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Like Father, Like Son

September 28, 2007 4:09 PM

Owen Garriott belongs to a very exclusive club: one of the first six scientist-astronauts selected by NASA in 1966.  He was an engineering professor at Stanford at the time, and scholars of his type did not readily fit  into the hot-shot pilot culture of the early astronauts on the way to the moon.  But he did fly for 59 days on the Skylab space station in 1973, and then again on a shuttle flight, STS-9, in 1983.

Now, his son Richard, barring surprises, will become the first American to follow his father into orbit.

Richard Garriott's name will be familiar if you're a serious computer gamer.  The Ultima series of  role-playing games began with him.  The brand has passed from his hands, but made him both wealthy and legendary in gaming circles.

Richard is now, among other things, on the board of Space Adventures, the company that brokered the flight of Dennis Tito and other early space "tourists."  He'll be their sixth orbital client.  His flight, on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, is currently set for October 2008.

“I am dedicating my spaceflight to science,” he says in a release on their site.  “It is my goal to devote a significant amount of my time aboard the space station to science, engineering and educational projects. I understand the necessity for conducting research in extreme environments whether it is collecting microorganisms from deep sea hydrothermal vents to carrying out experiments in the continuous micro-gravity of Earth orbit.” He continued, “We need to be adventurous in mind and stimulate our intellects to answer today’s most daunting scientific questions and to invent tomorrow’s technological marvels.”

There is already a well-produced website, richardinspace.com, very much like sites for previous Space Adventures clients.  (Look at this one for Charles Simonyi, the developer of Microsoft Word, who flew last year.)

You can argue about the merits of commercial space trips still being the province of the very rich (and you're welcome to weigh in below), but there does seem to be a moment of passage here.  There have been astronaut offspring who served on the staff of Congressional committees, and I knew one who worked in NASA's public affairs office.  But now we genuinely may have two generations of space flyers in one family.

Keith Cowing, who runs the NASAWatch website, posted an item about this, and received a reader comment:  "actually he will become the SECOND second generation astronaut. Sergey Volkov, who is the son of cosmonaut  Aleksandr Volkov, is scheduled to fly in April 2008 (Soyuz TMA-12). This is half a year before Richard  Garriott's flight."

(NASA photo of Owen Garriott outside Skylab in 1973.)

September 28, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

A 'Cure' for the Earth

September 26, 2007 3:12 PM

Gaia.  When James Lovelock, the Oxford professor, first put forth the notion in the 1960s, it was either ignored or derided as some weird new-age religion.

The Gaia theory is hard to sum up in a brief way, but Lovelock suggested that we think of the whole earth as a living entity, with all its parts--living or not--contributing to its stability. 

"We now see that the air, the ocean and the soil are much more than a mere environment for life; they are a part of life itself," he's written. "Thus the air is to life just as is the fur to a cat or the nest for a bird. Not living but something made by living things to protect against an otherwise hostile world."

Lovelock has gotten increased attention--along with some continued derision--from environmental scientists over the years.  Now, with a brief letter to Nature, he and his colleague Chris Rapley invite more of each.  Rapley is director of the British Antarctic Survey and the Science Museum in London.

"Sir," they write, "We propose a way to stimulate the Earth's capacity to cure itself, as an emergency treatment for the pathology of global warming."

And what might that way be?  They suggest giant tubes--100 to 300 meters long, standing vertically in the world's oceans, to draw up nutrients from the deep and create algae blooms on the surface.  The algae would absorb carbon dioxide, and create compounds that would seed the formation of sunlight-reflecting clouds in the air.

"Such an approach may fail, perhaps on engineering or economic grounds," they write. "And the impact on ocean acidification will need to be taken into account.

"But the stakes are so high that we put forward the general concept of using the Earth system's own energy for amelioration. The removal of 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the air by human endeavour is beyond our current technological capability. If we can't 'heal the planet' directly, we may be able to help the planet heal itself."

The full text of their letter is HERE. And Nature has a news piece HERE. 

