A new book looking at the inner lives of astronauts is Larry Klaes’ subject today. Planning for long-term missions like a manned trip to Mars requires a great deal of work on closed systems, as we’ve recently discussed. But we also have to consider the psychological issues raised by confinement in a cramped environment for long durations, issues that are one thing in the confines of low-Earth orbit but perhaps another when far from the home world.
Early on the morning of February 5, 2007, several officers from the Orlando Police Department in Florida were summoned to the Orlando International Airport, where they arrested a female suspect. This woman was alleged to have attacked another woman she had been stalking while the latter sat in her car in the airport parking lot. Judging by the various items later found in the vehicle the suspect had used as transportation to the Sunshine State all the way from her home in Houston, Texas, her ultimate intent was to kidnap and possibly conduct even worse actions upon her victim.
While such a criminal incident is sadly not uncommon in modern society, what surprised and even shocked the public upon learning what happened was the occupation of the perpetrator: She was a veteran NASA astronaut, a flight engineer named Lisa Nowak who had flown on the Space Shuttle Discovery in July of 2006. As a member of the STS-121 mission, Nowak spent almost two weeks in Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS), performing among other duties the operation of the winged spacecraft’s robotic arm.
It seems that the woman who Nowak went after, a U.S. Air Force Captain named Colleen Shipman, was in a relationship with a male astronaut named William Oefelein. Nowak had also been romantically involved with Oefelein earlier, but he had gradually broken off their relationship and started a new one with Shipman. Oefelein would later state that he thought Nowak seemed fine about his ending their affair and moving on to another woman. However, by then it was painfully and very publicly obvious that Oefelein had not thoroughly consulted enough with his former companion on this matter.
NASA would eventually dismiss Nowak and Oefelein from their astronaut corps, the first American space explorers ever formally forced to leave the agency. NASA also created an official Code of Conduct for their employees in the wake of this publicity nightmare.
Now I have no documented proof of this, but I strongly suspect that the Nowak incident played a large but officially unacknowledged role in the creation of the recent offering by the NASA History Program Office book titled Psychology of Space Exploration: Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective (NASA SP-2011-4411), edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, a professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the California Institute for Integral Studies, as well as the director of Interstellar Message Composition at The SETI Institute.
Quoting from a NASA press release (11-223), which appeared about the same time as the book:
Psychology of Space Exploration is a collection of essays from leading space psychologists. They place their recent research in historical context by looking at changes in space missions and psychosocial science over the past 50 years. What makes up the “right stuff” for astronauts has changed as the early space race gave way to international cooperation.
The book itself is available online in several formats.
From the Right Stuff to All Kinds of Stuff
It may seem obvious to say that astronauts are as human as the rest of us, but in fact our culture has long viewed those who boldly go into the Final Frontier atop a controlled series of explosions otherwise known as a rocket in a much different and higher regard than most mere mortals. Even before the first person donned a silvery spacesuit and stepped inside a cramped and conical Mercury spacecraft mated to a former ICBM for a brief arcing flight over the Atlantic Ocean in 1961, NASA’s first group of human space explorers – known collectively as the Mercury Seven – were being presented from their very first press briefing in 1959 as virtual demigods who had the right skills and mental attitude to brave the unknown perils of the Universe.
Image: The Mercury Seven stand in front of a F-106 Delta Dart. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
The Mercury Seven astronauts were not just men: They were an elite breed of space warriors ready to conquer the Cosmos who also represented the best that the United States of America had to offer when it came to their citizens, their technology, and their science. The nation’s first space explorers may have been ultimately human and limited in various ways, even flawed, but the agency’s goal was to keep any issues in check through their missions at the least and preferably during their full tenure with NASA.
By the time of Nowak’s incident, astronauts may not have been the demigods of the days of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, but they were still looked upon as highly capable people who ventured to places few others have gone and who did not give into human passions beyond a few moments of wonder at the Universe, realistic or not. This is why Nowak and Oefelein’s behaviors were so shocking to the public even four decades after the first generations of space explorers.
There are two reasons why I brought up the dramatic events of 2007 with Lisa Nowak: The first is my aforementioned hypothesis that what took place between the former astronaut and her perceived romantic rival led to NASA feeling the need to examine their policies regarding the human beings they send into space and formally documenting the resulting studies.
The second reason is that Psychology of Space Exploration needed more of these personal stories about the astronauts and cosmonauts. Now certainly there were some of these throughout the book: The Introduction to Chapter 1 relays a tale about a test pilot who was applying to be an astronaut who told an evaluating psychiatrist about the time the experimental aircraft he was flying started spinning out of control. The pilot responded to this emergency by calmly leafing through the vehicle’s operating manual to solve the immediate problem, which he obviously did.
