Table of Contents

- From Smart Flesh to Custom Organs: The Growing Science of Tissue Engineering

- Training for War, Part IV

- Dungeons and Dragons: The 40 Year Quest for a Game that Breaks All the Rules

- Training for War, Part V

- Rendezvous and Docking: A User’s Guide for Non Rocket Scientists (Part 1)

- Rendezvous and Docking: A User’s Guide for Non Rocket Scientists (Part 2)

- Training for War, Part VI

- Bloodied By Starlight

- Why Science is Never Settled – Part One

- Why Science is Never Settled – Part Two

- Even Fantasy Needs a Little Science(Even Magic Needs Rules)

- Living without Satellites

- Behind the Scenes at Mission Control

- Using Outer Space to Improve Life on Earth(Or Why Space Advocates and Environmentalists Should Work Together)

- A Medieval Artist In The 21st Century

Baen Books

Free Nonfiction 2014

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.

From Smart Flesh to Custom Organs © 2014 by Tedd Roberts

Training for War, Part IV © 2014 by Tom Kratman

Dungeons and Dragons: The 40 Year Quest for a Game that Breaks All the Rules © 2014 by Bob Kruger

Training for War, Part V © 2014 by Tom Kratman

Rendezvous and Docking: A User’s Guide for Non Rocket Scientists (Part 1) © 2014 by Terry Burlison

Rendezvous and Docking: A User’s Guide for Non Rocket Scientists (Part 2) © 2014 by Terry Burlison

Training for War, Part VI © 2014 by Tom Kratman

Bloodied by Starlight © 2014 by Jonathan LaForce

Why Science is Never Settled - Part One © 2014 by Tedd Roberts

Why Science is Never Settled - Part Two © 2014 by Tedd Roberts

"Even Fantasy Needs a Little Science" (Even Magic Needs Rules) © 2014 by Tedd Roberts

Living without Satellites © 2014 by Les Johnson

Behind the Scenes at Mission Control © 2014 by Terry Burlison

Using Outer Space to Improve Life on Earth © 2014 by Les Johnson

A Medieval Artist in the 21st Century © 2014 by Randy Asplund

A Baen Book Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

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Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

eISBN: 978-1-62579-278-5

From Smart Flesh to Custom Organs:

The Growing Science of Tissue Engineering

by Tedd Roberts

One of the biggest challenges to developing the next generation of bionics and brain-controlled prosthetics is getting electrical sensors onto the relevant parts of the brain without damaging it. Many of the electrodes used to record from the brain are rigid wires sometimes known as daggers, such as the ceramic electrodes (Figure 1) used for the recent report of a memory prosthetic [1].

Figure 1: Ceramic Electrode for recording from deep brain structures.

Used in the laboratories of Dr. Robert Hampson, Wake Forest School of Medicine,

Winston-Salem, NC, and Dr. Greg Gerhardt, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY.

The problem with these rigid structures is that they don't conform to the tissue they are supposed to record. The surface of the brain is folded. Structures within the brain are complicated three-dimensional shapes with folds, bends, ridges, troughs and curves. One solution is to make electrodes flexible like the ones shown in Figure 2. This electrode is patterned onto thin plastic so that it flexes where the brain flexes, and molds itself (mostly) to the surface of the brain. The problem is that the material used to make the flexible electrode is still pretty thick and stiff compared to brain tissue. It doesn't quite conform to the surface of the brain. It also doesn't move when the tissue moves. Mostly, we don't want it to. The wires that connect the recording sites can still be pretty fragile, and they might break if the material flexes too much or moves around too much.

Figure 2: Subdural array electrode. Used in the laboratory of

Dr. Naotaka Fujii, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Japan.

So, how are we going to make electrical recording surfaces that can truly mold to the tissue it records from? We need something flexible, yet durable - and something we can make in any shape or size. Enter Smart Flesh the flexible printed circuit made from silk that adheres and flexes with skin, muscle or brain. This remarkable development comes from the laboratory of Dr. John Rogers at the University of Illinois. It is hard to say exactly which capability Dr. Rogers first sought –- flexibility, conforming to the folds and wrinkles of the skin, brain (Figure 3) or any three-dimensional surface – or stretchability, the ability to expand and contract with the aforementioned skin, brain or any moving surface. However he set about developing these properties, the possibilities for novel electronics and sensing systems are exciting.

Figure 3: Illustration of a Smart Flesh electrode that conforms to the surface of the brain.

Photo by the Rogers Research Group (Dr. John A. Rogers) at the University of Illinois,

and featured on the cover of Science News.

Why are flexible circuits so important, though, and how did we get here from the rigid circuit boards that are familiar from the computer electronics revolution of the last century? Prior to the 1950s, electronic circuits were discrete in that each transistor, each tube, each switch was physically connected to the rest of the electronic systems by wire. A recent visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View yielded a fascinating look at what must seem ancient history unless you actually grew up as part of the computer industry in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. The earliest computational devices (such as Babbage's Difference Engine) used gears, cogs and clockwork – but the electrical and electronic computers of the 1950's used tubes, switches and miles of wire. The first computer that I ever used on a regular basis was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11. (I absolutely loved the fact that my favorite SF author of the time –- James P. Hogan – worked for D.E.C. and included them in his books.) This computer was built in the 1970's and predated the use of motherboards common to modern PCs – but the main backplane which connected all of the processing components was a steel post and copper wire construction. The backplane was a rigid piece of fiberglass with hundreds of posts. Each post was wrapped with the non-insulated end of a copper wire, with the opposite of that wire wrapped around another post on a separate part of the backplane. Sockets on the backplane allowed one to plug in primitive circuit boards, which were the first attempt at putting patterns of fine copper, gold, and silver films onto flat boards to create circuits that did not require wires. In 1958, Jack Kilby, at Texas Instruments company outside Dallas, TX, developed a method for making all of the circuits needed for an electronic device out of the same block of material—in this case, silicon. This "integrated circuit" would be refined and miniaturized to result in the computer chips that we take for granted.

Meanwhile, in the field of neuroscience, researchers were limited to putting rather large single wires (approximately 1/4 millimeter diameter) into the brain to record from individual neurons or brain cells. Even though the technology advanced to the point of using multiples of very fine wires (1/100 of a millimeter in diameter), it still did not fulfill the need to precisely position each wires to record specific networks and circuits within the brain. It was not until Dr. Greg Gerhardt and Dr. Karen Moxon at the University of Colorado Health Science Center developed a technique for applying integrated circuit techniques to sub-millimeter thick aluminum oxide ceramic, that neuroscientists had reliable circuit-like electrodes (Figure 1) that could be placed deep in the brain and still record precise locations within that brain. However, those electrode were still fairly rigid, and did not conform to the structure – meaning that the neurons to be recorded had to conform themselves to the electrode, rather than the electrode conforming to the neurons.

The rise of consumer electronic devices from the 1980s to the present brought many developments in circuit technology. A new flexible circuit first showed up in 35mm film cameras that incorporated electronic shutter control and metering. The need to fold the electronics into the camera body required a sturdy, yet flexible wiring, and flex circuits perfectly fit that purpose. The earliest flex circuits etched flat connectors onto DuPont's Kapton film (developed for the Apollo Program) and electronics developers found numerous ways to incorporate the flexible electronics into their devices. Neuroscientists also briefly considered flex circuits for our recording electrodes, but found that the material was not very durable in the warm and wet conditions of the human body (and brain!).

This is why Smart Flesh is such a boon to physiology and electronics. A quick review of Dr. Rogers' website shows many different applications of polymers, biology and electronics. One application of Smart Flesh is circuits built onto a surface of silk which can be placed on the skin, or inside the body and retain its shape while remaining flexible. Another application is dissolving circuits based on polymers that will survive hours to weeks, but dissolve like surgical stitches once they are not longer needed. A key feature of all of many of the Rogers Lab developments is the ability for the electronic components to bend and stretch. Figure 4 shows how the "wiring" of smart flesh is looped and folded in three dimensions, and is not flat as in printed circuits or integrated circuits. The combination of folds and flexible electrically conductive silicon and carbon nanotubes ensures that the embedded wiring of the circuit will not break or separate as the surface is bent, rolled or shaped.

Figure 4: Three dimensional folds allow Smart Flesh to stretch and fold without breaking electronic wiring.

Photo by the Rogers Research group.

Once it is common to print circuits on flexible material and apply them to skin or brain, it is a short step to making the circuits that can be applied directly to tissue. One way might be to construct the circuits with a peel away or dissolvable backing, so that the circuit could be placed on skin, or on an internal organ such as the heart, and only the electronics left in place. Another technique could certainly evolve from 3-D printing and fabrication technology using conductive inks and nanotubes. Imagine a heart pacemaker printed directly onto the surface of the heart, sensors that measure the stress on a recently broken bone, or temporary monitoring circuits that dissolve when they are no longer needed!

Technologies such as Smart Flesh highlight developments in the growing field of Tissue Engineering. It has long been assumed by Science Fiction authors and readers that laboratory manufacture of living organs would eventually replace organ transplantation as a means of repairing damaged humans (see Larry Niven's A Gift From Earth). One possibility raised in both the scientific and SF communities was that of cloning organs all the way up to whole bodies from just a few cells and samples of DNA. We now know that cloning is possible, but largely relies on stem cells—cells that are in a protean, undifferentiated state capable of developing into all of the specific cell types in a body, and thus are capable of differentiating and potentially developing into any type of cell—such as the recent report of a kidney grown entirely from stem cells. Tissue engineering seeks to shortcut the necessity to grow cloned tissues and organs by directly manufacturing them.

One of the first successes in the field was by Dr. Anthony Atala in 2006. Atala, first at Harvard University, then at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, dripped a nutrient solution with cartilage and stem cells over a balloon-like template to create a hollow structure made of cells similar to the human bladder. In 2007, the first of these lab-grown organs was implanted in a human patient. More recently, a breakthrough treatment for severe burns involves spraying the damaged skin with stem cells using a skin gun. The stem cells form a protective layer, reduce infection and form new skin without the scarring and complications of skin grafts. It will not be long until tissue engineering will adopt the techniques of 3-D printing to print a new organ instead of waiting for it to grow!

The implications are tremendous: a combination of custom-manufactured organs and the means to print electronic circuits on them. Aside from the obvious conspiracy theories and threats that such circuits will be used to control the patients, the concepts of combining tissue engineering and smart flesh are intriguing: imagine a heart transplant that can monitor its own health and report to a doctor any signs of rejection. Imagine still, that the heart can use its own circuits and tissues to prevent rejection! Can we print new Islet cells for a malfunctioning pancreas and cure diabetes? Perhaps we can... Indeed we probably will, as the future unfolds, until the day when we can manufacture a prosthetic for the brain, print it on smart flesh, place it on the brain, and dissolve the backing, leaving only the circuits... and cure traumatic brain injury, stroke and Alzheimer's disease.

The possibilities are perhaps frightening, but they are in greater measure very exciting. Tissue engineering and the use of advanced life-like materials such as smart flesh are making science fiction into science fact... and it's happening even as we speak.

1: Robert E. Hampson et al 2013 J. Neural Eng. 10 066013 doi:10.1088/1741-2560/10/6/066013.

Training for War, Part IV

by Tom Kratman

Vignette Seven: oh, of course the enemy will always set himself up for maximum vulnerability to your drills and standard operating procedures.

(The following is extracted from Carnifex, Volume II in the Carreraverse)

Cano was pissed. Being taken by surprise, ambushed himself by the Duque, was just too fucking much. Bad enough that—

“Relax, Tribune,” Carrera said, not ungently. He was actually impressed with the kid. “I just have some questions. It was a good ambush. Really. What bothers me was that maybe it was too good. Why do you think it was so good?”

Cano didn’t relax. Sure, he wasn’t a signifer anymore; he was entitled to tie his boots in the morning without tying the left one to the right one. Even so, this was the bloody Duque. He was a bastard; everyone knew it. Cano could just see his career flying off to parts unknown and unknowable. He could—

“I asked a question, Tribune,” Carrera reminded.

“Oh . . . sorry, sir. I was . . . I just wasn’t expecting you to—”

“I asked a question, Tribune.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Well . . . sir . . . we’ve done this ambush here maybe a dozen times just since I’ve been leading the platoon. The boys know what to do and, then again, we drill the shit out of it . . .”

Aha.

“Jamey! Call the Chief of Staff, the I and the Ia. I don’t give a shit if they’re asleep. Get ’em up.”

Vignette Eight

Hamilton couldn’t figure it out. He knew the company—his new company—was well drilled. Yet every problem thrown at them this brisk Fort Stewart morning they pretty much flubbed. It was taking longer for them to react than it should have if they’d never drilled a step.

It took the common sense of his driver to explain it: “Everything you’ve thrown at them is different this morning, sir. For example, that ambush? Well, you had it placed over there on the right and behind. Normally, it’s always up ahead, either right or left.”

“So?”

“So they’re having to stop, think, overcome the conditioning of years of doing it the other way, then think of what to do for this. And they’ve drilled so much they’re not good at thinking quick.”

“Oh. How come you’re still a private.”

“I’m new, sir. Not stupid, but new.”

Battle Drills and SOPs^1

Drills are preset and rehearsed to the point of conditioned solutions to common battlefield problems. Though I can see the point, for some of them, I’m not a huge fan, overall. There are a few reasons for my lack of enthusiasm. One is that, used enough, the enemy can study them at leisure and arrive at the perfect counter to almost any given drill. Another is that war is chaotic and unpredictable such that the drill is usually somewhat inappropriate. The same generally holds true for Standard Operating Procedures, individual tasks done to perfection, crew drills, and formations.

There are some very good armies that historically have been utterly dependent on battle drills, crew drills, SOPs, and the like. Almost every army uses at least some of that. But for those that use only some, there’s a marked reluctance to get too very dependent on them, in part, I think for the time training them (to the point of conditioning) involves, and in part because an army dependent on drill will tend to select for leadership people very comfortable with drill, with present solutions, which are precisely the wrong people to put in charge of an inherently and irredeemably chaotic endeavor like war.

There are a number of other objections to overreliance on drill besides the two I mentioned, above. I suggest using the below as a set of filters for what should and should not be turned into drill.

Drills, if they’re to be reliable, must be conditioned into troops, almost as if the troops, leaders, too, were Pavlov’s dogs. So if the subject of the drill simply can’t really be conditioned in a normal human being, well enough to rely on it, don’t try to make a drill of it.

Even if the matter is something a normal human being can be conditioned into, conditioning usually takes a lot of time. Time, of course, is usually at a premium. Thus, even if something can, in theory, be conditioned, if you don’t have the time to condition it, don’t waste what time you have on the impossible.

Drills—like the other things, mentioned above—are executed under certain conditions. If those conditions are subject to radical differences such that no amount of practical drilling can condition them all, do not train as a drill something that will only be true infrequently.

Military units suffer losses. They are almost never at full strength. If a drill requires a particular level of manpower or equipment, and you can reasonably predict that that particular level of strength will rarely be met, don’t bother.

Those last two are related. We legitimately and effectively use crew drill for armored vehicle crews. And why not? The inside of a turret—the key condition—doesn’t change. The crewmen have seats they stay in. The gun doesn’t move laterally or horizontally relative to the crew. The internal communications gear typically works. For the other key condition, strength, the crew of an armored vehicle generally lives or dies together; they generally suffer no attrition that matters in the short term. Yes, it sometimes happens but not commonly. So a drill for a crew like that—a crew drill—makes sense.

The same holds true for much that the mortars and artillery do. Their positions may change from place to place, but the important thing, the gun, is always the same. The positions they build to protect the gun and themselves are always the same, too. The casualties they take, mostly to other mortars and artillery, or air, tend to be either catastrophic or insignificant.

Artillery and mortars don’t usually come under small arms fire. Mines are only rarely a problem for them. For the most part they lose men to aerial attack and counterbattery fire from enemy artillery. That fire either is close enough to emulsify the crew, or it’s far enough away, when it explodes, to do only limited damage to the crew, or it is so far away it is irrelevant to the crew.

In the first and the last of those cases, that the artillery crew was drilled numb doesn’t hurt matters. It can still either do the job or it is dead. In the middle case, because gun crews are much larger—or at least ought to be— than the bare minimum needed to load and fire the gun, and because artillery crew drill is simple enough that everyone can be, and in a good crew is, trained to do all the jobs. Therefore, even with some losses, the gun can still fill the important jobs with adequately trained troops and still function at a reduced rate of fire.

The drill at the crew level becomes much more problematic when we rise above the level of a single, simple crew to a platoon of mortars, tanks or tracks, or a battery of guns. Then the key condition is no longer the same all the time. Units above the crew level always have to adjust: to terrain, to the enemy situation, to their own strength. Indeed, the variables for infantry are infinite, a few drills won’t do and the number that might do is impossible.

In any event, before you decide to train something as a drill, ask yourself also whether the conditions—to include your own strength—are likely to be the same in war all the time.

Note that the Russians, one of the more thoroughgoing drill-based armies, show a key point for drills above the crew level: a line remains a line, even when you erase some portion of it. As they do, if you plan on doing a drill or formation with any unit above the crew level, you had best consider making it some variable on a line or similarly simple geometric shape. A wedge or echelon, for example, counts as a line. Only that kind of formation or drill is very sustainable after losses.

Similarly formations: picture a platoon, normally of four vehicles, trying to bound forward by sections of two vehicles. That’s fine, as far as it goes. Ah, but what about when the platoon is down to only three vehicles? Then it doesn’t work so well anyway, and hardly at all in the same way. The three vehicle platoon moves either with an inadequate overwatching force—one vehicle—or the section on overwatch is two vehicles and the single track sent ahead to bound feels alone and abandoned, advancing most reluctantly.

So under normal combat conditions—because, again, normal is understrength—the bounding overwatch drill has less benefit than you expect and need, and all the time spent on drilling such movement tends to be wasted. On the other hand, a company bounding forward by alternating its platoons can work because even if a bounding platoon has taken some losses, it is still capable of covering its own front and has enough sub units left to give each other moral support to go forward.

Time to execute the drill in battle is another consideration. Some things don’t have to be conditioned in order to be done. Even in battle there is often time to give more than one-word drill commands. Before deciding to train something as a drill, consider if there would normally be time to give orders to have your troops act more appropriately than a drill would allow.

Then, too, one should prioritize. Ask yourself if the drill a matter of life and death for an individual, victory or defeat for a higher unit? I don’t mean simply that under some rare circumstances a well-executed drill might be life or death for us or the enemy. I mean is a precise conditioned response virtually always that important?

Sometimes it is. Reaction to a near ambush is that kind of circumstance. So is using a Bangalore torpedo^2 to breach an obstacle, especially when attacking a position held by an enemy with a very responsive artillery support network . . . if surprise fails you and you must clear a path quickly.

At a lower level, the individual level, there are also a few tasks like that. The whole field of combat demolitions is dangerous enough to justify drilling troops to do it perfectly every time. The time to put on a gas mask is about that critical, too. Although, as a little experiment in the downside of drills and SOPs, sometime have your troops come under a chemical attack when they are advancing at a crawl under fire, with inadequate cover and concealment. Watch how our boys, already well-drilled on immediate action for a chemical attack, stand up despite the direct fire to put on their masks.

“Only the very simple can work in war,” as Clausewitz observed. Complex drills simply won’t work, even leaving aside that the time required to condition something goes up with that something’s complexity, even as the probability of conditioning it drops.

As suggested above, your enemy is probably not a fool. He will adapt to your drills very quickly, given a chance to study them.

The final problem with basing one’s tactics and training around drill is that there is a mindset, common in many armies, which has no understanding of war as the chaos it is. To these people everything is controllable, everything is predictable. They will forget that war is about prevailing against an armed enemy, who does not think about himself as a target set up to give you the best possible chance of success, but instead will do everything he can to thwart and destroy you.

In peacetime maneuvers, these people and their units often do well, even better than those who see war more clearly for what it is. They then stretch the idea of drill beyond the legitimate limits it has, and try to make everything a drill, everything precise. Skills and purely measurable factors assume an unmerited importance. Worst of all, leaders and troops are not trained to think. Their moral faculties are not developed.

After the First World War there, the victorious French Army developed some very standardized drills for higher formations. The German Army examined these division level drills in wargames on maps and came to the conclusion that they were, most of the time, more effective than the more chaotic approach the Germans had favored. Nonetheless, the Germans didn’t adopt the French methods. The French continued to drill; the Germans continued to treat war as uncontrollable chaos and trained their army accordingly.

France fell in six weeks in 1940.

And now, just to prove that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, I’m going to break the filters I gave above and suggest one drill for heavy units, tank, mechanized infantry, motorized infantry, plus other vehicle mounted units, that meets almost none of them. This is a drill—in two variants—for underway fueling, feeding, and arming.

In the first of these, four trucks—a mess truck, a fuel truck, an ammunition truck, and a trash truck—line up on the road, either to one side or, if the road’s wide enough and the fuel truck has two nozzles, in the middle of it, and the troops go through on their vehicles. At the first truck, the mess truck, the squad leader holds up the number of fingers for the people he has to feed. The mess folks on the truck dish out that many meals, covering one of the meals for the driver, who can’t stop to eat. The non-driving personnel begin wolfing their food down like ravenous, wild, mad, rabid beasts. The driver continues on to the next truck, fuel, and stops the track. He then tries to imitate the others (nomnomnom), while someone plugs the fuel nozzle into the vehicle and the fuel folks oversee the pump. Meanwhile, the squad leader sends one private jogging to the next truck, with a written list of the ammunition needed. When the vehicle is fully fueled, or as fully fueled as it can be made, in times of logistic austerity, the driver puts down his chow and moves up to the ammunition truck, where the ammunition is waiting. This is tossed over and dumped on the floor of the track, pending a rest halt or assembly area where it can be properly stowed. Someone bends down and does the best stowage he can, under the circumstances. The driver might or might not get a bite at this time. The ammunition placed below, the track moves on to the trash truck. While going there, all the trash from the previous day, plus the garbage and paper plates from the meals just consumed (I mentioned “ravenous, wild, mad, rabid beasts,” did I not?) and tosses it over in passing.

The second version is basically the same, except that everybody is moving the whole time. Yes, it takes a little practice. But, with practice, a mechanized infantry company can be fed, fueled, rearmed, and have its trash removed in ten or eleven minutes, while never becoming a stationary target for enemy artillery.

Why do this as a drill though? Good question. Try this: much time in training is wasted by stopping, starting, and building up momentum and inertia. This way cuts way down on that. Too, like Collins’ example of passing out ammunition on the route march to the line of departure, something that simply feels real, and, chrome-like, adds that sense of, “this is what it will be like,” which tends to carry over past the minor event to the major exercise, validating the exercise. Additionally, it has the effect of inculcating in the mind of every man in a heavy, mobile unit that speed is their best asset, more than guns and armor.

As for the disadvantages noted in battle drill, they don’t generally apply to this, since it is not an exercise in using force to overcome force, against an intelligent, self-willed enemy.

Vignette Nine: sometimes the best way to learn to understand and defeat your enemy is by walking in his shoes:

The mission was deliberate attack at the company level, but it was an OPFOR mission, in this case to simulate a Soviet motorized rifle company conducting an assault from the march. MILES would be used.

Well, thought Hamilton, I don’t think it would be unprincipled to use the actual Soviet drill for this. Rather, unless we do use that drill, we’ll be in violation of the conditions for the problem.

So he called together his lieutenants and explained to them they were going to simulate a Soviet unit—“Oh, yes, boys, you are going to command the company in rotation for this.”—doing things the Soviet way, as the only way to properly test their sister company, the platoons of which would be defending battle positions.

And that was what they did for the day; they practiced doing things the Soviet way. This involved rolling in column to about twelve hundred meters away, forming platoon columns as they closed, dismounting just out of small arms range, forming on line, and walking forward firing from the hip. It culminated with the platoon leaders calling, “Into the assault: FORWARD!” and the troops shouting, “Urrah!” and then charging at the run, screaming like Furies and firing like maniacs.

The first platoon of the other company wasn’t expecting that. They ran.

Wow, thought Hamilton, I sure didn’t expect that.

The second platoon of that company ran, too.

Uh, oh., thought Hamilton; I think we have just discovered that our units are going to run for their lives if they ever have to face a Soviet Army doing even the simplistic crap it’s been trained to do. I see no end of bad in our future.

The third platoon was going to run; Hamilton was with them while one of his lieutenants commanded the company. He could see them getting ready to bolt. They didn’t, but only because the battalion commander declared an artillery-delivered FASCAM (FAmily of SCAatterable Mines) minefield right in front of Hamilton’s company. Never mind that as a battalion commander he lacked the authority for FASCAM on his own hook. Never mind that the entire divisional artillery could not have delivered it so instantaneously, if that had been all they had to do.

(In other words, that battalion commander, faced with someone using realistic conditions, decided to adopt an unrealistic condition to avoid what he apparently felt was personal humiliation. For shame.)

The rest of the story is that, when it became Hamilton’s company’s turn to defend by platoons, the sister company had learned to do the same Soviet battle drill, possibly with a couple of improvements. Hamilton’s first platoon…stood. Hamilton’s second platoon…stood. Hamilton’s third platoon stood—and without the battalion commander giving them an impossible FASCAM obstacle.

I think, thought Hamilton, that the difference isn’t so much in the quality of the companies. I think it’s that my men were inoculated by seeing the Soviets from the inside, first.

Notes:

1 Note: if this sounds familiar, yes, this part of the talk, which I’ve been giving for years, was modified for inclusion in Carnifex.

2 Note: I’m not actually sure Bangalores are still in the system. There are limitations, however, to the MCLIC, the Mine Clearing Line Charge, sufficient to justify making your own, even if they’re no longer in the system.

Dungeons and Dragons:

The 40 Year Quest for a Game that Breaks All the Rules

by Bob Kruger

Dungeons & Dragons turns forty this week. A thorough discussion of D&D involves just about every issue that crops up in game design, so it’s great for a broad overview of the field. But D&D itself is less a game than a set of traditions, an evolving hobby rather than a finished consumer product. At its best, D&D facilitates the creation of a meaningful story that is a surprise to everyone, including the Dungeon Master, and its group dynamics, its mythic subject matter, the element of luck, and even the players’ naïve faith in the rules are instrumental to this effect. In the past week, I’ve talked to several prominent game designers, many of whom were involved with crucial stages of the game's development, to discuss its appeal and test my ideas about how it works.

The One Rule of D&D? Nobody Knows the One Rule of D&D.

In 1997 my friend Jonathan Tweet was working on a new Basic Set to go along with the D&D 3.0 edition, of which Jonathan was chief designer. Jonathan and I got to talking about the project over beers in a Seattle-area pub. We mulled over the influence of miniatures rules—that is, the use of representational figures in three dimensions, usually of metal—on the early editions of the game.

I told Jonathan that I had originally begun learning D&D from the blue-box set I got in 1980 for my eleventh birthday. The blue box was several editions removed from the original 1974 woodgrain-patterned set but still contained unexplained scraps of miniatures rules and lacked clear instructions about the play setup.

The rules I learned from were poorly written and edited, but in a way that somehow rendered the game more appealing. This wasn’t a slick product for a mere consumer; it invited you—practically begged you with its amateurish presentation—to take its ideas and build on them. First, though, you had to decipher those ideas, and boy did I get that wrong. Or did I?

The included dungeon map looked like a game board to me. The miniatures rules about character and monster movement (one inch = 10 feet), coupled with the map legend (one square = ten feet) and the advice that the game was divided in turns, suggested to me that you were supposed to redraw the map to a larger size (with one-inch squares), place miniatures representing the characters at the dungeon entrance, advance so many squares per turn, and then what? There was a Wandering Monster table and a rule that said that you checked once a turn to see if a monster appeared. Maybe at that point you introduced a monster to the board, but where did you put it? At the edge of sight, maybe? A torch illuminated to six inches, or sixty feet; elves had see-in-the-dark, or “infra-,” vision to sixty feet. So unless you were coming up on a corner, you put the monster or monsters at sixty feet. Right?

My interpretations were consistent with the rules and allowed me to play a game with friends that had the trappings of what had been described in magazine articles. Of course, anyone familiar at all with D&D knows it’s not quite this mechanical. Players don’t get to see the map; the Dungeon Master describes each area as the characters enter it, and miniatures are used to help stage encounters but aren’t really needed at all. Most players ignore the movement rules, and a “turn,” which can be divided into ten melee “rounds,” is not a discrete move in the game but a time measurement, and really only a useful concept during combat or when the party is under some kind of deadline pressure.

As I learned these more-accepted ways to play, the game became increasingly fun, and I had this naïve sense that my discoveries would go on indefinitely, leading me and my friends to some ultimate escape.

When I’d finished my reminiscence, Jonathan admitted he found it interesting as an example of how beginners gain a foothold on the game.

Jonathan and I discussed the idea of introducing D&D the way I’d misinterpreted it to be, as a kind of board game, perhaps with modular squares, and then having the players drop the board-game props as the Dungeon Master gained confidence with storytelling and the players with roleplaying. Whether our conversation directly influenced him, I don’t know and neither does he, because he doesn’t remember, but these concepts did get incorporated into Wizards of the Coast’s first Basic Dungeons & Dragons set.

At that time, it had been 17 years since my initial experiments with D&D. Now, another 17 years have passed, and two and a half editions of D&D have come and gone.

Jonathan and I recently met up with our friend 4th Edition designer Rob Heinsoo for lunch. I asked if they’d found D&D as unclear as I had, a question I had failed to ask Jonathan 17 years before. I mean, the rules couldn’t have been as bad as I remembered. How could the game have caught on? Rob and Jonathan, at least, must have understood them.

Nope, they admitted, they really didn’t. So what made them keep at it?

"D&D was hard to play, and it involved a lot of patience, arithmetic, and even tedium,” said Jonathan. “Mapping the dungeon by hand on graph paper is slow. The cool stuff is all in your head, invisible. A D&D session can be a like a six-hour bout of sensory deprivation. If you weren't committed to the quest of killing monsters and taking their treasure, it was the last thing you'd want to do.

“That said, if you wanted to fight monsters, D&D was the only game in town. In 1977, when I started playing, Space Invaders hadn't even appeared yet. We put up with every inconvenience to play that game.

“We tested my introductory D&D sets [at Wizards of the Coast] with kids, so I've watched lots of kids learn D&D cold. When it works, you sometimes see the a-ha moment where a 14-year old realizes that the action is really in your imagination, and that means you can do anything with the game.

“D&D rules don't define your game. Instead, they define the tools you'll use to build your own game."

If Rob couldn’t understand the rules, then absolutely no one should have been able to. In the early seventies while living with his family on an army base in Germany, he’d been a customer of Guidon Games, a mail-order retailer of historical lead figures and war games. Guidon also published rules, including Chainmail, a medieval miniatures game co-authored by Gary Gygax that was the progenitor of D&D. Rob bought the original D&D box set in 1974,1 the year it came out, and he could not understand its sketchy combat system at all.

“Rules problems probably started with the fact that the game wanted you to use dice with strange numbers of sides,” said Rob. “I had six-sided dice, and knew a wargame that used them. When I asked grown-ups about getting other dice, well, none of us had ever seen such a thing. My childlike understanding was that I would literally have to go to TSR in Wisconsin to get these weird dice, which the grown-ups around me said didn't even exist. So I kind of forgot about the dice and skipped a lot of other rules that my reading level wasn't up to deciphering and adjust the combat rules from the Napoleonic minis game I knew.

“Roll a d6 [that is, a regular six-sided die], add bonuses for magic items, high roll wins. Gradually I worked other elements of the Napoleonic game into the mix, like using the cannon's grapeshot template I had made from twisted coat hangers and using that as a fireball explosion, but mostly we were making it up as we went, doing what seemed fair, or at least fun. Sometimes I would kill a friend's character in a trap, and that wasn't much fun. Other times we would have fun doing things like recreating the Watcher in the Water scene from LotR on the second level of my dungeon, or imagining a school for dragons on the third level.”

So to play the game, Rob fell back on the very Napoleonic miniatures rules that inspired D&D in the first place. The dice the original rules required were polyhedral dice, those platonic solids in every nerd’s basic toolkit: the pyramidal four-sider, the standard cube, the eight sider, the twelve sider, and, king of all, the twenty-sider, icosahedron, herald of a billion virtual dooms (ah, so that’s how you’re supposed to get this number from 1 to 20!). After first trying to use plain dice and then learning better but having to wait for the real thing, he made do with chits drawn out of a cup.

“The game was clear about the type of fun you were supposed to have, just not about how to get there,” according to Rob. “By the time I re-read the rules as an 11-year-old and figured out how D&D was really supposed to work, we'd been playing for a couple years using anything I could cobble together. I may have been younger than most, but I don't think I was the only person forced to cobble their own system together, and for a lot of people that also became part of the fun.”

As a middle-schooler, Jonathan heard rumors of D&D out of Augustana College in Illinois, where his dad was an English professor. He gleaned that it involved players standing in a circle pretending to be monsters and treasure. Odd, he thought, that college students would like that kind of thing. When his dad introduced him to a group playing in the student union building, strange dice on the table, character sheets and books piled around, the game hit him with nerd lust.

“So you actually had an example of play,” I said. “Did you get it on your own after that?”

“No, my dad introduced me to a guy who taught me.”

Then Jonathan and Rob told me how another important roleplaying game designer, Ray Winninger, came to D&D by way of the Deities and Demigods pamphlet. Ray gathered that you played the gods, and he and his friends battled orcs with the impunity of exterminators clearing out basement mice.

It’s not so much that the rules were poorly written; it wasn’t just that we didn’t know what we were doing, apparently Arneson and Gygax didn’t either. What was all this crap about movement in inches anyway if redrawing the map with one-inch squares was wrong? Back in the seventies, those guys had begun to create a new thing; it was not a miniatures game, not really. But they tried to make it look like it was, throwing in shoptalk without translation.

So none of us knew what we were doing, but was that a problem? Jonathan and Rob agreed that they took the incompleteness of the game as an invitation to develop it themselves.

Playing a Game by Telling a Story

D&D has been an activity largely defined by its fans. Veteran game designer Mons Johnson told me, “D&D had a strong high concept, but was always just a structure, a Christmas tree with no ornaments you had to decorate yourself.”

The storytelling element is key. If you’ve got players pretending to be heroes in a medievalish fantasy world, if you’ve got dice, and a dungeon master to tell the story, you’ve got D&D. Of course, Gary Gygax tried to get a lot more to stick to it, but struggled to draw lines between simulation and abstraction. On the one hand, he was fond of tables for interpreting dice rolls, not just combat tables for magic-users, clerics, fighter-types, and thieves, but tables to routinely check your characters for parasites and to diagnose mental ailments brought on by trauma or sorcery. On the other hand, he said in the original Dungeon Master’s Guide that “hit points,” the measure of damage a character could sustain, represented a mix of skill, luck, and divine favor more than physical toughness. Whereas wounds like broken bones weren’t, as he put it, “the stuff of high fantasy,” both trichinosis and trichophobia apparently were.

Most players I knew dispensed with the Parasitic Infestation table.

The Rise of the Modules

Though depending on the hard work and superior judgment of its audience, D&D was sold as if it were a finished consumer item and not a hobby kit, and it sold well under that pretense. By the early eighties, D&D’s parent company, TSR, had begun to tighten control of their brand, reining in the hobbyists who had evangelized and defined it, and wresting the company from Gygax himself. In 1982, TSR pulled the license they’d granted another game company, The Judges Guild, to produce D&D supplements, especially adventure packets known as modules. Several Judges Guild modules are still regarded as early classics, but their tone, design, and even interpretation of the game were at odds with the direction of TSR’s own. Also in 1982, Mayfair Games began producing their Role-Aids line of supplements, a move that caught the baleful notice of TSR lawyers, who obliged Mayfair to sign an agreement in 1984 restricting the way they referenced Dungeons & Dragons. At this time, TSR steadily upgraded the design of their modules and rulebooks. Between the slicker presentation and the brand policing, they sent the message that amateurs weren’t welcome to contribute.

“I started playing D&D in 1974 when it first came out and never bought a module,” Rob Heinsoo observed. “By the mid-eighties many kids didn’t even know you could create your own modules. Publishing a game that people had to reinvent meant there was a lot of creativity early on. It’s like early Christianity or Islam where there’s this charismatic moment, but then it has to be codified.”

TSR did more than codify, though. To extend Rob’s analogy, they routed the heretics who made it lively. Gary Gygax’s genius wasn’t in logical game design, writing, editing, or even business. Rather, it was in fusing the trappings of popular fantasy literature, board games, and miniatures games into a storytelling procedure just coherent enough to inspire players to make it better. TSR didn’t show awareness of this fact, and despite—maybe because of—superior production values and the game’s huge influence on literature, movies, and computer games, D&D fell into steady decline, until Wizards of the Coast bought it in 1997.

The Wizards Appear

Wizards itself originally formed out of a D&D group that tried to make a business selling roleplaying game supplements generic enough to avoid TSR’s censure. TSR didn’t bother them, but they ran afoul of a roleplaying game company called Palladium that sued them for referencing their trademarks, and the settlement in 1992 almost destroyed them before Wizards hit it big with Richard Garfield’s Magic: The Gathering card game the following year.

Flush with money from Magic, Wizards purchased TSR in 1997 and gained control of D&D. The Wizards founders keenly understood D&D’s hobbyist appeal, and sympathized with the amateurs that wanted to publicly add their own contributions. Wizards president Peter Adkison worked with Jonathan Tweet, Skaff Elias, Ryan Dancey, and many others, to develop the core D&D rules as an open-source product, called D20, after the common abbreviation for a twenty-sided die. (A friend of mine from the original Wizards cohort, founder Ken McGlothlen, states in my Facebook group, “The idea for D20 [and I'm not speaking from Jonathan's perspective, as he wasn't around at the time] was floated originally by Michael Cook as ‘Envoy’ in 1990, and he did quite a bit of work on it before politics shut it down. Michael doesn't get nearly enough credit….”)

Along with the Open Gaming License that defined the terms of its public use, D20 revitalized D&D as a hobby, and the supplements and systems built on the OGL, like the Pathfinder roleplaying system and Jonathan and Rob’s own 13th Age game, have thrived. Even The Judges Guild made a comeback.

Jonathan and his team reworked D&D from a fresh and logical perspective. Miniatures rules deserved a nod and would strengthen the role of, and therefore the market for, a D&D minis line. The first two editions of D&D were littered with inconsistencies. Monsters and player characters had their abilities defined on different, incompatible scales for no clear reason. The combat tables could be boiled down to a simple formula and modifiers. The armor class scale was goofy and unintuitive: the lower your armor class in the original rules, the harder you were to hit. And so on.

Arguably, something was lost in all this housecleaning, but much more was gained. Wizards didn’t sum up D&D, but their key ideas seem vindicated: the game is a hobby, and it worked largely despite many of its rules. D&D has some powerful hooks.

Mythic Archetypes Make a Comeback

A large part of the success of D&D was simply great timing. Fantasy literature was on the rise. D&D offered fans a chance to creatively engage with settings, monsters, and characters inspired by fantasy writers. These included Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, and Michael Moorcock, but the single greatest influence on the themes and trapping of the game was undoubtedly Tolkien. The final book in the The Lord of the Rings series, The Return of the King, had been released in 1955, but the books didn’t reach mainstream attention until the sixties, when college students in the United States made it popular.

Gygax and Arneson released D&D at a time when The Lord of the Rings was an established but still new phenomenon, and the animated movies based it and its prequel The Hobbit were in planning but still years away. The early editions of D&D made explicit reference to hobbits, ents, and balrogs, which were wholly Tolkien’s creations, and Gygax removed them only after the Tolkien estate threatened a lawsuit. He then reinstated hobbits as “halflings,” a name Tolkien had also used for them, but with less proprietary claim. Nearly all the characteristics of elves, halflings, dwarves, and orcs were standardized according to hints in Tolkien’s work, and are central to D&D. As a rule, D&D players before 1980 arrived at the game by way of Tolkien, including me, Rob, and Jonathan.2

Tolkien’s popularity is a separate study entirely, but in his obsessive fantasy world-building, with maps, made-up languages, monsters, and a divine pantheon, he provided the template for the Dungeon Master. Moreover, Tolkien drew extensively on northern European mythology. As Rob noted, “Outside of a few preparatory schools, hardly anyone has a classical education these days. D&D has been classical education for the masses.”

D&D owed Tolkien a huge debt but went far beyond his contribution in reviving the central myths of Western Civilization for popular consumption. Western culture is rife with images and linguistic artifacts from Celtic, Norse, Roman, and Greek mythology, but before D&D few people associated them all with each other. When I was a young kid in the early seventies, I puzzled over the Mobil gas-station logo. Why did a horse have wings? Between the Monster Manual and its sequels and the Deities and Demigods book, D&D appropriated and ranked just about every hero and creature that had ever popped up in a European myth or fairytale, creating a sort of memory palace for the bits of arcana scattered all around us.

Of course, bestiaries and mythic encyclopedias existed long before D&D, but the game assigned numeric attributes to creatures and magic items. The game set a standard for talking about goblins, kobolds, elves, and dragons. D&D made farflung monsters and magic cohere.

Getting the Jung of Things

Gygax’s project to normalize the discussion of monsters like dragons and orcs; adventuring classes; magic spells; and treasures mirrored an earlier project of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who had been Sigmund Freud’s main disciple until he began to question Freud’s ideas. Jung set out to make common abstractions from world myths. He hit on the idea of the collective—that is, universal—unconscious and the archetypes.

The archetypes are a slippery concept and can’t be approached with too-literal a mindset, because they are glimpsed by their contents, which are changeable. Just like a drinking glass can hold and give shape to various materials, like water, sand, or pebbles, the archetypes are filled with human experience. For example, Jung identified one archetype he called the Shadow, which contains aspects of one’s personality that are incompatible with society, either because they’re outright evil or just arbitrarily forbidden. Other archetypes include the anima, which is the feminine aspect of a man; the animus, which is the masculine aspect of a woman; and the Mana, or “Wise Old Man,” that represents the collective unconscious itself.

In Jungian psychology there is a ranking of dream symbols, from personal to universal, but interpreting the symbols isn’t as simple as looking up their stats in the psychoanalytic version of the Monster Manual. They depend on context. A horse by itself doesn’t mean much, but when that horse is in a house, it may represent the vitality of the body. (One nice thing about Jungian psych is that it recognizes a subject’s authority over his own experience. While Freud could always counter objections to his diagnoses by claiming that the patient’s unconscious had merely repressed the truth, Jung tended to defer to the patient. If the patient wasn’t satisfied that Jung’s dream interpretation was correct, then neither was he.)

A test of the antiquity and universality of a symbol for Jung was its emotional quality. If it struck a person with religious awe or dread, if it had what Jung called a “numinous” quality, it might lie close to the heart of the human condition. Underground labyrinths are a classic dream symbol representing the unconscious, with the deeper levels inhabited by the most primitive and hazardous psychic forces. It’s maybe not so curious that the dungeon goes so well with the dragon and its treasure. The idea of sprawling underground catacombs, with greater foes and greater treasures the deeper you go, is very much a Jungian motif.

Jungian analysis and D&D range the same territory. Ideally, if not always in practice, a character is a vehicle for exploring one’s hopes and fears. Parodies of D&D on shows like Community and the IT Crowd recognize its group-therapy aspect—for example, to get over feeling alienated and depressed or to come to grips with a romantic breakup. According to Jungian psych, some symbols are more universal and powerful than others. By placing them together in a game, Gygax made it possible for older symbols to give the Midas touch to arbitrary new monsters, treasures, locales, and character classes. Like Jungian psychoanalysis, the game is an exercise in relating oneself to universal myths.

Warbands of the Dining Room Table

While Jungian psych is more my thing than Jonathan’s, he and I both share an interest in evolutionary psychology, which takes the view that our ancestral hunter-gatherer environment and tribal dynamics had a big impact on how the human mind evolved. We’re not true believers, but we think interesting hypotheses have come out of it.

I asked Jonathan about group dynamics from an evo-psych view, and he brought up the idea of D&D group as warband.

