Hasta La Gadget!

Okay, so we all know that warp drive isn’t possible, since nothing can go faster than the speed of light, right? It turns out that some physicists believe it may be feasible after all. According to Space.com, the idea is to find another method of propulsion besides a rocket, which could never propel something faster than the speed of light–the universe’s speed limit as set by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. (A few physicists theorize that this has already happened, just after the time of the Big Bang.)

“The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it,” said Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, in the article. “The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it’s not moving at all. It’s the space-time that’s moving.” So how do you do that? Since any concentration of mass warps space-time around it–just very little, given real world, everyday objects–“some unique geometry of mass or exotic form of
energy can manipulate a bubble of space-time so that it moves faster than
light-speed, and carries any objects within it along for the ride.”

To accomplish this, scientists are already experimenting with rotating super-cold rings, parallel uncharged metal plates, and (in a purely theoretical sense) harnessing dark energy, that mysterious stuff that is supposedly out there but no one can find yet. So they’re on it–awesome. In the meantime, got your tickets for Star Trek yet?

Get ready for a trip to the past that rivals the visit to Lego’s secret vault: All the Lego Space sets ever released in one single place, gallery after gallery of childhood memories.

I admitted it already while I went back in time in the Lego vault, and I will say it again here. My weakest spot when it comes to Lego is Lego Space, specially the sets from the 70s and 80s.

In fact, watching Star Wars for the first time and the Lego Galaxy Explorer is what made me want to be an astronaut for the first time. That’s why I couldn’t leave them out from our Get Me Off This Rock space week.

Here they are, plus a bonus treat: Confidential product shots from the 2009 Lego Space line—although if you ask me, nothing beats the sets for the late 1970s and the 1980s.

In 2002, rogue NASA interns stole millions of dollars in moon rocks. This is the untold story of how they did it.

Building 31 North’s white halls are empty, because it is the middle of the night. NASA interns Thad Roberts and Tiffany duck inside a bathroom, and tear off their clothing. Then they change into the contents of their duffel bags—2mm thick neoprene bodysuits. Like in a bad movie, the suits will help Thad and Tiffany avoid heat sensors armed to feel out threatening climate changes inside a vault. The adrenaline, their attraction, the smell of rubber suits and the fear of failure is almost overwhelming. After pulling on the thermally shielded gear, Tiffany and Thad step back into the corridor, moving toward the turnstile lock that guards their target: NASA’s prized stash of moon rocks.

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Building 31 North, which sits on the grounds of Houston’s Johnson Space Center, is where NASA keeps all 600 pounds of the moon rocks it has secured. They are the sole property of the government, collected over six lunar missions and protected with the dramatic intensity of national treasures. Building 31 North is one of the few buildings on earth constructed under Class 100 standards—it is a structure that can withstand 1000 years of water submersion, among other durability metrics that should not be tested this side of Armageddon.

Breaking into it is designed to be impossible for normal people. But not harder than building a shuttle, or figuring out how to put a rover on Mars. The agency hires people with the ability to find solutions for intimidatingly large problems exactly like this one. In this regard, Roberts was your typical NASA intern. The 25-year-old was pursuing multiple degrees in Physics, Geology and Anthropology. But while Thad was school smart, he also has an almost unquencheable adrenaline-seeking side, and was consumed with a strange Excel spreadsheet of personal goals that read like he was trying to prove himself to Evel Knievel and a rocket scientist at the same time: Experience zero gravity, check; experience severe dehydration, check; find dinosaur tracks, no problem. The list was long, and as he checked off one after another, maybe Thad’s ego began to believe anything was possible.

But Thad wasn’t in this alone. He was on his way to a divorce fueled by an affair he was having with fellow intern Tiffany Fowler. Tiffany was equally dynamic—a firecracker and former cheerleader who spoke French in bed and conducted stem cell research on NASA’s behalf. Thad wanted her, so when Tiffany begged to hear his idea to liberate the moon rocks, he told her. And when she wanted to follow through with the plan, the romantic and exciting thing was to start hatching a plan as if it were yet another science problem at work. One that would could make them very rich, or ruin their lives.

Soon one more curious co-op, the 19-year-old Shae Saur, had joined in on the heist. After months of preparation, they found themselves embarking on their unauthorized mission, driving for Building 31 North after dark with intel on every security device—and plans to get around them.