Nevertheless, more of these kinds of stories would have not only made the book a bit less dry as it was in places, but they would have added immeasurably to the information content of this work.
As just one example, in Chapter 2 on page 26, the author mentions (from another source) that the Soviet space missions “Soyuz 21 (1976), Soyuz T-14 (1985), and Soyuz TM-2 (1987) were shortened because of mood, performance, and interpersonal issues. Brian Harvey wrote that psychological factors contributed to the early evacuation of a Salyut 7 [space station] crew.”
The problem here is that the book then moves on without going into any details about exactly what happened to curtail these missions. Knowing what took place would certainly be useful in making sure that future space ventures, especially the really long duration ones that will be of necessity as we move past our Moon, could be the difference between a secure and functioning crew and a disaster.
Incidentally, the author noted that the Soviets, who were usually reticent about giving out many technical details or goals on most space missions manned and robotic, were more open when it came to the experiences of their cosmonauts and showed more interest in their physiological situations in confined microgravity situations than NASA often did with their astronauts.
The Soviet space program also had a longer period of actual experience with humans living aboard space stations starting in 1971 with Salyut 1 (or Soyuz 9 in 1970 if you want to count that early space endurance record-holding jaunt) which NASA did not share between their three Skylab missions in 1973-1974 until their joint involvement with the Soviet Mir station in the 1990s. Having the details from that era would be of obvious benefit and interest.
Image: The MIR station hovering over Earth. It deorbited in March 21, 2001.The station was serviced by the Soyuz spacecraft, Progress spacecraft and U.S. space shuttles, and was visited by astronauts and cosmonauts from 12 different nations. It endured 15 years in orbit, three times its planned lifetime. Credit: NASA.
Granted, as with a collection of research papers such as this, there are plenty of references. Finding the stories this way is not a problem if you are doing your own research and using Psychology of Space Exploration as a reference source, but for the more casual reader it could be a bit of a disappointment when these items are not readily available.
While I think most people who want to learn more about how our space explorers are affected by and respond to and during their missions into the Final Frontier will find something of interest and value throughout this book, Psychology of Space Exploration is largely a reference work that goes into levels of certain details as befitting literature of its type while missing a number of others which I think are just as important for a comprehensive view of human expansion into space, both in the past, the present, and most vitally the future.
The ultimate goal of putting people into space is eventually to create a permanent presence of our species beyond Earth. That is the grand aim even if their initial underlying purposes were more geared towards engineering and geopolitical goals. This is similar to the history of the early navigators who crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to the New World, for they too had other plans initially in mind, although the ultimate result was the founding of the many nations that exist in the Western Hemisphere today.
To give some examples of what I feel is missing and limited in representation in Psychology of Space Exploration, there is but a brief mention of what author Frank White has labeled the “Overview Effect”. As the book states, this is the result of “truly transformative experiences [from flying in space] including sense of wonder and awe, unity with nature, transcendence, and universal brotherhood.”
Clearly this is a very positive reaction to being in space, one which could have quite helpful benefits for those who are exploring the Universe. The Overview Effect might also have an ironic down side, one where a working astronaut might become so caught up in the “wonder and awe” of the surrounding Cosmos away from Earth that he or she could miss a critical mission operation or even forget what they were originally meant to do. Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter may have been one of the earliest “victims” of the Overview Effect during his Aurora 7 mission in 1962. Apparently his very human reaction to being immersed in the Final Frontier in part caused Carpenter to miss some key objectives during his mission in Earth orbit and even overshoot his landing zone by some 250 miles. Carpenter never flew in space again, despite being one of the top astronauts among the Mercury Seven. It would seem that in those early days of the Space Race, having the Right Stuff did not include getting caught up with the view outside one’s spacecraft window, at least so overtly.
Another item largely missing from Psychology of Space Exploration is the effects on space personnel after they come home from a mission. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, who with Neil Armstrong became the first two humans to walk on the surface of the Moon with the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, is one of the earliest examples of publicly displaying the truly human side of being an astronaut.
Although not revealed publicly until 2001 by former NASA flight official Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., in his autobiography Flight: My Life in Mission Control, the real reason Aldrin was not selected to be the first one to step out of the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle onto the Moon was due to the space agency’s personal preference for Armstrong, who Kraft called “reticent, soft-spoken, and heroic.” Aldrin, on the other hand, “was overtly opinionated and ambitious, making it clear within NASA why he thought he should be first [to walk on the Moon].”
Image: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Credit: NASA.
