Beyond: Our Future in Space (9 page)

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Revolution Is Coming

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Space Doldrums

NASA has been in the doldrums.

The doldrums are a place, not a state of mind. In the eighteenth century, sailors knew the doldrums as a region near the equator where the prevailing winds might die for days or weeks, leaving sailing ships stranded on a glassy sea. NASA has also been becalmed, and its personnel and its supporters have experienced the accompanying feelings of listlessness and stagnation.
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As our story moves from the past to the present, we first describe how far our aspirations have fallen in forty years—from the Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 to an inability to get an astronaut into low Earth orbit. We look at the difficulty of space travel, rooted in the implacable truth of the rocket equation. Then we see a glimmer of hope in the nascent space tourism industry. Last, we draw a parallel between the evolution of information technology and space technology, leading to optimism that resurgence is around the corner.

NASA’s lowest point was arguably the 2013 shutdown of the US Government, when 97 percent of its employees were furloughed, the highest percentage of the twenty-four federal agencies. Only a skeleton staff remained to ensure the safety of the crew on the International Space Station. Other activities halted immediately—no research was performed, no missions were planned, no e-mails were answered. It was a stark reminder that the exalted goal of space travel could easily be grounded by terrestrial politics.

The agency has also been struggling with decrepit infrastructure. In 2013, the Office of the Inspector General found that 80 percent of NASA’s facilities were more than forty years old and woefully out of date, and carrying maintenance costs of $25 million a year. What’s needed is far more than a coat of paint; the backlog of deferred maintenance totals $2.2 billion.
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NASA’s government funding has been shrinking for decades (
Figure 14
). For perspective, the bank bailout in 2008 cost more than has been spent on NASA since it was started in 1959. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

Nothing epitomizes the malaise better than the Space Shuttle. By the time of the last flight in 2011, it represented forty-year-old technology. The launch rate ended up ten times lower than originally planned and the cost per launch twenty times higher. Two of the five orbiters suffered a catastrophic fate, with the loss of all on board. Apart from emblematic flights to launch and service the Hubble Space Telescope, most of the time the Shuttle served as an expensive limo to launch satellites and ferry construction materials to another high-priced and outmoded facility: the International Space Station. The Challenger and Columbia disasters are etched in the national psyche, and they have contributed to a widespread ambivalence about America’s space program.
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Since 2011, the United States has been unable to get astronauts into orbit without help from the Russians.

In addition to the fairly frosty relations between the two countries, the Russians have their own problems.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian space program suffered from diminished budgets and a lack of innovation.
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In 1965, the Soviets invented the Proton rocket to launch ICBMs, and they still use variations of the original design. In recent years, the Russians have suffered seven mission failures. In 2010, three satellites crashed into the Pacific Ocean. In 2011, a resupply mission to the International Space Station exploded over Siberia in a spectacular fireball, forcing the six waiting astronauts to dig deep into their reserves of food and water. In 2013, another three satellites were lost in an explosion that rained hundreds of tons of toxic debris on the launch site. Yuri Karash, a member of the Russian Space Academy, compared Russian rocket development to attempting to upgrade a steam engine: “You equip it with a computer. . . . You equip it with air conditioning. You put a locomotive driver with a university degree in the cabin, and it will still be the same steam locomotive.”
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The Russian Government audit agency noted that money intended for the space program had simply been stolen.

At the Baikonur Cosmodrome, on the steppes of western Kazakhstan, the decay is obvious. Baikonur is where Sputnik was launched, and where Yuri Gagarin and Laika made history. But today, nomadic herders occupy the many vacant buildings and the town struggles with heroin smuggling and radical jihadists. American, European, and Japanese astronauts arrive at the launch site via a rutted road where camels have the right of way. But they keep on arriving because it’s their only way up.

Meanwhile, NASA’s generally successful program to send out robotic probes to explore the Solar System is also under stress. The budget for planetary science is falling. Complex interplanetary probes cost a couple of billion dollars each and the budget only has enough slack to fund a couple of missions per decade.
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A more fundamental problem involves plutonium. Since the 1970s, almost everything we’ve learned about the outer planets and their moons has relied on power from heat released by the radioactive isotope plutonium-238. Solar power is too feeble and chemical batteries are too inefficient, so this by-product of nuclear reactors (which cannot be used to make a bomb) is the go-to super-fuel. But poor planning and false promises from Russia have left NASA with barely enough plutonium to power missions for the next few years. The nuclear crisis is so bad that affected researchers call it “The Problem.”

Communication is another mundane but basic problem. When you watch a silly cat video on YouTube, you give little thought to how the data got to your computer, apart from being dimly aware that the video is really a stream of ones and zeros. In fact, videos and e-mails and data aren’t transmitted whole. They’re disassembled into packets of data, distributed worldwide via optical fiber and radio waves over a network of networks, and reassembled at your computer or handheld device—rather like digital sausages. It works well for Earth-bound humans, so why would it be hard for an astronaut to watch cat videos on the Moon or Mars?