Getting the Psych Right

One of our closest primate relatives is the chimpanzee, and it’s violent and xenophobic, apparently by nature. Male chimpanzees forage as individuals but organize into bands for hunting and warfare. When they find a strange male chimp in what they regard to be their territory, they’ll cooperate to hold him down and beat him to death. (“Why the animosity?” I asked. Jonathan shrugged, and said, “They’re neighbors.”)3

"Chimps spontaneously form bands of three to five males and maybe a female, and they venture into enemy territory,” said Jonathan. “There they kill males they find and take possession of females. If young men like forming into marauding squads of bad-asses, that predilection goes way back. There may also be a connection to hunting and scavenging. A million years ago, bands of us fought predators for their kills. Today, we like to pretend we're roaming around fighting monsters for their loot.”

The chimpanzee warband is a functional group, not a friendship group. Chimps have their intergroup rivalries, and they set them aside to form a band. Similarly, men join warbands, either spontaneous primitive ones in neighborhood gangs or formally trained and coordinated military units. The male warband may well be in our blood. Again, these are functional, not friendship, groups: the friends don’t form the band; the band forms the friends.

"In many tribal societies, adolescent men go through shared, painful rites of passage,” Jonathan added. “These ordeals bind them together, and the adolescents become a cohort of warriors who will fight side by side for the rest of their lives. Maybe the pain we shared by mapping every inch of the dungeon had some sort of bonding effect."

In nearly every case that Jonathan, Rob, and I could think of, a D&D group had at least one member who wouldn’t normally spend time with the others. Also, D&D games incorporated men of very different ages. A black college student played with Jonathan’s group of white middle-school kids, but he wasn’t a social outcast among his peers and certainly didn’t hang with the players outside the game. My groups brought together neighborhood kids I didn’t otherwise spend time with, and in high school I was briefly part of a group that incorporated nerds, stoners, and jocks alike who had little to do with each other outside the game.

In the ancestral environment, adolescent men would have been initiated into mixed-aged warbands to hunt animals or raid other tribes. It’s during that same age that boys first play D&D. The appeal of slaying monsters to take their treasure may correspond to chasing predators off their kill. In his book An Instinct for Dragons, anthropologist David E. Jones posits that dragons are an amalgam of the raptor, snake, and cat predators that threatened our ancestors. Jonathan thinks the idea is interesting, but doesn’t credit it much. Dragons might basically be snakes.

To say that the warband fits male psychology isn’t to say it commands a dedicated mental circuit. The warband may be a side effect of more generalized brain functions. In either case, I think Jonathan’s on to something. However, we brought this idea up to Richard Garfield, the American game designer who created Magic: The Gathering, and he wasn’t so sure.

“I think that’s a common property of games. It doesn’t apply only to D&D. You could say the same of bridge or chess clubs.”

While D&D is primarily a male activity, a lot of women play too. I asked my daughter about this. What about the idea that going into “dark and nasty places with a group in order to kill dark and nasty things,” as Jonathan puts it, is really a boy thing?

My daughter Alyx commented that she gets that, but thinks it’s a matter of degree. In babysitting young boys and girls, she sees boys’ tendency to be more aggressive and their need to channel it. On the other hand, she likes the same things about D&D that boys do, the idea of hunting monsters and gaining treasure. She especially likes the storytelling aspect and using the rules as a springboard to improvisation, having to keep on her toes when the dice produce an unexpected result. She also says that the fantasy allows her to work out her real-world anxieties by “giving them a different texturing.”

“Like my elf character is concerned about the environment; she fights those who ruin and corrupt nature,” Alyx said.

Compared to all our great-ape cousins except gibbons, humans have little sexual dimorphism, which indicates we have undergone similar selective pressures. A warband brain circuit or circuits may exist only in men, may include both men and women, or may, like physical strength, involve an overlapping but separate distribution. Alyx claims that one thing that attracts girls like her to D&D is that due to magic and special character-class powers, girls aren’t limited by strength or size. They do the same things boys do.

Who Is the Player and Who Is the Master?

About a month ago, I told Jonathan that I was interested in making a disciplined study of D&D. He pointed me to his acquaintance Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World, an exhaustive history of the early game and its influences. Meanwhile, former Wizards project manager Mike Davis pointed me to Characteristics of Games by former Wizards R&D staffers Richard Garfield, Robert Gutschera, and Skaff Elias. Peterson’s book demonstrates that both historical board and miniatures games and fantasy literature inspired D&D. The other book, Characteristics of Games, defines the mechanics of all games, including sports and computer games, and outlines the balance of luck, skill, and human factors among them. Both books are excellent, though Characteristics holds the most general interest.

Characteristics of Games collects and standardizes many terms used by expert designers. One of its key dichotomies is agential versus systemic elements. A game, as the book stresses, is much more than just its rules system. A game is an activity that takes place among players, and involves their quirks and larger goals. The rules are systemic; the human element is agential. (The book states, “One can think of ‘agential’ as a more euphonic version of ‘player-ential.’ ”) D&D is heavily agential. The group dynamics of the game within its systemic, or game-defined, roles are maybe its most important feature.

Playing at the World reveals that the role of Dungeon Master grew out the referee role in miniatures games. Due to the variability of the miniatures battlefields, often involving ad hoc three-dimensional terrain, disputes arise about how to apply rules, and a referee is called in to resolve them. A Dungeon Master began in this role. In the proto-D&D games conducted by Dave Arneson players assumed the roles of heroes on one side and monsters on the other and played against each other to win. The referee kept them honest. Eventually, Arneson conducted an odd experiment and assumed the role of both monsters and the referee at the same time, thus inventing the Dungeon Master.

The DM Breaks the Game

The Dungeon Master role is a powerful discovery. Once you set up a referee in the angsty position of representing a side and yet striving to be impartial, you have, by received wisdom, broken your game.4 But it’s really only a conflict of interest if the referee wants to win. The DM’s goal is not winning but to facilitate a story and show everyone a fun time.

When I played the DM as a kid, I had a naïve faith in the rules to create a story; I tried to submit to the dice as much as possible. Like an author friend of mine who consults the I Ching to tell his fortune, I half-convinced myself that the story produced by rolling dice and consulting tables had an objective reality. There’s a line by Gary Gygax that Wizards founder Ken McGlothlen likes to quote: “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.”

The no-winner side effect of the DM function is probably D&D’s most-touted feature, but who can take credit for it? From a remove, the DM idea looks pretty creative, but then so does, say, the design of a butterfly or fish. An animal, according to the theory of evolution, embodies a series of accidents that resulted in the appearance of conscious design. And that’s how things seemed to work with the Dungeon Master and other player roles in D&D, an activity more discovered than created.5

What principles of human social interaction did D&D discover, though? Is it surprising that anyone would want to lead a group in creating a story? Recall that D&D initially spread on paper as a rough concept and people had to be taught how to play. Both learning how to be a DM and fulfilling the role mirrored the ancient oral tradition. A DM is an entertainer and a transmitter of culture, epitomizing the storyteller and shaman, prestigious tribal roles that are probably as old as language itself. But what about the players? Do they fill tribal roles?

Specialists and Utility Players

As a young kid, I’d join the boys in the neighborhood in their game of army or Cowboys and Indians, which combined hide-and-seek with imaginary gunplay. Determining who got shot and therefore was out of the game could start fights, and was resolved more by intimidation and wheedling than logic, although it probably didn’t seem that way to the strongest and most popular kid. Through Cowboys and Indians, boys negotiate their place in the gang as leader, lieutenants, and spear carriers. This is taxing, especially to introverts. Wouldn't it be great if you could just slip into a comfortable role that your group would immediately acknowledge as valued? A good adventure needs a range of interesting specialties: a thief, a fighter, and a spellcaster like a priest or wizard. It doesn’t need a spear carrier, nor even a leader^6, the Dungeon Master not being technically part of the group. Everyone is highly valued, at least on a systemic level. Unlike the Cowboys and Indians game, you don’t get into arguments about what you accomplished because the dice resolve those uncertainties, and in addition to dedicated powers, each character type has its own dice bonuses, like the hiding bonus for thieves and combat bonus for a fighter.

I talked to Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield about this, and he said that he didn’t see the specialization as a unique feature of Dungeons & Dragons.

“I wouldn’t put D&D on a separate level from sports in this regard,” Richard said. “Anytime you have a team activity, you have a tendency to create specialized roles. I think you have a point in that D&D offers people who don’t participate in sports the opportunity to explore the sports dynamic.”

My zoologist friend Dr. Rob Furey observes that sports and D&D, beyond being games, are play activities, which many species engage in. Play activities allow animals to practice skills directly applicable to real life, and cooperation and specialization are important concerns of human beings.

Richard and I discussed the aspect of having your role handed to you and supported by the rules rather than your own ability. Richard pointed out that you do exercise skill.

“Not everyone’s equally suited to play all characters,” he said. “The guy who plays a cleric like a fighter, for instance, and is not making good use of his spells.”

Even given that a player’s character might not be a good personal fit, D&D allows players to assume a useful role with minimal negotiation. That’s a significant time and stress saver, and allows you to get on with the story. Also, after you’ve overcome initial self-consciousness, it allows you, ironically, to be more yourself, because your usual persona isn’t at stake (the Persona, or mask that you present to the world, happens to be one of the Jungian archetypes).

The Heuristics of Growing Up

From its universal symbols to the roles of characters and Dungeon Master, D&D presents a framework within which a meaningful and surprising story might grow. But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes you open the wardrobe and go into Narnia; sometimes you find the gate is closed. And just as with going to Narnia, D&D gets harder when you’re no longer a kid.

So why is this? Is it simply that you have to stop toying with the possibilities and take on a serious role in life, to contribute to society, to make money, to raise a family? D&D’s a childish pursuit with limited real strategy potential, and you outgrow it. Right?

Not necessarily. The fact you’ve stopped learning how to make it better doesn’t mean there isn’t more to learn.

D&D is a hugely ambitious project. It’s easy to parody, because it’s easy to see the level at which it becomes ridiculous, and not so easy to see its possibilities. Its core strength of being a no-winner game is also its greatest weakness in this regard. The reason that chess is widely known as a deep, intellectual game is that chess experts beat amateurs. A beginner has effectively no chance to beat an expert. You can’t argue with that. Most people think winning at chess is a matter of intelligence and being able to plan ahead. Intelligence is a factor, but the difference between a poor chess beginner and a solid player is that the solid player has climbed further up the “heuristics tree.”

A heuristic is a general strategy, or rule of thumb, for getting ahead in a game, like the opening moves in chess or the guidelines for hitting and standing in blackjack. They are not the rules; they guide you in how to exploit the rules. Characteristics of Games defines “climbing the heuristics tree” as “learning successively better and more sophisticated heuristics for a given game.”

The book distinguishes between positional and directional heuristics. Positional heuristics give you a sense of how you’re doing in the game. Directional heuristics guide you in making your move. In D&D, a positional heuristic in a fight might be your remaining hit points. A directional heuristic might be to run from the fight when your hit points are near the upper range of a monster’s damage potential. Those with no awareness of a game’s directional heuristics are out to sea; they’re playing a random game. Players perceive different heuristics at different skill levels. Those with only passing familiarity with D&D notice only its simplest mechanics, and don’t appreciate how much the players and DM can negotiate a higher level of play.

The Imprisoned Halfling's Dilemma

Discovering a game’s heuristics through play comprises a lot of a game’s fun. But you can define game strategies mathematically too. Game theory was invented in the forties by mathematician John von Neumann, who applied it initially to economics, and it observes that games have best-strategy positions for rational players, called equilibria. Consider the theoretical game of prisoner’s dilemma, a staple of game theory. Prisoner’s dilemma can be described in different ways, but here’s the setup from Characteristics of Games. Two people rob a bank together, hide the money, and are independently caught. The police are trying to get each to rat out the other. Each has the option of staying quiet or squealing. If both players stay quiet, they go free and split the money, a mutual win. If one betrays the other and isn’t betrayed himself, he goes free and keeps all the money while his partner gets jail for five years. If each betrays the other, they both go to jail for three years. This is what the tradeoff matrix looks like, where one unit of money is equal to the opportunity cost of a year in jail:

In the absence of any other factors, the best strategy is betrayal, because it’s the position from which it doesn’t benefit you to unilaterally change. Whether you assume the other guy will stay quiet or squeal, you stand to gain the most (against cooperation) or suffer the least (against betrayal) by betraying. This equilibrium, where neither player can improve his situation by changing sides unilaterally, was identified by mathematician John Nash, of A Beautiful Mind fame. To model a real-world scenario and possibly get a different equilibrium point, you need to broaden the picture, say by assuming communication over a series of games and introducing a small chance of spontaneous cooperation.

Prisoner’s dilemma shows mathematically that a rational solution to a strategic problem may not be the optimal solution. If the goal is to achieve the best outcome for both players, then cooperation beats betrayal. Adding up the values in each cell of the matrix, cooperation yields a 2. The other options yield no better than a –3.

A Proper Game Is Never Solved

If you’re just finding the most rational, or even optimal, strategy among a set of competing options, you’re not really playing a game but rather solving a puzzle. To make it a game, you need either an agential factor like political maneuvering or extra randomness, as supplied by dice, or both. What I’d call a “proper game” is never solved. When you’re a little kid, tic-tac-toe works as a proper game, but eventually, you solve it, and every game you play thereafter results in stalemate. Heuristics help you reliably exploit the equilibrium points in a game, but they don’t let you solve it. No human can solve chess, for instance. Heuristics just help you play at a higher level and survey the larger possibilities.

But if tic-tac-toe doesn’t qualify as a proper game when it’s solved, neither does Cowboys and Indians when no one can agree on the rules, which is most of the time. Again, we return to the role of the DM.

“You really do need a 'proper' two-sided [or more] game to have the game theory stuff or equilibrium strategy make much sense,” Skaff Elias noted to me in email. “The DM has way too much power to call him a side or player, and his 'strategy' would be to simply always win if he cared to.”

As I said before, if D&D is interpreted as DM-versus-players, it’s an unfair game. Game theory really doesn't apply. The same is true if the DM tries to take the players’ side. But unless the DM runs the adventure like a board game—like I attempted to do when I first tried it – he can’t be impartial either. Even if you wanted a DM to act like a computer, you’d have to program a rule to cover every situation, but that’s impossible. Therefore, either the DM improvises or he limits the scope of the game.

Actually, I think limiting D&D to board-game scope—as I did when I first played it—is a valid way to start out. Even if a DM is comfortable with storytelling, the group might not be. They may need to warm up with more structure. To approach D&D like a board game, a DM needs to break it down, to identify what Characteristics of Games calls the game’s atom, or basic unit of gameplay, which is just enough activity so that players “feel like they’ve really played some of the game,” like two possessions in football. A D&D atom is probably an encounter situation with a monster or trap and ends when the monster or trap is overcome. Next, he needs to identify the variables involved and not allow for much improvisation. Combat is a frequent type of conflict in the game because it’s the easiest to quantify, and most of the D&D rules concern its variables, namely armor classes, hit points, and various standard bonuses that accrue to strength and dexterity.

Improvising and the Old Reliables

Reliable encounter and combat heuristics have evolved for D&D. If you’ve got the advantage of surprise, you want to set up an ambush rather than reveal yourself. You want to use missiles if you can instead of charging in. You want to position the thief to creep in for a sneak attack. You want healers in position to heal. You want to target enemy spellcasters with a silence spell, which drastically reduces the spells they can cast back at you. You may want to spread oil on the ground that you can light to cover a retreat or injure and expose your foes.8

Beginners have fun learning these proven cooperative strategies, or solving explicit puzzles, like a sphinx’s riddle or a murder mystery from prepared clues. But at this level, D&D grows stale, and if this were all the game had to offer, it wouldn’t be as popular.

When I was in middle school playing basic-set D&D, I had a naïve belief that the advanced rules, which covered the higher character levels, would show me how to climb the game’s heuristics tree (and maybe give me the key to storytelling itself). The basic rules teased you with narrative possibilities, but the ones they actually described were limited: hitting an opponent, searching for secret doors, checking for traps, picking pockets, making saving throws, choosing spells. They listed only a few magic items and other treasures, weapon and armor types, spells, and character classes. All the most popular commercial modules needed the advanced rules, which covered the higher-level characters and monsters; and the scenarios they described seemed rich with new possibilities. Surely Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would offer more “proper-game” strategies.

But it really didn’t. Aside from a few actual game rules, like to determine when monsters would cut and run, it mostly just gave you more monsters, weapons, armor, magic, and character types. These were important to D&D’s function as classical education and to offering the community more things to talk about, but they didn’t represent an advance in gameplay potential. The new variables, like getting worms from bad inn food, didn’t really improve on just making stuff up, and proved the futility of trying to circumscribe the possibilities. In an honest if not too business-savvy move, Wizards dropped the pretense of an “advanced” set when they took over D&D.

To play D&D at a truly advanced level, that is, to tell a unique story, requires improvisation. The dungeon setting, with its constrained environment, and the rules written to it are scaffolding to get things started. D&D improves on Cowboys and Indians by setting a structure for players and the DM to create and abide by their own rules. When the players have a naïve faith that rules exist for all contingencies, they’re more likely to accept the DM’s pronouncements, which seems to me one good reason that the Dungeon Master’s Guide includes most of the game rules, and in theory if not practice, these aren’t known to the players. It’s also a reason for the DM’s screen—which hides not only dice rolls, but also the times the DM interprets them without consulting any rules.

The Stages of the Quest

In moving beyond the board game, the expert DM places encounters in a meaningful context and helps players set both wider proximate goals and ultimate goals. For instance, with the ultimate goal of defeating a powerful dragon, a party’s first larger goal might be to earn enough money and experience to leave the safety of a town—as in the old computer game Darklands, which I think is a good example of a computer game that can offer inspiration for D&D adventures.

Since the computer fills the role of Dungeon Master in Darklands, a given strategy might yield a dependable result, and therefore be a true heuristic. One heuristic in Darklands was to get ambushed by thieves and steal from them, sell their goods by day, and then purchase increasingly better armor and weapons. You needed to keep money on hand in case you ran into the watch. If you didn’t bribe them, they’d strip you of all your possessions; if you fought them, you might bring the whole town guard on you. So: hunt thieves, retreat to the inn, sell the loot, bribe the guards, repeat.

Here’s an example of a D&D adventure mirroring the Darklands starter heuristic:

1. The party goes into the wilderness and is outmatched in a fight with wandering monsters. The DM gives them the chance to make a tactical retreat. They are chased to town.

2. They stumble through the gates and are approached by a solicitous stranger who tells them to meet him at the docks to get healing.

3. Attentive to hints, the party instead pays money they can barely afford and gets healing elsewhere, another kind of tactical retreat. They are so broke they cannot even stay in the inn.

4. They make the rendezvous prepared. They meet and overcome an ambush, gaining experience and loot. Hah, an advance. They go to the inn and nurse their wounds, secure from thieves.

5. At the inn, the party learns that the thieves they killed are part of a larger network, and they decide to clean it up (for altruistic reasons, of course).

6. After a few interesting tactical battles, the DM introduces the crooked town guards, who confront the party on its way back to the inn and demand a bribe for breaking curfew. They’re outmatched, so they pay, which is another kind of tactical retreat. (If they choose otherwise, they may learn a hard lesson.)

7. The party fights thieves and small monsters and gets enough experience, magic, and equipment to challenge the crooked watch.

8. After defeating the watch, the party heads into the countryside and defeats the monsters that first defeated them.

Out of the Chaos, Magic Strikes

In a computer game, this progression would be scripted and almost inevitable, but the possibilities at each point are much more varied in D&D, or at least they should be. The general heuristic to be found would therefore be more general, say to identify safe zones, retreat from larger foes, and save enough money for bribes. At each of these points, the adventure could take a very different path from the one I described. It’s up to the DM to recognize the dramatic possibilities unfolding. A so-called sandbox adventure, as opposed to a canned-story adventure, would place the monsters in the wilderness, describe the town watch as crooked, and define a network of thieves; the possibilities from there are limitless, and the party would need to set their own goals.9

Wizards of the Coast founder Ken McGlothlen sums up the situation:

“Player characters will make unexpected choices; a good gamemaster will find that non-player characters [that is, those run by the DM] will make unexpected choices as well, just as [novel and short story] authors will occasionally find their characters doing something different than what those authors had intended. The gamemaster must plan ahead for contingencies, but accept that some contingencies will never happen, and unexpected ones will. But in a good campaign, the players will never, ever feel railroaded.”

A DM learns storytelling outside of the game, in playing computer games; in reading widely; in dreaming up his own adventures, or pondering how to merge third-party ones into his campaign. When he brings his group together to create a story, there’s a fair chance the whole exercise will devolve into chaos, that no magic will happen at all.

But sometimes it does.

Notes:

1. In the first draft of this article, I wrote that Rob Heinsoo had purchased the white-box set of original D&D. Nooo, he had the original original brown woodgrain-patterned set. I am duly chastened. I didn’t even know that there was an edition before the white-box set.

2. Ken McGlothlen: “Believe it or not, not true of Peter, myself, and a few others in the Walla Walla crowd. We were playing B1 [the first basic-set module, “Descent into the Unknown”] before we read Tolkien. (For me, it was a close call; I think I picked up The Hobbit a few weeks afterward.)”

3. Rob Furey noted that animals do not normally cross territories to kill neighbors, and this applies to chimps. It is in their fitness interest to respect territorial boundaries, and this warfare involves chimps encountering strangers, not neighbors (but that’s what Jonathan initially said, and he was making a joke with the latter comment). In her book In the Shadow of Man Jane Goodall observed that chimp gang murder is a rare occurrence. Chimps more frequently team up to hunt prey, which include other large primates, like colobus monkeys.

4. I ran this idea by Richard Garfield, but he disagreed that having a player adjudicate the rules meant that a game couldn’t be about winning. He pointed out that there are miniatures games where the player who knows the rules best interprets them for the others and strives to be impartial. Of course, the DM has rules the player doesn’t, has to make up new ones on the fly, and keeps the statistics of the monsters he represents secret from the players, so if the idea doesn’t hold generally, I think it does for D&D.

5. Evolution’s happy accidents occur within the framework of natural laws. The question of whether nature has any teleology, that is, “far logic” directed by a divine will, is a philosophical, not scientific, one. Tolkien, who, as I’ve said, provided the obsessive-fantasist template for the Dungeon Master, very much believed in divine teleology. He was a Catholic who considered himself a “demi-creator” exercising a divine faculty (or “a talent on loan from God” to quote Rush Limbaugh’s self-assessment). Tolkien found his own path to God through his work as well as his religion. The idea of Dungeon Mastering or D&D being a Satanic activity, as fundamentalist Christian preachers claimed during the eighties, probably would have struck him as odd. On the other hand, being a bit of a coot who said college students dressing up as his characters “were drunk on art,” he might also have dismissed D&D as silly. Tolkien died the year before D&D was released.

6. In the first versions of D&D there was the concept of a player leader who would report group decisions to the Dungeon Master, a role known as the caller, but Jonathan identified it as an unnecessary misstep.

7. I asked Skaff Elias, one of the authors of Characteristics of Games, how heuristics relate to game equilibria, and he said, “I don't actually think heuristics need to exploit purely rational strategies. For example a heuristic one might employ is that you know you feel uncomfortable roleplaying a murdering, thieving, bastard, so you pick a good character, or even a paladin.

“You may know that you are really good at talking around the table, so a heuristic might be to put stat puts in Charisma, pick a Charisma race [like elf], or a Charisma-based class [like a paladin or bard] so that your natural talents and inclinations and enjoyment match the stats. There isn't any mechanical benefit, so it's not 'rational' (and may even be the reverse) but your heuristic for personal and table enjoyment is one of 'irrational' benefit to you.”

8. In his online editorial for Dragon Magazine “Achieving Equilibrium” Steve Winter, addressing game theory, briefly describes various strategies for party-cooperation:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.aspx?x=dnd/dred/2010November

9. Confounded by maps and combat tables and willful players, it’s very easy to lose sight of the primary storytelling goal. I’ve already explained how when TSR policed the D&D brand it ended that “charismatic moment,” as Rob Heinsoo put it. As part of their effort to bring D&D to a mass audience, it seems they hedged their bets against hit-or-miss storytelling with modules that had a foregone conclusion.

A month ago, I stumbled upon Loren Rosson’s Busybody blog and its articles “Classic D&D Modules Ranked” and “Looking Back on Dungeons and Dragons”; both identify a shift in the mid-eighties from sandbox to story-path design, and a corresponding progression from D&D’s Golden Age to a Bronze Age. The publication of adventures that encouraged DMs to behave like computers was a hallmark of D&D’s decline.

Classic D&D Modules Ranked: http://lorenrosson.blogspot.com/2013/02/classic-d-modules-ranked.html.

Looking Back on Dungeons and Dragons: http://lorenrosson.blogspot.com/2011/09/looking-back-on-dungeons-and-dragons.html.

Loren’s articles owe a debt to other articles at Grognardia, which he links to.

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Thanks to Jonathan Tweet, Rob Heinsoo, Ken McGlothlen, Mike Davis, Mons Johnson, Skaff Elias, Rob Furey, and Richard Garfield for their discussions that informed this article. Thanks to Jim Lin for hosting the Super Bowl party where many of these conversations took place.

Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, and Wizards of the Coast are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

Training for War, Part V

by Tom Kratman

Training individuals and the chain of command.

The Army’s record, I know, and the Marines, I’ve been told, is not all that good here. We waste a lot of time. We misdirect a lot of time. Worst of all, we centralize in such a way as to remove from non-coms, especially squad leaders, their historic responsibility to train their own troops. A side effect of that institutionally directed irresponsibility is that the squad leaders are often a lot weaker than they ought to be.

Vignette Ten: Knowledge is power.

Camp Swampy, 1986.

When Hamilton was a young puppy of a lieutenant, his company commander made him promise that, when he took command of a company, he wouldn't change a blessed thing for at least six weeks. Instead, he solemnly promised, he’d do a lot of LBWO, asking questions, and then analyze.

He did that for the first six weeks of his first command. In the process, he saw all kinds of interesting and eye-opening things: People sleeping in the barracks on duty time, squad leaders who really didn't have the first idea that they were responsible for their troops, in toto, squad leader time consisting of people playing ping pong in the dayroom. And this was in one of the better companies of that battalion, Hamilton’s predecessor having been a first class officer, in general (though he never made general).

Hamilton didn't really blame the squad leaders or platoon sergeants. And his platoon leaders were all brand new. The officer corps had castrated the NCO corps decades prior. They were so used to being told what to do, all the time, to having their time managed by higher, that the idea that they were responsible was just alien to many, maybe even most, of them.

So Hamilton called everybody from squad leader on up into his office and gave a little speech, more or less to this effect:

"Boys, I've been in the Army about nine and a half years by now. I think probably every year, sometimes twice, some company commander or other would announce, 'People, I'm sick of this fucking off in the barracks. We're gonna account for every man, every minute. We're gonna tighten up the training schedule...We're not gonna let a minute go to waste...”

“Yeah...no. That usually worked for about ten days until the next crisis came upon us and some new priority popped up; then we went right back to what we'd been doing.

"We're going to try something different. Rather, we're going to try a few things different.

"Item one: Look at your new training schedule. Note where it says 'sergeants' time'? Right; it doesn’t; it's gone. All time that I don't specifically take is sergeants' time. Now flip it over.

"Item two: Remember where it used to say 'opportunity training'? Note that now it says 'mandatory opportunity training.' That means you are going to do it; trust me on this. I'm testing Friday afternoons. If your guys fail, we'll retest Friday night until Saturday morning, if that's what it takes. Yeah, it's micro-managing. For the moment.

"Item three: Where's the time coming from for this? Go back to what I said in item one; I'm not putting anything on the schedule that isn't _my_ major event. So you now have a lot of time.”

The first week they didn't believe him. He had the first sergeant select two men from each squad, randomly, and used his platoon leaders and platoon sergeants to test. The men failed. So the dirty bastard kept the whole company there retesting until about 23:30. Next week, two of the squad leaders believed. Their people passed. The rest stayed until about 22:30. The next week it was four, until maybe 21:00.

It took six weeks but, by that time, they all believed.

Hamilton kept it up for another six weeks after that. Allegedly, one – at least one; might have been more – of his squad leaders had troops coming up to him and saying, in one case literally, "Forsooth, Sergeant, I am in desperate need of getting laid. Sadly, if we don't pass the muthafuckin' CO's test Friday, it won't happen again this week, either. So please, PLEASE teach me this shit.”

After that twelve weeks was over there was another little prayer meeting in Hamilton’s office. The gist of that was, "Okay, now you know you can do this; you can train your own troops without being told where and when to do it. The next step is that now you're going to decide what your squad needs. Right. Now give me five Soldiers Manual tasks, three if they're exceptionally hard. Yeah, that's each of you. Yeah, I'm still going to test Friday night."

That program, in conjunction with some other things, worked pretty damned well. By well I mean that when the annual hands on Skill Qualification Test^1 rolled around, the rest of the battalion shut down for two or three weeks to prep. Hamilton’s crew didn’t. Instead, they went to the field, did a best squad competition, some deliberate attacks, couple-three live fires, some patrolling, some anti-armor ambushing...and basically had a good time. They came in from the field rather late the night before it was their turn to take the SQT (which in that battalion was done much like an EIB test, _very_ anal). Hamilton told the boys, "Oil your rifles, knock the mud off your boots, get a good night's sleep. See you out here in the morning.”

Seven people in that company didn't max the test. That was something over two thirds of all the maxes in the battalion, which is pretty good considering he had less than ten percent of the battalion. The top nine squads were Hamilton’s, ten counting company HQ. The top three platoons were his, and nobody else was even close. All his squad leaders acquired a pretty vast level of prestige with their own troops and within the battalion, overall.

After that, he still collected their tasks, but just spot checked occasionally. The sergeants were doing it, all individual training, entirely on their own hook. And from there he could put in a date and time for a given inspection or any other event related to his squads and be quite confident it would get done, efficiently and well.

(Oh, the next year, where he paid zero attention to the upcoming SQT, only four of the men didn't max it.)

Vignette Eleven: Be innovative if you want your troops to learn innovativeness. Be determined if you want to develop determination in the men.

Hamilton thought the boys were ready for a plus up – a toughening up – in the condition for Mission Essential Task: Conduct Deliberate Attack. What he had in mind to do was a night assault river crossing with his own company and two smallish platoons attached from a different company (E, aka AT), where the large platoon from Echo Company would play the Opposing Force. The site chosen was the old site for M113 water operations. It had a couple of advantages over other places, notably having slow moving water, a causeway through the middle, and a complete lack of alligators, which is always nice. Crossing the causeway – deemed to be a bridge for the exercise – would be one of those not real bright moves. Besides, the optimum way to take a bridge is both sides simultaneously.

Hamilton requested a dozen RB-15s, 15 man rubber boats, which could hold one hundred and eighty men, which was about right. The Engineers promised him seven, which could hold one hundred and five. Then they changed this – rather late in the game – to seven RB-7s, seven man rubber boats, which could hold forty-nine. What showed up on his figurative doorstep was four RB-3, one of which leaked, which could hold nine…to get about one hundred and eighty men across the stream…under fire.

So Hamilton finds himself standing there, glaring at these freaking four (minus one; don’t forget that leak) miserable RB-3s. He wonders if the battalion commander who declared the nonsense FASCAM is behind the shortfall, but, No, Tuffy’s not that bright.

He has a tactical plan: The two attached platoons are going to be a) a diversion, then the force to grab the near side of the “bridge.” Thus, he doesn’t absolutely have to get them across by boat. The machine guns, too, can cross over later. They’ll support by fire initially, so that's another dozen or so men that didn’t have to cross right away.

But I've still got about a ninety of my own men and I can, in theory, only get nine of them across, at which point the boats are on the other side and they can't be rowed back.

Asks Hamilton’s supply sergeant: “What the fuck we gonna do, sir?”

Hamilton looks at the boats. Looks at the far side of the stream. Looks back at the boats. And then he has one of those epiphanies, rare in anyone but perhaps rarest of all in himself:

“Get me,” he tells supply, “a roll of 550 cord or, failing that, that twine that comes on the conical spool."

"Huh?"

"Just do it."

Then he goes to explain how they’re going to do this to the men.

******

What they end up doing is grossly overloading the RB-3s with five men each, no packs. To the stern of each boat they tie off a length of twine. And for each boat there is a three man team to haul it back from the far bank in a hurry and force feed the next load on. The two diversionary platoons are AT, hence somewhat less than ept as dismounts. This is good; Hamilton doesn’t want ept; he wants want noisy. They’re bait and good bait’s supposed to wriggle.

So the AT platoons, acting as riflemen, make a horrific racket by the “bridge” east of the crossing point. All the OPFOR pick up and move to cover the bridge, apparently on the theory Hamilton might just be stupid enough to try one of those Charge of the Light Brigade rushes.

While they’re doing that, the rest of the troops sneak up to the river / canal (it was actually more like a canal, though, technically, it was a river), bearing the boats, already prepped with twine. The machine guns go to the right of the crossing point, about forty-five degrees from the far side of the bridge.

The boats are loaded, the guns in position, and the MGs well sited to support. In they go. The machine guns kick off with pretty impressive support, actually. OPFOR are pinned in the wrong place. Row-row-row your pissant RB3. Dismount. Secure the far side. Start hauling the boats back. “Hey, Schmidlap; where’s the twine?” “I dunno; I thought Weaver had it.” “Hell, no, you were supposed to make sure…”

Yep: All three boat teams lost the twine. Damn!

Into the water go the load teams splashing around looking for the twine. They find it. The boats get hauled back and the next fifteen men board the grossly overloaded RB3s. Row-row-row…

Dismount. Splash. Loose footing. Glub, glub, glub.

“Haul the boats back.”

Somehow, two of the load teams manage to lose the twine again. Into the water….splash-splash… “I’ve got it…here it is.”

Haul the boats back. Force feed the load…row-row-row…this time they don’t lose the twine.

On the far side, it’s just a wonderful cluster. Some of the OPFOR (on their left) realize what’s going on and try to shift. Others, further away, are still fixated on the two AT platoons. And, losing the frigging twine or not, Hamilton and crew are still building up combat power a lot faster than they can shift around.

And then there are seventy or so men on the far side, sweeping the entire bank, left to right.

Contemplate that in relation to two young privates from a shattered platoon accomplishing a mission that should have taken a platoon.

Combatives

Outside of in Ranger School, the Army’s usually not overly enthused about training combatives, close, hand to hand, combat. There are a lot of good reasons for that. One, troops get injured in the normal course of the thing, simply from hitting and throwing each other. Either that, or the thing ends up being slow motion nonsense, or pull your punches bad training. Then, too, actually fighting like that is, like a bayonet fight, among the least likely things to happen in battle. Thirdly, we don’t really have a good, practical, teachable system of combatives. Indeed no system could be very good for the highly limited time we can spend at it.

Still, there are some benefits to spending a few morning physical training sessions pounding on each other, notably character development through physical pain. That said, I recommend the following:

1. Do so many pushups first and during that the soldiers’ muscles are exhausted. This way, they can strike with all the force and speed they can muster, but that force will be very light and the speed slow.

2. Do no pushups if you’re practicing throws and falls. You want them to be able to roll with the throw and you want your throwers able to let them down in fairly controlled fashion.

3. Borrow some foam neck braces from the medicos for strangulation and garroting practice. Watch carefully because they might hurt each other anyway.

4. Remember that even sheathed bayonets and pugil sticks can damage people. Watch these things most carefully.

Counseling

A good maxim to follow here is that nobody’s OER or NCOER should ever come as a surprise. Another good maxim is that nobody’s going to get any better unless he knows where he’s deficient.

Because of these, I strongly recommend using the very same forms for regular, routine performance counseling as are used for the current OER and NCOER. I further recommend turning all those graded areas into tasks, with conditions and standards. Lastly, I recommend being honest, in real English, as opposed to honest in the parody of English normally used in evaluations. You know, the parody whereby “somewhere a village is missing its idiot” turns into “this sergeant / lieutenant / captain is the greatest thing since canned beer.” If you’re going to be honest with performance counseling, be sure you explain to your subordinates that those honest comments and numbers, if numbers ever make a return, will be translated into parody English and be suitably inflated for actual evaluation for record purposes. They won’t believe you at first but you have to try.

I used to have a couple of pretty good sets of tasks, conditions and standards for these, as part of a pretty good SOP. The rating systems have changed too much for those to be useful to you. Still, to give one example, suppose there’s a block for physical fitness, as there always is. The task for counseling purposes might be called something like, “Attain and/or Maintain Physical Fitness.” The conditions may read, “As an officer or non-commissioned officer, in an MTO&E infantry unit, with not less than X days a month off, and not less than Y days a month not in the field and hence available for physical fitness training.” Standards might read, “Pass the APFT^2, fall out of no runs or road marches without a doctor’s letter affirmation of illness or injury consistent with inability to complete same.” The counseling SOP might then say that failure to meet the bare minimum standard will result in a less than top score in that area, with a negative comment, while meeting the bare minimum will result in a normal, maximum score in the area (recognizing that said maximum is the result of score and language inflation), while achieving a score in the APFT of between the minimum to pass and the maximum possible might get a favorable comment, space permitting, in the evaluation report and maxing it would get a favorable comment in the evaluation report.

And surely, since I’ve spent some time here talking about integrity, someone is going to observe, “But isn’t using bogus verbiage and ridiculously inflated numbers an ethical violation?”

It’s a good question, but it’s not exactly the right question or, rather, questions. The right questions are, “Beyond destroying my subordinates by using standard English and standard numbers in my evaluations, when no one else does, or won’t for long, and no one believes at face value those numbers and comments, anyway, what good am I doing?” and “When language and numbers are grossly inflated for a particular purpose, and everyone knows they are, isn’t the real lie in using standard language and numbers, which everyone reads against that inflated system?” My answers to those questions are, “none,” and, “yes.”

I suppose I’ve seen a dozen or more different OER and NCOER systems, over the years. In every case that I’ve seen, the systems started with, “This time it’s going to be different. This time we’re going to be honest.” It never is and stupid officers who believe the Pravda, and enforce the lie (see above, yes, in this case honesty in one sense is a lie in another) invariably cause vast damage to juniors whose only crime was being assigned to units commanded by morons. When this happens again, and it will again, zip your mansuit all the way up to the neck and say, “No, we’re not going to play this. I will not wreck my subordinates so my boss can make a purely spurious comment on his OER support form.”

Vignette Twelve: No, hitting a moving target is very difficult indeed.

Hamilton – and this is a very different manifestation of the eternal Hamilton than usual – found himself as a, no lie, no joke, horse-mounted dragoon in Grey’s Scouts, Rhodesia, in the mid-seventies. This particular version of Hamilton had been a United States Marine, once, and thought he could shoot. His Rhodesian colour corporal thought rather differently.

The corporal lined his squad up along a slope, the line running downhill. Then the corporal produced a large truck tire, in the center of which he’d mounted a target. “Lock and load,” ordered the corporal. “Now see if you can hit this,” said he, starting the tire rolling downhill. Every man basically emptied a magazine at the target and not one hit it, not with even a single bullet, on that first attempt.

Think about how simple that is to do. How it doesn’t require electronic devices, radio bandwidth, computers, fragile controllers, or much in the way of time or other resources. And consider, too, that the technique will be available anyplace you can find a tire, a cardboard or paper target, and a slope. Oh, and a little instruction on lead and in flight ballistics would probably be useful, as well.

As mentioned elsewhere in this article, though, marksmanship is one of those things that needs mostly to be conditioned. This is also true for hitting a moving target. Contemplate, however, MILES, the laser training engagement system mentioned previously. It has no ballistic properties. Time of flight is much faster than for a bullet, indeed it is essentially instantaneous.

I would suggest that using MILES is training people, conditioning them, to be bad shots, and that the more they use MILES the worse shots they are being conditioned to be.

Cause and Commitment

It’s a truism that men don’t fight for causes, they fight for their comrades. It’s a half-truth, though, and like other half-truths, wholly misleading.

Why? Because the cost of fighting is pain, pain from the loss of those same comrades. In the absence of a reason to put up with that, the sensible group of soldiers, neither wanting to die nor wanting to lose friends, simply deserts, or carries out their missions in the most lackadaisical and safest manner possible. In short, without a cause they can believe in, eventually the day comes when the soldiers won’t fight at all.

Go look up, “combat refusal Vietnam.” And then, since it can actually get worse than mere mutiny, look up, “Fragging.”

That doesn’t mean the cause needs to be drummed into them with the most heavy-handed propaganda Hollywood and Madison Avenue can come up with. Frankly, as with EO nag sessions, gender sensitivity training, and any of the other, similar wastes of time, the troops just tune it out, as they tune out all the politically correct propaganda regularly inflicted on them by the EO fascisti. They don’t usually care all that much about who invaded who, or the pristine excellence of the current president, nor parties, nor spreading democracy around the world, nor preserving feudalism in Kuwait. It’s sufficient for them to know they’re fighting for secure energy supplies, so we don’t fall into an industrial dark age and so our people do not starve. It’s not bad for them to know – indeed, it can overcome all kinds of gray areas in a nation’s past conduct – that we’re fighting for survival. Revenge is good, too.

Vignette Thirteen: We become brave by doing brave acts. – Aristotle, Nichmoachean Ethics

Aristotle looked at this as a matter of habit. There is surely some truth to that, but I would suggest a good part of it is process, too. From Carnifex:

Escuela de Montañeros Bernardo O’Higgins, Boquerón, Balboa, 8/3/467 AC

Jesus, this shit terrifies me.

Ricardo Cruz had his left hand jammed into the crevice of an otherwise nearly sheer rock wall. The hand was formed into a fist, effectively locking him to that wall. His other hand searched for further purchase higher up while his booted feet rested precariously on a couple of finger-widths of ledge. A rope was coiled around his torso.

Cruz’s job was to get the bloody rope up the cliff, attach a snaplink to whatever could be found, and create a belay system so that the rest of the men could follow safely. On the way up Cruz mentally recited the very unofficial and much frowned upon version of the Cazador Creed.

Considering how fucking stupid I am . . .

Aha! There was a little outcropping of rock. He grabbed tight hold of it and began working his left leg to another little spit of a ledge.

Appreciating the fact that nobody lives forever . . .

The ledge and the outcropping held. Heart pounding, Cruz unballed his left fist, removed it from the crevice and began feeling up and along the wall for another place to anchor his hand before he risked moving his lower foot.

Zealously will I . . .

Cruz’s foot slipped.

*****

…try to fuck every female I can talk into a horizontal . . . FUCK!

Cruz felt his lower foot slip vertically. That put excess demands on the other one, which likewise lost its hold on the rock ledge. His left hand hadn’t quite found purchase. In much less time than it takes to tell about it he found himself hanging by the fingertips of one hand, and not even all of those.

His body slammed the cliff face, almost causing him to lose his death grip on the outcropping. Moreover, while his helmet protected the bulk of his head, in slipping he had managed to scrape the left side of his jaw along the rough rock wall. He felt hot blood drip down his neck.

His first instinct was, frankly, akin to panic. It lasted milliseconds before training and experience took over.

I’ve been scared witless before and overcome it.

I can again.

*****

The first thing Cruz’s questing fingers found was a tiny little spur of rock. It would never do to support his entire weight but, gripped by two fingers and a thumb, it was just enough to take some weight off of the overstrained fingers of the other hand. His heart began to slow, if only slightly.

Okay . . . so I have at least two or three more minutes of life. My fingers will hold that long. A lot can be done in two or three minutes.

Next, his foot found the previous ledge it had occupied. He was unwilling to take quite the same perch he had had previously. He spent some of his one hundred and twenty to one hundred and eighty seconds feeling around for the best position he could find. When he found it he tested it, spending a few more precious seconds. He then allowed his foot and leg to take some weight from his whitened, tired fingers. At last, breathing a little more easily, Cruz found a spot for his other foot and began to rest his fingers in turn.

*****

Yeah, it’s a true story.

Officer and NCO Professional Development

We pay a lot of lip service to this. Actual execution? Not so much.

