Exploration: Part Two

(This posting is the second of two on Chris Hadfield's Exploration talk at the Orpheum Theatre - Part One can be read here.)

After a brief intermission, Chris Hadfield returns to the stage to continue his look at the future of space exploration.

What does he see as the most important factor in the exploration of our solar system? Water. It's the key element of life on Earth, and an equally key element of space exploration. "With enough water, we can survive anywhere."

He then asks the question, "Where should we explore in our own solar system if water is the key to survival?"

One place to start is Mars. The Martian polar ice caps are an obvious resource for extended stays on Mars, and satellite images have shown sublimating water, places where water ice* has evaporated and recondensed. The Opportunity probe discovered examples of sedimentary rock, evidence that Mars used to have oceans and lakes.

"InSight is a rectal probe for Mars."

NASA's current mission, the Martian InSight lander, is drilling into the surface of Mars in order to taking temperature readings to determine how deep the ground is frozen and where liquid water might be found.

The Commander points out that there is water all through our solar system. Comets are primarily water, a building block for water in the solar system. "We're trying to understand what are asteroids made of - the Japanese Space Agency recently sent a little probe to an asteroid called Ryugu." The Hayabusa 2 probe successfully landed on the surface of Ryugu and conducted experiments to examine the asteroid's interior.

Jupiter's moon Europa was examined by the Galileo probe, which discovered that the surface of Europa is covered with cracks that appear to be healing over time, a process consistent with ice and liquid water.

"Europa is a water world - in fact, there's more water under the ice cover than there is water on Earth."

The combination of heat and liquid water leads to the possibility of life - "the same processes that produced life on Earth four billion years ago could be happening on Europa." Hadfield mentions the Europa Clipper probe under construction by NASA, with a planned launch date sometime in the 2020s, which will take a closer look at the moon.

Saturn is also a hotbed of possibilities. NASA's Cassini probe revealed in 2017 that the moon Enceladus is covered with deep crevices, and is spewing plumes of water into space, water which ends up becoming part of Saturn's ring structure. As Cassini neared the end of its lifespan, NASA flew the probe through the plumes to confirm their content.

As with Europa, the combination of heat and liquid water creates the possibility of life on Enceladus.

"These are all definite destinations for exploration."

However, to reach these destinations, Hadfield sees the need for innovation and invention.

"Who is Henry the Navigator now? Who is the inventor of the wheel? Who is trying to come up with better ideas so that we can explore further?"

Hadfield cites the three billionaire tech entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk as frontrunners in innovative and creative thinking in the area of space travel.

"All three of them think that this is the time in history to design a new ship...maybe this is the time in history when we're able to leave the earth like we've never done it before."

He focuses on Elon Musk's SpaceX company and its innovative plan to reuse the first stage boosters from its Falcon 9 rockets by landing them on floating platforms, thereby creating a more economically sustainable model for orbital launches.

SpaceX conducted its first test launch in in April of 2015, making an unsuccessful attempt to land on a barge near Florida, which, interestingly, Hadfield doesn't view as a negative outcome.

"They learned a lot - it's really good to fail early - if they'd gotten away with it the first time, they wouldn't have learned anything. Through failure comes rapid learning."

One year later, SpaceX successfully completed a booster landing on a floating drone ship. SpaceX has flown 70 missions using this system, and "now owns the world's launch market".

Musk has upped the ante by taking three of SpaceX's used Falcon 9 boosters - "...that didn't used to be a thing, used rockets" - and combining them to create "the biggest rocket that exists", the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, which Musk views as a potential platform for a mission to Mars. Hadfield sees this as "opening up opportunities in exploration that we've never seen before, taking the next level in invention."

However, at this point in time he sees the Moon as the next immediate destination - "not just to visit, not to just go camping, to permanently live there."

He points out that as part of the Chinese moon landing at the start of this year, one experiment grew cotton, the first time any sort of cultivation has taken place anywhere other than Earth. "It's just a first step, but it's a pretty interesting step."

