Ian Irvine
Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, writes to her friend Natalia Danesi Murray about the flight to the moon of Apollo X in May 1969:
“I know your heart is in your throat during this flight to the moon, and I read with fear and trembling what those eagle men plan to do. Naming everything after the cartoon characters of Peanuts [The lunar module was named Snoopy and the command module Charlie Brown] seems a little more Amurrican than necessary, but it, of course, pleases the USA public.”
Richard Nixon writes in his memoirs:
“For me the most exciting event of the first year of my presidency came in July 1969 when an American became the first man to walk on the moon… On Sunday night, July 20, Apollo VIII astronaut Frank Borman, Bob Haldeman and I stood around the TV set in the private office and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. Then I went into the Oval Office where TV cameras had been set up for my split-screen phone call to the moon. Armstrong’s voice came through loud and clear. I said, ‘Because of what you have done the heavens have become a part of man’s world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquillity, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to earth.’
“After a journey of almost half a million miles to the moon and back Apollo XI landed less than two miles from the prearranged target about a thousand miles south-west of Hawaii. I was there to welcome the astronauts home. When I talked with them through the window of their quarantine chamber it was hard to contain my enthusiasm or my awe at the thought that the three men on the other side of the glass had just returned from the moon. I said impulsively, ‘This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.’ When I talked to Billy Graham a few days later he said, ‘ Mr President, I know exactly how you felt, and I understand exactly what you meant, but even so I think it may have been a little excessive.’”
Cecil King writes in his diary on 22nd July 1969:
“The big news for weeks and months past has been the landing on the moon. It is an immense technological achievement. The foresight involved has been miraculous. The men’s courage has been admirable. They have been in an unknown world and in great danger for a week, and have never faltered. But having said all that, it is hard to see what of real value has been achieved. The Americans are beset by problems: their big cities, the Negroes, Vietnam, inflation, the armament race etc. The moon is not urgent and not a purely American problem, and in any case the biggest problem facing all of us is a spiritual and moral one, not a political or technological one. I regard the moon as an escape.”
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Stephen Eales
On 14th May two giant telescopes on top of an Ariane 5 rocket were launched into space from Kourou in French Guiana. From Cardiff I am leading two of the surveys that one of the telescopes is carrying out. This is my account of the days leading up to launch. And follow my diary after the launch at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog.
Launch -6 days. I am a chronic worrier, but it is disconcerting to see my normally level-headed colleagues join me in the fog of anxiety. The conversation at coffee every day this week has been about Herschel and Planck, the two telescopes that, if successfully rocketed into space, could help to answer questions about how the stars and galaxies were formed, and why the universe expanded so rapidly in the first split second after the big bang.
This week, though, we haven’t mentioned any of this. Instead the conversation has been about things that could go wrong. If anything does, it will be something daft. The first launch of Ariane 5 in 1996 failed because the software wasn’t updated from the less powerful Ariane 4. When the rocket measured the higher acceleration, it thought it was heading towards Earth and blew itself up. Possible daft things that we thought of this morning include Herschel and Planck getting stuck together and ending up just observing each other, or the cover not coming off Herschel’s mirror, leaving a billion-euro camera with its lens cap on hanging uselessly in space.
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Philip Ball
What’s the state of British physics?
Is British physics in crisis? You might have thought so, judging by the recent laments of astronomers at threats to curtail projects and withdraw from international facilities. Yet a new report prepared for Research Councils UK by a team chaired by Bill Wakeham, vice chancellor of Southampton University, says the subject is in a “generally good state of health.”
This is not a whitewash. British physicists produce more publications per capita of population than any country bar Germany and the Netherlands, and their university departments enjoy international prestige. So what’s the problem?
At root, it’s that astronomy and particle physics each cost more than most of the other branches of the discipline put together. This is partly why these two fields have their own research council, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Much of its expenditure is on subscriptions to institutions such as Cern, the European Space Agency and astronomical telescopes, all of which amounted to £154m in 2006-7.
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Geoffrey Miller
Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence with other physicists. They argued that our galaxy holds 100bn stars, that intelligent life evolved quickly on earth and that therefore extraterrestrial intelligence must be common. Fermi listened patiently, then asked, “So where is everybody?” That is, if extraterrestrial intelligence is so common, why haven’t we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi’s paradox.
