The Vision

November 18, 2008 3:23 PM

President Bush and his staff thought they were reinvigorating the American spirit of exploration when they proposed the "Vision for Space Exploration."  They wanted NASA retiring the space shuttles by 2010, returning to the moon by 2020, and eventually sending astronauts to Mars.

"The Vision," as some NASA managers labeled it, is far from being realized.  The shuttles are still puttering along; the Orion spacecraft to replace them are falling behind schedule, and as for Mars -- well, not in our lifetimes.

Now, with Mr. Bush's successor assembling a staff, the Planetary Society, an advocacy group co-founded by Carl Sagan, suggests a new "Road Map" -- skip the lunar base Bush suggested, and go beyond.

"Exploration of Mars should be the ultimate goal of human space flight in the foreseeable future," it says.  The moon-base idea "has driven a series of programmatic decisions that may instead lead to multi-decade delays in the expansion of human activity beyond the Earth-Moon system."  Find the full proposal HERE.

All well and good (and no saying Barack Obama or any other decision-makers would be much swayed) -- except that it provoked a quick, detailed rebuttal from retired astronaut Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, the twelfth man to walk on the moon.

"I am sorry, but I can no longer support the society in its goals as they seem to have gone back to being more political than rational. I want humankind on Mars more than most, but I, at least, feel obligated to look at this goal rationally."

He goes on at some length: "We need generations of engineers to relearn how to operate in deep space at and for long durations on a location that is more accessible than a trajectory to Mars or on Mars itself."

He adds, "Returning to the Moon has a far better chance of sustained political support than does a far, far more costly, start from scratch Mars program." 

Is he right?  Would any of this be exciting to the American people?  Would it be to you?  Right now there are seven shuttle astronauts, at great expense and some risk, visiting the space station to install...plumbing.

November 18, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

Mission Endeavour

November 14, 2008 6:03 PM

(Update: 8:25 p.m. EST)

Space Shuttle Endeavour lit up the sky at the Kennedy Space Center as it launched tonight, racing up the east coast of the United States on its way to orbit

Seven astronauts are on board.  Their flight is scheduled to run just shy of fifteen days.

By space shuttle standards, the flight of STS-126 sounds mundane: Endeavour is being sent to the International Space Station, carrying a second toilet...two small sleeping compartments for astronauts...an exercise rig...a refrigerator...a waste water recycling system (yes, astronauts in the future are expected to drink purified urine and perspiration; most say that's fine with them as long as they don't think about it very hard).

But, of course, sending astronauts into space is not yet mundane.  The flight costs roughly $1.1 billion, the ship travels at 17,500 miles an hour, and the temperatures around them in orbit can go up and down by several hundred degrees in a few minutes. 

Since the first components were launched a decade ago, the space station has never been able to accommodate more than three crew members at a time.  After this flight, NASA says it will be ready for six.

NASA's updates of the flight are HERE.  Descriptions of its payload are HERE.

This mission comes at a complicated time for NASA, as it is for the nation.  Barack Obama has a transition team looking at space issues, led by Lori Garver, a NASA manager in the Clinton years who later tried (unsuccessfully) to become the first non-zillionaire to buy a seat to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz.  Obama, who at one time proposed delaying the space shuttle's replacement to pay for education initiatives, changed course in mid-campaign and said he'd like to close the gap between the shuttle fleet's retirement in 2010 and the first flights of the new Orion spacecraft five years later.  President Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration," to move on from space shuttles and on the the moon and Mars, is very much up in the air.

And then there's this: The Government Accountability Office put out a list of thirteen "Urgent Issues" (the quotation marks are theirs) the new president and Congress must face.  "Retirement of the Space Shuttle" was one of them.

November 14, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

How McCain Won (or Could Have)

November 14, 2008 2:40 PM

According to the totals so far, Barack Obama won the election by something more than 8.4 million votes.  But Mike Sheppard says the margin that really matters was only 445,912.

Sheppard, you may recall from a previous post, is a grad student in statistics at Michigan State who became interested in the interplay between the popular and electoral vote in history, and calculated how many votes it would have taken in each race to change the outcome. 

Sheppard has refrained from telling me what his own political leanings are; his interest is in how well (or not) the electoral process works.

He showed that more than half our presidential elections since 1824 could have come out differently if fewer than two percent of voters -- the right two percent -- had voted differently and swung the electoral college totals to the losers.  In 1976, for instance, Gerald Ford could have beaten Jimmy Carter if Ohio and Hawaii had gone his way -- and it would only have taken 9,246 voters to make the difference.

David Chalian, our political director, has supplied the total popular votes for 2008 as of today:

• Obama: 66,624,447
• McCain: 58,182,368

Take a look at Sheppard's analysis HERE.  It was not a close election by his standards; John McCain needed at least seven more states to win the electoral vote.  But the most efficient way, mathematically, for that to have happened would only have taken 444,121 popular votes (out of 126 million cast), since North Carolina, Indiana, New Hampshire, etc., were so close. 

