Back to the Moon? And on to Venus, Mars and the asteroid belt

Are we finally entering the golden age of spaceflight we originally expected (way prematurely) in the 1970s?

Mars mission successes - including China's impressive lander - are adding up. Samples are being returned from asteroids (the likely source of major riches.) The new generation of space telescopes is already revealing wonders, even before the Webb goes up. SpaceX has upturned launch economics with levels of re-use that forced panicking Lockheed/Boeing/ULA to run, desperately to Blue Origin to save them...

...and Sen. Shelby is no longer able to bully Congress into forcing the "Space Launch System (SLS)" down NASA's throat, a wasteful boondoggle so typical of Shelby's corrupt party... as the Spacex "starship," if fully successful, promises the possibility that another boondoggle - sending "American footprints back-to-the-Moon!" - won't be the calamitous distraction that is seemed bound to be (details below)...

...and new satellite comms constellations may soon deliver world access to underserved people, all over the planet. And much more. We are still a civilization that does stuff. And even more important stuff down here, on Earth.

== We're Explorers! ==

A while back I linked you to the announced Phase One awards given by NIAC -- NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program (I am on the advisory council). Great, pioneering projects! Some of them bordering on science fiction. Now come the Phase II and III announcements! Projects that proved themselves to have at least an on-paper or preliminary plausibility to dramatically change our access and future out there in the cosmos!

In case you missed it... here is the descent and landing video from the wonderful Martian arrival of Perseverance. Forget the audio thing! Watch the collated 3 minutes of incredible beauty and stunning competence during arrival. I did NOT expect my breath to catch at the sight of a parachute deploying, or my heart to race at footage of dust blowing from a rocky plain. 

More crucially, the "Sky Crane" landing system is now no longer a 'miracle," but a reliable system, proved repeatable. A routine miracle.

Again, we are a people who do such things. Stop letting mafiosi undermine our confidence.   

Nearly 11 Million Names of Earthlings are on Mars Perseverance...’ 

Ooooh, I did warn about this is a short story called “Mars Opposition!” 

And if you want to be scared out of your britches, give it a read in The Best of David Brin!

== Back to the moon? ==

I've been a lonely dissenter on the notion of U.S. astronauts rushing back to the dusty/useless lunar plain, when humanity for sure will be going there anyway, in the form of Apollo-wannabe tourists, eager for their coming-of-age ritual. The US+Japan+Europe can accomplish vastly more bypassing that playpen/sandbox, doing things only we can do. And yet... if Elon truly can pull off his next prodigious leap, not just perfecting Starship but especially the super-heavy BFR to launch it out there, and do the refueling thing, then I might change my mind. 

But Jeff B and Dynetics should still develop their landers... to sell to those tourists! (While keeping techs proprietary!)

What stands out is that NASA still intends for astronauts to ride to the moon aboard the SLS... there and back via Orion capsule. Using the SpaxeX ship ONLY as a lander! But of course that will happen twice... to use up the SLS monsters in the pipeline. Then Frankenshuttle can quietly fade away. 

SpaceX has built and tested a functioning prototype of the elevator that Starship would use to lift and lower astronauts to and from the lunar surface. In blazing speed. This despite getting the least development funding from NASA’s program to incentivize private companies to make lunar landers. “Known as the Human Landing System (HLS) program, NASA selected three providers – a Blue Origin-led consortium, Dynetics, and SpaceX – to build prototypes and compete for one or two follow-on contracts back in April 2020. SpaceX’s Starship offering was deemed the riskiest solution and the company received a middling $135 million to Dynetics’ ~$250 million and the “National Team’s” ~$570 million. For their ~$820 million investment, it’s unclear what exactly NASA has gotten from its two best-funded teams aside from paperwork, a few completed design reviews, and two low-fidelity mockups mostly made out of cardboard, foam, and wood. Meanwhile, in the ten months since SpaceX received its $135 million, the company has built no less than eight full-scale Starship prototypes, performed a dozen or more wet dress rehearsals and static fires with said prototypes, and performed two powered hops and two high-altitude test flights.”  ... Oh... the image in this article looks straight out of a 1950s Wiley Ley/Bonestall envisioning! 