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When it comes to Thad’s story, it is worth noting several things. I was not allowed to quote him directly from my interviews, and the others involved in the crime declined to verify his facts. This is his story as he told it to me. And in the time since, he’s written a novel about the heist, which was “based on truth, but it’s embellished.” So, take the tale for what it’s worth.

The Space Center had been under 24-hour supervision since the 9/11 attacks, but the guards planted at each entryway are not in the habit of stopping NASA’s carefully selected interns—who are always working—from entering after hours.

The guard said, “You get a new car?”

Thad replied, “No, sir. Borrowed it to help a friend move.”

So with a wave of a hand, Shae, Tiffany and Thad were granted access. Thad guided the Jeep Cherokee on the short journey past Rocket Park—an open sky cemetery of former rockets and spacecraft—then parked near the entryway of Building 31.

Once they were in range, the three set about linking and looping the cameras inside Building 31, a system that they had previously taped between shifts of employees responsible for watching the cameras. It is unknown how Thad and company received the intel required to do such a thing, even if the idea itself is straight out of a heist flick. But Shae stayed in the car to monitor the rewired cameras, to warn Tiffany and Thad if anything went wrong. While they prepped, they watched for the presence of fellow late night co-workers, but Thad timed their arrival well and they are alone. So far so good. Thad and Tiffany crawled out of the Jeep, grabbed their duffel bags, and headed for the entryway. Getting inside the front door was easy—a former coworker had simply emailed Thad the code that would allow them access. Inside jobs are often like this, but NASA doesn’t make it easy to steal moon rocks—the puzzle was only starting to get complicated.

Inside the building, an unassuming university-like structure formed by blocks and filled with sterile white walls, Thad and Tiffany walked down well-lit hallways. The milky corridors, warmed by picture shrines to missions past, form the passageway between the offices of full time NASA employees, as well as the route to the inner sanctum of Building 31 North. They stopped to prepare.

In the bathroom, when Thad and Tiffany put on their wetsuits, they also stopped to check their breathing apparatus. The moon rocks were in a chamber devoid of oxygen in order to keep the rocks from rotting by oxidation. They would have 15 minutes of air supplied from their tanks once they entered the nitrogen-filled chamber, past the airlock.

If the interior of Building 31 can be described as white, then the interior of Building 31 North can be described as bleached—immaculate and bloodless in a wash of round-the-clock sterility. During the day, the single lab inside the pearly building buzzes with the movement of white jackets occupied by some of the biggest brains in the world. But at night, once the scientists have passed through the clean room that guards their entries and exits, the lab is nothing but white surfaces, cold metal, glass panels and the unearthly presence of nitrogen tanks. Thad and Tiffany’s path took them straight through clean room and across the empty laboratory, leaving them at the edge of a short hall that dead-ended at the door to the vault.

Breaking into the actual vault required a complex series of codes, some of which were cracked using a dusting of calcite, fluorite and gypsum powder. The mix of the three glows under blacklight, and by paying careful attention to the absorption of the powder it is possible to tell which finger came down first and so forth. It doesn’t quite make sense that Thad could use this trick to figure out the exact sequence for all the codes, based off such rudimentary information. But once Thad had eventually thrown his whole weight against the vault door, the two were inside.

The vault itself was much like the laboratory, a big room in which core samples and moon rocks are encased in glass and metal, numbered by mission. But they hadn’t the time to admire their surroundings. To stay on track—or more importantly, to stay alive—Thad and Tiffany had only 3 minutes to crack the safe, or they wouldn’t have enough air to get back outside.

As the seconds crept onward, Thad continued to struggle with the code, so he quickly moved to plan B, which involved unbolting the heavy safe from the ground, loading it on to a small dolly and carting it back out to the car. It wasn’t easy, but within the remaining time allotted to them, the two managed to slip out of the vault, through the laboratory, down the hallways, past the rooms, through the doors and out of the grounds undetected—all while dragging over a quarter ton of rocks and metal. No small feat, and I’m unsure of how, even on a dolly, a man and a woman could have moved it all.

NASA didn’t realize the safe was gone for two days. A list of suspects was slowly put together. There were no clues left behind—not a fingerprint, a piece of hair, nothing—so the resulting set of names (which was void of that of the actual culprits) looked more like a compiled NASA shitlist than anything else.

The samples they took were from every Apollo mission, ever. Sometime between the heist and its resolution, Tiffany and Thad arranged the moon rocks on a bed—and had sex amongst them.

