Paranormal Searchers

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Cool Science and Technology Stuff Coming up This Spring and Summer

There is an unusual confluence of very interesting, exciting stuff scheduled to happen over the next few months in the domains of science and technology.

A critical step will be taken toward radically reducing the cost of reaching orbit, bringing humanity one step closer to finally realizing the dreams of a true Space Age.

A revolutionary mass-market electric sedan will finally reach its first customers, and its manufacturing will ramp up from there.  The most ambitious robotic mission to Mars yet will (knock on wood) reach the surface of the Red Planet.

And an asteroid probe will depart from asteroid Vesta on a multi-year journey to Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system and a dwarf planet possessing more water (in the form of ice) than all the oceans of Earth combined.  I would just like to briefly run down these developments and what they hopefully portend.

I.  April 30, 2012: Unmanned SpaceX Dragon spacecraft scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral and, a few days later, dock with the International Space Station.
SpaceX Dragon
SpaceX Dragon 2
This doesn't sound very momentous if one were to judge it against, say, the Apollo program or the expectations it engendered.  But to most people who follow the progress of spaceflight, the upcoming launch of the Dragon spacecraft - even unmanned - signals a drastic sea change in the fortunes of humanity's long-delayed ambitions in space.  Until SpaceX came along, the future looked grim indeed:


The US space industry had virtually collapsed into an uncompetitive, overpriced monopoly joint-venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin called United Launch Alliance (ULA) - a company whose rocket flights are so expensive their business is almost a government monopsony (i.e., a one-customer market).

Meanwhile, the Space Shuttle was headed for the junk heap, and the best replacement Congress could come up with (NASA had plenty of better suggestions, but as usual their opinion doesn't matter) was to pay the same contractors used on the Shuttle even more money to build much humbler and less capable systems.  To some extent Congress - and primarily the Senate - is still forcing NASA to keep pouring money toward that objective, an embarrassment called the Space Launch System (SLS) that its critics have renamed the "Senate Launch System" because the motivation for it seems to come primarily from pork-addicted Senators rather than the space community.  Basically, SLS is a version of the Saturn crew-launch rocket and Apollo capsule that doesn't go anywhere, costs as much as if not more, and delivers both fewer astronauts and less cargo to orbit than the Space Shuttle: A giant leap backwards, at enormous cost.  And it would contribute absolutely nothing toward the goal of opening space to ordinary people.

Fortunately one Elon Musk was on the case - the real guy on whom the makers of the Iron Man films based their interpretation of Tony Stark.  He had started SpaceX several years before this point, and repeatedly crashed prototype rockets before finally getting it right and using the engine from that success to build an even bigger rocket - the Falcon 9 now sitting on the pad in Florida waiting for its April 30th launch.  There have been two successful flights of the Falcon 9 prior to this one, the most recent of which launched a Dragon spacecraft engineering model into space which then returned to Earth and was recovered for examination.  The upcoming launch will be the first flight of the fully-equipped cargo version of the Dragon, and will also test the procedures and equipment used for docking it to the International Space Station.
So far so good, but you may still not quite understand just how important this flight is.  After all, how significant can the launch of an unmanned capsule be?  Well, for starters, the capsule was designed from the ground up as a crewed spacecraft able to carry seven astronauts to orbit - it is doing the unmanned cargo runs first in order to shake out the more basic systems and procedures.  Secondly, it is making these cargo flights under commercial contracts from NASA, which are radical departures from their normal way of doing business: More often they will pay one of the major contractors "cost-plus," meaning that a profit is guaranteed no matter how much something ends up costing, so there has never been any systemic incentive to reduce costs or innovate.
This is the reason space has remained out of reach for everyone but a select few in history.  The cargo contracts, however, are a relatively simple and direct purchase of services - NASA will pay them so-and-so to do thus-and-such, and that's it.  No guarantees of profit.  Whatever profit SpaceX sees from the contract will have to be derived from their being innovative - i.e., for the first time ever, a NASA contractor will be rewarded for making space cheaper.  And the company is well on the way to achieving that: Their list price for commercial launches - and it's somewhat revolutionary that they even list their prices instead of keeping them confidential - is already several times lower than prevailing market prices, and will likely continue to sink as volume increases and further innovations occur.
Will Dragon ever carry you and me to space?  No.  SpaceX ultimately plans to offer crewed commercial flights to orbit for a few million dollars - an order of magnitude beneath what the Russians currently charge, which only a few billionaires have been able to afford.  But it's only the beginning - the birth of a process of cost reduction and market expansion.  They are currently competing for new contracts whereby they will be paid on a commercial basis for ferrying NASA astronauts to ISS, which would bring in large sums of public money to help reduce the cost further and develop systems that will ultimately be available to private customers.  And beyond that, SpaceX - I'm not kidding here, and neither are they - plans to develop a version of Dragon that will land on Mars, at least as an unmanned scientific platform (initially).
In fact, according to Elon Musk, the entire purpose of SpaceX is to realize human colonization of Mars - a statement that would mark anyone else as unrealistic in the eyes of the current space industry.  But SpaceX has already achieved things deemed borderline impossible by the wise elders of the industry, and done so several times over, and the more accomplishments it racks up, the more tantalizingly achievable Musk's dreams seem to be.  This April 30th, if no more delays occur in the schedule - and we should be realistic that delays happen often in rocket launches - SpaceX will reach another milestone in its progress along the road toward those dreams, and take humanity with them one step closer to a real Space Age.  If the mission succeeds, the pace of progress will accelerate; if it fails, they can still continue.  So I for one am very excited as this launch approaches.
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II.  No later than July, 2012:  Tesla Model S luxury electric sedan begins deliveries to first customers.
 