While I am on record dissing the notion of the U.S. dropping more ambitious and rewarding ventures farther out, in favor of a rush to put more footprints on a dusty-useless lunar plain (yawn! leave that to the kiddies!) I am fine with helping US companies develop landers they can sell or rent to those Apollo-wannabe tourists!

== And on to Venus and Mars ==

The Parker Solar Probe (the author of Sundiver is an official ‘mascot) in one of its swings by Venus looked down on the dark night side... and could see through the clouds to heat-revealed surface features!  And more from Parker!  NASA’s Parker Solar Probe captured the first complete view of Venus’s dust ring, a band of particles that stretches for the entirety of the planet’s path around the Sun.

Okay, as said above, I am still giddy over the success JPL/NASA had in landing Perseverance on Mars! Only, now that they are sure of the landing system and can optimize its weight parameters, then next time – a suggestion? Next time, LAND the darn descent stage after it finishes delivering the rover! And why not? a weather station? Seismic station? Practice?

Speaking of landers: the commercial lunar vehicle Peregrine, if successful this coming July, would be the first-ever commercial American lander on the moon — and the first United States spacecraft to touch down at all since Apollo 17 in 1972.  The same company will then target 2023 to land VIPER, a vastly more sophisticated water-surveying rover near a lunar pole, conveyed moonward by a SpaceX Heavy and brought gently down by a GRIFFIN lander. 

And it’s a moonrush! Japanese lunar robotics company ispace will deliver a rover built by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the moon in 2022, via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Japanese startup says it supply the lander that transports the rover from the moon's orbit to the lunar surface.

Okay, like we needed this?  How about a space hurricane in our planet's upper atmosphere -- made up of swirling plasma and "rained" electrons... a 620-mile-wide (1,000-kilometer) plasma mass swirling above the North Pole. It had spiral arms and lasted for nearly eight hours. An amazing image.

== The Sky is For The Rich? ==

A fine review of a new book - Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut, by Nicholas Scmidle - about the New Space Race, in which whole nations - China, India, Russia and even NASA - struggle to keep pace with the upward momentum of a clade of billionaire dreamers and do-ers... Musk Bezos, Branson, and several you likely haven't heard of. Heinlein predicted such an era in positive terms. I portrayed plusses and minuses, in EXISTENCE. And Wil McCarthy's book Rich Man's Sky depicts worrisome, downside trends toward owner-feudalism in future space..

This article starts with an image of Branson's Virgin Galactic mother ship based at New Mexico's Spaceport America, which gets to use the USG's White' Sands tracking facilities, but is, in consequence, way out east of the town of Truth or Consequences, NM. Those buying tickets on Virgin's deluxe space super-experience will have to leave their luxury jets and ride an air conditioned bus for 40 minutes. Along the way, they will be entertained by an introductory video of yours truly, explaining in advance what they are about to see. Fiorty minutes of me blabbing about the spaceport> That alone is worth the price!

Perhaps that's the closest I will get, to riding the torch. But WTH. We are doing these fine things. That is, if we do all the fine things, including saving the planet, species, civilization, justice and a decent, worthy enlightenment.

Quasars, supermassive black holes... and Perseverance(!) and more!

Still riding a high from watching Perseverance land on Mars! (Aren't you?)  Okay, Curiosity might have just been a miracle. But this is something far, far better. Repeatable competence!  Putting again into stark contrast those propagandists (and their moron followers) who spread reflexive hate toward all the skilled professions -- the folks who know stuff, or know how to do stuff. 

No, it's not zero sum. Boffins who can do these things or who know a lot haven't paid for it by sacrificing realness, or common sense, or wisdom... or even art or necessarily faith. On average they are more wise about other things, as well. That's how it works. And the wise among us know it.

So how about now let's share even more examples of how skilled folks are opening to our caveman-dazzled eyes ever more wonders of a fantastic universe! And shedding light upon the wonder that is ourselves. Starting with...

== Put this in perspective, hm? ==

Hot news about where and when we are! Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, according to a better model of the Milky Way Galaxy based on new observation data, including a catalog of objects observed over the course of more than 15 years by the Japanese radio astronomy project VERA.   

