Just Rock Away for Free

The year 2008 has turned out to be a great year for NASA — one of the best in its 40-plus year history. And the past couple of weeks have been especially impressive. Let’s take a look at what NASA has accomplished.

One of the most amazing feats was the successful touchdown of the Mars Phoenix Lander near the north pole of Mars. This is the first soft landing on Mars in 30 years. When the spacecraft turned on its cameras and gave us our first look, the setting appeared desolate. But the mission is focused less on what we see, and more on what’s beneath the surface.

NASA scientists hope to find a giant block of ice at the north pole. If there is ice on Mars and it is close to the surface, it might make a Mars mission easier. The ice could provide fuel, drinking water, irrigation and maybe a raw ingredient for construction. And, obviously, if there was once lots of water on Mars, and if some of it remains, there is hope that some type of life might have appeared on Mars in the distant past.

So how will the lander figure out whether there is ice on Mars? It has three instruments that can look at the soil in incredible detail. The first instrument is the TEGA, or the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer. TEGA starts with a small sample of soil that the lander’s robotic arm digs from the surface. TEGA slowly heats the sample, looking at the amount of energy it takes during the heating process. The sample’s temperature eventually rises as high as 1,800 degrees. Meanwhile, different gases are boiling off the sample, and they get analyzed by a tool called a mass spectrometer. Think of a mass spectrometer as a sensitive nose that can detect individual chemicals in incredibly dilute quantities and report back to Earth.

There is also a microscope and a wet lab. The microscope lets scientists on earth look at soil grains down to the atomic level. The wet lab lets scientists measure the acidity and conductivity of the soil, and also check for different kinds of common soil chemicals. After running all these tests, scientists will have a detailed analysis of Martian soil, and will know how much ice it contains.

While the Phoenix lander has been getting a huge amount of press, another mission lifted off recently with much less fanfare. It is called GLAST, or the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope. It’s an orbiting telescope in the same way that the Hubble Space Telescope is an orbiting telescope. But instead of looking at light like the Hubble does, GLAST looks at gamma rays.

The interesting thing about gamma rays is their source. Gamma rays come from some of the most energetic events in the universe. For example, when a star explodes in a supernova, it usually produces gamma rays. When black holes swallow stars, the same thing can happen. GLAST will let scientists better understand what is going on, and why.

NASA has also been adding to the International Space Station, and the June shuttle flight played an important role. The STS-124 mission took up the biggest piece of the space station so far — a compartment as large as a Greyhound bus. It’s part of the Japanese science lab, and it will allow scientists to perform a wide range of experiments in areas ranging from biology to materials science.

One of the interesting things about the Japanese lab is that it has both the huge pressurized section for humans, as well as a “terrace” that is out in the open vacuum, completely exposed to the space environment. A robot arm and an airlock will let scientists manipulate the experiments outside.

The space station now weighs more than 600,000 pounds and has an internal volume of 11,000 cubic feet. That makes it about as big as a 1,400-square-foot house on Earth. Seven more missions over the next two years will complete the space station.

And the year isn’t but half over. NASA is planning a huge mission in October to service and repair the Hubble telescope one more time. There are two more construction flights to the ISS planned in November and December. Several other smaller satellite missions will launch as well.

Hundreds of Kashmiri Hindus backed by political parties clashed with police in the capital Saturday while holding a rally to pledge support to activists in Jammu protesting the killings of two people and revocation of the land transfer to the Amarnath Shrine Board.

Around 3,000 people of all age groups gathered at Jantar Mantar in the heart of the capital and proceeded towards Parliament House, but were stopped by police officials near the Parliament Street police station there.

When the protesters tried to remove the barriers put up to stop them, the police fired water cannons and baton charged the crowd. According to the protesters, nearly 15 people were injured in the clash.

“We condemn the indefinite curfew and the shoot-at-sight orders on peaceful protesters in Jammu and its outskirts. Governor N.N. Vohra along with his people is trying to crush the entire movement initiated by the common citizens of Jammu against the communal and discriminatory policies of the state government,” said Aditya Raj Kaul, one of the protesters.

“It is a direct attack on the freedom of press and a human rights violation by the state. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) needs to intervene immediately,” Kaul added.

Rahul Sharma, another activist, said: “We immediately demand re-allocation of land to the Amarnath Shrine Board and removal of Governor Vohra.”

The protest was organised by the Amarnath Sangarsh Samiti along with various other civil society organisations and Kashmiri Hindu frontline groups such as Roots In Kashmir, Panun Kashmir, JKNDF and Jammu Kashmir Vichar Manch.