There have been a lot of large-scale geoengineering ideas before--dropping iron into the oceans as a nutrient, launching giant sunshades into orbit--but this one seems new.

Attention or derision?  What ought this to bring?

September 26, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

A 'New Day for Energy in America'?

September 24, 2007 6:49 PM

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it's getting the first application in nearly 30 years to build a new nuclear power plant in the U.S.--and the first since the Three Mile Island Accident in 1979.

The application is coming from NRG Energy, Inc., which would add two new reactors to the South Texas Project, a site it already runs with two reactors in Bay City, Tex., southwest of Houston. 

NRG, based in Princeton, N.J., put out a statement late Monday afternoon: "'It is a new day for energy in America. Advanced technology nuclear power plants like STP 3 and 4, generating a vast amount of electricity cleanly, safely and reliably, will make an enormous contribution toward the greater energy security of the United States,' said David Crane, NRG's President and Chief Executive Officer. 'But equally, this announcement heralds a new day for the environment. Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fueled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions--and most importantly in this age of climate change--no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.'"  NRG's full statement is HERE. 

Nuclear energy has been in limbo, generating about 20 percent of the country's power but without any new plants, since TMI.  Its opponents cite not only the risk of accident, but its cost-effectiveness, and what to do with the radioactive waste generated by reactors.  (Take a look at this PAGE from Public Citizen, the activist group, which has already said it will fight the application.)

Supporters of nuclear have been saying that new plants can be built and run safely, and--witness NRG's argument above--a nuclear plant doesn't emit carbon dioxide.

The battle is joined.  Thoughts welcome as always.

(AP Photo above: the Watts Bar nuclear plant in Tennessee.)

September 24, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (28) | TrackBack (0)

'America at Home'

September 21, 2007 5:23 PM

"What if you could invite people all over the United States, at the exact same moment, every day, to record one aspect, one component, one slice, of life at home?" asked Rick Smolan.

Smolan, a photojournalist who’s turned into a producer of big photographic events, has another one going this week.  In the 1980s he conceived “A Day in the Life of America”--a lavishly illustrated book with pictures by a hundred photographers he assigned around the country.  He followed with others, such as “24 Hours in Cyberspace” and “One Digital Day.”

Now, in this post-9/11 era, he’s spent this last week producing “America at Home.”

"I think after 9/11 that Americans turned inwards in a very interesting way,” he said when we talked this morning.  “I think there was a sense of--when animals are scared they run back into their nests.  I think we were all quite frightened, and I think we turn back to the things that give you comfort, which is your families, your children, our parents, your bedroom.

"And I think we all have this instinctive feeling of going home when we're under stress."

“America at Home” repeats the Day-in-the-Life formula--a hundred professional photographers, deployed around the country from Alaska to Florida, chronicling what people do when they get up in the morning, what happens when they sit down to dinner at night, and everything in between, as long as it has to do with home.

“How do you turn your house into a home?  That's the overarching theme of the project,” he said.

When Smolan began such projects, pictures were shot on film, and good pictures were mostly shot by the pros.  But photography, like so many other things in the digital age, has been opened up--240 million Americans have cell phones, most of them with cameras built in.

So Smolan is inviting everyone--anyone with an image they like of home life--to upload their favorites to a website.  Some of them are already on an online map; more will be in the book that results.

"This is everyday, ordinary people telling extraordinary stories about their lives through photography, because photography's pretty easy, and the cameras are getting pretty good as well."

“America at Home” is a commercial venture: in addition to the book, Smolan says they plan a web version and an exhibition.  But beyond that, he says, he hopes to create a chronicle for the future, so that people will know what we looked like, back in 2007, when we came home at the end of the day.

(Photo: Jackie and Robert Harvey say grace before dinner with their five sons.  Image copyright Ben Garvin/America at Home Project.  Used with permission.)

September 21, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Arctic Ice

September 20, 2007 3:41 PM

Even though autumn begins on Sunday, this is the time of year when the Arctic ice cap reaches its minimum, warmed by the heat that builds up in the atmosphere over the summer.  The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that it's reached a record low, passing the mark set in 2005. Click HERE for their map. 