The paradox has become ever more baffling. Over 150 extra-solar planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Paleontology shows that organic life evolved very quickly after the earth’s surface cooled. Given simple life, evolution shows progressive trends towards larger bodies, brains and social complexity. Evolutionary psychology reveals several credible paths from simpler social minds to human-level creative intelligence. Yet 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence has yielded nothing. No radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings.
It looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science has overestimated the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence evolving. Or perhaps evolved technological intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make spaceships would also be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Fermi’s paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about cold war geopolitics.
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Ian Crawford
The building of high-technology weaponry, much of it for export to parts of the world that could do without it, dominates the business of the western aerospace industry. While many of us may lament this fact, we are faced with the dilemma that these companies are mainstays of the economy, directly employing well over half a million people in the US, and over 100,000 in Britain, with many more employed in supporting industries. The aerospace industry is also strategically important, and a driver of technological innovations with wide commercial and civilian applications. No government can afford to see these industries run down as a result of hostility to arms sales, especially if the jobs would merely go elsewhere and the world would be no better off. Moreover, as we have just seen with the dropping of the Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE Systems’s dealings with Saudi Arabia, the industry seems well able to use its political influence to protect its perceived self-interest.
For both political and ethical reasons, therefore, it is desirable to identify non-military business opportunities for the aerospace sector. The armaments industry is not well adapted to diversification, largely because of its reliance on government contracts, its large investment in specialised skills organised around highly complex projects and the high unit cost of its products. However, there is an obvious alternative to military production—an expanded programme of space exploration. Space is a viable alternative for the arms industry because the technologies involved are similar, and many companies already have a significant interest in this area. Increased involvement in space exploration would reduce the aerospace industry’s reliance on military production (and arms exports), while maintaining employment and innovation. For example, had Britain not opted out of the European Space Agency’s contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), companies like BAE could have devoted more of their business to building ISS components and less to selling weapons. As it happens, opportunities for greater investment in space exploration will soon be upon us, stimulated by the declared intention of the US to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. This is leading to the emergence of a global strategy for space exploration in which the British scientific community is already involved, and to which, given the political will, our aerospace industry could make a real contribution. Indeed, in early January the government launched a public consultation to inform the UK Civil Space Strategy 2007-10.
The counter-argument will be that selling arms abroad brings money in, while government-sponsored space activities amount to a straight subsidy. However, this ignores not only the fact that the arms industry is itself already heavily subsidised, but also the scientific and cultural benefits of space exploration, which deserve government support in their own right. Why? First, the exploration of the solar system will add greatly to scientific knowledge. Second, space exploration is inherently exciting, and as such is an obvious vehicle for inspiring young people to take an increased interest in science and engineering. Third, space exploration provides a natural focus for international co-operation, and may help to build a stronger sense of global solidarity. And fourth, the development of a space-based industrial infrastructure may one day contribute to the global economy by providing access to essentially unlimited supplies of energy and resources.
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Philip Ball
Chemical reassurance
It is not easy to make TNT, as I once discovered by boiling toluene and nitric acid during a school lunchtime to no great effect. Neither is it terribly hard—recipes can be found on the web, and the raw materials at DIY shops—but a little chemical experience provides some perspective on how difficult it is to concoct an aircraft-busting explosive in the cabin toilet. So it is not surprising chemists have expressed doubts about the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic flights. Could two liquids really be combined on a plane to make an instant explosive?
The plotters were supposedly going to mix up triacetone triperoxide (TATP), an explosive allegedly used in the 7/7 London bombings. In principle TATP can be made from hydrogen peroxide (bleach), acetone (paint thinner) and sulphuric acid (drain cleaner). But like much chemistry, it’s not that simple. The ingredients have to be highly concentrated, so can’t easily be passed off as mineral water or shampoo. The reaction needs to be carried out at low temperature. And even if you succeed in making TATP, it isn’t dangerous until purified and crystallised. In other words, you’d be smuggling not just highly potent liquids into the aeroplane loo but also a refrigerant and distilling apparatus—and the job might take several hours.
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Sunder Katwala
The emergence of David Cameron as Tory leader-elect (barring a big upset) offers both a credible electoral threat and a political opportunity for Labour’s next leader, Gordon Brown. You know you have embedded long-term political change when you convert your opponents. Both Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher achieved this. But Blair/Brown are only part of the way there. The critique implied in Gordon Brown’s phrase the “progressive consensus” is that Labour has yet to win the big public arguments needed to forge a “new common sense” in British politics around left-of-centre values. The revival of the Tories could, paradoxically, speed that process.
