009 and completed its planned 3.5 year mission, then entered an extended mission phase that was expected to last four years, but was cut short when two of the reaction wheels that enable precision pointing of the spacecraft malfunctioned and couldn't be fixed remotely. Orientation of the unit needs at least three wheels.

Image courtesy of NASA

Don't count Kepler out yet. Mission engineers at Ball Aerospace have come up with a way to use sunlight as a substitute for the third reaction wheel. By positioning the Kepler just right, it allows sunlight to hit all the sun facing surfaces equally. Coupled with the remaining two reaction wheels, they are able to keep the spacecraft stable which will allow it to continue to scan parts of the sky, though not with its original precision.

New Tools and New Ideas

So what's next? These amazing experts, using their wiles and wits have already proved that planetary systems are indeed the rule and not the exception, but we are just at the beginning of this process. We need more data. Are planets more numerous in one part of the galaxy or evenly distributed? Are they more numerous near nebulas or areas rich in heavy elements? While we've found a few worlds of roughly Earth's size, in orbits that favor liquid water, our current tools are still not sensitive enough to detect atmospheres on planets that small. But help is on the way.

There are some exciting new ground based observatories that will be coming online soon. Most interesting are perhaps the Gemini Planet Imager, a coronagraph with adaptive optics that will be attached to the eight meter Gemini South telescope at Cerro Pachon in Chile and SPHERE which will be installed on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal in Chile. Both of these projects will attempt to find exoplanets using direct imaging.

New Space Telescopes

Of course I like things that fly in space, so the new generation of space telescopes excites me the most. The European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory will be launched in December, 2013 or early January, 2014. Gaia's five year mission will boldly go to the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 where it will park and using a form of astrometry will continuously track the movement, brightness and position of more than a billion stellar objects, nearly one percent of the stars in our galaxy. Using a form of astrometry, it could potentially find tens of thousands of new exoplanetary systems.

ESA plans to launch another space telescope in 2017 called Cheops. Like Kepler, it will use the transit method, but since its main purpose is "follow up" observations, it will only look at one star at a time, trying to characterize previously found planets and confirm the presence of candidate planets that have been tagged by earlier efforts.

NASA also plans to launch a mission in 2017 called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite or TESS. Kepler focused mostly on stars that were 1,000 light years away, but TESS will use an array of wide field cameras to look at the brightest stars within 100 light years of home. They hope to find a collection of exoplanets that can be later studied closely by the James Webb telescope in an effort to characterize their atmospheres

Conceptual Image of the James Webb Space Telescope

Image courtesy of NASA

The big man on campus will be the above mentioned James Webb space telescope, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency; it's slated to be launched in late 2018. And BMOC it will be at 13,700 pounds and nearly three times larger than Hubble. Like Gaia, the JWST will be parked at Lagrange Point two, but even though it's cold out there it isn't cold enough. A multi-layered sun shield the size of a tennis court will protect JWST's infrared instrumentation from the sun and serves as a radiator to dump excess heat and cool the telescope to a consistent 50 degrees Kelvin. That sun shield and the 6.5 meter primary mirror have to be folded into a compact brick that can fit into an existing rocket payload fairing, then successfully unfold like certain popular transforming robots once it arrives on station. This requirement has increased the complexity by adding many moving parts and raised costs to around 8.8 billion, putting its completion and launch in jeopardy several times due to budget cuts.

That said, the JWST should be worth the price and effort once it comes on line. Eager scientists around the world plan to use its sensitive infrared instruments for many varied projects, including an effort to study the origins of the universe itself, but our intrepid planet hunters already have dibs on time slots too.

JWST model in Dublin, Ireland

Image courtesy of ESA

JWST will be able to actually find planets via direct observation and transit, but its most valuable contribution may be the ability to closely examine the atmospheres of exoplanets. Smaller telescopes like Hubble and Spitzer already do that with large exoplanets in the right orientation, but James Webb will be able to do it with more accuracy, for nearby Earth sized planets. It will be sensitive enough to not only measure the amount of water and gases in the atmosphere, but in ideal situations possibly even see interesting details like oceans and ice caps.

The Next Big Step

Beyond James Webb, there are a few small, specialized space telescopes planned, but nothing that will push the technological envelope significantly. Of course brilliant researchers will continue to tweak the available options, squeezing more and more out of limited resources, but if we ever plan to learn more than mass, size and atmospheric makeup of Earth-like exoplanets we'll need better tools. There is however a Holy Grail sought by planet hunters. It's called the Terrestrial Planet Finder.