In my not so very humble opinion, Professional Development, properly, is training of leaders in one of three areas: To take over higher levels of responsibility, to perform in MOSs not their own or work more closely with MOSs other than their own, to learn more esoteric areas that are within the leader’s MOS, but not normally well trained either in the school system or in the Army at large. I would say, thus, that a class in how to conduct a 100% inventory for a change of command is proper for lieutenants, since most of them will be taking over companies and thus have command responsibility for property at some point. Road marching an entire company would be, for a platoon leader, similarly useful. Planning air support or artillery support, which is normally done at higher levels would be the same. Military history is a clear subject for professional development, for every level and rank. Cultural studies could be legitimate subjects, and almost certainly are for areas where we are going to fight where the culture is, in some sense, itself the enemy. Training management fits, especially since the demise of BTMS^3.

What’s not OPD or NCODP, though it is often presented as such, are subjects that are better put out in meetings, or in specific classes, that do not accomplish those three things mentioned above. The latest nonsense on gender orientation sensitivity from the EO fascisti is not really professional development. Nuances of the latest scheme for evaluation reports likewise doesn’t fit.

Music and Song: “The song for the soldier is a war song,” it is not, “I don’t like spiders and snakes.”

The great thing about war songs is that it’s conditioning below the conscious level. You see, soldiers will often resist conditioning, if they know that you’re trying to condition them. But singing? That’s so innocent, even as we “Rally round the flag, boys,” that we’ll gladly go, “Over there,” to be “Dog-faced soldiers”…

Even the act of singing – quite without any martial theme – has training value: “We’re here and we’re together.”

That said, lotsa luck, actually. Though there is vast training value is having the troops sing together, actually getting American soldiers to sing, other than cadence songs, which don’t usually work the same way or for the same reason or to the same ends, is about impossible.

I recall an article I read once in the old Infantry Journal (the predecessor, along with the Field Artillery Journal, of AUSA’s Army Magazine, not of Infantry Magazine), written during WW II by a US Army infantry private who had been a German Army infantry private in the Great War, lamenting our unwillingness to sing. According to the article, in the old German Army singing was a training event and they had singing lessons and practice at company level. Maybe that would work, but one doubts we’ll ever find the time and determination to do it.

Which is a shame, really, because, once you paid the price in time and effort, you could continue to draw dividends on your investment more or less forever.

Crime and Punishment (at the company and battalion levels, and below)

We don’t really punish, via non-judicial punishment, to deter; anyone who can be deterred from breaking the rules in a serious way by the fairly trivial punishments company and field grade officers can impose is probably too deficient in character ever to make much of a soldier. Instead, starting with the premise that most of the men want to do the right thing, if only to think well of themselves, we punish to prevent demoralization of those righteous soldiers, which demoralization will result from failure to punish the wicked.

Most official punishment will be non-judicial and related to minor infractions. If you’re having to court-martial someone, presuming he’s found guilty, he will cease to be a problem for you, for the most part.

Here are a few rules, taken from a long ago OPD session with my lieutenants and used – in a somewhat exaggerated version – in my novel, H Hour:

Rule One: Non-judicial punishment should be very rare, indeed. Most problems can and should be handled well before it gets to you. If you find you’re having regular NJP sessions, there is something wrong with your command.

Rule Two: Take the time to plan the event. That means write out the script and rehearse it, if only in your mind. If you’re a decent human being; it’s hard to be a harsh bastard. Rehearsal helps.

Rule Three: Use it as an opportunity to build your chain of command. Get input in front of the culprit from the squad leader, platoon sergeant, and platoon leader. Ask the question: ‘Is this soldier salvageable?’

Rule Four: Always max out the guilty bastard, but then suspend any punishment you think is excessive, or likely to do more harm than good. Taking money or rank or both from a married man hurts his family, something you ought not want to do, if it’s at all avoidable, because it is likely to ruin someone salvageable, to say nothing of harming the innocent. Restricting him to the barracks hurts him, in fact, gives him a serious – possibly terminal – case of lackanookie. Tie that in to the recommendations from his chain of command. Remember, too; suspended punishment reduces the probability of appeal, which helps uphold your authority.

Finally, Rule Five – and I cannot emphasize this enough: Always, always, always add to the punishment, ‘and an oral reprimand.’ Once you invoke those words, you can give an ass chewing so abusive that it might get you court-martialed in other circumstances. There is perhaps no practical limit in what you can say and how you can say it, because you will have invoked the magic words. To the best of my knowledge and belief, there is no legal limit. (Oh, go ahead; check with JAG. I’m getting on in years, after all, and things change.) This also tends to partially cover up your excessively kind and generous nature in suspending a goodly portion of the more material punishment. That said, sometimes you will want to do the oral reprimand first. And, in any case, remember that a commander is always on stage.

But, again, this sort of thing ought to be rare. How do we keep it rare? How do we keep it rare in an army springing from a litigious, rights obsessed, Mammy Yokumesque (“Good is better than evil because it’s nicer!”) society? A bureaucratic society? A society that insists on consolidating power up, rather than distributing it down?

There was a time when most disciplinary problems were handled by sergeants with anything from pushups to extra duty to a minor beating. We can, I think, do without the beatings, but is it really wise not to trust the men and women we trust to lead our soldiers in war with the power to discipline those soldiers?

My approach – I commend it to you – was to tell the troops, “When your sergeant tells you to drop for pushups, or gives you a spot of extra duty, take it as a compliment, that he sees some worth in you. He doesn’t have to be that lenient. He can bring you to me for much worse punishment. If you don’t want to do the pushups, don’t. If you don’t want the extra duty, fine, no one will make you. At least until the non-judicial punishment is imposed.”

Of course, if you’re going to do that, it’s best to explain to the sergeants not to, and how not to, abuse it.

Notes:

1 The Army doesn’t actually do this anymore, which is maybe just as well.

2 Army Physical Fitness Test. The Marines have their own, as do the other services.

3 Equal Opportunity, the bureaucratic successor in interest to the race relations bureaucrac

4 Battalion Training Management System. While imperfect, and imperfectly understood and executed, it was one of those things – once mandatory, now defunct – that helped the Army out of the post-Vietnam doldrums. I believe it was done away with on the premise that its guidance had become part of the Army ethos. I strongly recommend at least considering bringing it back to recover from the middle eastern and Afghan campaigns. For the reader, you can find something about BTMS and its history at Anne Chapman’s The Army’s Training Revolution, 1973-1990. Also, a fair number of used books for the various levels of BTMS have found their way into commerce. No, you can’t have my copies.

Rendezvous and Docking:

A User’s Guide for Non Rocket Scientists (Part 1)

by Terry Burlison

Note: A glossary of terms is provided at the end of the article.

NASA has flown rendezvous missions for nearly a half-century. Since Project Gemini, astronauts and mission controllers have safely brought space vehicles together, whether from one country or more, over the earth or the moon, in a matter of hours or of days. They make it look as easy as calling your best friend and saying, “Meet me at Costco at ten o’clock.”

How do they make this astonishing feat look so easy? What does it really take to get a vehicle from the launch pad into orbit and mated safely with another craft, hundreds of miles high traveling at a blistering 18,000 miles per hour?

Well, sit down, strap in, and hold on. You’re about to learn why it’s called “rocket science.”

The “panes” of rendezvous

Planning a rendezvous mission starts months, even years before the actual flight. Seemingly as much art as science, rendezvous dictates when you launch, where you launch from, how long the mission lasts, how much propellant you need, and when your crew eats and sleeps. It can be constrained by sunbathers in Cuba or Hawaii, the location of the sun, foreign birth-control programs, or a human’s vomiting tendencies.

But it all starts with the question, “When do we leave?”

During a mission countdown, in real-life or even in the movies, one often hears of a launch window: a mysterious slice of time during which the spacecraft must leave the pad. (In movies, this is usually right before a hurricane hits.) Any mission that involves rendezvous, whether with the International Space Station (ISS) or with another planet, has a launch window: a scheduled liftoff time and some additional duration, often only a few minutes long, during which you must launch. For low earth orbit (LEO) missions, this window is defined by two limitations or “panes”: the planar pane and the phasing pane. (Windows have panes, get it? That passes for NASA humor.)

A low earth orbit is essentially a circular path around the earth. (Actually it’s elliptical, but that’s one of several complications we’ll ignore for this discussion. Okay, it’s not eactly elliptical, either, but . . . never mind.) If you draw a big circle on a flat piece of cardboard you’ll notice that the circle lies in a plane. When a vehicle is in orbit, it remains within its orbital plane. If you somehow launched into the wrong orbital plane, you are, in NASA parlance, SOL (“shit out of luck”). A simple diagram will explain:

Figure 1: One degree of orbit plane change (not to scale)

Once you’re in orbit, traveling at about 18,000 mph (27,000 km/hr), changing your direction even a little takes a LOT of delta-V (change in velocity). To change your orbital plane by one degree requires a maneuver of over 400 feet (122 meters) per second. For the space shuttle, this would require nearly half of the shuttle’s entire on-orbit maneuvering capability, which must be also used for attitude control, orbital maneuvering, rendezvous and docking, separation, and deorbit.

(Note: That’s why the shuttle Columbia couldn’t have just “gone to the ISS” had they known about the wing damage. Such a massive plane change would have taken about 12,000 feet (3,700 meters) per second of delta-V!)

Thus, it is really, really, really important to get into the correct orbital plane at launch. This is where the planar launch pane comes in.

In LEO, your orbital plane remains fixed relative to the stars; it does not rotate along with the earth below. (This is another simplification, but true enough for the moment.) Imagine cutting a big circle in your sheet of cardboard, drawing an arrow to indicate direction of travel, and placing this cardboard “orbit” around a globe, one of those desktop models you can spin. Place it so the arrow is pointing counter-clockwise when viewed from the north pole. Be sure the center of the orbit always coincides with the center of the earth.

If your cardboard lies along the equator (or “equatorial plane”), the inclination of the orbit is said to be zero degrees. You’re always flying over the equator. This is creatively referred to as an equatorial orbit. Now if you tip your cardboard up to a 51.6° angle to the equator, still keeping the centers aligned, you’ve set your orbit at an inclination of 51.6°—which happens to be the inclination of the ISS. The two points where the plane intersects the earth’s equatorial plane are the ascending (northward) and descending (southward) nodes.

Figure 2: Orbital inclination and line of nodes (Source: NASA's RNDZ 2102 Workbook)

As mentioned earlier, the orbital plane does not rotate; it remains fixed while the earth rotates beneath it. If you pick a spot on the earth, say at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (28.5° latitude) and spin your globe, you’ll notice that the launch site passes directly through the plane of your cardboard orbit twice per day.

Thus begins the definition of the launch window.

Two times each day, your launch site will pass directly under the plane of your target orbit. This is when you must launch! If you delay, you will be launching into a different orbital plane; even if it has the same inclination, it will cross the equator at a different point and create a wedge angle between the orbits. Since the earth rotates 360° in 24 hours, elementary school math tells you that’s a degree every 15 minutes. Very quickly, you’ll be too far out of plane to ever make your rendezvous.

But it gets worse. It also turns out you typically don’t have two opportunities per day. Virtually all launch sites in the world have some kind of launch azimuth restriction, defined by range safety considerations. Simply put, there are some launch angles you can’t use because your rocket will be flying over populated areas. Launching too far northward out of Cape Canaveral, for example, overflies the east coast of the United States, an area rife with politicians and lawyers who will take monetary offense if you drop empty stages or solid rocket boosters on them. Launching too far southward, the path passes over Cuba and the Bahamas. Since there are a number of catastrophic failures, from explosions to engine failures, that could cause a booster to plummet to earth in a horrific fireball, good neighbor policies forbid flying over those populated areas, as well. Thus, northward flights from Cape Canaveral are limited to an inclination range of 28.5° (due east launch) to about 57°.

(Note: To get into higher inclination orbits, including polar orbits, the United States actually launches southward out of Vandenburg AFB in California.)

Figure 3: Launch azimuth constraints for Vandenburg AFB (Western Test Range) and KSC (Eastern Test Range)

As you might have noticed in the above figure, there exists a small range of inclinations, 28.5° to about 38°, that do have two opportunities a day out of KSC, north and south. But since the ISS orbits at an inconvenient 51.6° (more on that later), a vehicle launching from KSC has only one launch opportunity per day, launching to the north.

Therefore, once a launch date has been chosen by mission planners, the launch time is now fixed: For the ISS, it’s the time on that date that KSC will rotate under the northbound (or ascending) segment of the ISS orbit plane.

Sadly, launching on time has long been a problem in the space program, especially for the shuttle. That’s why countdowns have all those built-in holds; they provide time for the launch team to troubleshoot any problems before the scheduled liftoff. Even then, reliably launching on time is a tremendous challenge. Hence the need for a launch window.

But how long is the window? If we don’t launch exactly on time, how much propellant (and therefore, delta-V) is onboard our spacecraft for changing planes once on orbit? Essentially, none. But that doesn’t mean the vehicle must lift off at exactly the scheduled time, because of a technique used during ascent called yaw steering.

A dog-leg to the left (or right)

The launch vehicle imparts a massive amount of delta-V to the spacecraft, taking it from only a few hundred feet per second (the earth’s rotational velocity at the launch site) to some 25,000 fps (18,000 mph or 27,000 kph) at orbit insertion. Anyone who has seen a launch in person will testify to the awe-inspiring spectacle of millions of pounds of highly-explosive propellants erupting in pillars of flame and shattering the sky with ear-splitting power.

Typically, the spacecraft doesn’t require exactly 100% of that impulse to get into orbit: there is usually some extra capability, or margin, available. Planners can also reduce the payload to orbit in order to free up propellant during ascent. This margin can be used to turn the rocket in a “dog-leg” maneuver to get it into the correct orbital plane. This means the rocket can launch a few minutes early, or late, and still steer onto the right course. A vehicle’s “yaw-steering” capability depends on the rocket, the payload, and other factors, but for the shuttle, this amounted to about 10 minutes of launch window when flying to ISS. Additional yaw steering could be achieved by using more launch propellant to yaw, but this further reduces the payload you can lift into orbit. (For shuttle, a 10-minute launch window already costs about 2,500 pounds (1,100 kg) of payload.) Also, more extreme yaw maneuvers induce higher aerodynamic loads on the shuttle and its huge external tank and also affects downrange safety margins, such as where the external tank will impact after being jettisoned.

Figure 4: Illustrative dog-leg ascent (not remotely to scale)

Consequently, by sacrificing about 2,500 pounds (1,100 kg) of payload to orbit, the shuttle could launch about 5 minutes before the perfect time, or 5 minutes afterward, and still steer into the correct orbital plane, thus saving the vehicle’s onboard propellant for orbital maneuvers.

But where in the launch window is the best time to go? It depends on who you ask.

Figure 5: Shuttle launch window performance margin (Figure courtesy of Wayne Hale)

Oops

This anecdote, from a source that requests anonymity, illustrates the difference between science (the “perfect” answer) and engineering (the “best” answer).

“The FDOs (Flight Dynamics Officers) always set us up to launch at the opening of the window so we had the best chance of launching. However, that isn’t really the optimal position. [A certain astronaut] found out there were a couple of pounds of propellant to be saved by launching 6-7 minutes into the 10 minute window. He pressed this for over a year and finally won. So, we rock up to STS-88, the first launch to ISS. We have a system failure in the final 10 minutes before launch, it takes us too long to fix and get back on the count and we miss the launch by about 4-5 seconds. Window closes, launch scrubbed . . . because of a poor plan.”

As others have noted, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Thus we have the “planar pane” of the launch window. But there is another constraint, one defined by surprisingly human limitations.

Going through a phase

When you launch, the odds are slim that your target vehicle, such as the ISS, will be in exactly the correct spot in its orbit for you to go right up and dock with it. Most likely, it will be too far ahead or behind. Thus, you could launch into the correct orbital plane and directly to the correct altitude, and discover your target is on the other side of the earth.

Mission planners could postpone the mission until a day when the target is in the perfect spot at the exact launch time, but a much better solution is to allow the chaser spacecraft to phase, or catch up to, the target spacecraft after launch.

A basic tenent of orbital mechanics dictates that the higher the orbit, the slower the orbital speed, whether it’s a satellite around the earth or a planet around the sun. It’s why a martian year is longer than an earth year. Thus, the target vehicle will be moving slower than a spacecraft at a lower altitude. The greater the difference in altitude, the greater the difference in speed. The lower, faster spacecraft thus catches up to the higher, slower one at a rate that depends on the heights, or energy, of their respective orbits.

It’s often not practical to raise the target vehicle to a higher altitude, nor can a chaser spacecraft safely orbit lower than about 100 nautical miles (185 km) altitude because of our atmosphere. Therefore, the chaser altitude range of 100 nm up to the target’s altitude defines the range of “catch-up rates” for chasing and rendezvousing with the target.

(Note: You could launch the chaser into a higher, slower orbit and let the target vehicle catch up to it and then rendezvous from above, but this is a waste of energy and therefore, of propellant, payload, and money.)

So when you get into orbit, the target will be some fraction of an orbit ahead of you, possibly close to 360°. This distance is called the phase angle. The lower the initial, or phasing, orbit, the faster the catch-up rate and the less time it takes to complete the phasing.

Now we add in the human element.

In the “good old days” of Gemini, the spacecraft was so simple that the crew could transition from launch to rendezvous almost immediately upon reaching orbit, and the rendezvous could be completed very quickly. (Gemini 11 achieved rendezvous on the first orbit!)

Figure 6: Gemini 11 rendezvoused with an Agena upper stage in one orbit (NASA archive photo)

The shuttle, however, was a vastly more complex machine, requiring a great deal of crew activity after launch to get everything configured for on-orbit activities: powering down auxiliary power units, opening payload bay doors, deploying the cooling radiators, etc. The crew had already been up for a long time and gone through the adrenaline-pumping experience of launch. Thus, NASA did not ask the crew to perform the time-consuming and difficult task of closing on the target vehicle and docking on the first day.

However, spaceflight experience has shown that space adaptation syndrome (“space-sickness”) is most likely to strike crew members on the second day. Since it’s distracting to use sophisticated navigation equipment while vomiting, rendezvous was typically scheduled to occur on day three, roughly 40 hours after launch.

As Ken Young, a retired NASA manager puts it: “The STS crew workday was heavier [than Gemini/Apollo]—open payload bay doors, deploy radiators, etc.—and with six or seven crew the chances of one or more being [nauseated] doubled or tripled, which drove the third day choice. But also it gave a much bigger phasing window (even though for Space Station visits at 51.6 the plane window was still only about 10 minutes).”

Additionally, allowing extra time for a vehicle to phase increases the number of launch opportunities per year. For example, if the vehicle has enough time on orbit to phase a full 360°, the ISS could be anywhere in its orbit on launch day, meaning any day of the year would potentially be feasible for launch.

So the crew planning people look at day three, determine when the crew will wake up, eat, and be ready to execute the final maneuvers, and align that (if possible) with the workday on the ISS. They also estimate how long it will take to perform those approach maneuvers and subtract that from when the crew needs to “call it a day” and get to bed. Those few hours in-between define the timeframe in which the phasing must be completed.

For example, assume the crew will awake at 0600 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on day three. Maybe two hours later, or 0800, they’ll be ready to fly the approach. If the crew must end their work day by 2300, the phase window would be fifteen hours long. However, that fifteen hours excludes the time it takes to approach and dock. If that requires ten hours (including some margin for contingencies), then the phase window is only five hours long, and phasing must be completed between 0800 and 1300 on that day.

Mission planners now come up with the rendezvous profile: the orbital altitudes and durations that will bring the chaser spacecraft to the ISS within the window defined above.

That’s if everything goes right. If there is a launch delay, however, the original phase angle between the chaser and the ISS—the one mission planners worked so hard to estimate and then used for all the mission timeline planning—will change. This changes the amount of phasing time required and can cause the ISS crew to violate the wake/sleep constraints. For example, a delay of 10 minutes means the ISS will have moved almost 40° further ahead in its orbit. This could require the chaser to phase too long and put the rendezvous too late in the day three workday. Consequently, there exists a “phase pane” in the launch window that limits the amount of launch delay to assure that the chaser will arrive at the target on the correct day, and within the correct timeframe on that day.

It is the intersection of these two panes that defines the final launch window.

To summarize: mission planners pick a launch day, which gives a nominal lift-off time. This time is then moved slightly earlier according to how much yaw-steering the booster rocket can do. This is the opening of the launch window. Crew timeline impacts are studied to determine the best arrival time and the phasing constraints are added to the yaw-steering limits, giving the closing of the launch window.

All that just to get off the ground.

Just change the laws of physics

Other considerations can impact the launch window, such as lighting conditions at launch. Since the shuttle could abort its ascent and land across the Atlantic (or even back at the Cape), launches were scheduled when lighting conditions from the sun were such that the crew could clearly see the runways. After the Columbia accident, NASA also required certain lighting conditions for the cameras observing the shuttle during ascent. Thus, a poor sun angle for a given day/time could also impact the launch window.

A source who prefers to remain anonymous recounts the following story about the preliminary plan to fly cooperative rendezvous missions with the Russians in the early 1990s.

Ronald Reagan had proposed building Space Station Freedom: an entirely U.S. asset, launched due east from Kennedy Space Center into a 28.5° inclined orbit. This would maximize the size of the station we could build, since launching eastward takes full advantage of the earth’s rotational speed. Due-east launches also allow for relatively long launch windows. (Take my word for that.)

Bill Clinton scrapped Freedom and redirected NASA to build a station in partnership with the Russians. As part of a live-together-before-marriage arrangement, NASA was directed to fly missions to the Russian Mir space station, which was at 51.6° inclination. This meant not only reducing our payload capability to orbit, but drastically shortening the launch windows, because of the orbital plane issues discussed earlier.

My source recounts a press conference given by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin shortly after signing the agreement: “A very funny story about that was Dan Goldin was doing a press conference right after we had signed all the agreements with the Russians for the Mir missions, and someone asked about the short launch windows and the potential for missing a launch due to a failure close to launch. Goldin, in his typical humble self, declared that a 10-minute launch window was unacceptable, he had never approved it, and he would get that changed. We almost fell out of our chairs laughing. We never did get the answer as to whether he was going to move the Sun or the Mir. Neither moved and we lived with 10 minute launch windows throughout Mir and ISS.”

Birth control vs. détente

Yet another launch constraint we haven’t discussed is communications coverage—the requirement for key events in the mission (radio, radar tracking, video, etc.) to happen during certain times or over certain locations. Ken Young relates the following story about the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), the first cooperative space mission between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

In 1974, NASA launched an Applications Technology Satellite (ATS-6), a spacecraft that would provide much better tracking of the upcoming ASTP mission. The satellite was to be placed in geosynchronous orbit over the Galapagos Islands.

Young explains: Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us planners (and, indeed, to all but a few NASA people) the State Department had made a commitment to India that in mid-1975 the ATS-6 would be re-located to about 35 degrees East (over equatorial east Africa) to support a year-long Indian birth-control education program. The Indian government gave out hundreds of black and white TV sets, with antennas that could pick up birth-control videos beamed down from the ATS-6 to little villages.

This little surprise came just [a few] months before the July 1975 flight. Thus, re-planning of the whole . . . sequence was required. The rendezvous and subsequent handshake [the famous “handshake in space”] would now have to occur over France, in the ATS-6 new coverage zone. That, as only rendezvous experts will understand, also meant a significant liftoff time change to accommodate the optimum terminal phase lighting conditions. Needless to say, ASTP officials on both sides were not happy with such a “last-minute” change. Such things as the schedule for live congratulatory talks from President Ford and Chairman Brezhnev had to be changed [as well]. And remember, every detail of ALL plans had to be documented in both English and Russian and run through the interminable sign-off gauntlet, a process that literally took months. Then NASA had to negotiate through the State Department to allow for several days during the actual flight that India would not use the ATS-6 to transmit their birth-control videos.

Despite all the uproar we managed to make the changes and pull off a perfectly nominal rendezvous, docking and crew transfer with excellent live TV coverage. I don’t think anyone ever examined Indian birth statistics nine months after the days we used ATS-6, but chances are they’d find a spike in births!

Figure 7: Planned parenthood from orbit: NASA's ATS-6 satellite (NASA archive image)

Getting there from here (wherever “here” is)

Once you’ve figured out when to launch, you have to figure out how you’ll actually find and approach your target vehicle. Rendezvous can be broken into two segments: the inertial segment and the relative segment. When the chaser vehicle gets on-orbit, the target is typically far, far ahead, out of sight, way beyond the range of any kind of rendezvous radar. So the first several maneuvers are planned by the ground, which is tracking both vehicles and knows where they are in inertial (Earth-centered) space. Once the chaser gets into close proximity, it can acquire the target with its own sensors, radar for example, and then figure out the best way to get to it. This is the relative phase—when the chaser can measure where the target is relative to its own position. It’s rather like using your GPS to get you to the mall, then using your eyes to get into the parking lot and finding a space.

Theoretically, the chaser could stay in its low initial parking orbit until just the right moment and blast its way up to the ISS, but as discussed before that would most likely cause rendezvous too soon. Regardless, such a maneuver generates very high closing rates. Coming in at high speed is very dangerous, as the crew has little time to respond to problems or errors, and a 200,000 pound (91,000 kg) spacecraft hardly handles like a sports car. Additionally, stopping “quickly” requires blasting all the chaser’s reaction control system (RCS) jets directly at the target, spraying it with all kinds of nasty rocket contaminants (plume impingement).

Imagine parking in a tight space at the mall. You could roar down the parking lot at full speed, slam on the brakes at the last second and throw your car into the spot. After all, it works in the movies. But in the real world we slow down as we turn in, slow down even more as we approach our spot, then very slowly and carefully turn the vehicle into the spot and creep up to the correct position before stopping.

So too, in orbit.

Therefore, to ensure arrival at the right time, with the right lighting conditions, and with low closing velocities, our rendezvous profile consists of a series of maneuvers to gradually raise the chaser’s orbit, each one reducing the closing rate, and culminating in an approach to the target at the right time and place.

It can look something like this:

Figure 8: Sample shuttle rendezvous profile (inertial view from above ISS orbit plane)

Figure 9: Sample shuttle rendezvous profile (relative view centered at ISS)

(Source: Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Design Reference for the International Space Station)

These graphs show an approach of the shuttle to the ISS. The upper is an inertial view of the maneuvers, looking down from a point above the target orbit plane. The lower graph uses a relative coordinate system, centered at the ISS with the vertical axis pointing downward toward the center of the earth and the velocity direction to the left.

As you can see, the profile consists of a series of oddly-named maneuvers that gradually raise first one “side,” then the other, of the shuttle’s orbit, until finally reaching the ISS orbital altitude.

Let’s go through the maneuvers.

The OMS2 burn occurs immediately after orbit insertion to place the shuttle in its parking orbit. On the ground, Mission Control recomputes the rendezvous profile after they’ve determined the shuttle’s precise orbit (and allowing for any launch delay). So while the maneuvers themselves will stay in the profile, for now, their timing and magnitude will change slightly.

The first “phasing” burn, called NC1, is performed to raise the apogee (highest point) of the shuttle’s orbit. This increases the orbit’s period, slowing down the catch-up rate to the ISS. These coasting phases can last for many hours, even days.

The shuttle will adjust this phasing orbit multiple times, in this case NC2 and NC3, each tweaking the shuttle’s apogee and catch-up rate. During one of these coast phases, the shuttle might perform small planar correction burns (NPC), to correct for any errors in the launch that did not place the orbiter in precisely the desired orbital plane and resulted in a wedge angle between the vehicles’ planes. Recall that even small planar errors can result in very large burns.

On rendezvous day, the shuttle executes a maneuver designed to bring it to the ISS’s vicinity. The height adjust (NH) raises the apogee of the shuttle’s orbit to a specified height, in this case the altitude of the ISS. A half-orbit later, the shuttle performs another phasing burn to take it right on in to the terminal rendezvous phase.

The shuttle might also have stopped at the NC4 point on the plot before approaching. If berthing is to be postponed for several hours (or a day or more), this “stand-off” distance may be as much as 40 nm (74 km) or more behind the ISS, where the shuttle can drift safely while the crew sleeps.

A nearly infinite number of profiles can be employed to perform a rendezvous, each with advantages and drawbacks. NASA flew many different profiles during Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, ASTP, and shuttle. The profile above was developed for shuttle mission planning purposes. An actual profile, as flown on STS-88 to Mir, is shown below. Note the large number of (mostly small) NC (phasing) maneuvers. These as-flown maneuvers are the result of constant updates of the shuttle and Mir locations which caused the Flight Dynamics Officer to re-compute the profile during flight, substituting NC maneuvers for the originally planned burns.

Figure 10: STS-88 actual rendezvous profile, as flown (Source: STS-88 Post-Flight Report)

Fly me to the . . . ISS

Now that we see how it’s done, let’s hop aboard an imaginary vehicle and go through a rendezvous mission.

Mission planners have picked a date and time for us to arrive, accounting for ISS crew schedules, ground coverage (Russia requires the rendezvous occur over the Motherland), lighting, etc. Working backward, they have determined the launch date and thus, the launch time. The launch window has been calculated, and all systems are Go.

We climb aboard our fictional space vehicle, which we’ll call the space shuttle. A small problem delays launch by three minutes, but we’re still well within our window when the main engines ignite, the solid rocket boosters erupt, and six million pounds of thrust blast us into our parking orbit. Because of the delay, the ISS is about 12° further ahead in its orbit than we had planned. If we stick to our original rendezvous plan, we’ll have to spend more time in our phasing orbits and will arrive too late in the Day 3 workday.

No worries. After NASA has tracked our vehicle for a while to be sure they have a good fix on our position and velocity, Mission Control’s Flight Dynamics Officer (FDO, call sign “Fido”) calls upon his back-room support people and together they update the rendezvous maneuvers to get us to the ISS when and where we should. They send us the updated maneuver plan, changing the burn times and amounts slightly to correct for errors from launch and to allow for the longer phasing time.

Over the next two days, we’ll keep getting these updates from Mission Control. As burns are executed, the FDO will change the rest of the plan based on new tracking data. Small plane-change maneuvers may be inserted to correct for errors from launch or other factors. Over those two days the ISS, originally far on the other side of the earth, becomes visible ahead and above us, a beacon gleaming in the sunlight, far brighter than any star or planet. Slowly, it brightens further, climbing closer and (apparently) higher as we move toward it. If we need to, we could now use our star tracker, normally used to align the inertial platform in our vehicle (more on that later), to track the angles to the ISS. Using algorithms known as Kalman filters, we can check our relative position to the ISS (even though we’re still in the inertial rendezvous phase) to make sure that everything is on course.

On day three, we are finally ready to rendezvous. We’ve gotten the latest updates from Mission Control and fire the first of two burns to get us up to the ISS orbit. The ISS grows larger, brighter, closer. We pass into darkness and can no longer see it, but a light on the ISS gleams in the blackness, surrounded by innumerable, brilliant stars. As we approach daylight, the ISS suddenly blossoms into brilliance as the sun hits it. Moments later, a rainbow of color explodes along the horizon and we, too, pass into sunlight. We fire the final burn to raise our orbit to the ISS’s altitude, targeting a stand-off point behind it. As we coast up to the ISS altitude, the TIG (time of ignition) clock counts down to zero and the engines fire, gently pushing us back in our seats. Moments later, we have arrived: co-orbital with the ISS, some 40 nm (74 km) behind. Mission Control informs us that the burn was nominal (NASA-ese for “okay”) and we breathe a huge, collective sigh of relief.

We’re here. It’s been three long days, several maneuvers are behind us, and we are safely rendezvoused with the ISS, drifting behind it in a nearly identical orbit. All that remains now is to close from our stand-off point, fly-around for inspection, then approach and grapple.

We’ve accomplished the hard part (launch window targeting), the really hard part (ascent and rendezvous), and in next month’s installment, we’ll take on the really, really, really hard part: bringing our 100-ton vehicle safely to berth with the million-pound station, both tearing around the earth at 18,000 mph.

Sounds like fun!

Glossary

Ascending node: The intersection of a vehicle’s orbital plane with the earth’s equatorial plane, with orbital motion in a northward (versus southward or “descending”) direction.

Cross coupling: The translation motion caused by a rotational jet firing (and vice versa) caused by misalignment of the maneuvering jets to the vehicle’s body axes and center of gravity.

Delta-V: Change in velocity, caused by maneuvers or forces acting on the vehicle.

Doppler shift: The compression or stretching of an electromagnetic signal’s wavelength caused by motion toward or away from the observer.

Ephemeris: Essentially, a huge table predicting the positions, velocities, and other data of an object in orbit.

Equatorial orbit: An orbit around the equator, with 0° inclination.

Flight Dynamics Officer (FDO, “Fido”): The front-room Mission Control position responsible for the vehicle’s trajectory, from tower clear until landing and rollout. This includes all rendezvous maneuvers.

Geosynchronous orbit: An orbit with a period of 24 hours. If it is also a circular orbit at 0° inclination, the spacecraft remains fixed over the same spot on the earth (geostationary orbit). Primarily used for communications satellites.

Inclination: The angle of a satellite’s orbital plane to the earth’s equator.

Inertial coordinate system: A non-rotating, essentially fixed (relative to the stars) coordinate system with origin at the center of the earth.

Figure 1: M50 Inertial coordinate system

(Source: Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Design Reference for the International Space Station)

Inertial Navigation System (INS): Avionics hardware used to calculate estimates of a vehicle’s state (position, velocity, attitude) relative to an inertial coordinate system.

Integrate: Computing the future state of a vehicle given its current state and estimates of future forces acting upon it.

Kalman filter: A mathematical algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time to estimate other variables that can’t be directly measured, or cannot be measured accurately.

Launch azimuth: The angle of a vehicle’s launch groundtrack, relative to due east.

Launch window: The time period on launch day during which a vehicle must launch to meet its mission objectives.

Launch window planar pane: The limitation on the launch window caused by the earth’s rotation and limited by a vehicle’s ascent performance.

Launch window phase pane: The limitation on the launch window caused by rendezvous constraints, such as lighting, communication coverage, or crew work day limits.

Lighting constraints: Limitations imposed by sun angle. Can impact launch, aborts, landing, on-orbit rendezvous, or approach and docking.

Margin: A vehicle’s capability beyond the minimum required to meet mission requirements, such as extra propellant, payload, time, etc.

Nodal regression: The westward (or eastward) rotation of a satellite’s orbital plane, caused primarily by the oblateness of the earth.

Nominal: Normal or expected.

Oblateness (Earth): The flattening of the earth, caused by our planet’s rotation and resulting in a “bulge” around the equator.

Phantom plane: The targeted insertion plane for the chaser vehicle which will result in minimal wedge angle difference at rendezvous.

Phase angle: The angle between the chaser and target vehicle, typically measured in the target vehicle’s orbital plane.

Phasing orbit: A chaser vehicle’s orbit, usually at a lower altitude (energy) from the target, causing it to approach the target over time.

Plume impingement: The impact of exhaust gases upon another object.

Relative coordinate system: An orthogonal, rotating coordinate system centered at one vehicle (usually the target) with the Z-axis pointing to the center of the earth, Y-axis along the satellite’s angular momentum vector, and X-axis perpendicular to both, with positive in the direction of orbital travel. For a circular orbit, X is along the velocity vector. Also called an LVLH (local vertical, local horizontal) coordinate system.

Figure 2: Relative coordinate system

(Source: Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Design Reference for the International Space Station)

Relative navigation system: Hardware, such as rendezvous radars or star trackers, used to measure angles, distances, velocities, or attitudes of one vehicle relative to another.

Rendezvous profile: A series of maneuvers designed to bring a vehicle from orbital insertion to the near-proximity of another spacecraft already in orbit.

Star tracker: An optical device for keeping an inertial navigation system properly aligned by measuring the positions of stars. Can also be used to track other objects in orbit.

State vector: A set of information describing the position, velocity, and attitude (and possibly rates) of a vehicle at a specific time.

State vector update: A new, more accurate state vector uplinked from the ground to improve the onboard estimate of a vehicle’s state.

Wedge angle: The angle between two orbital planes. A combination of the differences in inclination and ascending node location.

Yaw steering: A technique used during ascent to steer the launch vehicle to the east or west in order to get it into the proper phantom plane.

Zonal and tesseral harmonics: Higher-order effects of the earth’s non-spherical shape, which perturb the motion of vehicles in orbit.

Rendezvous and Docking:

A User’s Guide for Non Rocket Scientists (Part 2)

by Terry Burlison

Note: A glossary of terms is provided at the end of the article, as are two appendices: “Complications” (why all this is even harder than it sounds) and “Flight Lessons” (two historic missions where things didn’t go as planned).

In last month’s article we discussed rendezvous: that magical blend of art and science that enables us to figure out when to launch our spacecraft and how to maneuver it to the proximity of another vehicle already in orbit above the Earth. We flew an imaginary space shuttle rendezvous, culminating in a stand-off position some 40 miles (74 km) behind the International Space Station (ISS). The courtship phase of our mission is complete; now it’s time to get these vehicles to mate.

To do so, you must forget everything you know about how things move on Earth.

Imagine you’re the starting quarterback in the Super Bowl. You take the first snap from center, spy a receiver breaking into the open downfield, and loft a perfect pass that drops gently into his hands as he streaks toward the end zone. You’re up six-nothing and already making plans for that MVP trophy.

Not a likely scenario, admittedly, but one that’s easy to imagine.

Now, let’s move that game into the future: the first Super Bowl played in low Earth orbit. Players line up, hovering in zero gravity with their NFL jetpacks. The center snaps the ball, you see the receiver open far ahead, and once more you loft the football in his direction. This time however, the ball continues to climb, moving higher and higher above the playing field. Worse, the ball also starts slowing down as it gains altitude. It stops moving forward entirely and, still climbing, begins gliding back toward the line of scrimmage! You stare in horror as the ball now flies backward, far over your head, picking up speed as it hurtles out of the stadium behind you! The game is only a few minutes in, you’re already down two-nothing, and the world is laughing at you. What went wrong?

Welcome to the Alice in Wonderland world of orbital mechanics.

Conservation: It's not just a good idea; it's the law

Back in school you probably learned about something called “conservation of energy,” and perhaps immediately forgot about it. What relevance could it have to daily life?

Well, a lot. And not only for astronauts.

The conservation principle essentially says that the energy in a closed system is constant: it can be neither created nor destroyed, only converted. To change the energy of a system you must either add to it from outside or transfer it to a different system. For this discussion, we’ll talk about three basic kinds of energy: chemical, kinetic, and potential.

Chemical is easy to understand—it’s the energy stored in the chemistry of a substance, such as batteries, gasoline, or rocket propellants. Converting it into usable energy is as easy as flipping a switch or lighting a match.

Kinetic is pretty straightforward as well—the energy of a moving object. Look at a car after a head-on collision and you can see how much energy the vehicle had prior to impact!

Potential energy is a bit harder to understand. It’s the energy stored in an object by its physical relationship to an electromagnetic or (in our case) gravitational field. Moving an object farther from the center of the Earth, for example, increases its potential energy. You can demonstrate this with a fun experiment right in your own home!

Drop an egg on to your floor from a millimeter; it probably won't even crack. Now increase that egg’s potential energy by raising it over your head. (This, too, is energy transfer: to the egg from your muscles, which in turn came from your food, which in turn came from the Sun, etc.) Now, drop the egg. All that new potential energy gets converted into kinetic energy and, upon impact, is transferred to the planet Earth, much to the dismay of the egg.

Let’s apply these principles to space flight.

The booster rocket converts a massive amount of chemical energy into kinetic and potential to get the spacecraft into orbit. Once the spacecraft separates from the booster, it has a fixed amount of energy—a combination of its altitude (potential) and speed (kinetic). This total energy does not change as the spacecraft moves around its orbit! At perigee, the vehicle is closest to the Earth (lowest potential energy) and thus travels at its fastest speed (highest kinetic energy). As the craft drifts upward toward apogee, it trades off that speed for altitude, slowing down as it climbs.

Figure 1: Energy in an orbit remains constant

Higher orbits have more energy (and longer orbital periods) than lower orbits. Thus, the ISS at 210 nm (388 km) has more energy than a chaser vehicle at 110 nm (204 km). Since we don’t live in the Star Trek universe, we can’t instantaneously transport to a higher altitude—the only way to get to the ISS is to add kinetic energy via the chemical energy in the fuel. In other words, fire the engines.

So we execute our maneuver, increasing our speed and raising the opposite side of our orbit. Let's assume we're going up to the ISS altitude. Quick quiz: When we get to apogee (210 nm), will we be going faster, slower, or the same speed as the ISS?

We’re at the same altitude so we have the same potential. But since our overall orbit has less total energy, our kinetic energy (speed) must be slower than the ISS. Therefore, we have to thrust forward, adding speed, to match the orbit (and therefore the energy) of the ISS.

Still awake? Good, because this is where things get weird.

Curiouser and Curiouser

An inertial view of our approach orbit, from a fixed distance away, looks like this:

Figure 2: Approach shown in inertial space

Remember our relative coordinate system we introduced last time? It's centered at our target vehicle (in this case, the ISS), the “down” axis is always pointing at the center of the Earth (yes, positive is actually downward), “ahead” is along our direction of motion, and “sideways” is perpendicular to both. This is the way we humans see the world: centered at ourselves (of course), down is “down,” and ahead is “ahead.”

Thus, you might think that when viewed by the astronauts, the approach to the ISS would look something like this:

Figure 3: NOT how an approach really looks!

In fact, it looks like this:

Figure 4: How an approach really looks

Rather than approaching from behind and below, we’re closing from ahead. Why? Two reasons.

First, remember our discussion of energy. As you recall, when we reach the ISS altitude, we are traveling slower than the ISS. That means that we will appear to be “backing up” as we get close to it!

Imagine trying to park your car this way. You approach the parking spot (which you think is standing still, cooperatively awaiting your arrival), but as you approach, it suddenly starts accelerating ahead of you. To get in the spot, you have to anticipate this and aim for a point ahead of it so the parking slot will accelerate to a location under your car at the right moment!

Second, this relative coordinate system, called LVLH (local vertical, local horizontal) is rotating. Remember: down is always toward the center of the Earth. As you revolve 360° around the Earth in your orbit, you must also rotate 360° to keep the Earth below you. How does this impact what we're seeing out our windows?

Well, stand next to someone, then turn around. They will appear to move around you even though they're still standing in exactly the same place. (A few tequila shots can generate a similar effect.)

The combination of these two things—difference in energy (speed) in the two orbits and the rotating LVLH coordinate system—generates some truly bizarre “relative motion” plots. In fact, there are a lot of different approaches, but few look the way we'd expect.

Figure 5: Some different possible approaches

If you re-read the opening paragraphs of this article, you might now understand what happened to your perfect pass. You added kinetic energy to the ball by throwing it. The ball then had too much speed for its original orbit (the one you’re still in). So it started climbing. However, as it climbed it traded that kinetic energy for potential and slowed down. And kept slowing, until it was going slower than before you threw it! Thus, it began drifting backwards. Add to this the fact that the field you're on is rotating—keeping “down” toward the center of the Earth—the ball moves far above and behind you.

Figure 6: No Pro Bowl for you

So how do you actually complete the pass? You’d have to throw the ball backward! That would slow it down, so it now has too little energy for your orbit. It starts falling, trading potential for kinetic, meaning it will soon speed up, move ahead, and eventually climb back to the altitude where you threw it. (The pass also takes the entire first half to complete.)

Figure 7: Peyton Manning in orbit

Don't expect zero-gee football anytime soon.

Mating ritual

Now let’s finish the fictitious mission we started in my previous article.

In our last installment, we left you aboard an imaginary space shuttle. You had successfully rendezvoused with the ISS, at a point 40 nm (74 km) behind the ISS. Now it's time to approach.

On Earth, if you want to approach an object in your car, you point the nose at it and press the gas. That's exactly not what we want to do now! Unlike the movie Gravity, we don’t just aim at the target and fire our thrusters. (One of approximately 42,000 technical flaws in the movie. Sorry, Mr. Clooney: it really is “rocket science.”) To approach the ISS, which is ahead of us, we slow down. This will drop us into an elliptical orbit with perigee below the ISS, meaning as we fall away from the station we will trade off enough potential energy for kinetic that we will start speeding up and moving toward it. Once we pass perigee, we will start climbing again, gradually slowing until we reach apogee, back at the ISS altitude. In fact, we end up in exactly the same relationship to the ISS we were immediately after the maneuver, except closer. How much closer depends on the maneuver: the more we slowed down, the farther ahead we'll move each orbit. We don’t want to attempt closing all the way in one shot, so we’ll aim for a closer point, eight miles (15 km) away.