Even though Aldrin was a fighter pilot during the Korean War, earned a doctorate in astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and played an important role in solving the EVA issues that had plagued most of the Gemini missions and was critical to the success of Apollo and beyond, his lack of following the unspoken code of the Right Stuff kept him from making that historic achievement.
Aldrin would later throw the accepted version of the Right Stuff for astronauts right out the proverbial window when he penned a very candid book titled Return to Earth (Random House, 1973). The first of two autobiographies, the book revealed personal details as had no space explorer before and few since, including the severe depression and alcoholism Aldrin went through after the Apollo 11 mission and his departure from NASA altogether several years later, never to reach the literal heights he accomplished in 1969 or even to fly in space again. Although Aldrin would later recover and become a major advocate of space exploration, he is not even given a mention in Psychology of Space Exploration. In light of what later happened with Nowak and several other astronauts in their post-career lives, I think this is a serious omission from a book that is all about the mental states of space explorers.
The other glaring omission from this work is any discussion of the human reproductive process in space. NASA has been especially squeamish about this particular behavior in the Final Frontier. There is no official report from any space agency with a manned program on the various aspects of reproduction among any of its space explorers, only some rumors and anecdotes of questionable authenticity.
As with so much else regarding the early days of the Space Age, that may not have been an issue with the relatively few (primarily male) astronauts and cosmonauts confined to cramped spacecraft for a matter of days and weeks, but this will certainly change once we have truly long duration missions, space tourism, and non-professionals living permanently off Earth. As with daily life on this planet, there will be situations and issues long before and after the one aspect of human reproduction that is so often focused upon. Unfortunately, outside of some experiments with lower animals, real data on this activity vital to a permanent human presence in the Sol system and beyond is absent.
I recognize that Psychology of Space Exploration is largely a historical perspective on human behavior and interaction in space. As there have been no human births yet in either microgravity conditions or on another world and the other behaviors associated with reproduction are publicly unknown, this work cannot really be faulted for lacking any serious information on the subject. What this does display, however, is how far behind NASA and all other space agencies are in an area which will likely be the determining factor in whether humans expand into the Cosmos or remain confined to Earth.
So Far Along, So Far to Go
What the Psychology of Space Exploration ultimately demonstrates is that despite real and important improvements in how astronauts deal with being in space and the way NASA views and treats them since the days of Project Mercury, we are not fully ready for a manned scientific expedition to Mars, let alone colonizing other worlds.
Staying in low Earth orbit for six months at a stint aboard the ISS as a standard space mission these days gives an incomplete picture of what those who will be spending several years traveling to and from the Red Planet across many millions of miles of space will have to endure and experience. If an emergency arises that requires more than what the mission crew can handle, Earth will likely be a distant blue star for them rather than the friendly globe occupying most of their view which all but the Apollo astronauts have experienced since 1961.
Regarding this view of the shrinking Earth from deep space, the multiple authors of Chapter 4 noted that ISS astronauts took 84.5 percent of the photographs during the mission inspired by their motivation and choices. Most of these images were of our planet moving over 200 miles below their feet. The authors noted how much of an emotional uplift it was for the astronauts to image Earth in their own time and in their own way.
The chapter authors also had this to say about what an expedition to Mars might encounter:
As we begin to plan for interplanetary missions, it is important to consider what types of activities could be substituted. Perhaps the crewmembers best suited to a Mars transit are those individuals who can get a boost to psychological well-being from scientific observations and astronomical imaging. Replacements for the challenge of mastering 800-millimeter photography could also be identified. As humans head beyond low-Earth orbit, crewmembers looking at Earth will only see a pale-blue dot, and then, someday in the far future, they will be too far away to view Earth at all.
Image: Jerrie Cobb poses next to a Mercury spaceship capsule. Although she never flew in space, Cobb, along with twenty-four other women, underwent physical tests similar to those taken by the Mercury astronauts with the belief that she might become an astronaut trainee. All the women who participated in the program, known as First Lady Astronaut Trainees, were skilled pilots. Dr. Randy Lovelace, a NASA scientist who had conducted the official Mercury program physicals, administered the tests at his private clinic without official NASA sanction. Cobb passed all the training exercises, ranking in the top 2% of all astronaut candidates of both genders. Credit: NASA.
Now of course we could prepare and send a crewed spaceship to Mars and back with a fair guarantee of success, both in terms of collecting scientific information on that planet and in the survival of the human explorers, starting today if we so chose to follow that path. The issue, though, is whether we would have a mission of high or low quality (or outright disaster) and if the results of that initial effort of human extension to an alien world would translate into our species moving beyond Earth indefinitely to make the rest of the Cosmos a true home.