See their summary HERE.  They write: "The long-term average minimum, based on averaging data from 1979 to 2000, is 6.74 million square kilometers (2.60 million square miles) and occurs on September 12. Compared to this average, five-day mean ice extent for September 16, 2007, was lower by 2.61 million square kilometers (one million square miles), an area approximately equal to the size of Alaska and Texas combined, or the size of ten United Kingdoms.

"The minimum for 2007 shatters the previous five-day minimum set on September 20–21, 2005, by 1.19 million square kilometers (460,000 square miles), roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five United Kingdoms."

As you've probably read elsewhere, the famed Northwest Passage, sought by explorers for centuries, is currently open to ships, according the the European Space Agency, which makes its own measurements. 

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Shuttle Update

Florida Today reports this morning that repairs to the shuttle Discovery's landing gear are ahead of schedule, and an  Oct. 23 launch date is still on the table.  More HERE.

September 20, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

YouNews

September 18, 2007 11:44 AM

What if the news of the day came directly to you, without any editors filtering it?  What if you could go online and get websites, or RSS feeds, or whatever, that just gave you the stories most likely to interest you?  What if--

Well, what if I stopped talking about this as a what-if notion?  It already exists, of course, in myriad places.  Think of Digg, or Reddit, or the automated headline-gathering done by Google News.  They don't have editors actively organizing stories in an order that they think will be most important or interesting to you.  Their content is chosen or prioritized in some way by you, the user.

The phenomenon is growing--The New York Times has just announced a self-selecting service, though one of the options on "My Times" is "Journalists' Picks."  The AP has a piece about the use of such so-called "widgets" by newspaper websites; you can read it HERE.

But back to the original question: what happens when online readers pick the stories?  The Project for Excellence in Journalism, founded by former Washington Post reporter Tom Rosenstiel, spent a week over the summer (June 24-29) surfing the major user-news sites, and REPORTS that the diet of stories was was very different from what one would find, say, on our site. 

Whereas the mainstream media did a lot that week on Iraq and immigration, the PEJ report says, users of Del.icio.us and Digg picked a lot of technology and science items--the introduction of the iPhone, for instance--as well as news-you-can-use stories, such as how to avoid blood clots on long plane flights.

"If a new crop of user-news sites--and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites--are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources," says the PEJ report.

The PEJ found people going to blogs, YouTube, WebMd and other sites that may not describe themselves as news sites.  They chose less overseas news than news editors generally do, and they changed topics more often.

Witness Monday night.  While "World News" here at ABC led with health care, Digg.com's top item over the previous 24 hours  was "How tourists, hikers and fisherman can avoid conflicts with Grizzly Bears."  (Take a look--there's a punchline.)

What do you think?  I promise not to tell our editors.

September 18, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

One Less Shuttle Flight This Year

September 17, 2007 7:07 PM

This just in from Gina Sunseri in Houston:

A hydraulic leak in the landing gear of Space Shuttle Discovery threatens to delay the launch of the next flight, STS-120, which had been scheduled for October 23rd.

Sources also tell ABC News external tank issues--the ongoing questions about foam and ice breaking loose during launch--will most likely push the flight after that, STS-122, from December 2007 into January 2008.

STS-120 and STS-122 are two of the 14 flights scheduled to finish and supply the International Space Station before the shuttle quits flying in July of 2010. 

To meet that target, NASA will have to launch six shuttles in 2008, six in 2009, and two in 2010.

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Note added Tuesday morning:

Thanks for your comments.  I've spoken with Gina; she says her sources tell her there's a fair amount of foam on the external tank for STS-122 that needs to be removed and reapplied.  Combine that with the potential squeeze caused by STS-120 issues, and managers may decide not to rush to make a December launch window, which was less than a week long anyhow.  It's a complicated business....

September 17, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Whose Atmosphere is it?

September 13, 2007 12:41 PM

Vermont is not usually a battleground. But it's one of a dozen states that's been in court, arguing that if the federal government isn't going to control greenhouse gas emissions, the states ought to.

