NO IDEA TOO WILD FOR NASA’S SCI-​​FI ARM

For 25 years, Ross Hoffman has had a vision: to use tiny changes in the envi­ron­ment to alter the paths of hur­ri­canes, slow down snow storms and turn dark days bright.
For most of those years, Hoffman kept his ideas largely to him­self. His adviser at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told him weather con­trol was too out­landish for his Ph.D. the­sis. The chances of a buttoned-​​down foun­da­tion or gov­ern­ment agency fund­ing such research were so slim, Hoffman didn’t even bother to ask.
But, in 2001, all that changed. Hoffman stum­bled upon a tiny, obscure cranny of the American space pro­gram — the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, or NIAC. In this $4 million-​​a-​​year agency, Hoffman found a place where the wildest of ideas were not only tol­er­ated, they were wel­come.
Shape-​​shifting space suits? Step right up. Antimatter-​​powered probes to Alpha Centauri? No prob­lem. Robotic armada to destroy incom­ing aster­oids? Pal, just sign on the dot­ted line. Weather con­trol seemed down­right down to earth in com­par­i­son.
Hoffman is now wrap­ping up his half-​​million-​​dollar study for NIAC. But the agency is con­tin­u­ing to bankroll con­cepts for a future decades away.
Some space ana­lysts won­der how long it can last, how­ever. With NASA in tur­moil, and a pres­i­den­tial direc­tive to return to the moon, will a sci­ence fiction-​​oriented agency like NIAC sur­vive?
My Wired News arti­cle has details.
THERE’S MORE: LL points out that a related pro­gram, NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Project, has been axed by the agency.
“One won­ders,” LL writes, “if the fed­eral gov­ern­ment does not fund this kind of research, and pub­lic cor­po­ra­tions are elim­i­nat­ing most of the basic research expen­di­tures, what would hap­pen to the sci­en­tific lead­er­ship of this coun­try?“
AND MORE: “The lead­er­ship in basic sci­ence has already been ceded in cer­tain areas,” says Defense Tech dad Tom Shachtman. “High-​​energy par­ti­cle research has gone to Switzerland because we wouldn’t fund the super­col­lider; cutting-​​edge stem-​​cell research is now being done pri­mar­ily in other coun­tries because it has been impeded here for political/​moral rea­sons. Congress, and in some instances the Executive Branch, have become unwill­ing to rec­om­mend for fund­ing a lot of research that is too far out, or that appears to not be cost-​​efficient in terms of yield­ing near-​​immediate prac­ti­cal results. That is the very def­i­n­i­tion of short-​​sightedness.“
AND MORE: NIAC is a lot more rel­e­vant than you think, Hoffman says. Take the all the stud­ies “that relate to the sus­tained explo­ration of Mars,” for instance.
One NIAC-​​funded researcher looked at where to live on Mars, and decided caves were the best place. Another stud­ied a plant genetic assess­ment and con­trol sys­tem for space envi­ron­ments, since astro­nauts can­not live by Tang alone. A third looked at what to wear on Mars, and set­tled on “an astro­naut bio-​​suit sys­tem… cou­pling human and robotic abil­i­ties into a hybrid of the two, to the point where the explorer is hardly aware of the bound­ary between innate human per­for­mance and robotic activ­i­ties,” Hoffman explains.
Then of course, there’s the ques­tion of how to get to the Red Planet.
That would be tack­led, one NIAC thinker sug­gests, with “small, highly autonomous, solar-​​electric-​​propelled space ships, dubbed Astrotels for astro­naut hotels. Hyperbolic ren­dezvous between them and the plan­e­tary trans­port hubs [would use] even smaller, fast-​​transfer, aeroas­sist vehi­cles called Taxis.“
Obviously.

May 7th, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.