Figure 8: Mid-range rendezvous approach

(Source: Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Design Reference for the International Space Station)

This NC, or phasing, maneuver is designed to bring the shuttle from its current position (40 nm) to a point near the ISS orbital altitude in exactly one orbit. Yep, we’re tearing through space at almost 18,000 mph, and it’s going to take us over an hour and a half to go 32 miles!

The NC maneuver occurs during a daylight pass, shortly before the vehicles plunge into darkness. This assures the Sun is “behind” the shuttle, brilliantly illuminating the ISS. Notice the gray patch labeled “STRK Pass” and the dot labeled “Sunset.” After the NC burn, the crew will use the shuttle’s star tracker to track the ISS, taking angle measurements on it exactly like they would on a star when aligning the inertial platform. Those angle measurements are then passed through a Kalman filter which, knowing the shuttle’s position, can accurately determine the ISS’s location relative to the shuttle, instead of to the center of the Earth.

Up to this point, the maneuvers have been computed on the ground, using two separate inertial state vectors (positions, velocities, and time) for the shuttle and the ISS. We now transition from the inertial phase of the rendezvous to the relative phase. As described in the last article, this is akin to using GPS to get you to the mall, but now you use your eyes to find the parking lot entrance.

During this star tracker pass, we take several “marks” to refine the estimate of the ISS position relative to us, and those data are then fed into our onboard targeting computer which then computes the next burns.

The next maneuver, shortly after entering darkness, is a “corrective combination” (NCC) burn. This important maneuver uses the star tracker updates to help us refine our trajectory, assuring us that we will hit exactly the right spot and to take out any planar error at the same time.

We use the star tracker because it gives us good estimates of the ISS position when we’re still some 40 nm distant. As we close to within about 14 nm (26 km), we come within range of our rendezvous radar (RR), a device that gives us extremely accurate range and range rate information. The RR will be the primary source of navigation data for the next few maneuvers.

We’ve now come out of darkness. The Sun has once again blazed into sight, and the ISS now gleams brilliantly only a few miles away. The radar has acquired it and further refined our next maneuver, the terminal phase initiation (TI) maneuver, which will occur around orbital “noon.”

If we were having a problem on our vehicle or on the ISS, we could wave-off the TI burn; our shuttle would simply kiss the orbit of the ISS (almost) and we would immediately drop below it and move ahead, once more climbing to the ISS altitude one orbit later, but now some twenty-four miles ahead of it. (A requirement for visiting the ISS is that our coasting trajectory must never endanger the ISS, even in the event of a catastrophic failure.) But if all goes well, we will execute the TI burn on time and begin our terminal phase approach.

Figure 9: Post-TI trajectory

(Source: Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Design Reference for the International Space Station)

The terminal phase trajectory will not be perfect, so we plan a series of mid-course correction maneuvers (MC). We continue to track the ISS with our radar, constantly updating and tweaking those burns to make absolutely sure we are on the correct course. The TI burn is scheduled during a daylight pass so that if the RR has failed, we can use the star tracker as a backup (assuming the ISS isn’t so big and bright that it renders the ST useless). We pass into darkness again; now we are close enough to track a light on the ISS with our star tracker (Night STRK Pass). Another mid-course correction, if needed, then sunrise greets us with a fantastic view of the ISS, now only a mile away.

Two more mid-course tweaks and, we’re almost there!

Final Approach

We’ve just spent another orbit (about 90 minutes) closing from 8 nm to one, a blistering approach speed of about 5 mph—hardly faster than a brisk walk. Time to slow down!

To avoid slamming into the ISS in the event of a failure of some kind, we aimed for a point below it (on the “positive R-bar,” in NASA speak). As we approach this spot, about 600 feet (180 m) below the ISS, we have to make a decision: abort, fly around, or approach.

To abort, we do nothing; we will simply drift safely ahead and away. But we’re here to stay. While we could approach the ISS from any direction, the best, from an orbital mechanics standpoint, is from directly above or below, or from directly ahead or behind. These positions are on the positive and negative R-bar and positive and negative V-bar. (R-bar being the radius vector toward the center of the Earth and V-bar being essentially along the velocity vector of the ISS). We could do a maneuver to fly around the ISS to the positive V-bar or negative R-bar, but for this mission, we’ll go directly into an approach from below.

Figure 10: Shuttle approach corridors to the ISS

Being a certified orbital mechanic, you now realize this is not a stable position. We have lower energy than the ISS so our period is shorter, meaning we’ll start dropping and moving ahead if we do nothing. But a small burst of our rear-firing jets will propel us forward. Almost immediately, orbital mechanics will cause us to start to rise, moving up the R-bar.

Once we close to about 170’ (52 m), we stop to make sure everything is ready on our orbiter, on the ISS, and at Mission Control (both U.S. and Russian). The differential orbital mechanics effects are weak enough that we can stay on station for a while without burning up all our propellant. This is also a chance to confirm the huge solar arrays on the ISS are configured such that any jet firings in their direction won’t torque the entire station around.

(I was in mission control at a backroom support station for the STS-98 mission. The Atlantis waited and waited on the R-bar for the Russians to feather their solar arrays. Finally, the shuttle began to approach anyway. Sort of a game of cosmic chicken, I gathered. Finally, the Russians feathered their arrays. “It happens all the time,” a trajectory officer told me, shaking his head.)

Houston calls and gives us the “go” for approach. We fire the downward jets to start pushing us toward the station. Orbital mechanics slows us down (which is good) and causes us to fall backward (which is bad), so as we approach we have to keep tweaking the downward and rearward jets to keep us on centerline and moving upwards. This approach is preferred because orbital mechanics provides our braking: as we climb, we automatically slow down and don’t have to impinge the station with upward-firing jets as we would with a V-bar approach.

Figure 11: R-bar approach (no jets fire at ISS)

Figure 12: V-bar approach (jets fire at the ISS)

(Source: Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Design Reference for the International Space Station)

You may have seen movies where the shuttle (or another spacecraft) comes barreling in, screeching to a halt just as the docking mechanisms touch (<cough> Armageddon <cough>).

Not exactly.

As we approach the station, our speed is constrained by a series of “braking gates” to assure we don’t inadvertently crash into the station. (<cough> Progress <cough>). These speed limits look like this:

That Fast and Furious five mph terminal segment is behind us. We’ll stop again at around 30’ before finally closing.

From here on in the differential orbital mechanics are so weak we can pretty much ignore them and thrust directly toward our goal, tweaking our course as needed. During this phase of the approach, all of our previous sensors are useless. The ISS became too big and bright for the star tracker miles ago. The rendezvous radar pings now bounce all over the structure, giving us wildly erratic readings. So how do we now estimate our range, rates, and angles?

To provide data all the way to contact, NASA developed the Trajectory Control Sensor, (TCS). This device uses a laser radar to determine very precise range and range-rate. The shuttle also had cameras in the payload bay that showed the ISS on monitors in the crew cabin; the crew used overlays on the monitors to estimate their position and attitude. Additionally, the shuttle crew carried a hand-held lidar, or laser radar (HHL). Believe it or not, an astronaut would lie on his/her back, aim the laser through the overhead window, and bounce the laser off a selected spot on the ISS! This device would then measure the reflected beam and compute range and range-rate.

Figure 13: Astronaut Al Drew with the HHL (NASA archive image)

A former trajectory officer who requests anonymity recounts an interesting experience certifying the HHL:

We also flew Hand-Held Lidar (HHL) units. Essentially police laser guns. Funny thing is, everyone was scared of the TCS on the first docking mission so we used the HHL to verify and “certify” the TCS prior to docking. Years later, someone questioned the accuracy of the HHL and they used the TCS data to validate/certify the HHL! Classic.

In total, that final 600’ takes us the better part of an hour. Had we been racing a three-toed sloth, the sloth would have gotten to the station, devoured their entire onboard supply of freeze-dried fruit, and be fast asleep before we arrived.

Typically, two spacecraft in orbit join by docking: one vehicle has a male (“probe”) segment and the other a female (“drogue”) receptacle. The pilot glides himself to within a few inches of his goal, and once he’s certain everything is properly aligned thrusts his probe firmly into the awaiting drogue. This triggers a set of latches, and the two craft snuggle together. (Who says rocket science isn’t sexy?)

Figure 14: Apollo-era “probe and drogue” (NASA archive photo)

For the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), NASA developed the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System, or APAS. This “androgynous” system gave both vehicles similar equipment, preventing a Cold War “who’s on top” argument. The space shuttle used a variant of the APAS for flights to the Russian Mir space station, and again to dock with the Russian segment of the ISS.

Figure 15: ASTP "androgynous" docking adapter (NASA archive image)

For ISS, a debate raged: docking in the traditional manner, or berthing—using the remote manipulator arm to bring the vehicles together. A source recalls:

There were lots of studies and many designs (from new to resurrecting the Apollo/Soyuz mechanism) but honestly, no one had money to build one. The station [program] wanted shuttle to pay and vice versa. Docking was probably preferred but it was really expensive and people kept saying “just berth it, it only costs you a grapple pin somewhere.” This kept the fighting going for years.

Since the Russians already had a docking adapter we could purchase and modify for far less money than developing our own, docking finally won the day.

So we crawl to within 30’ of the ISS, snailing in at 0.1 fps. Twenty feet. The TCS is firing, giving us range and rates. Ten feet. A crew member lies on her back, firing the HHL for redundancy. The commander stares at a monitor at the aft crew station, watching the feed from a camera mounted along the centerline of our docking adapter, his hand on the controllers. Another astronaut switches out overlays as we approach. Finally, our pressurized mating adapter (PMA) nudges against its counterpart on the ISS. The commander fires thrusters to shove the vehicles together with enough force to engage the PMA latches. The shuttle is pulled snug against the ISS, vibrates for a moment, and is still.

Houston, we have arrived!

Figure 16: Shuttle docked at ISS via the PMA. Note the orientation dots affixed to the ISS, and the shuttle’s rendezvous radar dish next to name. (NASA archive image)

Journey’s end

Our trip lasted only a few days, but was the result of decades of planning, practice, and experience and of many mistakes and many improvements. Rendezvous, prox ops, and docking required inventing entirely new areas of orbital mathematics, new software, new sensors, new procedures. Without that Herculean effort, no humans would be living in space, no footprints would decorate the surface of the Moon. The fact that it has become so commonplace is a testament to the ingenuity and dedication of scientists, engineers, and pilots—experience that will serve us well as we open paths to the rest of the solar system.

(Of course, that’s after we figure out deep space hyperbolic rendezvous. And proximity operations in orbits around other worlds. And docking mechanisms that can survive months on the Martian surface. And . . .)

Figure 17: When it all goes right: shuttle at ISS

The following two appendices describe “real-world” complications not discussed so far, and two missions where things went wrong, told from the mission commanders’ perspectives.

APPENDIX A: Complications (Warning: science ahead!)

This section is for space geeks and hairy-knuckled engineers who, in lieu of a normal life, enjoy math, science, and spaceflight arcana. You can skip this section and suffer no irreparable harm.

A rendezvous plan is designed in advance, assuming everything will go more-or-less according to plan. But once the vehicle is actually on-orbit, things change. To update the rendezvous plan during the mission, engineers have to know several things, including where the two vehicles are now, and where they will be in the future. An object’s future location essentially depends on three things: its current location, how fast it’s moving (and in what direction), and the accelerations it will undergo.

Determining a spacecraft’s location and velocity (and attitude, the direction its pointing) is called navigation. If you think it’s easy, you’re wrong. If you think it’s hard, you’re still wrong. It’s really, really hard.

Where am I?

On the ground, we can navigate simply by looking around. Need better accuracy? Measure your location relative to a fixed object, such as a signpost, with a measuring tape or rangefinder. Or use GPS, which will tell you your location to within a few feet.

It’s not so easy in space. While GPS has vastly improved spacecraft navigation, until recently it was considered experimental. After all, GPS was designed and optimized for terrestrial applications, not for vehicles flying hundreds of miles up in space and traveling at many thousands of miles per hour. For spacecraft without GPS (including Gemini, Apollo, and even shuttle), the problem is much more difficult.

Navigation starts on the launch pad, where engineers know the spacecraft’s location with a high degree of accuracy and load that information into the vehicle’s computer. But how does the spacecraft know where it is once the engines ignite and blast it into and beyond the atmosphere?

A spacecraft’s computer doesn’t just look around and “see” where it is; instead, it uses an inertial navigation system (INS). This typically includes sets of gyroscopes and accelerometers, called Inertial Measurement Units (IMU). An IMU cannot directly measure a vehicle’s location, nor can it measure the vehicle's speed, but it can sense accelerations. During flight, the INS uses (integrates) these accelerations to constantly estimate the vehicle’s new velocity, position, and attitude.

Figure 18: Inertial Measuring Unit (Apollo Lunar Module)

Imagine waking up in a car traveling down a very smooth, quiet highway at a constant speed. If you keep your eyes closed, you not only have no idea where you are, you can’t even tell which way you’re pointed or how fast you’re going. However, if you start from a known location, say your driveway, and are very, very good at sensing acceleration and change of direction (which is also an acceleration), and if you have a good sense of time, you could keep a very rough idea of your position and velocity. (“I’ve accelerated to about 40 mph, driven for ten minutes, then turned left.”) The better you can sense those accelerations and times, the better you can navigate. But of course over time your estimate will get worse.

So it is with an INS. At liftoff, the vehicle has an excellent estimate of its position, velocity, and attitude (known as its state), and the INS can sense acceleration in all three axes, both translational (forward/back, left/right, up/down) and rotational (roll, pitch, yaw). It will integrate these accelerations using its clock and determine its new velocity, then integrate that new velocity to estimate its current position and attitude. And it does this many times a second.

Whew. But as with our fictional car passenger, its estimate gets worse with time. Errors creep in. The platform soon isn’t even sure which way its gyroscopes are pointing, meaning all those integrated accelerations are slightly wrong.

Astronauts can “re-align” the INS gyroscopes by using the star tracker to measure the angles to the stars. But that doesn’t fix the errors already accrued in the vehicle state. That task is one of Mission Control’s most important jobs: the state vector update.

From the moment the vehicle launches, it is tracked by various radars: C-band (skin track), S-band (radar/transponder), satellite (TDRS), etc. These radars send signals to the vehicle and then listen for the response. Depending on the system, they can measure the angles to the target, the time it took the signal to get there and back (range), and the amount the signal has Doppler shifted (range rate). These data tell the tracking station the vehicle’s location in the sky, its distance away, and its relative speed (how fast it’s approaching or separating from the tracking station). By filtering that data, computers can, over time, come up with extremely accurate estimates of the vehicle’s state.

Flight controllers on the ground then compare that filtered state to the onboard state estimate, knowing the filtered state to be more accurate. When the onboard state has diverged by too much, the ground uplinks a new state vector (X, Y, Z, and Vx, Vy, Vz, and time, all relative to some predefined coordinate system) to the vehicle. This is called a state vector update and assures that the vehicle and the ground both agree on the spacecraft’s location and velocity.

The same process is carried out for the target vehicle.

So we’ve finished our state vector update and we know (pretty accurately) the locations of our two vehicles. Now we must predict where they will be in the future, so we can plan all those rendezvous maneuvers we discussed earlier. We can integrate these states forward in our computers, estimating all the forces (and subsequent accelerations) we anticipate they will undergo between maneuvers, and predict where they’ll be in the future. The accuracy of this ephemeris is highly dependent on our ability to model the forces that will act on our two spacecraft during flight.

How hard can that be?

Where am I going?

To this point, we’ve assumed a perfectly uniform, spherical Earth, devoid of atmosphere, Moon, Sun, or any other complications. Now we’re going to complicate matters. A lot.

First let’s consider this tenuous envelope of nitrogen, oxygen, and other gases called an atmosphere. While it’s exceedingly handy for life, it’s exceedingly nasty for trying to predict where objects in LEO will be in the future. As a vehicle plows through the atmosphere, the air molecules slam against its skin, slowing it down. This is true for softballs or space stations. This atmospheric drag is a function of the density of the atmosphere, the area, mass, shape, and orientation of the object traveling through it, and the square of that object’s speed.

Atmospheric density is astonishingly difficult to compute. Many, many different mathematical models of the atmosphere have been advanced through the years, with arcane names like 1962 Standard, Jacchia 1970, Jacchia 1971 (aka CIRA72), NRLMSISE-00, and many others. All of them attempt to create a mathematical model or table that will estimate the density of the atmosphere, pressure, temperature, speed of sound, etc. at a given altitude.

Figure 19: A sample atmosphere table

An atmosphere model may also include location and date, because despite our earlier assumptions, the Earth is not a sphere (more on that later). It’s flattened, bulgy, with bumps and dips, and it’s spinning very fast. All these things effect the shape of the atmosphere. Additionally, the atmosphere changes shape and density with the seasons, even the time of day. On top of that, solar radiation from the Sun (which varies on a roughly eleven-year cycle) excites molecules in the atmosphere. During periods of high sunspot activity, the atmosphere “climbs,” extending its thin tendrils higher into space to clutch at spacecraft flying in low orbit. Atmosphere models attempt to quantify these effects.

Since drag is too tenuous to be sensed by our INS, it has to be modeled, historically in ground computers because of the complexity of the computations. But even though the magnitude of the drag is small, it acts constantly—and it really adds up. For an object in LEO, atmospheric drag can change a vehicle’s predicted location by dozens, even hundreds of miles in a single day! Thus the ongoing need for better atmosphere models.

One complication down.

Which way is up (or down)?

Gravity. We’re all familiar with it, this thing that holds us to Mother Earth and seems to get stronger each year (at least according to my scale). It’s easily measured, and it points straight down. Right?

Wrong on both counts.

In our earlier rendezvous discussion, we assumed the Earth was a sphere. It isn’t. Imagine taking a wad of clay, rolling it into a perfect ball between your hands, then placing it on a table. That’s a spherical Earth.

Now, put your palm on top of the ball and press down slightly, flattening the ball on the top and bottom and bulging it through the middle. That’s an oblate spheroid, and is much closer to the Earth’s shape. (In fact, the Earth is about 23 nautical miles (43 km) smaller in diameter through the poles than across the equator.)

But you aren’t done yet. Take your ball of clay and squeeze it in several other places, creating more, but smaller, bulges. Then add all kinds of dimples and dips to it, and press into it some heavier and lighter beads, so it’s no longer of a uniform density. Starting to get the picture?

The initial equatorial bulge you created is the dominant gravity perturbation that spacecraft encounter. For an equatorial orbit (0° inclination) or a polar orbit (90°), it has virtually no effect. But for the vast majority of low orbits, it’s a problem.

Imagine you’re onboard the ISS, whipping about the Earth at 210 nm (390 km) altitude and an inclination of 51.6°. As you pass the equator heading north, you ascend over the northern hemisphere. Were the Earth spherical, gravity would be straight down. However that equatorial bulge, now off to your right, means there is “more Earth” to your right than to your left! Therefore, gravity is not straight down, but pulling you ever so slightly to the right. When you pass the equator again, heading south, the bulge is now to your left, pulling you slightly in that direction.

Figure 20: Nodal regression from torque produced by Earth's equatorial bulge

If you’ve never played with a gyroscope, you might guess that would change the inclination of the orbit. Nope. When a spinning object is pushed in one direction, it doesn’t tip: gyroscopic forces cause the object to nutate, in this case twisting the orbit around the equator. This is called nodal regression: a “node” being the point of an orbit that crosses the equator (ascending or descending), and “regression” because this equatorial bulge causes the orbit’s node to move to the west (usually), or “regress.”

Figure 21: Nodal regression plot (Credit: Fundamentals of Orbital Dynamics by Bate, Mueller, and White)

Why is this such a problem? Because the amount of nodal regression depends on the inclination and altitude of the orbit. The implications of that statement provide a frightening realization for a novice mission planner: All those different orbits in the rendezvous plan will have different nodal regression rates from that of the ISS!

Is that really a big deal. Yep. Every day, the ISS orbit regresses about six degrees! During a rendezvous mission, this differential nodal regression can induce significant wedge angle errors between the vehicles’ planes.

Thus, the launch window code must drive the launch vehicle not to the ISS orbit plane, but to a “phantom plane” that is different, allowing the cumulative nodal regression in your mission plan to bring the chaser into the ISS orbit plane at the start of terminal phase. Remember that a launch delay changes the entire rendezvous plan, which changes the phasing orbit altitudes, which changes the differential regression, which changes the location of that phantom plane. Etc. etc. etc.

But it gets worse. Equatorial flattening, while the dominant complication, is only one issue. This misshapen ball we inhabit has other weird characteristics that must be modeled, such as zonal harmonics, tesseral harmonics, mass concentrations, and more. A full-up gravity model of the Earth is very complicated.

But unlike the atmosphere models, at least it doesn’t care about the Sun. Well . . .

The Sun’s gravity also impacts an orbiting vehicle. As does the Moon’s. As does solar radiance: the pressure of sunlight on the vehicle—which varies by the time of year and other factors.

But wait, there’s more! Every time our vehicle fires a maneuvering rocket, say to change attitude, it imparts not only a rotational acceleration to our craft, as intended, but also a translational acceleration. And in the name of fairness, the reverse is true: firing translational jets typically imparts rotational acceleration. This effect is called cross coupling and comes from the fact the jets cannot be perfectly aligned along the vehicle’s X,Y, and Z axes as well as pointing through the vehicle’s center of gravity. Besides, the center of gravity itself changes throughout the flight as payloads are deployed, propellant is burned, consumables are vented overboard, etc.

Speaking of consumables: every time we dump urine or waste water overboard, or otherwise “vent” any gases or liquids, more rotational and translational acceleration is imparted to our craft, thanks to Newton’s third law of motion.

The better we can model these effects, the better we can predict the maneuvers and plan (and execute) our rendezvous mission. For example, each orientation of our vehicle produces different drag, like holding your hand out a car window and twisting it. For that reason, Mission Control keeps an attitude timeline (ATL, pronounced “attle”) for their spacecraft: a chart of all expected attitudes throughout the mission, to be used for drag computations. They also maintain a vent timeline (VTL, pronounced “vittle”) so they know when vents or “dumps” will happen—liquids or gases expelled from the vehicle while on-orbit. Since all maneuvers, vents, and dumps change the mass and center of gravity (c.g.) of the vehicle, which then changes the drag and maneuver accelerations, they also keep a “mass properties” table: a chart of the vehicle’s mass and center of gravity for the entire mission.

Figure 22: Sample of shuttle venting events. A timeline of such events (the VTL) is used to improve the accuracy of the vehicle's ephemeris. (Source: Flight Dynamics Console Handbook, NASA)

So, roll all that together: atmosphere model, gravity model, ATL, VTL, mass properties, then combine it with all your estimates of the vehicle itself (engine performances and characteristics, estimated mass at lift-off, etc.), mix in your estimates of state from the onboard instruments or the ground, run it through a high-precision mathematical integrator (another source of error), and you generate your rendezvous timeline.

Repeat as needed, which is constantly.

APPENDIX B: Flight Lessons

As you have learned, rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking are among the most challenging tasks in space flight. It doesn't always go as smoothly as in our imaginary mission—a lesson NASA learned early and often.

Gemini 4: “I didn't have any idea in the world where we were”

NASA needed to master rendezvous and docking to go to the Moon, and Project Gemini was their test-bed. Gemini 4 (GT-4), the second manned Gemini mission, would demonstrate long-duration space flight with the crew, Jim McDivitt and Ed White, spending four days in the cramped capsule. NASA planners, however, decided the mission wasn't ambitious enough.

The Soviets had just performed world's first extravehicular activity (EVA), or “spacewalk.” So late in the mission planning phase for GT-4, NASA planners decided to add a spacewalk to the mission. As if that wasn't challenging enough, mission planners also decided at the last minute to use GT-4 to demonstrate on-orbit station-keeping.

From his home in Arizona, Gen. McDivitt, describes NASA's first attempt at on-orbit proximity operations:

“Towards the end of our training, and I mean really towards the end, they decided to do an EVA. And to make the EVA look like it was doing something, they decided to add [an experiment] to the upper stage of the Titan. I was going to fly over, and Ed was going to run over [using his hand-held maneuvering unit] and recover it, see how it was affected by launch. . . . It was completely ridiculous.”

Figure 23: Ed White's EVA on GT-4, photographed by Jim McDivitt. Note the Hand-Held Maneuvering Unit. (NASA archive photo)

Despite press reports, this was not a rendezvous at all, since the two vehicles went into orbit together. Still, NASA assumed GT-4 would be good practice for learning to fly one vehicle in proximity to another.

They were wrong.

With only a brief time to train for the EVA, and no training at all for station-keeping, McDivitt and White blasted into space atop their Titan II launch vehicle. Upon reaching orbit, the Gemini capsule separated from the Titan upper stage.

The Gemini separated from the Titan and moved away, as planned. The Titan, although no longer thrusting, was still “venting” excess propellant, which caused the stage to move away and begin a slow tumble. By the time McDivitt got the Gemini capsule separated and turned around, the upper stage was much farther away than expected.

“I maneuvered over to it, just as we were going into the dark. So now I'm trying to station keep with a maneuvering vehicle. Another thing they did, they put two strobe lights on the stage. Since one light was on each side, I could see only one flashing strobe light. . . . Nobody in their right mind would fly formation with a strobe light in their eyes! It didn't give me any clues at all, it just blinded me. I don't know why the hell they put that on there.”

Over the next couple of orbits, McDivitt tried closing on the Titan, but with no radar and only a single blinking strobe visible during night passes, the task proved impossible.

“We were close to it a number of times, but it kept maneuvering away. And I couldn't tell how close I was or what kind of closing rate . . . I was on the top, bottom, left, right, behind and in front of that tumbling upper stage.

“Finally, I just broke it off; I didn't want to run into it. It wasn't a vital part of the mission.”

Ken Young, a former NASA manager and rendezvous specialist, worked that flight from Mission Control:

The GT-4 story was always a bitter one to us rendezvous guys since the exercise was NOT about rendezvous, but instead a somewhat feeble (and botched) attempt to get a feel for station-keeping/formation-flying as a leg up on the Apollo [missions].

The whole exercise was literally a last minute (a month or so before flight) secret add-on and, regrettably, the NASA PAO (Public Affairs Office) guys used the term “rendezvous” with the press, and all involved got egg on our face! It wasn't a big deal or significant failure to our group but, of course, the press played it up as one.

In their crew debriefing immediately after the flight, commander McDivitt and pilot Ed White described their frustrations:

McDivitt: I watched it, and it looked like it wasn't going away from us any more. . . It was in the window and I could see it. The booster started falling again, descending below us. It actually went out of my view in the window. At the time, though, our relative velocities were quite small . . . So, I allowed myself about another minute and I pitched down and looked for it. It appeared that during that minute it had gone a lot farther down than I had expected it to go.

White: Yes, I was surprised. Remember that it looked like the orbit was surely something different than we predicted.

McDivitt: Yes. It looked to me like the booster and the spacecraft weren't in anything that even resembled the same orbit.

Before McDivitt could fly back to the venting upper stage, the two spacecraft entered the night side of the Earth, plunging them in darkness. With only a single, flashing strobe light for guidance, McDivitt attempted to close on the Titan.

McDivitt: I didn't have any idea in the world where we were. . . . Finally, we could see the sky starting to get a little gray, and I thought at least we were going to get to see where the thing was. And all of a sudden the booster came out, just like that, and you could see it. The lights disappeared and there was the booster. It was two or three miles away, I'll bet.

Running low on propellant (this was only the beginning of a four-day mission), McDivitt tried once more to close on the Titan.

McDivitt: So I aimed behind it, so to speak, and down, and I thrusted that way trying to get enough closing velocity . . . we just didn't gain on it . . . I just absolutely could not get down to the booster. It kept pulling away and pulling away until the time we got to Hawaii.

White: You were putting a lot of delta-V in there, and we just weren't doing anything. We just weren't making any headway.

McDivitt: [T]he only thing we could do would be to leave the booster. The fuel was down to around 75 percent on my gauge. . . . So I made up my mind then that it looked like a hopeless task and that we had better stop this stuff or we were going to lose all the fuel for the whole mission.

The post-flight analysis took months. Back in Houston, Jerome (Jerry) Bell was tasked with the unenviable job of figuring out what had gone wrong. He explains:

The post flight [analysis] was started in real-time immediately after the termination of the station keeping. Management and PAO needed something to give to the media and [the analysis] was going on in parallel with the flight and beyond. We had to take hundreds of pulses and try to model them as best we could. . . I think we stopped after inputting 92 small maneuvers. . . . [The analysis] continued for months, and everything was classified confidential.

Ken Young agrees:

One of our guys, Jerry Bell (who wasn't “in the know” pre-flight), was given the impossible task of post-flight analysis on what went wrong. Bell spent an agonizing six months or so running dozens of scenarios and relative motion plots. A thankless job, for sure.

NASA had learned an important lesson. Station-keeping in space was not as simple as flying jets in formation. Future crews would need to be well versed in the nuances of orbital mechanics before strapping into their seats.

A list of rendezvous flights from Gemini and Apollo show that the lessons took a long time to master.

Table 1: Gemini and Apollo rendezvous missions

STS-41C: “It’s what we should have done in the first place”

Even two decades later, proximity operations continued to surprise NASA.

On STS-41C, the very first space shuttle rendezvous flight, the orbiter Challenger was to rendezvous with the Solar Max satellite, a spacecraft launched in 1980 to study the Sun. The gyroscopes that stabilized the craft had failed, and NASA saw this as an opportunity to show off their new shuttle’s on-orbit repair capability.

According to the mission plan, shuttle commander Bob Crippen would rendezvous with Solar Max. Payload specialist George “Pinky” Nelson would then do an EVA and strap into the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), a powered backpack that would enable him to fly over to the tumbling satellite. Nelson would then use a custom-built device to grab hold of the satellite and use his backpack to stabilize it. He would then return to the shuttle, Crippen would fly over to Solar Max, and another astronaut, Terry Hart, would grab it with the shuttle’s arm. After stowing it in the payload bay, astronauts would perform another spacewalk to replace the malfunctioning gyroscopes, then return Solar Max to orbit to complete its mission.

According to Crippen, the rendezvous phase went perfectly. “Perfect. Just like clockwork.” He adds with a laugh, “[That’s] always amazing when you’re doing something for the first time.”

But the good fortune didn’t continue. When Nelson arrived at Solar Max, he discovered his special docking device wouldn’t latch onto the satellite. Nelson tried several times, each attempt bumping the spacecraft and imparting additional rotation and translation to it. Solar Max began tumbling faster. Nelson even tried grabbing it with his hand and stabilizing it, but to no avail. Finally, the rescue attempt was aborted. Nelson returned to the orbiter and Crippen tried to maneuver Challenger close enough for Hart to grab the spinning satellite with the arm. “I approached the satellite and Terry Hart had the arm ready, but it was tumbling too bad.”

By now, Challenger was dangerously low on maneuvering propellant, particularly in the forward RCS tanks.

“While it was wildly rotating, I definitely burned up more propellant in the forward RCS than I should have. But I didn’t know if there was another method of getting [Solar Max] in. . . . I thought if we didn’t get it, it was lost.” A problem with the shuttle’s digital autopilot (DAP) also led to additional propellant use: every time the orbiter fired jets to maintain attitude, cross-coupling effects pushed the shuttle closer to Solar Max, requiring Crippen to maneuver away. “It tended to ‘walk in’ toward the satellite, so you ended up almost continually popping the jets to stay away from it.”

Mission Control aborted the attempt, and Crippen moved Challenger to a stand-off position for a second-day attempt, something NASA had not foreseen nor rehearsed. Overnight, Solar Max mission controllers were able to stabilize the satellite enough to attempt another approach, and Houston mission control computed a new rendezvous. The next day, low on forward RCS, Crippen re-rendezvoused with Solar Max.

Terry Hart was able to grab the Solar Max with the arm, move it into the bay, and the rest of the repair mission went off as planned.

“It’s what we should have done in the first place, and not used the MMU,” Crippen says, chuckling.

Sometimes, the simplest plan is the best, even at NASA.

Figure 24: Job well done. STS-41C crew celebrate capture of Solar Max

Glossary

Ascending node: The intersection of a vehicle’s orbital plane with the Earth’s equatorial plane, with orbital motion in a northward (versus southward or “descending”) direction.

Cross coupling: The translation motion caused by a rotational jet firing (and vice versa) caused by misalignment of the maneuvering jets to the vehicle’s body axes and center of gravity.

Delta-V: Change in velocity, caused by maneuvers or forces acting on the vehicle.

Digital Auto Pilot (DAP): Software programs that interpret maneuver requests, such as attitude hold or station-keeping, and generate jet firings to satisfy those requests.

Doppler shift: The compression or stretching of an electromagnetic signal’s wavelength caused by motion toward or away from the observer.

Ephemeris: Essentially, a huge table predicting the positions, velocities, and other data of an object in orbit.

Equatorial orbit: An orbit around the equator, with 0° inclination.

Flight Dynamics Officer (FDO, “Fido”): The front-room Mission Control position responsible for the vehicle’s trajectory, from tower clear until landing and rollout. This includes all rendezvous maneuvers.

Geosynchronous orbit: An orbit with a period of 24 hours. If it is also a circular orbit at 0° inclination, the spacecraft remains fixed over the same spot on the Earth (geostationary orbit). Primarily used for communications satellites.

Inclination: The angle of a satellite’s orbital plane to the Earth’s equator.

Inertial coordinate system: A non-rotating, essentially fixed (relative to the stars) coordinate system with origin at the center of the Earth.

Figure 25: M50 Inertial coordinate system

(Source: Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Design Reference for the International Space Station)

Inertial Navigation System (INS): Avionics hardware used to calculate estimates of a vehicle’s state (position, velocity, attitude) relative to an inertial coordinate system.

Integrate: Computing the future state of a vehicle given its current state and estimates of future forces acting upon it.

Kalman filter: A mathematical algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time to estimate other variables that can’t be directly measured, or cannot be measured accurately.

Launch azimuth: The angle of a vehicle’s launch groundtrack, relative to due east.

Launch window: The time period on launch day during which a vehicle must launch to meet its mission objectives.

Launch window planar pane: The limitation on the launch window caused by the Earth’s rotation and limited by a vehicle’s ascent performance.

Launch window phase pane: The limitation on the launch window caused by rendezvous constraints, such as lighting, communication coverage, or crew work day limits.

Lighting constraints: Limitations imposed by Sun angle. Can impact launch, aborts, landing, on-orbit rendezvous, or approach and docking.

Margin: A vehicle’s capability beyond the minimum required to meet mission requirements, such as extra propellant, payload, time, etc.

Nautical mile: 6076.1155 feet or 1.875 km, approximately one minute of latitude.

Nodal regression: The westward (or eastward) rotation of a satellite’s orbital plane, caused primarily by the oblateness of the Earth.

Nominal: Normal or expected.

Oblateness (Earth): The flattening of the Earth, caused by our planet’s rotation and resulting in a “bulge” around the equator.

Orbital period: The time it takes for one object to complete an orbit around another. In low Earth orbit, this is on the order of ninety minutes.

Phantom plane: The targeted insertion plane for the chaser vehicle which will result in minimal wedge angle difference at rendezvous.

Phase angle: The angle between the chaser and target vehicle, typically measured in the target vehicle’s orbital plane.

Phasing orbit: A chaser vehicle’s orbit, usually at a lower altitude (energy) from the target, causing it to approach the target over time.

Plume impingement: The impact of exhaust gases upon another object.

Range and range rate: The straight-line distance to an object and the rate at which that range is changing.

Relative coordinate system: An orthogonal, rotating coordinate system centered at one vehicle (usually the target) with the Z-axis pointing to the center of the Earth, Y-axis along the satellite’s angular momentum vector, and X-axis perpendicular to both, with positive in the direction of orbital travel. For a circular orbit, X is along the velocity vector. Also called an LVLH (local vertical, local horizontal) coordinate system.

Figure 26: Relative coordinate system

(Source: Rendezvous and Proximity Operations Design Reference for the International Space Station)

Relative navigation system: Hardware, such as rendezvous radars or star trackers, used to measure angles, distances, velocities, or attitudes of one vehicle relative to another.

Rendezvous profile: A series of maneuvers designed to bring a vehicle from orbital insertion to the near-proximity of another spacecraft already in orbit.

Rendezvous radar: An active radar system (Ku-band on the shuttle) that determines range and range-rate to the target vehicle. The ISS had no transponder onboard, so this was entirely done by “skin tracking.”

Star tracker: An optical device for keeping an inertial navigation system properly aligned by measuring the positions of stars. Can also be used to track other objects in orbit.

State vector: A set of information describing the position, velocity, and attitude (and possibly rates) of a vehicle at a specific time.

State vector update: A new, more accurate state vector uplinked from the ground to improve the onboard estimate of a vehicle’s state.

Wedge angle: The angle between two orbital planes. A combination of the differences in inclination and ascending node location.

Yaw steering: A technique used during ascent to steer the launch vehicle to the east or west in order to get it into the proper phantom plane.

Zonal and tesseral harmonics: Higher-order effects of the Earth’s non-spherical shape, which perturb the motion of vehicles in orbit.

Training for War, Part VI

by Tom Kratman

Collective Training

There are a number of different approaches one can take to collective training. If I had to characterize the American technique, I would say we use the building block approach, heavy on repetition. By “building block approach” I mean we train on, say, assembly area procedures as an independent item, as we may train on conduct of a vehicular movement along a road as an independent item, and as we may train on bounding overwatch or react to near ambush or assault as independent items. To a considerable extent, drill is the mortar that holds those building blocks together.

I am unconvinced that this is the best way to do it. The reader may take that as meaning, “I am fully convinced that this is not the best way to do it.” In the first place, review those filters I gave for drills. Again, most things we train on as drills ought not be done as drills. This makes for a very weak mortar, heavy on the sand. Secondly, this approach really doesn’t grab the troops’ attention, their hearts and minds. “Boo hoo…so we missed X in the assembly area? So what?” Thirdly, this approach, being mostly performance measure oriented, tends to lack quality control. “Yes, you did Z. How well did you do it and how do you know? Oh, someone checked he blocks for performance measures, did they?”

Instead, I offer the following as a better alternative to the building block approach.

A Mission Essential Task List (METL) for a Mechanized Infantry Company or Battalion

1. Conduct Movement to Contact culminating in a Hasty Attack / Meeting Engagement

2. Conduct Movement to Contact culminating in a Hasty Defense

3. Conduct Airmobile Raid

4. Conduct Deliberate Attack

5. Attack on Urbanized Terrain

6. Defend on Urbanized Terrain

7. Defend Battle Position

8. Delay in Sector (Company and Battalion) / conduct anti-armor ambush (Platoon and Squad)

9. Conduct Recon Patrol (Squad and Platoon task, with implications for higher)

10. Conduct Ambush Patrol (Squad and Platoon task, ditto)

Provisos:

1. Every building block-like step in the ARTEP can be included in these mission essential tasks, and will be qualified and verified by whether the unit succeeds in meeting the standards (not performance measures) for the tasks. Assembly area procedures and troop leading procedures? They’re in every mission. Road marches? They’re in almost every mission. Reaction to X or Y or Z? That’s up to you to include in the conditions for whatever missions you see fit to include them in.

2. The number ten is key, because of the way the troops – leaders, too, usually – think. “Ah, we can do everything but the airmobile raid so we’re about ninety percent combat capable, which is not bad.” The number ten is also sufficient to give just about every imaginable set of conditions and enough variance in missions to develop problem solving ability for problems involving the use of force to overcome force.

3. Trick of the trade: it is usually very difficult to come up with enough opposing force to make a recon patrol a real challenge. Try this: As part of a competitive exercise, start the troops – we’ll assume nine squads – in a circle with about a kilometer or kilometer of so between each of them, a roughly ten kilometer circle, in other words. Hmmm…go ahead and draw that rough circle on a piece of paper and label the positions for squads 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Imagine that 1 is at the top, or north. Now find the center of the circle. Now emplace a recon objective, maybe it’s the battalion mortar platoon, due south, about one third of the distance between the center and the circle. That is the objective for squads at points 1, 2, and 3. Now go around one hundred and twenty degree and emplace another recon objective, maybe a mess tent. That is the objective for squads beginning at points 4, 5, and 6. Do the same for 7, 8, and 9, with perhaps a headquarters tent with much radio traffic noise. Note that because of the way the thing is set up, squads starting at 1,2, and 3 must pass through – or fight through – six other squads, near the center of the circle, to get their information, and are very likely to run into two more close to the objective. Again, if part of a competitive exercise, this will make for a tough, tough, tough recon patrol. Randomize the starting positions for the squads.

4. Helicopters are expensive to use, hence often hard to come by for training for a mech unit. A raid is a difficult mission, indeed one of the most difficult. To me it makes a certain sense to use this hard to get asset under the most difficult circumstances, to get the maximum feasible training benefit.

5. Surprise is a hard thing to simulate in peacetime training. Yet taking advantage of surprise, and working to achieve it, is very important in war. Still, time counts. Like those ambushes Hamilton’s squad had to walk through, if he hadn’t known they were there he’d never have been certain to walk through them, which would have made the exercise a waste of time for the ambushing units. In that kind of case, it’s sufficient to tell the troops walking into the ambush, “Pretend you don’t know they’re there until they either open fire or you actually hear something suspicious.” For things, though, missions like raids, where surprise is key and the defending force, if ready, can basically stomp the raiding party in a way they couldn’t in war, you have to go a step further. One approach that can work is to put the defending troops in their sleeping bags, dressed and with boots but with their equipment off. When they think they hear something they can alert and move to their defensive positions as soon as they have their equipment on and in hand. If they alert falsely, they go back to their sleeping bags, with their boots off. That means that when they alert, they’ve got to get their boots on before moving. If they alert falsely again, off come the uniforms. This also serves to train the raiding force to move fast once the enemy knows they’re there.

6. The other principles of war: Mass, Objective, Security, Maneuver, Offensive, Unity of Command, Simplicity, and Economy of Force, also should be drivers of your training. While you’re at it, add in my modifications: Attrition, Annihilation, and Shape.

7. Any of those missions can, with imagination and even a modest degree of moral courage, be trained as live fire exercises.

8. The US Army tends to emphasize maximum fill of supply at all times. This made a certain sense in front line spots like West Germany and Korea, where moving to one’s battle positions on short notice was more important than training for tough times. In the states, however, or Germany now (not Korea), though, keeping the fuel tanks constantly full is conditioning for the easiest circumstances, logistic plenty. It would be better, as conditions for the tasks in the above METL, to drain the tanks and restrict the amount of fuel the S-4 (supply officer and section/ supply and transport platoon fuel section) has to give out to no more than the minimum needed for the next mission. That, rather than conditioning the troops to fill tanks, conditions them to conserve, and to plan, and not to waste.

9. History is also a grand driver for setting up exercises. Read Infantry in Battle, What Now Lt? (the 9th Division one, not the Robert Babcock book…if you can find a copy. I have one; so does the War College. That may be it), or Make Every Shot Count (though I have some issues with that). The Center for Military History is replete with free publications that are useful reading for a soldier, and also useful for setting up problems.

10. There is a temptation, almost insuperable, given the expense of first class training, to squeeze every little plus and minus out in the after action review, or AAR. DO NOT BOTHER. The troops will learn what they learn from what they experience in an exercise. They will listen to about three each plusses and minuses, after which it all is either tuned out or lost in the noise. Keep your AARs short and sweet, tell them whether they met the stands and if not, why not, and limit yourself to three of each, up and down.

11. There is a strong prejudice against last minute changes to the training schedule. Most of that prejudice is residual, from the days that the post-Vietnam era ruin of an Army simply could not plan and keep to a training schedule. That is still something to be wary of, and changes ought never be permitted due to – people ought to be fired over – simple laziness and inability to plan and supervise. That said, there is one excellent reason to change the training schedule even at the very last minute and, rather than being blameworthy, it is highly praiseworthy. Try this: every day, contact Range Control to see who has cancelled X range for the following day (or even, if you are very good, and your command is, that very day). Why? Because the odds are very good indeed that it isn’t just a range or training area that’s not going to be used, but ammunition, too. And, as the unit that has cancelled is not going to want to lose their ammunition allocation for next year; they will probably be willing to just give it to you. You might be surprised how often you can do a night ambush, or a movement to contact live fire, with ammunition someone else ordered but cannot use.

