MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2014
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
Sanctity of Truth
32
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Complexity Explained, Through Absurdity By KENNETH CHANG
SANDY HUFFAKER/GETTY IMAGES
Risking Space on a Budget By JAD MOUAWAD
Space travel has long been the preserve of governments and science fiction fans, but recent commercial ventures, often backed by billionaire entrepreneurs, have been seeking to get into the race. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, set up Blue Origin to lower the cost of space technology; Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the aim of going to Mars one day; and Richard Branson started the space tourism company Virgin Galactic. But two recent accidents involving commercial rockets have underscored the high risks and soaring costs involved in any spaceflight. On October 31, a Virgin Galactic space plane exploded during a test flight over the Mojave Desert in California, killing one pilot and injuring another. Days earlier, an Orbital Sciences rocket carrying a supply vessel to the International Space Station blew up seconds after it was launched from a Virginia island. “The engineering and physics of space tend to be unforgiving, no matter who is doing this,” said Scott Pace, a former assistant administrator at NASA, the American space agency. The common thread between these new space initiatives is that they all are looking for ways to sharply cut the cost of spaceflight. Without that, analysts say, there is no realistic prospect of making spaceflights both routine and affordable in the future. After pioneering space exploration and landing on the moon, NASA has had to adapt to tighter budgets and redefine its mission. Today, one of its main goals is to encourage and fund the development of commercial space entities. Orbital Sciences is operating under a $1.9 billion contract from NASA to deliver cargo to the space station. Its Antares rocket exploded on the third of eight resupply missions. SpaceX was recently awarded $2.4 billion by NASA to build a transportation system for astronauts within the next three Kenneth Chang contributed reporting.
JOEL KOWSKY/NASA, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
In October, an Orbital Sciences rocket exploded and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, top, crashed. years. SpaceX was also the recipient of an earlier $1.4 billion contract to deliver cargo to the space station. Boeing also won a NASA contract for $4.6 billion to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the space station. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences have sought to reduce costs in different ways. Orbital’s rockets use a pair of refurbished engines built in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. The engines were intended for Soviet rockets destined for the moon, but were never used and lay in storage for decades. The engines were refurbished by an American company and incorporated into the Antares rocket by Orbital. SpaceX, by contrast, builds its engines for its Falcon 9 rocket and aims to reduce costs, in the long term, by reusing the rocket. The company has succeeded in firing a test rocket called Grasshopper, having it hover at around 730 meters and then returning it to its point of launch. But its efforts to land Falcon 9 rockets have so far been unsuccessful, though the company says it is getting closer. In August, a bigger test rocket trying a high-altitude test was destroyed shortly after takeoff.
No one was injured. NASA is “looking for cheaper access to space,” said Marco A. Caceres, a space analyst at the Teal Group, a consulting firm in Virginia. The trouble, he said, is that reliability and price are often tied together. “It may be unreasonable to expect to pay under a certain amount to get a reliable vehicle,” he said. Virgin Galactic is an exception to the model of government-funded launchers. The company has been working on an experimental vessel to take paying passengers to the edge of space and back. The craft, called SpaceShipTwo, was designed to be launched from a plane, then rocket up to its apogee at about 100 kilometers, an altitude considered the boundary of outer space. At the top of the ascent, two tail booms would rotate upward into a position intended to create more drag and stability, and allow the plane to descend gently back into the atmosphere. Accident investigators said that the plane had shifted early into this configuration for reasons that are unclear. In a statement after the crash, Virgin Galactic responded to criticism that the design of SpaceShipTwo was flawed and that the test flights were reckless. “At Virgin Galactic, we are dedicated to opening the space frontier, while keeping safety as our ‘North Star,’ ” the company said. Mr. Caceres said the new space entrepreneurs were good at creating excitement about their ventures. Before the latest accident, about 700 people had reserved seats on Virgin Galactic, with tickets costing $250,000 each. “You are talking about a brand new era of space,” Mr. Caceres said. “You have personalities like Richard Branson and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are not engineers. These are different kinds of people and they can generate a lot of excitement and capital investors who are willing to give you a lot of money.” However, he added, “the downside is that if you have problems, you have all this attention focused on you.”
While giving a physics talk for high school students five years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Randall Munroe could tell that his audience was, in his words, “not totally with me.” He was trying to explain potential energy and power — not complex concepts, but abstruse. So, in the middle of his threehour presentation, Mr. Munroe, who is best known as the creator of the web comic xkcd, switched gears to “Star Wars.” “I thought about the scene in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ when Yoda lifts the X-wing out of the swamp,” he said. “It occurred to me as I was lecturing.” Instead of abstract definitions (an object lifted upward gains potential energy because it will accelerate if dropped; power is the rate of change in energy), Mr. Munroe asked a question: How much Force power can Yoda output? “And so I did a rough version of the calculation on the fly in the classroom, looking up the craft dimensions and measuring things in the scene on the projector in front of them,” Mr. Munroe said. “They all perked up.” For most people, physics is not interesting in itself. “The tools are only fun when the thing you’re using them on is interesting,” he said. The students started asking other questions. “What about the end of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ when Sauron’s eye explodes? How much energy is that?” The experience inspired Mr. Munroe to start soliciting similar questions from his xkcd readers. Mr. Munroe has now collected that work, including a version of his Yoda calculations and new material, into a book, “What If?” which has been on the nonfiction best-seller list since it was published in September. As its cover asserts, the book is full of “serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions.” “It exercises your imagination, and his dry wit is charming,” said William Sanford Nye, better known as “Bill Nye the Science Guy.” “He does, for lack of a better term, absurd scenarios, but they’re very instructive.” What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? (“The answer turns out to be ‘a lot of things,’ ” Mr. Munroe writes, “and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter [or the pitcher].”) If every person aimed a laser pointer at
the moon at the same time, would it change color? (“Not if we used regular laser pointers.”) How long could a nuclear submarine last in orbit? (“The submarine would be fine, but the crew would be in trouble.”) The explanations are accompanied by the same stick-figure drawings and nerdy wit that made xkcd popular. (What does xkcd mean? The comic’s website explains, “It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation.”) While a physics major at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, Mr. Munroe started working as an independent contractor on a robotics project at the nearby NASA Langley Research Center, and he continued after graduating. During that time, he started scanning his doodles and posting them on the web. By mutual decision, the NASA contract ended in 2006. Mr. Munroe became a full-time cartoonist and moved to the Boston area, because, he said, he wanted a bigger city with geekier things to do. In 2012, he added the “What If?” feature to the website. Now, he said, he receives thousands of questions a week. Many
Outlandish physics from the creator of a web comic. are obviously students looking for help with homework. Others can be answered simply: No. “One of them was ‘Is there any commercial scuba diving equipment that would allow you to survive under molten lava?’ ” Mr. Munroe said. “No, there’s not. There’s nothing complicated about the answer to that. It’s exactly what you think.” As a child, Mr. Munroe also asked questions. In the book’s introduction, he recounts wondering if there were more hard things or soft things in the world. The young Mr. Munroe, 5 years old, concluded the world contained about three billion soft things and five billion hard things. “They say there are no stupid questions,” Mr. Munroe, now 30, writes. “That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. “But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.”
RANDALL MUNROE/HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT