Hasta La Gadget!

We reached the Moon in a tin can, built a humble space station, and have a plan to reach Mars in a bigger tin can. But we need to reach the stars. And we will.

Yes, I know what you are thinking: “It’s impossible.”

And right now, you are right. Our current propulsion engines are, simply put, pathetic. We are still in the Stone Age of space travel. As cool as they are, rocket engines—which eject gas at high speeds through a nozzle on the back of a spacecraft—are extremely inefficient, requiring huge volumes of fuel runs out faster than you can say “Beam me up, Scotty.”

We have cleared the tower

Solid boosters, hybrid, monopropellant, bipropellant rockets… all these would be impossible to use in interstellar travel, with maximum speeds going up to a maximum of 9 kilometers per second. Rockets won’t work even using the effect of planetary gravity to gain impulse. Voyager—the fastest man-made spacecraft out there racing at 17 kilometers per second—would need 74,000 years in deep space to reach Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star located at 4.22 light-years in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest to our Sun.

But even if we were able to build a massive spacecraft with today’s experimental—but feasible—propulsion technology, it will still take thousand of years to reach Alpha Centauri. Using nuclear explosions—like the ones proposed in the Orion project—would be more efficient than rockets, achieving a maximum of 60 kilometers per second. That’s still a whopping 21,849 years and a couple months.

Using ion thrusters—which use electrostatic or electromagnetic force to accelerate ions that in turn push the spacecraft forward—would only reduce that amount marginally. Even theoretical technology—like nuclear pulse propulsion, with speeds up to 15,000 kilometers per second—won’t cut it. And that’s assuming we can find a way for these engines to last all that time. And let’s not even get into the resources and engineering needed to create a vessel capable of sustaining life for such a long period of time.

All to reach a stupid red dwarf with no planets to explore. We may as well not go, really. You know, let’s just save Earth from our own destruction and colonize Mars or Titan or Europa (if the aliens let us do that.)

Our ignorance is our only hope

It gets even worse. Our current understanding of physics—which says that nothing can travel faster than light—basically establishes that we will never be able to achieve space travel in a way that is meaningful to Humanity. In other words, even if we are able to discover a propulsion method that could get a spacecraft close to the speed of light, it will still take hundred of years to reach an star system with planets similar to Earth. By the time the news get back to us, we all will be dead.

And that’s precisely the key to our only hope to reach the stars: Our ignorance. As much as we have advanced, we are still clueless about many things. Physicists are still struggling to understand the Universe, discovering new stellar events that we can’t explain, and trying to make sense of it all, looking for that perfect theory that will make everything fit together.

That fact is that, since we don’t know how everything works, there still may be something that opens the way to faster-than-light space travel. Discovering the unknown—like physicists have been doing since the Greeks—and harnessing new math and theories into new technology is our only way to spread through the Universe in a way that makes sense to Humanity as a whole. You know, like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars: Travel across the Universe in hours or days, not in centuries or millennia.

I’m giving her all she’s got!

One of those yet-to-be-unraveled things is the Big Bang, the origin of the Universe itself. Our origin, the final question that we have been trying to answer since we came out of the cave and looked up the night sky. We still don’t know exactly what happened, but the observation of the Universe from Earth and space probes have caused some physicists to propose many different models. One of these models says that, during the initial inflation period of the Universe, space-time expanded faster than light. If this turns out to be the case, it would make possible the creation of warp drives.

Yes, the warp drives.

Warp drives were first proposed in a logical way by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. He theorized that, instead of moving something faster than the speed of light—which is not possible under Einstein’s relativity theory—we could move the space-time around it faster than the speed of light itself. The spacecraft will be inside a warp bubble, a flat space that will be moved by the expansion of the space behind it and the contraction of space in front of it. The spacecraft won’t move faster than light, but the bubble will. Inside the bubble, everything would be normal.

A way to understand the effect, as Marc Millis—former head of the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project at NASA’s Glenn Research Center—explains, is to look at the way a toy boat reacts in the tub when you put some detergent behind it. The bubbles will expand the space behind the boat, impulsing it forward. In the same way, a spaceship with a warp drive would be able to do the same thing.