12. I’ve recently become aware that the Army, which used to have a great many useful subcaliber devices and simulators to simulate major rounds of ammunition at a fraction of the cost, now has few or none. Puff Boards? The last one was turned in from Fort Benning about six years ago. Where once there were pneumatic firing devices for mortars, which cost nearly nothing to use, now there are collections of unserviceable parts and questions: “Hey, anyone know what this was for?” There used to be 14.5 mm for artillery and 22mm inserts for dummy sabot rounds for mortars, now those are gone. Gentlemen, ladies: Austere times are coming; indeed, they’re already here. Get those sub cal devices back in operation. Order new ones. That said, sub cals can be made a lot better by following this procedure: ind an open sandy area for the subcal impact area. Build a bunker at one edge of it. Make sure the bunker cannot see anything full size. Reduce the viewport as necessary so it can’t. Dig a trench to the bunker, that turns into a crawl tunnel near the end. The objective is to get the troop to lose track of full scale, so that when he looks through the firing / vision port of the bunker it all looks normal. Treat the open area as a big sand table. Put in hills, dunes, streams, lakes, buildings, roads. Make a map, with grid system. Add toy tanks and troops. Even if you don’t have sub caliber ammunition to use, get your best pitcher, with grenade simulators, to toss them at the grid the FO sends. Have an FDC verify the data for different types of calls for fire.

13. Training is a matter of life and death. There is no such thing as “good enough.” There is only, “as good as we can be given the time and resources.” And if you are good enough in a task, meeting the standards? Toughen the conditions. And if you are good enough and the conditions are tough? Move on to the next task.

Collective Live Fire Training

By live fire I do not mean knocking down targets on an administrative qualification range somewhere. Something is not a live fire merely because of the use of live ammunition. By live fire I mean the execution of those METL tasks, above, or other, similar tasks, with targets substituting for a live enemy (though they ought to act fairly alive) and the unit doing all those things it would do in war against a live enemy.

Live firing is, potentially, the most valuable training we can give people. There we can train skills: Shooting, moving, communicating, planning, giving orders, supervising. We can condition people against fear to some extent because, properly done, there's a heightened element of risk. We can develop their problem solving ability in problems involving the use of force to overcome force. We can test our equipment and doctrine under conditions most closely approaching war. And we can select for leadership and elimination from service, in part because of the heightened risk.

Sadly, live firing in the Army or Marines can be, and typically is, the worst, the most counterproductive, training on offer.

Why? Well how about that walk-crawl-run thing? You know, the one where leaders, rather than developing their own order, are issued their order. You know, the one where the troops go through a flat open range, with maybe a few piles of logs and low berms, about seven times going, “bang…bang…bang.” You know, the one where they then do it three more times with blanks. After which, maybe, that is to say if the man responsible for the range is totally convinced that all training benefit has been eliminated, that every possible value has been sucked from it, they do it with live ammunition.

We call it, “Walk-Crawl-Run,” but, in fact, from start to finish, the troops never are running. At that last rendition they’re still crawling; they’re just doing it on a moving sidewalk.

And what have we done, by this? We’ve conditioned the troops, utterly convinced them, that they and their leaders just aren't competent to fight.

There is a place for this: ONCE. The very first time. Ever. Or if a unit has had nearly one hundred percent turnover since the last one, which really ought never be allowed to happen. But after that, having shown how to do it, to keep on with the travesty has nothing but bad effects.

For that matter on site rehearsals generally suck most of the value from training. We justify this because the enemy, being gentlemen, always let us rehearse on his ground. Or something. Or how about giving the leader or commander the plan, rather than letting him develop his own from higher's plan…because he's just not competent...and never will be, since you won't let him even try.

My advice then is do it like war, or don't do it at all.

Doing it like war also means not establishing a second chain of command, called “safeties.” Why not? Because they are responsible. Being responsible they will take charge. They will give orders. There is little more dangerous than a troop on a live fire exercise getting orders from both his immediate leader and this other person who has taken charge of him. It confuses him. Confused troops do dumb things.

Get that? Having safeties, establishing a separate safety chain of command, is inherently unsafe.

So how do we do it?

First, do not establish that second chain of command. Do, however, task your evaluators to watch out for danger. Tell them that the only command they are permitted to give to the troops going through the exercise is a complete halt for everyone. “Stop! Cease Fire! Lock and clear!” Period.

VIII

If everything were to be discountenanced in

peace by which an accident might possibly occur,

soldiers would be greatly sinned against, since they

would be enfeebled and rendered inept for war, the

chances of losses being doubled at the same time.

—Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz,

The Nation in Arms

Axiom Thirteen: Safety is a combat multiplier; all the best safety publications, regulations, and bureaucrats say so. The problem is that it’s often – in practice it’s usually – a multiplier with a value of less than one.

A little less than half of our day is spent at night, or in other forms of limited visibility. Night has been the aide of the outmatched for millennia. Failure to be prepared to fight at night destroyed the Athenian expedition against Syracuse. And even if the more powerful party, as long as your enemy may resort to operating at night, you must be able to meet him.

Despite this, in a repetitive show of absolutely cutting edge, world class moral cowardice and unfitness for office, some years ago a succession of commanders taking their units through the National Training Center, at Fort Irwin, decided against doing a night attack, because of the risk assessment. This lasted for about two years to my knowledge; it may have gone on longer.

Just think about the short-sightedness, careerist selfishness, poor judgment, and moral cowardice implicit in that. Then ask yourself just what the hell we select for in promoting senior officers.

Vignette Fourteen: Don't forget about luck, good and bad

The CG who made the old 193rd Infantry Brigade, in Panama, unusually nuts – it had, though, always been a little strange – was named Leuer. Leuer’s contribution to safety was to require all the officers to put red dots on their watch faces: “Time Out For Safety.” If he was serious about it, none of us believed it. It was the kind of place where, if someone was shot on a live fire range, you didn’t stop training but just called in a “Dustoff” and kept going. Yes, really.

Most lieutenants simply stopped wearing a watch, in rebellion at what they saw as hypocrisy. They had no problem with the risks, mind you, only with the pretense that anyone cared about the risk.

After Leuer left he was replaced by Woerner. Woerner didn't really seem to fully understand what the 193rd was when he took over, so we got progressively nuttier and nuttier, which is to say progressively more disdainful of anything that so much as smacked of safety, without his understanding or realization of what was going on more or less behind his back.

So, one week, one of the platoon leaders in the company Hamilton was XO for ordered a metric buttload of demolitions, the study of which said platoon leader had taken as an elective, so it was said, at West Point. He trained the company on the classroom part, with heavy emphasis on Factor P, for Plenty. Then the company went to a place not all that far from Range 12, which was an abandoned major ammunition supply point. The commander sent Hamilton along to keep the platoon leader from doing anything too outrageous.

The only helmet on the range was Hamilton’s, under the theory that the most probable cause for a fatality (this was perhaps optimistic) would be a hangfire of sorts that went off while someone was checking out why the explosive failed to go boom, after the regulatory wait. Since Hamilton was the senior officer present, that was going to be him. Worst come to worst, he didn't want anyone to have to fill out any paperwork having to explain why his disembodied head wasn't in a helmet. The one vehicle was his M151 jeep, or given local pronunciation, “heap.”

After blowing up some small shit, the next event was to try to send a rather large tree into orbit. They started by using a shaped charge to blow a hole into the Earth underneath the tree. Then they start packing. In went one hundred and sixty-eight sticks of military dynamite. That was followed up with a couple of forty pounder cratering charges. Okay, maybe it was four or five. In went some TNT. Okay, it was a lot of TNT. Then they added a leetle touch of C4, for ambience. And they were ready to go.

Hamilton looked at his jeep. He looked at the base of the tree. This is a big tree, an easy twelve feet across, maybe even fifteen. It’s a big-assed tree, in any case. Hamilton looks up and up. Tall tree. Really tall. He told the platoon leader, "Hold up a minute," then – anticipating a nasty survey should the jeep be damaged – he told his driver to drive about four hundred meters away and listen for screams.

Then he told the platoon leader, “Okay, go ahead.”

Remember, his was the only helmet for miles.

With a beatific smile, the platoon leader squeezes the blasting machine and touches off the tree, which starts to rise. And rise. And rise. Actually, it looks like a leafy Saturn V heading for space. It’s really beautiful and, fortunately, when it stops rising and starts to fall it falls in the other direction.

Unfortunately, tons and tons of dirt and, oh, yes, rock come down. Miraculously, nobody gets hit or, at least, not seriously hit. There are, go figure, a few bruises here and there. Of injuries, though, that’s it. But about a quarter ton boulder lands not all that far from Hamilton, exactly where his jeep had been parked. No, not a few feet either way. Had he not had it moved, his driver would have been squashed like a bug.

Now, one can take several lessons from that. One is that it was incredibly stupid, from start to finish. It was. The second is that luck plays a tremendous role in human affairs. It does. And the third lesson was that Hamilton was never again, not even once, to be cavalier with any demo above the one pound level. Never.

Vignette Fifteen: Don't forget about luck, bad and good

It was SOP in Hamilton’s unit, the one he served as an Exec for, that Claymore mines, safety regs be damned, could be set off perfect well a meter or so in front of the firer, provided that sandbags – two or three or sometimes four of them, for the timid – were placed behind them to absorb the blast and the plastic fragments.

So the company is giving a demonstration of daisy chaining Claymores, linking them with det cord to set them all off, simultaneously with a single detonator, or “clacker.” There are targets set up along a berm a hundred meters or so from the bleachers whence the troops watch. There are also sandbags behind the claymores, which are perhaps fifty meters from the berm.

Along comes another officer, formerly of the same battalion but now, sadly, contaminated by Fort Sherman’s unrighteous ways.

“No, no, no. There’ll be none of that daisy chaining here,” insists he. “Move those Claymores to the other side of the berm.

Well, after some fruitless argument – fruitless because this defector of an officer owned the range – Hamilton gave in…with indefinable misgivings. So the whole bloody assembly was disassembled and the Claymores and sandbags were moved to the other side of the berm\, with the targets being moved further downrange still. Then they were set off.

Now you have to picture this; for the first time in memory this company is actually doing something like following the rules. And, because they did, when the backblast, which is only limited, not eliminated, by the sandbags, picks up a stout rock, which it drives back against the earthen berm, turning said berm into a launch rail.

Up, up and away, goes the rock. Down, down, down, comes the rock. Right onto the knee of a medic, sitting the bleachers, watching the demonstration. Smash! Ouch! “Medic!”

So much for following the rules.

Vignette Sixteen: You want me to do what?

“I want a rolling barrage preceding the troops up the final objective.”

“Whew,” said Lieutenant Hamilton, “that’s a pretty tall order, boss.”

“Yeah, well, figure it out.”

“Yes, sir.” Crap! How do I do this?

In the event, what Hamilton did was think about the attributes of the systems available – 105mm M102 howitzers, 107mm heavy rifled mortars, and 81mm smoothbore mortars – to do what his battalion commander wanted, to walk a rolling barrage in front of the assault line.

Right off he tossed out the 81mm mortars. They were just not accurate enough. Being finned they were subject to derangement by winds. And quality control at the factory was probably not everything one might have wanted.

The 107mm rifled mortars were better. Within their range, on a windless day, they were about as accurate as a 105, though their trajectory was usually high enough that winds, if present, could move them around a little.

And then there were the 105s.

For the latter there were four attributes of importance, though it took some thought to identify them. The guns had lesser deviation error than range error. They could fire shells on delay fuse. They could be pre-fired, which is to say, pre-registered. They could use meteorological data to correct for any changes after they were registered. Most of this was also true of the 107mm mortars.

Right off, Hamilton made several decisions. One was that the mortars and the 105mm howitzers would set up to fire at right angles to the anticipated assault line, so that any deviation would move the guns right or left, as the troops faced, but not long or short, into their ranks. Moreover, the mortars would only fire on the final objective. The third requirement was that every round to be fired would be pre-registered. Fourth was that all guns would fire with delay fuse, which was tactically sound, even more visually impressive to the troops, and much, much safer.

In the event, it worked well. At a certain point in the exercise, the infantry company commanders going through the live fire would receive authority to fire the rolling barrage. They’d call for it and the guns would go through their dance, dropping rounds seventy-five to about one hundred and fifty meters ahead of the line. The delayed explosions lofted great quantities of dirt and rock skyward. The troops were impressed and the artillerymen had to be sent to the hospital to have their erections surgically reduced. Okay, I’m lying about the last part. But not by much.

Vignette Seventeen: Opportunity knocks but once

“Hey, sir, what do you want me to do with this?”

“This” was a dud 4.2 inch mortar round, held in the sergeant’s hands, that he’d carried from the half completed fighting position where it been uncovered, fortunately without going off. Hamilton nearly wets himself. You don’t, you just don’t, mess with duds.

Thinking, Oh, fuck, Hamilton turns the sergeant around and begins to guide him closer to the impact area to the north. It’s not far.

Says he, “Let's just put it on the other side of the lip of the OP line, shall we?" He then walks the sergeant, arm around the sergeant’s shoulder, to where he wants the round put down…gently.

Gay? Not at all. Hamilton just needed to make sure that a) the sergeant didn’t fall and b) that if the round went off – 4.2 inch was a little deadlier than a 105mm shell – he would not survive the experience. In any event, they did get it placed back on the ground ten or twelve feet down from the lip.

Then, thinks Hamilton, Aha, training opportunity. He tells the sergeant, “Go take apart one of those claymores and prime this thing for demolition.” Then he has the unit – actually two companies, training together – line up south of the lip, such that there was probably thirty or forty meters of dirt between them and the round. Nothing with any velocity can go to them directly, and anything that goes up, with come down with only terminal velocity, if that.

"Okay boys; heads down! This is what incoming feels like!" KAABOOOOMMM!

Appendix 1

Things we are not, never have been, and hopefully never will be serious about:

1. We have to be ready to go to war tomorrow!

Oh, really? Let me tell you what life would be like for an army totally dedicated to going to war tomorrow. Every CO would call the troops in, every day, at somewhere between midnight and 0230. They would then load all the vehicles, check shot records, run the boys (oh, and girls, too, of course) through JAG, etc. Ammunition would be taken from the bunkers, broken down and distributed (and then the clever and thoughtful commander would start the paperwork for the survey for the ammunition damaged).

Then, while waiting for flights to be arranged and ships and flat cars to show up, they’d send everyone home for one last chance at a little woopie with Mama (or Papa, I suppose). There would be no training to get better for going to war, someday, because, by God, the number one thing to do is to be ready to GO – that is the operative word, “Go,” not win, but “Go” – to war tomorrow.

Of course, we don’t do that. Nobody does. Nobody ever has. Nobody ever should. Everyone knows it’s silly and so pays it little more than lip service. Instead the “going” part is just one more mission, and often shunted to a low priority to allow time to train to win the fight once we get there.

Besides, jumping through our butts and improvising are among our greatest strengths.

2. It is completely impermissible and doubleplusungood ever to get a soldier injured or killed in training.

Again, oh really? Let me tell you what an Army would look like that never got a soldier killed or hurt in training. It would stay in the barracks. All training would be done on simulators…heavily cushioned simulators. The troops would never be allowed to take their weapons from the arms room. Foot marches and other physical training would be strictly forbidden, lest somebody have a heart attack. Parachute jumps for parachute units? “No, nay, never!”

Instead, we know everything we do carries risk and we accept that, even as senior cowards and frauds dishonestly pander to “enlightened” sentiment and say, “It is completely impermissible…”

We can’t say how many senior non-coms are going to have heart attacks on foot marches under heavy loads, but we know someone will. We can’t predict when a tank will catch fire, the fire suppression system fail, and a driver, trapped inside, will burn alive. But it has happened before and probably will again. We can’t say when the jump masters will screw up, put two people out opposite doors at the same time, and have those two jumpers smash into each other, before falling to their deaths. But that, too, has happened and, given an infinity of time and sufficient jumps, it will happen again. Or something just as bad will. Or an unpredictable wind will spring up and drag several troops to their deaths. Or dump them in trees, where one will hang and another be impaled. We can’t say when a track will drive off a bridge into the water, drowning the crew. But, boys and girls, it’s going to happen.

I would further suggest that anyone who mouths the platitude opening this section, or any variant thereto, has thereby demonstrated dishonesty and morale cowardice sufficient to select them out of the armed forces. At the very least it should be a bar to promotion or selection for command.

3. Every Marine a rifleman.

A rifleman as someone who can shoot with a reasonable expectation of hitting a target, within the rifle’s effective range, where no one’s shooting back? Sure, this much of a rifleman the Marines can produce. So could the Army – so could the Andorran Army, if they had an army – if it chose to. But a rifleman actually morally and emotionally integrated into a unit capable of closing with and destroying the enemy, or repelling his assault by fire, close combat, and counterattack? One doubts. In fact, one rolls on the floor laughing. Oh, sure, there’s always the individual exception. Counting on individual exceptions is right up there with confusing hope and a plan.

This doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthwhile to try to keep a combat mentality among one’s service support types. It is definitely worthwhile. What it means is, as the Sphinx told the Aussie, “Don’t expect too much.”

Appendix 2: Build your own targets

Training doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, stop in the theater of war. Rest is needed, of course, or the troops begin to morally and mentally disintegrate, but the biggest and most important rest troops pulled out of the line get is relief from danger and the stress danger brings. It is in those rests that new troops are best integrated, and best integrated by hard training with the old troops.

I’m not a huge fan of electronic targets. They have their place, but they also have certain disadvantages, expense, the need to be dug in from direct fire, unreliability, ease of hitting , and – because they’re so easy to hit, unrealistic zombie-like behavior. They just won’t stay down. They’re also going to be about last priority for shipment to the theater of war.

Remote control electronic targets are also not necessary to conduct live fire training. And, since we do in war what we practice in peace, it is rather important that the troops learn how to build and use their own in peacetime, so they can do it from available materials in war.

For the following you are, or anyone tasked to pull targets is, anywhere from twenty or thirty to thirteen hundred and thirty feet (one four hundred meter roll of commo wire) from the target. The troops about to attack the objective which includes the targets are all around you. The box - which is, say, about 18"L by 30"W x 6"D is, at rest, closed. (The size isn’t key, experiment a little.) The hinges are towards you, as is the base of the target. The head of the target is away from you.

1. The basic live fire target begins with an e-type silhouette, or any other roughly man-shaped, lightweight but sturdy target. Cut a round hole inside the target, center of mass, four to six inches in diameter. Make sure the sides of the hole are fairly smooth.

2. Take a wooden ammunition box with a hinged cover. Almost any box will do, though I’ve always preferred mortar ammunition boxes. Nail the silhouette to the box cover, with the bottom of the target nearest the hinges. You may need to put strips of wood over the target before driving the nails, to distribute the stress on the target.

3. Put a nail in the box’s lid, on the edge away from the hinges, and another in the base of the box, also away from the hinges. Connect with cord to keep the target from being pulled all the way forward, to where it won’t fall back again.

4. Drive a nail into the lid of the box, between the hinges. The nail is just in the lid, but not interfering with anything else. It provides a point of attachment for the stick, below, such that when you pull on the commo wire, the stick stands up, which then provides that roughly forty-five degree angle to lift the sandbag, hence lift the target, without overstressing the balloon.

5. Take a fifteen to eighteen inch stick and drill a hole in one end, from side to side. Run string through the hole, and affix to the nail in 3, above. This stick is for leverage. Why? The problem with this kind of target is that, at rest, it's parallel to and quite close to the ground, as is the commo wire. You can tug on the commo wire forever, but all you will do is overstress and break the balloon or glove, or tear the wire from the sandbag, leaving the target flat and useless. What you've got to do it elevate the commo wire in some way, so that it is tugging the sandbag/balloon at about a 45 degree angle, give or take. But you've got to do that in some way that doesn't give away the position of the target. Hence the stick which, at rest, lays flat, but when tugged on, stands up.

6. Take a sandbag and place in in the hole in the target, open side down.

7. Stuff a filled balloon or a blown up and tied off surgical latex glove, into the sandbag.

8. Site the target where you want it, and fill the box at least partway with dirt, to prevent the target being pulled completely over. Run commo wire from the sandbag to the stick, affixing it to the stick, then on as far as needed toward the beginning point of the live fire.

9. When you pull the commo wire, the stick will rise, giving leverage to allow the target to be pulled up. It can be pulled up and dropped as much as desired, until a friendly troop manages to put a bullet through the balloon or glove, allowing it to collapse and the commo wire to pull the sandbag through the hole. After that, the target will go down and stay down.

10. It is possible to make the target “shoot,” once at least, by using a practice grenade fuse, with the spoon held down by a loop of wire, it being pulled out of the wire, or vice versa, when the target is raised. Christmas tree lights and batteries can be used at night. A small chemlight hidden by a fold of MRE packet, taped to the front of the target, works too. I am sure there are other methods, as well; use your imagination. Using your imagination is about half the point of this paper.

Note, here, that marksmanship in combat – the probability of a hit – drops to a fairly tiny percentage of the probability on an administrative range. The smallness of the part of the target that must be hit for a kill compensates for that reduction.

There are a number of possible variants to this target system. Instead of a hole being cut, a C of coat hanger wire can be affixed to the target with the balloon-filled sandbag jammed in that C, hanging from a cable or pole. Trenches and fighting positions can be dug and targets with the wire variant can be carried, raised, and lowered by live soldiers under that cover. They can be hung and put on trip wires to swing down in trenched and tires houses. The targets can be connected as a series and hung from an overhead cable to be pulled through the kill zone in an ambush.

It is possible to do with these something that is ordinarily very difficult, a live fire company defense with a reasonable number of the enemy. That said, it takes a lot of work, a lot of ammunition boxes, and a lot of commo wire and rope.

Do not skip the sandbag and go directly from balloon or glove to wire. Even if the balloon can take the stress, it usually won’t. Plus, the heat of the sun will tend to expand the balloons to bursting.

Appendix 3: Chrome

Chrome, a word I’ve borrowed for these purposes from the wargaming community, are things that add realism and spice to an exercise, but are not, strictly speaking, necessary for it. A certain amount of it is worth putting into the preparation for training, as long as it doesn’t become a distractor of limitation on training. It has no useful purpose of its own, but only in the service of other training. It validates that training in the hearts and minds of the soldiers, by making it seem most real, hence making them feel most prepared.

When General Collins wrote, in his Common Sense Training, about excess emphasis on realism as sensory (my phrasing of it, not his) – sight, sound, smell – I am almost positive he was criticizing REALISTIC COMBAT TRAINING and how to conduct it, by a lieutenant colonel named Robert Rigg. Rigg’s book, published in 1955, is replete with ways to put that sensory experience into training. Some of those ways are fantastically clever. Others – borrowing corpses from a morgue or medical school to accustom the troops to the sight of dead bodies – strikes me, frankly, as bizarre. Worse, I’m not sure what it does to the troop to see the dead mishandled, treated disrespectfully, and used as mere props. I doubt it does anything good, given that the troop knows he may himself be among the dead someday in the not too distant future.

That treatment of the dead isn’t the only objection one might have for Rigg’s book. It is so resource intensive that not more than a fraction of what he suggests could be done by a unit below division level. If done at division it would probably suck away every bit of chrome potential for any lower unit. And if restricted to division-run, then the training for the troops would come very infrequently indeed. I suppose this may have made sense in the army of the 50s, an organization mostly lost and looking for a mission amidst a nuclear doctrinal wasteland, and to some extent unserious. I think Rigg’s purpose was mostly conditioning the troops against simply freaking out at the sights and sounds of the battlefield. If that were that much of a threat, it would be more valid.

By the way, if you don’t think Rigg is still having his effects, ask yourself if the training experience at the National Training Centers would really be appreciably less if the OPFOR vehicles were not rigged with those expensive and somewhat fragile VISMODs to look like Russian / Soviet equipment?

Again, though, chrome, if not taken to ridiculous extremes, can have value.

Some suggestions – a not very exhaustive list; rather, a very inexhaustive list – for chrome for particular METL and other tasks:

1. Deliberate Attack: If it includes a preparatory bombardment, have craters blown or dug around the objective. They would be there in war. They add confusion and difficulty to movement, but they also provide covered and concealed positions for the troops to rush to and from.

2. For a night live fire ambush, clothe the targets and hang boots from them. Put items of intelligence value – maps, diaries, and letters to and from home – in their pockets and boots. There is a recipe for making fake blood with food coloring and powdered chalk. Put some of that in the pockets, as well.

3. For any offense or defense, if there are old armored vehicles in the training area or range, put a mix of waste oil, diesel, gasoline, cut up old tires, and maybe some condemned meat in a half barrel inside and set them off. Doesn’t cost much. Doesn’t take much effort. And the smoke and smell do add a certain something.

4. Do not issue ammunition in the assembly area. Deliberately withhold it until the troops are marching to the Line of Departure, then pass it to them from the back of a vehicle as they pass. (This one I’ve shamelessly ripped off from General Collins. No, as a matter of fact I don’t feel a bit guilty.)

5. For MOUT, Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain – city fighting, basically – go through the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office, DRMO, formerly Property Disposal Office, PDO, for scrap furniture, clothing, anything else that might be found and fix up the houses. That’s not just for visual impact, old clothing can hide booby traps. Furniture can conceal mouseholes and, broken apart, provide material to fortify.

The most thorough incidents of chrome in training I know of occurred during a counter-guerrilla ARTEP in Panama in 1978, for 4th Battalion, 10th Infantry. For it, two A teams from 3rd Battalion, Seventh Special Forces, were detailed to provide “special effects.”

For one event, a hill was notionally bombarded by about thirteen mortars and eight 105mm guns, plus some A-7s from the Air Force’s wing down there, for three or four hours. While the notional bombardment was going on the special effects special forces went to work. They first used a fair quantity of demolitions to blow down trees and crater the earth. They took several troops and moulaged them up nicely. Not content with the standard moulage kits, from eyes hanging by threads to guts extruded from bellies, the SF folks put wads of cottage cheese on heads to simulate brains. They also had six gallons of condemned whole blood which was liberally poured over the cottage cheese and moulage sections and pieces. They’d set traps and caught some animals, which they killed and then burned the bodies of to give the air that nasty stench of overdone meat and carbonized hair. Fires were set. The “wounded” troops were further put through a short course in acting, so that their screams and moans would be about as close to real as possible.

I remember that the first man off the helicopter, when a platoon was sent in to do a bomb damage assessment, took one look, one sniff, one earful of heartrending shrieking, then promptly bent over and threw up.

For another event for the same ARTEP, the special effects teams wired several kilometers of jungle with demolitions overhead, in the trees. These they set off as one company, “Mad Dog” A-4/10, if I recall correctly, moved through the jungle, at night, supported by their own mortars firing illumination (risky, and a pain in the ass, frankly, but a nice touch when you can get away with it). The demo would be set off overhead when the company was below it, as if it were enemy artillery or mortars.

Some years later I was reminiscing with a senior NCO who had been in that company, at that time, doing that night movement to contact. He said, “I had two tours in Vietnam, both as a grunt. But I never felt as much like I was in a war, really in a war, as I did that night movement on the counter-guerrilla ARTEP with A-4/10.”

Bloodied By Starlight

by Jonathan LaForce

Dedication:

No man is ever born a Marine. He’s made into one. First at a recruit depot, by Drill Instructors, and once he arrives in the Fleet, it is the Non-Commissioned Officer who molds him into a shape that will bear the burdens of this nation. This is respectfully dedicated to Staff Sergeant Potting and Sergeant Huerta. You inspired me, taught me, screamed at me and kicked my ass repeatedly till I became an NCO in my own right. Thank you. To the men of Charlie Battery, 1/12: you will always be my brothers.

You never forget that first time.

You're never quite sure when it will happen. But that singular moment never, ever leaves your mind. And you can't go back to what you once were. The innocence flees, leaving behind a starkly changed man.

***

The heat was always there. At night, it cooled down . . . to ninety degrees. I kept sweating long after twilight, continuously guzzling water in a way elephants might find impressive.

Entertainment was a grab-bag. Did Bizzle and McCallister find a massive pair of camel-spiders under a seven-ton truck? We grabbed an ammo can, our Marlboros and our Copenhagen, it was time for the gladiator matches to begin. Like inamtes at a prison, tobacco products were our currency of choice. Inmates also wear uniforms. The irony is not lost on us.

During the daylight hours, I ran laps in my body armor, shedding weight beneath that Helmand sun. Dumb bells, barbells, pull-up bars and weight benches got used like the only whores in a major port—with roughly the same wear and tear. My body became lean and burnt beneath the sun, trying to work out my frustration.

And we all threw ourselves into practicing rapid emplacement, muscling five tons of scorching steel-and-titanium howitzer into position, applying brute force with the precision of a neurosurgeon slicing through a cerebral cortex.

Why did we do it? To become better at our craft, of course: somewhere, there were squads of grunts moving on patrol. Their sole purpose was to locate, close with, and engage the enemy. But when they hit an enemy position that they couldn't overcome, they turned to us artillerymen.

And for one singular moment, we had a chance to prove ourselves capable, needed, and wanted. Everything we'd ever sweated, bled, and trained for came down to a twenty-second race against the clock—could we put 110-pound bullets down range, timely, accurately, and effectively?

If the answer was yes, then the masochist's paradise we'd passed through became justified.

If we were found lacking, then it had been in vain. And amongst the combat-arms branches of the USMC, you won't find the shirkers, the cowards, or the non-aggressive peaceniks. None of us enjoyed losing—such an idea is anathema to our creed.

Five months of boredom and nothing to show for it. Not because we lacked ability or were found unreliable. Simply no need for us to fill.

We ate our lukewarm Alpo T-rats covered in gallons of Tabasco and Texas Pete, twice a day. We looked at wild camels and wondered—what exactly did smoked camel taste like?

We collected our shit and piss in metal drums, then burned it all with JP-8 diesel, the blaze adding a strange aroma to the air. I could taste it even in my fang paste when I did morning hygiene. Burning shit, Axe body spray, musty feet that spent twenty-two hours in the same pair of socks and combat boots I wore the day before. And there are seventy-six more men inside that 300-meter-wide triangle-shaped patrol base, just like me. After a while, even the camel spiders stopped coming near us. Donkeys stayed away for fear of smelling so bad. We forgot what women smelled like—they became a creature as mythical as the unicorn.

There was no Internet available. PFC Schmuckatelli couldn't call home to tell Mommy and Suzy Rottencrotch about how bad things were. We wrote letters by hand and prayed the mail convoy didn't get blown up along the way.

The care packages we received became a life support so necessary we'd crawl naked across that hot white sand all day if it meant getting those twelve inch by twelve inch by six inch packages intact. A month after they left Mainland USA, they arrived at our patrol base. Anything which might melt, had. Gummy bears, known for their individuality, were eternally joined together in a 1 pound gelatinous brick. Enough sugar to put a hummingbird in a diabetic coma, and we consumed it rabidly—to us, it was manna from Heaven.

We needed more though, and in the black expanse of the cosmos, Saint Chesty Puller had heard the pleas of his sons.

Change came, in the form of a Sea Stallion Helicopter spurting black smoke and leaking fluids everywhere; that ugly, scary, gorgeous bitch of a monstrosity carried twenty-three of us off to Kajaki Dam. We were needed to support Echo Battery, by taking over their three howitzer tubes, plus the mortars, while they pushed out into the valley below and went hunting.

Fire missions every day? At odd hours of the night? Living in a concrete Afghani-style crack house? We looked at that with all the fervor and joy of a Pentecostal preacher at a tent revival, "Hallelujah!" choruses reverberating off the trucks, lizards hiding their faces in annoyance at the ruckus.

Then the offensive started. And all hell broke loose. As the Christmas carol states, "It came upon a midnight clear . . ."

The October night was still warm, and we had bedded down in the mortar pits near 2100. Sleep came easy.

That was when the field phone screeched awake, inches from my face. "FIRE MISSION!"

A recorder's purpose is to alert the gun crew, then write down the mission data and repeat it back to the FDC so they knew you heard it correctly. Precision is a must. Arty men do it by mils, of which there are 6400 in a circle, 17.7 mils per degree. The room for error does not exist. I rapid-fired back answers over the hooks at the top of my lungs, while I wrote by the light of a green glow stick cracked and duct taped into place just before sun down.

"Battery adjust! One round! Special instructions: at my command!" they told us.

I repeated the command to FDC, then yelled to the adjusting tube, "AT MY COMMAND, MOTHERFUCKERS!"

Even as I barked that out, the wheel clicked into place, the gunner's shoulder went up into the barrel and he was spinning the whole piece around on his body to align the sights on the aiming stakes. It came back down, he rapidly checked the sights once more, and called back ready.

"Ready One!" I barked over the radio.

"One ready," FDC responded.

The whole process had taken less than 20 seconds. My armor was half-buckled and my helmet wasn't even close to my head. Personal safety didn't matter compared to getting those rounds downrange.

The phone crackled again, loud in the starlit darkness.

"Standby! . . . FIRE!"

The gunner dropped the round down the tube, then tebowed to the deck. And a massive FWOOMP filled the air.

"Mortars, this is FDC. Be advised, the patrol was getting shot at by a machine gunner in a house in the black zone."

"Roger that."

Silence.

Then, "Mortars this is FDC, the observer was off by fifty meters. Get ready for a second adjustment."

"Solid copy, FDC."

I was growling by then, making sounds more fit for a raging Sith Lord. But I was totally and completely calm. No sweating, no shakes, no hesitation. Simply the mind of a man drilled in his craft. This is what sergeants and corporals have built with throughout the centuries: mortal men, the greatest and most challenging of all materials. From it they craft professional soldiers fit to wear the cloth of a nation, to bear arms in her name across the sands of foreign lands known colloquially—and collectively—as "Hell."

A second shot was necessary, and after it left the tube, we waited. Tense.

"End of mission! Mortars, you put that round through the roof and dropped the house on him!"

The feeling of elation when we shut down and went back to bed brought a strange satisfaction to my mind. Not that I enjoyed killing people, like the psychopathic murderers portrayed in Hollywood films, but that I did it right. Like a professional.

That night had been the first, and as God is our witness, not the last.

By the time we were done, the Taliban refused to go near Kajaki Valley. It was a meat-grinder, turning them into pasty red smears across the sand.

We all changed with it too; we finally knew how good we were. Nothing left to prove to any man alive. And capable of violence in a way that is horrifying and respectable all at once.

The first time we entered a real chow hall after six months of rations, a marine tried barring entry to us. We looked him up and down—we in our torn, dirty, patched-up fatigues, dirt-caked bodies and well-worn weapons; he in his clean, pressed camouflage uniform and starched cover. He seemed soft and yielding, more like the costume a stripper wears than the iron and canvas used to make the parade-slung rifle on his shoulder. A mewling lap dog pup would've had more success against a Siberian tiger than he found that night.

***

Tonight, I sit down in my bed and quietly read a book. My wife is asleep beside me. She doesn’t know all that I've done. And I will never tell her. Some things, as Kipling determined a century ago, are best kept from an innocent bride.

I place my left hand gently on my wife’s stomach, where a baby grows. For some reason, the baby is calm when I do this, and grouchy towards my wife when I am not around.

Strange it is that hands so stained should bring peace to my tiny family. Perhaps it's because those who have destroyed and shattered can best understand what peace is. Even if we'll never again find it within ourselves.

Why Science is Never Settled – Part One

by Tedd Roberts

There is a tendency for members of Western Societies to consider science as an accomplishment – a set of settled, known facts and values. Accompanying this attitude is one which considers Scientists (with a capital "S") to be authoritative and wise, knowledgeable in many things other than their specialty. It is a stereotype established by some of the notable scientific figures (and communicators) of the past and present: Einstein, Sagan, Hawking... and perpetuated by a media which treats the notion of scientific expertise as knowledge itself. The very presence of three little letters after a name –- P-h-D – is taken by many to be a mark of authority, and the "Scientist" is accorded credibility and wisdom well beyond their due.

This is curiously at odds with a society that simultaneously praises and distrusts science. We live in an age filled with the wonders of scientific advancement –- from medical/health care, to computers, to self-driving cars –- yet we also have groups that loudly proclaim their distrust of anything "technological" or "scientific" and turn toward mystical and superstitious explanations instead. But this is not intended as a political rant, and I am not necessarily referring to the groups and actions that you might infer from the title or previous statements. Read on, and let's look at what science is, who scientists are, and examine the ways in which Science, as a field, makes mistakes, changes its mind, and arrives at its findings. We will then compare and contrast those observations with the quasi-religious approach which declares that the scientific evidence for or against a particular subject is "settled", that there is "consensus" among all right-thinking scientists who support that view, and that the opposition are "not real scientists" at all.

The Scientific Method

One of the most important considerations in judging the pronouncements and proclamations of "Science" is to understand that science is a process of examination and exploration, not a "fact", pronouncement, or conclusion. In essence, science consists of formulating a hypothesis from observed facts, creating experiments to prove or disprove the hypothesis, observing the results of the experiments, then making a conclusion to accept or reject the original hypothesis on the basis of those observations. This is commonly known as The Scientific Method and derives from Aristotle's original definitions of deductive reasoning.

"Science is a process, not a conclusion" -– you'll read that quite often in this article and in my other writing. I think that the exact wording is original to me, but it may have already escaped my control and entered the 'net at large, given that I use it quite often. I have a small plaque in my academic office which states: "Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind."  [I may have to use that in a title someday.] My graduate research mentor claimed that the plaque should read "Science is the process of going blindly to see if there are alleys."

But what does that say about the both scientific observation and conclusion? Certainly while one is *in* the alley, one can see *only* the alley, and it would be easy to conclude that the alley is in fact open, and not blind – until one reaches that blind end.  Yet the true methodology of science is not about going blindly at all. If you Google "Scientific Method" – you find a definition that states that first, one formulates a question, i.e. what do you want to study? Then initial observations are made from an uncontrolled, natural context or environment. From those observations, a hypothesis is formed and experiments are proposed which will test – under controlled conditions – whether that hypothesis is true or false. What is meant by controlled conditions? Basically, the experimenter must ensure that there are no external factors which could produce a result without the experimenter's knowledge (I'll give a specific example in the next paragraph). The experiment is conducted, the observations made (and statistically analyzed if necessary (and more on that much later), and a conclusion made about the validity of the hypothesis. Good scientists stick to making claims only about their hypothesis. Very good scientists use their old hypothesis to form new ones to further refine and test their conclusions.

Here's an example. Like many academics, I can't get seriously started on my morning work without a cup of coffee. I like hazelnut-flavored powdered creamer, and I have a one-cup-at-a-time coffee brewer. If I choose the wrong setting, the cup gets full, and I risk spilling coffee as I stir in the creamer. Or I could put the creamer in the mug before the coffee, but I still have to stir it. So is the spillage from the stirring, or does the creamer make the mug too full -– after all, it's a powder and it dissolves. It shouldn't take up too much space, right?

So there's my question: I want to know if the spilled coffee is due to adding the powdered creamer (and not simply splashing the coffee as I stir it). Let's work through the steps of the scientific method:

1. Question –- does adding powder to a liquid increase the volume of the liquid?

2. Initial observations –- adding a powder that has to be stirred does indeed cause my coffee mug to overflow, but maybe it's because I have to stir it too much. There are two possible solutions to this:

1. The powder adds volume to the liquid, and it overflows because of added volume –- we can test this because the interaction of liquid and solid is consistent under controlled circumstances.

2. The powder adds no volume, thus it must be my stirring that causes the overflow –- we really can't test this, since my stirring technique changes each time.

3. Hypothesis (aka The Null Hypothesis, H_0) –- powder dissolved in a liquid does not add any volume.

1. Thus, we choose to test (and negate) my first possible solution.

2. Note that this Null Hypothesis also implies an Alternate Hypothesis, HA, which states: Powder dissolved in a liquid does add volume to the liquid.

4. Experiments:

1. Put a measured amount of (liquid) coffee in a narrow, tall beaker with fine volume measurements engraved on the side. This is commonly known in the lab as a graduated cylinder.

2. Allow the liquid to settle, and then measure the exact volume of the coffee.

3. Measure a known weight (preferable to volume) of creamer to the liquid. Use tall enough beaker/cylinder and a means of stirring that will not allow any coffee to splash out.

4. Stop stirring, allow the surface of the coffee to settle, and then measure the volume.

5. Repeat several times and compare the measurements.

5. Controls -- it is very important to perform your experiments under conditions such that there is no other cause of a change in the volume of the coffee.

1. Since we know that heat causes liquids (water) to expand, and cold causes it to contract (until it ices and expands again) –- ensure that all tests are conducted using a thermometer to ensure the exact same temperature of coffee.

2. Some powders are more dense (more weight per volume) than others, so always use the same type and brand of creamer, the same coffee, coffee maker, water, etc.

3. Always allow the liquid to stop moving (from stirring and pouring) before measurement, and minimize the pouring or transfer of ingredients to avoid accidental spills.

6. Analyze the data -- in our experiment, you will find that the creamer does indeed increase the volume of the coffee, but it may not be exactly the same each time because of factors outside of our control, such as variations in the packing density of the powdered creamer or small measurement errors. This is where statistics come in. Multiple repetitions of the experiment mean that we can calculate the average result (the Mean) and how much it randomly varies from trial-to-trial (the Variability). Variability is typically calculated as Standard Deviation, and generally, an experiment-induced change in the mean that is three times the Standard Deviation is considered "highly significant"

7. Evaluate the hypothesis -- we observed that creamer does indeed increase the volume of the coffee. Thus we reject the Null Hypothesis and instead accept the Alternative Hypothesis.

As good scientists, we can now entertain other questions, such as: Does temperature matter? What about sugar instead of creamer? Does the sequence (coffee first or creamer first) matter? What about different liquids? Unfortunately, our experiment does not enable us to answer those questions –- after all, we specifically set up the conditions so that those factors were controlled -- but it does provide us with the means to perform further experiments and find out new answers.

Please note that nowhere in this explanation did I mention "facts," "conclusions," "consensus," or "settled." That's because science describes the process of looking. If we find a blind alley, we know to go back and look in another place... but it we fail to find the blind wall at the end of the alley, do we really know that the alley is not blind? Or merely that we have not yet found the end? For that, let's look at some of Science's famous blind alleys.

Famous Scientific Blunders

The Science is Settled (Blunder # 1) -– The Sun revolves around the Earth

Okay, you should have seen this one coming; it's the favored example of those attacking nonscientists, religion, and the just plain ignorant. But looking at it from a scientist point of view: Question –- Why does the sun always rise in the East and set in the West? Observations: The sun, moon and stars always follow the same rotation around the Earth. Conclusion: The Earth is the center of the system of sun moon and stars. This Aristotelian or Ptolemaic view of the universe was settled science.

The conclusion is, in fact, scientifically sound for its day and age. While Aristotle is credited with the origins of the Scientific Method, he and the astronomer Ptolemy really didn't have a way to conduct controlled experiments on heliocentrism (Sun-centered) versus geocentrism (Earth-centered). However, what they knew was that they had no evidence that the Earth moved, and they certainly knew how to measure movement _– wind, birds, water, a rolling ball, stars in the night sky. In fact, Ptolemy was a skilled scientist: astronomer and geographer... for the second century A.D. He confirmed many of the measurements of Eratosthenes (third century B.C.) regarding the roundness and circumference of the Earth. He also refined the knowledge of optics in terms of reflection, refraction and much of our current knowledge of optical illusion. Yes, he got some measurements wrong, such as the exact circumference of the Earth, but he did not have all of the tools necessary for the experiments that would have disproved his Null Hypothesis.

It took Copernicus to put all of the additional scientific observation of more than thirteen centuries into a new theory of heliocentrism. If Ptolemy had had the vision (pun-intended) to look carefully at the apparent reversal in the orbit (aka "retrograde motion") of Mercury, Venus and Mars, he, too, might have substituted the Sun for the Earth as the center of his astronomic model. Indeed, while Geocentrism was compatible with (and eventually central to) the early Christian faith, the heliocentric model did gain religious acceptance, via Pope Clement VII. Copernicus himself held a doctorate in Canon Law (i.e. church law). Thanks to the wonderful research done by Baen authors Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis for 1634: The Galileo Affair, we also know that the popular view that Galileo's 17th century "apostasy" consisted of defying the Catholic Church over heliocentrism, was in fact over other violations of church doctrine, rather than heliocentrism, which had been gaining Church acceptance for more than a century.