In 2002 NASA decided to focus its efforts along two lines of technology development, but each version has two things in common. They would have large mirrors and a means of occulting light from the parent star, enabling the telescope to see the much dimmer light or heat from an orbiting planet.

Concept for TPF-I

Image courtesy of NASA

The first design, with possibly the greatest potential, is the Infrared Astronomical Interferometer, dubbed TPF-I. As its description implies, this telescope would operate in the infrared range like James Webb, but that is where the similarity ends. Interferometers use a collection of smaller mirrors, linked and precisely controlled by computers, to mimic a large telescope mirror. They have been used with great success on ground based telescopes, but a space-based version requires leaping several technology hurdles. If the individual mirrors are free flying and not physically connected, then a method of extremely precise communication and control would have to be developed. Since TPF-I's inception, advancements in these technologies have come rapidly, making it seem much less of a pie in the sky approach, but a great deal of research is still needed. This method would also enable astronomers to adjust the distance between the mirrors and even add more units, creating an effectively larger and larger telescope. The other configuration, where individual mirrors would be physically connected at a set distance, would be easier and more robust to operate once built, but would need either human or robotic assembly on orbit. TPF-I would use a method called nulling to reduce the star's light by a factor of one million, enabling it to see faint heat emissions from planets.

Image courtesy of NASA

The second design, a Visible Light Coronagraph called the TPF-C, would be a large optical telescope like Hubble, but with a mirror at least four times larger and a hundred times more precise. This configuration would use special optics to reduce starlight by a factor of a billion and allow it to see very dim reflected light from planets. This mirror and telescope would be larger than James Webb, so would require the payload bay of a rocket like the Space Launch System or possibly lifted in smaller pieces, then assembled by humans or robots once in space.

In 2004 the U.S. congress approved both avenues of research, but funding was never appropriated for either. As of 2011, both versions of the TPF telescope were listed as canceled. However, not all hope is lost. There is talk of s mission to deliver a 60-70 meter "star shade" to the area of space in front of JWST. Its design is light and rather simple except for an odd daisy-petal shape needed on the edges to break up the corona effect of the star's light. If it could be launched, deployed and precisely controlled the star shield would provide the occulting option to the James Webb and expand its planet finding ability by being able to block out a star's brightness enough to see dimly lit planets.

Budget cuts due to a drop in public interest may restrict our timelines, but that doesn't stop us from thinking big. Other than pesky details of funding and cheap access to space, there is little stopping us from building telescopes on the far side of the moon.

NASA has plans for a kilometers wide radio telescope to study the origins of the universe, but I'd like to see us build very large optical and infrared telescopes too. When I said think big, I meant it. If we can find a way to build an optical telescope in the 70 kilometer diameter range, most likely in the form of an interferometer, we could not only get detailed spectrographic analysis of Earth-like exoplanets we could actually map their seas and continents. Now that might produce some really interesting results.

Conceptual Image of a Lunar Observatory

Image courtesy of NASA

Going Interstellar

A lot has changed since those summer nights lying under the stars forty-one years ago, but perhaps the most important of those changes happened in 1992 when Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail published a paper on the first confirmed planets outside our solar system. It was a point in history that might have started something wonderful. The math predicted planets and we had seen tantalizing traces, but before that discovery we didn't know. Now we do. The next important discovery in this hopefully long chain, will be when we are able to confirm that a nearby planet harbors life. I wonder what we'll do then. We'll have two choices. Go or don't go.

Unlike that ten year old lying under the stars and contemplating spiders on Mars, I have a firm understanding of the staggering distances involved, even to our closest stellar neighbor, but there is still enough of the kid left in me to say we have to go. Doing it will be a matter of will, money, time and ingenuity. Robots or generation ships or some sort of warp drive, it doesn't matter, but once we know, we have to go. If we aren't too afraid and can tear ourselves way from reality shows long enough, one day kids on some far away world might just stare into their sky one night and say, "Hey look. That star's getting bigger."

Copyright © 2013 by William Ledbetter

William Ledbetter lives near Dallas with his family and too many animals. A Writers of the Future award winner, Bill is also a consulting editor at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Quantum Kiss ezines. Bill is also the administrator of the annual Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest for Baen Books.

