[tt] New York Times: The Space Age

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The Space Age, which makes up almost all of this week's Tuesday Science 
Times Section (several articles), 7.9.25

With Fear and Wonder in Its Wake, Sputnik Lifted Us Into the Future
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25sput.html
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Fifty years ago, before most people living today were born, the
beep-beep-beep of Sputnik was heard round the world. It was the
sound of wonder and foreboding. Nothing would ever be quite the same
again in geopolitics, in science and technology, in everyday life
and the capacity of the human species.

The Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite, a new
moon, on Oct. 4, 1957. Climbing out of the terrestrial gravity well,
rising above the atmosphere and into orbit, Sputnik crossed the
threshold into a new dimension of human experience. People could now
see their kind as spacefarers. Their enhanced mobility might someday
prove as liberating as the first upright steps of hominid ancestors
long ago.

The immediate reaction, though, reflected the dark concerns of a
world in the grip of the cold war, a time of fear and division in
which the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States,
stared each other down with the menace of mass destruction. Sputnik
altered the nature and scope of the cold war.

It was an unprepossessing agent of alarm. A simple sphere weighing
just 184 pounds and not quite two feet wide, it had a highly
polished surface of aluminum, the better to reflect sunlight and be
visible from Earth. Two radio transmitters with whiskery antennas
issued steady signals on frequencies that scientists and ham
operators could pick up, and so confirm the achievement.

The Russians clearly intended Sputnik as a ringing statement of
their technological prowess and its military implications. But even
they, it seems, had not foreseen the frenzied response their success
provoked.

When the Soviet dictator Nikita S. Khrushchev received word of the
launching, he was of course pleased, and he and his son, Sergei,
turned on the radio to listen to the beeping Sputnik. They went to
bed, the son remembers, without realizing the immensity of what was
happening during those hours.

The Soviet press published a standard two-column report of the
event, with a minimum of gloating. But newspapers in the West,
particularly the United States, filled pages with news and analysis.

Sputniks signal reverberated through chambers of the powerful and
down ordinary streets. People listened and, from rooftops and
backyards, saw in the night a moving point of light, like an errant
star. The interrogatory of invention used to be What hath God
wrought? Now it was What are the Russians capable of next?

No event since Pearl Harbor set off such repercussions in public
life, Walter A. McDougall, a historian at the University of
Pennsylvania, has written. A younger generation may draw comparison
with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

Sputnik plunged Americans into a crisis of self-confidence. Had the
country grown lax with prosperity? Was the education system
inadequate, especially in training scientists and engineers? Were
the institutions of liberal democracy any match in competition with
an authoritarian communist society?

In The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age
(1985), Dr. McDougall wrote that before Sputnik the cold war had
been a military and political struggle in which the United States
need only lend aid and comfort to its allies in the front lines.
Now, he continued, the cold war became total, a competition for the
loyalty and trust of all peoples fought out in all arenas of social
achievement, in which science textbooks and racial harmony were as
much tools of foreign policy as missiles and spies.

At the time of Sputnik, John F. Kennedy was the junior senator from
Massachusetts with no particular interest in space. Yuri A. Gagarin
was an unheralded Russian military pilot. John H. Glenn Jr. was a
Marine Corps pilot who had recently set a record for the fastest
transcontinental jet flight to New York from Los Angeles. Neil A.
Armstrong was testing high-performance aircraft in the California
desert. Their lives were soon to be changed, as were those of
hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, other workers and
ordinary people everywhere.

Thomas J. OMalley, an aviation engineer in New Jersey, would move in
a few months to a forlorn spit of land at Cape Canaveral, Fla., to
be a test conductor in the accelerated development of the Atlas
missile, which would eventually lift American astronauts into orbit.
We had one goal, he recalled recently. To get something up there as
quickly as possible.

Christopher C. Kraft Jr. soon found himself working with a task
force planning an American response to the challenge. He would
become the first flight director of astronaut missions, but at the
start, he has written, the morale of American engineers was low. I
wasnt the only engineer who was stunned at how much I didnt know and
how much I had to learn, he said.

When the Sputnik news reached Huntsville, Ala., Wernher von Braun
was beside himself with restless frustration. Mr. von Braun, a
German-born rocket scientist working for the United States Army,
said this country could have beaten the Russians into orbit if not
for Pentagon orders to resist any thought of adding a small
satellite to the Jupiter-C missile he had been testing.

To make matters worse, the first American attempts to launch a tiny
Vanguard satellite were embarrassing failures. It was the end of
January 1958 before Americans succeeded with Explorer 1, boosted
into orbit by a multistage version of Mr. von Brauns Jupiter-C. But
the much larger Sputnik 2 had already carried the dog Laika into
orbit, a harbinger of human spaceflight. The original Sputnik in
Russian, satellite or fellow traveler was no onetime fluke.

The post-Sputnik dynamic even reached out and recruited me. I was
then a soldier in the cold war. Along with nearly every able-bodied
young American man (even Elvis had to put in his two years), I was
fulfilling my obligation to interrupt life and career for military
service. I had completed college and was a reporter on military
leave of absence from The Wall Street Journal, at the Army base in
Fort Dix, N.J.

The morning after the Soviet triumph, I was on a one-day pass in
Trenton. I bought the papers and spread them out on a coffee shop
table. Banner headlines trumpeted the news. The recondite language
of rocketry and orbits tied up my head, but I read on. I gave a
passing thought to the coincidence of Sputniks going up on my
birthday; at least I should never forget the date the space age
began.

My story should at this point resound with destinys thunderclap or a
sudden gust swinging open the door, scattering the papers and
leaving me strangely moved. But I had no premonition that Sputnik
had set in motion events that would shape my career. It was not
until 1959, soon after I returned to The Journal from service in
West Germany, that I felt the Sputnik effect.

Newspapers and other media, influenced by Sputnik, were scrambling
to expand coverage of science, medicine and technology. I agreed to
the managing editors suggestion that I try my hand writing about
medicine. One thing led to another, from medicine to science and
space exploration, to Time magazine and eventually to the staff of
The New York Times to cover the most ambitious American response to
Sputnik: the Apollo program.

Sputnik should not have come as such a surprise. Both the Soviet
Union and the United States had embarked on the development of
ballistic missiles for carrying nuclear warheads to great distances.
They had also announced plans to launch artificial satellites in the
International Geophysical Year, a cooperative 18-month scientific
undertaking to study Earth and its atmosphere, beginning in 1957.
Khrushchev had reiterated Soviet intentions only two months before.

But a shock it was, a wake-up call. One of the intriguing
might-have-beens of history is: What if Americans had deployed the
first satellite?

Alex Roland, a historian of technology at Duke University and a
former NASA historian, said that a first launching by Americans
would have merely confirmed their reputation for technological
superiority. The costly rivalry for dominance in space, he said,
would have probably been waged with much less driving urgency.

John M. Logsdon, director of the Institute of Space Policy at George
Washington University, agreed. If not for Sputnik, he said, there
would probably not have been Apollo.

But after Sputnik, there was no stopping the momentum of the space
race. Critics attacked the administration of President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, who at first had dismissed Sputnik as an event of only
scientific interest. Soon the Defense Department stepped up missile
development. The Democratic Congress established the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The perception of a threatening Soviet advantage in missiles
persisted. Necessity had dictated the Russian concentration on
missiles. Ever since World War II, American bombers had been more
capable than those of the Russians, who also had no air bases in
striking distance of their adversarys heartland, in contrast to the
American bases that ringed the Soviet Union.

An exaggerated estimate of the missile gap became a rallying cry of
the 1960 presidential campaign and may have been crucial in Kennedys
narrow victory. Not long after he took office, the Russians scored
another stunning triumph. In April 1961, Gagarin became the first
human to fly in Earth orbit.

After weeks of closed-door consultations, Kennedy went before
Congress, on May 25, and declared, Now it is time to take longer
strides time for a great new American enterprise time for this
nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement which, in
many ways, may hold the key to our future on Earth.

He committed the country to the goal, before this decade is out, of
landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

How brief the space race was, the 12 years from the wake-up call to
the first walk on the Moon, but thrilling, mind-boggling, even
magnificent at times.

While the Russians forge ahead, Americans begin catching up with the
Mercury and Gemini flights in orbit. As the goal comes into sight,
there are the countdowns of tingling anticipation. In the dark
before dawn, we drive toward the shining light enveloping a
spaceship that looks like an obelisk out of antiquity, waiting to be
launched. The blast of the Saturn 5, just three miles of sand and
scrub away, beats on your chest and shakes the ground you stand on.
Once at full thrust, and unbound, the huge rocket at first appears
to be losing its fight against gravity, then slowly rises to the
occasion and is off over the ocean, fire and vapor trailing behind.
Spacefarers are on their way to the Moon.

Three lunar voyages are most sharply etched in memory. The Apollo 8
astronauts, in December 1968, are the first to reach the Moon,
circling it 10 times. Out their windows they see the achingly
beautiful Earth, blue and green under swirls of white clouds. On
Christmas Eve, the men take turns reading verses from Genesis. It is
a gift from on high at a time of turmoil and despair in the year of
assassinations, rioting cities and a divisive war.

Then there is Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong steps down
the landing crafts ladder and takes one giant leap for mankind. Buzz
Aldrin joins him for the first walk on the Moon. In contrast to
explorations previous landfalls, the whole world is watching on
television.

In the current documentary film In the Shadow of the Moon, Michael
Collins, the Apollo 11 pilot who remained in lunar orbit during the
landing, recalls that on the crews world tour afterward, people they
met felt they had participated in the landing, too. People, instead
of saying, Well, you Americans did it! he said, everywhere, they
said, We did it! We, humankind, we, the human race, we, people, did
it!

The warmth of shared experience was remarkable, given the origins of
the space race in an atmosphere of fear and belligerence.

Apollo 11 essentially ended the space race, and public interest in
spaceflight was flagging by the time of Apollo 13, in April 1970.
The residual self-assurance that committed the country to Apollo in
1961 had given way to self-doubt. The war in Vietnam, another
chapter in the cold war, shoved Apollo to the periphery of the
national mind.

Apollo 13 is the mission that failed, but a drama of epic dimensions
worthy of Homer. Three astronauts go forth on a daring quest, meet
with disaster, face death and barely limp back to the safety of
home. If anything, this brush with death put a more human face on
spaceflight and made it seem more exciting, and dangerous.