But while there have been already experiments in the laboratory that suggest that this may indeed be possible, we are still far, far away from developing the technology that would make warp drives a reality. To start with, the amount of energy necessary to bend space like this is way beyond anything we can produce today. Some scientists, however, suggest that antimatter may be the fuel that will make this possible.

Again, there are a lot of question marks surrounding antimatter, but this is precisely part of our only hope: Somewhere, still hiding, is the breakthrough that will make interstellar travel possible. The possibility is still there.

Why should we go to the stars?

So call me an optimist if you have to. It may be all this sun shining in New York right now. Or maybe it is because I saw Star Trek yesterday (and it was as good as I hoped it to be and then some more.) The fact is that I’m convinced that interstellar travel will happen. You and I will probably not see it, but if Humanity can survive self-annihilation, I’m sure we will achieve it.

No, “will we reach the stars?” is not the question to answer. We will. The more important question is why do we need to go?

The answer to this is the reason why we have celebrated humans in space all this week, now coming to its end. As I said when we started Get Me Off This Rock, space exploration is the most epic and most important adventure Humanity has ever embarked upon. When we travel to space we are opening the way to the preservation of Humanity. We are trying to contact other civilizations. We are trying to answer the biggest questions of them all: Who are we? Why are we here? How did we get here? Are we alone in this rock we call Earth?

But there is more. A lot more. Ultimately, the most important thing will not be getting the answers to these eternal questions. The most important thing will be the process of reaching for the stars. Because if we manage to get there, it would mean that we managed to survive as a species. That is the only way we can develop the engineering and the resources needed to build something like the Enterprise. Survive self-destruction, solve the problems we have here, collaborate, work as species, not as countries or corporations.

That’s what space exploration and interstellar travel is all about. Only if we manage to go beyond our petty fights and stupid wars, only if we work together towards a better future, we will be able to go where no one has gone before. And be back to tell about it before dinner gets cold.

Recommended reading: Wikipedia, The Warpdrive: Hyper-fast travel
within general relativity by Miguel Alcubierre (PDF), Assessing Potential Propulsion Methods (PDF)

In his final installment as Gizmodo’s cherished Astroblogger, real-life astronaut Leroy Chiao covers the taboo topic of sex in space. Will it happen? Has it happened? Guess you’ll have to read to find out…

Has anyone had sex in space? To date, I can tell you emphatically, no. Why am I so sure? It’s simple. Guys are guys. If a guy had sex in space, he would not be able to stand not bragging about it. Am I right, or am I right? Sorry to disappoint you, but there it is. We would all know about it. Or, I should say, we will all know about it when it happens.

So, what’s the deal? Do we have blow up dolls or robots to take care of business? No, and not that we’d really want such a thing! Humans look a lot better.

Besides, would sex in space—bragging rights aside—really be so great? This week, I’ve given you a look at the difficulties of doing things in microgravity, and the potential for making some pretty disgusting messes. So, apply all you’ve learned, and honestly assess whether or not sex would be better up there. You’d have to anchor yourselves, somehow (in all six degrees of freedom), otherwise it would be more than the headboard you might bang up against. And, some objects, while not sharp (we are careful about that), might really hurt to run into during a moment of passion!

So what do we have? What do you think? There is a rule that even alcohol (for drinking) is not allowed onboard, because NASA is worried about bad PR. Can you imagine NASA wanting to address the issue of sex? Ha!

What about the future, as we fly longer and farther into space? That’s easy. Crews are already mixed, and crews will become larger. As this happens, there will be a gradual transition from crew to colony (for example, a permanent moon base). Just like in your office now, romances will sprout (which the participants will think are secret) and things will take their natural course.

And, people back on Earth (the guy’s friends) will hear about it, almost immediately after it happens. The news will quickly spread from there. And then, you’ll know.

People are people, even in space!

Check out astronaut Leroy Chiao’s previous illuminating, insightful columns, a centerpiece to our weeklong celebration of human life in space, “Get Me Off This Rock”. If you love Leroy as much as we do, you can book him to speak at your business or school, by reaching him at the Leading Authorities Speakers Bureau.