We contine a multipart series on training for war by retired Army lieutenant colonel Tom Kratman, creator of the popular Carrera military science fiction series, with latest entry Come and Take Them. Does it seem as if the United States land armed forces have lately been training to be cadres of world policemen and social workers rather than soldiers prepared to win a war? Here Kratman distills lessons from years as a commanding officer in the U.S. Army, where he retired a lieutenant colonel. Kratman’s argument: an army is for winning wars. And to win wars, you have to train men (and some women) to be warriors.

Training for War, Part III

by Tom Kratman

Tasks, Conditions, Standards

Everything in training in the Army and Marines, though the terminology may differ in the Corps (or in the other services), is a task, done under certain conditions, to certain standards. That, at least, is the theory. In practice…well, not so much.

One of the problems resides in or around the concept of standards.

The first of these problems is, well, just what do standards mean without conditions. Everyone’s seen the captain whose company always puts on a good show, where the troops’ hair is always cut, the lockers sorted to perfection, the floors in the barracks gleaming, never a cigarette butt in the police call area, etc. Quite likely, too, that there’s never a DUI, that everyone contributes to Army Emergency Relief, and the operationally ready rate for the vehicles approaches one hundred percent. “That captain has high standards,” say his superiors.

Does he really? What if looking good is all they do? What if the reason for the one hundred percent OR rate is that the vehicles are never used, nor even inspected closely, lest something go wrong or be found wrong?

In fact, that captain has a very different set of task, conditions, and standards he’s operating from. The task is: Look good enough to higher to get that coveted water-walking OER. The key conditions are: To the exclusion of everything else. And whatever standard we might think to apply are meaningless, because of the real task and the real conditions.

That example is extreme, of course, but it is not unreal. Sometimes it even works to advance the inherently illegitimate task, and the clear bastard of an officer. And, naturally, the troops not being dummies, and training being everything and everything training, this kind of program is also training them, to put appearances first, last, and always.

Vignette Six: Nobody is useless, but some people’s highest and best use is as a bad example.

The mission to attack Cerro Galera, on the southwest corner of the Panama Canal Zone, just northwest of Howard Air Force Base, was so miserable – it being densely overgrown and extremely steep – that it was assigned almost by roster. The mission was partially evaluation driven, with serious bad OER karma for commanders of units that failed the evaluation. It was also partially real world driven as, in the event of hostilities with Panama, there was a fair to middling chance that the heights would have to be cleared.

The battalion commander could apparently care less about real world considerations; what mattered to him was his OER, and part of his set of conditions for gaining that water walking OER was, “to the exclusion of all other ethical and moral considerations.” In support of that, and even though he could not have done it for real war, nor for legitimate training for war, he spontaneously and surreptitiously altered the conditions. Instead of the attack up Cerro Galera going in as a real simulation, the battalion commander had ropes installed all along the slope to make the going much easier and faster than it should have, or legitimately could have, been.

(As an aside, it came as a surprise to no one who knew this battalion commander when, later, as a colonel promotable, commanding a training brigade, he browbeat his headquarters company commander into falsifying his Army Physical Fitness Test score. It was something of a surprise, though, when the Chief of Staff of the Army allowed the wretch to be promoted to brigadier general and then retire, rather than court-martialing him as he plainly deserved. But then the Army’s major task is, all too often, “look good” with conditions, “no matter the cost in ethical precedent.” Oh, yes, it is. How do you suppose officers like that thrive?)

This illustration leads to something else:

Axiom Nine: In the absence of valid conditions, standards are completely meaningless.

A few examples: 1) Task: Engage target with a rifle … Conditions: Given range of one hundred feet, an infinity of ammunition, a zeroed rifle, no wind, on a perfectly clear, sunlit day, with the target painted bright orange. Standards: hit the target at least once. 2) Task: Run twelve miles. Conditions: Given three days, a smooth flat pavement, athletic clothing and shoes. Standard: Arrive. 3) Task: Conduct reconnaissance patrol. Conditions: given an MTO&E[1] infantry squad, a perfectly flat golf course overlooked by a hill, the hill being accessible, in the absence of an opposing force, with various displays laid out on the golf course, in plain sight, without camouflage, said displays showing friendly and enemy equipment, in an inactive NBC[2] environment, with a working radio, in the daytime, without fog or precipitation. Standards. The unit identifies eighty-five percent of the equipment displayed…

You get the idea. Cub scouts could do any of those. Brownies could do any of those. There’s nothing wrong with the standards, per se, but the conditions make those standards meaningless.

