Centauri Sky

Stopping an Interstellar Freight Train

2011-07-05T01:54:00.000-07:00

So you're travelling to Alpha Centauri at 10% the speed of light and the two stars are shining out of your viewscreen. Congratulations, you avoided life support failure, the crew going crazy, or the ship's computer going crazy and killing the crew in their hibernation pods. Now how do you stop? I put this blog post up because I was inspired by the Icarus Project's post on the same subject, and I've been giving this a great deal of thought over the years.

The bad news is that it's going to take all the energy you put into getting up to your velocity into slowing down. You could use your rocket engines (assuming they still work) to slow down, but that means your initial fuel load goes up exponentially and the spacecraft at launch would have been the size of a mountain. (Launching this is going to make the Apollo project look like the Bobsy Twins and their kindly uncle building ships in their back yard*). The alternative is to simply cut your initial velocity in half and use the other half of your delta V (total velocity capacity) to brake at the other end. But it means getting there slowly, and slow means that taxpayers and politicians are less likely to fund such a venture (and the mission is already going to take decades).

Obviously, you would ditch as much of your unneeded payload as possible (but, light years from anywhere, every scrap of material is valuable). Radiation shielding, habitats, soil, empty fuel tanks, all jettisoned except for landers, science payload and your colony equipment. Oh, and colonists, all crammed into a tiny habitat, or camping out in the landers. The high-efficiency motor itself used to get up to this speed is likely to be massive; if one could drop it overboard if there was some other way to break, one probably would. Still, perhaps a fuel reserve could be used to slow the spacecraft a little bit before saying goodbye to the motor. A 10 or 20% reduction in velocity might make all the difference - this must be weighed up against the risk of the motor not working after all these years in vacuum and hard radiation, and already thousands of hours of operation.

The good news is that there are ways to slow down, albeit each with their own limitations. The most viable way to slow down would be with a Magsail. This uses the interstellar medium, which although is a huge vacuum, actually has one or two ions per cubic centimetre. Travelling at such high velocities, this actually translates into a very, very thin mass flow. Running a current through a huge superconducting loop hundreds of kilometres in diameter would tug on these stray ions with a magnetic field, transferring the ship's momentum to the them and slowing the ship down. A very elegant solution which works better when decelerating from higher velocities. Perhaps it would be better to hang onto the engine and only fire it when the ship's velocity got down to ~0.001c, or in the region of a few hundred kilometres per second.

The second no-fuel alternative is to use a solar sail. A BIG solar sail. But to slow down from 0.1c, even a mere 50 tonne payload would require a sail 1000km in diameter, and using an efficient inflated sail made of beryllium diving right in. Making the sail out of super-high strength, high temperature carbon nanotube technology doesn't help that much. Where it does get better though is that when the slower clip you can come in at, the less of a problem it is. The diameter appears to scale with the incoming velocity; so at 0.01c the sail diameter is only 94km. And of course, the sail mass is proportional to the inverse square of the diameter, so a 94km sail only weighs 1% of what a 1000km sail would be. Interested readers should consult Pat Galea's article on this. Alpha Centauri, however, does offer the chance to use two suns to slow down - albeit not in line with one another, making it a lot more difficult to brake at one and then brake at the other. A gravitational slingshot might help, though - calculated to shave off velocity instead of boosting it.

Aerobraking is how planetary landers shed all their nasty orbital velocity, but could we do that to shave off a few percent off of our incoming velocity? Planetary atmospheric deceleration is basically impossible for even a tiny fraction of lightspeed; the probe would almost surely incinerate. At very high velocities, radiative flux heating rather than conductive heating dominates. The radiative flux from plasma sheath surrounding the probe would also incinerate the sidewalls. Also, since this is a huge spacecraft, aerobraking is problematic even for regular atmospheric entry, due to surface area to volume constraints. Heatshields are heavy. Aerobraking also requires a spacecraft to be moving at a speed that is still slow enough to allow the planet's gravity to pull it close in an arc, getting more braking effect. Decelerating from even ~0.001c would create something like a Tunguska explosion on the surface of the planet. Even then, a survivable deceleration spike (say a couple of hundred G's if everybody's vitrified) would only be for a few seconds and shave off a few dozen kps, because, travelling in a straight line at even low sublight means you only dip into the atmosphere for a very short distance. Space shuttles and capsules can afford to decelerate slowly because they travel thousands of kilometres because they are travelling slow enough that they are curving around the planet as they do so. At such high speeds, a planet's gravity wouldn't curve the spacecraft's trajectory at all.

So aerobraking is a no-go. Our spacecraft would disappear in a Tunguska like explosion. So what now? We've got all this mass sitting at (basically) zero velocity for us to slow down, but we're going too fast and planet atmospheres are too small. I considered trying to punch out a "corridor" of atmosphere with projectiles, but I think that would dissipate too fast. Plus, it would be rather catastrophic for the planet's environment, doing some rather drastic remodeling. Not what you want if you want to study it, especially if there's the possibility of life.

This is a somewhat insane proposal that involves using your environment and whatever you have lying about to your advantage. The idea is precisely that your spacecraft is a flying bomb; a snotty tissue tossed out the window at a passing planet would obliterate a city when travelling at even these "low" sublight speeds.

Towards the end of main engine deceleration, the spacecraft dispenses a number of small, independent solar sails. This zip on towards the target star while the main craft continues to large behind. Having no payload, they can decelerate to lower velocities by braking at the star. The main craft then arrives in the system, ditches its main engine and deploys its own solar sail. It brakes hard at the target star, bleeding off a large chunk of its remaining velocity and carries on past the star, heading towards the now near-stationary sails. The next phase is tricky and smacks of insanity. As it approaches each sail, a small railgun on board fires a pellet at each mini-sail in front, blowing it up. The explosion is like a small nuclear detonation, and the main craft's sail catches the debris, slowing it down almost like a parachute. Alternatively, the sails decelerate completely (if the closing velocity is slow enough) because they are so light, and then shoot back out towards the main craft at the same speed, getting a huge energy boost from the sun. If depending on thousands of mini-sails is too problematic, then one big sail could be released and then dole out its energy in the form of small pellets of ice, which the main craft could then ram into. The disadvantage is that not all of the available mass would be used up in the ramming. The mini-sails' total mass would be totally used up in the ramming explosions, whereas the mass of a larger sail wouldn't be used at all - it would just carry on out back towards Sol.

A brief understanding of this concept is that the energy for deceleration is only available at the target star for a short time, which gets even shorter the faster the probe is moving and thus requires much bigger sails. Using mini sails captures this energy and the main craft gathers it up in chunks (by basically ramming into them).

*I have no idea who these characters are, I only know Jerry Pournelle mentioned them. i.e. Something from before my time. I assume it's like the Hardy Brothers (which I also never read).