Even when astronaut guest blogger Leroy Chiao isn’t asked, he knows people are dying to know: What’s the deal with relieving yourself when there’s no gravity to contain the mess? How does it actually work?

In the early days, there were no restroom facilities onboard spacecraft. The first flights were only supposed to last minutes, so it was thought that there was no need. The story of Allen Shepard having to relieve himself in his suit became common knowledge, after the event was dramatized in the movie, “The Right Stuff.” Later spacecraft, including the Apollo spacecraft, also had no toilet facilities. The crews of these vehicles used modified piddle packs (used by the military), which utilized a condom, attached to a hose and bag, for collecting urine. What about women? Back in those days, there weren’t any in the space programs (except for Valentina Tereshkova, who probably used a diaper), so it wasn’t an issue.

For collection of number two, modified sealable bags were used. There was no privacy aboard the Gemini and Apollo capsules, so imagine doing all of this in close quarters with your buddies! To make matters worse, these bags were (are) clear. They are still carried aboard US spacecraft, for use in the event of irreparable toilet failure.

Fortunately, things got a lot more civilized in the Shuttle program. As I mentioned before, the Shuttle is a business class affair. It contains a relatively large toilet area, which features a privacy screen.

The Soyuz capsule also has a toilet in the upper living module. When someone has to use it for number two, the other two crewmembers can retreat to the descent module, to give the third guy a little privacy. Usually, that toilet is not used for that purpose, though. Crews go through a preflight enema, which usually is enough to clean you out for the two days of flight it takes for the Soyuz to phase, rendezvous and dock with a space station.

The toilet aboard the International Space Station (ISS) is the same as the one that flew on the MIR station. This is also a civilized affair, in a relatively large area, with a privacy screen.

So, how do these toilets work? They all basically work the same way. In the absence of gravity to help you, airflow is used to try to collect everything and point it in the proper direction. To urinate, it is pretty simple. Use the long hose, which has a funnel attached to the end. Turn on the system, and make sure there is good airflow before relieving yourself. Make sure not to actually contact the funnel with your valuable parts; it’s a disgusting thought first of all, and second of all, you wouldn’t be able to shut the system down before you really regretted getting the life sucked out of you, so to speak! By the way, this system works for women too. The suction is adequate to make sure that the liquids go to the right place.

For number two, the seat lifts up, revealing a small hole. You’ve really got to get to know yourself, and get good at lining things up for this operation! The system again uses airflow to collect and hold things down where they’re supposed to go. After you’re finished, the bag is tied off and pushed down into the replaceable silver can.

Accidents do happen, and by international agreement, you clean up your own mess!

Is it worth it? One of my crewmates on Space Shuttle once told me that he wished that we could land every morning, so that he could take care of business there, before launching back into orbit. Yeah, it’s not pleasant, but you get used to the hassle of doing these hygiene tasks. It’s not so bad.

Follow astronaut Leroy Chiao in his guest column, as we celebrate human life in space with our “Get Me Off This Rock” week.

In Leroy Chiao‘s five-day stint as astronaut guest blogger, he’s striving to illuminate the everyday aspects of life aboard the International Space Station, stuff that isn’t in press releases. Today’s topic? The air they breathe.

OK, so someone wanted to know what the International Space Station smells like. After we opened the hatch, I noticed a moderate smell of plastics, not unlike that new car smell. That’s from the various synthetic materials onboard, outgassing. It’s not too bad, and after an hour, I stopped noticing it.

We do scrub the atmosphere, though. We have carbon dioxide removal systems, as well as a micro-impurities removal device. Oxygen is added of course, as it is consumed. We use an electrolysis device to crack water, dumping the hydrogen overboard. (See gallery for all the air-processing machinery described here.)

That device is a bit cantankerous, so we also have oxygen candles, which we “burn” periodically. These are the same kinds of systems that are onboard nuclear submarines, which face similar technical requirements.

One interesting fact is that nitrogen is not replaced, except to compensate for leakage. The human body does not really utilize the inhaled nitrogen, so it is recycled.