By the end of 1972, the last of the 12 men to walk on the Moon
packed up and returned home, and no one has been there since. At the
conclusion of that flight, Apollo 17, I solicited historians
assessments of the significance of these early years in space.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. predicted that in 500 years, the 20th
century would probably be remembered mainly for humanitys first
ventures beyond its native planet. At the close of the century, he
had not changed his mind.

In succeeding years, the Russians and Americans continued
spaceflights, at a reduced pace. Most American money went into the
space shuttles, the reusable vehicles confined to orbit that never
lived up to their promise to make human flight more routine. The
publics most lasting images of the program are the Challengers
deadly explosion shortly after liftoff in 1986, and the Columbias
disintegration on re-entry 17 years later.

It was left to the relatively low-budget robotic spacecraft to
sustain the impression of exploration and discovery on this new
frontier. In that respect, they alone exceeded early promises.
Russian and American craft explored Venus. American vehicles landed
several times on Mars, and a European capsule reached the surface of
Saturns moon Titan. Two Voyager craft made a grand tour of the four
giant outer planets and are now approaching the edge of the solar
system. The Hubble Space Telescope still sends images from deep in
cosmic time.

Carl Sagan, the astronomer and author, often spoke of this as the
golden age of planetary exploration. In all the history of mankind,
he wrote, there will be only one generation that will be first to
explore the solar system, one generation for which, in childhood,
the planets are distant and indistinct disks moving through the
night sky, and for which, in old age, the planets are places,
diverse new worlds in the course of exploration.

One evening in 1990, I drove across Baltimore on a sentimental
journey. Every so often since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
reunification of Germany, the collapse of communist regimes in
Eastern Europe and the last gasps coming out of the exhausted Soviet
Union itself, I had allowed myself reflections on my two years as a
soldier in an unconventional war and the nearly half-century of
anxieties of living in a world primed to blow itself up.

I could hardly think of myself outside the context of the cold war.
Without the intense Soviet-American competition epitomized by the
space race, I would not have become a science journalist who wrote
about astronauts going to the Moon to beat the Russians. I would
therefore not be in Baltimore again, this time with astronomers who
were preparing to look into the heavens via a giant orbiting
telescope.

I found my way to Travelers Lounge, the bar that had been across
from the gate to the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird. We
used to tarry in the back room there, over pitchers of beer fueling
arguments about politics and the American novel. I took a stool and
told the bartender that it had been more than three decades since I
last had a beer here, back in my Holabird sojourn.

One of them comes in every few months and looks around, the
bartender said. Were about the only thing left from those days.

So I had seen. The fort was gone. In its place stretched one
corporate complex after another, buildings of glass and steel and
spreading car parks. The names I saw were as unfamiliar as their
digitized new-technology goods and services. I imagined I was
looking on a monument to the cold war, and how apt it seemed.

The conflict we had lived through did not lend itself to heroic and
triumphal iconography, nothing like the Iwo Jima flag-raising
statue, nothing to glorify war or proclaim victory. So these
commercial enterprises rising from cold-war technology, supplanting
an old fort, were working monuments to the end of the cold war,
monuments that do not look back.

At least Travelers and I had made it through this passage in
history. Over my shoulder, I saw families and couples dining, not a
beer pitcher or soldier anywhere. I wondered what post-cold-war
memories these diners would bring back there in coming years.

I took my leave of Travelers and an era. I had to be fresh in the
morning for another meeting with people at the Space Telescope
Science Institute. They were tending their own monument to the cold
war, which had fostered the Hubble Space Telescopes technology. I
wanted to learn more of our and my own expanding universe.

Over a long dinner, after the cold war and almost 30 years since the
first lunar landing, a former astronaut who walked on the Moon and
one of the Apollo flight directors got to skylarking about the good
old days, something people do when they think of their past receding
and the world changing all around. They laughed almost to tears
telling cherished stories, one trying to top the other.

Then a cloud seemed to pass over their faces. Pete Conrad, the
astronaut, who would soon die in a motorcycle accident, and Gerald
D. Griffin, the flight director, wondered in perplexity what had
happened to their good old days. What of those grand prospects of a
few decades ago? No humans have flown to Mars, as once predicted, or
established a permanent base on the Moon. A long-sought orbiting
space station was finally being assembled in orbit, but no one
seemed sure what it was good for, except as a demonstration of
cooperation by many nations, including Russia, in a major space
endeavor.

Economics and shifting national priorities had thwarted the most
ambitious post-Apollo plans.

Dr. Logsdon of George Washington University called Apollo a product
of a specific time in history, and a singular crash program
responding to a perceived threat to the country. It did not
represent a firm commitment by society to full-scale space
exploration.

As Dr. Roland of Duke pointed out, Apollo did just what it was
designed to do, which was to convince the world and ourselves that
we were masters of technology, and it wasnt designed to do anything
else. As yet, he said, we have not identified a mission for
astronauts that was commensurate with Apollo.

Dr. Roland noted that telecommunications was the only space
enterprise that pays for itself and, he added, It has transformed
the world. All other space activities, military and civilian, depend
so far on what states believe are in their best interest to invest
in and those interests have changed since the cold war.

Let Neil Armstrong, known as a man of few words, have the last word.

I think well always be in space, he said in an interview for NASAs
oral history program. But it will take us longer to do the new
things than the advocates would like, and in some cases it will take
external factors or forces which we cant control and cant anticipate
that will cause things to happen or not happen.

Mr. Armstrong then struck a note sure to resonate with many of his
contemporaries. We were really very privileged, he said, to live in
that thin slice of history where we changed how man looks at himself
and what he might become and where he might go.
+++++++++++++

New Horizons Beckon, Inspiring Vision if Not Certainty
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25next.html

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Fifty years of spaceflight have taken people to the Moon and have
sent unmanned vehicles zipping to the fringes of the solar system.
What could the next 50 years bring?

Much more, or potentially not much more. Government-financed space
travel could stall in the face of Americas growing aversion to risk
and a kind of orbital ennui. NASA has, after all, already tried for
more than a decade to develop follow-on vehicles to the flawed space
shuttle and is in the process of trying again.

Private enterprise is stepping up, but the industry is still
fragile.

Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, said in an interview
that he was confident of one thing for the foreseeable future: Were
going to have a space program.

Beyond that, all bets are off.

The one thing of which we can be certain, Mr. Griffin wrote in a
recent essay on the Web site of the magazine Aviation Week and Space
Technology, is that in trying to envision the world of 2057, two
generations in the future, we will be wrong.

Experts in government, industry and science agree, however, that
these three broad trends will shape the coming decades in space:

¶NASA has embarked on a program to return to the Moon by 2020, not
just for what some critics call flags and footprints, but also for a
lasting presence with scientific research and preparation for
expeditions to asteroids and, eventually, Mars. The space shuttle
program is being wound down by 2010 to create the next generation of
vehicles.

¶Other nations, notably Russia and China, have ambitious plans and
could spur a space race like the one that sent Americans to the
Moon. It took Sputnik for us to recognize what the Soviet Union was
up to, said Harrison H. Schmitt, who flew the last mission to the
Moon, in 1972. I dont know what it will take this time.

¶Private enterprise is moving ahead, beginning with space tourism
and, later, transport services for NASA and other governments to
outposts like the International Space Station. Beyond that, ventures
could include mining on asteroids and manufacturing drugs in space.

John M. Logsdon, director of the space policy institute at George
Washington University, says a big question has yet to be answered.

At the level of government, I think were still struggling as to why
were sending people to space, Dr. Logsdon said. Its a decent
question, and I think its an unanswered question.

That leaves the manned space program at a precarious point, he said,
adding: If the current proposals to restart human exploration fail
politically, indeed, the human space flight endeavor conducted under
government auspices might well lose its momentum. I obviously hope
that doesnt happen. But its far from a slam dunk that were going
back to the Moon and on to Mars.

Entrepreneurs say they have the answer money. Peter Diamandis, a
founder of the Ansari X Prize, the $10 million competition to put a
pilot in space without government financing, said that with all the
energy and minerals to be found there the first trillionaires are
going to be made in space.

In the next 50 years, Mr. Diamandis said, economic engines, not
political ones, will push the space frontier.

Dr. Logsdon is skeptical. There are a variety of alluring prospects
that have been around almost since the start of the last 50 years
that are still there as alluring prospects, he said. And we are not
further along in knowing whether they can be turned into reality or
not. The continued reliance on chemical rockets, for example, limits
the weight that can be taken into space.

Yet much has changed in the last 50 years that could lay the
foundation for the next 50. A new generation of ultrawealthy
entrepreneurs who grew up with a space fascination are pouring
personal fortunes into making space businesses real.

Paul G. Allen, a founder of Microsoft, paid for SpaceShipOne, the
tiny craft that won the X Prize in 2004. Elon Musk, a founder of
PayPal, is developing rockets through his company, Space Exploration
Technologies, and has NASA financing that could lead to his
spacecrafts carrying people and supplies to the International Space
Station.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is developing rockets at a
site he owns in western Texas.

Robert Bigelow, who made his fortune in hotels, is developing a
space transportation system and a space station that could be used
as an orbiting hotel or a research base.

The official charged with regulating commercial spaceflight,
Patricia Grace Smith of the Federal Aviation Administration, said in
an interview, When I look out 50 years from now, I fully expect that
we will have actual, operational spaceports that are commercially
operated and owned.

At the dusty, sprawling Mojave Air and Space Port in California,
dreamers and pragmatists join in planning the future.

Jeff Greason, the founder of Xcor Aerospace, one of several rocket
companies there, said his industry was ready to talk big again after
years of having to shake off the pixie dust of science fiction. We
had to stop focusing on the grand and glorious future, he said,
because otherwise, people werent going to take us seriously as a
business. We very consciously turned the vision thing off.

Were making progress on real businesses that turn profits, he added.

Other companies are already in the game. Mr. Greasons neighbor,
Scaled Composites, is working on a successor vehicle to its
SpaceShipOne.

Richard Bransons company, Virgin Galactic, which will buy the
vehicles, has a long list of potential space tourists.

Esther Dyson, a longtime technology guru who is encouraging
investment in space, said the development of rocket businesses
paralleled the early days of personal computing and the Internet.
Early government financing created technologies whose use was
largely limited to government and academia.

So eventually these commercial types came in, and suddenly a whole
lot of revenue came in, she said. It benefited the research types,
as well as the commercial types. And it created an infrastructure
for the public.

That led, in turn, to todays Google, Netscape, Google Earth, all
these wonderful things we take for granted.

Mr. Greason predicts that government will take the lead in
long-range exploration, but that industry will take up the slack
closer to home. Just as the military relies on private air carriers,
he said, the government efforts will become customers of the private
efforts.