The Science of Mass Effect

2011-07-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

What's a computer game and a propellantless drive doing in a blog about realistic interstellar flight with solar sails, fusion drives and the scuzzy facts of cosmic radiation? Well, I was thinking back about having played Mass Effect, and looking back at some discussion with some (smarter than me) folks who discuss and experiment with propellantless propulsion and advanced physics, I thought I'd try and show how some of this is cropping up in mainstream entertainment (what do you mean you never heard of Mass Effect?).

First off, Mass Effect, and its sequels. I'm sure a lot of you will have at least heard of it, and some played it. It's a combination of shooting game and role playing. While it's a fantastically well crafted and seriously fun game with some great acting, it's also really meaty in its science. Unlike Star Trek's "Particle of The Week" technobabble, the creators of Mass Effect carefully pondered what they could do with cutting-edge physics and technology. Ships, for example, have to have radiators or else they'll cook from their own internal heat in the vacuum of space. Weapons are variants on mass drivers and need to either cool down or deposit their waste heat into disposable heat sinks. Soldiers and everyday civilians are enhanced with cybernetic implants and nanotechnology.

Other topics are touched on, such as what happens when AI evolves and computing progress leads to Singularities. This is reminiscent of Sci-Fi authors like Peter F. Hamilton and Charles Stross. In fact, the game's fluff specifically mentions a couple of people I've had lively discussions with - space wargame designer Ken Burnside and the creator of the Atomic Rocket website, Winchell Chung. You can see a pair of recruits with their names being chewed out (with some mild profanity) here.

The most interesting aspect for me is the titular Mass Effect. In the game, the Mass Effect is generated by applying electrical charge to a chunk of Element Zero (just your average plot Unobtanium). There's a bit of waffle about how this Element Zero manipulates dark energy, the odd force causing the universe to expand. This Mass Effect is used to generate gravity, allow ships to accelerate at stupendous velocities, travel faster than light and to create force fields. In this video, everybody's favourite pop scientist, Michio Kaku, discusses the tech of Mass Effect.

What struck me is that the Mass Effect is an inertia-modifying effect. Which is exactly what the Mach Effect is, just without the Element Zero. It can be achieved by common or garden variety capacitors, so the theory goes, or anything else that fluctuates in internal energy quickly enough. I'll spare the long discussion, but it's really a logical outgrowth of Einstein's General Relativity to explain inertia - basically it's caused by the gravity of the rest of the universe pulling on an on object. Wiggle the object in the right way, and you can get those rubbery strings of gravity to work for you (note, nothing to do with String Theory). A bit like how a vibrating table can make an otherwise heavy object easy to push. Basically, the object's inertia is being lowered for a microsecond, and if you time the shove right, you can push it with less force. Interestingly, it appears that it would great gravity fields around it (because of all those stretched or relaxed gravity "strings"). Those gravity fields could give us artificial gravity generators, force fields, tractor beams and maybe even faster than light travel. Just like the Mass Effect universe.

The scientists (notably Dr. Woodward), engineers and Joe Averages (i.e. yours truly) who discuss the Mach Effect were talking about how to raise awareness of it, so instead of making a Doritos-and-Mountain Dew-fuelled looong email trying to explain all of this, I thought I'd put it here in the public eye, so to speak. A lot of promising physics concepts are familiar in Sci-Fi, or are otherwise making their way into the public consciousness thanks to the general curiosity of people surfing the net. Of course, Joe Average might look at you and go what? But those of us who watch Big Bang and have a vague clue about what Sheldon spouts may know. And maybe all that's needed to get promising revolutionary technologies off the experimental bench and into spacecraft...

When playing Mass Effect 2, I took a trip down to the engine room and saw the Mass Effect core vibrating... much like the way the Mach Effect devices would work (although you wouldn't necessarily *see* the vibrations, which would be in the mega to gigahertz range...). 3D artists, game programmers and designers are a smart bunch, and you often see unexpected references to some really intriguing ideas wrapped in a game or movie. I wonder if the inspiration for the Mass Effect was indeed the Mach Effect?

Interstellar Flight: The Generation Ship

2011-01-29T09:15:00.000-08:00

I talked about hibernation previously - now let's talk about simply slogging it to the stars the hard way, no sleeping on the job. Many SF writers talk about generation ships as a way to get human colonists to a distant star. But there's a couple of problems with generation ships which don't make them so attractive.

First off is the sheer size of these things. In order to get a minimum viable population without the hazards of inbreeding, you'll need something like 180 individuals. Small groups have made it to colonise islands, perhaps 50 or less breeding members. A single female even could simply impregnate with frozen herself and raise her daughter to fly the ship (not that her daughter would likely be grateful for the thankless life she's born into).

The trouble is, we need a lot of people to cover all the scientific and engineering disciplines. Small armies of technicians, engineers and scientists service the space shuttle, for example. The 7 or so people on board really just push the buttons, as competent as they are. Fixing complex problems like those that would arise on a spacecraft require lots of smart brains. And there's no guarantee that subsequent generations would be as smart or motivated as their astronaut parents. The automated systems on the ship had better be pretty reliable or else extremely easy to fix. Possibly even to the point of having an AI or expert system and be almost self-repairing (can you say HAL 9000?) One might envision a generation ship with primitive humans, having lost the skills of their ancestors, worshipping the benevolent computer-deity literally controlling their world. This, plus the possibility of disease or accidents wiping out large chunks of crew, points to the need to have as large a crew as possible. And more humans equals more mass.

Mass requirements for keeping a human alive in space, and fed with soyburger and supplied with toilet paper, range from 100 tonnes to 1000s of tonnes. Biotechnology can really help here; improving crop yields and increasing efficiency of recycling systems. Certain tools, chemicals and medicines could also be grown in bioreactors. The entire ship (or at least the habitat) could be constructed of organic materials. This pretty good from a radiation shielding standpoint, the abundant hydrogen atoms in organics and plastics are great for stopping cosmic radiation and preventing the lethal backscatter of secondary radiation that occurs when a speeding iron ion smashes into structural aluminium.

In addition to the mass requirement, there's also volume. NASA studies estimate that 100 cubic metres is enough for a single human for an indefinite period. I rather think the ship's crew may grow up a bit nutty... anyway, with the life support requirements, rather more volume than that is likely. Inflatables seem the current best technology, but just how safe will they be after decades of hard radiation exposure? Perhaps they will need some extra reinforcement for a more permanent solution, but at the moment they look like a good bet.

SF is replete with stories of hollowed-out asteroids as generation ships, but the truth is that they're terrible spaceship hulls. For a start, they're weak - asteroids being composed of rubble, and would need the rock to be fused. The rock would still be fundamentally very weak for its mass. And that mass would weigh in the millions of tonnes for a generation ship a kilometre or so across. Furthermore, the rock is not such a good radiation shield. Plain old plastic, water or wood is better for cosmic radiation. And radiation shielding wants minimum volume to be used most effectively - generation ships are anything but minimum volume.

Hollowed-out comets or ice asteroids seem to be a somewhat better option - although frigging cold, they would provide water, oxygen and reaction mass. A layer of insulation could allow for an inner shell lined with water, and aquaculture. Everybody living in boats and stilt houses - how very appropriate for the island-in-space theme! Of course, the best option is still to purpose-build an actual hull for the job. And that's going to be heavy.

Assuming the minimum case of 180 people (at any one time), the ship needs to weigh at least 18 000 tonnes if 100 tonnes of life support infrastructure are necessary to keep things going - that's a WWII battlecruiser. Being more conservative, that could mean 500 000 tonnes of ship for 500 people and 1000 tonnes of life support. To match the current mass of the ISS at 400 tonnes, we would need something like 8 tonnes of life support for 50 people (and no idea of how they're going to go down to the surface). That's a pretty miserable cramped existence, eating algae glop for hundreds of years, living naked and escaping to VR all the time. But it might be possible.

The point is, at what point is it simpler to put more fuel up to go faster? With a solar sail, you've no choice - you're limited to 0.001c with a scorching approach. But fusion-powered craft might just prefer to burn more fuel and get there faster rather than build a big expensive habitat and risk the crew dancing around fires playing bongo drums when they should be getting in their landers to go the surface. Reducing the mass from 18 000 tonnes to just 180 yields a 100x jump in mass ratio, which can be cashed in for a 2.4x increase in speed over just having a 10x mass ratio (rough approximation). Instead of getting to Alpha Centauri in 200 years, a trip of 83 years becomes possible. The crew might be old duffers by the time they get there, but they can limit their numbers because they don't have to keep a society going on board. Or they could prolong their lives with life extension drugs.

Life extension also poses its own problems. While it's useful for long voyages where you want to actually live to see the target star and use your expertise instead of teaching it to your children and hoping they teach it to the next generation, it's a problem on a generation ship. Even with people sticking to two children per couple (or one child to one parent in polyamorous Heinlein-esque communal love-fests), room's going to run out real fast. Great-great-grandpa and grandma may have to be euthanised.... or their children only allowed to breed when their parents die. Which is a problem is females can only safely breed up to about 40. There better be some serious mojo in those pills if that's going to be the case.

Speaking of kids... can you imagine what a 2 year old would do in a delicate, tightly enclosed environment? Or a sulky teenager? Best just feed the crew contraceptives and boosterspice* til they get to their new Eden...

*anti-aging drug in Larry Niven's known space novels

Interstellar Exploration - Two Motivations

2011-01-15T11:32:00.000-08:00

Chinese junks, similar to what Zheng He's fleet may have looked like. Credit: Wikimedia

Exploration is rarely about the pure, unfettered pursuit of knowledge. Scientists want to prove a theory. Politicians want to see high-tech industry stimulated and their national prestige elevated. Private citizens want to go "because it's there." History has shown that there are two broad kinds of exploration - with their own separate outcomes. The first is the show of force. The second is sustained interest.

1405 saw the launch of Zheng He's expedition of exploration from China. A massive flotilla of 317 ships and 27 000 crewmembers, with 44 huge treasure ships measuring 120-150 metres in length. Or, accounting for typical historical exaggeration, probably half that as 100 metres is the limits of what is possible with wooden ships (note that no remains of these craft have ever been found).

Christopher Columbus had 3 ships, 23 metres long, and 270 men (before the usual diseases started wiping them out). The only thing he had over Zhang He was the fact that he didn't sing soprano (Zhang He was a eunuch).

The Chinese weren't interested in colonisation or trade. They wanted to show off, impress people with their bling (hence the treasure ships) or else kick them around a bit. They wanted to remind people that China, just like every other Empire in the world, was the centre of the world. It was the Apollo project of the era, in more ways than one. Because after a flurry of these expeditions, the whole thing was called off due to escalating military conflicts and finally a big damn wall to keep the Mongols out.

Christopher Columbus of course, had different motivations. He wanted money by opening up an alternate trade route to Asia. And he didn't make such a big investment - three ships, perhaps a big thing in Medieval Europe. Although everybody thinks of him as a big success because he found this place called America, he failed to find the trade route. He wasn't even out to prove the world was round, everybody knew that.

Now, how did the New World wind up colonised? Why didn't the Chinese do it? Europe was a dirty little backwater, although the first glimmerings of scientific enquiry were beginning. Simple: China wasn't interested. China could have easily afforded to colonise and conquer these new lands. The Europeans were broke, and constantly fighting each other. But there was land to exploit, and savages to convert! There was also somewhere to run away to if you didn't fancy being oppressed!

So, we have two scenarios with which to place interstellar colonisation in. The first is the massive show of force, done mainly to impress and sustained by government interest. The second is a trickle which eventually becomes a flood, sustained by continued private interest (Hey Sven! Could I interest you in a place called Greenland!). This can tell us something about what kind of colonies we can expect, and who's going to found them.

Interstellar Flight: Hibernation

2011-01-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

So let's say we've discovered a nice habitable planet around those nice, nearby sun-like and well-behaved stars, Alpha Centauri A or B. How are we going to get there? As it stands, there are three possible ways of getting there. Obviously it's going to take a long time.

The simplest in engineering terms is hibernation (aka "suspended animation"). This has the very important engineering advantage of not needing all the mass of a big habitat or a closed ecology. The ship can go faster or be smaller (and cheaper) as a result. Throw the humans in the hibernation chambers and let them sleep the journey away. Plus they won't go stir crazy or forget how to do their jobs. However, there are significant challenges: we don't really have the first clue as how to induce hibernation in humans.

Short-term hibernation is possible through induced (or accidental) hypothermia. Unfortunately it's dangerous - Swedish radiologist Anna Bågenholm was dunked under ice with a core body temp of 13.7°C. A drop below 28°C is often fatal. However - this hypothermia-induced hibernation can be extended for long periods. Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, a Japanese skiier, went missing and was recovered 24 days later with his organs shut down and his body temperature at 22°C. What was particularly amazing was how he survived for so long without any fluid intake.

Hypothermia can also be induced for medical reasons (with much better prospects of surival as it's controlled): English and Japanese doctors pioneered the technique of using deliberate hypothermia for heart surgery with packs of ice, and the Russians perfected the technique (the normal solution these days is to use a heart-lung machine). Basically the brain chilled to about 16°C (60°F) and the body to 24°C (75°F). This gives the doctors a 30 to 60 minute window where the heart stops and they can tinker with it, then whip the body back up to full temperature with no lasting brain damage. A recent discovery with mice showed that hydrogen sulfide combined with hypothermia could be used to induce hibernation in mice - but only mice. It probably won't be as simple with humans, but the US military is certainly interested in it for trauma applications. Extreme hypoxia might also be a trigger.

Unfortunately, humans just aren't built for hibernation; this technique must be done correctly otherwise there is severe risk of cardiac arrest. More so is the problem of simply lying inert for years on end. Wouldn't the body degenerate? What crucial processes might be impaired? It might be necessary to wake the sleepers up every year or so to let them recover, before climbing back in the freezer again - with significant impacts on life support requirements.

For really long term flights, it might be necessary to go all the way and use cryogenic preservation - ie freezing the astronaut solid and then thawing him/her out. Unfortunately, this is kind of problematic - small embryos and organs can be successfully quick-frozen, but damage from expanding ice crystals (especially during re-warming) causes all kinds of havoc. A way around this is vitrification - basically pumping the body with antifreeze, turning the body into a block of glass at -135°C. This unfortunately creates further problems in the form of the toxic antifreeze now flushing the body.

A vitrified rabbit kidney being thawed - notice the lack of frost and ice.

Although reviving the patients is tricky for both cryogenic preservation and hibernation, perhaps AI will have advanced enough for it to handle the process without having to have someone on hand. Continual waking and thawing may not be a good idea - so perhaps some brave souls will volunteer to spend a significant chunk of their lives in extreme boredom watching over their crewmates. It may also be possible to grow whole new bodies around the vitrified brains, with the ship becoming more like the mass (and cost) of an unmanned probe. Once it arrives in the system, it mines sufficient material to build a habitat and create nutrients to grow the crews' bodies. However, this is getting to the real bleeding edge of the possible - FTL may be possible before then.

The most likely scenario - hibernation through some combination of induced hypothermia, hypoxia and drugs, seems feasible enough that we could conceive of an interstellar mission if the propulsion technology is likewise developed (which seems to be the far more difficult problem). Since hibernation has many more applications than just long-duration spaceflight, it'll probably be developed sooner rather than later.

The hibernation "pods" would probably be some small climate-controlled chambers with a comfy bed, IV drip and some sensors, hardly weighing anything at all. More like the cheap-looking hibernation pods in the original Planet of the Apes than big bulky cryo-coffins. They'd be located right in the heart of the ship, surrounded by as much radiation shielding as possible, and with a bit of rotation to keep fluids behaving properly. The quarters for the awake crew would probably be right next to it, to take advantage of the proximity to the sleep chambers' radiation shielding. Upon arrival, the sleep chambers could be used as bunks for the crew.

Reliability of the hibernation mechanisms would be a big issue - springs, one of the most reliable components, rarely last beyond 60 years. New, highly fatigue tolerant materials need to be designed, along with fault tolerant systems - more so than with a ship where everybody's awake and able to fix things. This in itself is a significant challenge, but the aerospace industry tries to reduce maintenance and extend aircraft life to lower operating costs, so this is another area where industry may make the development anyway.

Appreciating What We Have Already

2011-01-12T04:03:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we forget we're living in really amazing times. I saw this over on Wayne Hales' blog and shamelessly stole it. It looks like the cover of an SF book or a still from an SF movie, but it's not. It's astronaut Tracy Caldwell-Dyson looking out of the ISS cupola. Here's the full-sized original from wikimedia.

Wayne Hale talked about how images like this would inspire the public. I was personally wondering how she managed to look like she was lying down when she was in zero g, and whether her elbow was going to smudge the optically perfect glass.

For me, the constant SF eye candy can never dull the awesome reality of knowing that someone up there is seeing something like this right now. We have a 300 tonne space station, 3 different unmanned cargo vehicles, a space plane headed for retirement and the prospect of 3 or 4 new craft to replace it. Add to that the prospect of a private space station before the end of the decade, the Russians and Chinese possibly building their own and it gives you hope for the future. Yeah, space isn't happening as quickly as we would like but boy, what we have already boggles the mind.

If you've got the time (and bandwidth) why not watch a tour of the ISS from Youtube and get a taste of what it's like out there.

DARPA and 100-Year Starships: Not so Fast

2010-11-05T02:03:00.000-07:00

Credit: Adrian Mann, who does artwork for Project Icarus!

Recently there was a big flurry of stuff in the news about DARPA commissioning a "100 Year Starship Study." Tossed in amongst this was a variety of other stuff, like microwave beam-powered launch and sending humans on one-way trips to Mars. Naturally the media got this all backward and took it to mean that NASA was planning to send humans to Mars by 2030 - but leave them there. Which is rubbish, as at the moment NASA has no plan and no direction except to visit a NEO in the 2030s. Woo hoo.

The fact of the matter is, as the Tau Zero blog, Centauri Dreams confirms, is that DARPA is merely interested in setting up the business case for an organisation with developing deep-space flight as its goal (and presumably interstellar flight). It recognises that there are huge hurdles to overcome, and that the technological windfall might be very great indeed. Consider hibernation - which would be of enormous benefit in keeping critical patients alive until they can be treated.

Unfortunately, there's not even a hint of anybody starting something up seriously.

As the content of this (poorly maintained) blog attests to, I'm quite interested in interstellar travel and colonisation. I'd recently read Ark by the eminent Stephen Baxter, which dealt with an interstellar mission spurred on by a global flood (deep subterranean aquifers suddenly releasing their contents). I was so inspired by the description of the ship that I went back to the drawing boards of my own designs and started looking up papers on the subject. Now, Faster-Than-Light travel is right out - simply because nobody has any idea on how it might eventually come to light (no pun intended of course). And then there's the problem of how we might be able to power it - something like the total energy output of a galaxy to move one piddly ship? Then there's all the other problems - how do you make the warp bubble, the warp bubble destabilising, etc. etc.

Which brings us back to regular Slower-Than-Light travel, the capabilities of which are not very spectacular. It turns out that to get anywhere at a reasonable pace, heck, even to launch a decent-sized colony ship at Voyager II velocities, a prodigious amount of energy is required. How much?

Marc G. Millis of the Tau Zero Foundation has an interesting article on the arXiv preprint server, "Energy, incessant obsolescence, and the first interstellar missions", is quite revealing - and depressing. It puts into perspective the enormous energy requirements even modest STL requires. It's a lot of energy. Let's put it into perspective how much:

Eq. 1 Source: Marc G. Millis

That little e is the pesky thing that means the faster you want to go (relative to your exhaust velocity), the bigger your fuel load. Let's say you have a space shuttle engine which burns hydrogen and oxygen and gives you, oh, 4.5 kilometres per second (kps). You want to get into Earth orbit, about 9 kps. That 9 kps is your delta v, (the triangle with a v), and you put that over your exhaust velocity (vex) and you get e². Plug that into the calculator and you get 7.389. What this means is that your spacecraft is now 6/7 fuel load and 1/7 everything else. Basically a flying fuel tank. What it also means is that for your spacecraft to go at, say, 3% the speed of light, your exhaust must travel at 3% the speed of light (c). That's hard. Chemical rockets manage something like 0.001% c.

The second side of the equation is where it really stings. See that vex²? Multiply 3% c (9 million metres per second) by 3% c (another 9 million metres per second) and you wind up with energy levels in the range of kilotonnes and megatonnes per kilogramme. So, it pays to go bigger and slower. Doubling your exhaust velocity (and hence top speed) quadruples your energy requirement, whereas doubling your mass only doubles the energy. Putting a satellite in orbit requires something in the range of a WWII conventional bombing raid in terms of energy. Sending a teeny probe to Alpha Centauri at 3% the speed of light requires lots more energy. How much more? OK, let's break into the equation.