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Typically, the life of NASA terrestrial moon rocks is dull. After reams of paperwork get approved, a small fragment of the rock makes its way out of this building and into the hands of a researcher, who for a period of time can coax the moon to give up its secrets. However, when the researcher’s time is up, the rock must be returned to the safekeeping of its disaster-proof home, but now permanently compromised by the prods and chemical dousings that so rarely result in something worth talking about.

By this point, the rock is considered too tainted for further use, but is subjected nonetheless to the same eager security as the rest of the contents of 31 North. The rocks, never to be touched again, go in the safe that Thad stole, which is kept inside the same vault where the untested moon rocks rest behind glass panels in a heavily monitored, oxygen-free climate to simulate the moon.

It is worth noting that at any point in the vault, Thad or Tiffany could have used glasscutters to get to the untouched moon rocks behind a panel, but stole the much more difficult to carry safe instead. Why?

There is significant frustration among NASA employees regarding the tested rocks. Tainted as they may be, many feel they deserve to be at least on display. Perhaps most irritatingly, they present an obvious answer to NASA’s funding issues. Science’s trash can be a collector’s treasure, and the price on a piece of the moon, chemical-laden or otherwise, mirrors that of any other intergalactic relic. For these reasons, conversations about these stored rocks are as common on the grounds of the Johnson Space Center as the solving of more everyday astronautical problems. And NASA employees like to solve problems. To Thad Roberts, the problem of the underutilized-but-valuable moon rocks had a simple answer. He told me that if they were useless to science, he saw no harm in stealing them. And the fact he stole the safe, not the more easily taken fresh rocks, seems to back this up.

On the other hand, the FBI’s case files contradicts this notion:

…they also contaminated them—making them virtually useless to the scientific community. They also destroyed three decades worth of handwritten research notes by a NASA scientist that had been locked in the safe.

Who do you trust less, a convicted thief, or the US government?

The story, however, does not end here.

********

Gordon McWhorter, a friend of Thad’s who was largely unaware of the magnitude of the heist, had helped to find a buyer for the rocks, across the internet.

Greetings.

My name is Orb Robinson from Tampa, Fla. I have in my possession a rare and multi-karat moon rock I’m trying to find a buyer for. The laws surrounding this type of exchange are known, so I will be straightforward and nonchalant about wanting to find a private buyer. If you, or someone you know would be interested in such an exchange, please let me know.

Thanks.

A Belgian amateur mineralogist by the name of Axel Emmermann had been coveting moon rocks as an addition to his unusual collection. Emmermann wanted the rocks if the price was right, and Thad had priced a quarter pound of moon far, far under NASA’s post-crime estimate of over $30 million. The price was so right, in fact, that Emmermann grew suspicious, and worried that the deal might be less black and white than it seemed.

On July 20, 2002—exactly 33 years to the day after the day that Armstrong first stepped on the moon—”Emmermann” met Thad in a Florida restaurant. They chatted, then headed for a hotel where the official swap was to take place. They all stepped out of the car. The Orlando Sentinel reported that Roberts joked, “I’m just hoping you don’t have a wire on you.” He was. The person Thad thought was Emmermann was actually an FBI agent.
In moments, 40 agents, 40 guns and the sound of a helicopter overhead surrounded them. The freeway had even been shut down in case of escape. They’d been made.

Tiffany and Thad were in a holding cell together for 24 hours, but that was the last time they’d be together until the sentencing date.

In court, Thad looked back at her from his seat in the courtroom; Tiffany looked down at her feet.

The punishments were doled out in unfair, interesting packages. Both of the girls were simply handed probation, but the boys were both dealt several years. Gordon was served nearly as harshly as Thad, who received 100 months for his planning, execution of the crime (a sentence that was later reduced). As if all of this wasn’t enough, Thad was also brought up on charges of stealing dinosaur fossils from a dig site in Utah. The case was folded into this one.

Thad spent his time in prison doing things befitting of an ex-NASA co-op, like teaching his inmates about quantum physics, but also spent a good deal of time mourning the loss of Tiffany. On August 4th, 2008, when his sentence was finished, he was dismayed to learn she had moved on. By that point, however, he had another thing in his possession, a completed book entitled Einstein’s Intuition: Visualizing an Eleven-Dimensional Framework of Nature, An Introduction to Quantum Space Theory. That says that the book covers Einstein’s theories of truth, the rational complete form of nature, and the interplay of the seen and the unseen. It has yet to be published.

