A Stagnant Industry Ripe for Disruptive Change

Recently, Elon Musk of SpaceX gave some insight into his business philosophy. He noted that many people considered the space industry to be moribund. The United States has been using essentially the same rocket technology for decades. This past week NASA sent its Curiosity rover to Mars on an Atlas V rocket. The Atlas V and the Delta IV are the most capable launchers we have and they are both almost old enough to collect Social Security benefits. I can vividly remember walking through the Atlas factory in the 1960s in San Diego, which was the building next to the one that housed my cubicle. There was a row of gleaming metal rockets in varying degrees of completion.

Sure, the Atlas V of today is an improved version of the one that we were building in the 1960s, but it is the result of a series of incremental improvements, nothing radically different. All the traditional space companies are doing essentially the same thing they have done since Yuri Gagarin woke up the USA by flying over our airspace without asking for clearance. They are depending on cost plus fixed fee contracts from the US government. For decades there has been no incentive to make radical improvements in the way things are done or to cut costs. After all, the government would pay whatever was charged, and cost overruns had come to be expected as normal.

In a word, the space industry had become stagnant. Musk cited such an industry as one ripe for disruptive change. He founded SpaceX and set about designing rockets from scratch, with no preconceived notions and no ties to legacy launchers which had started life as nuclear bomb-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.

SpaceX has become a powerful disruptive force in the launch business, despite efforts by the old guard and their allies in government to keep on doing business as usual. SpaceX is severely undercutting the competition in launch costs, and is working aggressively on cutting costs even more, by developing fully reusable boosters.

SpaceX is only one of a number of new companies, headed by visionary leaders, which are finding new ways to reach and operate in space. This so-called NewSpace movement is causing a major disruption in the way the space business is done, and it is about time. Forty three years ago, NASA sent Apollo 8 to the Moon. Six of the subsequent Apollo missions landed on the Moon, the last one returning thirty nine years ago. Since then, no American has gone beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). It’s about time to break out of the doldrums and start reaching high again. Private companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Bigelow Aerospace are the catalysts to an industry that will get us out there. The Federal bureaucracy and Congress would serve us best by getting out of their way, rather than handing down mandates of how things should be done.

Let the disruption happen. If that means laying off engineers who have obsolete skills, so be it. It’s good to move out of your comfort zone anyway. Learn something new and then start to make a real contribution.

View from the South

I’m back from South Africa, where I visited the only operating radio astronomy observatory in the Southern Hemisphere. Photos at http://wp.me/1xYFi

The Road to Africa

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour made a series of “Road” pictures to exotic locales, such as The Road to Bali, The Road to Zanzibar, and The Road to Singapore. An unlikely set of circumstances would put them on the road and they would end up in the exotic place mentioned in the title of the film.

Two days ago, I returned home after a month in a place I never thought I would ever visit. It’s indeed an exotic locale. You might be wondering what road could have possibly taken me there. Would it surprise you to discover that right now you may also be on the road to an exotic place yourself? You always have the option of stepping off the road, and staying where you are, but by seizing opportunities when they’re presented to you, you could follow the road to a surprising destination.

As a pre-teen, I didn’t realize that I was on the road to anywhere in particular, but I was. I received a short wave radio for Christmas one year and used it to listen to radio stations from different places around the world. At night I could pick up WLS from faraway Chicago, Deutsche Wellen from Germany, and even Radio Moscow from the other side of the world. My body was stuck in New Jersey, but my mind was on the road to exotic places.

A little later I became a ham radio operator and communicated with fellow hams in countries around the world. I built amplifiers, radio transmitters, and receivers from the odd assortment of components that I found around the house. My father was an electrical engineer, so there was always an ample supply of resistors, capacitors, and vacuum tubes for me to experiment with.

I went on to become an electrical engineer myself, which was another step along the road.

The road hasn’t always been straight. After becoming a digital design engineer, I moved to software developer, then to technology manager, sales manager, and marketing manager. Along the way I became an author and a college instructor.

Eighteen years ago I joined the Oregon City Toastmasters Club and became a Toastmaster. The steps from newbie Toastmaster to Distinguished Toastmaster took me further along the road. At that point I had no idea where the road might be leading, but had faith that it was going in a good direction.