"Everywhere you see light blue, those are glaciers."

The discovery last year of underground glaciers on the Moon "almost changes the game completely" in Hadfield's opinion.

"By our best estimation, there are 600 billion liters of water on the Moon, a huge amount of water. A natural place for us to go next. Water to drink, oxygen to breathe, and hydrogen and oxygen for fuel.

"So now, everyone's thinking about going to the Moon."

NASA, in cooperation with Canada and its other international partners, has already announced its plans to construct a permanent orbiting space station around the Moon. "And of course, Elon is thinking of going there as well. He's building this great big rocket, the BFR: the Big...ah...Flying...Rocket - and then just landing it on the Moon.

"We'd have a whole new place that humans can go."

Hadfield considers the International Space Station to have been a pivotal element in advancements in space exploration. "The Space Station has taught us so much about our planet - living there continuously for nineteen and a half years. The ISS is the great exploration vessel of our generation," helping us to understand our planet and develop the technologies to go further, as well as learn what happens to the human body during extended periods of time in space.

This knowledge is a crucial element as we move forward in the exploration of our solar system.

"It's not far away that our technology will be good enough to live on Mars. The amount of water trapped in the polar ice caps of mars is immense. If you could somehow melt all the water on Mars, it would cover the planet ten meters deep."

In summarizing, he takes a philosophical look at what exploration means to us as a species:

"These things are possible. We only think they're impossible because we haven't done them yet. To be able to harness the energy, to be able to go further out, with higher speeds, to make it easier to explore, to be able to live in other places, to get our eggs out of one basket - we're on that edge of exploration right now, just limited by our own imaginations.

"We need to solve the problems on Earth first, we need to think about who we are, but it really comes first circle. What we can do in one lifetime is just amazing, to push ourselves, where we learn to walk, and we learn to walk in places we've never been.

"The human brain is the greatest exploration engine, to be able to imagine things that don't exist, and to be able to understand the problems we're facing. We are an incredibly clever species, we just have to see the world as one place, and see our place in it.

"We have to solve these problems, for the next generation. What is going to be normal for them that wasn't for us? We need to put examples in front of our kids of opportunities that exist. You limit most of your choices in life because of the example of the people around you."

"We need people like Joshua, and Jenni, and David, and Jeremy."

For Hadfield, the positive results of putting the right examples in front of the next generation is typified by Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, one of the new astronauts selected in 2017. "She saw Roberta Bondar fly in 1992, and thought, 'Wow, that's something I can do? I want to do that.'

"It's very close to a Canadian flying in space and going to the Moon, and there's a very good chance that it will be Jenni."

He ends with a quick version of his well-known cover version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, then actually looks a bit embarrassed as we give him another standing ovation, waving goodbye and bowing repeatedly as he makes his way off stage.

Thanks for your commitment and your passion, Commander - and thanks for being so Canadian. You make us proud.

- Sid

* This is not a casual distinction. The Martian polar ice caps are covered with a layer of frozen carbon dioxide - more commonly known as dry ice. The northern ice cap has a layer of approximately one meter, and the south pole is covered with a permanent layer eight meters in thickness.

Exploration: Part One

A spotlight illuminates a spare, unadorned stage, empty except for a guitar and its case, a microphone, and a black-draped table with a bottle of water and a glass.  Then an exuberant Chris Hadfield makes his entrance, greeted with an enthusiastic standing ovation from the audience.

He responds with equal enthusiasm: "I'm excited too! We've got so much to talk about," and proceeds to deliver a passionate, dynamic and inspirational three hour talk* on his topic of choice: exploration.

He starts with the analogy of the single step that is at the beginning of all exploration, comparing it to the first uncertain steps of a baby, then progressing to learning to ride a bicycle, the first machine that we use to increase our speed and distance, culminating in the Eagle Moon Lander, "one of the best bicycles we have ever built."