NASA will meanwhile be trying to extend the reach of humanity. Mr.
Griffin, its administrator, laid out a rough timetable for the goals
that President Bush set in 2004.

He sees the mileposts clearly along the way, returning to the Moon
by 2020, with a small lunar outpost a few years later, on the way to
towns on the Moon. The first flights to Mars could occur in the next
decade, he said, so that by the 100th anniversary of spaceflight in
2057, we can be looking back at the 20th anniversary of the first
human landing on Mars.

If the United States wants to lead the way, he said, the clock is
ticking.

This is the last generation of Americans which is going to have the
unquestioned opportunity to lead that enterprise, Mr. Griffin said.
Because in the next generation we are going to find, at least,
Russia, China, India and Europe fully as capable as we are. It will
be a matter of interest and politics and societal will or desire.
But it will not be a matter of capability.

Whoever takes them on, the challenges will be greater than any that
spacefaring nations have yet faced. They involve radiation levels
that science does not yet know how to protect against and problems
like reduced gravity and Moon dust, which is ultrafine-grained,
chemically reactive and highly abrasive, all of which may mean
serious health problems for astronauts.

At a conference in June on lunar settlements, Dr. James S. Logan, a
former chief of medical operations at the Johnson Space Center and a
founder of Space Medicine Associates, a medical consulting group,
pointed out that the previous missions to the Moon involved just 600
total man-hours on the surface, a figure likely to be exceeded on
the first return mission.

In his presentation, Dr. Logan pointed out that the earlier exposure
times, while significant, did not provide strong evidence that
long-duration exposure would be safe.

At a conference on space medicine this year at the Baker Institute
for Public Policy at Rice University, Peggy A. Whitson, an astronaut
who is about to take her second stint aboard the International Space
Station, said radiation would continue to be a concern.

We have to just accept the fact that if were going to explore, Dr.
Whitson said, were going to have to accept a higher level of
radiation than, say, OSHA permits for atomic workers.

Dr. Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon on the panel with
Dr. Whitson, said, To me, an unacceptable level of risk would be a
radiation exposure that would result in acute and substantial
performance effects, either fatality or cognitive decline.

If the effects are so debilitating that the mission fails, Dr. Clark
said, its pointless to go.

There could be other problems with a Mars mission that scientists
are just beginning to explore. At the Rice conference, Dr. Nick
Kanas of the University of California, San Francisco, a psychiatrist
who has studied astronauts, described what he called the Earth out
of view phenomenon.

Dr. Kanass research has found that one of the most positive parts of
going to space is seeing the Earth. But on a trip to Mars, the Earth
would dwindle to a bluish speck.

No one in the history of humans has ever studied what its like to
see the Earth as a little dot, he said.

In an interview, Dr. Kanas said losing the visual connection with
the home planet could be a unique stressor.

Communications would slow markedly, with lags of more than 40
minutes, he said. Ready access to powerful telescopes and libraries
of Earth images might help, but it would be important to fight those
feelings of extreme isolation and loneliness.

Mr. Griffin acknowledged that problems like radiation presented
grave challenges in each new environment, but added that he was
confident that protections would be discovered, just as early
sailors learned that sauerkraut and lemons could protect them from
scurvy on long voyages.

And he predicted that the lessons learned about bone growth, cell
biology, damage prevention and repair would help treat diseases on
Earth.

Mr. Schmitt, the Apollo astronaut, agreed. Despite very real risks
of living in space and on other planets, he said, I dont see any
showstoppers.

Stuart Witt, general manager of the Mojave Air and Space Port, takes
an even longer view. In his office, with composite craft being
designed in nearby buildings, Mr. Witt noted that five centuries
ago, Magellan left Spain with five ships and 270 men. Two years
later, one ship returned, with 18 men.

He quoted from memory a passage from Charles Van Dorens book A
History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future (1991), pointing out
that after the surviving ship returned loaded with valuable spices,
subsequent expeditions never lacked for sailors to man them and for
captains to lead them.

They knew that the spirit of exploration was far bigger than any
individual, Mr. Witt said.

The argument resonates with Mr. Griffin: Every time that humans have
invested in the past in breaking through new frontiers, its been to
our profit.

It may be tough on the individual explorers, but its been pretty
beneficial for the human race as we sit here, he continued, waving
his arms to take in his office, Washington and America, in what once
was the New World.

Well lose people, he said flatly, and risks must be minimized. But
exploring is embedded in our DNA.

The urge to go beyond might actually be ingrained in the helical
curves of our genes as one of the many behavioral traits now being
linked to genetic propensities, said Jeffrey M. Friedman, director
of the Starr Center for Human Genetics at the Rockefeller
University.

Indulging in a bit of speculation at a reporters request, Dr.
Friedman said its very plausible to suggest that there might be a
primal urge to explore and take risks.

And you sort of have direct evidence of it in the history of human
migrations, he added.

In any population, there would be a spectrum of traits from
stay-at-homes to explorers, with those at either end of the spectrum
prospering in some circumstances and suffering in others.

The future holds promise and peril, as any visitor to Mojave can
see. At Scaled Composites, an explosion last month killed three
employees. The accident involved the nitrous oxide that Scaled
Composites uses as a propellant, though there was no rocket test at
the time. The accident is under investigation.

Meanwhile, the company continues to develop its next craft, and
Virgin Galactic said no customers had canceled. When asked whether
the accident gave him second thoughts, James Lovelock, the
88-year-old British scientist and author, said, I have no qualms
whatever.
+++++++++++

When the Space Age Blasted Off, Pop Culture Followed
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25pop.html
By RANDY KENNEDY

It was not the most eloquent line uttered in movie history, and it
may have been one of the silliest: Greetings, my friend. We are all
interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to
spend the rest of our lives.

But the sentiment, as intoned by the celebrity psychic Criswell at
the beginning of the 1959 astro-disaster Plan 9 From Outer Space,
was a perfect way to explain the influence that the space race, then
in its infancy, was already beginning to exercise on American
popular culture and art, from movies and television to architecture
and design.

An effect was much more than simply a spillover from the silvery
streamlining of the space program. It was an increasing
preoccupation with the future and technology that helped change not
only the countrys look in the 1950s and 60s, but also, in some ways,
its very conception of itself, as if seen anew from space.

The architect Buckminster Fuller, one of the space ages most ardent
proselytizers, put it much more coherently in his book Operating
Manual for Spaceship Earth: We are all astronauts.

Deciding which cultural offerings from those post-Sputnik years were
deep and lasting and which were probably not (space-age bachelor-pad
music? The Jetsons? Barbarella? Tang?) will always be topics of
impassioned debate among space aficionados. But a half-century into
that once-imagined orbital future, it has become a little easier to
put the era into cultural perspective.

The worlds of fashion, furniture, comic books and childrens toys
were all profoundly affected, often for the good.

Television and the movies, as evidenced by examples like Plan 9,
Lost in Space and Invasion of the Saucer Men, in which an aliens
severed hand crawled around wreaking havoc on the big screen, did
not fare quite as well.

Even so, it is difficult to imagine cinema without Stanley Kubricks
2001: A Space Odyssey. And it is almost impossible to imagine that
movie, made in 1968, looking the way it did in the absence of an
American space program, even with earlier influences like the spacey
designer Raymond Loewy or the architect Eero Saarinen, whose curvy
1948 Womb chair looks like something made specially for Kubricks
set.

In the realm of art, the influence was smaller and, usually, less
direct. The cultural scholar Dave Hickey said he always felt that
the the ice-white cube, which became the standard kind of ascetic
interior in museums and galleries by the 60s, could be traced in
part right back to NASA.

I remember thinking at the time that, all of a sudden, we were
looking at art in clean rooms like those where the astronauts suit
up, Mr. Hickey, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas,
said in a recent interview.

Robert Rauschenberg was probably the most famous artist to use space
imagery front and center, incorporating pictures of astronauts and
space capsules into his works in the 60s.

At Bell Laboratories, which was intimately tied up with NASA in its
earliest years, Billy Klüver, an engineer, organized groundbreaking
collaborations with artists, including Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol,
to inject space-age technology into artworks, a program whose legacy
is still felt today.

Many cultural critics say probably the biggest impact can be seen in
architecture. Especially in California and elsewhere in the West,
the work of architects like John Lautner transformed the look of
cities and highways with upswept winglike roofs, domes, satellite
shapes and starbursts that became the dominant visual language of
motels, diners and gasoline stations.

Professor Hickey describes the look as somewhere between Hindu
temples and launching pads.

The look, sometimes called Googie, after Lautners design for the
Googies coffee shop in Los Angeles, predated the Sputnik launching
and had influences back to Wayne McAllisters curvaceous hotels and
drive-ins, to Frank Lloyd Wright and even to Futurism in the 1920s.
It took off along with the space race and produced buildings that
tried very hard to bring the Jetsons to life, like Lautners 1960
Chemosphere, a saucer-shaped house that looks as if it is preparing
to hover out over the Hollywood Hills.

Kenneth Frampton, the architectural historian, said it was often
difficult to disentangle the threads of the space-age look, whose
origins come from early airplane and jet design. Mr. Frampton added
that the lines of influence that began with Fullers geodesic domes
and other futuristic ideas could be traced across the ocean to
Archigram, the visionary group of British architects who proposed
far-out projects (never realized) like capsule-shape living pods and
suits that could expand and double as structures.

Their spirit has in turn inspired and animated many contemporary
high-tech architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Renzo Piano,
whose tubular, machinelike Pompidou Center, built with Richard
Rogers, seems to evoke the space race in very specific ways.

You could draw certain parallels between the structure of the
Pompidou and the structure of the rocket-launching facilities at
Cape Canaveral, said Mr. Frampton, who teaches at Columbia. They
might not have been thinking about it, but I think there is some
kind of unconscious affinity there.
++++++++

New Challengers Emerge, Threatening to Take the Lead
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25china.html
By GUY GUGLIOTTA

In March, during an otherwise routine budget hearing, Michael D.
Griffin, the NASA administrator, warned members of Congress that
Chinas aggressive space program could easily put humans on the Moon
before American astronauts are able return to the lunar surface
under the space agencys proposed Moon-Mars project.

The China card can be a strong selling point on Capitol Hill, and
Mr. Griffin, trying to finance an ambitious human spaceflight
program with Mars as the ultimate goal, plays it as well as anyone.

This is Americas great space-age paranoia: that the United States
has frittered away 35 years of space superiority, and a new
generation of rivals is about to shove it into second place.

China is the challenger du jour. It became the third nation to send
a human into space in 2003, it put a two-man crew in orbit in 2005
and it plans to send an unmanned orbiter to the Moon this year. It
plans to launch three astronauts and conduct its first spacewalk in
2008.

In January, Chinas military destroyed one of its own derelict
satellites with a guided missile in a provocative demonstration of
ballistic prowess. Although it is unclear what the Chinese intended,
the test left no doubt that space hardware everything from crucial
navigation and communication assets to secret spy satellites is a
very soft target. And no one has more space hardware than the United
States.

Despite its achievements, experts say, China is decades away from
developing the full array of space expertise and infrastructure that
allows the United States to simultaneously launch astronauts, send
unmanned craft to explore outer planets, take spectacular pictures
from orbiting telescopes and profile the eye of a hurricane. We are
leagues ahead of everyone else, and its going to take a lot of time,
effort and money to counter that superiority, said Joan
Johnson-Freese, chairwoman of the Department of National Security
Studies at the Naval War College.

Still, what China can do is match, compete with or even supplant the
United States in piecemeal ways, said Eric Hagt, head of the China
program at the independent World Security Institute. By putting
humans in space, China wins significant prestige, Mr. Hagt said.
Putting their own man on the Moon before the United States can
return would put the Chinese first in the world.

China is not the only player with space aspirations. India is
developing a human spaceflight program and hopes to have astronauts
in orbit by 2014. Europe and Japan, which routinely fly astronauts
aboard the space shuttle, also have highly developed space science
programs. Japans innovative mission to orbit the asteroid Itokawa
has produced a journals worth of research papers, and next year the
European Space Agency expects to bring its 30-satellite Galileo
navigation network online as an alternative to the Global
Positioning System in the United States.

Russia, once Americas only rival in space, has been out of the game
since the breakup of the Soviet Union. But the Russians these days
are flush with petrodollars and looking for ways to reassert their
power.

Russia has the capabilities, the big industrial base, the trained
cadre of people and the ability to launch in all kinds of weather,
said John Logsdon, a space historian at George Washington
University. It has a relatively unambitious space plan for the next
few years, but that could change.

Fifty years into the space age, human spaceflight and space science
remain the most traditional measures of prestige and accomplishment,
but space has also become a lucrative business and a new territory
for military competition.

The big money is still in building spacecraft for governments, and
the major aerospace companies worldwide, like Boeing, Lockheed, the
European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, and RKK Energia, a
Russian company, focus on that. Building commercial satellites is a
much more modest undertaking. Since 2004, the world has produced 80
of them; China has built 3.

Spaces other cottage industry is a Russian monopoly: running a ferry
service to the International Space Station with its venerable Soyuz
spacecraft. Since 2001, five well-heeled space tourists have paid
$20 million apiece or more to visit the station. Soyuz also carried
American astronauts to the station after the 2003 Columbia accident
grounded the space shuttle fleet.

With plans for the shuttle to be retired in 2010, the United States
is developing new launching vehicles capable of returning astronauts
to the Moon and eventually taking them to Mars. That is the kind of
big, high-risk idea that has always defined space leadership, and
that is where China is competing.

China launched its first satellite in 1970, but its space program
languished during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and internal
power struggles. Estranged from both the Soviet Union and the United
States, China learned to fend for itself. In 2003, a Long March
rocket carried Lt. Col. Yang Liwei aboard the Shenzhou V spacecraft.
Colonel Yang returned safely to Earth after 14 orbits and became a
national hero.

The Chinese share little information about their programs, but Zhang
Oinwei, who heads construction of the Shenzhou spacecraft, said the
human space flight program spent about $2.3 billion in the years
leading up to Colonel Yangs flight.

In 2005, Shenzhou VI, carrying two Chinese army colonels, orbited
Earth for five days. Shenzhou VII, scheduled for launching in 2008,
will carry three crew members who will attempt Chinas first
spacewalks.

The Shenzhou (it means magic vessel) spacecraft are patterned after
the Soyuz but are slightly larger. China has said that its goal is
to use the Shenzhou to develop orbiting skills and technology and
eventually to build a small space station.

Although the Chinese have not formally announced plans to send
humans to the Moon, the Shenzhou flights, coupled with plans for
science missions to orbit the Moon, put robotic rovers on the lunar
surface and return soil samples to Earth show that China has read
the Apollo playbook.

Mr. Griffin of NASA has described the Shenzhou program as having
reached the Gemini stage, recalling the two-man American flights in
the mid-1960s that prepared astronauts for the Apollo missions. He
told Congress in March that it would easily be possible for the
Chinese to mount a lunar mission within a decade. If so, China could
put humans on the Moon by 2018, a year earlier than the United
States, under current American budget projections.

The United States, worried about Chinas military ambitions, has
regarded the Chinese space program warily in recent years, imposing
export restrictions on commercial technologies that might also have
military uses.

Last year, Mr. Griffin accepted an invitation from Chinese officials
to tour their space facilities in the hope of broadening ties. After
cordial talks and meetings with civilian space scientists and
engineers, however, Mr. Griffin cut his visit short when the
military refused to let him visit the human spaceflight training
facilities at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi
Desert.

If we are to conduct human space flight activity together, we have
to have a great degree of trust, a great degree of sharing, a great
degree of openness, Mr. Griffin told reporters at the end of his
trip. Transparency and openness mean being able to see and touch and
ask questions and get answers, and China and the U.S. are not at
that point.

Despite Chinas achievements and aspirations, there is no evidence
that the Chinese can soon compete with the United States in
technical skill or space infrastructure. This is about political
will, said Dr. Johnson-Freese of the Naval War College. They are
challenging what we are willing to do, or willing to pay for.

Congress seems solidly allied with Mr. Griffin on the need to
finance the Moon-Mars project, but the Bush administrations
insistence on paying for the program without increasing NASAs
overall budget has put some spaceflight advocates on edge. At the
same time, scientists interested in robotic missions and space
research worry that Mr. Griffins interest in spaceflight will
shortchange those programs.

For those concerned about China, however, there was plenty to worry
about after the Chinese shot down a Fengyun-1C weather satellite in
January. The destruction of the satellite created more than 900 new
trackable pieces of debris, increasing by 10 percent the amount of
hazardous space junk circling Earth. China made matters worse by
refusing for 12 days to acknowledge responsibility for the
satellites destruction, which was viewed by most of the rest of the
world as pure folly.

Western analysts have offered several reasons for Chinas wanting to
shoot down the satellite. China may have wanted to test its ability
to destroy enemy satellites in a confrontation over Taiwan; it may
have wanted to show the United States how vulnerable satellites are
and encourage participation in talks aimed at banning weapons in
space; or, it may have just been a long-scheduled test that the
military conducted without informing the government.

Some considered the incident as evidence of another cold war
rivalry. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California,
long a space program advocate, said the Chinese are already in a
space race with us, and we havent recognized it.

But others say the time is ripe to sit down with the Chinese and
co-opt them. Dr. Johnson-Freese said the United States should
encourage China to put more satellites in space, to make them as
dependent on space assets as we are, and just as vulnerable.
++++++++

From the Start, the Space Race Was an Arms Race
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25mili.html
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Sputnik forced the Eisenhower administration to consider a scary new
world of space arms. It did so in two ways: talking peace and
preparing for war.

That duality held firm for much of the ensuing half century.
Washington publicly encouraged peaceful uses of space even while
spending billions to explore futuristic weaponry like death rays
fired from rocket ships.

By and large, those arms remained as fictional as those in The War
of the Worlds. But analysts say the Bush administration is now
tilting the balance toward deploying real armaments, mainly
antimissile interceptors that would speed into space to smash enemy
warheads. But it also wants to loft jets that can shoot deadly laser
beams and orbital battle stations that can hurl swarms of lethal
munitions.

Space weapons are still definitely part of the program, said Philip
E. Coyle III, a former director of weapon testing at the Pentagon.
But they dont emphasize it because the arms-control people come out
of the woodwork.

Critics say the overall program is costly and unnecessary, and the
funds better spent on countering such threats as terrorism.

Today, the biggest item in the nations arms budget is building
antimissile weapons. For next year, the administration wants nearly
$11 billion, including a down payment on a $300 million effort known
as the Space Test Bed.

We believe that space offers a lot of flexibility, Lieut. Gen. Henry
A. Obering III, director of the Pentagons Missile Defense Agency,
told the Senate in April. The test bed, he added, will reveal what
is within the realm of the possible and what is not.

That challenge drove the Eisenhower administration as well. Sputnik
raised alarms that Soviet nuclear warheads could soon fly halfway
around the globe to obliterate the United States, and in response
the administration scrambled to find ways to shoot them down.

The crash program eventually cost many billions of dollars and
explored such ideas such as lasers, particle beams and other
would-be weapons that now seem quite bizarre.

Project Defender, as it was known, got under way in 1958 as a secret
rush involving thousands of the nations best scientists. One bright
idea was to destroy Soviet missiles early in flight with Ballistic
Missile Boost Intercepts, or Bambi.

The scientists wanted to put hundreds of battle stations into orbit.
Tracking intercontinental ballistic missiles by their fiery exhaust,
the stations would launch rocket-propelled Bambis that would smash
the rising missiles to smithereens. To increase the odds of a direct
hit, the weapon would release a rotating wire net 60 feet wide.

Soon, Pentagon experts seized on a new device known as the laser
that they hoped would one day fire rays of light strong enough to
smash rockets and warheads.

By then, however, critics were attacking the entire antimissile
effort as deeply flawed. They argued that an enemy could deploy
cheap decoys among its warheads to outwit antimissile arms, and that
a leaky shield would be worthless because a single nuclear blast
could do so much damage.

At the same time, military scientists were finding it harder than
they had expected to zero in on enemy targets. The designs grew ever
more grandiose and elaborate, like an orbital battle station bearing
no fewer than 3,000 nuclear arms.

It turned out that it was a lot easier to draw this stuff than do
it, remarked John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a private
group in Alexandria, Va., that tracks military and space endeavors.

Eventually the Pentagon scaled back its space efforts, designing
land-based interceptors meant to fly into space on a moments notice.
And Washington began talking to Moscow about halting the burgeoning
antimissile race.

The costs of the race were becoming clearer to both superpowers.
Even a flawed antimissile system would require the other side to
take expensive countermeasures. And even a leaky defensive shield
might make a nuclear strike less unthinkable, undermining the global
balance of terror that had thus far prevented a nuclear war.

