Diving into the sun...and ever outward. Expanding our horizons

Taking a pause from Earthly troubles... today we'll look right into the sun! Real-life missions and the big news that we're re-issuing SUNDIVER!  After a several year hiatus, my first novel - a murder mystery with cosmic implications, plunging into the furnace of a star - is available, revised and with a new introduction. See below!

Meanwhile, in other space news... Jason Derleth, head of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC), is interviewed by Fraser Cain on Universe Today. Jason has done a terrific job developing NIAC into NASA's Venture or DARPA center, nurturing early stage concepts, some just this side of sci fi and others that took off skyward. I'm privileged to serve on the advisory External Council. 
     Watch the podcast and consider - do you know anyone who might want to apply for a NIAC grant? We're especially interested in space-related, bold projects in biology!

== Lunar obsessions ==

Many of you know I'm cool to the latest mania for returning U.S. astronauts to the moon's dusty, almost-use less plain. Oh, I am fine with someone keeping that  obsession going. Humanity will go there anyway, as the Chinese, Indians, Russians, billionaires and so on desperate desperately  pursue rites of adulthood we had 50 years ago... their "bar moonzvahs."  I'm also fine with American companies building advanced landers and such to sell! (NASA has put out a call for two different lunar landers, from two different sources.) 

Oh, I'll keep an open mind. Indeed, NIAC is funding concepts in getting that lunar polar water. Even though initial calculations suggest that we can get everything of value - including water - far more efficiently and copiously from asteroids. As Andy Weir makes clear, in his novel Artemis, the Moon is largely of use for tourism.

The absurd “race” to plant US footprints back on the moon’s dusty/useless plain does have positive aspects. I fully support U.S. unmanned exploration missions like VIPER… a lander rover that will do surveys and assays of lunar ice in deep, dark places near the lunar poles.

Still, let me say something nice: I well recall...  Reflecting on the second moon landing -- I remember Apollo 12 so vividly. Earlier, Armstrong & Aldrin almost died, flying almost blind and almost out of fuel. A few months later, the 12 crew glided in so smoothly and easily that they landed within meters of the planned site... less than 80 meters from the Surveyor probe... while joking all the way. The image of both Apollo and Surveyor in the same photo remains one of my top ten exemplars of human competence. 

With less computer power than we now have in some light bulbs. A nerdy, even impudent competence that only ever appeared in democracies, like Periclean Athens and Florence. And a major reason why enemies of our renaissance are waging all-out war on the fact-using professions. And why no despotism will ever make it to the stars.

== More space news! ==

NASA flew gas detecting aircraft across 10,000 square miles of California from 2016 through2018. Landfills accounted for 41% of the methane emissions it identified, manure management 26% and oil and gas operations 26%. If we were a species worthy of the stars... Seriously, is this what aliens are waiting for, before making contact? A sign we can stop fouling our own nest?

Meanwhile, NASA's first large-scale, piloted x-plane (or experimental aircraft) in more than three decades, the experimental X-59 jet, which could make supersonic commercial travel a reality, has been cleared for final assembly.

Studies of Jupiter’s gravity suggest a density distribution that’s a bit too diffuse to have occurred if the early, rocky core was left undisturbed to collect all the later gases in its giant envelope. One possible explanation, a fairly early collision with a super Earth-sized planet that stirred and mixed the core just right. We get to peer into epochs that we always thought invisible forever. Ah, to do with human hearts.

Okay. Even a space posting can't escape politics completely. “Why the economies of Alabama and Mississippi have suddenly gone in opposite directions.” Well, one reason is the boom around tech enclaves like Mobile and especially Huntsville, where a big NASA center has drawn in talent from all over the nation, substantially altering cultural assumptions. 

== And that Solar News ==

Okay, I promised to get all sunny on you, starting with news that the solar sunspot cycle in at a weirdly deep minimum... but then...

...solar tsunami waves blare the harbingers of a transition from one sun cycle to the next.

Interesting results from the Parker Solar Probe as the spacecraft is starting its fourth close orbit around the Sun, edging closer to its scorching target.

Which brings us to...

... we've just re-released the novel that inspired it all… SUNDIVER! Now available as an ebook on Kindle and in paperback -- 

-- with a brand new author's introduction about the personal and scientific journeys leading to my first novel!

You'll come away from this suspenseful, fulfilling and often funny space mystery both entertained and... well... having learned a thing or two. What a deal.

Space! Heading out there...

First some fascinating news about how seriously some of our leaders in politics and industry are starting to take Our Future In Space.

Shall we begin “bootstrapping” our space technologies toward the goal of a Solar System Civilization? The idea is no longer science fiction alone. “Right now, the mass we use in space all comes from the Earth. We need to break that paradigm so that the mass we use in space comes from space,” said one NASA official – quoted on a page at the site of the White House. 

Yes, the White House. Tom Kalil is Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and his page is a down payment on what might become a special program out of the president’s office, aimed at helping spur the techs we'll need, in order to use space resources.  Look it up… and stay tuned.