"Michael Collins took this picture of the Eagle in 1969.  Every human being that has ever lived in in that picture - except for Mike."

Looking at the background of the Apollo program that produced the Eagle, Hadfield quotes the famous 1962 speech by John F. Kennedy in which he announced, "We choose to go to the Moon" commenting that “JFK was challenging us to do something we had never done before, to use this new technology and have it take us somewhere we'd never been before. Seven years later, we took our first step onto the Moon."

"Our imprint, our visible exploration of someplace other than our own planet."

He goes on to speak about the effect that watching the first moon landing had on him, on how it changed the course of his entire life: "The moon landing did something for me - it gave me permission to imagine myself as someone completely different. What might I be able to do? What are the limits in my world? Where can we go in a lifetime?"

Some people would ask why would you explore?  For the Commander, exploration puts the world in perspective - "It's so tiny by the standards of the universe. The better our machines get the better we can understand the perspective of where we are."

"That bright dot at the lower right is Earth from 1.5 billion kilometers, shot by the Cassini probe in 2013."

"The best exploration machine we've come up with is Voyager, which left in 1977.  There's actually two of them, Voyager I and II.  They went beyond Pluto and now out beyond the influence of our sun, the Voyager probes are 22 billion kilometers away.

”Through Voyager, we have left our solar system. If you stuck your hand out the window of Voyager - which would be a bad idea - you would no longer be able to feel the solar wind from our sun.

"How did we do that? How did we explore that far away?"

To look at how we’ve reached so far, the Commander first takes a look at where we started, detailing the history of exploration and technology here on Earth. To Hadfield, it's all about speed, starting with the six kilometer per hour walking speed of homo sapiens that spread humanity around the planet, and working up through the domestication of the camel and the horse, the invention of the wheel in the Ukraine, then the development of boats and sailing and early exploratory trips by the Vikings around the year 1000.

500 years after that, humanity needed “a better spaceship”, leading to the development of the caravel in Portugal, “the great exploration vehicle of its time”, capable of 15 kilometers an hour.  The Cape of Good Hope was transitioned in 1487, and Columbus travels across the Atlantic to North America five years later. These voyages needed more than just improved ships, they required improved mathematical and navigational tools, technology like the sextant and astrolabe: “…the computers of the time for navigation, a tremendous technical achievement.“

The steam engine catapults humanity into the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, followed fast by the airplane, the jet, the Saturn V rocket, which reaches a speed of 9,920 kilometers per hour, the 60,000 kilometer an hour speed of the Voyager I and II probes as they passed Pluto on their way out of our solar system, and the planned Solar Probe, which will need to reach a speed of 700,000 km per hour to successfully pass within 6 million kilometers of the Sun.

He also looks at some of the people who helped to explore our world and increase our understanding of it, early explorers like Jeanne Baret, the first woman to circumnavigate the world in the 1760s – “tough and self-reliant”, and the Montgolfier brothers and the first manned balloon flight by Étienne Montgolfier in 1783.  He also notes Charles Darwin’s voyage of exploration, circumnavigating the world in the Beagle in the 1830s, visiting the Galapagos Islands, and eventually publishing The Origin of the Species in 1859, his groundbreaking work about the fundamental nature of life.

1911 sees the first real exploration of Antarctica by Roald Amundsen, American test pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in 1947, and 14 years later, five foot two Yuri Gargarin is the first man in space, “opening the door”. Eight years later, Apollo 11 puts the first man on the Moon.

Hadfield then speaks to the immensity of space, and the challenges of finding a way to cross the vast distances involved in the exploration of space, illustrating the point by comparing our solar system to the recently discovered M87 black hole.

From XKCD

"Our galaxy is vast. Our best telescopes show us that the Milky Way*** is 200,000 light years across - it's huge. If you start counting stars, there are about 400 billion stars just in our galaxy, and we've discovered in the last ten years that each of those stars has, on average, has one planet, and one in ten is like Earth.  So about 40 billion potential earthlike worlds in our galaxy."