1/2m = 500kg (for a 1 tonne probe).
We'll assume the probe's delta V is the same as its exhaust - 2.7. Less the 1 = 1.7.
vex² = 8.1 x 10¹³

Putting it all together:
500 x 1.7 x 8.1 x 10¹³ = 6.885 x 10¹⁷ Joules. About 150 megatonnes yield (metric tonnes). By comparison, the highest nuclear weapon yield is in the region of 5.2 megatonnes per tonne. That's roughly 1000 Hiroshimas to get one tonne to Alpha Centauri in about 135 years. Double the delta v, however, and the energy requirement only goes up by 3.7. (the actual kinetic energy requirement is still the same). So it's somewhat more efficient to have a lower exhaust velocity and more fuel.

Millis compares energy used by space missions today with total world energy output, and compares energy growth with the energy required for an Alpha Centauri mission. It's rather depressing. Only by 2500 are we able to send such a probe to Alpha Centauri. And sending a 25 000 tonne colony ship on a millennia long journey to the stars requires more energy for a long trip than to actually send it on its way! (Best case scenario 2200). All of this dovetails with other authors' projections, economic, spacecraft top speed, etc. which puts the first possible interstellar colony ship in two centuries' time. Bummer. But it at least gives us some other numbers to play with, which I'll (hopefully) blog about over the next couple of weeks.

What it does show, though, is that big generation ships are likely to be available earlier than unmanned probes. And that a "space ark" is possible perhaps in one or two hundred years, if we throw enough money at it (which may only happen in case of impending global disaster). The (somewhat) silvery lining is that Millis considered the proportion of energy spent on spaceflight as a constant. With mass commercialisation, that number may well go up as a percentage. Much the way the energy spent on flight has gone from zero to becoming a major global warming problem...

1 point 3 BILLION internet users...

2010-07-09T01:25:00.000-07:00

International companies have this going through their heads whenever they think of China: 1.3 BILLION customers, probably in a Dr. Evil voice.

From the outside, it looks fairly straightforward. But let's not make the mistake of thinking China is going to become a country of 1.3 billion Americans overnight. The average Chinese person in the city is making less than the South African minimum wage - about US$300 compared to US$400, and that's for a 40 hour week. Oh, there are plenty of white collar staff earning pretty well, but still below what South African equivalents are earning. They make up for this low wage situation with dirrrrt cheap products. Now, how is your average factory worker going to afford a PC which will cost one or two month's wages, even in dirt cheap China (even if you can buy a pirated copy of Windows 7 for 5 yuan)? Sure, you can use an internet cafe if you want.

Yet China has some 384 million internet users. This doesn't mean that 384 million people have computers and an ISP. In fact, in 2008, "only" 32 million PCs were sold. 102 million computers were in use, compared to 274 million in the US. That's 1 computer for every 13 people, compared to roughly 1:1 in the US. Then, you have to actually wonder - just how much money are these users generating? A fairly large chunk of these PCs were bought with totally pirated OS and software. Baidu, China's "answer" to Google is in fact more like China's Pirate Bay - its success is through hosting pirated media! And, even with the lion's share of 384 million users, its turnover was less than $3 billion in 2009, an eighth of Google which has over a billion users.

Sure, the penetration is going to increase, and maybe someday we can expect 1.3 billion computers (or their future equivalents) in use. But for that to happen, we will also have to see dirt poor rural farmers lifted to the equivalent salary of the average American "poor." To match the US now, China "merely" has to maintain wages grow at 10% for the next 25 years or so. To overtake the US, it has to maintain this growth rate for about 50 years. Can it? It's doubtful, heck, downright impossible. If you really want an idea of the growth of the Chinese internet, follow Baidu.

Obama Bowls Us A Six

2010-03-09T04:08:00.000-08:00

Hi folks in the blogoverse,

Last December I wrote about the fate of the ISS and what might happen to it, for my IEMBA Seminar at Temple University. I predicted that the ISS might be wiggled an extension, but I certainly wasn't prepared (along with most of the space community) for Obama's doozy of a budget that he dropped on us in February. It was very interesting for me though, as I was just studying an introductory accounting & finance course (yay, I now know what a debenture is!). ISS extension to 2020... great! ISS budget boost, wow, even greater! But nobody was prepared for the outright cancellation of Ares V (not gonna happen), Ares I (lame duck, doomed to be Xmas dinner) and Orion. And now the US was supposed to pay the Russians a whopping $100 million per Soyuz seat. Uh oh. I said the Japanese were not going to trust the Russians, and those guys have learned the art of capitalism. No disrespect to Roskosmos, but wow! $100 million? And, dear readers, NASA is having to rely exclusively on private transport to ISS, which, though good and cheap, is not going to be soon. And last of all, no clue as to NASA's destination, no timetable, just a vague promise to be "somewhere, sometime." Urgh. Administrator Bolden did his best to field the blame like the good soldier he is, but man this is turning out ugly.

Well, the Congressmen are lining up for a fight because they don't want to see all those shuttle layoffs in their districts, nor are the big space companies wanting to give up their juicy contracts. Optimists are predicting a sensible compromise (perhaps with DIRECT - yay!) Pessimists see an even more botched budget and space plan. As for yours truly? I'm somewhat ambivalent. I favour a space shuttle extension to 2015, with two flights a year on a lean budget to service the station properly. A lot of knowledgeable folks who work on or near the shuttle have said that the ISS is not really meant to be run on the meager offerings of Progress, ATV, HTV and the COTS suppliers - SpaceX and Orbital. No offense to those guys but it is a matter of tonneage, and also seats. Shuttle extension also preserves the vital elements for a heavy lift booster - like DIRECT or Ares-V Lite as some call it. SSME, External Tank, Solid Rocket Boosters. This way money is pooled between the two programs, there's a smooth transition and all those skilled workers aren't lost to second-hand car dealerships.

Some 15mm SF I'm Working On

2010-02-22T22:04:00.000-08:00

Some 15mm SF that I've been working on. All three models are from Ground Zero Games. On the left is an armed civilian, middle is from their Alien Mercs line and on the right is a Crusty (not-District-9-Prawn). All of them have amazing detail. The green fellow in particular was a pleasure to paint, brown, green skin and rusty weapon. I painted him in Warhammer 40K style as one of their Orks. Maybe I can tempt some of that crowd into discovering that there are actually other games out there! (I wonder if you asked them if they had heard of Napoleonics, what they would say...)

Next up is an APC from Old Crow. I try to keep all my vehicles as non-metal because I'll be moving back to SA from Japan very soon, and the weight of all that lead will soon add up. It can double as an SADF Ratel or any one of the other modern APCS, as well as an SF one. Painted it desert camo, as SA military hardware is usually this drab brown and it's fairly universal as far as modern conflicts go. I also figure habitable exoplanets will usually be dry and desert-y too.