The data recorded throughout Psychology of Space Exploration clearly indicate that despite over five decades of direct human expeditions by many hundreds of people, we need much more than just six months to one year at most in a collection of confined spaces repeatedly circling Earth. This will affect not only our journeys and colonization efforts throughout the Sol system but certainly should we go with the concept of a Worldship and its multigenerational crew as a means for our descendants to voyage to other suns and their planets.
This book is an excellent reflection of NASA in its current state and human space exploration in general. As with the agency’s manned space program since the days when the Mercury Seven were first introduced to the world in 1959, we have indeed come a long way in terms of direct space experience, mission durations, gender and ethnic diversity, and understanding and admitting the physiological needs of those men and women who are brave and capable enough to deliberately venture into a realm they and their ancestors did not evolve in and which could destroy them in mere seconds.
Having said all this, what I hope is apparent is that we now need a new book – perhaps one written outside the confines of NASA – which will address in rigorous detail the missing issues I have brought to light in this piece. This request and the subsequent next steps in our species’ expansion into space – which will also eventually take place beyond the organizational borders of NASA – cannot but help to improve our chances of becoming a truly enduring and universal society in a Cosmos where certainty and safety are eventually not guaranteed to beings who remain confined physically and mentally to but one world.
New Horizons’ encounter with Pluto/Charon in 2015 is eagerly anticipated, but let’s not forget that the spacecraft will be operational afterwards as it moves deeper into the Kuiper Belt. Fuel will be tight, but there should be enough available for one and possibly a second encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO), assuming we can identify a likely candidate. I’m often asked how such targets would be chosen, and here’s one answer: A new site called IceHunters has been set up at Southern Illinois University that will draw the public into the hunt for icy objects.
At the heart of the IceHunters project are images made by some of the world’s largest telescopes (most come from the 6.5-meter Magellan telescope in Chile and the 8-meter Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea), of the region where potential targets will be found. Like SETI@Home, IceHunters leverages widely distributed PCs in the hands of end-users worldwide. Check the site and you’ll see that instead of conventional astronomical images, you’re looking at ‘difference images’ — produced by subtracting two images as a way of removing non-moving objects like stars and galaxies. Of course, these objects actually are moving in their own right, but the method should help Kuiper Belt objects and asteroids stand apart from the pack.
Images like these play havoc with computers but a critical human eye can, with skill, pick out unknown objects. KBOs and asteroids can be marked by anyone with an up to date Web browser. Pairs of images taken at different time intervals are subtracted from each other, but as the image shows, it’s impossible to equalize the appearance of the stars perfectly before the subtraction process occurs. As a result, we wind up with blotches and other odd marks where star residuals are found.
Image: To make the pesky stars disappear the two images are subtracted from one another. This doesn’t make the stars go entirely away. Even with the blurring step, the two images aren’t exactly identically and instead of having 1-1 = 0, we have something more like 1.01432 – 1 is not 0. Where the first image was brighter, a bit of white shows in the image. Where the second image was brighter, there is a bit of black. The KBO stands out in this image as both a dark blob (from being in the second image) and a white blob (from being in the first image). Credit: IceHunters.org.
It’s amazing to realize as we embark on this search that other than Pluto, the first Kuiper Belt Object wasn’t discovered until 1992. That was the work of Dave Jewitt and Jane Luu at the University of Hawaii, who discovered the object designated 1992QB1 at about 40 AU from the Sun. Although the Kuiper Belt is one of the least mapped regions of our system, we’ve now found more than 1,000 objects beyond Neptune’s orbit, and current estimates are that as many as half a million KBOs larger than 30 kilometers or so in diameter are lurking out at system’s edge.
IceHunters images are drawn from a roughly 2-square degree field in Sagittarius, chosen because objects here would have the potential to be near New Horizons’ trajectory after its 2015 encounter with Pluto/Charon. The KBOs discovered will be collected into a catalogue and published with the name of their discoverers, another chance for citizen scientists to make a tangible mark in their field.
“Projects like this make the public part of modern space exploration,” says SIUE assistant research professor Pamela Gay. “The New Horizons mission was launched knowing we’d have to discover the object it would visit after Pluto. Now is the time to make that discovery, and thanks to IceHunters, anyone can be that discoverer.”
The first KBO chosen as a target won’t be selected until just before the encounter with Pluto/Charon, but the hope is to identify a KBO at least 50 kilometers across. The procedure for this encounter would roughly parallel what happens at Pluto. The spacecraft will be making global maps of Pluto and Charon at various wavelengths and taking high-resolution images to study the surface composition of these objects. New Horizons will pass within 12,500 kilometers of Pluto itself (29,000 kilometers from Charon) and will see Plutonian features as small as 100 meters across.