He pauses for a moment then makes a deadpan observation: "That's pretty intriguing..."

"Then there are other galaxies, the scale is incredible, the number of stars, the number of things that exist - all the possibilities that exist, the unimagineably huge number of possibilities!

"How can we understand it?"

He takes a moment to look at the work of Vera Rubin, the first woman astronomer to work at the famous Palomar Observatory in California, who looked at the Andromeda Galaxy and realized that there were too many stars.

"There isn't enough gravity to hold all those stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, and from that she theorized the existence of dark matter - she could have called it Ralph - everything we know about only accounts for six percent of the universe.  The other 94 percent is unknown."

"Can we even explore these places - what is the fastest ship we can imagine?  There's the Enterprise - Kirk was always calling on Scotty for more speed, faster, Scotty."

Using Star Trek's USS Enterprise and its faster than light warp drive as an example, he first explains that the warp drive system is based on the cube of the warp number****, which makes Warp 9 equal to 729 times the speed of light.

At that speed, he calculates that it would take Starfleet's proudest ship 274 years to cross the Milky Way Galaxy, adding, "They were only on a five year mission!! They didn't go anywhere! They were just driving around the neighbourhood!!"

More seriously, he looks at the practicalities of how we are going to explore the universe.

"Maybe we're going to have to get into the very essence of not huge but small, maybe that's the only way that we'll be able to do it - to accelerate very small particles to speeds that will push us to unimaginable velocities."

As an example, he cites Costa Rican ex-astronaut Franklin Chang Díaz, a PhD in applied plasma physics who visited space seven times.  After leaving NASA in 2005, Chang Díaz started the Ad Astra rocket company, which is researching plasma-based propulsion systems for space exploration.

But propulsion is not the only issue - Hadfield contends that new sources of power will also be a crucial aspect of future exploration.

"We need the power of the atom to make it work. We need not just fission, but fusion, to understand how the atom works In order to break the bounds of our own solar system let alone our galaxy."   He points out that many people are working on fusion reactor research, with General Fusion, one of the key players, located nearby in the Fraser Valley.

“They hope to create enough pressure inside this device to fuse two light atoms into one heavier atom which would release an enormous amount of energy - maybe that's the right idea. That's how the sun does it."

Other crucial research is underway at CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.   "The underground CERN particle accelerator accelerates individual bits of matter and slams them into each other not only to understand what an atom is, but what makes up neutrons:  subatomic particles, quarks, muons, bosons, trying to understand the very nature of matter itself.  

"If we truly want to explore, we can't just rely on horse power or cannon power or steam power. Being relentless inventors is the only way to travel even further and to understand even more.  We need a better power source, better than burning oil and coal and wood, and maybe the answer will come from deep underground."

At this point, the Commander took a break - and, based on the length of this post, we're going to do the same thing. In the second half of his talk, Hadfield looks at the crucial role played by water in exploration, and where we may go next.

- Sid

* I have to give the Commander** full points - unless there's a really well concealed teleprompter somewhere in the theatre, he speaks unaided for the entire three hours.

** I know that he's actually a Colonel, but really, I think he'll always be Commander Hadfield to the general population. And it's also his Twitter hashtag - @Cmdr_Hadfield - although it's colchrishadfield on Instagram.

*** I'm never sure about things like this - does everyone know that our solar system is in the Milky Way Galaxy? I've known for as long as I can remember, but not everyone has the advantage of being a science fiction fan.

**** Again, you all knew that already, right?

Reading Week: Keeping Score.

Installation, East Jesus Art Garden, Slab City

And so, in the fullness of time Palm Springs Reading Week came to an end.  The final list of books read was as follows:

The Brain Stealers, by Murray Leinster;
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury;
Ringworld, by Larry Niven;
Cowl, by Neil Asher;
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;

And last but not least, Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, not to mention the purchase of $150 CAD worth of used books.

All that and the Cheesecake Factory, too - what more could you want from a vacation?

- Sid