There are rumors of unsolved mysteries. Supposedly, two significant pieces of NASA history went missing during the time of the crime, and have not been recovered: The original video tapes of the 1969 Lunar Landing, and six folders of more mysterious content that were supposedly stored in the safe. Thad claims to have never seen them.

Carmel Hagen serves as editor at realtime search engine OneRiot, where she guzzles Bawls energy drink and chucks empty bottles at PCs. In her spare time she sleeps, explores San Francisco, and writes for a solid mix of urban culture, trendsetting and tech publications.

Contributing astronaut blogger Leroy Chiao continues his five-day mission to enlighten us about space travel, backtracking to the pre-launch period of nervous tension—and steak and eggs—then on to that unforgettable moment of explosive truth.

Today, I was going to write about how to do something else in space. But, I changed my mind. Let’s back up to the beginning of a mission. What’s it like to go through a launch? How does it feel? Are you able to sleep the night before? Do you get scared? What do you eat before?

Steak and eggs. Medium rare and over easy. This is what the first astronauts ate before launch and why not? I remember during one of my launch counts, the ladies were taking our pre-launch breakfast orders, going around the table. I was hearing things like, dry toast. A little yogurt. Cereal. You gotta be kidding me, what kind of pantywaists am I flying with? They got to me and I replied firmly and evenly, “Steak and eggs, medium rare and over easy.” Everyone looked at me funny. I stated the obvious. “Hey, we might go out tomorrow and get blown up. I’m going to have steak and eggs!” Immediately, three guys changed their orders to steak and eggs. I was doing all of us a favor, really. You need a hearty breakfast before launch, you’re going to be really busy. Yogurt? Come on.

Sleep wasn’t really a problem either, although I tended to wake up a few times at night in anticipation, just like when I have other important morning appointments. We usually wake up about four hours before launch, and hit the ground running.

After breakfast and cleanup, it’s time to get suited up. Walk down the hall and meet up with the suit technicians. Seasoned professionals, your suit tech has been with you all through training. He or she makes sure that everything is just right, and after the pressure checks are complete, sends you on your way.

From that point, it’s a bit of a blur, as you walk out of the Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center, to the applause of the employees who have gathered at the entrance. You climb onto the Astrovan, which is a converted Airstream RV from the Apollo days. Crews typically joke and banter a bit, the atmosphere is lighthearted, during the short drive to the launch pad. Everyone falls silent as the bird comes into view. She is beautiful. She is ready, as are we.

At the pad, we climb out and ride the elevator to the 195-foot level, where we are greeted by the ingress crew. Time for one more quick pee. Maybe for good luck, but more, so that I won’t have to use the adult diaper that I’m wearing! After all, we strap into the Space Shuttle about two and a half hours before launch.

Is this when the jitters hit? Actually, no. This is kind of a time to relax a bit. The environment is totally familiar, thanks to the hours upon hours spent in the simulators. For once, nobody is talking to you. Nobody is asking you for something. It’s not unusual to doze off.

As the launch count proceeds, there is a point at which things get serious. Certainly as we come out of the T-20 minute hold. After we come out of the T-9 minute hold, the cockpit is sterile. No unnecessary chatter on the intercom. Is this when it becomes real? Not just yet. For me, it is not until the T-90 second point, when the Launch Director says something like, “Columbia, close and lock your visors, initiate O2 flow, have a good flight.” Then it very suddenly becomes very real.

What did I feel at T-Zero? The answer might surprise you. I felt relief.

Certainly, I was keyed up. After all, we were sitting on top of a bomb, being accelerated to orbital velocity of 17,500 mph in less than nine minutes. Pretty heady stuff! But the thing of which astronauts are most afraid is not getting the chance to launch into space. What if I get hit by a car? What if the doctors find something wrong with me at the last minute? What happens if…? All of those worries go away the instant the boosters light!

First stage on the Space Shuttle is shaky. You can’t really read the instruments and screens very well. At T-Zero it feels like someone kicks the back of your seat really hard, the Shuttle seems to leap off of the pad. You hear the wind noise build into a high-pitched whine. You see the blue sky start to get dark, fairly quickly. You don’t so much hear the rumble of the engines as feel them. Everything is oddly orderly, even quiet. That’s because we are accustomed to the simulators, when all the warning and emergency lights and klaxons are going off, as we deal with the failure scenario presented to us by the training team. On launch day, pretty much everything usually works!