My Toastmaster training gave me the confidence to believe that I could be an effective speaker to just about any audience on just about any topic. When I discovered that I could go on cruises to exotic places absolutely free, just for giving talks on the ship, I applied to do just that. Over the past five years, I’ve visited 25 countries on cruise ships, most of them more than once. However, none of those visits were to countries on the most exotic continent of all, Africa.

Africa, considered dangerous and politically unstable, is not on the itinerary of many cruise ships. I figured it would undoubtably be the last continent that I would ever visit, if I ever visited it at all. However, that was before the cruise I lectured on this past summer. I lectured on astronomy on two legs of an around the world cruise, starting in London and ending in Los Angeles.

On that cruise, I delivered 17 lectures, almost the equivalent of a full quarter course in astronomy. In one of those lectures I described the transit method for detecting planets orbiting other stars. That lecture turned out to be a key step along the road, because after the lecture, a man in the audience, Bill Young, came up and told me that what I had described reminded him of how his business worked.

In the transit method, the light from a distant star is blocked slightly by a planet passing between the star and the observer. Bill’s business was to detect small amounts of metal on the body of a human being. A human body has a characteristic signature when it passes through a magnetic field. This signature is altered slightly if the person is carrying metal. Thus metal on a person can be detected in a similar way to the way astronomers detect a planet orbiting a distant star.

I was fascinated and expressed a strong interest in Bill’s business. He was from South Africa, where there are a lot of gold mines, and where people sneaking small quantities of gold out of the mines are a real problem. His business is to deter such thefts by making it impossible for a person to get out with gold, without being detected.

Bill made me an offer. He invited me to come to South Africa for a month to learn about his business and to learn if it was something I wanted to do. I had several things going for me, thanks to the strange, twisted road that I had been following.

* I was located in America, a market that Bill was trying to break into, and I understood American business.

* I was an electrical engineer, and Bill’s product was electrical.

* I had sales and marketing experience, and sales and marketing were the two areas where Bill needed the most help.

* I was a persuasive speaker.

* I had the ability to learn a new topic quickly.

* I knew how to teach others what I had learned.

I went to South Africa for a month, and learned a lot about gold mining and gold theft. I learned about metal detection and access control. I learned that Bill’s company, Saflec, builds the most sensitive metal detector on the market, and that there was a huge opportunity for it in the Americas.

I left Africa with Saflec’s support in starting up my own company to market Saflec’s metal detectors and access control systems in North, Central, and South America. Bill will join me in my booth at the annual mining engineering show in Seattle in February, and I’ll be presenting a paper on our metal detection technology at the show. I expect my new company, Goldfinger Global, LLC to be successful and I expect to have a lot of fun along with a lot of hard work in making it successful. I also expect that I’ll be hiring some people along the way, and thus helping in a small way with America’s unemployment problem.

Who would’ve thought that a short wave radio received as a Christmas present would have set me on the road to Africa, and after Africa, back to the Americas? I certainly would never have imagined it. What about your road? There’s no telling where the road will take you, if you are bold enough to keep walking along it.

Journey to a Near Earth Object (NEO)

Over 6,000 NEOs (asteroids and comets whose path crosses that of Earth) have been found so far, and it is estimated that 95% of those out there have yet to be found. Several of the 6,000 are reachable with current hardware, while it is certain that some that will be even easier to get to will be discovered soon. The best current candidate is 1999 AO10. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines!

The K-Prize

People love to win prizes. At carnivals, accurate aim in the shooting gallery could win you a kewpie doll, and lots of people take a shot at it. The most famous prize in recent years was the Ansari X Prize, offered by the X Prize Foundation, which was a $10 million prize awarded to the first team to launch a ship into space twice within a two week period.

Space Ship One, now hanging in the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, next to the Wright Flyer, won the prize. Designed and built by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites and funded by Paul Allen, Space Ship One actually cost more than the $10 million prize that it won. However, it proved out a novel technology that has since gone into Space Ship Two, a fleet of five spacecraft that will ferry passengers to the edge of space for $200,000 per passenger.

Going for the prize turned out to be a good investment for the prize winners. The $10 million prize was just enough incentive to encourage a race that accelerated development in spacecraft technology. Other competitors for the Ansari X Prize developed new technology also, and are solid competitors in the new, emerging commercial space business.

Now the X Prize Foundation has a whole host of new X prizes for the solutions of a wide variety of technical challenges. A multi-million dollar prize has already been awarded to a team that built a vehicle which negotiated a tough desert course, driven by a computer. The Lunar X Prize will be awarded to the first team to land a rover on the Moon, drive around there, and send video back to Earth. Another X prize will be awarded for developing a Star Trek style tricorder for medical diagnosis.