Tesla Model S
Tesla Model S
As with the dreams of the Space Age, people had begun to give up on the dream of electrifying America's transportation system - and as with space, it was largely due to the arbitrary and corrupt decision-making of a few large, oligopolous industry giants who simply had no incentive to innovate.  They had infamously killed the electric car despite massive interest from early-adopters, and essentially dictated their own terms to a market that was beginning to demand change.  The concept was sabotaged, with company officials putting out the idea that EVs were lame, weak, silly-looking little bug cars driven by patchouli-stinking hippies, and refused to fund any attempt to prove otherwise.
Enter Elon Musk - yes, the same Elon Musk, who has developed a habit of smashing through economic gridlock to drag humanity into the future.  He came upon an electric car startup that, without his involvement, very likely would have had a similar future to nearly every other EV startup that comes and goes: Developing a cool-looking technology, and then failing to bring it to mass market due to a lack of business sense.  Instead, Tesla Motors was born - a company with its eyes set on directly challenging both Detroit and Tokyo.  They achieved early success at this goal long before coming anywhere near to commercial viability, because the Tesla Roadster - a sleek, sexy, dedicated EV supercar - managed to leave Ferraris and Lamborghinis in the dust on race tracks.
But it was never the point of Tesla to sell hand-assembled electric supercars to the ultra-rich - that was just a starting point for far greater ambitions.  What the Roadster achieved was to leave Detroit's slanderous propaganda against EVs in the dustbin of history, bringing out pure sex-on-wheels from a Silicon Valley startup without any kind of permission or input from the Big Three.  Now, that said, the big challenge remained - how to move to mass-production of electric vehicles and bring the technology to a price point that a significant number of consumers could afford.  The Roaster was well over $100k even after tax incentives, and its production was a boutique affair totally unsuited to pursuing a broader market.
Enter the Model S - a luxury sedan priced at about half of the Roadster and intended to compete with the likes of Lexus and BMW rather than Ferrari and Porsche.  Tesla bought a defunct GM/Toyota plant in Fremont, CA in order to manufacture the Model S, and has used its Energy Department loans to finance the repair and retooling of the plant - an endeavor that has already created a substantial number of jobs in the area.  In addition to the DOE loans, Tesla had gone public with an IPO and generated far more interest than even optimistic forecasts had anticipated.  According to Tesla, deliveries of the Model S to its pre-order customers will begin "no later than" this July, and production targets are in the five-digits for the first year.
For a nice background on the history of these developments, I suggest the sequel to Who Killed the Electric Car - the far more upbeat and inspiring, Revenge of the Electric Car, which tells the tale of Tesla up to (nearly) the present, along with several other companies.  The Chevy Volt, in particular, would not have happened without Tesla.  The Nissan Leaf probably would have, but in a much less energized marketplace.
But even the Model S is just another stepping stone toward Tesla's ultimate objective - the production of an electric car for the rest of us.  The work on this eventual offering is shrouded in mystery, and code-named Blue Star (the Model S was called White Star) - a car intended to be priced between $20k and $30k, competing with Hondas, Fords, Chevrolets, Toyotas, Hyundais, Mazdas, Subarus, and so and so on.  An intriguing hint about the Blue Star's ultimate name is that in the early days of the Ford Motor Company, the Ford Model S was the precursor to the Ford Model T that finally exploded the market for automobiles.  I don't know whether it would be awesome if they called their mass-market car the Model T or if it would be too on-the-nose, but it's at least an appropriate analogy.
But that's still to come.  What we will see this summer is the debut of the Model S on American streets, and it brings us one step closer to the day when the petroleum and automobile industries part ways once and for all.  The Model S may not fill the streets, but with any luck it will at least be a visible presence in the more affluent, environmentally-conscious parts of the country - a tangible sign of positive change afoot and a-wheel.
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III.  Sometime in July, 2012: Dawn spacecraft departs asteroid Vesta on its way to rendezvous with Ceres in 2015.