On my first flight, I was up on the flight deck for launch. I had a small mirror, through which I could look out of the overhead windows, which were pointed more or less towards the Earth. (The Shuttle rolls into launch azimuth and heels over as the ascent proceeds.) I saw the ground rushing away, through the flames of the engines.

After about two minutes, the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) tail off as the last bits of fuel in them are consumed. You feel the deceleration, and then see the flash of bright light as the separation motors fire, peeling them away from the stack. It is suddenly very smooth and quiet. My heart leapt into my throat when this happened to me the first time. My first thought was that the main engines had also stopped and we were about to go down! But, that was not the case, I just hadn’t expected second stage to be so smooth.

During the last few minutes of launch, the vehicle accelerates to orbital velocity. You are under three Gs of loading, so it feels like a small gorilla is sitting on your chest. It takes a little effort to breath, but it’s OK.

Suddenly, right on cue (you’re always watching the clock), the main engines cut off, and you are instantly weightless! As I looked out the windows and for the first time beheld the awesome beauty of the Earth from space, I was almost overcome with emotion. I had made it, I had realized my childhood dream. I allowed myself to revel in this moment for just a few seconds. Yes, I was in space, but it was also time to get to work!

Maybe next, I’ll tell you about the Soyuz.

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

History’s worst rocket tragedy actually occurred on the ground, in 1960, when the Soviets were experimenting with a dangerous new fuel. Piers Bizony chronicles it in his upcoming book, How To Build Your Own Spaceship:

On August 3, 1957, the Soviet Russian R-7 Semyorka missile, called “Little Seven” by the men who worked around it, flew a simulated nuclear strike trajectory, then became a space launcher just two months later, on October 4, by launching Sputnik. A great international triumph, then, but in missile terms, not necessarily the military advantage that Russia wanted.

The Semyorka used kerosene and LOX. Who in their right mind wants a nuclear missile that takes three or four hours to prime with LOX before you can launch it? Not the Soviet Red Army, for sure. So they commissioned an even more secret missile, the R-16, which, in theory, could be fueled and primed several days, or even weeks, before it was needed, with no loss of oxidizer, because its engineers had abandoned super-cold LOX and kerosene in favor of nitric acid and hydrazine: hypergolic fuels… a fuel and oxidizer combination that can be stored indefinitely at normal pressures and temperatures.

Hypergolic chemicals are efficient too. They ignite spontaneously on contact with each other and deliver a pretty good bang for your buck. Of course there’s a downside. Hypergolics are among the nastiest and most toxic substances in the rocket business. Did we mention that they can be stored? Well, sort of. They are so corrosive they will play havoc with any part of your rocket (or your people) that they come into contact with that they shouldn’t….

In October 1960, the R-16 was hoisted upright for launch at Baikonur, Russia’s ultrasecret equivalent of Cape Kennedy, based deep in the deserts of Kazakhstan. And so began the single greatest rocket disaster in history.

The R-16’s “storable” fuels wouldn’t store. They were viciously corrosive and leaky as hell, oozing from dozens of pipe joints and tank seams. On October 23, the surrounding launch gantries were crowded with young technicians trying to fix a dozen different problems. As zero hour approached, the rocket began to drip nitric acid from its base. At this point, launch director Mitrofan Nedelin should have ordered the entire gantry to be evacuated, but he didn’t seem to care about the risks. He sent yet more ground staff into the pad area straightaway, to see if they could tighten up some valves and stop the leaks and get the rocket up in the air.

Suddenly, the rocket exploded, instantly killing everyone on the gantry. With nothing to support it, the upper stage crashed to the ground, spilling fuel and flame. The new tarmac aprons and roadways around the gantry melted in the heat, then caught fire. Ground staff fleeing for their lives were trapped in the viscous tar as it burned all around them. The conflagration spread for thousands of yards, a wave of fire engulfing everything and everyone in its path. More than 190 people were killed, including Nedelin, perched on his chair near the gantry as a surge of blazing chemicals swept toward him.

From Piers Bizony’s How To Build Your Own Spaceship, due out this August for $15. Excerpted with permission of Plume, an imprint of the Penguin Group.

MORE RESOURCES

Video of the disaster:

Haunting details and quotes from the event, curated by Jacqueline Sly in a space history project