Offering prizes for accomplishments is a proven method of challenging people to rise above the ordinary and do something extraordinary. This brings us to the K Prize. The K stands for Kickstarter, which can be found at www.kickstarter.com. Just as the Ansari X Prize provided a kickstart to the commercial space business, the Kickstarter Web site provides funding for creative projects of all kinds. The basic idea is simple, but the way it takes advantage of the allure of prizes is ingenious.

Suppose you want to create an ambitious creative project. Perhaps you are a musician who wants to produce a CD of your original songs. Maybe you are a composer who would like to write a symphony, but you need to eat and pay rent while you are doing it. Or possibly you might be a motion picture director who wants to produce a feature film.

Here’s what you do:

Decide how much money you need to bring your project to completion.

Set up a kickstarter project for that amount of money.

For a fee, kickstarter.com will allow you to post information about your project along with incentives for people to pledge to donate cash. Larger donations qualify for larger incentives.

Whatever amount you specify, it must be raised within 60 days. If pledges exceed your goal, you get the money, less kickstarter’s fee. If pledges do not reach the goal, you get nothing, and your potential donors are not charged.

This is a win-win-win situation.

Kickstarter gets to collect a fee for every successful project.

Creative people get funding for their projects.

Donors get the warm feeling of helping a struggling artist and at the same time helping to bring about the creation of a work of art.

My son Rob currently has a Kickstarter project that is trying to raise $10,000 to complete the feature film he started working on seven years ago. He is 88% of the way to reaching the goal, with 6 days left.

Go to www.kickstarter.com and in the search box type: The Mad Scientist. This will bring up a description of the project, including the film trailer. You could become a co-producer of a major motion picture, with a small pledge. You might even want to qualify for one of those nifty incentive prizes. Prizes are great.

64% of the way Home, with 25 Days to Go

The creative project funding site kickstarter.com is currently hosting a funding campaign for the feature film The Mad Scientist, the second feature film from Portland, Oregon-based Taylor Twin Pictures. Shot with a Canon EOS D7 DSLR, The Mad Scientist is a science fiction time travel story set in the future. Back this project for a film credit as well as a host of other film-related goodies.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1008341264/the-mad-scientist-a-feature-film

Become a Movie Producer. Encourage Talented Young Artists

Help to fight evil and save the world as we know it, and become a feature film producer in the process. The Mad Scientist, a feature film, needs one final push in funding. You could help. Kickstarter makes it easy at http://wp.me/p5WHG-5q.

Christmas Traditions

When I was growing up, my parents established some Christmas traditions. Like many American families, we bought a Christmas tree every year, decorated it with colored glass balls, tinsel, and multi-colored lights, and we exchanged gifts. Santa Claus was a big part of it, although I couldn’t figure out how he got all those presents into the house, since we didn’t have a chimney. Actually, we did have a chimney, but it was a metal pipe that ended up in the furnace in the basement, not in a fireplace in the living room. My mother sent Christmas cards to my parents’ friends. By and large they were not people that I knew, aside from my grandparents, aunts and uncles.

We had another Christmas tradition, that didn’t quite match up with the Christmas tree, presents, and Santa Claus thing. That was the tradition at our church. There we learned about the birth of the baby Jesus in Bethlehem with shepherds, angels, and wise men. The choir sang Christmas music and the sanctuary was decorated with wreaths and more than the usual supply of candles. We went caroling, especially visiting the homes of congregation members who were too ill to go to church. That was rewarding, although it was also a challenge to sing while we were freezing, out in front of somebody’s house.

After I moved out, went to college, and married, my wife Joyce and I got to decide on what our own Christmas traditions would be. We didn’t do anything weird. We bought a Christmas tree every year. We decorated it with colored glass balls and multi-colored lights. We passed on the tinsel, because is was such a drag to remove from the tree after Christmas was over. We exchanged presents. Santa Claus continued to come, to the amazement and delight of our kids. We even sent Christmas cards to our friends, and included a photocopied letter in which we told our far flung friends what we had done in the past year.