In other words, Mr. McCain could have become president by winning in the electoral college, 270-268 -- though still losing by 7.6 million votes.

November 14, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (46) | TrackBack (0)

Requiem for a Robot: Mars Probe Dies

November 10, 2008 9:52 AM

(Updated 4:00 p.m EST)

Phoenix Mars Lander, the plucky little ship that was sent to land in the Martian Arctic in May, has fallen silent. 

A source at NASA confirmed it this afternoon, and mission managers talked about it at a teleconference.  In the frozen twilight (-140 degrees F) of autumn on Mars, its solar panels could no longer gather enough power to recharge its batteries.  This was expected.  The mission was planned to last three months; it kept going for five.

"It's rather tough living up north of the Arctic Circle, and we knew the end was coming," said Barry Goldstein, the mission manager.  "It's been a great mission." 

The ship sent its last signal on November 2.  Engineers programmed two ships in Martian orbit to listen for signals as they passed over the landing site every two hours, but in addition to the cold and diminishing sunlight, the lander's solar panels had apparently been coated in red dust by a sandstorm on Mars. 

Controllers say they will keep listening for about three more weeks, but they say they will be surprised if they hear anything more.

Phoenix confirmed what scientists suspected but had not seen until now, that there was water ice, in large quantities, just beneath the Martian soil.  The ship's digging arm scraped away enough dirt to expose the ice, and then its cameras showed it sublimating -- vaporizing -- in the thin Martian air.

"Phoenix has been an excellent exploration into uncharted territory," said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program.  "Phoenix provided an important step to spur the hope that we can show Mars was once habitable and possibly supported life."

The probe did not settle questions of whether there could be liquid water in the Martian soil  And it had some trouble analyzing soil samples for evidence of organic molecules, the building blocks of life.  The total cost of the project, NASA said, was about $475 million in the seven years since the mission was proposed.

Over at Wired, knowing this day would come, Alexis Madrigal and his cohorts decided to sponsor an epitaph contest -- and they struck a nerve.  We humans seem to like our robots.  More than 900 people sent in entries.  A lot of them are funny, some are touching, and with few exceptions they're very clever.  Almost nobody wrote, "Here lies the Phoenix Mars Lander...."

The winning entry, by readers' vote, came from a South African man named Graham Vosloo: "Veni, vidi, fodi. (I came, I saw, I dug)."  Readers also liked, "So long and thanks for all the ice," and "It is enough for me. But for you, I plead: go farther, still."

The entire list has been posted as a Google spreadsheet; find it HERE.  "I was a better use of your tax dollars than a bank bailout," wrote one wag.  You may also like "DO NOT DISASSEMBLE." 

Most of the entries are in the first person, and all are under 140 characters -- the limit inspired by the Twitter page the lander kept.  (Open secret: the page was actually kept up by Veronica McGregor, the news chief at JPL.)

One person wrote: "If Found, Please Return:
First Star on the Right...
Straight On Until Morning."

November 10, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (19) | TrackBack (0)

Jurassic Park, the Sequel

November 04, 2008 3:52 PM

The whole premise of "Jurassic Park" was preposterous on its face.  Making clones of long-dead animals?  We know better.

But now a Japanese team has taken -- let's say, a step.  They report, in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that they cloned mice from bodies that had been kept frozen for 16 years.  It's not bringing life back from the Jurassic, just the 1990s, but still, it's something most biologists would have thought impossible.

The abstract of the paper is HERE. "As all of the cells were ruptured after thawing, we used a modified cloning method and examined nuclei from several organs for use in nuclear transfer attempts," write Teruhiko Wakayama and his colleagues at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan. "Using brain nuclei as nuclear donors, we established embryonic stem cell lines from the cloned embryos. Healthy cloned mice were then produced from these nuclear transferred embryonic stem cells by serial nuclear transfer."

Edyta Zielinska at The Scientist in Britain went looking for reaction.  "If you had asked me five years ago" if cloning a frozen animal were possible, said Peter Mombaerts of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, "I would have said 'no way.'"

It's only going back 16 years, not 160 million, but the researchers say there might be benefits to their work.  They talk of protecting endangered species, now, before too much time passes.

(Image courtesy National Academy of Sciences-PNAS.)

November 4, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (35) | TrackBack (0)

"Lifelong Republican" EPA Chiefs Back Obama

November 03, 2008 7:08 PM

There is a man-bites-dog quality to this story: the first two administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, both appointed by President Nixon in the 1970s, say they are voting Democratic this year.

