NASA’S WILDEST DREAMS

NASA has always had it share of dream­ers. Years before Leonard Nimoy put on pointy ears or Neil Armstrong made his giant leap the space agency’s big thinkers were sketch­ing out Enterprise-​​esque ion propul­sion engines and colonies on other worlds.
But there are some ideas too mad even for NASA’s mad sci­en­tists — espe­cially in these budget-​​challenged times. Enter NIAC, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. This five-​​person, independently-​​funded cen­ter, hands out about $3 mil­lion per year to sci­en­tists propos­ing the wildest of wild ideas: weather con­trol; robotic fleets defend­ing the earth from aster­oid attack; shape-​​shifting space suits. After the six to twenty-​​four month stud­ies are done, NIAC then shops the pro­pos­als to NASA proper, where the real fund­ing can begin.
Like NIAC’s best-​​known grad­u­ate — the 62,000-mile “Space Elevator” for haul­ing cargo into orbit the ideas are decades away from the pos­si­ble. But some­times, even the nut­ti­est dreams come true. As NIAC direc­tor Bob Cassanova coun­sels, “Don’t let your pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with real­ity sti­fle your imag­i­na­tion.“
I take a quick look at four NIAC projects in this month’s Wired mag­a­zine — a follow-​​up, of sorts, to an arti­cle I wrote last May for Wired News. Here are two pro­grams that’s didn’t make it into the mag­a­zine piece (they over­lapped with some other Wired sto­ries), but are still pretty cool, nonetheless.

ANTI-​​MISSION. Getting to other stars or even to the edge of our own sys­tem will take a whole lot of speed. Los Alamos physi­cist Steve Howe thinks he has the turbo-​​charger: anti-​​matter. Pound for pound, the unsta­ble par­ti­cles are tens of mil­lions of times more pow­er­ful than chem­i­cal or nuclear pro­pel­lants. By trap­ping mol­e­cules of anti-​​hydrogen in tiny elec­tro­sta­tic traps and then drib­bling those mol­e­cules against a uranium-​​coated sail Howe believes he can get a space­craft to the solar system’s edge, 23 bil­lion miles away, in just ten years. It took the Cassini probe to Saturn seven years to go just a bil­lion miles. Under a NIAC con­tract, Howe thumb­nailed an anti-​​matter-​​powered mis­sion to the Kupier Belt, the band of icy bod­ies beyond Neptune. For the trip to hap­pen, it’ll take a “mir­a­cle of some mag­ni­tude” ramp­ing up anti-​​matter pro­duc­tion by 200 mil­lion per­cent. But the Kupier jaunt is just a warm up for the big adven­ture, a four-​​decade excur­sion to Alpha Centauri.
MARS NEEDS CAVES. To live on Mars, peo­ple may have to go back to being cave­men. The Red Planet’s atmos­phere is too thin to shield astro­nauts from deadly radi­a­tion. So most NASA Mars base schemes have called for tons of rock to cover a habi­tat there. But New Mexico Tech’s Penny Boston has a bet­ter way. Just under Mars’ sur­face are lava tubes that stretch for tens, even hun­dreds, of miles. Explorers could live in these big, hor­i­zon­tal caves, free from the fear of get­ting zapped. And because the tubes are easy to seal off, they’d be great breed­ing grounds for breath­able air. There’s even a half-​​decent chance of find­ing water close by. Boston has mapped out Martian cave life for NIAC. Next up: liv­ing, two weeks at a time, in plastic-​​sealed lava tubes in New Mexico’s Mars-​​like desert. 

January 3rd, 2005 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.