The new map suggests that the center of the Galaxy, and the supermassive black hole which resides there, is located 25800 light-years from Earth. This is closer than the official value of 27700 light-years adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1985. The velocity component of the map indicates that Earth is traveling at 227 km/s as it orbits around the Galactic Center. This is faster than the official value of 220 km/s. So… not quite as far into the boonies as we thought.

Recently discovered, that the farthest known quasar -  about 13.03 billion light-years from Earth - can be dated back to just 670 million years after the Big Bang (the universe at this time was a mere 5% of its current age), making it the most distant and earliest quasar ever found. This quasar also hosts a giga-supermassive black hole that has a mass equal to 1.6 billion of our suns. It produced a wind of super-heated gas flowing from around the galaxy's supermassive black hole, with this gas traveling at one fifth the speed of light. Fascinating. Beyond its intrinsic interest, including wonder over how a black hole could get so incredibly massive, so fast, there’s the fact that remnant giga-black holes left over from that era may be near us, now quiescent since the epoch we reside in is – naturally – much older. 

Oh, but let's take that thought farther! If some astronomers have recently observed supermassive Black Holes, others have proposed that a few might measure up to a QUINTILLION solar masses. Um... gulp?

SLABS would be  "Stupendously LArge Black holeS". “at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, at 4 million solar masses, and the most photogenic SMBH in the Universe, M87*, at 6.5 billion solar masses. The chonkiest black holes we've detected are ultramassive, more than 10 billion (but less than 100 billion) solar masses. These include an absolute beast clocking in at 40 billion solar masses in the centre of a galaxy named Holmberg 15A.” Based on the primordial black hole model, the team calculated exactly how stupendously large these black holes could be, between 100 billion and 1 quintillion (that's 18 zeroes) solar masses.

Okay do I get predictive cred here? Again, while some astronomers are speculating humungous black holes somewhere in the cosmos that are vastly, vastly bigger than the biggest at the cores of galaxies... see my short story “Bubbles.”

== More mundane? Just... galaxies...==

Scientists Say There Are Likely Fewer Galaxies in Space Than They Previously Thought . While NASA previously determined that there were around two trillion galaxies in the universe, new findings say the number is more likely hundreds of billions. 

More modest densities in the news. Astronomers have found the spectra of calcium and other metals at the surfaces of some white dwarf stellar remnants in the same rations as continental crust, suggesting that these thin coatings came from former planets...a concept you can find eerily similar to a plot element in Heaven’s Reach.

TESS is taking up where Kepler left off, and wonders continue!  “Using observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a trio of hot worlds larger than Earth orbiting a much younger version of our Sun called TOI 451. The system resides in the recently discovered Pisces-Eridanus stream, a collection of stars less than 3% the age of our solar system that stretches across one-third of the sky.” Actually, this article offers FIVE  ways this system is really interesting. 

== A new era for visual astronomy? ==

It’s a bit abstract and complicated… but a recent discovery using the fastest ever atomic clocks and the newly coined time measure – a Zeptosecond (sounds like a Marx Brother!) – enabled researchers to prove that “the electron shell in a molecule does not react to light everywhere at the same time. The time delay (247 zs = 2.47e-18 s --GDN) occurs because information within the molecule only spreads at the speed of light.”  This means that the phased arrival of visible light rays can be measured , the way radio astronomers have long done it with long radio waves, letting them do Very Long Baseline Interferometry.

My very first job as a Caltech undergraduate, the summer of 1969, was as assistant to Professor Marshall Cohen, hauling and setting up big ol’ reels of computer tape for VLBI post-analysis, using the recorded phase timings at dishes widely separated across the planet to do interferometry… turning those far-apart radio telescopes into essentially one instrument, able to parse sky-angles of incredibly small width, distinguishing objects both small and very far away. This new discovery might – perhaps – let us do this with much shorter wavelengths of visible light, possibly with baselines that span the inner solar system!

“While the Goethe work is technologically still far from an operational interferometer wavefront time-tagging capability, this seems about 100 million times better than would be needed for the optical wavelength Event Horizon Telescope that recently gave us the first image of an active black hole!” The article also speculates that aliens might be able to see us from a distance better than we thought possible.