Conversely, try this:

Task: Conduct Deliberate Attack

Conditions: Given an MTO&E infantry company, with sixteen hours to prepare, from issuance of the warning order from battalion to crossing the line of departure, with the operations order from battalion coming not more than four hours after the warning order, the LD being at a distance of four kilometers, the objective being two kilometers past that, with the entire area between the LD and the objective subject to direct enemy fire, mines, indirect enemy fire, in an active NBC environment, with an enemy platoon one third the strength of the company, dug in, said platoon blocking access to the objective, with trenches and bunkers, the enemy having tactical, protective, and supplementary wire emplaced, plus a protective minefield. The OPFOR has both MANPADS[3] and light cannon for air defense. The company will be supported by the battalion’s heavy mortar platoon, two sorties of A-10s, and one battery of 105mm towed guns. Ammunition for indirect fire support is not constrained. Terrain is jungle. There may be streams and / or swamps to slow progress. Casualty assessment will be mixed MILES and evaluator judgment.

Standards: The objective is taken. The OPFOR platoon blocking the way suffers not less than seventy-five percent casualties. The company suffers not more than twenty-five percent casualties. No friendly unit endangered by friendly fire or action.

I trust it’s not too hard to see how those standards are actually fairly tough to meet, given those conditions.

Note that changing any of those standards or any of those conditions requires some thought and judgment. If you reduce the size of the enemy force, maybe you want to eliminate the two sorties of A-10s. If you make the minefield more substantial, maybe you need to give the company more time and attach a platoon of engineers.

As a general rule, too, I’d suggest that for collective combat tasks the following table for force rations should be adhered to.

Yes, by the way, I am saying that the most rear echelon of service support units still needs to be trained to fight, to defend and also to attack, and that that table gives a fair estimate of the chief condition – force ratio – to do so successfully and train to do so successfully. What? A maintenance platoon conduct a deliberate attack? Yes. See the German “Snail Offensive,” Russia, 1942, at Military Improvisations During the Russian Campaign, CMH Publication 104-1, which is available on line, for free, at history.army.mil.

So that’s one problem with standards, when they’re established without reference to the conditions. The other problem is when the standards aren’t really standards at all, when, instead, they become “performance measures.” What’s a performance measure? It’s generally a step which, if taken in the right sequence, is thought to equate with success at the task. The ARTEP, the Army Training Evaluation Program, is replete with performance measures masquerading as standards. The big problem, though, is that performance measures usually lack quality control and too often key on trivia. Trivia? I recall a test on using a lensatic compass at Fort Stewart, in the 1980s, whereby whether a soldier passed or not had to do with which thumb went over which when using the center hold technique. It was absurd, the more absurd for how seriously it was taken.

Not quite so trivially, but perhaps as uselessly, the ARTEP will have dozens of steps, say, for that deliberate attack mission, from receive the warning order to initiate necessary movement, to establish assembly area, to conduct troop leading procedures, to move to the line of departure…

All of those have some value for an evaluator to look at, but none of them, taken alone or together, equals success in quite the same way as: “The objective is taken. The OPFOR platoon blocking the way suffers not less than seventy-five percent casualties. The company suffers not more than twenty-five percent casualties. No friendly unit endangered by friendly fire or action.” And if you can’t evaluate based on those, once again, look to the conditions to see if you have made them thorough enough, and difficult enough, to simulate war reasonably well.

Changing conditions, toughening them, is also a way to effectively heighten the standards but without the demoralization attendant on changing them, which changes say, in effect, “I told you you were good before. I lied. That’s why I’m raising standards now.” Toughening the conditions can consist of reducing preparation times, changing light and weather conditions, adding obstacles, directing the route over unbreached and unbridged obstacles, making it an active (as in they’ve been used) chemical warfare environment, increasing the enemy force, change it to a nighttime task, etc.

1 Modified Table of Organization and Equipment

2 Nuclear, Biological and Chemical. Inactive means nobody’s using them.

3 Man Portable Air Defense Systems. Stingers, Redeyes, Blowpipes, Strellas, Grails, etc.

This series continues with “Training Part for War, Part Four.” Tom Kratman is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and the author of many science fiction and military adventure novels including Carrera series entry Come and Take Them.