It is also useful to note that in disrupting the settled science of geocentrism and replacing it with heliocentrism, Copernicus was also guilty of accepting a conclusion that would later be proven false. By the 18th – 19th Centuries, William Herschel and Friedrich Bessel were showing that the sun might be the center of the solar system, but not of the universe. With Edwin Hubble's astronomical observations of the 20th Century, we started to get a view of our galaxy – indeed of multiple galaxies, and the study continues to expand our scientific knowledge of the universe, including results from the orbital telescope which bears Hubble's name.

In astronomical physics, science is not a conclusion: not geocentrism or even really heliocentrism, but a process of investigation, observation, testing and refinement to this day. My favorite example of continued scientific investigation was performed on the Moon on August 2, 1971, when Astronaut Dave Scott (Apollo 15) dropped a hammer and a feather onto the moon's surface. After three and a half centuries, they continued Galileo's famous experiments in gravity to demonstrate that (in the absence of air resistance) weight and volume were irrelevant to gravitational attraction. Science is ongoing, and never satisfied.

The Science is Settled (Blunder # 2) -– The human body is regulated by four "humours" which control health, emotion and mental state

Back when I was a student, I attended two years of medical school. That has how it was done in those dark ages [grin!], either physicians needed a firm grounding in physiology and pharmacology, or physiologists/pharmacologists needed a firm grounding in human systems (i.e. medicine). In the course (again, pun-intended) of study, we learned much of the history of medicine and related fields. Dating back (again) to Aristotle, there was a theory of four humours or bodily fluids, which governed health and wellbeing of a person. If the blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile were in balance, a person was healthy, but diseases were thought to result from an imbalance of the biles. If a person was courageous and hopeful, but overly amorous, they had an abundance of blood; cowardice or failing libido was thought to reflect too little blood – strangely attributed to the liver, and not the heart. Yellow bile, from the gall bladder, was associated with anger and bad temper; black bile (from the spleen, with irritability, depression and sleeplessness. Phlegm, from the brain and/or lungs was associated with calm, but also lack of emotion. From these humours, we also got the names for temperaments: sanguine (blood), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile) and phlegmatic (phlegm).

Pretty archaic and backward, right? Modern science would never admit that this theory or its originator has a place in the practice of medicine – or would they? Except the historical personage associated with the theory was Hippocrates, known as the Father of Medicine, and for whom the Hippocratic Oath (medical ethics most famous guideline: "First do no harm") is named. The concept of humours likely originated in the 5th century B.C., and was actually primarily promoted by the Greek physician Galen in the 3rd century A.D. Despite this now disproven settled science of medicine, Galen's work forms the foundation of much of what we now know about human anatomy, physiology and neurology. Even as the Hippocratic theory of humours waned, Galen's theories on anatomy, and particularly, the circulatory system were accepted settled science until the 17th century when English physician William Harvey demonstrated that venous blood did not originate in the liver, but instead, the venous and arterial system were a single system with two (actually four) components. Galen (and Hippocrates) were hampered by law forbidding dissection and investigation of human corpses, and by the lack of technology which would have kept their vivisection subjects alive long enough to completely figure out mammalian physiology. Still, Galen was a scientist; he hypothesized, experimented, analyzed, and constantly revised his theories.

Strangely, the theory of humours almost received verification in the 20th century with the experiments of Otto Loewi, who demonstrated that a fluid collected from the vagus nerve would control the heart rate in a frog. Loewi electrically stimulated the intact vagus nerve, and it slowed the heart. He then took fluid from around the heart, transferred it to a second frog, and the fluid alone slowed the second frog's heart. Was this evidence of humours? Or something else. Fortunately, by this day, Loewi was on the trail of neurotransmitters and hormones –- chemicals secreted by cells in the brain, nerves, adrenal glands, and other secretory organs -- which served to transfer control signals from the brain to the rest of the body. Many of these hormones circulate freely in the blood, much like the humours proposed more than 20 centuries earlier.

We now know much more about medicine and the human body, and we pretty much know where Hippocrates, Galen and others went wrong. When blood collects and settles, it forms four layers: a clot (black), blood cells (red), lymphocytes (white) and plasma (yellow). Hormones do circulate in the blood, and some diseases, and disorders result from a disruption in the normal circulatory, hormonal and even neurotransmitter systems. Still, the theory of humours survived for well over a thousand years -- not universally and not without modification -- but it took more advanced science to disprove this settled science.

The Science is Settled (Blunder # 3) _– Dinosaurs were cold-blooded, dumb lizards (with a brain the size of a walnut)

The Chinese were known to have found bones of konglong or "terrible dragons" since the Western Jin Dynasty of the late 3rd century A.D. but it was not until the mid 19th century that English paleontologist Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur" for the gigantic fossil creatures first reported in scientific journals less than 20 years previously. Until the first American fossil Hadrosaurus was discovered in Haddonfield, NJ in 1858, everybody knew that dinosaurs were four legged giant reptiles. That Hadrosaurus was clearly bipedal upset the early settled science and consensus that had arisen in scant 40 years of this nascent science.

Other blunders which were, for a time, considered settled science included a rather famous "duel" between two 19th century dinosaur hunters. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh competed to see who could identify the most new species or classifications of dinosaurs. In a move reminiscent of a particular scientifically contested topic of today, Cope and Marsh schemed, ridiculed, diverted specimens and even publically fought over their dinosaur identifications in a feud that came to be known as the Bones Wars. Marsh accused Cope of incompetence when he pointed out that Cope had reconstructed an Elasmosaurus incorrectly, putting the head at the end of the tail. Marsh, however, was not without fault. In 1877, Marsh reported a new species, Apatosaurus, based only on discovery of a spine. Two years later, Marsh improved the description with an illustration of pelvis (hip) and vertebra (spinal) bones; and then described another species, which he called the "thunder lizard," Brontosaurus¸ based on pelvis, vertebrae and shoulder blade. Within the next 20 years, an intact Brontosaurus skeleton was unearthed and went on display at Yale University. Alas, poor Dino was actually an Apatosaurus -- the two species were actually juvenile and adult versions of the same dinosaur. In a further insult (or karmic justice), the Yale skeleton was not complete, lacking a skull, and Marsh had used a skull from another dig. It took nearly 100 years for the final correction to occur -- the Yale "Brontosaurus" had the body of an Apatosaurus and the head of a Camarasaurus! The history of the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus mistake is interesting, and I can recommend a nice article about the controversy at the Museum of Unnatural Mystery website at http://www.unmuseum.org/dinobront.htm. The science may have been "settled" at one time, but scientists are human, subject to the same mistakes and petty jealousies of any of us, and this case illustrates those faults very well.

Back to our section title, however... Soon after Charles Darwin published his book, Origin of Species, biologist Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds had evolved from dinosaurs. However, the consensus of the time was that dinosaurs were cold blooded lizards, not avian at all. In fact, the flying reptiles -- Pterodactyl and Archaeopteryx are not classified as dinosaurs at all. Yet in the 1970's, discovery of the clearly bird-like Deinonychus, and in the 1990's, the feathered dinosaur remains in China confirmed Huxley's conjecture, and has convinced most of the field to accept this new theory. The final blow to the concept of dinosaurs as cold-blooded lizards comes, starting with Deinonychus and the discovery of soft-tissue impressions (and actual preserved tissue) revealing the structure of inner organs of dinosaurs and leading to theories that at least some dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

The history of dinosaur science is fascinating, and an excellent capsule view of the premise of this article. Science is never settled; scientists are constantly finding new data and revising old assumptions. In addition, scientists themselves are human and can even have some pretty big flaws. By the way, it's been fun researching the material for this essay, and I reiterate my recommendation of the Museum of Unnatural Mystery link provided above. There's some great explanations and Q&A there.

Scientific theories change all the time

- In the 1970's, scientists predicted global cooling. In the 1990's and 2000's it was global warming, in the 2010's there's again talk of cooling.

- For centuries, gastric (stomach) ulcers were thought to be due to stress, spicy foods and excess stomach acid, until 1984, when Australian physician Barry Marshall drank a culture of Helicobacter pylorii and developed stomach ulcers from the bacteria alone.

- Newton, Einstein and Hawking have each had the final word in the field of Physics -- at least until the next run of the Large Hadron Collider.

- No human could survive transonic speeds... until Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier; no human could survive the radiation of space... until the Soviet and American astronauts spent days in orbit in the 1960's; no human could survive the passage through or space outside the Van Allen radiation belts... until the Apollo moon missions.

- The pesticide DDT was used to kill mosquitoes, particularly in regions of the world prone to malaria. However, it was proven that DDT to cause the shells of bird eggs to become thinner, thus endangering many species if DDT use continued... until it was determined that the report amount of thinning was actually smaller than the margin of error for the measuring instruments of the time.

- Human memory is mystical and metaphysical, with no connection between the mind and the brain... until it was demonstrated that memory is associated with specific anatomical areas of the brain... and then it was discovered that trained flatworms could be ground up, and molecules extracted and fed to other flatworms who then had the "memory" without the need to learn... except that memory requires specific patterns of anatomical connections, and chemical and electrical signals... until it was found last year that some memories may actually consist of molecules that can be inherited! [But that's a topic worthy of its own article!]

The hallmark of science is that it is always hypothesizing, always collecting data, always testing, and always refining or looking for new theories. In fact, the only indication of a good theory is whether one can make valid predictions with the theory. One successful prediction, however, is not enough -- after all, just one failed prediction negates a theory, one correct prediction simply means the theory works for now, or until a failed prediction or a more comprehensive theory comes along.

In fact, I am often asked how a scientist with a personal religious faith can reconcile evolutionary theory with that faith. My response is that a scientist uses theories all the time. Their job is not to judge the truth of a theory, but rather its utility. As long as a theory is consistent with observations, can be used to test and/or predict the data one has in hand, and successfully predicts results, it is a useful theory. The concepts of truth or belief are irrelevant to the Scientific Method, and should never contaminate the science.

* * *

This brings us to the next phase of this essay—which we will cover next month in Part Two: the fallibility of scientists themselves and the false notion of "consensus in science.”

* * *

Why Science is Never Settled – Part Two

by Tedd Roberts

In Part One of this essay, we explored the basics of the Scientific Method and demonstrated how various scientific fields are constantly changing their notion of settled science as theories and hypotheses are refined and technology for testing those hypotheses improves. In Part Two, we now move on to examine the ways in which errors, miscalculations and deliberate deceptions contribute to upsetting settled science.

* * *

Scientists are human, too

Yes, scientists are human, with all of the faults and foibles that implies. The example of the "Bone Wars" between paleontologists Cope and Marsh should tell us that. While popular culture prefers to paint Galileo as persecuted by the Church for his science -- indeed, consequently founding a counter-religious illuminati of scientists -- careful study of history reveals that Galileo was not "persecuted" for his beliefs, but rather he was sanctioned by Rome for his personal actions in defiance of a church order of which he was a member. We certainly have plenty of parallels today in which it is easy to point to scientists whose behavior casts a shadow on their own work. Of course, there are a few factors which tend to assist the process of self-destruction.

The problem of "Publish-or-Perish"

The essential currency of an academic scientist consists of two items: how many papers they publish, and how well-funded their research. While many scientists would love to have a job where all they needed to do was conduct experiments with no obligation to fight for promotion and funding, the simple truth is that any job must be evaluated by some form of a performance metric. Within most scientific jobs, that metric consists of having other scientists evaluate your work and pronounce that it is good. Typically, this consists of writing up results (and conclusions), submitting them to a scientific journal, obtaining a favorable review by peers, and then having that paper published in a journal where others can read it. Most of the evaluation of "worth" comes from the peer-review process (and more on that later), since, once published, any confirmation or refutation of the experimental results must take the form of letters to the editor, or new papers which agree or disagree with the published results. Letters to the editor are in fact very rare in science -- not that they are there, but that the number of letters compared to the number of published papers is really very small (not all journals accept letters, and even then, there may be 1-2 per issue, while the number of new papers is often 20-50 per issue).

Studies which produce results and conclusions counter to those always published must overcome the prior results in both numbers (how many published papers cite the result or the refutation) and the "Impact Factor" of the journal in which the study appears. Much as certain newspapers have reputations based on circulation and the type and number of articles they print, scientific journals have a similar ranking system based on a weighted ratio of the number of subscribers divided by the number of citations of the articles they publish per year. Thus, it is not just how many articles are published, but how many are read and subsequently cited by other authors (in other papers and journals). This ratio gives a sense of the relative impact that a journal has compared to others in its field. Thus an article in Science or Nature has 2-5 times the impact factor of an article in Journal of Neuroscience, and 10-20 times the impact factor of an article in an open-access, open-review journal such as Frontiers in Neural Science. Any countervailing research published in a lesser impact journal is much like a battle of King of the Hill, and requires either repeated publication or getting the countervailing results into a similar high-impact journal.

Scientists are thus rated on the number of papers they publish, the impact factor of the journals in which they publish, and indirectly (via impact factor) how often their research is cited. At research foundations, corporate laboratories and government agencies, publication is the main tool used to assess the productivity of a scientist. In academia, there is one other factor: funding. Within colleges, universities and medical schools, some or all of a professor's salary may be "hard money" (paid by the institution) and some "soft money" (paid from research grants). In fact, almost all salaries in research below the Professor level are paid to a large degree from the research funds and the greater the scope of research project, the more funding sources required to support it. Research grants go through a peer review process similar to research publications; therefore the number of funded grants is also used as an evaluation tool for salaries and promotion of academic scientists.

Thus we come to the publish or perish dictum. The requirement for published papers and grants varies from place-to-place and also depends on the scientist's status: full professors with tenure need not worry as much as assistant professors without tenure. I have seen one recommendation that an academic scientist should publish one paper per year per person in the lab. Thus, a lab consisting of the investigator, one post-doc, two students and a full-time technician would want to publish 5 papers (or 4 papers plus one new, funded research grant) per year; with more credit given for high-impact articles. Personally, I feel that a lab which tries to publish so much runs a grave risk of errors, although it is true that larger labs have more opportunity to publish than small labs, so perhaps some variation on the rule is appropriate. My own preference has long been for one-two moderately placed (in terms of impact factor) papers per year, plus presentations at two scientific meetings a year. Still, given that it takes several weeks of writing just to produce one paper, plus time for the reviews and revision, publish or perish soon involves more time writing than researching, and all too often, rushing results into print before they are fully analyzed.

Accidents occur, and scientists are not immune from them. Hopefully, errors are caught in the review process; it has certainly happened to me, and I've caught many errors as a reviewer. Too much pressure to publish too often (or simply rushing the process), can lead errors that must later be corrected, either through published retraction, or simply by other lab(s) finding and reporting to differing results. No scientist truly wants to get a result published, and then find out later that the results were not valid due to a decimal point error in statistics... except when the errors are deliberate...

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics!

Since scientists are human, there is always the chance that one of them (us!) will deliberately manipulate data and or results -- particularly through the use of statistics. Those readers with a background in statistics will know that the primary use of statistical tests is to determine whether two sets of observation are different when it is difficult to determine by other means. Certainly, some scientific results can be clearly determined without statistics. For example: "Roses are red, violets are blue..." embodies an observation with a clear difference between the two cases. Ah, but it is not always so simple. Violets are, in fact a shade of purple, although statistically speaking, if one were to measure the color hues of violets, it might be shown to overlap with blue. As scientists, we would phrase the statistical question as follows: Does the color variation of the population of violets include the color blue? We further qualify the question to: Is it likely that if 95% of all violets in existence (also known as the "population" of violets), they would include the color blue? This, then, it what is known as a "P<0.05", or a probability limit of 5%. In other words, does the presence of the color blue fall within 95% of the population of violets, or with the "outliers" comprising the other 5%? Statistical comparison provides a means of answering that question of whether two conditions can produce the same result given the normal, random variability of natural systems.

Now of course, when we get to roses, the situation is very different. While violets, by definition, have a fairly limited color palette, roses have a very broad palette -- from white to black, and nearly all colors in between. Thus in answer to the question: "Are roses red?" We can say yes. Likewise with: "Are violets blue?" "Yes." Now we can also look at the additional question: "Are violets red" and, with a statistical likelihood of at least 5%, answer "No, violets are not red (P<0.05)." In other words, we accept the hypothesis: Violets are not red. But, "Are roses blue?" Here we have a problem, because the 95% population of rose colors does include the color blue, and we reject the hypothesis: Roses are not blue.

Thus we come to the crux of the problem –- even without deliberate malfeasance, it is all too easy to misrepresent the results of scientific experiments when the statistical tests give ambiguous results. From a scientific standpoint, Roses are red (among other colors) and violets are blue (to within a couple of shades); in addition, violets are not red (P<0.05), but roses are not "not-blue." Note that these "statistical" results are dependent on how thoroughly the scientist samples the populations for their test. If we sampled only American Beauty roses, then indeed, roses would be red and not blue, and our statistical confirmation would be valid, but only for the population of flowers we sampled.

A Lack of (Statistical) Power

A paper on this very issue of statistical misuse entitled: "Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience," by Katherine S. Button et al. appeared in the April 10, 2013 issue of Nature Reviews, Neuroscience, a quite respectable journal featuring reviews in the field of neuroscience. This report reviewed the statistical tests reported in Neuroscience research papers from 2011, and concludes that in the data they sampled, the statistical tests from those studies were very likely to either accept a hypothesis as true –- when it was not -– or miss confirming a true hypothesis.

The Nature Reviews article started with a literature search for meta-analyses in Neuroscience published in 2011, and found 246 articles that used "meta-analyses" -- essentially combining the data from many prior papers and re-analyzing those larger data sets for observations that cannot be seen in small data sets. A meta-analysis thus looks at data gathered and reported across many primary publications -- original reports from a single lab. The authors then sorted through those 243 articles for ones that provided enough information on the original data to allow calculation of statistical power in about 40 of those papers. Power functions uses the mean, or average, for a population, a measure of variability, and also determined how large of a difference can be reliably detected given a limited sample size. In essence, it is a way of predicting whether a statistical test is, itself, valid. The Statistical Power Function is the foundation of experimental design, and is the basis for justifying how many subjects to test, and what is considered a statistically significant result.

Button et al. concluded that many of the meta-analyses papers did not have high functions of statistical power, and risked incorrect interpretations of the statistical comparisons. However –- and this is very important –- that conclusion did not apply this conclusion to the field of Neuroscience as a whole. In short, headlines from April 2013 implying that the study condemns an entire field of science, are false. In perspective, this article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience sounds a cautionary note regarding the need for better statistical planning in meta-analysis. What the article does not do is state that all or even many Neuroscience articles have the same flaw. In particular, given that this caution applies to making unwarranted conclusions (and affects our notion of settled science), it again points out that fact that scientific discovery is an ongoing process, and the very announcement of settled conclusions sets the research up for scrutiny and critique. It behooves us all to avoid the danger of schadenfreude by using the result outside the scope of the study thereby committing the exact same error pointed out in the paper. Meanwhile, there are other factors at work which point out the good and bad with respect to scientific research, but frankly, misinterpretation of statistics pales in comparison to deliberate deception.

The vaccine controversy

One of the more famous incidents of scientific malfeasance involved a study from 1998 which showed a link between the measles vaccine and autism. The data showing a causal link was taken from autistic children who had received the "MMR" vaccine to prevent measles. However, when the study could not be duplicated, investigation revealed that data was taken from just 12 out of over 200 children available for the study. This procedure is often called "cherry-picking" and is used to ensure small variability within a set of data so that any statistical test come out exactly in a manner predetermined by the experimenter. On this basis alone, the study was invalidated and a retraction printed in The Lancet, a high-impact factor journal for medical research.

This could have been ruled a mistake, given that experimenters may "cherry-pick" data from human patients given the ethical concerns of withholding a beneficial treatment, thus impairing the ability to establish strict controls on the study. Under the circumstances, it may have been necessary to severely limit the study population if there were various other factors which could have contributed to the effects and confused the findings. [Incidentally, this accusation is often raised against other correlative health studies: smoking, diet, cholesterol, gluten, etc.] Unfortunately, this case was not about simple misuse of statistics, for there was a deeper thread of malfeasance. The lead author of the study, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, had filed a patent for an alternate to the MMR vaccine. Furthermore, a researcher working under Wakefield's supervision reported that there was no measles virus present (hence no effect of the MMR vaccine) in the children used for the initial study; while a former graduate student testified in court proceedings that Wakefield ignored data which did not fit his hypothesis (that MMR vaccine was linked to autism).

In the aftermath, Wakefield resigned his hospital job in the United Kingdom, but was later censured by the UK Medical Research Council and banned from was fired from his medical and research positions, barred from practicing medicine in the U.K. He has since moved to the U.S., and despite admitting to the improper study, is still active in promoting the link between MMR vaccine and autism. In a strange turnabout to the notion of settled science, Wakefield's supporters accuse the medical authorities of U.S. and U.K. of the dogmatic approach and failing to acknowledge a link between vaccines and various diseases and disorders.

If data can be "cherry-picked," statistics can be misused, and hypotheses incorrectly rejected or confirmed, what are the protections against scientific malfeasance? What guarantee is there that a scientific report is valid, even if it goes against the conventional wisdom of the field? At the same time, how do we tell if a study is making false claims? The answer is, or should be, peer-review of scientific papers and proposals. A panel of other scientists reads any submitted paper or grant proposal, reviews the science for validity -- and recommends acceptance or rejection. At least, that's the way it is supposed to work, but the process of peer-review has its faults.

The problems of peer-review

[Disclaimer: I am a "peer-reviewer." I have over 100 scientific primary publications to my credit, and have been asked to review scientific articles since 1989 and NIH/NSF grant applications since 1998. Thus my opinion is shaped by 25 years in science participating in, and at the mercy of, peer review; and my typical workload consists of request to review about 12-18 papers and 5-10 grants per year. While this is what some my field might consider extensive experience with peer-review, it is also fairly limited in that it is only within my field, and only with respect to research papers and grants. By the way, my field required me to be the victim (excuse me – the recipient) of peer-review for many years (7 in my case) before becoming a reviewer.]

What drives doubts about the effectiveness of peer-review? Here are some examples:

- Evidence that the second generation anti-psychotics and antidepressants such as Abilify are not as effective as they were shown to be in initial research and clinical trials [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all]

- Similar to the above discussion of statistical power, a 2005 article in Public Library of Science journal claiming that 50% of published research findings are false due to statistical inadequacies [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/]

- An article stating that pre-publication peer review does not provide any guarantee of lasting importance of scientific results [http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/12/S4/S13]

- A field of opinion that pre-publication peer review serves only to limit publications to a level that meets the print capacity of the available scientific journals. The advent of on-line internet publication eases the space restrictions, so why not publish everything and let the broader scientific community sort it out? [http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/07/07/bulk-publishing-keeps-plos-afloat/] and [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0011.203]

- The highly public "ClimateGate" scandal has reportedly shown abuse of pre-publication peer-review to publish some articles and block others [http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/01/lord-moncktons-summary-of-climategate-and-its-issues/]

While I do acknowledge that there are some merits to the points addressed above, I don't believe that peer review is broken per se, but I do agree that the scientific community as a whole needs to police it better. Violation of public trust by manipulating the system of peer review is an egregious act. Sadly it is not unusual for a "good-old-boy" network to operate in science. First there is the very nature of finding the peers to review the paper. When a paper is submitted to a journal, the authors provide a list of names of scientists (peers) who have expertise in the field and should be able to judge the work on its scientific merits. There is often a second list of person known or suspected to be biased by virtue of a conflict of interest. Editors (and funding agencies) are alert to even the appearance of bias either for or against the authors, but it is often the case that an editor is unfamiliar with the details of the research and must rely on those recommendations to choose the peer reviewer. Over the past year I have become an editor of a journal in my field. It is hard to find enough reviewers willing to take time out of their research to review papers. Good reviewers get heavy workloads and many requests simply because they are so good (and available). Fortunately, most scientists are aware of appearance of bias, and will be more critical of their friends than a complete stranger. I, for one, try to ensure that someone I know professionally does not get a "pass" on sloppy science, since it also reflects poorly on me. In addition, recommending only "friends" as reviewers won't work –- as an editor, I soon discovered that only one in ten of the recommended reviewers will accept an assignment, but that those turning it down will recommend someone else; thus, editors work down the list until they find two-to-five reviewers (depending on the journal.

One of the problems in peer review is the "not invented here" syndrome. An article may be very well-written, but rejected by multiple journals on the basis of "not appropriate (or too complicated) for the readership of this journal." When reviewed by scientists with traditional training within a field, such a paper may be subject to highly critical reviews or unreasonable demands for additional experimentation or controls. When that same paper is read by cross-disciplinary scientists, it may receive a much more favorable (or even enthusiastic) reception. When added to the desire to get a novel finding into print first and lay claim to a result (thus upsetting settled science) it can be very frustrating to know that an outside audience would publish in a heartbeat, while still no getting recognition from one's peers!

This, however, is where the second and fourth bullet points above interact. A new model of publishing embodied by the journal PLoS One (Public Library of Science) is an online publication that does not make value judgments on the appropriateness of an article, but will subject it an open review by 2-5 peers whose name appears with the publication. Typical review is by 2-3 outside reviewers, plus the editor, and is "blind" in that the author never knows who reviewed the paper. The philosophy of PLoS One is to let the scientific community sort it all out post-publication; with unlimited space, there can be publication of every article that passes basic peer-review; however, the scientific community will decide for itself what is worth keeping. This is not an entirely bad approach, but it still has problems: (a) the supply of reviewers is limited (see above), and (b) once released, there is no good way to retract a publication later determined to be invalid. Thus, publishing more while maintaining the peer-review process is not necessarily a winning game. What if there were a way to reduce the burden of peer review by simply publishing and letting "society" decide what results are worthwhile? If all scientific publishing were done on the internet, and anyone wanting to find a particular result just had to search for it, there would be the issue of deciding which search results to choose: The most recent or the one with the most links or comments. Simple comment count would also not be enough, since those comments could entail a running argument of the pros and cons of the scientific paper. If we institute a judgment of worth or a vote on the acceptability of a scientific paper, we risk turning Science into a popularity contest. Consider also the Wikipedia model: Should just anybody -- with or without formal scientific training –- be able to edit our "WikiScience?"

By far, my strongest counter to claims that peer review is broken and should be replaced (or scrapped) is that if there are no gatekeepers, then there is no way to weed out the junk science. The continuing measles/autism scandal is the perfect example of science by public acclaim; if it had been subject to greater scrutiny, it may never have been published. In addition, once it was published, it has been damnably difficulty to remove its credibility from those who choose to believe. Do I think peer-review is broken? I certainly think it has been warped; which is good for challenging any notion of settled science, but is simultaneously dangerous in allowing science to be subject to public whim.

It's a process, not a conclusion

I do not think that any portion of the scientific process should be scrapped: from hypothesis generation, to statistical analysis, to peer review. I do think it needs better watchdogs -- and those watchdogs are the scientists whose job it is to always keep in mind that their job is to continually renew the process of science, and never "settle" (pun intended) for the easy answer or the sloppy science. If a scientist witnesses abuse of the system, they should be able to speak out and not get shut out because of political whim. When they find truly novel results, or results that contradict the settled science, they need to be encouraged to publish the novelty, correct their mistakes, and avoid the trap of thinking that a result is a conclusion.

At the same time, the public needs to be better educated so that they do not get told what to do be manipulative media politicians and yes, scientists. I would be all for fully open access to science if the public were educated enough to understand the basics to be able to tell what is and is not good science. Unfortunately the reality is that there exists a high level in science where only a very few people worldwide understand or even care. Only time can judge the worth of such research, the rest requires an educated populace. As long as there is *any* stratification within the populace based on education, there will be those who must translate science to the masses, and become a gatekeeper.

Unfortunately, the gatekeeper position can all too easily be corrupted as we have seen. Any scientific conclusion which agrees with the gatekeepers is too easily labeled as a "consensus," while dissenting opinions are labeled as "fringe," "deniers," or even "fraud." The section on scientific blunders in the beginning of this essay certainly highlights the error inherent when new evidence and scientific results comes along and relegate the former consensus position to the same historic scrap heap and geocentrism. I will sometimes state that any two scientists will produce three different scientific opinions. In even the narrowest aspects of my research field –- with possibly a total of only 200 labs in the world which study the same aspect of Neuroscience –- it is difficult to get even half of them to agree on any one theory. A true consensus in the sense of agreement of >90% of scientists in that field would require so many coincidences, that are mathematically extremely rare.

Internet memes and the love of science.

As stated above, there is a real need for better public education in science. In fact, an old friend of mine just went to work for the U.S. Department of Education in a program working to improve the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum in schools throughout the country. It is a daunting job, but frankly, it is not helped by the tendency for people to latch onto internet memes such as the Facebook website with the non-PG13 name: "I F---ing Love Science." Unfortunately, this site and others like it, do more damage to the notion of real science (not to mention perpetuating the false notions of settled science and consensus). The IFLS site and the pictures they post are often the flashy, colorful end result, and are more indicative of the skill of the graphic artist than the actual science. They generally ignore the need for a deeper understanding of the Scientific Method and the sheer mind-numbing tedium of experimental testing in order to truly "love" science. While a well-coifed scientific pundit in a tweed jacket (or an engineer in rumpled lab coat) is lauded by the media, working scientists are often ignored or distrusted. Very few scientists have publicists and make-up artists; science is not more "true" because the experiments bubble menacingly, flash lights on complex equipment, or turn pretty colors. Someone stated in an online discussion the IFLS memes don't truly love science, they are merely "admiring its butt as it walks by."

I can only hope that this exploration of why science is always changing, and always refining itself, will lead to a stronger, better educated public, resistant to error and fraud. Our greatest defense against being fooled or misled –- by changing theories in science, by misinterpretation or by pseudoscience -- lies with education. A true love of science and a better understanding of the dangers of thinking that science is settled or represents a consensus starts with knowledge.

Knowledge is power. Be powerful.

* * *

Even Fantasy Needs a Little Science

(Even Magic Needs Rules)

by Tedd Roberts

There is a division within the fandom of SF/F. No, I'm not talking about politics, publishing houses or Star Trek vs. Star Wars. No, the very title "SF/F" or, as the some would have it "FASF," should give it away. I'm talking about the division between Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Elves and wizards and demons would appear to have little in common with science, engineering and space. One deals in the mystical and metaphysical, the other in the scientific and technological. SF is basically speculative fiction in which the speculation revolves around extensions, projections or subtle changes from known scientific and engineering rules and facts. Fantasy involves a different type of speculation, in which properties of mind, magic and mystery combine with themes of good vs. evil, the benign vs. the horrific, and the mundane vs. the magical. Science and fantasy do not mix. They are antithetical, oil-and-water, black vs. white. But are they really? Or should they even be such polar opposites? In the following sections we will explore some of the basic assumptions of science fiction and fantasy, some examples of the genre that blur the lines between the two, and we will explore the idea that even fantasy can benefit from the realm of science and technology.

Clarke's Third Law

Fans of both fantasy and science fiction know that there are a few inviolate rules to the speculative fiction genre:

- "42" is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

- It is inadvisable to participate in land wars in Asia or go up against a Sicilian "When Death is On the Line."

- Fans will always argue as to whether Kirk or Picard was the better Captain.

- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This last is known as Clarke's Third Law, attributed to his essay "Hazards of Prophecy: Failure of the Imagination in the 1962 book, Profiles of the Future. There are indications that it might not be original to Arthur C. Clarke, since it echoes Leigh Brackett's "Witchcraft to the ignorant ... Simple science to the learned" ("The Sorcerer of Rhiannon", Astounding, February 1942) and Charles Fort's observation in Wild Talents (1932) that something currently unexplainable, may later be explained when more information is known.

This principle is very well known in science fiction – Clarke himself used it with respect to psychic phenomena in Childhood's End. Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels are distinctly fantasy, but later revealed to have arisen from the purely technological origin of a crashed starship. Jack Chalker's "Soul Rider" books initially reveal the mysterious realm of "Flux" ruled by the most powerful of wizards, yet his prequel Birth of Flux and Anchor reveals that Flux is merely an interdimensional energy source manipulated by physics and powerful computers – and eventually by talented individuals capable of interfacing with those computers without conscience direction.

Perhaps the most obvious application of Magic as Technology is in Rick Cook's "Wiz Biz" books in which the most powerful wizard of our world, is pulled through to magical realm to assist in a war of good versus evil. Instead of a wizard, they get master hacker "Wiz" Zumwalt, who quickly figures out that spells are a lot like computer programs. He and a few friends construct a "spell compiler" and they are off and running creating and using spells pretty much the same as any SF/F fan would use a computer, tablet or smartphone.

Another example of science-turned-fantasy is Wen Spencer's Tinker and sequels which detail a magical alternate world into which is thrust the mundane city of Pittsburgh. The means by which Pittsburgh spends twenty-nine days a month in that realm is technological. Tinker herself is just what her nickname suggests, a mechanical tinkerer . . . but Elfhome is clearly a magical world of elves, dragons and orcs. On the other hand, Tinker and Rick Cook's Wiz are great examples of fantasy which relies on a set of rules not unlike science. In such a case, what is the source and substance of magic? For Tinker and her husband Wolf Who Rules Wind, the Spell Stones supply a palpable energy that they can tap to work more powerful magic than they themselves can supply. Wiz runs programs which "compile" magic power into spells. In these universes, is "magic" simply access to an essentially limitless power source?

Larry Niven might disagree. In his Warlock series (aka Magic Goes Away), magic is powered by "mana" (wordplay on the biblical food source "manna" -- i.e. "manna from heaven")which is in danger of depletion. Niven goes on to write about locations of powerful magical spells and duels which depleted the source of all magical power in a region, making it as ordinary and mundane as the world in which we live. Piers Anthony uses a similar theme in The Source of the Magic in which magical power comes from a powerful demon, lost in thought beneath the magical realm of Xanth. While there is no particular danger of depletion of this magical supply (except in the one case where the demon decides to pause its meditation), the concept of a magical source of energy is nevertheless consistent, in that the closer one approaches to the source, the more powerful and wild the effects. Any Dungeons & Dragons (or equivalent game) player will recognize this principle in that magic users are limited in spells until they achieve high rankings. They must spend considerable effort in preparing a spell, and once the spell is cast, that "energy" is gone forever.

How then is this concept so different from John Ringo's There Will be Dragons? In the far future, mankind is freed of mere mortal limitations and exercises a near magical ability to transform themselves and their surroundings via manipulation of a power supplied by the ultimate supercomputer "Mother." Ringo uses Clarke's Third Law to good effect in his description of humans who use the all-pervasive power to change their own bodies, sculpt and mold their surroundings, and even fly -- that is until a civil-war erupts among the Council governing Mother and its allocation of power. Battle is waged with the ultimate in energy weapons -- energy itself -- leaving none for the now-mortal humans who must rely on skills preserved only by "re-enactors" and those who have rejected energy technologies.

Counterpoint - Niven's Law

While it is questionable whether the inverse of Clarke's Third Law was actually coined by Larry Niven, the commonly attributed "Niven's Law" states that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Perhaps no author uses this principle better than Terry Pratchett (in fact, some attribute this "law" to Pratchett rather than Niven). In his Discworld fantasies, the "High Energy Magic" students have created a computing device powered by magic, ants, honeybees and a small stuffed bear. Wizards regularly measure "thaum" units of magical energy with a "thaumometer;" druids fly-in replacement standing stones for their henge-computers and the anti-entropic properties of the Futures Market provides refrigeration for food storage.

Thus we set up a situation where fantastic events and abilities can exist with both a scientific/technological or magical origin. We have SF "superheroes" with near-magical powers attributed to scientific explanations, and fantasy heroes dependent on more mundane, but nonetheless technological, advances in blacksmithing, weaponry, armor and food preparation. Consider the dichotomy of the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling: The magical and mundane world exist side-by-side -- radio, newspapers, transportation, food preparation, domestic cleaning -- each world has an equivalent ability that is nearly unbelievable to the other. Arthur Weasley is fascinated by electrical plugs and sockets, because he cannot believe that the ordinary world has to physically connect to a power source. The "muggles" of Rowling's world are in no danger of truly discovering magic, because they simply ignore or explain away any sight or event which does not conform to a more scientific world –- much the way the mages Purple and Shoogar of David Gerrold and Larry Niven's The Flying Sorcerers explain each other's respective technology and magic to suit their own views.

The fact that there is even a dichotomy reiterates the premise of this essay -- that there exists a type of fantasy that uses or even requires that spells, devices and abilities follow scientific principles (or at the very least, what we might consider "normal-world common sense"). Magic requires power; heat and light sources require some form of on-off switch; news is delivered by print and voice, and any effect defined by technology can have a magical equivalent which works in a very similar manner to the technical one. Arthur C. Clarke is also reported to have said: "Science fiction is something that could happen - but you usually wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though you often wish that it could." With respect to examples used here, it would be hard to argue that the scientific world is the more desired one. After all, we are still waiting for flying cars, yet the Wizarding World delivers exactly that and more.

The Psychic Connection

Nowhere is this dichotomy more evident than in the supposition of mental or "psi" powers in both SF and fantasy. In the absence of a current real-world equivalent to telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation and precognition, any story incorporating such powers must be fantasy, right? Is X-Men fantasy or SciFi? It has mutants, and that's science -- but Professor X, Jean Gray and others have psi powers, so it must be fantasy! The concept of psychic powers taps directly into a gap in our real-world scientific knowledge -- namely, metaphysical properties such as the distinction between mind and brain, the sense of self, and the scientifically unanswerable questions of faith and belief.

A measurement of brain function can show us the regions and sections of the brain which are active with each activity, every song we hear (or perform), and even the images we sense in dreams (Kay et al. Identifying Natural Images from Human Brain Activity, Nature, 2008, vol. 453, pp 352-356). We can even detect patterns associated with thoughts, but cannot explain how those thoughts arise. We understand mental disease well enough to point to the biochemical imbalances and anatomical changes -- but cannot explain the disturbed thought patterns that arise as a consequence of the disease.

It is actually fairly easy to devise a technological means of implementing some psi powers. A transducer on the muscle control regions of the brain, interfaced to manipulation of electromagnetism and atomic forces would duplicate telekinesis. Implants on the speech and hearing centers could provide "telepathic" abilities. Even so, postulating a means of directly connecting the brain (and the mind) with those forces requires an element of the fantastic which is hard to reconcile with straightforward scientific knowledge. Travis S. Taylor has a theory that such phenomena can occur as a result of the brain interacting with quantum wave functions (as he wrote in The Quantum Connection and The Science Behind the Secret), and that each brain not only receives but generates quantum waves. While I have many disagreements with the examples and specifics of the Doc Travis' theory, I don't necessarily think he is wrong (we'll hash this out at a future date!). This we have a possible scientific explanation for an arguably fantasy ability. While the science to confirm the theory does not yet exist, projecting possibilities into the future is the hallmark of Science Fiction.

One of the more scientific treatments of psi abilities presupposes that use of ability depletes neurotransmitters, metabolites, or is otherwise equivalent to physical exertion. This is rather common in SF, and to a certain extent, it survives in fantasy in a manner similar to the D&D Magic User's need to spend a long period of preparation, to "concentrate the mind," and to use the ability once, then require a "recharge" before it can be used again. All too often, however, fantasy treats mental powers as accessing a nearly limitless power -– much as suggested in the beginning of this article.

Magic in Technological Society

What is this? Unfamiliar with the topic? Perhaps you know it better as Urban Fantasy. The UF genre is somewhat unique in blending what used to be the province of gothic horror with modern "civilized" life. Wizards, witches, vampires, werewolves and ghosts live side-by-side with cars and computers. In many ways, I prefer the approach of Jim Butcher in his "Dresden Files" books. Harry Dresden is a modern-day wizard living in Chicago –- strong magic and modern technology do not mix. Allow Harry too near a computer or television and it stops working. Sooner or later, elevators cease functioning and light bulbs burn out around him. He drives a 1960's Blue Beetle (that was no longer blue) simply because electronic ignitions and computer chips would not long function in his presence.

Still, the fascination with UF leads to stories with vampires and werewolves in public schools, and no one concerned that ancient curses are somewhat at odds with semiconductors and genetic engineering. Still, the latter field provides an out for the fantasy/SF crossover. A recent TV show "The Strain" treats vampirism as a parasite, and werewolf legends read much like a description of viral infection. In fact, it is quite possible that historical (and hysterical) legends of vampires resulted from a blending tales of albinism (lack of skin pigment leading to red eyes, white skin and extreme sensitivity to sun) with possible enzyme deficiencies best met by consuming blood and raw meats. Werewolf legends could have likewise resulted from cases of rabies passed from wolves to humans. Zombie legends actually arose from two sources – primitive religious practice which induced hypnotic/suggestive states in humans via drugs, and reports of the "madness" induced by prion diseases as a consequence endemic to cannibalism practices.

Thus urban fantasy can easily point to semi-scientific foundations for their fantasy. Werefolk may simply be amnesic aliens who "shift" from human to animal forms to better adapt to their new homes on Earth – as in Sarah A. Hoyt's Noah's Boy. With urban fantasy, it is not just easy, but expected to blend romance, history, and adventure. Nevertheless, when such fantastic monsters become too much for the mere humans to endure, one can always call on the technological armament of Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International where former school teachers, paramilitary operators and a combat accountant can whip ass, take names, and collect their PUFF bounties!

I am deliberately skirting past horror fantasy in this article, simply because the essence of horror is to shock and catapult the reader from his or her safe cocoon of normalcy. Horror is certainly a genre unto itself, Hollywood movie descriptions notwithstanding. Psychological horror/thrillers of the sort written by Dean Koontz and Stephen King do contain an element of science in how they treat the very real effects of psychological stress on their protagonists. Such stories require much more of science in the writing than perhaps in the stories; but the fantastical elements of horror can still draw on the scientific building blocks of mutation, alien technology and energy source as described above.

Hobbits and Wizards and Elves, Oh My!

The connection between science and fantasy is weakened somewhat in the area of epic or high fantasy. Good vs. evil, elves vs. orcs and epic quests owe more to mythology and legend than to technology. For these stories, I am reminded of a panel discussing how to put real science into science fiction at an SF/F convention a few years ago. Panelists included writers with various scientific backgrounds including a chemical engineer who wrote epic fantasy. I asked how she put science into fantasy, and was immediately informed that for her – science meant systematic methods, rules and principles, and that for her fantasy to be consistent, the magic had to follow rules and be consistent. This is much the same approach taken by Professor Sir John Ronald Reuel Tolkien who spent a decade developing his signature alphabet and languages for his legendarum High Fantasy. Tolkien was certainly a scholar and an academic in the classical style. In his writing he demonstrates an application of scientific determination in the rigors of his language and story.

Still, the magic of high fantasy brings us back to the original premise of this essay: If we view use of magic as tapping into a previously unknown source of (limitless) power, does it necessarily unite SF and F into a single theme? Perhaps not, for as Clarke once said "Fantasy makes the impossible probable; science fiction makes the improbable possible."

Both fantasy and science fiction are suited to speculation as well as caution. In the final analysis however, the division between fans -– and the distinction of the genre -- may be moot. Frankly, it is, and should be, the story itself that ultimately sells and entertains. Analyses such as this are a fun way to look at how common themes are handled differently by fantasy and science fiction. In addition, it is also useful for the writer to understand that an Atlantean fable can still be told whether the city floats in the air on antigravity beams, or swims in the ocean on the back of a giant turtle. Ultimately, the story is king, no matter whether science, fiction or fantasy; and no amount of literary hand-wringing will change the enjoyment readers gains from their favorite books.

