The way Will Whitehorn tells it, the story began in 2003 in Mojave California on a visit to Scaled Composites, a company with a reputation for designing futuristic aircraft. Whitehorn is one of the top executives in Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, and Virgin Atlantic, Sir Richard’s airline, was sponsoring Global Flyer, a Scaled Composites creation, on a non-stop voyage around the world. On his way out of the factory, Whitehorn saw something unusual and asked what it was. Burt Rutan, head of Scaled Composites, told him it was a spaceship. He was building it for another customer, but he couldn’t say any more.

Rutan’s customer turned out to be Paul Allen, one of the Microsoft founders.  When Spaceship One, as the aircraft was called, reached space for the second time on October 4, 2004, it won the ten million dollar Ansari X Prize. The craft was taken to high altitude by White Knight, a more-or-less conventional aircraft, and then dropped whereupon its engines ignited to shoot it a hundred kilometers above the planet and thus officially into space. It reentered the atmosphere and glided onto a conventional runway.

This was an epochal moment in the history of space because it was the first time space travel began to move from the realm of governments to the realm of private enterprise. But Mr. Allen is a billionaire only interested in proving that spaceship technology would work, not in exploiting it commercially himself, and this left Rutan a problem: he had a very cool spaceship on his hands but no way of making money from it. That’s where Sir Richard Branson came in. Virgin Galactic, the company in the Virgin stable headed by Mr. Whitehorn, decided to license the technology for Spaceship One and White Knight. Virgin Galactic wants to offer sub-orbital flights to paying passengers by the end of the decade.

Virgin Galactic has accumulated a number of commercial rivals in the space tourism market so free enterprise is working. One of them is led by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is building a competing sub-orbital spaceship at a ranch in Texas. His space company Blue Origin is so secretive that it won’t even answer questions about its logo. But Virgin Galactic has passed an important milestone. At an event held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in January, the company unveiled the design of its new generation of space vehicles and said the first examples have almost been finished out at Mr. Rutan’s factory. White Knight II, as it’s called, is due to roll out of the hanger soon. Test flights of Spaceship Two will start towards the end of 2009.

How does this space technology work? The combination of a carrier aircraft and a spaceship to get into space is sort of like building a two-stage rocket. Air launch rockets have a long history. Spaceship One and White Knight are essentially vastly improved and cheaper versions of the X-15 rocket plane that set speed and altitude records in the 1960s, and the B-52 Bomber that carried the Rocket Plane under its wings. However, pure rockets such as the ones that lifted the Space Shuttle won out because the space race between America and Russia emphasized speed over cost. Rockets were a cheap and proven technology, having already been developed as intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Rockets were a dead-end for the space program because they consume a huge amount of power as they claw their way up through the Earth’s thick atmosphere, and they spend most of that power lifting the fuel itself. By contrast, a rocket lifted by an airplane with wings before being launched can be made much smaller and lighter. The plane itself is light because engines breathe air. It thus needs to carry less fuel than a rocket and no chemical oxidant to burn that fuel as a rocket would. That also makes it safer, since chemical rockets are essentially giant firecrackers.  Each craft, the plane and the rocket, can therefore be optimized to do its own job. It’s also easier than designing a single vehicle with a lot of compromises to be able to do both jobs.

Virgin Galactic’s second generation of craft are based on Spaceship One and White Knight, but there are plenty of differences. White Knight II has been redesigned wholesale to lift a much larger spaceship with eight people on board instead of three. It has a wingspan similar to a Boeing 757. It’s three times larger than its predecessor and is the largest aircraft ever made from purely composite materials like carbon fiber. It has engines by Pratt & Whitney—tested and mature technologies, and with its twin boom and long wing it looks more like Global Flyer than its predecessor.

The new spaceship has been engineered to give the thrill of passengers having zero gravity swoops on the way down after they’ve watched the spaceship be released for its trip into space. There will be two pilots up front and six passengers who will have enough room to bounce around in the zero gravity. The spaceship is fueled by a hybrid rocket; called that because it contains both liquid and solid propellants. These rockets are cheaper to develop and operate, and the fuel is safer to store than purely liquid fuel ones. Spaceship One used as materials rubber and laughing gas, or nitrous oxide. Scaled Composites is studying alternatives to rubber that may improve performance. All of this pioneering technology leaves NASA and its European equivalent, ESA, in the dust.