I have to wonder how this might augment or replace the notion that I wrote about in EXISTENCE… and that we’re now funding at NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC)… to send missions to the solar gravitational lens distance (starting at 550AU), where the sun’s gravity focuses convoluted images from very far away. Fascinating…

…especially since it suggests advanced aliens might have excellent images of past eras of Earth that they might share with us, solving many mysteries. And we might start collecting such libraries, too.

Sing of singularities & supernovae -- And how to do a 'safe inauguration' wonderfully well.

With sighs of tentative-delayed relief, let's turn from politics -- till the end of this post, when I'll propose how the new US administration could hold a huge, celebratory inauguration in a way that's win-win for us all.

Only first... 

    ...SCIENCE NEWS!!

== Wowzer goings on up there! ==

Fascinating recent claims that there may be a lot of stellar range black holes out there... perhaps enough to account for dark matter? If it's true, I'd have thought we'd see the effects on perturbed orbits of exoplanetary systems. But most discovered exoplanets so far are close to their primary. One test may be when we can statistically appraise Neptune-distance planets. 

Of course then there's gravitational micro-lensing which would also have observable effects, if some of our NIAC projects bear fruit. This is checkable...

... and if it is true, it might mean that interstellar space is a minefield of MACHO objects, affecting the probabilities that interstellar colonization, even by probes, is even possible.

A strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth - No, don't get all lathered. The singularities at the Earth's core that I posited as plot devices in EARTH seem almost plausible, compared to this stuff. (And my concept of gravity lasers - or gasers - has passed every test, so far!) 

Most likely this 'article' is a discreditation sting, like the famous "Sokal Semiotics Paper" that revealed the credulous insipidity of postmodernist "scholarship."

An avid and clever and obsessed photographer calculated where to set up… and caught the NG-14 Cygnus mission to the International Space Station passing in front of the Moon on October 2nd, 2020. ‘It's wonderful to see the visible shockwaves emanating outward from the engines, separate from the superheated exhaust plume.’

The unexpected dimming of the supergiant star Betelgeuse was most likely caused by an immense amount of hot material ejected into space, forming a dust cloud that blocked starlight coming from Betelgeuse's surface. So, not an imminent supernova after all. We think. 

The star S62 whips around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, at an extremely tight orbit. At its closest approach, it can travel faster than eight percent the speed of light, entering a regime where relativistic effects like time dilation become detectable, even at long range. 

Strong evidence that a supernova went off not very far from Earth about 2.5 million years ago, possibly setting off the era of ice ages. 

Along similar lines… Was the late Devonian extinction event caused by a nearby supernova that shredded Earth’s protective ozone layer and fried early land life and denizens of the sea surface for 100,000 years?

== Weirder space concepts ==

One possible candidate for “dark energy” may be compact analogues to black holes that are repulsive. “Back in the 1960s, physicists suggested that all that elusive dark energy could be hiding in ersatz black holes called Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs)… The only way that GEODEs could expand the universe without destroying everything around them is if they were isolated in empty pockets of the cosmos…  “ New papers suggest  that GEODEs gradually grow and start rotating so rapidly that they repel each other into those empty expanses, so GEODEs could explain universal expansion without conflicting other models of the universe.

That's a possibility oddly reminiscent of my short story “Bubbles.” published in Lightspeed Magazine, with an Audio version here.

== We are beings who can witness black hole mergers! ==

Seven billion years ago one black hole roughly 66 times the mass of our Sun, and another black hole roughly 85 times the mass of our Sun came close together, rapidly spinning around one another several times per second before eventually crashing together in a violent burst of energy that sent shockwaves now detected by our gravity wave observatories. And while it is fantastic we are a people who now can do such things as this, observing things like this… what stuns me above all is what it says about the sheer magnitude of this universe. I mean think of how short a time LIGO has been tuned well enough to spot such things… and we’ve spotted several. It means such collisions happened all the freaking time, while separated by distances unfathomable to human imagination. As Doug Adams said: The universe is big, possibly even the biggest.

That fine-tuning improvement campaign for gravity wave detectors has been prodigiously successful, allowing detections now more than weekly! "When you look at the catalog, there's one thing all events have in common: They come from mergers of compact objects such as black holes or neutron stars. But if you look more closely, they all are quite different," Frank Ohme, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, said in a statement. "We're getting a richer picture of the population of gravitational-wave sources. The masses of these objects span a very wide mass range from about that of our sun to more than 90 times that, some of them are closer to Earth, some of them are very far away."