The states won in federal district court yesterday, and you can find the decision HERE. There will doubtless be appeals.  You may recall, back in the spring, the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide--from cars, factories, etc.--is a pollutant, affecting people's health or welfare, and the EPA ought to be regulating it under the Clean Air Act.

"This decision should put the nail in the coffin of the failed arguments of the auto industry," says a statement from the Sierra Club, which was party to the lawsuit.  "In this trial they used every tired argument about safety, job losses, lack of technology, and doubts about the science of global warming that they had--the same things they have been saying to the public and to Congress for decades."

A statement from Dave McCurdy, president and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers: "It makes sense that only the federal government can regulate fuel economy.  Automakers support improving fuel economy standards nationally, rather than piecemeal and will continue to work with the Congress, NHTSA and EPA to reduce our oil dependence while increasing fuel economy."  The full text is HERE.

Since the Supreme Court decision, the White House has promised to increase auto fuel efficiency. And the President has promised a climate change summit for this fall.

In the meantime, is it Vermont's job (or California's or someone else's) to regulate its part of the atmosphere?  Thoughts welcome.

September 13, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (23) | TrackBack (0)

End of the World--or Maybe Not

September 12, 2007 3:50 PM

In about five billion years, current thinking goes, the Sun will use up the hydrogen that fuels it and expand into a red giant, 100 times larger in diameter than it is today.  In the process, Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth will be consumed--burned to cinders and then swallowed by the giant, aging star that used to nurture us.

So the clock is ticking.  Only five billion years to go?  I remember being really bummed out when I first heard this as a kid, not understanding that five billion years is a really, really long time.

But maybe there's hope.  In Thursday's edition of NATURE, Roberto R. Silvotti of Italy's Istituto Nazionale de Astrofisica reports, along with 20 colleagues, that he's found a planet, 4,500 light-years away, orbiting a star that went through the same cataclysm--and yet the planet is still there.

The star, known as V 391 Pegasi, was probably quite similar to our sun at one time, and the newly-found planet, though much larger, was almost exactly as far away from it as we are from our sun.

But something happened.  For reasons the researchers say they do not understand, V 391 Pegasi lost much of its mass as a red giant.  A star with less mass exerts less gravity, so its planet drifted into a more distant orbit, about 160 million miles away (we're 93 million miles away from our Sun).  It survived, and the researchers, who were looking at the star for other reasons, stumbled upon it.

What does this mean to us earthlings?  Maybe--hardly certain, but maybe--our planet will have the same luck. 

Reuters spoke to Don Kurtz of the University of Lancashire, who was on the research team.  "The future of the Earth is to die with the sun boiling up the oceans, but the hot rock will survive," he said.

I feel much better now, and I hope you do too. 

(Artist's conception of V 391 Pegasi and its planet by Mark Garlick.  Copyright HELAS.  Used by permission from NATURE.)

September 12, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

NASA Decides: Less Drama on Future Shuttle Missions

September 10, 2007 12:17 PM

Gina Sunseri of our staff has sent this note from Houston:

NASA has decided to add a fifth spacewalk to the next shuttle mission so they can practice repairing a hole in the shuttle's heat shield should they ever encounter a problem like the one on last month's mission. 

Spacewalking astronauts will take a caulk gun (called a T-RAD) out on a spacewalk and see if they can repair damage on orbit.   Discovery will carry up damaged tiles in its payload bay for the astronauts to practice repairing with the thermal caulk.

A T-RAD (short for TPS Repair Ablator Dispenser; TPS is short for Thermal Protection System) was on board Endeavour last month, but it had never been tested.    

The crew that is flying on the next mission will be commanded by the ebullient and highly decorated Desert Storm veteran Commander Pam Melroy, the second woman to command a space shuttle flight.   Discovery is scheduled for launch Tuesday, October 23rd at 11:38am EDT.

(NASA image: STS-118 landing at the Kennedy Space Center on Aug. 21.)