Work is now beginning on another factory to start turning out these spacecraft in significant numbers. Virgin Galactic has ordered five spacecraft and two carrier aircraft. The spaceships will take longer to refuel for their next flight than the carrier aircraft do so thinking just as an airline would the firm has concluded it needs more spaceships than carriers. Each spaceship would eventually be capable of making two trips into space every day and the launch aircraft three or four flights. Rutan says they could operate from a number of airports and spaceports around the world. Virgin Galactic believes the fleet it has ordered should be large enough to furnish its space tourism business in the early years. Trips are expected to cost some two hundred thousand dollars each to start with, and hundreds of people have put down a total of thirty million dollars in deposits. Space travel is becoming real. As the price comes down, could this be your next vacation?

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What would it be like to live in the outer solar system? It turns out to be not too bad and so life out there might not be as unlikely as we once thought. Past the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, the Sun is a feeble dot in the sky. Temperatures are extremely cold, and yet under the surface of Titan, Saturn’s large moon, a vast ocean of water and ammonia may be lurking.

Astronomers have not directly observed this ocean, but recent observations with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft of Titan’s rotation and shifts in the location of surface features suggest a liquid ocean perhaps sixty miles under the surface. Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and the second biggest in the solar system, only slightly smaller than Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. It’s larger than Mercury and the recently demoted dwarf planet Pluto. Cassini has been looking at Saturn and its moons for several years and it has collected measurements using radar that penetrate Titan’s thick atmosphere, doing nineteen passes over the moon between 2005 and 2007.

Data from these early observations allowed researchers to locate fifty landmarks, including lakes, canyons and mountains on Titan’s surface. They looked at later radar data and found that prominent surface features had shifted by up to nineteen miles. That’s a lot. The spin of Titan’s crust is linked to winds that blow through its atmosphere, but this large a displacement of surface features would be hard to explain unless the crust were separated from its core by an internal ocean allowing the crust to essentially float. According to Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins University, who led the study, “It’s because Titan’s crust seemed so mobile that we infer this internal ocean.” He says the ocean is probably water, with a few percent ammonia, while the atmosphere is made up of nitrogen with other hydrocarbons that give Titan its orange color. Titan’s atmosphere consists of compounds that may have existed in the Earth’s primordial atmosphere, but Titan has more of the chemicals ethane and methane.

Titan is perhaps the most Earth-like landscape in the solar system and it probably has the most Earth-like weather. It’s much colder than the Earth, but the same processes that go on in our weather, particularly the formation of clouds and rain, happen on Titan, but in this case with liquid methane and not with water. Titan is thought to have hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and gas reserves on the Earth. On Titan, these hydrocarbons rain from the sky and collect in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.

Now the evidence of an underground ocean raises anew the possibility that life might exist deep under Titan’s surface. Similar underground oceans have been found on Europa, Calisto, Ganymede, and tiny Enceladus. Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus is the subject of a second recent story. It has all the ingredients needed for life erupting in geysers beneath its surface and spewing into the atmosphere.  Instruments on the Cassini mission a few weeks ago revealed a concentration of water vapor, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and organic material twenty times denser than expected, and the temperatures were higher than previously measured. Dennis Matson, the project scientist for Cassini, said, “Enceladus has got warmth, water, and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life.  We have quite a recipe for life on our hands.”

Saturn’s moons have long been of interest to scientists, particularly Titan with its enormous and significant atmosphere, but Enceladus’ chemical components are surprising because previously they’d only been found in comets. Cassini also measured surprisingly warm temperatures near the north pole. It doesn’t seem warm to us, but minus ninety-three degrees Celsius or minus a hundred and thirty-five Fahrenheit is tens of degrees warmer than scientists had expected. But it’s the liquid water that’s surprising, and those high temperatures near the surface make it likely that there’s liquid water not far below the surface.

There you have it. In the frigid depths of the outer Solar System, ranging from a large moon Titan to a tiny moon Enceladus, we have liquid water. We also have organic material, and we have energy: all the ingredients necessary for microbial life. Now, we just need a few billion dollars in NASA’s budget to send spacecraft out there with instruments that can make the careful measurements needed to be sure, and that’s at least a decade or more away. Astrobiology is not a subject for those in need of instant gratification.