Much like the church I grew up in, the various churches we attended over the years commemorated Christmas in much the same way that I was accustomed to. There was much talk about the baby Jesus. The choir sang Christmas music, and the sanctuary had accents of wreaths or maybe even a manger scene. It was inspiring to be in the choir during Christmas season. We would sing Christmas oratorios or even the Christmas part of Handel’s Messiah. I’m confident that the choir got more inspiration out of those services than the rest of the congregation did.

After all these years of celebrating traditional Christmases, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important tradition is getting together with family and close friends and having an enjoyable time together. Yes, we still have the Christmas tree, with the colored glass balls and multi-colored lights. More importantly, we have a special meal with all the family that can join us. We even send out the annual Taylor Family Christmas letter. Well, we try to anyway. The first time we failed to get it out by Christmas, it became the New Years Day letter. The next year, procrastination caused the New Years Day letter to become the St. Valentine’s Day letter, and the year after that, the St. Patrick’s Day letter. One year it even became the St. Swithun’s Day letter. St. Swithun’s Day is July 15^th. Lately we have just gone to calling it the Taylor Family Holiday Letter. Whichever holiday is closest serves the purpose.

There’s still a chance that this year I might even get that Holiday Letter out by Christmas. That would surely shock our friends so badly that they might have heart attacks. I guess I don’t want that to happen. Maybe I should just put it on a back burner for a while, and get to it after all the hustle and bustle of the Christmas holiday is over. It will lower my stress level, and my friends will no doubt thank me for my concern for their cardiovascular health.

 

Book Review: Deep Space Flight and Communications, Exploiting the Sun as a Gravitational Lens

Reviewed by: Allen G. Taylor Title: Deep Space Flight and Communications,   Exploiting the Sun as a Gravitational Lens Author: Claudio Maccone Format: Hardbound Pages: 401 pages Publisher: Springer-Praxis Books Date: 2009 Retail Price: $139.00 ISBN: 978-3-540-72942-6 As an author, I’m interested in attracting the widest readership possible for my books. That is why I pay attention when I hear or read about any factor that might reduce my readership. One thing I heard, is that for every equation you put into a book, you will lose half your readers. I don’t know if that is true, but if it is true, I am probably the only person on Earth who has so far read Claudio Maccone’s Deep Space Flight and Communications, Exploiting the Sun as a Gravitational Lens. The book contains literally hundreds of equations, not to mention inequalities.  If people interested in forming a space-faring civilization avoid this book because of the equations, they are making a major mistake. This is a big idea book, and it backs up the big ideas with solid analysis, which necessarily includes math. Try these for ideas: * Building a telescope that can resolve fine detail at the galactic center * Building a telescope that can detect SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) signals buried a thousand times deeper in cosmic noise than what current instruments can extract * Building a fuel-free spacecraft that can fly to other stars at relativistic velocities * Building a two-way light speed communication channel with human starfarers (or aliens) in interstellar space * Do all of the above within 20 to 50 years This sounds like science fiction, right? Our boldest planners are talking about maybe putting humans on Mars sometime in the 2030’s. Actually, the potential accomplishments Maccone describes are not so far fetched. They are solidly based on the General Theory of Relativity that Albert Einstein described almost 100 years ago. In 1915, Einstein proposed that matter distorts the space and time around it creating a curved spacetime. Thus, there is no such thing as a “force” of gravity. What we perceive as gravity is merely the bending of spacetime by massive objects. In 1919, English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein’s prediction by observing an eclipse of the sun. He noted that a star located near the eclipsed sun did not appear to be located where it was known to be. The light from the star had been bent by its passage near the sun. This idea of massive objects bending light was later described by Einstein and others as gravitational lensing. One of the consequences of gravitational lensing is that light coming in from distant stars that is bent by the sun’s gravity will come to a focus on the far side of the sun from the source of the light. A telescope placed at that focus will see a much brighter image than would be possible without gravitational lensing. This explains how we could get high resolution views of the galactic center, where without a doubt, a lot is going on. What about SETI? We could aim a gravitational lens telescope at a likely star system where we knew there was a potentially habitable planet, and listen for the aliens’ equivalent of I Love Lucy, spreading across the cosmos in all directions. We could pick up signals a thousand times weaker than what current SETI telecopes can manage. Rather than merely receiving greatly amplified light or microwaves, we can reverse the process and send greatly amplifed light or microwaves to a focal point in space. We can use this idea to send a spacecraft to a nearby star at relativistic speeds. On a straight line between the Sun and a target star, Proxima Centauri for example, place the spacecraft at the initial focus of the Solar lens. Back in the other direction, behind the Sun, place a power station that projects a powerful collimated beam at the Sun in such a way that the beam converges on our beam-powered spacecraft. The spacecraft will move out at a constant acceleration as long as the beam stays focused on it. This can be arranged by moving the power station in just the right way to keep the focus always located where the ship will be. This can continue right up to the ship achieving a significant fraction of the speed of light. To decelerate and come to rest at the target solar system, a mechanism such as Robert Forward proposed for his StarWisp vehicle could be employed. Once you have a base in a distant star system, you can use the lenses of both stars to communicate back and forth at light speed. The lensing would dramatically reduce the amount of power needed to get a message across the light years. Although not an easy book to read, Deep Space Flight and Communications is a blueprint for escaping the solar system and moving out into the cosmos beyond. It is the only system I know of that has the possibility of reaching other stars within a human lifetime, using current and near future technology. DARPA and NASA are conducting an evaluation of interstellar flight called the 100 Year Starship. They envision figuring out how to launch a starship 100 years from now. With the ideas that Claudio Maccone expounds in this book, we could be sending that starship out a whole lot sooner.   © 2010 Allen G. Taylor  This review first appeared on the Web site of the National Space Society