Much of the work will continue even as the spacecraft passes Pluto, looking back to take atmospheric measurements as New Horizons moves into the shadows of Pluto and its largest moon. Assuming all goes well, the Pluto/Charon encounter might be a warmup for the second or even third flyby of a KBO. Getting the eyes of the public on IceHunter’s ground-based images may uncover the identity of the spacecraft’s targets as they move through the vast stellar background. In any case, it’s a way of doing good science to build up a broader picture of the Kuiper Belt population.
Faces from Earth is an ambitious plan to send information about our species to the stars. We’ve done this before, in the form of the plaques mounted on the Pioneer spacecraft and the famous Golden Record of Voyager. What more can we do to ensure that future missions leaving Earth will carry such representation? Larry Klaes puts Faces from Earth in context by looking at how the idea of such messaging has developed and where we might go from here. This post originally appeared as an editorial on the SETI League site and is reprinted with permission.
For the vast majority of human existence, most members of our species rarely ventured beyond the borders of the places they were born and raised in their entire lives. For them, the whole world consisted of their family and their village. As for the other people in distant lands far away, they often had only a limited awareness of them, based mostly on stories told by visitors who had either been to these exotic realms themselves or knew someone who said they had journeyed there.
Then in the last several hundred years, our knowledge and technologies expanded tremendously. These events allowed us to both explore and understand not only the entire surface of our planet Earth and encounter the many human societies that live nearly everywhere upon it, but also to obtain a true grasp of the much vaster Universe beyond our globe.
Our species came to see that our world is neither at the center nor the bottom of existence, but just one of several planets circling an average star in a galaxy of 400 billion suns with worlds and possibly life of their own. In turn our galaxy, which we call the Milky Way, was realized to be one of perhaps 100 billion other stellar islands in the Universe, and some scientists theorize even that immense cosmic arena may have many companions or perhaps even an infinity of them.
Image: This image of Isaac Newton’s System of the World is one of the photographs included on the Voyager Record, now moving through the heliopause. Credit: NASA/JPL/Voyager Project.
When humanity began to venture in the direction of those numerous points of light in the night sky once we had grasped their true natures, first with telescopes and later with rockets and spaceships, we also pondered who or what might dwell in those faraway alien places and what their reactions might be towards us.
As is often the case when people are confronted with the unknown, wishful thinking, concerns, and fears take over their thinking processes. Alien have become everything in our culture from deities saving humanity from ourselves to monsters hell-bent on enslaving or destroying our species and our planet.
The truth is, in this fiftieth anniversary year of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, when astronomer Frank Drake began the modern SETI era by scanning two nearby stars in April of 1960 with a large radio telescope among the rural hills of West Virginia, we have yet to find any serious evidence for other intelligences or even life itself beyond Earth, despite a number of milestones which include the discovery of over 400 exoplanets since the last decade. Nevertheless, certain astronomers and others contend that the chances remain very good for the existence of other culturally and technologically sophisticated species throughout the galaxy.
Image: From the cover of the Voyager Golden Record. This picture has nothing to do with interpreting the disc contents, but rather is a pulsar map indicating the solar system from which the Voyager spacecraft originated. The cover of the Voyager record also contains an ultra-pure source of Uranium-238 to serve as a radioactive clock for determining the record’s age. This same pulsar map as well as hydrogen atom drawing were also included on the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques. Each pulsar has its own distinct and rapid pulsing radio frequency that is very slowly changing with absolute linearity. Credit: NASA/Sylvain Kepler.
While various SETI projects run by both amateur and professional people continue to listen and look for other living minds in the Cosmos, a few have decided that with so many stellar systems to investigate, discovering who else is out there might be helped along if we deliberately made humanity’s presence known to the galaxy, thus METI, or Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligences.
The first deliberate METI efforts began in the 1970s. Among those initial projects were the golden plaques and records carried respectively aboard the space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. Realizing that these robotic vessels would become among the first human artifacts to leave the Sol system after their missions to the outer gas giant planets, Drake and his colleague Carl Sagan and others designed messages and information packages for the beings who might one day find them drifting through the galaxy. For though their original missions would be long over and their mechanical systems shut down and frozen from the deep cold of interstellar space, the probes themselves and the METI artifacts bolted on to them would stay intact for many millions and even billions of years if left undisturbed in the preserving celestial vacuum.
This collection of far-sighted people assumed and hoped that the recipients, no matter how alien they might otherwise be to humanity, would at least have the languages of science and mathematics in common, since it would require a species with a sophisticated technological ability to travel among the stars to find them. Thus the information content of these packages were prefaced and suffused with these presumed universal keys to ease the task of decipherment.