Living without Satellites

by Les Johnson

Gravity was a fun movie that didn’t seem to care if it got the science "right." In portraying the very real threat of space junk destroying our satellites and space stations, Gravity was conceptually correct, but the timeline in which such destruction might occur was extremely compressed. Unfortunately, the threat posed by space junk is real and it isn’t the only reason we might have to learn to live without satellites…

Time Zero

Somewhere in Low Earth Orbit, a few hundred miles above the Earth

The weather satellite was old. It was launched into space in 1972 and had done its job well until it was turned off in 1983 as its replacement was finally finished and lofted into orbit to replace it. Having long outlived its useful life, the once state-of-the-art satellite, weighing 1580 pounds, was now just a dead piece of metal orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. Nothing much had happened near the old satellite since the rocket that carried it into space those many years before had sent it on its way to circle the globe every ninety minutes. Since it was launched, it had orbited the Earth nearly 250,000 times – traveling over nine billion miles.

The weather satellite’s orbit crossed that of many other satellites and many more pieces of orbital debris, but the probability of it being in the same place at the same time as anything else was rather small. After all, space is big. Space is very big and, compared to the volume of space around the Earth, the volume occupied by the weather satellite was very small. The probably of it colliding with another object in space on any given orbit was small, but, unfortunately, the laws of probability finally caught up with the weather satellite. After more than a quarter of a million orbits, even a low probability event might actually happen. And happen it did.

An old Soviet-era rocket booster was orbiting the Earth at the same altitude but at a slightly different inclination. (Orbital inclination is simply another way of saying at what angle the orbit makes compared to the equator.) Their orbits crossed in two places and it was at one of these crossing points that the unlikely event occurred.

The rocket booster had launched a Cold War era spy satellite that was lofted into space by the Soviet Union. The booster was out of fuel and had no way to propel itself back into the atmosphere to burn up, so its masters had simply cataloged its orbital location and forgot about it. After all, the country that launched it into space didn’t exist anymore. The booster also circled the Earth every ninety minutes at 17,500 miles per hour.

The two objects approached the same physical location in space at a relative velocity of over 30,000 miles per hour. When the weather satellite collided with the old rocket stage there was no sound – there was no air to carry any sound - but there was a flash. Given that the satellite and the rocket stage were each traveling at least twenty times faster than a bullet, both were totally destroyed. The resulting debris cloud consisted of more than ten thousand pieces. Each piece was moving at over 17,000 miles per hour and, as a result of the collision, all five thousand of them were thrown into new orbits. The amount of junk had just grown past the tipping point, raising the probability that a piece of debris would then hit another satellite, destroying it and creating yet more debris, etc. etc. etc.

The United State Space Surveillance Center, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

Months before, using computer simulations, the US Space Surveillance Network had predicted that these two satellites would collide. Sophisticated radars around the world kept constant watch on the myriad of objects now circling the Earth and equally sophisticated computer models predicted with high accuracy when such collisions were likely to occur. They got this one right.

A team of engineers was watching the display and anxiously waiting on the radar results to provide an estimate of how bad the collision was. After just a few orbits, they had their preliminary answer – pretty bad. According to their models, the debris created in this latest collision was just enough to initiate the Kessler Syndrome. The Kessler Syndrome, named after the engineer who predicted it, says there will be a time when there are enough pieces of debris in space to create a cascading series of collisions that may ultimately render Low Earth Orbit (LEO) unusable. Any satellite in LEO after that time will have a high probability of being hit by debris and destroyed.

The team lead, with data in hand, contacted his superior and informed him of the latest predictions. Not wanting to be alarmist, his supervisor asked for more information, including when the next collision was likely to occur if predictions of a runaway Kessler Syndrome were accurate.

The next impacts would occur in no more than six months.

Time Zero Plus 6 Months

The computer models were correct. Six months later, a two inch piece of aluminum, still traveling twenty times faster than a bullet, collided with a functioning Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite and destroyed it. The collision created another five thousand pieces of debris that quickly spread out into several different orbits.

Shortly thereafter, yet another piece impacted a European science satellite, creating still more debris.

The Kessler Syndrome had begun.

Time Zero Plus 18 Months

The six astronauts on the International Space Station were aware of the orbital debris problem. They’d learned about it during their extensive training and they had contingency plans in place should there be a debris threat to the 660,000 pound orbiting laboratory. Bigger than a football field, the station was a large target for debris. Fortunately, under normal circumstances, any debris object large enough to pose a serious threat to the space station was tracked on radar, allowing ample warning of any potential collision risk. In fact, the station performed adjustments to its orbit several times each year to reduce the likelihood of an impact with a closely passing piece of junk.

But these were not normal circumstances. The astronauts had been warned of the potential runaway Kessler Syndrome and were in the process of abandoning ship and returning to Earth in the emergency crew escape vehicle when the entire station shuddered from a debris impact somewhere in the Destiny, America’s Laboratory Module. Fortunately, they were in the process of leaving and they were quickly able to get in the escape vehicle. Moments after they separated from the space station and began their return to Earth, the thirty billion dollars orbiting laboratory lost its entire atmosphere and began tumbling out of control. As in the movie Gravity, it, too, had now become a piece of space junk.

Time Zero Plus 3 Years

Ten satellites and the International Space Station were now lost and the number of collisions was increasing.

The United States, Russia, and China were now on high military alert. Among the ten lost satellites were super-secret and super-sophisticated spy satellites. Since the Cold War, the world’s major nuclear powers had placed into space spy satellites capable of providing early warning of an attack. These satellites could detect the launch of an adversary’s missiles with sufficient time to trigger a punishing counter attack before the first hostile bomb could fall on one of their cities. The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, had worked to keep the peace for decades due to the vantage point provided by these eyes in the sky. As the satellites began to go down, defense planners got nervous and increased their state of readiness, regrettably also increasing the chance of a miscalculation causing a devastating war.

In both the United States and in Russia, forces were placed on high alert. Fortunately, both countries maintained a significant array of radar installations that could detect missiles in flight shortly after launch. Without satellites, these radars would provide the only warning that an attack had begun. Not since the Cold War had either country’s nuclear forces been on such a high state of alert.

Time Zero Plus 5 Years

The total number of satellite collisions totaled over twenty-five. The world’s spacefaring nations were now acutely aware of the problem and working to find a solution. Unfortunately, any solution would require building a series of complex and expensive spacecraft to either remove large debris objects or de-orbit small ones. The first of the satellites to try and reverse the Kessler Syndrome would not be launched for another three years – the total number of damaged satellites at that time was projected to be near fifty…

The disaster might play out very differently than the previous scenario. It might begin with a blast of radiation coming from the Sun impacting the Earth, zapping with spacecraft electronics and causing many of our satellites to die or become uncontrollable. It might also be caused deliberately, as an act of international terrorism, with a small country launching a rocket filled with ball bearings into an orbital region occupied by numerous commercial satellites, kickstarting the Kessler Syndrome. Any country with access to space can wreak all sorts of havoc on the largely fragile and unprotected satellites that freely circle the globe.

There are already over half a million pieces of debris in Earth orbit (Figure 1). Debris was probably placed in space with the launch of our first satellites in the late 1950s. Flecks of paint, screws and bolts from early rockets, bits of insulation, and even ice crystals discarded from orbiting space stations are among the debris that will likely remain in Earth orbit for thousands of years until their orbits naturally change and decay or until we go out and get them. Until recently, when a satellite was launched into space, no thought was given to what would happen to it after it completed its mission or ceased functioning. As a result, long-dead satellites are still out there, whizzing through space, becoming debris for some future satellite to crash into. Sometimes these old satellites still have residual propellant in pressurized onboard tanks or high energy batteries. Over time these tanks and batteries fail, causing a relatively large spacecraft to explode and create its own small debris cloud consisting of hundreds or thousands of pieces. Creating orbital debris wasn’t intentional; it happened due to a lack of foresight and planning.

Figure 1: Earth is surrounded by a cloud of spacecraft and debris that number in hundreds of thousands. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

No matter the cause, once the cascade of collisions begins, the result may be the same: a debris cloud of increasing size will encircle the globe. The cloud will consist of thousands of debris objects, each traveling at over five miles per second. These objects will circle the globe every ninety minutes and on every orbit, each piece will have a small, but very real, probability of colliding with a functioning spacecraft. When these inevitable secondary collisions occur, more debris will be added to the cloud, increasing yet again the probability of future collisions. Like a nuclear chain reaction, the cascade of collisions will continue until the count of debris objects numbers in the millions. There are now nearly half a million pieces of debris with diameters of a few centimeters or more. Most of these objects are in orbits too high for them to naturally decay, enter the Earth’s atmosphere, and burn up. Once the cascade begins and the tipping point is crossed, no satellite will be completely safe. Is this inevitable? No. But unless we begin to take steps to clean up the existing debris, limit the creation of future debris, and harden our commercial satellites against extreme solar storms, then this frightening scenario may become a reality.

Some may be wondering why I call this scenario “frightening.” After all, space is out there and we’re down here. How can the loss of space satellites, things that didn’t exist in any significant number until the 1960s, possibly have any meaningful impact on our lives here on Earth? Most people don’t realize how their lives are affected by space technology and space satellites. When they think of space exploration, they think of the International Space Station, Apollo and sending people to Mars. What they should also be thinking about are the Global Positioning System (GPS), communications satellites, spy satellites and weather forecasting – among many other things.

GPS was developed first and foremost to support the needs of the U.S. military. It consists of a network of between 24 – 32 satellites that provide line-of-sight access for receivers on the ground from virtually any place on planet Earth. A receiver uses the signals from multiple satellites simultaneously, and the amount of time it took each signal to reach it (knowing that the signal travels at the speed of light), to calculate its position on the ground with very high accuracy. Since the early 1990s, GPS has allowed our armed forces to navigate and coordinate with precision unequaled in the history of warfare. GPS signals are used to navigate drones for reconnaissance and combat, soldiers on battlefields, ships at sea, and planes in the air. GPS allows precise navigation anywhere on the globe and under varied weather conditions including rain, fog and sand storms. A sudden loss of GPS for the modern warfighter would be akin to someone losing one of their primary senses – sight, sound, smell or touch. It would not necessarily be fatal, but it would certainly be debilitating.

It is so useful that other countries are building their own systems so as to not be dependent upon the US should we decide to turn off GPS signals. After all, if we can use it, so can our adversaries. The Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) is Russia’s answer to GPS. Europe is building and deploying their Galileo positioning system and countries like India and China are building their own regional systems to provide comparable capability under their own control. Who can blame them?

Shortly after becoming operational, GPS entered the civilian economy like a tidal wave. Commercial electronics companies began selling portable GPS receivers for cars and trucks. Cell phone manufactures now have them embedded in virtually every cell phone produced. Google Maps changed the nature of mapping and how we travel, both in our cars and on foot. Local emergency personnel adopted the technology for E-911 services and for navigation. Cities have mapped the locations of fire hydrants and can direct emergency responders to the nearest one should the need arise.

Have you ever heard of Positive Train Control? In 2008, the U.S. Congress mandated that the nation’s rail system use GPS tracking to improve safety and reduce the risk of accidental collisions. Our rail system, which moves goods across the continent, is now dependent on GPS to function. And, as goes the rail system, so go the airlines. By 2025, U.S. air traffic control will move from ground-based beacons to space-based GPS tracking and navigation. Touted to increase the efficiency of air travel, with ever-increasing number of commercial airline flights, the Next Generation Air Transportation System will also be dependent upon satellites for routing planes and handling the complex traffic control near the nation’s airports.

Ships at sea already use GPS for navigation, with the thousands of cargo ships carrying everything from cars and electronics to food and diapers moving from country to country as international trade becomes increasingly globalized. Few countries make all the goods their citizens need within their own borders and GPS is one of the technologies that helped make massive international trade affordable.

The retail industry has embraced GPS for moving goods in a timely manner from warehouses to store shelves. Knowing where a particular shipment is located on its journey allows just in time manufacturing and inventory control, reducing costs and warehousing expenses. Retail companies also makes use of satellite technology in other ways. Credit card companies often use secure satellite links for card and check approvals at retail stores, bypassing the increasingly insecure Internet for transmitting financial data. The satellite dishes on the roofs of your favorite stores are not there for employees to watch DirecTV in the break room. They are likely VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) antennas that are humming with the financial and inventory data needed for the store to keep its doors open and its shelves stocked. Some banks now use VSATs to transfer funds from one to the other, making them a part of the global financial infrastructure.

Cable television doesn’t originate at your local cable company and then get piped into your home. Instead, the myriad of channels conveniently aggregated into whatever bundle to which you happen to subscribe come to your local cable provider by satellite relay. Without satellites, news of what’s happening in Russia, China and other parts of the globe cannot otherwise make it into the daily newsfeed. Your favorite football team playing a game in another state this Monday night likely cannot be broadcast without going through a satellite relay. If our communications satellites are lost, your televisions and, to the extent that they play to a national audience, your radios, will become purveyors of only what’s happening locally.

We shouldn’t forget weather forecasting. A network of satellites provides critical data for forecasting the weather, particularly the outlook for several days in the future. Figure 2 shows a satellite image of Hurricane Ivan approaching Alabama’s gulf coast in 2004. This type of data saves lives and, almost as importantly, helps people and businesses determine if they are in the path of a storm and how to react appropriately. The vantage point of space allows the precise evacuation of the communities likely to be most affected and those that are not in the line of fire to know that they can remain in place, saving lives and millions of dollars.

Figure 2: Hurricane Ivan made landfall at Gulf Shores, Alabama on September 16, 2004. (Image Courtesy of NOAA)

Satellite imagery is used by the military and our political leaders to maintain the peace. When your potential adversaries can’t hide what they’re doing, where their armies are moving and what they are doing with their civilian and military infrastructure, then the danger of surprise attack is diminished. In our nuclear age with instant death only minutes away by missile attack, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) only works if both sides know whether or not they are being attacked. The launch of missiles or a bomber fleet can easily be seen from space far in advance of either reaching their potential targets halfway around the globe. The danger of surprise attack is therefore small, making an accidental war far less likely.

So what does all this mean? And what do we do about it?

First of all, it means that the advocates of space development, exploration and commercialization have succeeded far beyond their initial expectations and dreams. The economies and security of countries in the developed world are now dependent on space satellites. We space advocates should celebrate our success and be terrified of it at the same time. Should we lose these fragile assets in space, our economy would experience a disruption like no other: ship, air and train travel would stop and only restart/operate in a much-reduced capacity for years (GPS loss). Many banking and retail transactions would cease (VSAT loss). Distribution of news and vital national information would be crippled (communications satellite loss). Lives would be put at risk and the productivity of our farming would dramatically decrease (weather satellite loss). The risk of war, including nuclear war, would increase (loss of spy satellites) and our military’s ability to react to crises would be significantly reduced (loss of military logistics and intelligence gathering satellites).

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can change how we view the space environment and do things to clean it up and prevent it from becoming increasingly trashed.

Most spacefaring nations now require spacecraft to deorbit within twenty-five years of their anticipated end of life. This will prevent the accumulation of old satellites in space and go a long way toward reducing the chance of future dead satellite explosions creating new debris fields. Most countries now also require their rockets to minimize the creation of new debris in the launch process. During virtually all phases of flight, rockets are now designed to not contribute to the buildup of space debris.

We can come up with a way to collect or destroy the nearly half million pieces of space debris already circling the planet. This won’t be easy. The junk is traveling at orbital velocities and will be difficult to find, catch and remove. The cost of creating a space garbage collection program could run into the billions of dollars.

We can stop testing satellite destroying technologies in space. In 2007, China wanted to show the world that they, like the US and Russia, could target and destroy a satellite in space. They used a missile to destroy one of their own old weather satellites, creating an estimated 2,600 pieces of new debris –having the dubious honor of causing the single largest debris-generating event in human history. Figure 3 shows the growth of orbital debris over time and the huge impact of this Chinese test. It must be noted that shortly after the Chinese test, the US conducted a similar test. The US targeted a satellite in a very low orbit for destruction; the debris created thus didn’t remain in orbit very long and it did not add to the overall debris accumulation problem.

Figure 3: The graph shows the dramatic increase in the number of cataloged orbital debris objects following the Chinese antisatellite test of 2007 and the Iridium/Cosmos spacecraft collision in 2009. The chart shows only those objects that are actively tracked and cataloged. It is estimated that there are approximately 500,000 smaller debris objects in orbit today. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

To protect against solar storms we should add significant shielding to our satellites, making them more resistant to the radiation that might someday otherwise overwhelm them. Most military satellites are designed to survive a space nuclear war and the increased radiation that would result. Civilian satellites are not, making them vulnerable to solar storms that do occasionally strike the Earth. Fortunately, we haven’t experienced a solar storm large enough to destroy our satellites since the dawn of the modern space age. But they do happen, we’ve just been lucky that they missed the Earth as they blew outward into the solar system.

We need to be aware of the risks we’ve accepted by becoming a space-dependent nation and civilization. With foresight and planning, none of these disaster scenarios need become real. Let’s have the dialog, make plans, and do what it takes to make sure that they remain in the realm of fiction.

Behind the Scenes at Mission Control

by Terry Burlison

Astronauts get all the glory: interviews, their pictures in the paper, the starry-eyed space groupies, those cool flight suits.

Mission controllers, however, rarely get mentioned—at least not positively. (Internet joke: “You might be a nerd . . . if you think the heroes of Apollo 13 were the mission controllers.” <rim shot>)

I’m here to set the record straight.

(NOTE: Since my quoted sources are still badged employees, they were unable to speak on the record. Thus, names are withheld to protect the somewhat innocent.)

When people ask my occupation, my past Mission Control experience somehow seems to creep into the conversation:

“What do you do for a living?”

“Well, I’m a writer, but I used to fly space shuttles out of Mission Control.”

Sometimes this does not get the reaction I’d like. Once, on vacation, I asked a waitress how a particular dish was prepared. She explained it, then asked what I did for living. “I work in Mission Control in Houston,” I replied with a modest grin. “Oh,” she said, clearly disappointed. “I thought maybe you were a cook.” My girlfriend laughed all the way back to our hotel.

Well, for those of you who do wonder, here’s what it’s like to work in the Big Room.

Flight Dynamics, call sign “Fido”

After college, I had the privilege of beginning my career in aerospace engineering at the top: as a NASA mission controller for the space shuttle. Not just any controller, either. Flight dynamics officers, call sign Fido, are the studs of Mission Control. (That’s fact, not opinion. Just ask any former Fido.)

Fidos are responsible for everything about the spacecraft’s trajectory from the moment it clears the tower on liftoff until landing. Sure, there are environmental guys, payload guys, avionics guys, etc. (and truth be told, they are the ones who usually handle problems during a mission, since it is their systems that usually break down), but Fidos—baby, we’re the ones that command the fire!

So for now, forget everything the media has told you about the astronauts. Forget Ken Mattingly in Apollo 13 single-handedly figuring out how to power up the dead Command Module. Don’t believe Al Bean “knowing” which switch to throw to save Apollo 12. Ignore Jim Lovell taking command of the Apollo 13 emergency while the mission controllers stared in disbelief at their consoles.

Beyond issues of personal hygiene, and, these days of course, payload experiments, astronauts do little without permission from the guys on the ground.

Houston, We Have A Control Center

Before I virtually sit you in the Fido’s seat, a little history is in order.

In the early 1960s, NASA was rapidly expanding its facilities, gearing up for the growing manned space program and needed a new center to control those missions. There was, of course, only one logical place for such a facility: Cape Canaveral, Florida. That’s where the rockets launched, that’s where the early control center was located, and that’s where the astronauts did most of their training.

So the new Manned Spacecraft Center was built a thousand miles away in Houston, Texas.

Figure 1: Welcome to JSC

(Photo courtesy of author)

Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan, was vice-president at the time. Back then, political considerations often took precedence over common sense (unlike today, of course). LBJ knew the community that landed the Manned Spacecraft Center would reap huge financial and publicity benefits, so he struck a deal with Rice University to lease several hundred acres of cow pastures near Clear Lake, Texas for one hundred dollars for one hundred years. And on that site, the government erected the Manned Spacecraft Center, known within acronym-laden NASA as MSC.

Actually, the Space Center is located 25 miles southeast of Houston, about half-way to Galveston. Take out a Texas map, one that shows cities as yellow blobs. You will see the great mass of Houston looming like a gigantic mustard stain in southeastern Texas. Extending down I-45 for 25 miles from that stain will be a long, slender yellow tentacle that lunges eastward and encompasses the Space Center, like a political amoebae engulfing a tax windfall.

So, yes, technically the Center is in Houston.

In 1974, the Manned Spacecraft Center was renamed the Lyndon Baines Johnson Space Center (changing the acronym to “JSC”). The Center itself is mostly a cluster of low, high-tech, concrete-and-glass buildings resting in a nice campus-like setting. Connecting sidewalks meander across manicured lawns and around small reflecting pools.

Figure 2: Pilot's-eye View of JSC

(NASA archive photo)

The personnel in the Center primarily work in one of several Directorates. The most important Directorate, indeed, JSC’s raison d’être, is the Flight Operations Directorate (FOD). In my day, FOD included the astronauts and, of course, the mission controllers. (The astronauts were later exiled to their own Flight Crew Operations Directorate, but have now returned to the FOD fold.)

Each building at JSC is numbered. In the early 80s, most of the flight ops people worked in Building 4, as they had for years. A couple hundred yards north of Building 4 sat a building with a Jeckyll-and-Hyde appearance: Building 30, home of the Mission Control Center. One half of Building 30 was a typical JSC office building: concrete-and-glass, low and sleek. The other half, attached by a low breezeway, was a large concrete cube with no windows whatsoever, its blank concrete walls utterly devoid of any device or emblem.

This was the Mission Control Center. The heart of NASA manned flight operations. (Since my tenure ended, JSC has added a new wing, and re-designated the buildings to 30A (offices), 30M for the original MCC (pictured below), and 30S (the new ISS control center.)

Figure 3: The Mission Control Center

(NASA archive photo)

Mission Control

The MCC is a three-story building (not that you can tell from outside). At the start of my tenure, the first floor was mostly support equipment, including the “brain” of manned space flight, the Mission Operations Computer (“MOC”), three IBM 370 computers with a tiny fraction of the computing power of a modern cell phone. Those babies sported 8MB of memory and still used magnetic tape drives for some mass storage. (For my article on the history of the MOC, click here.)

The upper two floors of the MCC were virtually identical: a large square room in the middle surrounded by a corridor with smaller support rooms around the outer perimeter. If the ground floor was the brain of a mission, this center room was the heart: the Mission Operations Control Room, or MOCR.

TV reporters always referred to the MOCR as “Mission Control.” Perhaps they thought the acronym MOCR—which rhymes with “ochre”—was too uncouth. Some years ago, JSC changed the name of the MOCR to the Flight Control Room, pronounced “ficker.” To no one’s surprise, the media still calls it “Mission Control.”

(This change was discussed when I worked there in the early 80s. Every time our manager would say “Ficker,” one of the women in our group giggled. Finally, he said, “If I can say it without laughing, you can hear it without laughing.”)

I never got a definitive answer why there were two identical floors, with two identical MOCRs. Some said it was so the third floor MOCR could be configured for Apollo while Gemini was being flown from floor two; others said it was to have a backup; still others, with a wary glance over their shoulders, whispered about future “classified missions.”

Certainly, during the early days of the shuttle program the Air Force did intend to use the third floor MOCR for Department of Defense shuttle missions. As far as I could tell, the extent of the classified preparations was to station some poor enlisted man at a tiny desk just outside the third floor elevator doors where he could glare suspiciously at us when we visited the vending machines. (Eventually, of course, the shuttle did fly classified missions, and I’m told by a former Fido: “By the time classified support actually began, the security level was considerably greater . . . card readers and magnetically locked doors and secure safes and CCTV monitoring and stuff like that.”)

When I originally stepped into the MOCR, the first thing I noticed was its small size. Perhaps due to the wide-angle cameras used for telecasts, I expected something large, perhaps even cavernous. In reality, the MOCR is about sixty feet wide and maybe forty feet long. About four times the size of a typical living room.

The second thing I noticed was the light—or rather, the lack of it. The MOCR was dark. The lights are on rheostatic switches. During missions or simulations (“sims”), they were kept at a bare minimum. This made it easier to see data on the console displays, which are rather like 1960s black-and-white TVs, only smaller and with fuzzier pictures.

During one of our simulations, the illumination issue demonstrated for me the power of the Fidos. I entered the MOCR with my boss, Jay Greene, who was the on-console Fido when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The room seemed no brighter than usual to me, but Jay walked over to the console and turned the lights down even more.

A voice from the back of the room wailed, “Goddammit, Jay, can we turn up the lights? I know you Fidos stare at a screen all day, but some of us have to read and write, you know!” Jay turned toward his assailant, gave his Brooklyn grin, then nudged the lights down a bit further. No one spoke again, and the lights stayed down.

I realized Flight Dynamics was the place for me.

(A colleague of mine informs me things changed in the post-Burlison years: “I remember the low lights, too. Some time later—not sure when exactly but it was before Challenger— the light level went up a bunch, and I hated it. I lobbied up the chain to get it turned down again, and after being a pest for a few weeks, got slapped back by PAO (Public Affairs Office) and some others that preferred the brighter settings. If I recall correctly, PAO’s objection had to do with the public TV feed cameras; I assume they must have replaced the cameras with ones that didn’t work as well in low light. Anyway, I lost that battle . . . wasn’t worth any silver bullets and I wasn’t getting any support for it. But the place wasn’t as cool, by any stretch.”)

The front wall of the MOCR was dominated by giant view screens. The center screen measured ten feet high by twenty across, and was called the “ten-by-twenty.” (No one ever accused us of originality.) On either side of it, and canted inward slightly, were two pair of ten-feet-square screens called “eidophors.”

Figure 4: The MOCR

(NASA archive photo)

Facing these five screens were four rows of two-tone green consoles, about four or five consoles to a row. The front row sat at floor level; each row behind it was tiered upward, a bit like a movie theater.

Behind the last row of consoles, a glass-enclosed viewing area overlooked the entire MOCR. This was the “VIP” area where presumably-important people sat during missions and pretended to understand what was going on.

The closer you sat to the glass wall, the less real work you did. The back row of consoles was pretty much reserved for NASA brass, such as the head of JSC and the head of Flight Operations. These people generally had little direct interaction with the flight controllers during a mission. In fact, many of us felt that the glass wall behind them could be moved about eight feet forward.

At the center of the next row sat the Flight Director. This position was well-named: he was responsible for the mission. Every decision, every interaction with the crew or vehicle was (and is) done with his explicit or tacit approval. The mission belongs to him (or nowadays, finally, “her”).

During a flight, mission operations goes on 24/7, rain, shine, or hurricane, so the Control Center is staffed by three rotating teams, each with its own flight director. Traditionally, each flight director had a color. Chuck Lewis was my flight director, and we were the Bronze team. The other two teams for STS-1 were Silver and Crimson. I don’t know if they carry on that tradition; if so, I can imagine a current Fido trying to impress some woman at a bar, “Yeah, sweetheart, I’m on the Puce team!”

Flight directors are literally at the center of the action in the control room. They must pull together information from more than a dozen flight controllers, figure out procedures in real-time, and decide what to tell the crew and when. They are the brightest, best trained, most knowledgeable people in the space program, apart from the astronauts themselves. At a party one night, I saw one of them walk into a closed sliding glass door.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the flight director never talks directly to the crew during a mission. I don’t care how many movies you’ve seen to the contrary, it doesn’t happen.

Except for payloads people, directing the astronauts as they perform experiments, the only person who talks directly to the crew during a mission, particularly ascent and entry, is the CAPCOM, which stands for “capsule communicator”—a name left over from the old days. (Actually, there is one other exception I’ll mention shortly.) The CAPCOM sits to the Flight Director’s right. This person is always an astronaut. A fellow astronaut knows what the crew is likely to be doing or thinking, how they are likely to react to instructions or situations. They are the perfect interface between mission control and the crew.

The second row from the front included people who actually work for a living. These included controls with such names as EGIL (Electrical Generation and Illumination), EECOM (Electrical, Environmental, and Communications), and GN&C (Guidance, Navigation, and Control). At the far left of the row sat the Flight Surgeon. In my day, this is the only person (except for the CAPCOM and the occasional president) who talked to the crew during flight.

NASA has always been extremely sensitive to any crew medical problems getting into the press. In the early days of the space program, if an astronaut had a medical issue, the surgeon would get on the air-to-ground communication loop and discuss it. Keen-eyed reporters, always lurking around for the next big scoop, would notice this and soon the knowledge that Astronaut A was suffering from the zero-gee trots would be in danger of escaping into the population at large.

To remedy this, NASA gave the surgeon his own private loop with which to speak to the crew. None of the rest of the mission controllers can even monitor it. Regular medical briefings were also scheduled so that discussions between the surgeon and the crew became commonplace.

The night before the launch of STS-1, the first shuttle mission, I discovered the surgeon served another, unsuspected service.

We were all sitting at our consoles and our flight director said, “Tomorrow’s a big day. If you think you might have trouble sleeping tonight, talk to the Surgeon—he has things that can help. If taking those things might cause you trouble waking up, talk to the surgeon—he has things that can help. If tomorrow you find yourself nodding off on-console, talk to the surgeon—he has things that can help.”

I figured if I asked the surgeon for something, he would open up his console and I would find it had no electronics in it at all, that his displays were nothing but stickers like on fake televisions in furniture stores. Inside his console, I suspected, I would find nothing but rows and rows of bennies, ‘ludes, reds, and such.

I abstained.

The front row of consoles included the “Trench”—Fido, Trajectory (or Retrofire), and Guidance, and was where the real work got done. And dead center, front row, sat the Fidos (and their co-pilots, the trajectory officers). To our right sat the guidance officer (call sign, imaginatively, “Guidance”) and to his right the data processing systems officer, or “DPS,” who was not part of the mythical Trench. (They insisted this be pronounced “dee-pee-ess,” so invariably we referred to them as “Dips.”)

The Fidos required more displays than could fit in our console space, so two additional displays were brought in and stuffed to our left, nearly blocking passage through our row. These displays looked like big black-and-white TVs. Hidden behind them sat the loneliest man in the MCC: the ground controller officer. One of the GC’s jobs was to keep the big projection display at the front of the room up and running. The projectors for this display sat in a big, dark open space behind the screens. The GC may as well have sat back there as at the end of the Trench, buried behind the Fido’s extra displays—he would have been no more isolated from human companionship.

I always wondered how GC got a front-row seat. My guess is the person making up the seating chart thought that “Ground Controller” sounded really important. I always felt kind of sorry for the GC guys; during the entire time I worked there, I never spoke to one of them, nor heard any other Trench guy do so. I suspect there are still colonies of them living in the deserted MOCR; ex-GC folk, mutated from years of close exposure to the Fido’s giant cathode ray tubes, snacking off expired drugs from the surgeon’s old console. (In fairness, I’m told today that, “they were actually pretty good guys, fully capable of speech and walking upright. We could even train some of them to have a sense of humor.”)

Figure 5: Fido/Trajectory Consoles

(NASA archive photo)

All told, we were a dozen or so steely-eyed rocket scientists, working in a dark, cold, antiquated room, squinting at low-contrast TVs. This is the glory that is Mission Control.

A few years ago, JSC opened a new wing on Building 30 which houses the new Flight Control Room. The new FCR has sexier-looking blue consoles with networked workstations at each position. The room is not tiered, and the Trench is now much closer to the giant screens in front.

The Fidos

Now you get to sit in the big boys’ chair, but you need to understand the privilege you’re being accorded.

NASA has always been a hierarchical being, both organizationally and in terms of “coolness.” At the top of the pyramid sat the astronauts (as they do today). Below them were the Flight Directors. Next came the Fidos. (Some may argue this point, but since they aren’t Fidos, no one listens.)

The Fido position is split into two: the flight dynamics officer and, in the Apollo/Gemini days, the retrofire officer (“Retro”). For the space shuttle, the latter was renamed to trajectory officer, call sign—more originality here—“Trajectory.” In addition to the two huge monitors blocking our row, the Fido had his own console and display and the trajectory officer another console and display. They also shared another console and display between them. The Fidos also controlled what is displayed on the four ten-by-ten eidophors, as well as the ten-by-twenty screen in the front. Normally, the ten-by-twenty showed the shuttle’s groundtrack, but during critical mission phases the Fido ordered the screen split into two ten-by-ten halves.

Thus, the Fido/Trajectory Officers actually controlled three consoles and displays, two additional CRTs, plus all six ten-by-ten foot displays at the front of the room. Not to mention the lights. Who wants to continue that “big dog” argument now?

The consoles themselves were also state-of-the-art 1964 technology. We each wore a “Starset” headset; a plastic device the size of a pistol grip that clipped onto our belt and had a long wire leading to an earplug and tiny microphone. They also sported a very long, coiled phone cord that plugged into slots along the edge of the console that enabled us to walk around while plugged-in. To be heard, we pressed a white button on the “grip” or pressed a foot-pedal on the floor.

The heart of any console position was the communication system, or “comm loops.” A loop is a connection between two (or more) controllers. For example, a Fido may talk to his backroom people on the “SDP DYN 1” loop. Only people with access to that loop could talk or listen to those conversations. Some loops were talk/monitor; some were monitor only. For example, there were three loops from the ground to the shuttle, Air-to-Ground 1, Air-to-Ground 2, and Air-to-Ground UHF. Anyone could monitor them, but only the CAPCOM could talk on them (remember?). My console sported a 48-button grid of comm loops.

Figure 6: Fido Comm links, back in the day

(Source: Flight Dynamics Officer Handbook, 1981. Note the high production quality.)

When making a call, a controller called the other person’s sign first, followed by their own, then waited for the response:

“Flight, Fido.”

When the Flight Director was ready, he would respond: “Go, Fido.”

Another example:

“Dips, Fido.”

“That’s ‘D-P-S,’ Fido!”

And there was none of that “over-and-out” stuff. Trust me.

A flight controller needs two skills above all others, and you won’t learn them in college: The ability to listen to a half-dozen conversations at once, ignoring everything that doesn’t relate to you, and mastering turning on and off those pushbuttons.

Scenario: You need to talk to the Flight Director. You push his comm button, make your call, then press another button to change “hot” loops—the loop that can hear you. Unfortunately, you didn’t press it quite hard enough, so you are still “hot” on the FD loop, meaning everyone in the MCC is listening. Thinking you’re talking to your backroom buddy, you say, “Hey Eddie, has that rash cleared up yet?”

Another rule is to keep your calls on-subject.

The comm system was included in the “big upgrade” to the new control center, and a former trenchmate of mine was not impressed: “This brings up another aspect of the ‘upgrades’ that I hated. The keyset hardware, while ‘antiquated,’ was infinitely superior in every operational way to the crap that replaced it. The tactile feedback, button lighting, color coding, and flash rate were perfect for high-speed phase operations. So, naturally, it was replaced by colorless touchscreens with no tactile response and cadaver-like flash rate. These were apparently more reliable, cheaper to maintain, and ‘programmable’ (whoopdefuckingdoo). So instead of being able to simply rest one’s fingers on a few button faces, press them as rapidly as needed and know the press had ‘taken’ by the tactile feedback (and, if necessary, a very quick glance to observe the flashing), now we had to keep hands off until it was time to select a loop. Then you had to locate the non-color-coded loop ‘button,’ make sure your finger was in just the proper ‘hot spot,’ touch it just so, wait a seeming eternity and physically divert your eyes from your data to observe that your selection ‘took’ by the agonizingly-slow flash rate, and finally carry on your conversation. It didn’t matter how pathetic it was for the operator—it was cool-looking to the Star Trek geeks who developed the specs without talking to the operators, and it supposedly cut costs. I ragged it mercilessly when we finally got to do the evaluations (which was by design too late to change anything) and referred to it only as ‘better than cancer.’”

I had the chance to observe the STS-98 mission from one of the trench’s support rooms and saw the “upgrade” first-hand. And I couldn’t agree more.

Another piece of the comm loop jigsaw puzzle was the telephones. Yep, telephones. Each console had an honest-to-goodness telephone built in, complete with rotary dial right there on the console. (Readers under twenty-five should ask their parents the meaning of “rotary dial.” Be prepared to hear how easy you kids have it these days.) You might use this to call someone off-duty or to order a pizza. (Just kidding. Burritos, maybe.)

These phones also received calls. I was instructed early on never to answer the phone with, “NASA, Johnson Space Center, Mission Control, Fido speaking.” Apparently, news reporters were not above finding the console numbers and calling them in their quest for potential “scoops.”

So we spent a lot of time watching all those screens and managing our communications. Oddly enough, one thing we Fidos did not do was run a computer from our console. No such capability even existed. We were the “brains” of the outfit. Grunt work, like entering numbers into a computer, was performed by our backroom support people, who frankly did pretty much all our actual work for us.

For example, one of my primary tasks was to generate “block-data.” The shuttle had six emergency landing sites around the world. Usually, one or more of them was available on any given orbit. My job as trajectory officer was to pick the best site, based on weather and political considerations (“Don’t fly over Chinese airspace unless you have to!”), then have the computer figure out how the shuttle would de-orbit in order to safely land there. This data had to be generated for every orbit in the mission and was sent up to the crew in “blocks,” such as ten orbits’ worth at a time.

The block-data information would be used by the crew in case of an emergency, where they had to get down now and might be out of communication with the ground, for example in case of a fire or meteoroid puncture.

The process would go something like this:

Trajectory (punching up the Dynamics Support loop—SSP DYN 1): “Dynamics, Trajectory.”

Flight Director: “You’re on the wrong loop, Trajectory!”

Trajectory (pressing the SSP DYN 1 button more firmly and watching to make sure it starts blinking): “Dynamics, Trajectory.”

Dynamics (laughing): “Go, Trajectory.” (Backroom conversations are less formal than those between front room positions.)

“I need to run an M40 maneuver.”

“Roger.”

“Guidance mode: PEG4-Deorbit. ‘H’ is sixty-five point eight three two. Theta is one-oh-niner point eight five oh. Prop is sixty-three thirty-three. C-one is one five eight oh eight, and C-two is negative sixty-three forty-five. Target TIG is thirty-eight colon thirty-three colon thirty-four. Delta-V and Delta-T overrides are zero.”

The Dynamics person enters this information into the MOC (using a terminal, presumably), the MOC churns and grunts for a while and if it doesn’t crash, the call comes:

“Trajectory, Dynamics.”

“Go.”

“Your M40 is up on channel twenty-nine.”

I would then punch up channel twenty-nine on my grainy monitor and verify that the inputs went in correctly, that the outputs make sense, and then send that data on to another controller who would relay it to the shuttle. And how, in the early 1980s, did this mission-critical information get to the most sophisticated machine ever devised by Humankind?

By teletype. If the crew happened to be talking to Mission Control, I would listen carefully to the Air-to-Ground loop until I heard the tikka-tikka-tikka of the on-board teletype chattering away in the background, and know my work was done.

Our console displays, though black-and-white and grainy, could accommodate very small text, even graphics, after a fashion. The screens were small, about 12” diagonally, but this lack of size and resolution did not stop industrious designers from putting more data on them at a time than any mere mortal could possibly read. Another on-the-job skill is learning to decipher these masses of data, picking out the handful of critical information buried in the morass of numbers—numbers that change every second.

Figure 7: Only two of many flight dynamics displays. And the data change every second!

(Source: Flight Dynamics Officer Handbook, 1981)

To get a printout of a display, the controller simply pressed the Hard Copy button for the appropriate screen. Somewhere in the bowels of the MCC, someone would make a copy of the display onto that gawdawful thermal paper like fax machines used to use. This smelly, slick, nearly unreadable sheet would then be rolled up, stuffed into a metal cylinder, and shoved into a “p-tube”: a pneumatic tube like drive-through banks use. Seriously. After pressing the button, the flight controller waited for anywhere from one to ten minutes until schwoop, clacka-clacka, thunk, the cylinder popped out and rolled into a bin near his feet. Grab the cylinder, pop out the display, drop it back in the return chute, and thwump, it was on its way back home.

(I hear the new FCR has laser printers at each console. They probably have push-button phones, too. Spoiled brats....)

Ready to Fly?

Now let’s see how you handle working in the Trench!

Preparing for a mission involves many training sessions called simulations. In these sims, the crew (astronauts) sit in big shuttle simulators, the mission controllers occupy their consoles (as do the backroom support people), and segments of a mission are flown using computers to simulate the data of a real flight. In the MCC, a sim is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, except for fewer neckties. The simulation supervison (“sim supe”) was generally a devious character of questionable lineage who would throw problems at us, typically at the worst possible time: engine failures, computer malfunctions, sensor problems, etc. Once you’ve survived many, many sims, you’re ready for the Big Day!

We’ve arrived hours before launch to verify day-of-flight winds, visibility, cloud-cover, etc. are all within flight limits. (Weather was a constant issue with shuttle flights.) We power up our consoles and watch the final preparations at the Launch Control Center at the Cape, making sure all our systems are ready for launch.

As the lift-off approaches, we commandeer the four ten-by-ten eidophors and tell the ground controller officer to split the big screen into two more ten-by-tens. We power off the two big displays blocking our aisle, and bring up the eleven displays we’ll be simultaneously monitoring during launch. Among the data we’ll monitor are graphical plots that tell us the shuttle’s position and velocity. These data come from three sources: S-band tracking (highly accurate ground-based radar), C-band tracking (less accurate ground radar), and telemetry (a stream of data from the shuttle, which includes where the shuttle thinks it is).

(True story: Moments before the launch of STS-1, we lost the Bermuda east coast S-band tracking station. This meant we might not be able to accurately track the vehicle until it made it to orbit. Flight rules called for the mission to be scrubbed. My boss, Fido Jay Greene, made the recommendation to go ahead and launch as long as he had C-band (skin) tracking radars available. And they did. It turned out that the TV coverage had co-opted the satellite that NASA used for relaying the tracking data. The announcers were too busy yakking to even notice the crisis.)

Finally the countdown, which may have started a few days ago, nears zero. The flight director polls the team:

“Fido?”

“Go.”

“Guidance?”

Go!”

And so on, through the front room positions.

Launch approaches. Our headsets are eerily quiet, no “ten-nine-eight-” countdown, just the occasional calls as milestones pass. Suddenly, our data comes alive! The shuttle’s main engines have ignited, and about five seconds later the big solid rocket boosters on the side of the shuttle’s external fuel tank erupt at “T minus zero.” None of us has a television feed (although that changed after the Challenger accident), and we stare at our screens as the single, quiet call, “Liftoff confirmed” comes over our headsets.

Now everything is changing at once. Numbers flicker on all those displays, and we see a set of yellow and red lines beginning to crawl up the ten-by-twenty’s displays, representing the shuttle’s position, velocity, flight path angle, etc. It’s really happening!

We hear an astronaut’s voice in our headset, “Tower clear,” and we are officially in control.

This is the Fido’s realm. During ascent, virtually all calls made in the control room (and relayed to the crew) are made by the Fido, and take precedence over virtually everything else. Most of these calls are to let the crew know what abort mode is available to them should something catastrophic happen, such as losing an engine.

Unseen by us, the shuttle rolls to orient itself (“Roll program”) for the orbit it needs and roars away. We watch the attitude numbers to verify they’re correct. Our gaze flickers over nearly a dozen displays, picking out the crucial bits of data such as attitude, thrust levels, flight path angle, acceleration, and more—skills honed over months or years of simulation practice.

After about two minutes, the two solid rocket boosters on the side have exhausted their propellant and drop off (“SRB sep”). The shuttle’s three main engines continue to burn, gulping propellant from the huge external tank attached to the shuttle’s belly.

The shuttle climbs out, gaining speed and altitude, and we watch our plots as the vehicle reaches various abort points—when the crew has different options should they lose an engine (or two). All of these abort calls are made by the Fido and are immediately relayed to the crew, as even a moment’s delay can be disastrous. (You can hear these calls on any recording of a shuttle launch.) As each moment arrives, we press our footpad and call out over the FD (Flight Director’s) comm loop:

“Two engine (Zaragosa)”: Should the shuttle lose an engine at this point, they could still make it across the Atlantic to an abort landing site, in this case Zaragosa, Spain. (There are others.) Initially, the abort mode is Return to Launch Site (RTLS), meaning if the shuttle were to lose an engine early in the ascent, they could turn around and actually fly back to the Cape. Now, however, they have enough speed, altitude, and distance to make it across the Atlantic (a safer abort). They are now in the “transatlantic abort” regime.

