The cover story of the February 2009 issue of
Popular Mechanics is called "NASA & Its Discontents," and relates the story of a group of NASA engineers who are not pleased with the
Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles, which are planned to start operation in 2015.
These disgruntled engineers have, on their free time, prepared an entirely different proposal - the Jupiter Direct system. Instead of going back to the baseline, like Ares, the Jupiter Direct plan would utilize systems which have been used for years with the shuttle program, so they can be built with slight modifications to current designs and at facilities that already exist. Their projection is that these plans could be implemented into a rocket that's ready to fly by 2013, shaving two years off the Ares proposals.
Unfortunately, the Ares plan has already been approved, and money has been spent with it in mind. Also, the Popular Mechanics article indicates that the Ares mission is based in part on proposals made by Michael Griffin, the NASA administer, prior to his appointment to the position. Griffin claims that similar designs were considered, and dismissed, prior to the adoption of the Ares plan.
Now, I am not an aerospace engineer, so I honestly can't say which plan is the best. However, it does look like the NASA administration is trying to stifle any sort of debate on their choice, and I don't think that's healthy. If there are NASA engineers who genuinely believe so strongly as to devote their free time to this, I think it needs to be taken seriously.
This sort of myopic, get it done and don't ask questions attitude is not beneficial in either engineering or science, though it is par for the course in politics ... and I think that's what's so frustrating, that instead of allowing for a scientific debate, it appears that NASA is being motivated, at least in part, by political and bureaucratic concerns, as clearly laid out in an October speech from Griffin:
If it is not obvious that objective expertise underlies NASA decisions and actions, then the civil space program will grind to a halt in response to one searching examination after another by various other governmental entities which claim the right of agency oversight, and can make it stick.
I read this, and I see both a valid point and a frightening end result. Yes, NASA has to be able to make decisions and plans without being bogged down by unending bureaucratic analysis of every single decision, but they also need to be an environment that accepts ideas openly and uses the best one - even if that means stopping a project in mid-stream to switch to one that has more promise. Griffin's statement indicates that the need to avoid unending bureaucracy means that no one can question the objectivity of the process. In fact, questioning whether they've made a mistake, in and of itself, could result in this "agency oversight," so we'd better put an end to it entirely.
My friend, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer, made a comment a while back in an e-mail about the space program suffering because of Star Trek. In the show, the engineer - Mr. Scott - always objected to the plan, saying that the ship couldn't do what it needed to do. The captain - James Kirk - always told him to do it anyway, ignoring the engineer's expertise. This made for great drama, mostly because Mr. Scott (almost) always found a way to pull it off anyway ... but this is not the way to run a space program.
The Challenger disaster was largely caused because of the need to push on instead of listening to the concern of the engineers (as Richard P. Feynman recounting the investigation in What Do You Care What People Think?). In this case, the new proposal would actually accelerate the timeline, shaving two years off from the current one, which has political benefit, given that it looks like we're in race with China to return to the Moon.
Yes, a government agency needs to be able to do their work without being stifled by endless analysis ... but progress takes place exactly because of this sort of analysis. Any government science agency is forced into the unenviable position of having to balance the two, and I fear that this may be yet another case where NASA is failing to achieve that balance.
Quantum effects cause strange things, such as the Casimir-Lifshitz interaction. Now, a team at Harvard has used this effect to create a repulsive force that can be used to create a frictionless quantum levitation between two surfaces!
Artistic rendering: quantum levitation
Capasso Group, Harvard University
The Casimir-Lifshitz interaction was originally predicted in 1948 by Hendrik Casimir (and extended by Evgeny Lifshitz in 1956). The idea is that the quantum effects of the vacuum actually create a slight electromagnetic field, which means that two uncharged conducting plates will develop a slight attractive force, pulling them together. This effect has been measured with great precision over the years, and even works in some cases when the vacuum between the plates is filled with certain sorts of liquids.
Until this new work by Harvard, however, no one had ever observed a repulsive Casimir-Lifshitz interaction, even though theoretically it should be possible. The team immersed a gold-coated sphere in liquid, measuring the force as it was attracted to a metal plate and then repelled from a silica plate. The next step is to take the repulsive effect and perform an experiment that demonstrates the predicted levitation.
Both the attractive and repulsive effects have a potential applications in the creation of tiny nanotechnology devices, which are built at a scale so small that designers may well be able to utilize these effects in a meaningful way.
Related Articles:
The
Large Hadron Collider was one of the biggest news stories of 2009, but there are plans for
other types of accelerators which might make such a massive machine completely obsolete.
The Large Hadron Collider is a massive, 27-kilometer wide machine, which uses electromagnets to slowly ramp a proton beam up to high energies and speeds, then collides it together with another beam. The scale of the device is immense and a large reason why it had a $9 billion pricetag ... before the recent repair bill, for fixing the problems that arose shortly after start-up.
One problem with devices like this is that each of them is essentially its own prototype. Particle accelerators are not devices which can be mass produced ... or are they?
A New Scientist article published on Monday suggested that new plasma-based accelerators could perform some of these accelerations at a cost and size greatly reduced from the LHC. Basically, the system involves shooting a laser beam into an excited plasma, which pushes the electrons in the plasma away from each other. This creates a dense bundle of electrons in the wake of the pulse, which pushes other electrons rapidly up to high speeds.
One of the problems with this suggestion (originally posed in 1979) was how to make a uniform energy beam, but this was resolved (by three different groups) in 2004. Now the issue is one of trying to come up with a good design, and working the kinks out of it to achieve what's needed. (There's also a serious problem in how to accelerate positrons using this method, which may have no real solution in the foreseeable future.)
According to New Scientist, the U.S. Department of Energy is supposed to evaluate these new methods, and possibly fund such a design, in March of this year. One proposal is a modest 10 GeV beam device, while another is an ambitious 250 GeV design!
I'll keep my eyes open for word on what the Department of Energy decides.
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This week, we review Alex Vilenkin's 2006 book
Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes, which explores the cosmological arguments in favor of the anthropic principle.
In this book, Vilenkin makes the case that quantum fluctuations cause tiny universes to be created and destroyed continuously (a theory known as eternal inflation). Our universe is one of these, which finished its inflationary period long ago. In this view, determining the properties of our universe should be based on the anthropic principle, a controversial principle which says that since we are here we can use the fact that we're here to explain and predict what values the universe should have. (The reason for the controversy is that most physicists would like to explain the properties of the universe that allow us to be here from fundamental principles, and not use the fact that we're here as one of the defining characteristics of the universe.)
For more information, or to compare prices on the book, read the full review.
Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes by Alex Vilenkin
Hill and Wang Press