First, it takes light or radio waves anywhere from four to twenty-one minutes to reach Mars from Earth, depending on where the two planets are in their orbits. NASA engineers don’t control the Mars rovers like a video game enthusiast would, flicking a joystick as the rover careens across sand dunes. The rovers are controlled painstakingly by commands that are separated by a half hour or more to allow for the round-trip signal time. Second, planets rotate and shadow the orbiters, so there are dead times when no communication is possible. Third, these interruptions and delays cause technical problems because the Internet paths are in constant flux; if a packet of data sits around too long before its partners arrive, it’s discarded. At the moment, the Internet can’t be extended into the Solar System. Luckily, the “Father of the Internet” is on the job. Vinton Cerf, designer of the original protocols for the Internet in 1973, is working with NASA on the next-generation system that will operate seamlessly across billions of miles.
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However, when one is becalmed in the doldrums, the real problem isn’t money or communication. A more fundamental problem is propulsion.

Principles of Flight

Why is space travel so difficult? It’s just a matter of accelerating an object to 17,650 mph, as Newton conjectured. But that’s as reductive as saying the
Mona Lisa
is just a picture of a smiling woman. A general description gives no sense of the complexity and subtlety of the work.

On the dead calm sea, a breeze springs up, ruffling the water and soothing your fevered brow. As humans have known for millennia, if you can catch this breeze in cloth or canvas, it will propel you forward. Large ships from the Romans through the Vikings used square sails to catch the wind, augmented by men pulling oars. But sailors plying the Mediterranean more than a thousand years ago discovered through experimentation that triangular sails allowed a boat to sail almost into the wind, and this capability was enhanced with multiple sails. Whereas a square-rigger can’t move downwind faster than the speed of the wind that’s pushing it, a modern yacht can sail several times the wind speed, even when it’s almost pointing into the wind.

The explanation was provided in 1738 by the Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli, a member of an illustrious family of mathematicians and scientists. The physical principle states that in any fluid flow, an increase in the speed of the fluid is accompanied by a decrease in pressure. Wind forced to travel over the curved surface of a sail must travel faster than wind moving behind the sail; the decrease in pressure on the front face of the sail creates a force that drives the boat forward.

Now imagine that the sail is horizontal. If it can be propelled through the air, it will experience that same force in an upward direction. The principles of flight are based on Newtonian physics, refined over several hundred years.

A flying object such as a bird, a plane, or a rocket is engaged in a constant tug of war among opposing forces. The downward force is the inescapable foe: gravity. The upward force is lift, provided by air flowing over a wing. The forward force is thrust, provided by muscles for birds and engines for planes. It’s opposed by drag, the resistance from the air, which can be minimized by careful aerodynamic design.

Human flight began with balloons. With a balloon, thrust comes from the whims of the wind and lift comes from the buoyancy of a gas less dense than air. The Chinese developed hot-air balloons for military signaling in the third century, at the same time that they were developing “fire arrows.” In 1783, Jean-François de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes became the first humans to fly, traveling five miles across the French countryside in a balloon designed by the Montgolfier brothers. They had to petition King Louis XVI for the honor, since he had originally decreed that condemned criminals would be the first test pilots. Balloons reach their limit at the height where even the lightest gas, helium, can’t provide buoyancy in the thin air. Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner got close to this limit in 2012 when he ascended to 24 miles in a balloon that was three times the height of a commercial jet. He took the quick route down, leaping from the balloon in a pressurized suit. In his four-minute-long free fall, he broke the sound barrier and reached a speed of 844 mph.
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Powered flight began modestly in 1903 when Orville Wright traveled 120 feet just a few feet off the ground at slower than running speed. The Wright brothers observed birds and conducted many experiments on wing shape and profile. A flat wing can provide lift, but modern airfoil design has led to a curved upper surface, echoing birds and boats. Their plane was built using spruce wood, a bicycle chain to drive the twin handmade propellers, and a custom-built engine, since no existing automobile engine was suitable. The brothers tossed a coin to decide who would make the historic first flight.

Throughout the twentieth century, airplanes traveled faster and higher. Thrust came first from variations on the automobile’s internal combustion engine, which was used to drive a propeller. Aircraft like this reached altitudes of 10 miles and speeds of 450 mph by midcentury, but they began to be supplanted by jets. The jet engine was the brainchild of RAF Officer Frank Whittle, who overcame significant physical limitations to become a pilot. His innovation was an engine that took in air, compressed it in a turbine, combusted the air–fuel mixture, and ejected the burning gas at high speed through a nozzle. This type of engine is most efficient at high speed and high altitude. Jets pushed altitude and speed records to the dizzying heights of 35 miles and 2,190 mph, or more than three times the speed of sound.
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The quest for space brings us back to the uneasy relationship between civilian efforts motivated by exploration and the shadowy world of the military. For example, the top speeds of military aircraft such as the SR-71 “Blackbird” are classified. The US Air Force has built a series of aircraft whose existence was not acknowledged by the government, military personnel, or defense contractors. Examples of these “black projects” include the Mach 3 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk stealth aircraft, and the B-2 bomber. All of these are air-breathing jet aircraft, incapable of reaching space.