Image: The plaque aboard Pioneer. Pioneer 10 and 11’s famed Plaque features a design engraved into a gold-anodized aluminum plate, 152 by 229 millimeters (6 by 9 inches), attached to the spacecrafts’ antenna support struts to help shield it from erosion by interstellar dust. Credit: NASA.
Sagan and his colleagues also noted that a good deal of humanity had a strong interest and various reactions to the Pioneer Plaques and Voyager Records. While some of it remained parochial, from fear of hostile aliens discovering our presence to prudery over sending nude human figures to the stars, many others were captivated and enlightened by the makers’ efforts to include a fair sampling of the various human cultures across our world, especially in the case of the Voyager Records, which had music, images, and languages representing a large swath of our species.
These plaques and discs, remarkable as they were, were physically limited in just how much they could tell another species about us or our own descendants who might one day venture into the galaxy and find these artifacts of their ancestors. In addition, not every opportunity to introduce ourselves to the wider Cosmos has been taken up by those who have built later vessels aimed at the stars, stating a lack of time, resources, and interest.
It is so important that a young and developing species such as humanity does not blindly toss its artifacts and eventually members of our own kind into a vast realm full of so many unknowns. Even if we are unaffected by our actions due to our current limitations, our descendants may pay an unfortunate price for our short-sightedness, or we may even cause problems for beings we do not even know exist yet.
Addressing these long-term and far-reaching issues, physicist Tibor Pacher of Hungary has begun a collection of programs aimed at ensuring that all future deep space missions contain information packages that properly represent our species and our world. These programs are also designed to raise awareness and education among the beings of this planet.
The primary goal of Faces from Earth is to make sure that every space mission leaving our Sol system has some kind of proper representation of its makers’ species and their home aboard. Even if the mission team has neither the time nor the interest in adding an information package to their spacecraft, Faces from Earth can provide one for them so that future recipients of vessels from our planet are not left in a state of confusion over who made and sent this craft and why.
One way Dr. Pacher envisions this plan is with Mosaic Earth. This project uses an image of Earth built up from the faces of many people from all over the globe in a holographic form to simultaneously represent our planet and our species. Every human being with access to the Internet can participate in Mosaic Earth and add their face to this representation of our species into the galaxy.
Mosaic Earth and other plans for future information packages on deep space missions will be placed aboard the using the One Kilo Message plan, a container weighing just one kilogram that will carry our messages and information to the stars. The design of these projects is meant to allow the widest capacity and variety of information about humanity that can be placed aboard a spaceship using as little volume as possible to ensure that the main mission of the vessel is not compromised. The Faces from Earth projects will also be designed for flexibility in terms of future improvements in the technology of storing and relaying information.
The other plan for Faces from Earth is bring about a global awareness of the many peoples on our planet and to educate them about astronomy and the Universe in the process. Having many people of all ages and backgrounds involved in this process will naturally lead to these goals.
In summation, the importance of being in essence respectful citizens of the galaxy and giving some kind of valuable legacy to our children is a driving force in the creation of Faces from Earth. It is designed to bring together people from multiple fields and disciplines across human culture to more fully represent the beings and items of our world to the Universe on all future deep space missions. We invite you and those who you think may be interested in such a project to join Faces from Earth to participate in our historic emergence into the Cosmos.
Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program and founding architect of the Tau Zero Foundation, now gives us a look at the Foundation’s current status and his thoughts on where it’s going.
To those who have been waiting for the Tau Zero Foundation to begin in earnest, your patience is greatly appreciated. We are definitely making progress and this article describes that status.
Sneak preview
For the readers of Centauri Dreams, the URL at the end of this article takes you to a sneak preview of our public website. Although the site is far from done (many corrections and additions still needed) enough content is there to give you an idea of what we’re delivering. Donations can now be accepted via the “support us” page (hint, hint). Yes, even modest donations speed up progress. We are, after all, still an all-volunteer effort, setting this up in addition to our day-jobs.
Stages of Implementation
Initially a network of volunteers, the Tau Zero Foundation’s practitioners will share their progress and insights with each other and on the public website. These practitioners have been selected to provide a complementary blend of disciplines (researchers, educators, journalists) and for their ability to deal with visionary subjects in a productively rigorous manner. Through these collaborations and by taking advantage of existing venues, occasional projects will be undertaken (books, documentaries, workshops). Once sufficient funding is secured, cycles of research will be supported, with a suite of tasks selected to advance a reasonable breadth of approaches. Within these, scholarships will also be offered to help promising students.
And where does Tau Zero stand in achieving its aims? Here are the envisioned stages of implementation. Right now, we are completing the Basics and moving onto our Debut, plus we’ve already started on some zero-cost opportunistic projects.