Pie-in-the-sky?  Well, the potential methods for extracting space resources are looking more and more manageable, starting with the plentiful water contained in some kinds of asteroids.  Probably the most needed-desirable of all materials in space, and the most expensive need we must fulfill, both for life support and fuel, if humans are to live and work out in space.

Unlike the gold and platinum and iron that our children will relish from rocks out there, water may be accessible much sooner, according to the folks at Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries.  And TransAstra Corp, where Caltech engineering prof Joel Sercel has worked out a plausible method. In optical mining, thin-film inflatable reflectors and containment bags are used to extract, collect, and store water from asteroids, using concentrated sunlight to crack asteroids and extract the water they contain. Once the water is stored in bags it can be used directly as rocket propellent in a type of engine called a solar thermal rocket. Later solar systems will crack and divide H2O into hydrogen and oxygen, allowing even more effective propulsion and portable power.

== More Space! More Space! ==

Um... At risk of making you all howl over the (utterly deserved and necessary) repetition... have I said already this is our best year in space since the seventies… and possibly ever? 

The roll call of stunning milestones just keeps flowing, with data from Mercury, Venus and Earth… orbiting and mapping Ceres (with its weird white spots and possible underground lakes), tons from Mars (including a comet swooping past the Red planet!), news of a likely Europa mission, wonders from Cassini at Saturn, including amazements from Titan…

…plus landing on a comet!  And of course, New Horizons swooping past Pluto (Watch this beautiful 16 second composite video and remember your civilization did something this competent.)

An article about Pluto Truthers… who claim the New Horizon images are faked, like everything else in the space program.  Eep.

== What more could you want? ==

                                                                                                

Well how about another Mars landing, next year?  InSight (Interior exploration using Seismic Investi­ gations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is a NASA Discovery Program mission that will place a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep inte­rior.

But that’s 2016. Heck we might have a Singularity by then, so let’s stay focused. (Did I elsewhere promise 2014 - 2015 would be transformative?)

Meanwhile, the mavens who gave us spectacular Pluto-Charon images have chosen New Horizons’ next target!  The spacecraft is to make a similar examination of a small, Kuiper Belt object, an icy body known as 2014 MU69 in 2019. Pluto is about three billion miles from the sun; 2014 MU69 is almost a billion miles beyond Pluto. “The New Horizons spacecraft is to adjust course through a series of four thruster firings in late October and early November. New Horizons would also make more distant measurements of 20 other Kuiper belt objects en route to 2014 MU69.”That they can do this at all, with their excellent fuel reserve, is one more checkmark of stunning human competence.  Let’s bring that back into fashion!

Technicians have begun assembling the world's largest radio telescope, with a dish the size of 30 football grounds, deep in the mountains of southwest China's Guizhou Province. Yesterday afternoon, they began to assemble the telescope's reflector, which is 500 meters in diameter, compared to Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters. "Having a more sensitive telescope, we can receive weaker and more distant radio messages. It will help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe," Wu Xiangping, director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society said.

Okay fine. But please read the first few chapters of Liu Cixin’s epic Science Fiction novel (and 2015 Hugo Award winner) The Three Body Problem. That will teach you caution not to press SEND with any “outgoing messages.” Listening is good.

== Other space news? ==

How about a patent on a 20km tall inflated tower from which payloard can be more easily launched into orbit?  This vision from Thoth Technology sounds exciting. Indeed… this is exactly what I described in 1980, in my novel Sundiver. Remember the “Vanilla Needle?” Except that my concept in Sundiver was even grander: an inflated tower that went up past 70,000 feet and was cavernous enough inside so that cargoes would rise up in it using... balloons! 

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered tiny primordial galaxies, which are estimated to have formed only 600 million years after the universe came into existence.  

                                                                                                         

By now you’ve heard about the discovery of a possibly Earthlike planet orbiting a very sunlike star. And you were wondering… are there aspects of this that I’m not seeing in even the science press?  I wonder what David Brin makes of this!  Did I read your mind? All right, in a nutshell…

… While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger. When Earth is that age, it will already be baked by our sun's shifting CUZ or Goldilocks zone. The Kepler 452 CUZ is probably shifting, too.

Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) have tasted space-grown lettuce. The red romaine lettuce leaves were grown entirely by the team and it marks the start of the "veggie project" that will see more food grown in space.

I often mention that I serve on the Board of External Advisers for NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group… or NIAC… which offers grants for developing far-out-but-plausible concepts for advancing space exploration.  Now see a handy website explaining the criteria used for judging grants!  

A deep astronomical study (the 2015 Space Weather Workshop) found stellar flares on other G-type main sequence stars (of about the same size and rotational period as the Sun) that had far more energy than anything observed by humans coming from the Sun. Combine this with an update on the mysterious "774-775 carbon-14 anomaly," showing that another anomaly happened about the year 993, and the report concludes that superflares 1000 times more energetic than those observed in our historical records of the Sun could be expected to occur about once every 5000 years.  

We need more resilience.