Kaul said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shiv Sena, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and many cultural, social and political outfits in the capital supported the protest.

The protesters warned of intensifying their movement in the coming days.

Unrest begin in Kashmir after the state government allotted 40 hectares of forest land in north Kashmir to the Amarnath Shrine Board May 26 for creating “temporary and pre-fabricated” shelters for Hindu pilgrims to the Amarnath cave shrine.

The order was revoked July 1 following violent protests in the Muslim-dominated Kashmir valley, in which six people were killed. The protesters alleged that the land would be used to settle outsiders and change the Muslim-majority character of the valley.

The revocation order silenced the protests in Kashmir but ignited demonstrations in the Hindu-majority Jammu region, which has been reeling under curfews, shutdowns and violent protests for more than a month now. The violence has claimed five lives.

In the worst-ever temple tragedy in Himachal Pradesh, at least 145 devotees, including 30 children have been killed and more than 50 injured in a stampede on Sunday at the Naina Devi shrine triggered by rumours of a landslide.

The bodies, mostly of people from Patiala, reached Bhai Jaitta civil hospital in Anandpur Sahib, Punjab, which is about 40km from the temple site, for post mortem, Ropar Deputy Commissioner B Purshartha said on Sunday.

Rumours of a landslide and rolling down of boulders from a nearby hilltop spread fear among the devotees resulting in the stampede as a large number of people trekking up and returning from the shrine ran into each other in a bid to escape.

Braving heavy rains, an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 pilgrims had gathered at the popular temple to offer prayers on the occasion of ‘Navratra’, a nine-day religious festival involving fasting in reverence to Goddess Durga worshipped as the symbol of power.

The incident took place at around 1000 hrs, Additional District Magistrate of Bilaspur C P Verma said.

As men, women and children waited in a serpentine queue to have a glimpse of the deity, suddenly all hell broke loose with people running helter skelter following the rumour of the landslide.

Children and women clutching the hands of their near and dear ones got separated in the rush to escape the landslide, realising little that they were hurtling to another form of death.

As devotees tried to outpace each other to find an escape route, they jumped over the railing along the narrow road and steep staircase to the temple, setting off a commotion and panic.

Coming under the weight of the surging pilgrims, the railing collapsed, sending many people plummeting down.

Several women and children, who could not jump the railing and stuck to the regular path, were trampled upon, witnesses said.

Some devotees died of suffocation and 30 children were among the victims, Himachal Pradesh (Home) P C Kapoor said in Shimla, about 140km from the temple.

He said there was no report of a foreigner dying in the stampede.

The condition of six of the injured was serious, Ropar Deputy Commissioner said.

The injured were taken to hospitals in Anandpur Sahib, Ropar and Chandigarh in Punjab and hospitals close to Naina Devi, Kapoor said.

Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal cut short his visit to Chamba, where he had gone to attend the closing ceremony of an international fair, reached Naina Devi and visited the injured at the civil hospital at Bilaspur.

Death and cries permeated the atmosphere in and around the civil hospital in Anahdpur Sahib as people went past each and every body lined up looking for their near and dear ones.

A man whose all the three children are missing after the stampede at Naina Devi shrine is in deep shock as he visited the Anahdpur Sahib civil hospital looking for them.

Jawahar Khurana, who belonged to Rajpura in Punjab, is frantically looking for his three missing children Mohit, Vikram and Tarun at the civil hospital.

“Since I received the information about the stampede I rushed the spot in search of my three children who had gone to pay obeisance at the hilltop shrine. I fail to understand why the God was so cruel to us”, a sobbing Khurala barely mumbled.

Sewak Ram, who lost at least five members of his family, said in a choked voice that “everything was going smooth but when the police used cane charge on pilgrims the situation turned ugly.”

The people from nearby areas of Anandpur Sahib have set up a community kitchen close to the hospital.

Himachal Pradesh government announced a magesterial inquiry into the incident and compensation of Rs one lakh to next of the kin of the dead.

Himachal MP Anurag Thakur, who is the son of Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal, visited the injured at the hospital.

Thakur said the state government would take all possible steps to help the injured and those whose relatives had been killed.

VP expresses shock over loss of lives at stampede

Vice-President Hamid Ansari expressed his shock and grief over loss of lives at stampede at Naina Devi temple in Bilaspur district in Himachal Pradesh that claimed the lives of 130 pilgrims and left scores injured.

He conveyed his deepest condolences to the families of those killed and injured in the incident.

Assuming we’re still driving cars in 20 years, researchers are developing a futuristic windshield to aid the elderly in keeping their eyes on the road.