These doubts prompted Washington and Moscow to ratify a 1972 treaty
sharply limiting their antimissile forces.

But by the late 1970s, the idea of arms in space seemed to grow more
alluring. In secret, atom scientists hailed the X-ray laser, which
was to channel a nuclear blast into beams that shot across space to
zap enemy missiles.

Inspired by such reports, President Ronald Reagan issued a call on
March 23, 1983, to make enemy missiles impotent and obsolete. His
research effort, scorned by critics as Star Wars, after the movie,
cost taxpayers more than $100 billion.

John D. G. Rather, a laser expert who was an official at a military
contractor during that era, said corporate greed undermined the
effort from the start. It became a tug of war, he recalled, where
everybody and their brother wanted a piece of the action.

In 1994, the dissipated effort suddenly came back to life as
Republicans swept to power in the House. Their Contract With America
explicitly called for the rapid deployment of antimissile arms.

The Clinton administration fought the initiative, but in May 2000,
George W. Bush, then a candidate for president, promised to deploy
defensive arms at the earliest possible date.

In July 2004, at a secluded Alaskan base, military contractors
loaded a first interceptor rocket into a deep silo, followed over
the months by 15 more in the wilds and 2 others at a sister base in
California. In theory, the sites can now fire interceptors at North
Korean warheads in space. The system has cost up to $40 billion so
far.

The Bush administration is pushing more exotic efforts, including a
fleet of Boeing 747s equipped with powerful lasers. The jets would
zap enemy missiles, letting the debris fall back onto enemy
territory. To date, the program has cost $4.3 billion.

Last month, a prototype jet with a bulbous nose for aiming the laser
completed its low-power flight tests. Engineers are to install the
big laser next year, with the projects annual cost at $549 million.
Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, said the
summer of 2009 should see the first shootdown of a missile.

The administrations Space Test Bed is a first step toward orbital
antimissile arms. The secretive plan has drawn sharp fire from
antimissile critics, and Congress for now has eliminated its budget
for the next fiscal year.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge,
Mass., in May called the plan costly, ineffective against speeding
missiles, but probably good at shattering satellites.

Its real value, the group said, is certain to be recognized, and
perhaps responded to, by other nations in a space arms race.

Critics fault the overall antimissile effort as misguided and
unnecessary. Any country stupid enough to fire a missile at the
United States or its forces, they say, would suffer annihilating
retaliation.

The real danger, they say, is terrorism. The billions the Bush
administration is spending on antimissile arms should instead go to
such precautions as securing nuclear arms around the globe and
protecting the nations borders and ports.

In March 2004, as the administration prepared to install the first
interceptors in Alaska, a group of 49 retired generals and admirals
wrote Mr. Bush to argue for such a redirection. In a letter whose
lead signer was Adm. William J. Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff under Reagan and the first President Bush, the group called
a financial shift the militarily responsible course of action.
++++++++

When Science Suddenly Mattered, in Space and in Class
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25educ.html
By CORNELIA DEAN

The students in Mr. Smoots science class in 1957 in the Lewis School
in Birmingham, Ala., might not have seen Sputnik or heard its
beeping, but they felt its presence.

We stopped having throwaway science and started having real science,
recalled Shirley Malcolm, one of the students. Here I was, a black
kid in a segregated school that was under-resourced Sputnik kind of
crossed the barrier. All of a sudden everybody was talking about it,
and science was above the fold in the newspaper, and my teachers
went to institutes and really got us all engaged. It was just a time
of incredible intensity and attention to science.

For many, Sputnik was proof that American education, particularly in
science, had fallen behind. Scientists and engineers warned Congress
that the cold war was being fought with slide rules, not rifles. In
response Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958,
providing, among other things, college scholarships and other help
for aspiring scientists, engineers and mathematicians. Meanwhile,
some of the nations eminent scientists were collaborating on new
ways to teach high school physics, biology and chemistry.

Those were heady times, recalled Gerald F. Wheeler, who as a young
high school physics teacher participated in workshops on one of
these plans, the Physical Sciences Study Committees curriculum for
physics. Its ideas were so fresh they were presented on mimeographed
sheets rather than printed pages. It was very high-energy
networking, he said. Science teachers trying to do a much better job
teaching.

Today Dr. Wheeler, a physicist, heads the National Science Teachers
Association, and Dr. Malcolm, an ecologist, is director of education
and human resources at the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. And the landscape of science education is far different.

We look at declining numbers of students who think that math,
science or engineering is what they want to do, Dr. Malcolm said. We
lived many years off the investment of the race for space, she said,
but today there is a kind of complacency.

She is hardly the first to sound this warning. In 1983, a bipartisan
federal commission warned in the report A Nation at Risk that the
country was engulfed in a rising tide of mediocrity, citing
particularly a steady decline in science achievement.

More than 20 years later, a panel established by the National
Academies, the nations leading organizations in science, medicine
and engineering, said much the same thing. In Rising Above the
Gathering Storm, a report issued in 2005, the panel said the erosion
of the nations scientific and technical strength threatened Americas
strategic and economic security.

Both of these documents, like other reports and expert
recommendations, called for more scholarships for would-be
scientists, higher teacher salaries and other efforts to halt a
national erosion of technical proficiency.

But none of them produced the widespread ferment and public
engagement of Sputnik.

In the decades after the launching of the satellite, Dr. Malcolm
said, other things refocused your attention, like the civil rights
movement, the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq or even, she said, the
celebrity culture of today. Over the years, the education acts
initiatives lost their tight science focus or were absorbed by other
programs.

The end of the cold war further diminished the national urge to do
anything spectacular in science education, said Charles H. Holbrow,
who abandoned an almost-complete doctorate in history and switched
to physics after Sputnik. Dr. Holbrow, an emeritus professor of
physics at Colgate and a visiting professor at M.I.T., spoke on
Sputniks influence at a recent meeting of the American Physical
Society.

There is no shortage of ideas about how to turn things around. But
people who study the issue see several problems.

Dr. Malcolm said some of the blame must go to the way classes are
taught, with too much emphasis on memorizing terminology and not
enough on concepts. Most students receive teaching-to-the-test
instruction, she and other experts say, in which science
laboratories are organized like cookbooks, with ingredients,
equipment and instructions and results known in advance.

Ideally, Dr. Malcolm said, students should be given the chance to do
real research to experience framing a question, deciding what kind
of evidence is relevant and figuring out how to collect it. Im not
saying theres not drudgery in science, she said, but when you get to
the point where all the data are sitting in front of you and you
start seeing patterns and nature begins to speak thats a kick.

The Bush administration has started a Mathematics and Science
Initiative that aims to draw attention to the need for math and
science, train more teachers in the subjects and identify effective
instructional strategies.

But Dr. Holbrow said, We know what works, that education that
engages the students directly in a hands-on way with the materials
is much more effective.

He is among the experts on science education who say that the
hands-on approach does not mesh well with the No Child Left Behind
law, the Bush administrations major education initiative, which
emphasizes standardized tests and focuses on reading and math.

Advocates of the approach note that testing on science will begin
next year, but Dr. Wheeler says he does not hold out much hope for
it, because its not in the yearly assessment, only three times in
the 12-year span from elementary to high school.

Others point to the state and local control over school curriculums,
beloved by Americans but rare in other developed countries. Dr.
Malcolm said some states or localities may set the curriculum bar
too low, while in other countries students are asked to learn more,
to know more, to work harder.

Some experts on science education also point to the typical sequence
of high school science instruction: biology, chemistry and then
physics. It would make more sense in reverse, these people say,
because the principles of physics underlie chemistry, which is
crucial for an understanding of biology.

Perhaps the leading champion of this physics first approach is Leon
M. Lederman, a particle physicist, Nobel laureate and former
director of Fermilab whose focus lately has been on improving
science and math education. He said the current
biology-chemistry-physics sequence dates from the late 19th century,
when we didnt know enough and biology was considered a descriptive
subject.

In fact, Dr. Lederman said, biology is the most complicated of all
subjects, and it is based on chemistry and physics. And, he added,
there is nothing in chemistry, no fact of chemistry or process of
chemistry that if you ask Why does this happen? you dont go back to
physics.

He said that about a thousand high schools had adopted the physics
first approach, and preliminary reports were encouraging. But if
students took physics first, there would be a big increase in
physics enrollments and an increased need for people to teach it.
And drawing people trained in science into the nations classrooms is
already a problem.

We do not respond to market forces with regard to our science-math
people, Dr. Malcolm said.

Dr. Lederman believes that the only way we are going to get serious
is if we rouse the public.

A public that has a sense of science makes democracy work, he said.
If you dont understand the language in which people are discussing
global warming or all the other issues, you cannot have a democracy.

Today echoes of Sputnik-era science curriculums live on in some
textbooks, Dr. Wheeler said, but in terms of the mass market, it
just did not make it. In part, he and others say, that is because
many teachers found these programs difficult to teach and worried
that they reached the brightest students but left the others behind.

Organizations like the National Science Foundation have programs to
advance science education, and the American Association for the
Advancement of Science has Project 2061, aimed at producing
widespread science literacy by the time Halleys Comet makes its next
appearance.

And in response, in part, to the Gathering Storm report, Congress
last month passed the 21st Century Competitiveness Act, which, among
other things, would provide more money for science education.

But that was just the authorization, Dr. Malcolm said. I dont know
where the money is going to come from.
++++++++++

Two Early Pioneers Continue Their Work at the Frontier
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25voyager.html
By KENNETH CHANG

Twenty years after Sputnik, on Sept. 5, 1977, NASAs Voyager 1
spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral. Its twin, Voyager 2,
had been launched a couple of weeks earlier, on Aug. 20, 1977.

Three decades later, both Voyagers continue traveling outward, still
taking measurements and still radioing their findings back to Earth.
Voyager 1, now more than 9.6 billion miles away, is the most distant
human-made object, traveling at 38,400 miles per hour. It has
entered the outermost neighborhood of the solar system, the
heliopause, where the winds of charged particles flying out from the
Sun have diminished to subsonic speeds.

When the solar winds come to a stop, Voyager 1 will have officially
left the solar system and entered interstellar space. That moment is
not expected until 2015. But remarkably, scientists say, the
spacecraft might continue transmitting its data back to Earth.
Voyagers power supply, a chunk of radioactive plutonium, should last
until 2020.

Voyager 2, which took a slower trajectory, is a mere 7.8 billion
miles away and has yet to reach the heliopause, although there are
signs that it is very close. Id be surprised if we havent crossed it
by the end of this year, said Edward C. Stone, project scientist of
the Voyager mission.