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This week saw the passing of a visionary of space and a giant of science fiction.  Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of ninety. The author of almost a hundred books, he was an ardent promoter of humans’ destiny beyond the confines of Earth, most famously in the book and following movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. His work was also foretelling of the future. His forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.

Clarke set his sights high. He did a lot of his best writing during the cold war, and he suggested that exploring space could serve as the moral equivalent of war, giving humans an outlet to their energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust. He influenced a huge number of American scientists and inspired a number of people to become astronauts. Carl Sagan was influenced by him, and producer Gene Roddenberry said that Clarke’s writings gave him the courage to pursue Star Trek in the face of ridicule from TV executives.

His ideas were often ahead of his time. The article he wrote on telecommunications satellites was almost rejected by the magazine Wireless World as too farfetched and ridiculous. Decades later he wrote a wry article called “A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time” in which he claimed that a lawyer had dissuaded him from applying for a patent for the idea because the lawyer said the idea of relaying signals from space was too outrageous to be taken seriously.

Arthur Charles Clarke was born in 1917 in southern England. His father was a farmer and his mother a post office telegrapher. He had four siblings and was educated in the regular schools of his town. His childhood imagination was awakened by rambling along the Somerset shoreline, by pictures of dinosaurs he found in cigarette packets, and by the gift of a Meccano set, which is the British equivalent of Erector. He also spent time, like young Galileo before him, mapping the Moon with a telescope he constructed himself from a cardboard tube and a couple of lenses.

The year his father died, when he was just thirteen, he found his first copy of Astounding Stories of Super Science, then the leading American science fiction magazine, and so his path was set. While still a schoolboy he joined the British Interplanetary Society, a small band of enthusiasts who held the view that space travel was not only possible but could and should be achieved in the not too distant future. He wrote his first story, Against the Fall of Night, when he was twenty, but it wasn’t published until sixteen years later.

He’s most famous of course for the movie and book 2001. Its genesis was a short story called The Sentinel published in a science fiction magazine in 1951. It tells the story of an alien artifact found on the moon, a small crystalline pyramid, that explorers from Earth destroy while trying to open it. One explorer realizes that the artifact is a kind of failsafe beacon, and by silencing it, humans have signaled their existence to their far-off creators. The power of “2001: The Movie” came from the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick who was fresh from his triumph in Dr. Strangelove.  When these two met they formed an immediate bond and a great team. Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novel. Stanley Kubrick produced and directed the film, and they are jointly credited with the screenplay. Even though it has the usual elements of hard science fiction, many reviewers and audience members were puzzled by the final scenes which seem almost ethereal, when the alien returns to orbit as a star child. The most memorable character in the movie is not a person, but HAL, the mutinous computer, a kind of smug machine that believed too strongly in its own infallibility.

Clarke’s reputation as a prophet of the space age rests on more than a few accurate predictions. Many people were influenced by him. Listen to Charles Kohlhase who planned NASA’s Cassini mission. He said of Mr. Clarke, “When you dream what is possible and add a knowledge of physics, you make it happen.” Another scientist Torrence Johnson said Clarke’s work was a major influence on many people in the field. He recalled a meeting of planetary scientists and rocket engineers where talk turned to the author. “All of us around the table said we read Arthur C. Clarke,” he said. “That was the thing that got us there.”

Clarke was a British citizen who lived most of his life in Sri Lanka. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998. Along with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Clarke said his greatest influence as a writer was Olaf Stapledon, the quirky British philosopher who wrote speculative narratives of extraordinary imagination. Clarke was also influenced by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. A statement from Clarke’s office says he had recently reviewed the final manuscript of his last novel called The Last Theorem, co-written with Frederik Pohl, which will be published later this year as his memorial. Some of his best-known books are Childhood’s End from 1953, The City and the Stars from 1956, The Nine Billion Names of God in 1967, Rendezvous with Rama in 1973, and The Songs of Distant Earth in 1986.

Clarke also wrote non-fiction books about nature and diving. He got interested in diving in the early 1950s when he realized that he could find underwater something close to the weightlessness of outer space, and he settled in Sri Lanka in the 1950s.  He suffered polio early in his life, and later in his life it returned and debilitated him, limiting him to a wheelchair. But of course his mind was never bounded by anything. He liberated himself and millions of people who, like him, would never leave the Earth, allowing them to vault into space on their imaginations.