Ground Truth

Last week, I mentioned on my Facebook page that I had signed up to test drive a 100% electric Nissan Leaf this past weekend. The Leaf is not a hybrid like the Toyota Prius. It has no gasoline engine, no tailpipe, and no CO₂.

Nissan is touring key cities with a fleet of Leafs in the month prior to their national rollout in the USA. I expected that my friends would find this interesting, and that the more ecologically minded among them might even think better of me for considering switching to a car that ran on electricity rather than gasoline and thus produced zero noxious emissions.

I did get some positive responses, but I also received a negative response that surprised me. One of my friends, who has always been a firebrand crusader for justice and righteousness, was very much against a car that ran on electricity rather than on gasoline. What a surprise. For heaven’s sake why?

Here’s her chain of reasoning:

Electric cars run on rechargeable batteries.

She had heard that rechargeable batteries contain rare earth elements.

She had heard that most of the world’s rare earth elements come from China.

She had heard that people in China work at dirty jobs in deplorable conditions.

Therefore everyone should boycott electric cars because they force those poor Chinese workers to have these terrible jobs.

There are a few facts that were not included in her analysis.

First of all, the kinds of rechargeable batteries that use rare earth elements are NiMH (nickel-metal-hydride) batteries, and the Nissan Leaf uses lithium-ion batteries. China is not a major exporter of lithium. So the Nissan Leaf is not encouraging the exploitation of defenseless Chinese lanthanum miners.

Second, a lot of things that she probably uses every day do use rare earth elements, including plasma TVs, mobile phones, disk drives, and the catalytic converter on the gasoline-powered car that she does drive.

In the Nissan Leaf, those lithium ion batteries drive a powerful electric motor, and powerful electric motors contain permanent magnets, which do make use of some rare earth elements, but so do all powerful electric motors, or any other device that uses strong magnets.

Another thing that my friend probably didn’t consider is that those Chinese lanthanum, erbium, dysprosium, and gadolinium miners are probably grateful to have the jobs that they have. If the world stopped buying rare earth metals, those poor folks would probably spiral into poverty.

I don’t know for sure whether my friend has ever been to China to witness working conditions there. I suspect she hasn’t and has formed her opinions by what she has read. I, on the other hand, have been to China a number of times and have visited factories. The working conditions seemed fine to me, and the facilities in many cases were more modern than comparable factories in the USA. The Chinese are a hard-working people, who in many cases put American productivity to shame. I have not met any Chinese people who felt that they were economically oppressed. They are working hard to better themselves.

The Nissan Leaf is a world product. It is manufactured in plants in Japan, Britain, and Tennessee. The lithium in its lithium ion batteries is mined in Chile, and turned into batteries in Tennessee. No significant part of it comes from China, so those poor oppressed gadolinium miners in China are not working any overtime to keep Leafs running. They are not getting any work at all from those Leafs.

So what’s the lesson here? One is that it is probably not a good idea to form a strong opinion about something based on a headline or article you read in the popular press. Another is that things are rarely as simple as what you might conclude from hearing a sound bite, or from listening to someone who has an agenda. There is no substitute for ground truth. Find out what the reality is for yourself, even if you have to visit China to do it.