Princeton scientists Feinberg and Milekhin (what a name for a physicist!) have a paper suggesting human scale wormholes could exist and allow personally instantaneous travel over great distances almost instantaneously. Long ago (Schwarzchild) wormholes were largely abandoned by General Relativity (gravitation) physicists are likely impossibly microscopic or hard to maintain or survive. It’s the other wing - quantum theoreticians  - who have rescued the concept in ways that are way outside my physicist practicing license!  It involves negative energy which can happen in the quantum world.

Then how to make them macroscopic? Well, let’s start with a FIVE dimensional cow…. and  these wormholes would resemble intermediately-sized, charged black holes that would generate similarly-powerful tidal forces that spacecraft would need to be wary of. (Sounding a lot like some speculations in my novel INFINITY’S SHORE!)

== Even weirder ==

A hypothesized alternative to Black Holes… a “Boson Star” would be compact and massive, but largely transparent. The most familiar bosons are photons, but also gluons, gravitons… the “particles” that mediate forces in the universe. They obey Bose-Einstein statistics letting them bunch together in total unison, as in a laser. The Fermions that make up matter  include protons, neutrons, and electrons, which follow Fermi-Dirac statistics and insist on their own identity being preserved. (Pauli Exclusion.) Though electrons can collectively form boson-like clusters. Phew! So what if some kind of bosonic particles gathered together into a “star”? Would it be something like a compact, self-sustaining laser?

In EARTH I posited a Gravity Wave Laser or GASER or GAZER that could form in the core of our planet and then be manipulated by humans on the surface… and does that qualify as yet another prediction from that novel that came eerily somewhat true? Sigh, let’s not get excited. Boson stars are even more speculative than my Gazers!

In the nearer term, the forecast becoming ever more likely is the Helvetian War, alas. 

== How to hold a BIG inaugural celebration safely and achieve a win-win-win-win! ==

Okay this is a science posting, but my idea for holding a fine, innovative inauguration of the new administration was so popular on FB -- and must be acted-on soon! -- that I will post it now for you blog readers.

New Chief of staff Ron Klain is planning for a minimized inaugural. 

No! Big mistake!

Think this through: 

(1) America and the whole world need a celebration on 1/20/2021! People will show up at the Capitol, no matter what. Vast vistas of flag-waving celebrants would do the nation good, especially in contrast to the recent past, but... 

(2)... sure, we're in a pandemic and responsible distancing is essential. 

(3) So? Everyone expects a change from tradition, so be creative! 

(4) it is insane for Biden, Harris and Pelosi to be in the same place, given the kind of paranoic jabber spewing across the QAnonsphere.

.... .... Put all that together and a solution comes to mind. One with tasty possible symbolic import.

HAVE KAMALA TAKE HER OATH ON THE STEPS OF THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL! Symbolically, it'd be a huge way to say - with both Lincoln and MLK gazing down - 'we've come a long way, baby!' And the swearing-in by Sonia Sotomayor would be a good offset to spotlighting John Roberts. But there's more...

Picture Harris giving her speech, then waving down the long, long Mall at the Capitol and calling out "Over to you, Joe!" ...

...past a vast crowd that now has plenty of room to spread out! 

 

Hand out a bazillion flags and flag masks and say:

"Use the flag to make a social distance circle. Let America's flag protect us, as we mean to protect and reclaim the flag!"

The images would be spectacular, denying the fox-o-sphere and Trump any "crowd size yammer rationalizations. It would also establish Kamala as a star and a voice of her own, not just a warmup act!

And then there's an added, somewhat paranoid reason. Keep her away from Joe! At least for most of this vulnerable ceremony in the open, so the 'proud-boogaloo jerks' and their backers won't see any tempting opportunities to violently spoil our day!

And just as desperately timely is this advice to Pelosi and the House dems to pass half a dozen bills that are one or two sentences each, and DARE those Senate GOP candidates in Georgia to support or oppose them!

 

Like as if any of you are in a position to get their ears... alas.