The Basics
Legal details and defining documents
First tier practitioners signed up (over 3 dozen)
Web presence constructed
Debut and Thereafter (assumes at least modest donations)
Continually add/refine Web content from specialty practitioner contributions
Devise means to identify and add new practitioners
Shift from “donations” to “membership” contributions
Regular conferences to review progress and prompt next proposals
Ultimate Embodiment
Invitational sabbatical research institute
Supporting actual interstellar missions
Tau Zero Scope
Based on the news about the forthcoming book, Frontiers of Propulsion Science (an example of an opportunistic project), some have asked if Tau Zero is focusing only on space drives and warp drives. No, Tau Zero covers the full span of the seemingly simple solar sails through the seeming impossible faster-than-light travel, and will even deal with sociologic implications of interstellar adventures. The Frontiers book represents the work of only some of our practitioners. Whereas prior interstellar flight publications dealt with technology, there was a void of reliable information about interstellar flight science, things like gravity control propulsion and faster-than-light travel.
Recently, other Foundation practitioners published the book Living Off the Land in Space, which deals with nearer-term technology rather than physics breakthroughs. A large portion of the Foundation’s practitioners are enthusiastic about nearer-term possibilities. Right now, it is premature to go into any of their contributions because I don’t want to make promises for things that we might not get the support to finish.
The sociological aspects are also important since they are the source of motivation (for humanity to survive and thrive) and affect how such work can be pursued in contemporary societal contexts. So far, the Foundation has barely begun to address such vital issues explicitly.
Not NASA
This brings me to another area for clarification; in part a legal obligation to address. The Foundation is NOT in any way affiliated with, or supported by, NASA. For me, NASA is my day-job and has occasionally allowed me to work the technical details of revolutionary spaceflight, but there is so much more that needs to be done than can fit within that day-job. It’s taken some time to work with the NASA lawyers to make sure that I what I do on Tau Zero does not conflict with my day-job and does not violate Federal regulations (you might be surprised about some of those regulations. Sigh).
For example, many of my contributions to the Frontiers of Propulsion Science book were done on NASA time (with clearance from legal & management), although the publisher is the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). AIAA is a professional society that provides a venue through which authors of multiple affiliations and nationalities could jointly contribute as well as providing the financing and distribution of the book to pertinent audiences. Although modest royalties will go to the non-government authors (government employees cannot accept honoraria for work done in their day-jobs), my NASA involvement in this book precludes any royalties going to the Foundation. The public companion book, however, will be handled differently.
I am also compelled to clarify the distinction from my NASA day-job because some of you have expressed the opinion that the government should support the things we do. Alas, that is not possible and the reasons are complex. This is where those sociological implications come in, and why my colleagues and I are seeking citizen and philanthropic support. As one example, when there was government funding, much of it was directed, via congressional earmarks, to boost weak regions rather than being sent to the best professionals.
Also, many of the Foundation’s activities are not allowed in US Government service. Unlike Federal agencies, this Foundation can: (1) Accept volunteer work (2) Accept donations directed for a specific purpose, (3) Create promotional materials as part of educational outreach, (4) Use the allure of science fiction as a thought-provoking tool, and (5) Earn revenue from products.
It’s not just an issue of money. It will not take that much money to make a significant difference. It is about adapting to current conditions and finding the best people. The kind of progress that we deliver is not the sort of thing that can just be assigned. It is a matter of finding today’s pioneers, wherever they may work, and bringing them together to amplify each other’s progress.
Our Niche
There are already well-run space organizations and this Foundation will not attempt to duplicate their fine efforts. Instead, this Foundation will rely on existing organizations whenever possible, channeling support to pioneers who can make the most out of existing research and publication venues.
For example, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society is already a well-established peer-reviewed journal through which to expose and critique emerging concepts of interstellar flight. Numerous scientific and engineering journals exist for vetting more specific details. Advocacy organizations, such as The Planetary Society and the National Space Society already exist to urge our political leaders to become better educated and more supportive of space endeavors. The X-Prize organization, which is funded through donations, is doing a fantastic job of provoking near-Earth entrepreneurial space adventures. Already their first prize helped launch Virgin Galactic with Burt Rutan’s winning spacecraft. Their next prize is aimed at getting affordable robots to the Moon! The SETI Institute’s Project Phoenix, another privately funded effort, is focused on listening for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. And then there is academia, which teaches students how to become engineers and scientists. Lastly, there are NASA, the European Space Agency, and other government space organization that follow whatever charter their political leaders can agree on for them. Yes, that was a loaded comment, and I’ll drop it there.