What else? What is the temperature onboard? The temperature was set by the mission commander—me. I live in Houston, so I like air conditioning. The cabin was set to about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Follow astronaut Leroy Chiao in his guest column, as we celebrate human life in space with our “Get Me Off This Rock” week. You can check out tons of great shots from Leroy’s ISS mission in his NASA gallery.

In the summer of 1986, I spent a week at Space Camp in Huntsville, AL. Not only that, but in our final mission, I crashed our Space Shuttle.

I remember watching the very first Space Shuttle launch ever, in April 1981. We were sitting on the floor in the hallway of my school, gathered around a little TV that had been brought out for the purpose. It was amazing, the way the four-piece futureship—the Columbia with its then-all-white fuel tank and boosters—ripped through the sky, rotating and tilting a bit towards the earth as it reached escape velocity, as if to ensure all spectators would get sweaty palms and an elevated heart rate.

For five years, the Shuttle was the thing, and every kid worshiped it. By 1986, my friend Clint and I had finally ditched plans to become doctors like our dads, and were firmly set on joining the astronaut program when we were old enough. (This is before we decided to be rock musicians, which is what Clint actually is.) Space Camp had been started at Huntsville’s US Space and Rocket Center in 1982, and was picking up a rep as a healthy, educational kids summer activity, so it wasn’t hard for Clint and I to convince our parents to sign us up.

But before we made it to Space Camp, something happened that made a lot of kids think twice about becoming astronauts.

On January 28th, everyone at my school was gathered around a TV again, this time in the gymnasium. The Space Shuttle Challenger was about to send a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, into space, so it was a big deal. At the end of the countdown, we watched as the whole launch system lifted off of the gantry, until a little over a minute into the flight, when something went horribly wrong. The Challenger broke apart, exploding in all different directions in a nasty swirl of hot smoke. I don’t remember if anyone cried, but I do remember the feeling of utter emptiness, helplessness, in my gut as I watched.

We coped with our grief through the spring, with jokes like “What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts” and “How do you know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? They found her head and shoulders on the beach.” Every kid lamented out loud that if they were going to have to pick a teacher to go on that particular ill-fated mission, why didn’t they pick mine. The humor was just a stage of mourning; we all loved our Space Shuttle. But the tragedy, and the fact that the Shuttle was grounded until further notice, made it a strange time to want to go to Space Camp.

It was also a strange time to release a film about Space Camp—and accidental shuttle launches—but that summer, before Clint and I arrived in Huntsville, that movie starring Lea Thompson and a young Joaquin Phoenix came out. We all saw it. Much of it was shot on the campus, though somehow, through movie magic, Huntsville became a suburb of Cape Canaveral. So when we got there, we knew sorta what to expect.

After bidding goodbye to our parents for the week, we were divided into groups, named after astral bodies, and issued visors. My team was the Sun—we had orange visors, and in true nerd form, referred to ourselves the Solarians. There were like eight of us, Clint and me, plus these cool guys from South Carolina named Sean and Comer (seriously, how can you not be cool with a name like “Comer”?), a couple of other geeks and two girls—bookworm types but hey, they still counted. We went to classes together: NASA trivia on Apple IIe’s with monochrome monitors, piece-by-piece walkthroughs of Mercury and Apollo capsules, demonstrations of rocket engines, even a spacesuit try-on.

In Space Camp: The Movie, there’s a piece of equipment made up of three rings attached to each other at different points, so that the human body in the middle could be spun in every direction. In the movie, it’s controlled with a stick, and whoever can use that stick to stabilize the machine technically has the skill to right a spacecraft that’s tumbling into the earth’s atmosphere during re-entry. Remember that thing? Well, it was 89% bullshit. The device existed, and a lucky few (I’m thinking the older kids) got to be strapped into it, but it’s just an orientation trainer, and has no stick, and can’t be controlled, except by spotters who spin it around manually.

The pool was for drills. The older kids in “Space Academy” got to do full spacewalk drills under water, like real astronauts do, with suits and everything. We youngins got some basic zero-buoyancy training. The most fun we had was emergency drills—a low-budget re-enactment of the scene where Gus Grissom is pulled out of the water in The Right Stuff.