In research by General Motors, the windshield will employ lasers, a camera and infrared sensors to enhance visibility of objects on the road. Of course, enhancing visibility of everything outside your windshield would only simulate an acid trip and likely spell out disaster, so GM’s windshield will focus on select objects.

For instance, the infrared sensors would detect and highlight a woman pushing a baby stroller in front of you. And on a foggy night, the lasers would outline the edge of a road. It’s kind of like having Terminator eyeballs while you’re driving — except you’re trying to do the opposite of killing people.

Possibility isn’t limited by technology. And it’s certainly not limited by human imagination. What makes something impossible is the lack of cold, hard, cash.

Gundam Mecha
Cost: $725M (Estimated parts total)

Someone went ahead and did it: calculate the cost of constructing a military-grade giant robot. The result, when you throw in flexible aluminum alloys, seven engines, thirty helicopter motors and a computer fast-thinking enough to keep it upright, is $750m a piece. That would get you half a dozen Eurofighters, a trio of Raptors, or about 125,000,000 copies of Peggle.

Moonbase
Cost: $105bn (Half of NASA’s anticipated $14bn 2019 Exploration Missions budget every year for a decade)

After mankind’s famous leap, it seemed the next step: a permanent manned presence on the moon. But with the Soviets scuppering their own lunar plans and the withering of the space age, it took NASA a generation to finally announce its plans.

The schedule sets completion for 2024, and it must be paid from NASA’s fixed budget of $17bn a year. But let’s imagine it was happening now. How much would it have cost? Assuming it was the agency’s main priority, it would have easily added up to more than $50bn in the first three years, with the lion’s share of the work still ahead of us. The real deal could cost more than twice that when it’s finally built: don’t forget all the regular service missions it’ll require until self-sufficiency or (far more likely) abandonment.

Orbital Hotel
Cost: $1.2bn (Britain’s Proposed ISS Astronaut’s Lounge)

The International Space Station, at $20m a trip, isn’t exactly a week in Tahiti. Hell, it’s not even a dirty weekend at the local Lamplighter, as far as amenities are concerned.

A dedicated hotel? It makes a big difference who builds it: NASA managed to pork away about $50bn not finishing the International Skipping Stone, but Russia will complete its share of the project at a fraction of that cost. Neither seem interested, however, in space hotels.

Leave it to the Brits. After decades of disengagement from human space exploration, it recently reversed its position—to propose a lounge for the station. Either it understands something about space travel NASA doesn’t, or it’s mad. Can you say Virgin Orbital, Sir Richard?

So, how much would it cost to make a permanent hotel in space? If we don’t allow ourselves the luxury of appending it to the ISS, it’s going to cost tens of billions of dollars. Britain’s supplemental habitation module, used as a hotel, would be far more economical: its proposal is tagged at $1.2bn. At $10m for a week on board, it could pay for itself in a couple of years—if the buyers are out there.

Transatlantic Tunnel

Cost: $1.6 trillion to $10 trillion, depending on how it’s cut.

How long is a piece of string? Figure that out, and you have the cost of building an intercontinental bridge or tunnel. Istanbul can sit this one out: it’s already got more than one! (And is about to build another, over a nearby 2km span between Europe and Asia, at a cost of a billion dollars.)

One such project is on the cusp of reality, linking Spain to Morocco beneath the Mediterranean sea. In essence, however, it’s little different to the existing rail tunnel between England and France, with a similar cost in adjusted terms: about 27 billion euros.

A proposed bridge or tunnel between Alaska and Chukotka, Russia is touted as the “Intercontinental Peace Bridge,” and could turn the intermediary Diomede Islands into the world’s most remote rest stop. The total length is about fifty-five miles, and the total cost about that in billions. Some claim as little as $15-25bn: one estimate places the cost at $105bn.

Italians plan to build the longest suspension bridge in the world, between the mainland and Sicily, but the latest E4.6bn proposal died in 2006 with the incoming government of Romano Prodi.

But none of this is what we want: a sleeper express between London and New York, right? An immersed tube under the Altantic could cost half a billion dollars a mile, about three times the cost of a modern bridge.

We’re already looking at about $1.6 trillion dollars, at that burn rate—and this doesn’t account for the precipitous drops at the continental shelves, or, indeed, the engineering problem of deep-ocean tunnel immersion.

If you’re thinking of cutting a tunnel the traditional way, under the sea bed, it gets even crazier. Extrapolating the cost of the Channel Tunnel, built in this fashion, and the price lands somewhere in the $10tn region.

Start saving your pennies!