Voyager 2 might make it to interstellar space a decade from now.

Various components of the spacecraft have worn out, scientists say,
and the Voyagers now rely on backup systems. But the outer solar
system is a relatively benign place. The Voyagers were built to
survive the intense radiation belts of Jupiter and, while crossing
Saturns rings, possible impacts with ring particles. After those
obstacles had been passed, then we knew had a good chance of lasting
a long time, Dr. Stone said.

Dr. Stone, who was named to project scientist in 1972, hopes to last
a while longer, too.

Ive been working on this for 35 years, said Dr. Stone, now 71. Im
not going to give up yet.
+++++++++

Present for the Beginning: A Khrushchev Remembers
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25serg.html
By WARREN E. LEARY

PROVIDENCE, R.I. He is 72 now, a distinguished engineer and author
who holds several advanced degrees and a senior fellowship at the
Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. But
50 years ago, he had a singular vantage point on the Soviet Unions
triumphant leap into space.

Sergei N. Khrushchev, then 22, was an engineering student who often
traveled with his father, the Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev.
In a recent interview at his office here, he recalled that his
countrymen were startled by the speed and intensity of Americas
response to the success of Sputnik.

The U.S. couldnt believe someone could be ahead of them in
technology, Dr. Khrushchev said in fluent English tinged with a
Russian accent. It was shock and fear. We were surprised by the
reaction.

It was not that the Soviets missed the importance of Sputnik, he
said, but it was seen as one more thing in Soviet technical
progress, one more achievement.

We had built the first nuclear power plant, our MIG fighters were
breaking aviation records, we had launched a successful jet
airliner, he continued. It was one more thing for us and we were
proud, but it was a shock in the United States.

The day after the launching, Pravda ran a small article on its front
page describing the development in dry, clinical language, telling
people how to listen to the new moons signal and promising bigger
and more capable scientific satellites. Elsewhere in the world,
newspapers ran banner headlines and multiple articles speculating
about what it meant for the future.

Once that reaction became clear, Dr. Khrushchev said, Soviet
officials quickly decided to make the most of it. We must make a big
noise about this, he said his father declared. Yes, make a big
noise.

The following day, Pravda devoted most of its front page to Sputnik,
its banner headline reading, Worlds First Artificial Satellite of
Earth Created in Soviet Nation. The issue included congratulations
from scientists in the West; a map showing the satellites track over
the Soviet Union and (for good measure) American cities; and even
poems with titles like Leap Into the Future.

Roald Z. Sagdeev, a former director of the Soviet Institute for
Space Research who is now a professor at the University of Maryland,
said that even if the United States had launched a satellite before
the Soviets, there still would have been active competition in space
because both powers had rockets and visionary people to make it
possible.

But when Sputnik went up first, Dr. Sagdeev said, there was this
feeling of My God, we are catching up with the United States! In a
few years, maybe we will go ahead. That hope meant a lot to the
Soviet people.

Sergei Khrushchev is taller than his father, but when he turns, his
profile bears a momentary resemblance to him. He recalled that his
father, who had wanted to be an engineer before being swept into
politics, had a keen interest in missiles and space.

In the 1950s, deeply concerned about an attack from the United
States, Khrushchev pressed his military to develop intercontinental
ballistic missiles that could reach American soil.

Sergei P. Korolev, an engineer and management mastermind considered
the father of the Soviet space program, was in charge of developing
that nations first ICBM, the R-7. A crucial moment in space history
occurred on Feb. 27, 1956, when Khrushchev and an entourage
(including his son) visited Korolevs offices and saw a full-scale
model of the huge R-7 rocket. As the impressed visitors were about
to leave, Korolev asked Khrushchev for a moment to discuss another
project.

Then Korolev took Father to a corner, Dr. Khrushchev said, and
showed him a model of a strange object that he said the R-7 could
send into space and fly around the Earth like a small moon. He
talked about how eventually these objects could go to the Moon and
even send people into space.

Korolev said the feat could be done at little cost and would be a
prestigious first for the Soviet Union.

Father was very interested, Dr. Khrushchev said, and had only one
question: Would this hurt the ICBM program in any way or put it
behind schedule? Korolev said no, and then he got the O.K. from
Khrushchev to proceed.

That event led to the night of Oct. 4 the next year, when Khrushchev
was visiting Ukraine to witness military maneuvers, talk with local
officials and discuss with some generals his plan to oust Marshal
Georgi Zhukov, the World War II hero suspected of planning a coup.

It was late in the Mariinsky Palace, where the premiers party was
staying, but Khrushchev stayed up talking to officials around a
dinner table as he awaited a telephone call, which came shortly
before midnight. Father came back from another room with a smile on
his face, and I knew then that Sputnik had been launched, Dr.
Khrushchev said.

An outstanding event has happened, Father announced. Korolev has
called me and reported that a little while ago the artificial
satellite was put into orbit. As Khrushchev talked about rockets and
what the event meant, those in the room listened politely but with
little interest, Dr. Khrushchev said.

The aide who had summoned Khrushchev for the phone call returned to
the room and turned on a radio in a corner, setting it to the right
frequency for the group to hear a few moments of the beeping of the
satellite signal before the craft faded over the horizon.

Father listened intently and happily, Dr. Khrushchev said. When it
was over, he ended the meeting and went to bed. It had been a good
day.
++++++++++

Space Age Artifacts? The Smithsonian Is Just the Beginning
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25dest.html
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Among the relics of the American space program, a few have achieved
iconic status John Glenns Mercury capsule, the Apollo 11 command
module, rocks from the Moon.

Then there is the Airstream trailer rediscovered last spring at a
fish farm in Alabama.

The surplus trailer had most recently been used as housing by the
Fish and Wildlife Service. But in late 1969, it was temporary
quarters for the Apollo 12 crew on their return from the Moon.
Worried that astronauts might pick up a lunar microbe and transmit
it to earthlings, NASA outfitted the trailer with blowers and
filters, and the astronauts remained in it for a few days until
receiving a clean bill of health.

The Airstream is being restored and will be on display beginning in
January at the United States Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville,
Ala.

There are two other surviving M.Q.F.s, as the initial-happy agency
called the mobile quarantine facilities, including one from Apollo
11 at the National Air and Space Museums Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center
near Dulles International Airport in Virginia.

Living quarters of a different sort can be found in the Wisconsin
Dells, where a spare core module of the Mir space station is on
exhibition at the Tommy Bartlett Exploratory. The 43-foot-long
module, one of several built by the Russian space agency, was bought
from a Moscow museum a decade ago by Mr. Bartlett, a Midwestern
entrepreneur best known for his waterskiing thrill show, which can
be seen next door.

One of the worlds largest test stands can be viewed at the Stennis
Space Center in western Mississippi. It is a 400-foot-tall structure
where engineers test fired the huge engines used to power the Saturn
V Moon rocket. A 39-foot-thick concrete anchor prevented the test
structure itself from flying into orbit. The test stand is viewable
from a visitors center, and because rocket testing continues there,
it is sometimes possible to watch an actual test.

The Stennis center is all about engines. To see an actual rocket,
one of the best places is a museum dedicated to the arms race, not
the space race. The Titan Missile Museum, a preserved cold war
complex south of Tucson, has a Titan II missile visitors can
practically touch. This one was part of a program to hurl nuclear
warheads at the Soviet Union. But the same rockets were used to hurl
the Gemini astronauts into space.

Not all space relics are so large or so serious. One of the oddest
is the hybrid lunar scoop and 6 iron that Alan B. Shepard Jr. used
to hit a golf ball on the Moon. It is the property of the United
States Golf Association and is now on display at the Kansas
Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson.

Mr. Shepard was also the first American in space, riding a Redstone
rocket on a suborbital flight in May 1961. He was preceded five
months earlier by Ham, a chimpanzee who was the first hominid in
space.

Hams ride was no walk in the park. His capsule landed hundreds of
miles off target, and a valve failure caused it to become almost
fully depressurized in flight. They were the kinds of mishaps that
later made the Apollo 13 crew famous. No one ever made a blockbuster
movie about Ham, who died in 1983 at age 27. But those who want to
pay him homage can visit his grave at the New Mexico Museum of Space
History in Alamogordo.
++++++++++

Voices: 10/4/57
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25voices.html
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

The launching of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, was a life-changing event
one that ignited imaginations, dictated the course of careers, and
changed the way people thought about science, education and global
politics. The New York Times asked scientists and others who lived
through it (and a few who were yet to be born) to reflect on what
Sputnik meant to them.

Homer H. Hickam, 64, author of Rocket Boys, a memoir adapted for the
movie October Sky.

I was a high school sophomore in Coalwood, W. Va., and I read in the
newspaper that Sputnik was going to fly over southern West Virginia.
At the appointed hour, our neighbors came to our yard to help me
watch it. My father said, Well, they can all go home because
President Eisenhower will never allow anything Russian to fly over
Coalwood!

But at the appointed moment, Sputnik flew over Coalwood. If it had
been God in his chariot that had flown over, I could not have been
more impressed. It was awe-inspiring. Sputnik looked like a bright
star that moved with such utter purpose that nothing could stop it;
and I, in that moment, realized I wanted to be part of the movement
into space. In that moment, I decided to get a job with Wernher von
Braun.

I ended up having a 17-year career in NASA, as a designer of
spacecraft and an astronaut training manager.
------
Ernst Stuhlinger, 93, former director, space science, Marshall Space
Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., and former deputy to Wernher von
Braun.

Exactly a week before the Sputnik launch, on Sept. 27, 1957, I went
to our commanding general in Huntsville, Gen. John Medaris, and told
him, General, I have a number of indications that the Russians are
very close to launching a satellite.

The head of the Russian Academy of Sciences had mentioned in the
news that the Russians were planning to launch a satellite in the
next couple of days. The Russians even gave the frequency of the
transmitter which would make the sounds of the little satellite
audible on Earth. I was in contact with a number of colleagues who
told me this.

He didnt believe it. He said: Ernst, calm down. Dont get nervous.
The Russians are not ready to launch a satellite.

A week later, I was in a taxi in Barcelona and I heard the news on
the radio. I said to myself, Well, I told you so.

It was very exciting for me, of course. The next thing I thought
was, I have a lot of admiration for the Russian space people who did
that. I thought: You people in Russia, you won the first round. You
may even win the second round a man in orbit. But we have a good
chance to win the third round, and that will be the trip to the
Moon. And then I immediately felt a kind of thankfulness to the
Russian colleagues because it was a wonderful wake-up call for us
Americans.