A broken Tory party—stuck with its core vote in the polls ever since the 1992 ERM crisis—has been the central fact of recent British politics, enabling Tony Blair to dominate the centre unchallenged. His strategy has had two pillars.
The first has been that economic success and social justice can—and must—go together. This will remain the central tenet of Brown’s Labour, while the Tory mods under Cameron will seek centre-right language to make a similar claim. We can expect broad agreement on macroeconomics. The substantive disagreements will be over whether state action can enhance long-term productivity and growth, and how to use the proceeds of that growth. Blair and Brown want to refine an “enabling state”; the right tends to think globalisation makes it an unaffordable luxury.
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Michio Kaku
The universe is out of control, in a runaway acceleration. Eventually all intelligent life will face the final doom—the big freeze. An advanced civilisation must embark on the ultimate journey: fleeing to a parallel universe.
In Norse mythology, Ragnarok—the fate of the gods—begins when the earth is caught in the vice-like grip of a bone-chilling freeze. The heavens themselves freeze over, as the gods perish in great battles with evil serpents and murderous wolves. Eternal darkness settles over the bleak, frozen land as the sun and moon are both devoured. Odin, the father of all gods, finally falls to his death, and time itself comes to a halt.
Does this ancient tale foretell our future? Ever since the work of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s, scientists have known that the universe is expanding, but most have believed that the expansion was slowing as the universe aged. In 1998, astronomers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Australian National University calculated the expansion rate by studying dozens of powerful supernova explosions within distant galaxies, which can light up the entire universe. They could not believe their own data. Some unknown force was pushing the galaxies apart, causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Brian Schmidt, one of the group leaders, said, “I was still shaking my head, but we had checked everything… I was very reluctant to tell people, because I truly thought that we were going to get massacred.”
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Oliver Morton
It is easy – and probably right – to be cynical about President Bush’s call for a return to the moon by 2020, and a mission to put people on the surface of Mars at some undisclosed date. There’s no prior evidence that Bush is a space visionary – while governor of Texas he never even visited the Johnson Space Centre, Nasa’s vast human space flight citadel in Houston. The space plans were rolled out in the middle of January, but having failed to strike a chord, merited no mention in the state of the union address the following week. A White House source talked to the Washington Post of a “Kennedy moment,” but to most observers it was just more irresponsible spending wrapped in specious rhetoric. In some ways, Bush’s announcement was pretty much the opposite of Kennedy’s original decision to go to the moon. But in others, it is peculiarly similar, and could mark the beginning of the end for America’s humans-in-space programme.
The first thing to understand about the original Kennedy moment – the 1961 call to put a man on the moon before the decade was over – is that it was entirely a creature of its geopolitical circumstances. While Bush may conceivably believe that space exploration is “a subject that’s mighty important to the country and to the world,” as he told the audience at Nasa HQ when announcing his new “vision,” Kennedy did not. “I’m not that interested in space,” Kennedy told his Nasa administrator, James Webb, in a private meeting when Webb came to him pleading for the wherewithal to make the space programme something broader than a blinkered rush for the moon. Kennedy cared about space only as a means to an end. “We’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget,” he told Webb “because we hope to beat the Soviets.” Other means would have been welcome, had they been available. “If you had a scientific spectacular on this earth that would be more useful,” Kennedy complained to his Apollo-sceptic science adviser Jerome Weisner, “say desalting the ocean – or something as dramatic and convincing as space, then we would do it.” In the absence of huge sexy desalination plants, the president was stuck with huge sexy rockets. But the record suggests that he used them without obvious enthusiasm for anything other than a cold war victory.
Thus the first big difference between Kennedy-to-the-moon and Bush-to-the-moon is that Kennedy’s programme had a well conceived and serious purpose, while for the most part Bush just has a second-hand version of that purpose. A lack of purpose for the programme does not mean that Bush had no reasons for announcing it. It allowed him to reassure those who worry about such things that America will not fall behind anyone else. The proposed schedule for a return to the moon is untaxing and unspecific, but it should do a good job of making sure that, at any given time, Nasa will be closer to putting people on to the surface of the moon than the Chinese. And the announcement allowed the president to reassure the two aerospace giants, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, that money will continue to flow through the space programme into their bank accounts after the space station is completed in a few years.
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