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The season of goodwill does sometimes end with a hangover, if not due to alcohol then of course to the bills that come due. After weeks when we look forward to opening packages for the cards and presents they contain, we dread that one credit card statement that arrives sometime in January. So to echo that discontent, we’ll start 2008 by looking at how astrobiology is paid for. Where do the budgets for astrobiology come from? This exciting research is severely challenged by current constraints on the federal budget.

First, the big picture. Science in the United States is funded by four agencies: the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the Department of Energy. NSF could fund astrobiology, but for historical reasons it doesn’t. So virtually the entire federal funding of this subject comes from NASA. NASA has a sixteen billion dollar budget. One-third of that is for science. The rest is for the shuttle program, the International Space Station, and ongoing research on propulsion technologies. Of the one-third science budget, which amounts to about five billion dollars, less than two percent goes to astrobiology.

NASA’s been in tough times the last few years. It had deep cuts to its research budget of several hundred million dollars. That’s a fifteen percent drop in what’s called the Research and Analysis or R and A budgets. Astrobiology, which is a new discipline, took an even worse cut, fifty percent, and making matters worse, NASA made the cuts retroactive so scientists who thought they had funding lined up for the year were suddenly scrambling for new grant dollars. This is a part of the science game that most people don’t realize. I’m lucky. I have a tenured job as a faculty member and teacher at a big university. I can’t be fired, except for gross dereliction of duty or malfeasance, neither of which I plan any time soon. I only have to raise the three months of my summer salary with grants. There are many people on what’s called soft money who go from one year to the next, having to perhaps support a family, paying their entire salary with evanescent budgets of NASA and the NSF.

Last year, NASA appointed a new Associate Administrator, Alan Stern, who took office pledging to reinvest in Research and Analysis as one of the main thrusts of his strategy for getting the most out of the agency’s flat budget. He brought along two deputies, one of whom, Yvonne Pendleton, said, “R and A is only a tiny part of the overall science budget, but when you cut it you feel the effect very quickly. The people who live off this money have very little else to fall back on.” When R and A spending is cut, it affects not only the scientist who sent in the proposal but also the graduate students and post docs that would have been fed using the grant. Stern has pledged that while he’s at the helm there will be no cuts from Research and Analysis, and that’s good news for every researcher in astronomy.

In the mean time, it’s a tough game. Only one in four NASA proposals is funded. NASA is also experimenting with what Pendleton calls demand-driven balancing to ensure that all scientists, regardless of their discipline, have a roughly one in four chance of winning a grant. As the situation now stands, some of NASA’s programs fund nearly every proposal they receive while others can only afford to fund about one in ten. By moving money around, the Science Mission Directorate hopes to give every scientist an equal chance of winning a grant while at the same time ensuring that the hottest disciplines get their fair share of the available pie.

This change will definitely help astrobiology. Astrobiology is popular enough that the oversubscription of money is often worse than four to one, and so the success rate is under twenty-five percent. So things could be looking up for astrobiology. Stern has promised to rescind the fifty percent cuts to only twenty percent. But a cut is a cut, and it’s hard to do the research with less money.

While we’re looking at the NASA budget and how it affects astrobiology, we can recall that the grants program is only one part of the pie. We fall back here on the Willie Sutton principle. Willie Sutton, you may recall, was a famous bank robber from the 1970s who told the judge that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. Well on the Willie Sutton principle, if you want to balance the NASA budget you don’t look to the grants program, which is only a few hundred million dollars, but to the big missions which are several billion dollars of NASA’s budget or ten times bigger. Unfortunately for astrobiology, some of its missions have been the villains in mismanaging or underestimating their costs.

Back to Alan Stern, who must be known in some circles as the grim reaper dude. Stern’s first target for cost overruns was the Kepler mission, a mission started in 2001 to launch a planet-hunting telescope that hopes to find Earth clones. Because of management problems and technical difficulties, the price tag went up, and the launch date slipped well beyond the original 2006 target. NASA steeled itself for a twenty percent cost overrun that raised the price to five hundred and fifty million dollars and accepted a 2008 launching date, but then the Kepler team came to Stern last spring and asked for an additional forty million dollars. He said no. In fact, he said no four times. To give teeth to the directive for fiscal responsibility, NASA threatened to open the project to new bids so other researchers could take over the equipment that had already been built. Well, that concentrated minds wonderfully, and Kepler team came up with a solution. The duration of the four-year mission was cut by six months, and pre-flight testing was scaled back. This compromised the mission but does let it go forward.