Looking back, Space Camp was largely an opportunity for the US Space and Rocket Center to sell a bunch of crap (t-shirts, pins, flight suits, hats) and promote its more edutaining rides. The best by far was the centrifuge, that zoetrope-shaped spinning room whose floor would fall out once centrifugal force had successfully usurped gravity as the main force holding you to a surface.

There was an IMAX theater, and we were there every night, seeing The Dream Is Alive, the greatest Shuttle film ever (I think Christa McAuliffe and the other doomed astronauts are shown training in that movie), and a bunch of others, including some science stuff in 3D. It was a little bit like spending a week living at a museum—we even ate in the same cafeteria that visitors did. We lived on freeze-dried icecream that we bought from the concession stand, and one night we were fed an entire meal of freeze-dried or reconstituted foods. I remember the peas, preferable dry, but not much else.

Our counselor was a big handsome fighter pilot named Ty or something, who told us more than once that he was a) a graduate of Top Gun and b) that he’d hung out with Lea Thompson when they shot the movie. Because of this double cred, we obeyed everything he said, and adhered to the lights out.

The focal point of the week at Space Camp was the shuttle mission, but even there, like in the pool, the younger kids got screwed. Our “shuttle” was this half-assed wooden play set, more or less the size of a shuttle, with a ladder that carried you from the flight deck to the crew deck, and an “airlock” that led to the cargo bay. Up top there were screens switches, but mostly they were simple PC screens to show wireframe flight-simulator type visuals, and switches leading to little lightbulbs and not much else. Down below, we had computer screens, and we had jacks for the headset intercom, and not much else. It was good enough for make-believe, but the Space Academy kids had a real frickin’ shuttle.

We weren’t even allowed in it. It was a shuttle mockup that was, I think, used by the astronauts themselves, complete with all the same hardware. Everything about it was 100X more real than our plywood construct, and every glance we stole at it was one of jealousy. It was featured in every brochure on the camp, apparently without fine print that you had to be this old—or maybe this tall—to see its insides. Crashing that thing would be like crashing the shuttle for real, dangerous and scary and expensive. Good thing I only crashed the POS junior edition.

Yep. When we were assigned roles, I didn’t get any of the good gigs: One of the girls, Cathy I think her name was, got a freakin’ space walk. Either Sean or Comer got to be the pilot (naturally), Clint I think was somewhere on the flight deck too. Me? I was shoved down in the crew deck with a couple of paste-eaters, “mission specialists” with nothing to do but report on fake experiments—probably involving mice or plants germinating or something. Maybe it was out of resentment, then, that I caused the whole mission to fail, epically.

Remember I said we learned trivia on Apple IIe’s? Well, I guess I didn’t learn enough, which is ironic, cuz I’m usually an ace at Trivial Pursuit. The thing about our make-believe mission was that it wasn’t sophisticated enough to be a true flight sim—instead, our counselors told us what was going on, and hit us with multiple-choice decisions on the computer screens—kind of a realtime choose-your-own-adventure—that would guide our craft safely home or into flaming oblivion.

We’d made it through the whole mission and were about to re-enter when our window of opportunity somehow closed, and we needed to pick a new landing site. The multiple choice options included White Plains and White Sands. White Plains. White Sands. They sound similar, right? I mean, I grew up in Indiana, so they were equally distant from my geographic frame of reference, and I was the product of the American education system, so I probably didn’t even have a geographic frame of reference. I suggested that we go to White Plains. Stressed it, over the weak protests of my teammates. I was damn sure. I reasoned with them over the intercom: It was a plain, and if we were in trouble, hell, we’d at least be able to put this sucker down on flat land.

I was wrong. White Plains, being a densely populated NYC suburb, is not a good place to land the Space Shuttle. Not only that, it’s in the wrong direction, if you miss your window over Florida. White Sands, New Mexico, all you Yeager fans surely know, is a fine place to crash land just about anything.

It was a fun week, Space Camp, but needless to say, I never went back. And I never became an astronaut. [Space Camp]