Supersonic Transport
Cost: $30m (Repair decaying BA Concorde) to $180m (Inflation-adjusted cost of a new one)

With the retirement of Concorde, the only supersonic commuter airliner, 2-hour trips over the Atlantic are a thing of the past. It’s perhaps the first tech to go from sci-fi to reality and right back again, all in the space of a generation: no zombie apocalypse required.

When British Airways killed the beast (now generally thought to be a ploy to move its first-class addicts to more profitable planes), Virgin offered to buy them for the same price BA bought them from the British taxpayer: $1 each. Ultimately offered $5m for each, BA preferred to let them fall into disrepair: to get one of the rotting hulks airworthy again may now cost far more than that.

Experts estimate that it would cost billions to develop a new supersonic airliner, however, so restoration of the existing ones remains a more likely scenario.

New York-L.A. Maglev Express
Cost: $70bn (Based on established construction costs)

At $70bn, it’s tantalisingly affordable by the standards of this roundup: a train that could beat airliners from one side of the country to the other.

Many agree that Maglev has enormous potential. Bite-sized examples are in operation all over the world. Birmingham, England, had the first in the 1980s, though the promise of airliner-like speeds on land is still unrealized. The British system sped along at a pathetic 26MPH and was designed to get air travelers to the planes, not to outrun them.

In fact, Maglev carriages, forced along by magnetic fields instead of traditional propulsion systems, still struggle to outpace normal high-speed trains: both forms of transit post speed records at about 360 MPH. In everyday use, modern Maglev systems manage about 260MPH — still ten times as fast as the first one, which ran only 20 years ago.

Nonetheless, they’re extravagantly expensive to build, even if maintenance is relatively cheap. Based on current construction estimates of $25m a kilometer, that 400MPH New York-L.A.’s $70bn route would be hard-pressed to find itself funding. Let’s get BosWash covered first, shall we?

A Floating City
Cost: $11bn For 18,000 Homes
International waters offer plenty of real estate, but getting foundations to stay put is another matter. Micronations like Sealand don’t count: we want the gigantic floating pyramid cities (pictured here) that Future Cities promised us in 1979.

The nearest real-life analogs to that particular wonder — perfectly possible as it is — are found in land reclamation efforts by the Dutch, in Japan and elsewhere. Kansai International Airport cost $20bn, and is a good example of a “city” built where waves once lapped.

As for something on the water itself, however, the best example is probably the Queen Mary 2, Cunard’s most expensive and majestic cruise liner. It cost $900m to put into service, and accommodates nearly 4,000 passengers and crew. A rival, the $800m Freedom of the Sea, packs in 5,730: it’s practically an ocean-going skyscraper. The next-generation of liners will hold as many as 10,000, and cost $1.2bn to build.

Realistic proposals for more grand sea-cities are thin on the ground. The Freedom Ship, proposed by Norman Nixon, is about four times the size of cruise liners. It would permanently accommodate some 50,000 people and cost more than $11bn to build.

Android Armies
Cost: $1bn a battallion
Seen Asimo? If you want your own, expect to pay Honda about a million dollars. Cheapskates can lease one for $166,000 a year. And he still can’t handle stairs.

Still, if you need to defend something very flat with robots (rather than automatic turret guns), simply because that’s a totally bad-assed thing to do, we could put out a battalion for about a billion dollars. Not too shabby, eh?

Blasters and Railguns
Cost: $10m for a field-effective weapon

Directed energy weapons are so well-understood that there are dozens of variations on the same basic theme.

Unfortunately, available batteries and coolants are just are not up to snuff.

For a laser gun, for example, we need a luggable assembly that can power a beam strong enough to match a firearm’s effectiveness, and a way to siphon away the heat such a gun would leak. Such tech doesn’t exist yet, at any cost.

We’re making progress: the U.S. now has test laser installations able to take out fighter jets and missiles, including a mobile one stashed aboard a Boeing 747.Railguns are another sci-fi staple finally bearing fruit in portable-ish form. Just this morning, the Naval Surgace Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, fired a 10 megajoule electromagnetic railgun. They’re talking about using these to replace 5-inch guns in the 2020s, though there’s no mention of cost.

Finally, no mention of death rays is complete without a tip of the hat to Nikola Tesla. Priceless stuff.

Interstellar Exploration
Cost: Unimaginable.
Scientists think that a probe could be sent to nearby stars, if it was light enough to be accelerated to relativistic speed with a giant laser. Let us not forget this would still be a decades-long mission, with a probe so small as to be measured in grams, not kilos.

Screw that nonsense: I want a warp drive. Pricing up the mathematical exegeses behind such notions, however, is simply beyond calculation.