"We are lifelong Republicans," write William Ruckelshaus and Russell Train in an opinion piece in the Tampa Tribune. "Yet after much thoughtful deliberation we have decided to support Barack Obama...."  The piece is HERE.

Ruckelshaus ran the EPA when it began in 1970, and returned from 1983 to 1985 to do the job under President Reagan.  (Students of political history may also recall he was one of the men in Mr. Nixon's crosshairs during the "Saturday Night Massacre" of October 20, 1973, when the president, angrily trying to fire the Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, couldn't find someone to do it.  Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Ruckelshaus, newly-arrived as Deputy Attorney General, both refused and left their jobs.)

Train was Ruckelshaus' successor at the EPA in 1973, serving through the administration of Gerald Ford.

Now Ruckelshaus and Train write, "Senator Obama has compellingly stated his intent to re-engage the community of nations in support of policies that will begin the arduous task of realizing a clean and secure future for the planet."

They have some kind words for Sen. McCain: "As a senator, John McCain has demonstrated courage and vision on important environmental issues, most notably in his leadership in addressing climate change, a balanced approach to energy policy, and in support for the Law of the Sea."

Then this: "However in his quest for the White House he has often modified his policies to appeal to the Republican base. While this may be fortunate for his candidacy, it is unfortunate for the American people."

How about EPA chiefs from other Republican administrations?  The most recent to hold the office are still in government.  So let's look back a few years. 

Christine Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey governor who ran the EPA in the first years of the Bush administration, has been campaigning for McCain.

William K. Reilly, who headed the EPA during the term of George H.W. Bush, is still on the board of the non-profit World Wildlife Fund, which has offered environmental advice to both candidates. 

As for Democrats who ran the EPA?  There's only one from the last 20 years, Carol Browner, and she's been advising the Obama camp.

November 3, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

Circuit Breaker

November 03, 2008 1:22 PM

Did you shop very much at Circuit City?  Did you find yourself alone there?

The chain, facing a one-year decline in same-store sales of 13 percent -- even before the market tanked -- has announced it is closing 155 of its stores, cutting its U.S. workforce 17 percent.

The company's list of stores to be closed is HERE.  Going-out-of-business sales start Wednesday.

The company is in enough trouble that its stock has been trading below one dollar a share for the last month -- low enough that the New York Stock Exchange threatened to stop listing it. 

"We deeply regret the impact today's announcement will have on our associates, our guests and the communities where these stores are located," said James A. Marcum, the company's acting president and CEO, in a statement.  "We truly are grateful to each of our associates for their many contributions to the company."

It's a tragedy to hear yet one more announcement of people losing their jobs, and it will hardly be the last this year.  But more than one reporter or business analyst said the chain helped do itself in.  Long before the market decline, it laid off many of its sales people on the grounds that they were too highly paid -- which is another way of saying they were the most experienced.

November 3, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)

Spaced Out

October 22, 2008 1:10 PM

It will be 40 years next summer since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, but there's still a space race on. 

The major players, and their motives, of course, have changed since the Cold-War days: it's now China, Japan, India and other Asian countries trying to show off their technology.  If the Indians can send a spacecraft into lunar orbit, the implication is that they can also sell you a pretty decent laptop. 

Do you care?  Yeah, if your job's on the line.  Which is why I wasn't terribly surprised by an e-mail this morning from the Obama campaign:

"With India’s launch of its first unmanned lunar spacecraft following closely on the heels of China’s first spacewalk, we are reminded just how urgently the United States must revitalize its space program if we are to remain the undisputed leader in space, science, and technology.

"My comprehensive plan to revitalize the space program and close the gap between the Space Shuttle’s retirement and its next-generation replacement includes $2 billion more for NASA -– but more money alone is not enough.  We must not only retain our space workforce so that we don’t let other countries surpass our technical capabilities; we must train new scientists and engineers for the next generation.  My comprehensive space policy focuses on reaching new frontiers through human space exploration, tapping the ingenuity of our commercial space entrepreneurs, fostering a broad research agenda to break new ground on the world’s leading scientific discoveries, and engaging students through educational programs that excite them about space and science." 

In the interest of equal time, you can find the McCain-Palin position HERE.

Where are the candidates really?  Take a look at what Rand Simberg wrote in Popular Mechanics back in April (you can skip the now-dated parts about Sen. Clinton).

With a troubled economy, of course, Obama has not made space a priority; earlier in the year he proposed paying for his education program (see the very last page) by delaying the Constellation Program (the space shuttle's replacement) for five years.  But a good number of people working on Constellation live in electorally-valuable Florida.

(Computer-generated artist's conception of Ares I launch from NASA/MSFC.)

October 22, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

Can You Hear Me Now?

October 17, 2008 6:13 PM

Let me tell you about the day I decided civilization was finished.

I was in a men's room at an airport.  A man came in, yakking loudly on a cell phone.  He did his business, flushed, and left -- and not for a second did he stop talking.