September 10, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

From the Fertile Mind of Arthur C. Clarke

September 07, 2007 2:21 PM

Stanley Kubrick's science-fiction epic "2001: A Space Odyssey" may seem a touch quaint in 2007, but when it came out in 1968 it was hailed as visionary.  It depicted astronauts going on a mission to Jupiter, in search of the first signs of intelligent life beyond the earth.

In the book version, though, Kubrick's co-author, Arthur C. Clarke, had the astronauts going to Saturn--specifically to its moon Japetus, which, as Clarke wrote, is six times brighter on one side than the other.  He imagined a large, white, eye-shaped oval on the bright side, with one of those mysterious black monoliths in the center. 

Well, Japetus is usually given the Greek-derived spelling Iapetus (pronounced "Eye-APP-ah-tuss"), and a few years behind schedule, NASA's Cassini probe should come within about a thousand miles of its surface on Monday morning, U.S. time.  It is only a mite less mysterious than when Clarke wrote about it.  Scientists now think the more intriguing side is the dark one, which may, over the eons, have swept up debris from among Saturn's 46 other known moons.  The bright side may be ice.

NASA has posted more HERE, mostly based on Cassini's one previous flyby of Iapetus, on New Year's Eve 2004, when it only came within 76,000 miles.  There's also more HERE from the Cassini imaging team. 

Iapetus is a tiny world, less than 900 miles in diameter, but it may have some of the tallest mountains in the solar system--three times as high as Mt. Everest.  A cold, dark, hostile place.

Is there a monolith on its bright side?  I'll leave that to the imagination. 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

September 7, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

The Bionic Arm

September 06, 2007 6:15 PM

A side effect of the Iraq war, we've all learned, is that troops who would have died in the past are coming home alive--alive, but sometimes less than whole. 

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been funding work for a program called "Revolutionizing Prosthetics," hoping to create an artificial arm that, for the first time, might come close to being as functional as the human arm. 

There's been a lot of attention given to work at Johns Hopkins and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, where doctors have been working on getting a wearer's nerves to send commands directly to the mechanical hand.  While it's still early, the results have been striking, and widely publicized.

At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, mechanical engineering Prof. Michael Goldfarb has been working on a more basic problem.  Let's say you can make a good prosthetic arm; how do you power it?  Does the wearer have a battery pack?  Do you plug it in overnight to recharge?

Goldfarb's group is experimenting with hydrogen peroxide, a simple compound used for bleach and rocket fuel.  Mix it with a catalyst, and you get steam.  Simple, more powerful than electricity, and non-toxic.  Vanderbilt has posted more HERE, and has produced a video, which you can watch HERE if you have Real Player 9 or newer.

Separately, Dean Kamen, the famed designer of the Segway scooter and the infusion pump used by many people who need regular liquid medication, has been working on an arm, and the VIDEO of a talk he gave at a TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in the spring has just been posted.  Kamen does not give many details in this five minute video, but he does speak compellingly about why he thinks this is work worth doing. 

(Vanderbilt University photo: Prof. Michael Goldfarb with prosthetic arm.)

September 6, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

The Fossett Search

September 05, 2007 5:20 PM

J. Stephen Fossett made a name for himself as a risk-taker.  He became wealthy as an options trader in Chicago, and he became famous for the many records he broke.

As far as we know, though, Monday's flight was supposed to be routine. 

There's a bit more at his own website, http://www.stevefossett.com, but it's also intriguing to find old biographies of him--such as the one HERE--from his past exploits. 

This BLOG about the search has been started in the last two days.

Today there were ten aircraft looking for him.  Does that make for special treatment?  The Nevada Wing of the Civil Air Patrol says no, that's what they do when a plane goes missing. "CAP is the official Auxiliary of the United States Air Force and functions primarily as the Search and Rescue arm of the Air Force locating commercial, military and private downed aircraft under the Wings jurisdiction."

Maj. Cynthia Ryan of the CAP: "If anyone has to be lost out there, this guy has the skills to survive."

September 5, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)