Figures are: the Alien Merc, an Old Crow trooper, GZG NAC Marine, GZG Ravager, GZG Crusty, another GZG NAC Marine. As you can see, the Old Crow guys are very short and skinny compared to everybody else. That's fine, I'll probably make them Chinese or Japanese troops and not mix them in with other figs. One grumble I have with Old Crow is that there's no SAW- or LMG-equipped troopers. GZG figs all have fantastic detail, although the NAC guys look like they've been chomping on the McStarBurgers when held next to the Old Crow. Maybe I'll paint them in nice slimming colours...

Not sure what I'll do with them yet. I have painted up about 20 Crusties and 40 Old Crow so I could do a humans vs. aliens slugfest, but I'd also like to do some post-apocalyptic scenarios, getting friends to role play as themselves with the armed civvies.

The People Demand Free Rocket Engines!

2010-01-19T14:52:00.001-08:00

I'm wondering how much it costs to ship 4-odd tonnes of space shuttle engine to South Africa. The reason I say this is because NASA is giving away worn-out space shuttle engines for FREE!!!! plus of course shipping and handling costs. The SSMEs as they're refered to by jargon-loving NASA (and me) are good for several missions before they wear out and need replacement. Brand new, they cost something on the order of $50 million apiece, so that is some serious discounting going on. What I love about these things is the way they look so dirty and scruffy now, just like the space shuttles, having been reused over and over again. Sadly after 2010, we're looking at the end of the Space Shuttle Program. Sniff. A possible 3-flight extension is being looked at up to 2012, to continue servicing the ISS (after NASA seriously screwed up the shuttle replacement).

The New York Times Article

Oh, and the shuttles themselves are up for grabs, although they are a bit more pricey at $30-odd million each. Mark Shuttleworth, care to give me a loan? But, the good news is that the shuttle is not dead. The SSME, the trademark orange external fuel tank and the white solid rocket boosters on the side will live on. Latest rumblings are that NASA's new administrator, Charlie Bolden, will adopt a new launcher design, based closely on the space shuttle hardware. The current (old) design, Ares V and its smaller counterpart Ares I, suck in many ways which I won't bother going into here, but safety is one of them.

This new launcher is based on an old NASA study about making a big heavy lifter using shuttle components. A group of space enthusiasts and engineers inside NASA resurrected and refined the idea, risking getting fired in the process (can you believe that!?) Called Team DIRECT, they've been championing the launcher design for years now. I'm proud to have offered some (incredibly minor) support to their cause. So, instead of outright cancellation when Ares I and V became engineering and budget nightmares, we have the good old space shuttle once again. No wings, but you don't need those out there, in the black...

Visit the team's website...

Shattered Horizon - Which Way Is Up?

2010-01-07T02:09:00.001-08:00

I've been playing with a game I got for a steal on Steam - Shattered Horizon (75% off - $5!!!). Basically, it's a First Person Shooter in space. Pretty much like the battle in Moonraker. This especially brings back memories of Descent on my old computer. But what it most of all feels like to me is Ender's Game - the enemy's gate is down (I'll have to explain this bit a little later)!!

A bit of comment on the game. It's set in the 2040s, and a "mining accident" has resulted in a large chunk of the moon being blown off and the debris orbiting the Earth in a deadly ring of boulders. The International Space Agency (ISA) and the Moon Mining Corporation (MMC) are both trapped in orbit, and supplies are hard to get through. The ISA blames the MMC for the "accident" and wants to bring them to book. The MMC of course don't want to go to jail and don't want to suffocate / starve so they wind up raiding supplies sent to the ISA. Pretty straightforward and kind of original plot - not that it really matters, as Shattered Horizon is a multiplayer-only game.

The game is not entirely ruled by the laws of Newton - there are maximum velocities but you do keep drifting once you fire your thrusters. Stopping dead is heard unless you anchor onto something with your boots. Aiming is harder when not anchored, so this is the better option for shooting. It also gives you better cover. Your weapon is a standard assault rifle, with some utility grenades - EMP to short out other players' suits and slow them down temporarily, a concussion warhead to knock other players away and ice clouds to hide behind or in. And a bayonet to slice suits open. Despite the single weapon choice, and the fact that there are only 4 maps availabe (one being a privatised ISS - pretty much like my previous posts' idea!), the game is lots of fun and has a dedicated following. The devs are also responsive to requests and feedback, and can incorporate ideas brought up in forums to updates. They also give clear Yes/No responses as to what they are going to do. For example, some players wanted blood squirts etc. and the devs responded No, because that would alter the game's rating to a more mature rating. Personally I think this is a good idea - plenty enough games have blood and guts already. The only thing really lacking is a solid single player experience, but with bots that may come in time.

The game is produced by Futuremark, those guys who build software to test the speed of your system, and this is a pretty demanding game. You wouldn't think it, but the shaders required to make the rocks look rocky chews up a lot of system power. There are LOTS of objects being rendered as well, unlike games set indoors with few visible objects. My laptop runs an ATI Radeon 4570, a sort of low-middle end card that will handle older DX9 games like Fallout 3 fairly well, but Shattered Horizon is DX10 only and really takes it through the wringer. After turning graphics way down, turning off Windows Aero and installing the latest video drivers, I managed to get the game running smoothly at about 20-25 fps (frames per second), which is the minimum for shooter games if you don't want to get shot every single time (movies typically run at 24 fps).

In terms of realism, this game is both quite realistic and gratifyingly fun. There's only a single multipurpose rifle, as I mentioned, as you don't want to fiddle with other weapons in zero G. "Sounds" in space are handled as being part of a situational awareness suite, which makes sense to me. Make gunfire sound like gunfire, and humans will react accordingly. Get your suit knocked out by EMP or power the suit down for stealth, and the sounds go away. You hear muffled sounds transmitted by anything you are in contact with, but that's it. Really atmospheric.

As for the Ender's game reference, the book basically involved young child cadets fighting with laser tag guns in a zero-G battle room. Ender, the main character of the book, revolutionised thinking by telling his posse to think of the enemy's gate as being down. In other words, to advance feet first because that made you a smaller target and forced you to think in 3 dimensions. The ISS level in Shattered Horizons makes me think of this quite often. I find it refreshingly mind expanding to pop up from a rock, hanging upside down and shoot somebody in the top of the helmet. It's also quite funny to get shot in a completely random direction. Watching other players' creative tactics is quite rewarding, especially when friends work in teams.

Overall, the game is pretty darned original and fun, and considering the price I got it for, is really worth it. Good for just mucking around in between working or hours of red-eye LAN gaming. Also a very good example of how a small company can produce a really quality product and stay in touch with their consumer base. Other games devs should take notice, in amidst this sea of World War II shoot-em-ups and Half-Life 2 wannabees.

Avatar and Lithium

2010-01-04T01:49:00.000-08:00

Avatar and Lithium. What the heck does a movie and an element used to treat bipolar disorder have in common? The answer is planets. But first, let's talk about Avatar, a most pleasant surprise for this SF bunny. Yes, this review is kinda late but it's not like a lot of people read this blog anyway.