What is missing from all this is an organization that looks beyond for the revolutionary advances that would change everything. And with that, providing the inspirations and reliable information from which students can become tomorrow’s pioneers. Being at the edge of knowledge can be risky. By accepting the challenge of the seemingly impossible goal of practical interstellar flight, we could very well discover what routine research overlooks, jumping significantly ahead. For example, science fiction will be deliberately used for its “what-if” and inspirational values, technical investigations will cover what others aren’t, and the provocative social implications will be explored, from the immediate effects of pursuing such a long-range endeavor, to pondering the implications of interstellar excursions, and of contacting extraterrestrial intelligence.
Since that kind of visionary work is difficult to support within established organizations, philanthropic support is sought. Consider for example SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It was once a government sponsored project that got nixed for being too visionary. With the support of wealthy philanthropists, it resumed its listening. The idea of going beyond that – beyond just listening to figuring out how to get out there – is even more daunting, but a niche that must be filled. The sooner we start working on those prospects, the better we will prepare humanity for the future.
Anticipated Roadblocks
I thought I’d share with you the difficulties we are likely to encounter as we get this Foundation running. It is my hope that, by providing you these insights, you can better grasp the real challenges we face. The goal is to find a way where our audience, you, can help us help you.
As we are finding out, trying to fit in this endeavor in addition to our day-jobs is proving more difficult that anticipated. That is why it is taking so long to get Tau Zero fully on line. Hopefully, as donations come in, we can offload some of the more routine tasks and perhaps even offer honoraria to help our practitioners accelerate their progress.
Obviously securing funding will be an issue. Finally we are now able to accept donations. Related to that is the condition that this Foundation cannot seek government funding so long as I am employed by the government or serving as the Foundation’s president. That does not, however, bar any of our practitioners from seeking government funding directly through their own affiliations, should government funding become available from time to time.
We are also likely to be overwhelmed with more requests that we can respond to. We do indeed want to hear what you think so that we can better serve you, but there are some inputs that are more helpful than others. For example, if you have encountered a book, article, or website that you have found particularly useful, please tell us about it. If there is something that you very much want us to teach on the site, please tell us about that too.
But that said, we’d prefer that you not send in your own work unless it has already been reviewed and published by another peer-reviewed source. If prior experiences are any indicator, I suspect that many enthusiasts will want us to evaluate their ideas. Because of the time-consuming difficulty of providing such reviews and because the results are seldom encouraging, we cannot provide such services. If I had a staff on hand to provide such evaluations, the cost of making the kind of thorough review necessary (given the sheer number of proposals) could reach $5000 per evaluation. Given the constraints not only on funding but the time of working scientists, we can only accept concepts that have been examined by a jury of professionals with solid credentials in the field.
I also know that many of you want us to provide a moderated forum where you can discuss your ideas with others. To a degree, we provide this function with the comment sections following the Centauri Dreams‘ articles, although Paul Gilster believes that weblog software is not optimized for this kind of discussion. I was recently informed that one of our practitioners has volunteered to experiment with methods to provide such online discussions. Given the volume of anticipated inputs and the difficulty of moderating such discussions – to let in provocative ideas while filtering out cranks – this service may take a while to debug. From my own experiences of trying to do this in the past, this is a daunting challenge. We may not succeed.
What we can do, and will do, is to provide guidance for how enthusiasts can advance their own work using all the mechanisms that already exist. This includes explaining – via the website and our publications – what has been already done, explaining the foundations of knowledge as they stand today, guiding you to what to study in school, and identifying suitable publishers to whom you can submit your work.
Closing
For humanity to reach other habitable worlds or be prepared to escape or prevent Earth disasters, much work is needed. While existing space organizations take the next obvious steps and entrepreneurial adventures bring the thrill of spaceflight to the people, this Tau Zero Foundation reaches beyond for the advances that others are not even looking for – advances that would revolutionize spaceflight. This is the realm of pioneers, risk-takers, and breaking with established norms. You can support this quest through your donations, by identifying the best-quality works to share, and by telling us what you need to know to make progress of your own. We will do what we can to share that information via publications and websites and to actually make the technical progress to take humanity to the stars – ad astra incrementis.
In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).
If you'd like to submit a comment for possible publication on Centauri Dreams, I will be glad to consider it. The primary criterion is that comments contribute meaningfully to the debate. Among other criteria for selection: Comments must be on topic, directly related to the post in question, must use appropriate language, and must not be abusive to others. Civility counts. In addition, a valid email address is required for a comment to be considered. Centauri Dreams is emphatically not a soapbox for political or religious views submitted by individuals or organizations. A long form of the policy can be viewed on the Administrative page. The short form is this: If your comment is not on topic and respectful to others, I'm probably not going to run it.