When I came back from Barcelona, I met with Dr. von Braun, who also
had the feeling that it was very fortunate that the Russians had
launched their satellite. He was very excited about it. We had many
plans on our hands, and this gave us the assurance that we were on
the right track with our plans. And when you think how successful
our trip to the Moon was almost exactly 10 years later we were on
the right track!
-----------
Walter Cronkite, 90, former anchor and managing editor, CBS Evening
News.

I was almost certainly in my office at CBS when I heard about the
launch. I was rather excited that we were making a major step
forward in the space program both the Russians and us.

I had been a reporter in the Soviet Union and I knew they were
working on space, but I didnt realize that they were going to come
to it so much more quickly than we were. In Moscow, youd read stuff
in journals and papers that indicated that there was some progress,
but we didnt know what the Russians actually had. We had a sense
that they were interested in space, but we didnt know how advanced
it was. So when Sputnik came, it was quite a shock for us. It
awakened a lot of people to the space program. Sputnik awakened
everyone.
----------
Esther Dyson, 56, of EDventure Holdings, investor in space and
Internet start-ups, and daughter of the physicist Freeman Dyson.

We werent astonished by the Sputnik launch in my family, because my
father knew Russian scientists and we knew that Russians were really
smart.

Im hoping that the next thing that happens is that the Chinese will
do something similar go to the Moon or do something with Mars. It
will have the same impact. People will say, My gosh, we need to do
something with our space program, which at the moment is suffering
from a lack of funding, attention and respect. Maybe the Chinese
will give us a wake-up call the same way the Russians did.
--------
Sir Martin Rees, 65, astronomer royal of Britain.

The Sputnik launch was widely reported in the U.K. There was a
special interest because the Jodrell Bank radio telescope had just
been completed, and it was one of the few instruments in the world
capable of tracking Sputnik.

I was 15, and I recall watching those reports from Jodrell Bank on
my parents flickering black-and-white television.

Certainly in the U.K. in 1957, there was general admiration of the
Soviet space program, though many of us were indifferent as to
whether it was the U.S. or the Soviets who had been to space first.
It was, for us, a spectator sport a byproduct of superpower rivalry.

Of course, we followed the subsequent developments of the Russian
space program: first dog in orbit, first man in orbit. When the
cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin visited the U.K., he was mobbed by
enthusiastic crowds. Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, a man
well attuned to the national character, cynically noted that the
crowds would have been bigger if the Russians had sent the dog.

Those who are now middle-aged can recall the exciting progress that
culminated in Apollo. But for young people today its ancient
history: they know the Americans put men on the Moon; they know the
Egyptians built the pyramids. But both episodes seem ancient history
endeavors driven by arcane motives hard now to understand.
--------
Neil deGrasse Tyson, 48, director, Hayden Planetarium at the
American Museum of Natural History.

I was born a year and a day after Sputnik.

Even as a child in the Bronx, I was aware of its influence on
society because the space launches were in the headlines. The move
of the United States to compete on the frontier of space created an
atmosphere of great interest in science. However, the people NASA
was lining up to send into space, in those early years, were many
skin shades lighter than I was. It meant that NASA did not have me
in mind in this new frontier of space. And so my interest in the
universe was not born of NASA, but came from books, teachers and
visits to New Yorks Hayden Planetarium.

I never wanted to be an astronaut. As a child in the 1960s, the
civil rights movement was what engaged my attention. There was a
limit to how much I could celebrate America putting white military
pilots into space, while my family was being denied the option to
move into the apartment building of our choice. For these reasons, I
became an astrophysicist not because of NASA, but in spite of it.
------------
Ursula K. Le Guin, 77, author of many science fiction novels,
including The Left Hand of Darkness.

I was busy having babies at the time. But I thought Sputnik was
cool. I do remember going out to watch the little thing go by. It
blinked. I think it blinked as it turned. Sputnik was different from
the cold war mindset of the time. I felt proud, as a human. Weve
done something. It didnt matter whether it was us or the Russians.
---------
Margaret J. Geller, senior scientist, Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory.

For many in the physical sciences, Sputnik had a big impact. There
was a large increase in spending for science, and there were
increased physics courses. The number of undergraduates getting
degrees in physics peaked in 1970-1, as a result of this investment.

By the time I went to graduate school, 1970, it was the beginning of
cuts in support for the physical sciences. That has continued till
today, eroding our scientific and economic leadership. When I was an
undergraduate, people going into science had the idea that the
United States would lead broadly in scientific research. That is no
longer the national view.
---------
Tom Lehrer, 79, mathematician and writer-performer of satirical
songs including Wernher von Braun and New Math.

I was of course aware of Sputnik, but I didnt give it much thought.
I was surprised at all the fuss. I was much more impressed by color
television.

It did have, however, at least one memorable, though ephemeral,
consequence. Americans were evidently afraid that Sputnik was proof
that the Russians were getting ahead of us because of the inadequate
science and math teaching in our schools. In an attempt to attack
the problem, some committee came up with a ridiculous curriculum
called New Math, in which they tried to teach kids abstract concepts
that they couldnt understand. The teachers werent prepared to teach
it, and the kids couldnt have cared less about it and its dubious
practicality. Despite the money poured into it by the government,
the fad soon died of natural causes.
--------
Edward T. Lu, 44, former NASA astronaut.

Sputnik happened six years before I was born. I know that it drove
the U.S. to send spacecraft, and later men, into space, and so it
indirectly changed where I ended up in my life. I was an astronaut
for 12 years, a profession that didnt exist before the events of the
1960s and 1970s.

In 2003, I was on the International Space Station for six months
with the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko. He told me hed been
named Yuri for Yuri Gagarin, their first man into space. If you look
at Russia, there are a lot of Yuris of a certain age because of Yuri
Gagarin.
----------
José Vázquez, 44, who teaches the course History of the Universe at
New York University.

Though I wasnt born at the time of Sputnik, I experienced the
reforms it brought. My teachers told me that after the launching of
Sputnik, the public school I attended in Puerto Rico began offering
revised science courses that focused on underlying principles and
inquiry-based learning. Prior to that, biology primarily consisted
of the fern/frog approach, dissecting frogs and drawing pictures of
ferns. Students like myself were not prepared to undertake basic
science research.

After Sputnik, there were new policies to attract gifted students
from minorities to the sciences. I benefited from those. Without
these programs, I would never have had the means to pursue a
scientific education. Prior to Sputnik, most Puerto Ricans
youngsters were restricted to what was called a life adjustment
curriculum, where the focus was on vocational education or joining
the armed forces.

To me, the impact of Sputnik was transforming.
++++++++++

Wanted: Billionaire Risk-Takers Seeking Eternal Renown
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25tier.html
By JOHN TIERNEY

If you are a billionaire, ideally a decabillionaire, pondering your
legacy, I have a proposition and a question for you. The proposition
is immortal glory for you (plus, as a potential spinoff, the
survival of humanity). The question is: How many rich people are
still admired five centuries after their death for what they did
with their money?

Try to name some pre-1500 plutocrats. Its not easy. You might come
up with a pharaoh or two still remembered for his tomb, or art
patrons like the Medicis. But these are risky role models. How could
you be sure anything you built would even last 500 years, much less
impress our descendants? What are the odds that modern art will be
remembered in 2600 as a second Renaissance?

But consider these role models: Prince Henry the Navigator, King
Ferdinand, Queen Isabella. Prince Henry ensured his place in history
textbooks by financing the 15th-century Portuguese expeditions down
the African coast that began the Age of Exploration. Then Ferdinand
and Isabella sponsored Columbus, turning themselves into permanent
one-name celebrities: a Brad and Angelina for the ages.

Youre too late to start a new age of exploration Nikita S.
Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy beat you to it but a new world is
there for the taking. Why waste your money on football teams or
Americas Cup yachts when you could send the first humans to Mars?

This is a once-in-a-planets-lifetime opportunity to win eternal
renown and perform a lasting public service that wont be done
anytime soon by any public agency. Politicians are understandably
leery of a Mars mission, and not only because the payoff would come
decades after the next election. Its hard to make a moral case for
cutting social programs and science research (like climatology or
unmanned space probes) to spend tens or hundreds of billions of
dollars to put a human on Mars.

But a billionaire doesnt have to answer to voters. You can take the
long view of Mars as our next home, a wilderness to be terraformed
into a livable backup planet in case of disaster on Earth. And you
can get to Mars much more quickly and cheaply than NASA, because you
can avoid pork-barrel spending and you can take more risks. Its not
a public scandal when private explorers make fatal mistakes.

Robert Zubrin, the head of the Mars Society, figures a private
explorer could get there within a decade for $8 billion to $10
billion, and a good chunk of that cost maybe all of it could be
offset with revenues from media rights and marketing tie-ins. Elon
Musk, the Paypal founder whos now building rockets in his new
company, SpaceX, guesses it could be done for just $5 billion.

It would be neat to have a one-time $5 billion mission to Mars, he
told me, but $5 billion is still far too much. Theres no way that we
could establish any kind of base on Mars or any kind of
self-sustaining biology there. We need to get that first mission to
under $1 billion, and then the later missions down to under $100
million.

Mr. Musk says his goal is to help establish a colony on Mars by
lowering the cost of launching payloads into space, but his companys
not ready to go up there until the venture looks profitable.

Sir Richard Branson is in a similar position with his new company,
Virgin Galactic, which is hoping to make money by taking customers
on suborbital flights.

Wed leap at the chance to go Mars, he told me, explaining that hed
be glad to start working on it if NASA offered prizes for
entrepreneurs who came up with the best plans and pieces of hardware
for the mission. The prizes would be a wonderfully cheap way to spur
innovation, but NASA and Congress show no interest in offering them.

So for now it takes someone with deep pockets to aim for Mars. If
you dont want to put up all the cash yourself, you could form a
consortium, like the Peary Arctic Club that financed the attempts to
reach the North Pole, or the private investors who joined Ferdinand
and Isabella in sponsoring Columbus.

Theres also a clever way that you could raise money and stoke public
interest while retaining control. Offer everyone a chance to ride on
your spaceship. You could run a straight lottery on the Internet, or
sell shares in a corporation that gave each shareholder a ticket in
a lottery. There could be regular drawings, with each winner getting
a chance to undergo training and testing with the astronauts.

The grand winner, the one who gets a seat on the spaceship, could be
chosen either by you or by the public. Imagine the ratings for
Martian Idol. (If youd like to see some preliminary market research
on the lottery, check out tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com, where Im
asking nonbillionaire readers how much they would spend on tickets.)