I had the opportunity to watch it in 3D at IMAX, which was terrific. As it was subtitled, I had Japanese floating in front of me and when the Nav'Ri spoke I had to struggle to read the kanji to figure out what they were saying. Mostly guesswork. I'll have to wait for the DVD.

The arrival sequence at Pandora was most gratifying, because the interstellar transport was actually a well-designed vessel, not something created by a 7-Up gulping graphic designer with no understanding of engineering and far too much Gundam influence.

You can read Winchell Chung's rave review here.

Pandora itself is a fascinating planet, or rather, moon. It orbits a gas giant around Alpha Centauri B, although the interesting thing is that astronomers have watched the Alpha Centauri system and are pretty sure that there are no gas giants in orbit around either. Theory says that there may be some planets tucked in there, and the two stars are far apart that planets in the "Goldilocks" zone won't get ejected by the stars' gravitational tug.

Now here's the interesting part. We know that stars that have planets appear to be depleted in lithium, including, of course, our sun. How lithium depletion relates to all this, we're not sure. th Alpha Centauri A and B have high levels of lithium depletion. There are two interesting possibilities here:

First, about a third of all stars seem to have lithium depletion. So as many as 1 in 3 stars may have planets. Of course, so far this means planets we can detect, not terrestrial-sized planets. Normal (lithium-rich) stars may be swarming with asteroids and terrestrial planets, which we can't we can't yet detect.

Second, Alpha Centauri A and B may well harbour small rocky planets. Maybe quite a few, since they are both heavily depleted compared to our own sun. But that remains to be seen, since there are so many other factors that could influence planet formation. For all we know, the planets may have been ejected into space by tidal forces long ago. It seems likely that a giant planet did not form close in and gobble up all the newly formed planets, because that giant planet would have wound up dumping its lithium back into its parent star as it continued inwards on its death spiral (computer simulations of "hot jupiters" indicate that they are so big that drag from solar wind decays their orbits and dumps them into their star).

No Christmas Spirit in Japan...

2009-12-25T05:19:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

Well, as Christmas day draws to a close, I thought I'd sum up what Christmas in Japan is like. I can do that in one word: empty. Perhaps a lot like what Christmas in the future will be like. Basically, there's no mention of the birth of Jesus, not even in the carols they play. To the Japanese, Christmas is about giving presents to children, images of Santa and reindeer... but in the shopping centres there are no Santas, but there are stockings filled with sweets. Tomorrow they will be gone, the ones that failed to sell destined for the burnable rubbish.

Japan has a long history of aping other cultures, adopting their customs like a set of clothes but never adopting their values. The same is true of Christmas. I think it's largely because they already have seasonal celebrations for spring, summer and autumn. New Year is not so fantastic and well defined to them so they took on Christmas with all its glitz and glamour and associations of winter comfort. At New Year in Japan, all there really is is some funny mochi, traditional Japanese food and ringing the bell at the local shrine on New Year's Day. Not much for companies to work with, hence the big embrace of Christmas with "roast" chicken (actually some kind of teriyaki) and "Christmas" cake (actually some kind of strawberry and cream thing). The lack of Jesus, wise men and co. is simply down to the fact that they clash with the nice red and white of Christmas, clad in their Palestinian attire. There are a very few Japanese Christians, but they haven't really spread the "Christmas message" to their (basically) atheist fellows. By "Christmas message" I mean a holiday, taking time off to see families, giving thanks - everything which O-Bon is to the Japanese.

As for the rest of the world, I think we'll see less and less of Joseph and Mary and their baby and more and more of the fat white-bearded man. Dwelling on the religious aspect of Christmas brings up religious and spiritual values, even if you're not Christian - and capitalist economies can't have that, people questioning materialism and so on (the whole point of Christmas is that the "king of the world" was born in a stable surrounded by smelly animals). But perhaps this empty Christmas is why the Japanese don't really take it to heart. It has no real meaning, and if the meaning of Christmas is further diluted by commercialisation, watering-down of religions and fragmentation of family units, then it'll eventually become irrelevant. Much like it was a few hundred years ago when it was a fairly minor religious event.

Cash on Delivery!

2009-12-23T23:30:00.000-08:00

I had such an interesting post on the fate of the ISS and Japan's involvement, but it was consigned to digital oblivion when FireFox crashed! Ah, well, it last it wasn't Internet Explorer, otherwise I'd have viruses running rampant through my system too. Or, worse, Safari - about as water tight as a fishnet stocking.

I was lamenting about my post when lo and behold the Amazon order showed up at my door! Wow, the Japanese postal service even at Xmas time is nothing short of amazing. Probably because they send New Year's cards instead of Xmas ones... Of course, I wasn't expecting the chap so I only had a couple of thousand yen in my pocket to pay for the book, which is Nation Branding by Keith Dinnie - one of my course lecturers. I'll have to charge him for that plug, hehe. Now, before I get sidetracked into a rant about Nation Branding / Public Diplomacy / sinister thought manipulation, I thought I'd talk about credit cards versus cash on delivery. Mundane, isn't it? Not really. For people living in Africa, with no credit cards but steady incomes, this is a real problem. There's a whole world of electronic education out there... oh, yeah some of it's free - heck a lot of it's free, but it's just not the same as a physical book, or an e-book, or a CD full of educational utilities. It was annoying as heck when I lived in SA, all these wonderful things to buy and here I am locked out of the world of e-commerce. Yeah, there were eBucks but those were only useful if you bought South African products. No thanks, I can pay for biltong (meat jerky only better) out of my wallet.

Then you have to wonder, what else are non-credit-carded people missing out on? Operating systems (Windows Vista was a washout but 7 is awesome), antivirus software, cheap hardware etc. One of the really annoying things about South Africa was the horrendous prices people had to pay for laptops. Incredible Connections, for example, charged R10 000+ for a machines that were nowhere near the power of my vanilla Dell Studio 15. Maybe only now do they have a machine on the shelves that equals mine, which cost me all of the equivalent of R6 000 when I bought it, including shipping from Singapore and delivery to my doorstep (albeit sans English Vista, which is a pain). Unbelievable. You might be persuaded to think SA has a 100% import duty on laptops - but it doesn't. Maybe now the situation is changing... but still, the models in the stores in August still wilted next to mine, for price and performance.

SA really needs to understand the power of credit cards, and making the availability of "pay-as-you-go" credit cards widespread. But no. We'll probably be stuck in the tech dark ages for a while yet.

Flatmates in Spaaaaace...

2009-12-21T16:14:00.000-08:00

Here's my post that I thought I'd lost. Silly fool that I am, I forgot that I backed it up on the blogger site! You'll notice that this was "published" on December 21st, yet I talk about losing it on December 24. Electronic media has a way of being mind-bending like that. I thought I might also mention that I sent a Xmas e-postcard to the ISS crew - which is quite busy at the moment with 3 docked spacecraft and 13 astronauts floating around inside. Sadly my e-postcard was highly unmemorable, something about does Santa deliver to your orbital inclination. At best it would get a groan.