Over the next few minutes, as the shuttle blasts out of the earth’s atmosphere, gains speed, and heads into space, we make a series of abort mode calls:

“Negative return”: At this point, the shuttle is too far downrange to turn around and return to the launch site. Loss of an engine in the next few minutes would require landing at a site across the Atlantic.

“Press to ATO”: If the shuttle loses an engine at this point, they can perform an “Abort To Orbit” into a lower-than-planned orbit (105 nm instead of 200+ nm).

“Press to MECO”: They are now going fast enough that loss of one engine means they can still make their desired (“nominal”) orbit at Main Engine Cut Off.

“Single engine Zaragosa, 104”: Now the orbiter can make it across the Atlantic should it lose two engines, assuming the other engine is throttled at 104%.

“Single engine press, 104”: The orbiter can finally make it all the way into its nominal orbit, even if it loses two of the three main engines.

You can hear these calls on the Flight Director’s loop for the STS-114 flight (the return to flight mission after the STS-107 tragedy) here.

At this point, the orbiter flies on to its nominal orbit, and the OPS 3 (on-orbit) phase of the mission continues.

Almost all of the later shuttle flights were dedicated to building/supplying the International Space Station (ISS). Getting to the ISS (or another spacecraft already in orbit) is called rendezvous. Maneuvering the shuttle through the complex choreography of orbital mechanics requires many on-orbit burns, all of which are planned and, after execution, confirmed by the Fido by checking tracking data and telemetry (data sent down from the spacecraft) after the maneuver. Thus, on a rendezvous flight, practically everything that happens during the mission must be cleared by the Fido, since practically everything can impact the maneuver plan: all maneuvers (obviously), communication or lighting requirements, even the crew’s sleep and work schedules. On a rendezvous flight especially, the Fido (and his team) is “top dog.”

(For a detailed explanation of rendezvous and all the tasks the flight operations folk must master, read my two-part article here.)

Once the orbital mission is over, the crew must return safely to earth. And again, this is the Fido’s realm. We’ve confirmed the landing site meets wind, visibility, and other requirements, and your backroom support team has run the deorbit solution for us, which we verified and had uplinked to the crew. The shuttle maneuvers to its burn attitude, executes the de-orbit burn, and is now on a one-way, hour-long freefall into the earth’s atmosphere, where it will execute a series of long banking maneuvers to bleed off excess speed (without overheating) and arrive at the landing site with exactly the right amount of energy, i.e., speed and altitude.

As Fido, this is your responsibility, and once more, your eyes flick over all those displays, taking in huge amounts of graphical and numeric data. Should the shuttle somehow lose its onboard guidance capability, say from a bad estimate of its position, it’s up to you to manually guide the crew, by voice relay, though the complex set of pitch, roll, and yaw maneuvers (not to mention speedbrake and body-flap settings) to keep it on course! Not a task for the faint-of-heart, and one that thankfully was never required outside of simulations.

Finally, the shuttle reaches its landing site, turns around the Heading Alignment Circle (HAC) and descends to the runway. The speedbrake comes full open, the braking chutes deploy, and the wheels come to a stop.

Your job is finally over.

Figure 8: Printout of STS-1 approach and landing, as seen by the Trench. Hard copy wasn't exactly laser-print quality.

(Image courtesy of author)

Changes

Time marches on, for better or worse (or both).

In the 1990s, NASA moved the flight operations into the new wing of Building 30. Gone were the venerable p-tubes, pushbuttons, and grainy black-and-white monitors. Gleaming new color consoles with networked workstations now faced huge, high-definition color screens. Functionally, little changed in the way the control center operated, but not everyone is enamored with the changes.

One of the self-described “aging, useless, Apollo-hugging clingers-to-the-past” offers: “I've always hated nearly everything about it...the flat floor layout, pictures on the walls, the planters at the back, the flat front wall, the front-side projection, and the stupid ‘Mission Control Center’ logo over the center screen. It's a room for [sissified] apron-wearing flight controllers IMHO.” He describes working in the new Trench is like sitting in the front row of an IMAX theater. But, of course, this old-timer doesn’t even have a Facebook account, so what do you expect?

Figure 9: The new FCR. Not everyone is a fan.

Reflections

People often ask, “What does it take to be a flight controller?” (When they aren’t asking me if I’m a cook.)

And I say, “Balance.”

Good grades, but not necessarily great. Outside interests. Confidence. In a critical situation, with no time and little information, the ability to make the right decision. A willingness to look beyond the confines of your job description, to see the big picture, to pursue knowledge until you understand a system, a problem, or a requirement thoroughly. And, honestly, a certain amount of ego.

It also requires a willingness to live in Houston, amid the flatness, the humidity, the suffocating heat, as well as fire ants, roaches, wasps, mosquitoes, snakes, line-dancers, and other vermin.

And dedication. Only one group exceeded the flight controllers in this category: the astronauts. I scoffed at them a bit at the beginning of this article, but they were the most intelligent, driven, fiercely knowledgeable group of people I have ever known. Sometimes, late at night I would stop by my office to pick up or drop off something; invariably, many of the lights were still burning up on the third floor.

And while the astronauts get all the glory—some of the time undeservedly, it is true—it is also they who don’t come home to their families when it all goes horribly wrong.

So it’s a hard job, a tedious job at times, when everything is going well. (One of my toughest tasks during STS-1, the historic first space shuttle mission, was staying awake.) Sometimes, the bureaucracy, politics, endless meetings, and egos can be tough to endure. But standing in the MOCR at the end of the mission, waving flags, applauding, knowing that you helped achieve something unprecedented, and that the whole world is celebrating along with us, is an experience beyond measure or price.

Even if you wear a tie instead of a space suit.

Figure 10: The author in the Trench

Using Outer Space to Improve Life on Earth

(Or Why Space Advocates and Environmentalists Should Work Together)

by Les Johnson

Figure 1: "Earthrise" as seen by the astronauts of Apollo 8 as humans circled the Moon for the first time and looked back upon their home planet above the desolate lunar landscape. (Image courtesy of NASA)

Those reading this are likely from the most prosperous civilization that the world has ever experienced. You are likely not wondering if you will be able to eat today. You likely have access to clean water, sanitation, and a warm shelter for the coming cold winter nights. You are literate and have access to further education. You have entertainment options literally at your fingertips – on your computer, smartphone, or tablet, or at most it is a quick car or subway ride away. There are about a billion of you living in North America, Europe, Japan and a few other countries.

There are another 2 -3 billion people on Earth who lack many, or all, of these things, but they are on their way to obtaining them. China, India, and Brazil are but three examples of countries with a growing affluence and middle class. They see that what those of us in the First World have and they will soon have it too.

There are then another 3 billion people who see what their formerly destitute neighbors in China and India are now achieving and want it also. They are working diligently to improve their standards of living and will soon join the affluence club.

Can the planet sustain 7+ billion people consuming and polluting at the same rate that we in the First World do? There are two frequent answers:

1. “No. The Earth cannot sustain such prosperity. We must reduce consumption, recycle, reuse, increase efficiency and lower our standard of living to save the planet.” That"s great for the billion of us in the First World but what about the other 6 billion people on the planet? They have a right to seek better health care, education for themselves and their children, food, shelter and generally a better life. Achieving this will require more resources than they currently consume. Telling them they must remain poor, forever, for the good the planet is immoral and unacceptable. Anyone who believes this should immediately trade places with someone living in a Third World slum and see how long they maintain that view.

2. “Yes. Malthus, the Club of Rome, and all the other doomsayers have been wrong before and they are wrong now. The Earth is huge and resilient; we can just keep going and rely on our innovations to keep us ahead of the mythical and hypothetical disasters that are constantly being thrown around.” This group is also wrong. The Earth contains finite resources and we can never recycle or reuse them with 100% efficiency. The laws of nature and realistic engineering practices simply make that impossible. We will eventually run out of places to put our trash, mine our raw materials and build our homes. I don"t know when that point will be reached, but it will be reached – I believe sooner than later.

Both of these answers are morally indefensible. Is there another way out of this mess?

Yes. We can potentially address this problem in a way to provides affluence to Earth"s billions of inhabitants, protects the environment and perhaps even allows us to restore much of the environment that has already been damaged. We can do this by looking up and taking advantage of the practically limitless energy and raw materials in space. Nature has provided us with everything we need to prosper and live ecologically sound lives – simultaneously. We just have to take advantage of it.

Before continuing, there are some key points to be made:

The universe is hostile to life – NASA discovered this in the 1960s as it sent people ever further into space, culminating with astronauts walking on the Moon. The vacuum of deep space is far better than anything we can create on Earth, and without air, life as we know it cannot thrive. (True, some forms of life can survive in deep space without air, but they are hardly multiplying and "thriving.") The Sun bathes the solar system not only with life-giving visible light, but also with life-sterilizing ultraviolet light and a continuous stream of radiation called the solar wind, punctuated often by intense bursts of hard radiation during Coronal Mass Ejections (CME). One of the Apollo missions to the Moon barely missed a large CME that would have killed the entire crew. Fortunately, they weren"t in space at the time and all were safe. The surfaces of most planets and moons aren"t much better. The Earth"s moon is a lifeless desert; during the day it is baked by sunlight to temperatures greater than boiling water and cooled at night to temperatures below 300 degrees Fahrenheit. And it"s in vacuum, bathed by the solar wind and frequently pummeled by meteorites. Venus has a surface temperature high enough to melt lead and, yes, it rains sulfuric acid there as well. Mars" surface is bone dry and its pitifully thin atmosphere allows most of the solar radiation discussed above to reach its surface, likely killing any life the might try to take hold there.

There are no environments in space. An environment is a place that harbors life and, as far we know, there are few, if any, environments beyond planet Earth. Admittedly, there may be forms of life of which we are unaware and that remain undiscovered out there. The ocean covering Jupiter"s moon, Europa, comes immediately to mind. Within the inner solar system that is readily accessible by humans, there appears to be no life other than our own.

Earth has never been a paradise. True, a cursory glance will show the Earth to be a beautiful blue ball filled with abundant life. From the fish and algae in the oceans, to the rainforests and jungles in the tropics and the tundra in the north, our planet seems to flourish with life. From the vantage points of our crowded cities and burgeoning suburbs, it"s easy to romanticize about the "good old days" in which our ancestors lived more within the natural world and less apart from it. Hogwash. Life on earth, including human life, has always been one of eat or be eaten. Within the oft serene ocean, fish eat plants and are in turn eaten by bigger fish. In the tropics, animals prey upon each other continuously as one form of life serves as the food source for another. (Those who believe Earth was a paradise before modern humans ruined it should remove all their clothes, leave all their belongings at home and attempt to live for year in the woods of a nearby national forest. If they survive, then we can talk.)

For humanity, there has never been a better time to be alive. Two years ago, I received a tick bite that sent me to the doctor where I received a likely diagnosis of Lyme Disease. I received a prescription for an antibiotic that I took for two weeks and I am now disease free. The cost? $1.25 (after insurance). If I had been the President of the United States 100 years ago, the Lyme Disease diagnosis would have been debilitating. Our ancestors had many more children than we do today (thank modern birth control) and they needed to have them because many were subsistence farmers who needed the extra farm hands to help keep everyone fed. And, oh yes, about half of these additional children would never live long enough to reach adulthood due to disease. Forget the modern amenities like cell phones and television that many claim they could live without for "the simpler life" and think about dental care, vaccinations against smallpox, and clean water. I assert that there has never been a better time in human history to be alive than today.

The most common steps used to solve a problem are to recognize it; seek to understand it; develop possible solutions, and compare the alternatives; identify the most promising solutions and implement them. Currently, space technology has helped us with the first few problem solving steps outlined above – recognize and understand. It is now time to consider the use of space resources as possible solutions to our energy and environmental problems.

Space satellites and technologies are globally monitoring weather patterns, atmospheric, surface and ocean conditions, crop health, economic development patterns, and resource locating. For example, satellite imagery shows us how rainfall and development patterns are affecting our environment (Figure 2).

Figure 2: On the left is a satellite image of Lake Chad taken in 1972. On the right is Lake Chad in 2001. What was once a large lake is now largely, at best, a marsh. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

Figure 3: Shows the changing face of the tropics. On the left is a satellite image of the rainforest in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil taken in 1973. On the right is the same region as seen from space in 2003. Immediately apparent is the loss of forest in Paraguay, but not in Argentina. At first glance, this would seem to be a victory for Argentina in preserving their natural resources and a loss for Paraguay. But is it? More than likely, the forests in Paraguay were cut by poor farmers seeking land to farm so they can provide better lives for their families. Should anyone deny them this “for the good of the planet”?

Figure 3: Land use policies have a dramatic effect on preserving the rain forests. Did Argentina act morally in preserving their forest between 1973 and 2003 or did they condemn peasants to lives in urban slums in order to preserve nature?

In addition to helping us monitor the planet, space can help us solve some very real problems as well. Consider our insatiable need to for energy.

Fossil fuels are like junk food. We know they are ultimately bad for us, not necessarily a problem now (pass the fries) but in the long term, we certainly need to stop using them (or, “hello cardiovascular disease”). We all know the dilemma. We get the vast majority of our energy from fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas and the supplies of each are finite. After all, the Earth is only so big and can only contain only so much. Thanks to innovative technologies like hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the United States recently became the world"s largest oil producer. In addition to the finite supply problem, burning fossil fuels does pollute the environment and contribute to the atmospheric carbon dioxide problem. [Author"s note: For this article, can we all agree that pumping billions of tons of waste products into the Earth"s environment should be avoided if we are being good stewards, regardless of individual opinions on the validity of anthropengic climate change?]

The problem is that there are few possible alternatives to fossil fuels and even fewer viable ones. All have their limitations:

1. Solar power is great, if you live in an area with plentiful sunlight and lots of available open space to build solar power stations. We don"t yet have good energy storage and that"s a problem at high latitudes when the long winter nights set in. Solar power can supplement the power grid, but it isn"t going to replace oil, coal and gas for base load power.

2. Hydro power is good if you live near abundant flowing or falling water. But we"ve learned that damming rivers to produce power destroys ecosystems and the developed world is actually taking dams down to restore watersheds and river systems.

3. Wind power is taking off in many parts of the world, but it, too, is somewhat limited in what geographic areas have continuous wind suitable for sustained power generation. This resource is important and should continue to be implemented, but it will also remain a supplement to the grid, rather than a replacement source.

4. Geothermal power will work if you live near active volcanoes. Iceland produces nearly 100% of its electrical power from geothermal energy which is great for its approximately 300,000 inhabitants. But it won"t help many of the world"s remaining 6-7 billion.

5. Nuclear power is the one alternative, high-energy-density power source that could replace fossil fuels for power generation. It is carbon neutral and relatively "clean," until you look closely. What about the waste products that will be dangerous for millennia? Consider the effect of natural disasters like Fukishima and then decide if you want thousands of new nuclear power stations being built near major cities which are mostly also along coastlines. And do we really want all the countries in the developing world running nuclear power stations? I think not – consider nuclear proliferation…

Figure 4: Artist concept of a space solar power station beaming clean electrical energy down to the Earth from space. (Image courtesy of the National Space Society)

It"s time to relook at obtaining continuous solar power from space. Placing square miles of lightweight, efficient solar arrays in space, generating power and beaming it back to Earth by laser or microwave is one alternative that should receive serious consideration. From geosynchronous Earth orbit, the sun (almost) always shines, allowing the power station to produce plentiful electrical power both day and night. The passage of a microwave beam through the atmosphere to the ground has a very limited impact on the local environment and could potentially allow us to dismantle one or more fossil fuel power generating plants for each solar power station placed in space. Japan is taking this seriously and, since they are a resource-poor island now dependent on unstable geopolitical partners for their electrical power, it will provide them with a clean, energy-independent future. Yes, the up-front costs will be high, but the long-term payoff of having a network of such power stations providing clean, efficient power are too positive to ignore.

Space might also enable that most elusive power source of the future, nuclear fusion, to become a practical reality. The Sun produces its energy by combining hydrogen into helium in a process called fusion. The problem is that the Sun fuses hydrogen by its mass – gravity essentially squeezes the hydrogen atoms together until they fuse and become helium and give off energy in the process. This isn"t easily done without the massive pressures experienced at the center of the Sun. Enter an interesting isotope of helium called Helium-3. (This is a helium atom with one fewer neutron in its nucleus; it has one less neutron than the average helium atom.) Helium-3 allows the fusion reaction to occur under much-easier-to-create conditions than are present at the center of the Sun. The Earth"s supply of helium-3, deposited here by the solar wind over millennia, has mostly leaked away into space out of the upper atmosphere. But it is thought that there is an ample supply embedded in the surface of the Moon. By going there and mining for it, we might usher in a new age of clean nuclear power on Earth –without all the nasty byproducts of today"s fission reactors.

Studies show that many of the elements we use in our everyday lives could be gone within the next half century: antimony, copper, gold, indium, lead, phosphorus, tin, and zinc are in short supply. [See Earth"s Natural Wealth: An Audit in Further Reading] The rapid industrialization of China, India and other countries is causing a rapid rise in the price of raw materials. Chinese companies in particular have been aggressively buying mineral rights in many African countries to feed their seemingly insatiable industries. How many open pit mines do we want dotting the landscape to supply us with the materials upon which our modern civilization depends?

I grew up in Eastern Kentucky where coal is king. I"ve seen the effects of mountaintop removal and deep mining. The land will take centuries to recover. The First World has done an admirable job regulating our companies to preserve the environment after extracting resources. But we"ve also simply exported this dirty work to developing countries where the environmental regulations are not as strict; essentially exporting our pollution and environmental degradation in addition to jobs. We need not do this. Let"s take mining to a place where no local life will be impacted: the asteroids.

In space near the Earth are thousands of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), meaning that there are multitudes of asteroids that orbit the Sun with essentially the same orbital parameters as the Earth. This makes them relatively easy to access. And they are made from the same "stuff" from which the Earth is made. They contain the same raw materials that we"re digging from the Earth to feed our industry and they are out there, in space, ready to be used. All we have to do is figure out how to go and get the resources from them affordably.

There are three types of asteroids:

Carbonaceous chondrites, or C-type asteroids, don"t contain much metal, but they do have hydrated minerals. This makes them perhaps the most valuable asteroids for future mining operations – “hydrated” means water and water is the key ingredient for future space exploration and development. It can be used for the obvious purposes by human explorers (drinking, bathing, cleaning, etc.) and it can also be easily turned into rocket fuel by splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen with sunlight-produced electricity. These asteroids may become the refueling stations of the inner solar system.

S-type asteroids are "stony" asteroids, and are primarily composed of silicates (rocks). M-type asteroids are where we will go for metals to feed our industries. Once the raw materials are mined, they can easily be nudged into an orbit that will direct them into the Earth"s atmosphere to drop in the desert where they can be retrieved and processed. A typical 1 kilometer-long asteroid has a mass of about two billion tons, containing approximately 30 million tons of nickel, 1.5 million tons of cobalt, and 7500 tons of platinum – and there may be as many as one million asteroids of this size in the solar system. Dazzling wealth that is, quite literally, just over our heads!

There is no technical or engineering reason we cannot do this today. It all boils down to money. It is currently far less expensive to continue digging these resources from the Earth than it is to bring them back from space. But this is changing. The price of these raw materials is increasing as demand grows and supply dwindles. The cost of getting to space is decreasing as more private companies enter the marketplace and more people and machines are flying there. Soon the price point will be crossed that makes space resources an attractive alternative to strip mining planet Earth. There are several companies looking into this: Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries are two that are taking the first steps toward space industrialization and resource development.

If the direst predictions resulting from anthropogenic climate change are real and the planet"s temperature begins to rise catastrophically, then space technology may provide a way to mitigate the problem. Kennedy, Roy and Fields [see Dyson Dots: Changing the solar constant to a variable with photovoltaic lightsails in Further Reading] propose an idea that would reduce the amount of energy from the sun into the Earth"s biosphere, reducing global temperatures in the process. They suggest placing large solar sails in space between the Earth and the sun to reduce the incident energy by 0.25%. This would reduce the global average temperature by about 2 degrees; an offset to global warming. And, should the technology have an unintended consequence once implemented, it can easily be turned off by simply flying the large sail, or sails, away and into deep space. The schematic in Figure 5 shows the concept as presented in Harvesting Space for a Greener Earth. [See Further Reading for a comprehensive explanation of the detail presented.]

Figure 5: Large solar sails could keep the Earth's temperature from rising should the worst predictions of anthropogenic global warming become a reality. Shown is a solar light shade blocking 0.25% of the sunlight reaching the Earth. This particular concept merges the sunshade with space solar power and has the sunshade/sail covered with photovoltaics, beaming the power back to Earth in a microwave beam which is reflected to receivers on the Earth"s surface near the North Pole. (Image from Robert Kennedy/Ultimax and & D.Hughes/www.debbiehughes.com)

Space development is not being advocated here as a panacea. It should, as a minimum, be considered by policy makers, politicians, scientists and engineers as we face the challenges of becoming a truly planet-wide industrial civilization. Environmentalists and space advocates should work together to make life on Earth tomorrow better than today for all of Earth"s inhabitants – not just industrialized humanity. We can be pro-environment, pro-technology and pro-economic growth at the same time. Many believe that space development is a means for humanity to leave Earth and find another (pristine) home. I believe we can use space development to support the elevation of billions of people out of poverty to allow them to lead more productive and far richer lives, undo much of the environmental damage we"ve already done to the planet, and sustain us as we migrate throughout the solar system and eventually to another star.

A Medieval Artist In The 21st Century

by Randy Asplund

Why on earth would any single person go to all of the trouble to learn to make medieval books entirely by hand? It may seem crazy at first, but there's a logic to it. I actually came upon it because events in my life naturally led me in this direction. I had always loved fantasy and mythology while growing up. During my early days at the University, I decided what I wanted most was to become a Fantasy and Science Fiction illustrator. Along the way, my interests in history led to me joining the SCA, a medieval reenactment society. All of this was mutually sympathetic.

My career started really taking off in 1993, when I started doing early Magic: The Gathering card game art, and my first Star Trek cover art commissions. For a while I was so busy that it was overwhelming. Along side of this I had been learning to make medieval art as a hobby. Gradually, I started phasing that into my professional commission work. Then, as it often does, the world changed. Technology overturned the SF & F illustration industry when the computer made it easy for anybody to crank out pictures, or cobble together low quality images from photos. My clients started buying cheaper digital art and cut the prices they were willing to pay so low that it wasn't worth the time to do the work. And then to add insult to injury, they now demanded All Rights contracts for the work rather than just First Use rights! It was an economic disaster for illustrators in the genre.

It felt to me like I was experiencing my own version of the Fall of Rome, and it was not just happening to me, but also to many of my friends. I was faced with either changing my art into something that I hated, or suffering through lean years as I competed with a plethora of really awesome artists who were now struggling for work. Fortunately, there was a choice number three.

Choice number three was to follow a passion I had been developing over the years, that of medieval manuscript calligraphy and illumination. I had gotten good at it, and the clients I was finding really appreciated me. As the church in Europe had held out against the Fall of Rome, I would also turn to the manuscript as a tool for my salvation. I stopped bothering to send portfolios to publishers. I dropped every one of my regular SF & F clients except for Baen Books. I like the people at Baen, and they have always treated me well. But work from one company would not provide enough for me to make a living, so I pushed on with the manuscript work.

I was getting a lot of great feedback. People were saying “Randy, you should write a book on this!” I would reply, “Yeah, I should. I will, someday...” But I wasn't ready. The subject was very broad and deep, and I had no idea how to drink in that much knowledge. Then one day, a woman saw me at a book festival and loved my artwork. She asked if I could make a medieval book for her.

A whole book? I'd only made the most rudimentary attempts in the past; mere casual endeavors. Yet, I had been teaching myself enough about it to feel that it could be done. I live in a good place for it. We have a lot of book arts support here, and we even have a thriving book arts supply store here in Ann Arbor! The improbability of such fortune did not escape me, but I had everything I needed, so I accepted the commission. In the end, I produced my first complete book made entirely from medieval materials and using medieval methods.

With this success, I realized that I was now at a point where I could consider really writing my book. I had already been putting bits and pieces of the idea for a book together, but I now knew that the book couldn't be just about manuscript calligraphy and illumination. It had to be the whole A-Z process of making the book. I already knew that it would need to include sections about making the materials, and now it would have to include everything all the way through binding it. Somehow I had gone from just writing a medieval version of a book any watercolorist/calligrapher could write, to writing one so involved that few people in the world would have the practical hands-on knowledge and experience to pull it off.

I soon realized that my book would also have to bring in scientific analyses of what had been found in extant books. It would need to cover the many ancient treatises, and it would have to pull it all together in such a way that it would work for any reader with an interest, not just historians and not just artists.

Stepping back from that notion, I realized that this was going to take a whole lot of effort and a whole lot of specialized research. A lot of the treatise recipes don't work as written, so I'd have to work them out and find out how to make them work. I am an artist, not a scientist. I just don't have that background. It was clear that I would need to teach myself a lot more than how to make a medieval book.

I started getting more and more commissions. I fostered the ones that brought me into more complex techniques. I gathered specialized tools, and when I couldn't get exactly what I needed, I made them. I created pen knives and ceramic studio ware that hadn't been seen in centuries. I went to collections housing medieval books and met conservation scientists and librarians who let me look at the real ones under magnification and to take measurements and direct observations. I even got to handle the pages of one of the greatest books in history between my bare fingers!

And it didn't stop there. I have been in communication with scientists around the US and in Europe about the processes. Sometimes they help me figure things out and other times I help them. Along the way, I had discovered that much of what I was learning was lost information, and that much of what had been figured out by scientists and historians was either presented out of context or is scattered amongst numerous academic journals. The knowledge is used mostly for learning how to preserve what remains in museums and other collections. The armchair historian could speculate about meaning, but without actually practicing the skills, the feeling of it was lost. It's like the difference between sending a robot to the moon to take measurements vs. actually sending an astronaut to stand there and feel what it is really like.

This is where the concept of "experimental archeology" comes in. Experimental archeology is the exploration of the actual historical methods used, with the same tools and materials, and it is accepted by the academic community as a valuable research method. It is the key to unlocking the secrets of the past in ways that science in a lab cannot. It is the uncovering of these lost secrets that has inspired me to call my book Secrets Of Forgotten Masters. The research I am doing for this book has become so ingrained in the artwork I create now that each supports the other. I could not do my medieval art without the research, and my artwork is the testbed for proving the research. I began to feel that writing Secrets Of Forgotten Masters had became as important to me as the art I was making with that knowledge.

And as I thought more deeply about it, the combination of research and artwork became more than a career move for me. As I considered why I was doing it, I thought about something else that struck me very deeply. What about the ancient people who made these books?

They were the master artisans to whom we owe the very transmittance of our culture. Without them, we would have no better clues about who we are and where we came from than what we learn from artifacts dug from the ground. Without the master parchment maker, the master calligrapher, and the master book binder, how would the works of Homer have been there to tell Schliemann where to find Troy? Without them, we would have forgotten the works of Aristotle, Socrates and Euripides. The great works of mathematics and engineering would only be hinted at by observance of such ruins as the Colosseum and the aqueducts. And so it seems fitting to me that my research and book respect these masters for the gifts they have given us. I am dedicating my book to them because I feel that none are more deserving of such a dedication than those who dedicated themselves, be it for faith or fortune, to giving us our identity.

These days, many of us seem to consider books to be cheap and disposable. After all, pretty much anybody can write one on their computer, send it digitally to a print on demand shop, or have it physically printed and delivered to their doorstep. Adding photos and other illustrations is just a matter of dropping in the image file and shaping the page around them. You can even get it paid for if you are good at online crowd funding. But my exploration of how books were made in the Middle Ages has opened a whole new perspective for me.

Because they were made entirely by hand from raw materials, books in those times were so valuable that they would equate to the cost of a nice car, or even as much as a house, by today's value. To make them was to manipulate a combination of death, of harvest, of poison, of crushing flowers and the bones of animals, the toil of digging hard stones from the earth, and literally the use of fire and brimstone. It took a lot of hard work with the hands, with molten metals, with leather, and with knives and hammers. Making a book required the skills and efforts of a diverse range of skilled workers, each specializing in their own craft.

To someone interested in the evolution of technology, that's pretty cool. How could someone like me resist? I am an artist; I love making things with my hands! Since my career has greatly been the illustration of our modern SF&F genres, when I started to explore the calligraphic and illustrative arts of medieval books, I considered that art to be the precursor of modern fantastic illustration. It seemed to be a natural progression. And while it was enjoyable to create, something bit me deeper than it does many contemporary calligraphers and watercolor artists. I wanted to know exactly how it was done in the past. This became a new passion. The more I explored this ancient, hands-on technology, the more fascinated I became.

I started to look for translations of treatises written in the Middle Ages which told how to make and use the colors. It turns out that there are quite a few recipes—when you know where to look. I started with the simple ones. My humble beginning was to make lamp black pigment by burning olive oil and collecting the soot on the bottom of a pizza pan. Then I bought malachite and other stones and ground them into pigment. It was fun, but it was just the bare beginning of something far greater. The act of creating the pigments became a part of my artistic process. It became as important to me as the final art itself. I read more. I started importing exotic plants from Europe, and growing many medieval plants in my yard that would create a host of yellows, greens, reds and blues. I harvested berries and flowers in Europe, making colors exactly the way they were made in the past. I bought specific insects from Turkey, and I charred the bones of animals as instructed by a 14th century manual. This was just the beginning of something amazing.

It became an obsession. I had to make things exactly as they did in the Middle Ages. I knew that the precious ultramarine blue came from one mine in Afghanistan in those days. So I had to get the same stuff. Even today, it is still hacked out of the mountain by people with pick axes, wearing just a cloth over their faces to protect them from the dust. Then it is carried by pack-mule past bandits and warlords and government officials, all needing to be paid off, until it reaches the coast, where in the Middle Ages it was sold to Venetians who took it home to Venice. From there it was distributed by ship across Europe at great expense. I discovered that the only significant difference between that story and today is that the Venetians have been replaced by New Yorkers, who then sell the raw rock to me at a gem and mineral show. Then I get to fracture this very hard stone by burning it, crushing it in a mortar, and then mull it on a slab before working it into a mass of wax and resin until it is like toffee. Only then can I extract the blue from the impurities by working it with sticks in potash lye that I make from scratch.

And providence smiled on me again. I discovered that the plant that makes two of the most important and vibrant hues of medieval manuscript illumination is not only naturalized in the US, but I happen to live in what I jokingly refer to as “Buckthorn Central, USA.” Its considered a pest plant over here. As tall as a tree, it has berries that American birds relish like few others. It grows everywhere, along fences, in backyards, and it fills the forests, keeping the park service quite busy trying to weed it out. In the summer, the Rhamnus cathartica berry is hard and green. As I follow a medieval recipe for it, I become part cook and part chemist. Through a process involving boiling the berries in potash lye and straining off the brilliant yellow through a linen cloth, I consider what it took just to make that cloth by hand in the Middle Ages, and the work I went through to acquire the potash lye.

Yeah, we can just buy the potash crystals and cloth today, but what fun is that? And when I tried modern potash, it ruined some of my colors because it was too strong. Medieval potash lye was milder and simple to make. So I decided to make my potash lye the old fashioned way. Fortunately, I had a friend with a long fence full of unwanted grape vines. I was happy to haul the vines away for her in order to further my experiments. So after hours of cutting, I had completely filled my van with coils of vines. Once home, and after drying them out, I built a fire in the fireplace downstairs. It was so hot from the vines that I feared I might set my house ablaze! I had to be careful, constantly ready to use the fire extinguisher rather than add a new bunch of vine. All I could do was hope there were no cracks up in the chimney. Eventually I had what I needed, a nice big pile of ashes. I took a large iron pot and some water and poured the water through the ashes. At the bottom of the pot were waste minerals, and the ash that came through the screen was skimmed from where it floated on top. That left an amber fluid of mostly potassium carbonate. Yup, we call it potash because it used to be made with ashes in a pot of water.

The fabric is another story. While one could purchase the loose linen fabric used to strain the berries out of the yellow broth, many medieval people made their own. Medieval linen started as flax fibers. It had to be processed, spun into threads and woven, just to get the straining cloth.

The other color buckthorn makes is called sap green. The real stuff is nothing like the imitation sap green sold today. The medieval color is far richer, more staining, and translucent. It comes from the same berries, but they are taken “in the vintage season” as one treatise recommends, early September. By that time, the berries have ripened. They are black and filled with a very sticky, dark purple juice. The trick is to make the juice turn green.

As it happened, I was in a conversation with one of the scientists at the conservation lab at the Getty Institute who was doing research on certain oriental dyes. She needed buckthorn, but had no idea where to get it fresh. I offered to get her some. So when the season came along, I headed out to a forested park to gather a very large bagful. I've done this before, so I thought I knew what to expect. The berries grow in big clumps, but come off easily. They are fragile, and often break, spilling their sticky purple juice. This tends to run down the hands onto the arms, and it is a certainty that it will get on one's clothes. I dressed appropriately; a 20 year old faded purple tee shirt and my worst painter's jeans. I was ready to stalk the wild buckthorn!

I was wrong. I normally get these from my backyard, but since I needed a lot, I went someplace with more of nature's abundance. Walking up to the first tree, I tested the berries. With a gentle test pinch, the purple juice ran between my fingers. Perfect! I opened the bag and started pulling off handfuls at a time. As the berries rolled out of my hands and into the bag, berries were inevitably broken, and the juice streamed down my arms. And that was about when the mosquitoes discovered me. Not just a few, either. It seemed like they came in organized squadrons, like German Messerschmitt fighters defending their Reich.

I started swatting them. I would pick a few berries, and then slap myself somewhere. Pick, slap, pick, slap. I cuffed myself behind the ears, in the face, all over my torso, on my legs, ...everywhere. I slaughtered many, but they just kept coming. Still a third of the bag to fill, and I was a huge purple blob covered by sticky juice. I persevered...

And that's when the yellow jackets discovered me. Because what makes the juice sticky? Sugars, and it turns out that yellow jackets just love buckthorn juice. If the mosquitoes were like fighters, I was not going to stick around for the bombers. I'd have to come back. Memories of a desperate flight from a honey tree that my childhood friends and I had thrown rocks at urged me on my dash back to the car.

Luckily, the green is easy to get, once you have the berries. For a large spoonful of juice it takes nothing more than to add a pinch of alum and let it soak a while in the presence of calcium carbonate, such as a clamshell.

Making paint brought me adventures that ranged from digging red ochre from a muddy commercial excavation in Virginia, to wandering in the woods of Sweden along ancient stone walls to collect billberries. But the illustrations these colors produce need to go with the words, and in order to write a book, one has to have ink. Medieval recipes for ink-making are plentiful, and they usually start with wasps. Great. Back to stinging insects... As if bees weren't enough!

But these are special wasp nests called oak galls. There are many kinds of oak galls, but they all start out with the wasp laying eggs in the tree's branch. The tree grows a sort of scar tissue around the eggs. As it grows, it is filled with gallic acid, which is a critical ingredient of the ink. Just as in the Middle Ages, the galls are harvested (I pick them up off trees with low branches) and crushed. The acid is extracted by soaking and boiling. To make it black, green vitriol (iron sulphate) is added and there is a reaction that makes it become silky black. The broken galls can also be fermented to make the ink more permanent, and wine can be added to make the letters hard to erase by scraping. But the ink is not ready yet. It won't stick to the page without a binder. In the Middle Ages the gum (sap) of certain trees was used for this. The favorite was, and still is, the imported sap of the acacia tree. But other gums such as the sap of cherry, plum, and some others also work well. Gum arabic, as acacia sap is called, is the binder still used today in watercolor paints and in many food recipes.

So, now you have ink; what about a pen? People originally cut reeds and dipped the shaped points into the ink, but then someone figured out that a bird's quill actually works a lot better. It makes finer lines. In fact, there are texts from the Middle Ages where the letter height is about 3/64 of an inch high. These were not huge ostrich feathers with the plumes waving around like the fans held by slaves in a bad Cleopatra movie. The favorite quills came from the feathers of geese, and they were stripped of the plumage and cut short, like our modern pens. These were tools, and they had to fit into a pen case.

We're almost ready to write that book now. Obviously, there were no laptop computers in the Middle Ages, and paper came to Europe gradually, never becoming common until the Renaissance, so what did people write on when they wanted to compose a book? (This is where most people say “vellum!”) But what is real vellum? Is it that thin tracing paper stuff you buy for drafting? No, it's animal skin. Specifically, vellum is a parchment made from calf skin. But wait, isn't parchment the stuff you use in baking?

No, baking parchment is just another example of how a word meaning one thing can change over the centuries to mean something entirely different, like when in the old days a mouse was a small rodent, not an electronic interface. Parchment means any rawhide skin that has been stretched wet on a frame, scraped very thin, and allowed to dry under so much tension that it becomes white and semi-opaque. That sounds exactly like the right stuff to compose a book on- but it's not.

Parchment is expensive today, and it was expensive in the Middle Ages. Depending on the size of the book, and a book may have several hundred pages of thin animal skin, it may take much of an entire herd of goats, sheep or calves to make enough parchment to copy out one book. So how did they do it?

The answer is the waxed tablet. My friends jokingly refer to it as the “medieval palm pilot.” It was simply a set of thin boards, hollowed on one or both sides, just deep enough for a layer of colored wax to be applied about as thick as a layer of paint. An author would compose their book on the wax, writing with a small pointed stylus, and erase by wiping the wax smooth with the flat paddle shaped end of the stylus. In this way, an author had the ability to make edits or even change the order of whole passages, before committing anything to the page. The tablets were often joined together along one side with cords tied through holes, and a pair was called a codex. And that is how our modern term for a codex style book evolved from the long papyrus roll type of book.

So the scribe sits now at a desk with a forty-five degree writing slope. The ink is in a ceramic pot or maybe a lead flask. The quills soak nearby in a horn of water to keep the tips straight; the parchment has been cut, and lines ruled out so the calligraphy will be straight. Now how does the scribe write the book?

This is where the “experimental archeology” becomes very important. While a chemist can work out how to make colors and inks, and a leather worker can work out how to process the parchment, just presuming that the scribe sets the waxed tablets out on the desk for copying is a poor assumption. By trying it out, you learn that the tiny squiggly lines cut in the shallow wax are only legible in raking light, and that you have to keep the quill going constantly to get any good use from it. Stopping creates mistakes, and pausing lets the ink dry and clog the pen.

This is where you need a dictator. No, not some egocentric politician who wants to rule the world. You need someone who can pick up the tablets and read them in the right order against the raking light. And the scribe cannot be a mere copyist, because he has to know how to spell the words. That meant another educated person, which during some periods of the Middle Ages was hard to find. Of course, in those days, an education wasn't really education and literacy wasn't really literacy unless it was in Latin.

Many people today fail to recognize the distinction between being literate in Latin and being entirely illiterate. It is commonly said that everyone outside of the church during the Middle Ages was illiterate, and it was only the monks who made all of the books. Well, that's just not true.

Let's go back to one of the most literate periods in the history of humanity, the time of the ancient Romans. There were a great many people who could read and write, even slaves. There were no Christian monks yet. They hadn't been invented. In general, people had a pretty good idea of how to communicate by writing. One could even grab a piece of birch bark, cut it into a long rectangle, and scratch with a dull point to write home that you needed a new pair of socks to be sent to your frigid outpost on Hadrian's Wall. You would simply roll it up and send it off to your wife back in Tuscany. Merchants had to keep records of what they shipped and where, and the tax man always wrote down who had paid and how much.

It was like this for centuries, with people writing this and that, mailing messages, drafting legal briefs for lawsuits, and invoicing each other, just like today. And then it happened. Rome crumbled. While the reasons and process of that long decline are not necessary for the explanation of literacy, it is important to understand that when new political entities took over, the massive bureaucracy that was Rome went out of business. In the meantime, there was that new religion in Europe which needed to know how to copy out holy books and other works, so they hired the lay scholars to teach them to read and write.

Merchants still kept records, and tax-men still wrote ledgers. It's not like people didn't know how to write, or we wouldn't have rune stones in Scandinavia. But keeping a lot of books was not the first priority outside of the church. Eventually many of the people who didn't need to know how to read and write had no place to learn it. Languages split into diverse dialects. Only the Latin of the church was close to stable.

The church became very popular—by mandate and sometimes pain of death. One kingdom after another adopted Christianity as its official religion. The Irish were sending missionaries all over Europe, founding churches and monasteries everywhere they could, even as far away as the Swiss Alps. By the twelfth century, there were so many churches popping up from Norway to Spain that the monks couldn't possibly keep up with it all. It's a whole lot of work and expense to make all of that parchment and all of that ink to just write the book, one calligraphic letter at a time. And that isn't even beginning to account for hand-planing the oak boards of the book covers down to the perfect, even thickness, or the tanning of the leather for its covering, or sewing the pages by hand onto tawed thongs in order to attach them to the book covers, or fashioning bronze clasps to hold the book shut. And all of that is just what was needed for a simple book. A fancy one often had gold that had to be beaten into leaf so thin that it actually floats on air currents, fine tooling on the leather coverings, and finely wrought illustrations, sometimes by some of the greatest artists in history.

The best Bibles and Gospels might even get treasure bindings of silver and gold, ornamented with intricate scenes carved on ivory panels and surrounded by precious gem stones. This required great skill in metal work, carving and lapidary arts. Where would the monks and nuns find enough skilled artisans to do all of that work?

To make it even more complicated, the chaos of the early Middle Ages evolved. Nobles had second, third and fourth sons who weren't going to inherit, so what would they do with them? The answer had been to send them off to an ecclesiastic life or turn them into warriors, but around 1200 a new option came along. It was the University. These were sprouting up in major cities, and of course the church was behind them. And what did the brash young noble student need to get him through his studies? I know, you're probably thinking “lots of beer.” True, but also books. Lots of books.

And once again, there we have the poor monks, struggling to just crank out enough bibles for the many churches and monasteries going up on every other hilltop. How did they ever do it in the age before the laser printer and inkjet? They didn't. They taught the lay craftsman to do it. And so the circle came around. Once again, professional scribes from outside of the church were needed. Book production became a big business. People called stationers would keep text exemplars, send them out to several calligraphers, commission the bronze clasps and bosses for the cover, arrange acquisition of the leather for the covering, and then they would collect all of the elements and bind the books. It's almost a modern industrial method.

This is a lot for a single twenty-first century artist to deal with, but somehow I got to the point where I have learned almost all of these skills. I don't know how to beat gold yet, but I've learned most of the rest. I have made my waxed tablets. I have taken dead sheep and goats and turned them into pages which have become illustrated, written artworks. I've dug colors from the earth and processed them into pigment by grinding and extracting them from impurities with the use of resins and fire. I've learned to write and paint using the same kinds of tools they used back then, many of which I've had to make myself, in order to do the job right. And I have learned to sculpt waxes and cast my bronze hardware for the clasps and bosses.

The Middle Ages was full of death. Not just the imagined death of action-packed science fiction stories, or real wars fought by robotic drones over some distant mountain range. The people dealt with death on a daily basis. When war came, it came in the form of burnt villages and slow death by sharp, heavy blades. Or death came more often at home where family members commonly watched their children die young, and older family members die from diseases seldom even seen anymore.

As I write this, I am sitting in the waiting room of the University of Michigan's Cancer Center, waiting on a loved one. There is tension here, forced into smiles as the people around me try hard to make the best of things. But this is no trip to a medieval physician. Some patients are here for simple screenings, and I just heard a nurse call for an old woman and say “I see you're really happy to be out of that wheelchair!”

The contrast between the past and the future is stark. I appreciate the reality of the past, and because I understand it, I love living in the future. The future has brought us so very much. I sit here, not in a place of death, but in a place of hope. The very old here understand. Through their lives they have witnessed great technological advances and they appreciate the privilege that the future has provided. To many of us though, these advances are less obvious because we live in a constantly changing world where everything is done for us, usually in the background.

But some of us have a great interest in the many hidden wonders of ancient technology. In times when life itself was a difficult challenge, people created incredible innovations and stunning works of beauty, many of which laid the foundations of our current culture and technological triumphs. And through more than two thousand years, the hand-made book carried our wisdom and our knowledge.