I think you could more than break even on the expedition, but maybe
it sounds too complicated. If youre too busy to organize an
expedition yourself, you could instead offer a prize or a series of
prizes (and let the X Prize Foundation manage it for you). By
putting up $5 billion, preferably more, you might start a
competition as exciting as the race to the South Pole a century ago.

A prize would be blessedly simple for you, but it does have one
drawback. Although prizes spurred many of the early feats in
aviation, we remember the winners, not the sponsors. How many people
know that a New York hotelier named Raymond Orteig put up the
$25,000 prize won by Charles Lindbergh for flying from New York to
Paris?

But everybody remembers the Spirit of St. Louis, just as they
remember the Santa Maria and the Mayflower and Apollo 11. So here is
my last piece of advice. Whether you offer a prize or send your own
expedition, insist that the ship carrying the first humans to Mars
be named after you. Sure, youll be accused of egotism, but pay the
critics no heed. Theyll be dead soon enough. Your name will live
forever.
++++++++++

One Giant Leap, Followed by Decades of Baby Steps
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25cosm.html
By DENNIS OVERBYE

This was going to be a sour grapes column.

Next week on Oct. 4, it will be 50 years since Sputnik launched the
world into the so-called space age.

Some space age. It has been 35 years since anybody was on the Moon,
or more than 300 miles from Earth, for that matter. NASA says it
will be 2020 before astronauts get back to the Moon, meaning that it
will have taken twice as long this time from presidential
declaration (Bush in 2003) to actual landing than the first time
around, when President John F. Kennedy declared in 1961 that America
would land on the Moon within the decade, and Apollo 11 launched
eight years later. You are free to make your own guesses about Mars.

If youre not a reporter covering the space program or a scientist
who uses space instruments, you probably have never met anyone who
has seen the curve of the Earth with his or her own eyes. It is as
if the response to Christopher Columbuss voyage had been confined to
mapping the reefs off Spain.

It wasnt supposed to be like this.

When Sputnik was launched, transforming what my parents thought of
as an unhealthy obsession with science fiction and all things atomic
or cosmic into the stuff of patriotic heroism, my friends and I
already knew how the future was supposed to unfold: Arthur C. Clarke
(Sir Arthur now), Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury,
among many others, had laid it all out in stories and novels that we
stole from the local drug store: the space stations, the Moonbases
and Mars colonies, the lonely asteroid prospectors, the nuclear wars
back home, the eventual dispersal of humanity to far flung stars
where Earth is only a dim legend.

The great space visionaries like Wernher von Braun, Robert H.
Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, as well as the
men and women of NASA, all drank the same Kool-Aid. But NASA, as the
current administrator Michael D. Griffin will be the first to tell
you, works for the president. As a result, true believers over the
ages have had to hitch their wagons to whatever political star is in
vogue.

Sputnik was an almost accidental outgrowth of the arms race, as
Matthew Brzezinskis new history, Red Moon Rising, makes grippingly
clear. Neither Nikita S. Khrushchev nor Dwight D. Eisenhower
understood at first how important and ominous that little beeping
ball orbiting the Earth was. After the United States reclaimed its
missile manhood by landing men on the Moon, President Richard M.
Nixon had no more use for the Apollo program.

Space aficionados have been wandering in the political wilderness
ever since, looking for a way to make cosmic affairs matter again.
Curiosity? It doesnt seem to be enough to loosen the purse strings
these days. American economic competitiveness? A recent NASA slogan,
NASA explores for answers that power our future, didnt exactly stir
the blood. To escape some planetary apocalypse like an asteroid or
plague? So far we cant seem to get out of our own way regarding
greenhouse gases and global warming.

I can think of many much worse ways than space exploration to put my
tax dollars to work, but the space dream has been dead for me since
the early 1980s, when I chanced to see a particular photograph of a
shuttle launching. The photo was taken from a chase plane. It shows
a tower of smoke rising upward from the Earths surface, which is
blurred by the haze of altitude and clouds. Near the towers glowing
top, like a pinhead on Jacks beanstalk, is the space shuttle,
dwarfed by its own plume, roaring away as hard as it can.

There, on a pillar of violence, is your dream of transcendence, of
freedom, of escape from killer rocks in the sky, boiling oceans or
whatever postmodern plague science comes up with. Of galactic
immortality.

That picture broke my heart. Id seen rocket launches before and been
appropriately chastened by the thunder and heat it took to break
free of gravity, but I had never seen it from such a perspective. So
much work for such a small step into the universe. How could this
ever be routine, economical or safe?

Dont get me wrong. In the long run, humans or their successors have
no choice but to get out there where the asteroids and cosmic rays
roam. The Earth, after all, is doomed to boil in a billion or so
years.

Recently I sent an e-mail message to Sir Arthur asking him how he
felt about the progress, or lack thereof, in space exploration since
Sputnik. In addition to being a visionary writer, he invented the
idea of the communications satellite, and for the last few decades
has been plugging the idea of a space elevator, which could haul
people and things nonviolently to geosynchronous orbit, 22,240 miles
high, perhaps with superstrong nanotubes. He was encouraged by the
prospects of such a contraption and the advent of what he called
citizen astronauts.

I remain optimistic that the best is yet to come, he wrote from Sri
Lanka.

In fact, the last 50 years havent all been a letdown. Science,
despite being relegated to the tail end of NASAs budget, has begun
to illuminate space and the universe to a degree no one imagined,
probably because none of my sci-fi gurus foresaw Moores Law, by
which the capabilities of computer chips have doubled every year and
a half.

Who dreamed that space would be peppered with black holes popping
off X-rays? Who dreamed that you could have a baby picture of the
universe when it was only 400,000 years old and a seething fireball?
Spy satellites have allowed the United States and Russia to take the
first timid steps backward from atomic catastrophe surely that
deserves a Nobel Prize for some spook somewhere.

As I write this, the Mars Phoenix lander is approaching Mars with,
among other things, the names of 250,000 Earthlings, including those
of my wife and daughter. Voyager 1 is leaving the solar system with
a recording of Beethoven, Chuck Berry, whale songs and the sound of
a kiss, among other things. It wont be long before space probes are
carrying genome sequences and even genes.

In this context the grapes dont seem so sour to me (although there
is a lot more science they could be doing).

Our machines have gone ahead of us. But someday people will hike
through the canyons of Mars. I just dont know when or how or who.
Maybe it will be the Chinese, who seem to still feel that they have
something to prove as a nation. Maybe it will be billionaire
adventurers like the Google founders who just put up a $25 million
prize for the first private Moon lander, who are free to risk their
own money and dont have to answer to Congress when things go wrong,
as they sometimes will who make the dream come true, for at least a
few.

There will always be someone willing to ride a pillar of fire into
the unknown, but it wont be me. I dont want to go to Mars anymore. I
no longer have the stuff if in fact I ever did to camp out in a tin
can for two years. Id be afraid to be so far from the Earth and my
family for so long.

I dont want my daughter to go either, for the same reason. When our
children do go off forever across the void then we will have a
chance to find out if we are as strong as our ancestors who bundled
their children onto ships in the hope they would reach a better
world across the ocean. Someday, somebody will go and not come back,
and humans will have escaped their nest, for better or for worse.

There is no galactic immortality. Everything we are and have done,
the whole Milky Way with its billions of stars, is eventually
destined to be swallowed up in a black hole. Neither ourselves nor
our works will survive the end of the universe, if dark energy
eventually blows it apart, no matter what we do. All we own is the
present, so it behooves each of us to live each moment impeccably,
guided by whatever lights we choose. Speaking only for myself, while
we are around we might as well embrace the light and the unknown,
the violence and vastness that terrify us.

My sci-fi dreams are dead, but Sir Richard Branson and his fellow
space entrepreneurs say they have business plans. If Mr. Branson
manages to get the cosmologist Stephen Hawking into space and back,
he will have done more for the cause of space exploration than 25
years of space shuttles going around in circles.

Watching the Apollo astronauts recount their travels to the Moon in
the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, I was wiping away tears
for a time when we had bold dreams and leaders who, for whatever
motives, could make them happen. Neil Armstrongs footprints on the
Moon are as crisp as the day he made them.

I will always be glad I was alive when he took that small step, even
if we are still waiting for the next big leap.
++++++

The Innovative Space Spinoffs, Both Real and Mythical
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25spin.html
By KENNETH CHANG

Tang, no matter what youve heard, was not an invention of the space
program. Neither were Teflon or Velcro.

Its true that astronauts drank Tang, the orange-flavored breakfast
drink developed by General Foods, in orbit; that Teflon is, in fact,
a component of spacesuits and heat shields; and that Velcro is a
handy way of keeping things from floating away in zero gravity. But
all three products were invented for earthbound use long before NASA
sent them into space.

So to what extent has the space program transformed modern life and
contributed to Americas prosperity?

Experts note some fundamental contributions. The satellites that
began beaming television signals instantaneously around the globe,
peering intently at developing hurricanes and studying the planets
changing climate.

Your life would be fundamentally different if we didnt have those
things, said Roger D. Launius, a space historian at the Smithsonian
Institution.

Other spinoffs are harder to identify, and their economic effects
are debatable.

Magnetic resonance imaging machines were not invented by NASA, but
software algorithms written to sharpen the images sent back from the
Moon were used by Landsat satellites for pictures of Earth and then
adapted by medical researchers to produce clearer M.R.I. images.

Various studies have said that what NASA spends on the space program
in 2007, its budget was $16.8 billion, about 15 cents a day for each
American or 0.7 percent of the overall federal budget is at least
tripled in returns to the economy.

Doubters might argue that something like the image-processing
algorithms used in M.R.I.s would have been written anyway, even
without NASAs help.

Mr. Launius said spinoffs should not be viewed as a primary
justification for the space program.

Spinoffs are serendipity to the mission that NASA is seeking to
accomplish, he said. Trying to justify the program on the basis of
serendipity is, I think, kind of misplaced.

In a speech this year, Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator,
made a similar argument, adding that the grocery and hardware stores
are the wrong places to look for space spinoffs, anyway.

The real spinoffs are at a higher level, Mr. Griffin said.

Any company that seeks to build a rocket or satellite component or
who even wants to supply nuts, bots and screws to the space
industry, he said, must work to a higher level of precision than
human beings had to do before the space industry came along.

And that fact absolutely resonates through our entire industrial
base. What is the value of that? I cant calculate it, but I know its
there.