It didn't escape our notice here that it's now 25 years since the first commercial cell phone service began.  We did a World News piece; the webcast version is HERE.

Volumes have been written about how the mobile phone has changed us.  We're all reachable, whether we like it or not.  We can talk to people with remarkable ease, but we're also surrounded by the din of other people having private conversations in public places.  A friend of mine would laugh at the conversations that broke out around us on planes when the flight ended: "Now would you please make three copies and send two to Steve, with a cover note...."  How many calls do we now make because we can, not because we need or want to?

A U.N. report says we're close four billion wireless phones worldwide -- more than half the planet's population.  In the U.S. alone, as of June, there were 262.7 million wireless subscribers -- 84 percent of all Americans. In a year, we use 2.23 trillion minutes of air time. 

And, of course, it's become a touch quaint to refer to cell phones as "phones" -- since it's hard to find one that doesn't include a camera, browser, texting, GPS, ability to download music or video, etc. 

Motorola, whose DynaTAC series was perhaps the first successful "handset" -- though at two-and-a-half pounds it doesn't seem very handy anymore -- has posted its own version of the cell phone's history HERE.  Watch the video from 1984.  It will remind you that time flies.

The CTIA, the industry association (CTIA used to stand for Cellular Telephone Industries Association), lists some changes that have come along since the first commercial cell-phone service in 1983:

• "Plenty of Time to Chat: In the first six months of 2008 (Jan. 1 – June 30) U.S. consumers talked on average a total of 187 billion minutes each month. That is more than 6 billion minutes each day, and amounts to nearly 13 hours (766 minutes) per customer each month.
• "Text is the New Talk: More than 384 billion text messages were reported by carriers this year between Jan. 1 – June 30, versus 295 billion voice calls. That is 22 billion more text messages than for all of 2007. Text messaging is doubling every year.
• "Subscriptions Soaring: The wireless industry saw almost 20 million new subscribers in just the last 12 month period (July 2007 – June 2008). There are 2,869 times more subscribers today than in January 1985." 

And by the way, to transmit all that stuff, the CTIA says that in June there were 220,472 cell towers in America.

(Image of 1983 phone courtesy Motorola.)

October 17, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (24) | TrackBack (0)

Tough Cars for Tough Times

October 15, 2008 3:29 PM

Take a look at the BMW 5 Series sedan.  It's a well-built upscale car -- but that's not the issue for the moment. 

Does the front of the car resemble a face to you?  It does to many people.  What do you think of it?  Please feel free to weigh in below.

Now, take a look at the Toyota Prius.  It's the darling of environmental consciousness -- but that's not the issue for now either.  What do you see when you look at its "face"?

The car companies would be really interested to know your answers because, to put it blandly, there are billions of dollars on the line.  So Karl Grammer, an anthropologist at the University of Vienna, got together with Truls Thorstensen, a design consultant there; they and several colleagues asked 40 people (half men, half women) to rate the "faces" of 38 different cars.

"All subjects marked eyes (headlights), a mouth (air intake/grille), and a nose in more than 50 percent of the cars," writes Grammer on the university website (full text HERE).

The researchers are publishing their results in the December edition of the journal Human Nature, and the abstract is HERE, but the key point is in Grammer's summary: 

"The better the subjects liked a car, the more it bore shape characteristics corresponding to high values of what the authors termed 'power', indicating that both men and women like mature, dominant, masculine, arrogant, angry-looking cars."

Dominant?  Arrogant?  Angry?  It doesn't take an academic journal to tell us that a lot of cars run on testosterone, even if all they do is sit in traffic.

A few years ago I did a story about a charming, eccentric French-born anthropologist-turned-consultant named Clotaire Rapaille, who argued that in a stressful world (the guy on your tail honking at you?), people retreat to the "reptilian instincts" that drive us all. 

We met at a Chrysler dealership.  Pointing out at the highway, Rapaille said, in a lilting French accent, "People feel it's a jungle out there.  It's 'Mad Max.'  It's very dangerous.  And the message they want to give is, 'Don't mess with me.'"

Rapaille advised Chrysler in the development of the PT Cruiser, a car with a 1930s design, made very much on purpose to look like Al Capone's getaway car.  You expected toughs in fedoras to climb out of it with machine guns.  And as for the car's grille, Rapaille said, "It does look as though it has a sly smile, does it not?"

The PT Cruiser has served Chrysler well in otherwise-dismal times.  And in the Vienna experiment, test subjects much preferred the hooded "eyes" of the BMW to the happy little grin of the Prius. 

But when times get really tough, do you have $45,000 (minimum) to spend on the BMW?  Or do you wish you had the hybrid that gets 45 miles a gallon?

(Pictures courtesy BMW and Toyota.)

October 15, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)