Recently I wrote an assignment for my MBA course on East-West negotiations. Given that I was allowed pretty much a free hand, I chose to write on what interested me, and that was spaaaaaace! Specifically, the International Space Station, which, by the way, at $30-$100 billion (estimates vary) is the single most expensive object ever built by humanity. Oooh, I can hear people thinking now "what a horrendous waste of many, it should be given to starving people in Africa..." Well, I can think of better things that can be spent on African orphans, such as Paris Hilton's fortune for a start. Let's leave that debate for now, especially as the fallout from Copenhagen is $100 billion for developing countries (most of which will probably be spent on fuel-efficient Mercedes Benzes for corrupt ministers).

The ISS is also the world's single largest international project. It represents an opportunity to do something that the various nations around the world couldn't do separately. The partner nations are the US, Russia, Europe (not a nation... yet), Japan, Canada and Brazil.

The US needed the partner nations to help foot the bill and also save the project from cancellation at the hands of Senate, just like every other imaginative project worth doing that didn't involve the military. Even then, Clinton had to step in and bring in the Russians. The US taxpayer is still fielding most of the cost - which, at $2 billion a year, helps maintain a strong aerospace industry in the US. A strong aerospace industry and government contracts means companies like Boeing can afford to develop the 787, with all its fuel-efficient goodness so the middle-class can have holidays in Thailand (not Africa, it's not charming enough).

Russia needed the ISS because it was broke and it needed to get the Mir 2 built. Mir 2 was sort of kludged onto the original US/international section, and as such can almost function on its own. More on this later. They did however sell a ride to the first African in space (who paid for his own ticket).

The EU wanted in because they were too cheap to spend money and build their own space station, let alone their own manned space transport, despite being the second largest GDP after the US. This must be because they spend all their money on Africa. No? Oh, they spend it on farm subsidies, which results in excess produce being dumped in Africa, driving farmers further into poverty.

Japan wanted in because they had lots and lots of money (at the time) and were spending it like crazy. A (very) small part of that went into Africa, but most went into golf courses in America and companies that went bust. They had all sorts of grand plans, like the HOPE mini-shuttle and later on a reusable space plane, but of course those fell by the wayside.

Fast forward to today, and we have a sticky situation. The Americans want to explore the moon again, a new Apollo - but the trouble is they have to do this on a shoestring. NASA got there by basically unleashing floodgates of money during the Apollo era, now this isn't the case anymore and there's a lot of projects chewing up money. The two biggest are the space shuttle and the ISS. The plan is to retire the shuttle after 2010 (which is probably a good thing), and then retire the ISS after only 5 years of use, in 2015. Now, the ISS partners have put loads of money into this thing and I'm sure they don't want to see it all goe up in flames so soon. The Europeans in particular seem to expect ISS utilisation up to 2020 (10 years of use was the original agreement) and they'll probably hold NASA to that.

As for the Japanese, they're also pretty peeved I suppose. The ISS modules they contributed - Kibo, the experiment pallets and HTV, the unmanned freighter to service the ISS - represent a pretty big investment for them, and are one of the few things to go right for them in manned spaceflight. But the Japanese aren't the type to shout and wave their arms and point fingers - that's the French way. They'd rather have a deal quietly worked out, all the while being inscrutable - and, typical only of the Japanese - sitting there silently. Normally, the ISS negotiations usually start out as discussions between engineers, and these ideas get passed up the food chain until finally the politicians come with their pens and seal the deal.

The trouble with Japanese systems however, is that ideas don't get passed upwards that much. So, although there could be a dialogue between NASA and JAXA engineers, getting the JAXA upper management to respond would take time - and time is running out to get NASA to extend the ISS, or for JAXA to figure out some way to save its modules. Also, the issue of nemawashi will complicate things even more, because the issues have to be circulated around everybody. If you've ever worked in a Japanese company, you'll know what I mean - things take forever to get started - although it works quickly when it does. Such are the differences that make Japan frustrating or fascinating, depending on your inclination and situation.

What this all really means is that, if NASA continues as directed and burns the ISS in 2015, Japan better have something lined up right now. Development of aerospace tech takes time, and space is no exception. The Russian segment could become independent, but the Russian docking collar doesn't fit the docking collar on JAXA's Kibo module. Eeerk. The Japanese would need to buy a docking adapter from the US part of the station, although it would be a barter agreement as typically no money changes hands in space agreements. I didn't mention this in my assignment - doh! It seems so obvious now. But the real reason I didn't mention it is that there are a lot of other issues here - power supply being one thing. Most of the juice on ISS runs off the US grid. The Russians will add on some extra solar power modules later on, but this might not be enough to power Kibo. There's also the small problem of the Russians being the surly landlord with vodka on his breath. Japan and Russia still smart over those little spats about the Kuril islands. And with the Russian bear starting to flex its muscles, cooperation with them seems less and less likely. Even the Europeans bailed out of jointly developing the Soyuz successor, stating that the Russians wanted to do all of the work and just get paid for it - which is not the point of space programs. Space programs exist to enrich your own tech and science bases. It's a bit like Brazil paying the UK to educate UK graduates to come over and work in Brazil for a little while.

So, what plans for Japan? I think they do have something up their sleeves, as it always seems to be the case nowadays with international cooperation. Some slides have shown a joint Japan-Europe free-flying mini-station based off of Kibo and HTV, albeit sorely lacking a manned module for people to go up there. Pay the Russians? It's also not good for much except week-long stopovers to stir the beakers and get samples from the lab. Hardly the constant attention that experiments on ISS can get.

Other slides have hinted at some sort of integrated orbital outpost, a mini-ISS which is more of an assembly station for lunar and interplanetary missions. So, they are hedging their bets and they sure don't want the Russian Bear in the capsule with them. Or the Chinese Panda either. Sometime soon we'll find out NASA's future direction from Obama, but even then that will have to fight its way through Congress...

The ISS ain't out of the woods yet. But I still hope to send a Xmas 2016 postcard to them.

You are at the end...

2009-12-20T20:29:00.000-08:00

Hello world, and such.

This is the "end" of the blog, although it's technically the beginning. When reading blogs, the format usually results in us starting with the first post and working our way back through time, much like like reading a book in reverse. Of course, a good ending wraps things up for the reader, so here is an introduction at the end.

This blog is about energy, space, physics, economy, the future and other such musings. The non-space related stuff may be offloaded to another blog, but for now this is the only blog there is. OK, so why "Centauri Sky" other than it sounds cool? Well, I have an abiding interest in space, as you may have guessed, and Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to earth. It is also the subject of a little-known race to find the closest extrasolar planets to Earth... and possibly the closest planets with life. You can read the rather inspirational story here:

Alpha Centauri Planet Hunt at SEED Magazine

Alpha Centauri also represents the sky that I grew up with in the Southern Hemisphere, which I can't see anymore on account of being in the Northern Hemisphere. Alpha Centauri was the star I looked for at night, against the vast majesty of the Milky Way's arms spread across the eye - the closest star to me other than the sun. So, it's part nostalgia for me. I hope you enjoy reading the stuff I put up here.