This is Vesta, illustrating the level of detail the Dawn spacecraft can see even from relatively high orbits:
Mountains and Dark Material on Vesta
This is the best image of Ceres mankind currently has, via the Hubble Space Telescope:
Ceres
Here is a diagram of the spacecraft's past and future trajectory in the solar system:
Dawn Diagram
I understand how this may not seem like a big deal to people who are not especially into space exploration - after all, it is an unmanned probe, and its targets are Main Belt asteroids with zero chance of ever threatening Earth, so why go there at all?  Well, basically, Ceres is a dwarf planet - basically a planet that's too small to have gotten rid of other objects in its orbital vicinity, but still big enough to be spherical and have nontrivial surface gravity - about 3% of g.  It also has more H20 than Earth's oceans, and is located strategically between Mars and Jupiter, which to any space geek screams "waystation."
But all of that is in the distant future when humankind has a need for water and fuel (water is rocket fuel, BTW) on the way to the outer planets.  So Ceres is important long-term, but really it just comes down to the fact that we've never seen it up close and personal, and it is a world - a spherical body that could have been a planet if not for Jupiter constantly perturbing its gravitational environment.  Unlike Pluto, it's not just one of several similar objects, but is distinct for its region of the solar system - there are no other dwarf planet asteroids: The other dwarves are all in the far reaches of the outer solar system, in the cold wastes beyond Neptune where it will be quite some time before humans have any use for them.  Ceres, however, is a place we are destined to go and at least set up interplanetary gas stations, if not settle.
That will probably be a century or two in the future, but how many times do you get to see a world for the first time?  Granted, I'm probably jumping the gun getting excited about what is merely a departure for Ceres - it won't be in a position to see anything new until 2015 - but every event in the mission is an opportunity for failure, so every event that occurs successfully is one step closer to that moment when we get to greet a new world.  The path to that moment begins in July when Dawn sets off from Vesta.
IV.  August 6, 2012: The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) "Curiosity" rover scheduled to land on Martian surface in Gale Crater.
MSL
RoverComparison
Curiosity is currently en route to Mars, and represents the most ambitious mission yet to the Red Plant - a truly gargantuan rover that dwarfs the recent Spirit and Opportunity rovers (they are about the size of coffee tables - MSL is the size of an automobile).  It is the most extensive probe ever built, designed to test scientific theories about Martian geology, chemistry, weather, history, possible biology, and develop specific knowledge about how humans can survive there.  MSL is very much a true scout mission, designed to pave the way for human exploration of Mars.
However, due to its size and weight, it cannot land on the Red Planet in the same way as the Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover craft - it is simply too heavy to bounce to the surface within inflatable airbags.  So NASA has devised a new approach whereby the descender module will fire its rockets and then lower the rover down to the surface on a "sky crane" cable.  Personally, the thought of placing such a massive and expensive system at the mercy of a landing approach that's never been done before really worries me.  It seems iffy, even reckless.  I wonder if perhaps it might not have been a better idea to just send more copies of Spirit and Opportunity with different instrumentation and different landing sites.  But the die is cast, and on August 6 we will find out whether humanity takes one more step toward its destiny on the Red Planet or if NASA has once again screwed the pooch putting specialized technology ahead of a practical exploration strategy.
If it succeeds, then a lot more than the rover itself will have been accomplished - the sky crane technology will also have been proven, opening up new exploration opportunities for weightier probes.  But it is quite a gamble, IMHO.  NASA has essentially placed the future of its entire exploration program on the success of a steel cable, because we can bet if this $2.5 billion behemoth fails, Congress will eviscerate their funding even further than they already have.  It makes me nervous, but it is also very exciting given how ambitious the mission is.

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