Another mission that had cost overruns was an astrobiology flagship mission, the Mars Science Laboratory. This has a price tag of 1.7 billion dollars, and its goal is to launch a nuclear powered, wheeled, robotic laboratory to Mars in late 2009, a craft that will be three times larger than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that are now operating there. Last summer, a review revealed seventy-five million dollars in cost overruns, so Stern’s office scaled back some of its capabilities, eliminating a camera that would have taken pictures of its descent and stopping work on a laser chemistry instrument called ChemCam, developed by researchers in the United States and France, that was designed to burn off surface coatings of materials to determine their composition.

This was unpopular, stirring a real uproar among scientists. The Planetary Society space advocacy group mounted a public campaign against it and also called for a congressional review of the decision. Then, in November, Stern announced that ChemCam and the descent imager were back in the mission. The designer had offered to finish the instrument at its own expense, and the ChemCam team got more money from Los Alamos Lab, its main sponsor, and the French partners. These hardnosed tactics by NASA’s associate administrator are hoping to keep a lid on the ever-escalating cost of missions and thereby feed more money into the more modest grants program that does most of NASA’s science.

However, there is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room as far as budgets are concerned, a mission I haven’t mentioned yet: the James Webb Space Telescope. This telescope is Hubble’s successor. Originally pegged at five hundred million dollars, the budget over the years has ballooned to over four billion dollars, and it won’t even be launched for six or seven years. It will be impossible for NASA to do all the science it wants to do while the budget of this one behemoth of a mission is growing in an uncontrolled way. Astrobiology will be hurt and many other types of science too. Sometimes you don’t really want to see how sausages are made, but this week I hope I’ve given you a little insight in how the sausages in of science of astrobiology depend on what goes on deep within NASA.

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Picture this scene if you will. Just below a half-opened garage door, a tiny device is seen lurking at the feet of someone in the shadows. It looks like a blue dragonfly. Then its miniature wings begin to flap, and it slips under the door and darts along the street. After rising through the air, it hovers outside the window of a building several stories up. There’s an opening on the roof, and it slips inside flitting from room to room with its video camera eye transmitting pictures to a screen on a remote control unit strapped to the wrist of its clandestine operator.

This isn’t a scene from a Bond film, but an animated video produced by Onera, France’s national aerospace company, to explain REMANTA, a project to develop technologies needed for miniature robotic spacecraft and aircraft. These bug-like flying devices are being developed in other research labs. Some are small enough to be carried in a briefcase. Others are the size of a jet fighter and need a runway for takeoff. These devices are generically called UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. The smallest of them are about six inches across. The bug built by REMANTA has a wingspan that size, and it flies by flapping its wings, a bit like a real insect. This means it needs less power than helicopter type rotors and is better able to withstand winds and being blown off course. Harvard University researchers have developed a fly-like robot that weighs just two thousandths of an ounce and has a wingspan of three centimeters. It’s about the size of a real fly. It cannot, however, fly on its own yet, it needs a power tether.

What have these devices got to do with astrobiology and space travel? Well, the future may be in going small. If we think about the pioneer and landmark missions of the current day, they are huge spacecraft like Cassini at two tons, or the ton and a half of the Hubble Space Telescope. But if we go in the other direction and use miniaturization, there are some interesting possibilities in space travel. Back in the 1970s some MIT undergraduates managed to get an audience with a mid-level NASA bureaucrat and they tried to sell him on the idea of using a robotic ants connected by a neural net to explore Mars and look for life. Well they were a little ahead of the technology, and I guess they were laughed out of the room. But the time has now come to try small robotic space explorers.

Mason Peck, who’s an engineer at Cornell University, envisages thousands of miniature spacecraft drifting to different planets powered only by the Earth’s magnetic field. His novel magnetic propulsion method recently earned him a seventy-five thousand dollar grant from NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts. The biggest advantage of using small spacecraft is that it could shave hundreds of millions of dollars off a typical NASA satellite launch because it requires almost no rocket fuel once in orbit. What he’s designed is basically a set of chips that use the Lorentz force, a physics phenomenon that acts on electrically charged particles moving in a magnetic field. In this case, the force would help the chips escape Earth’s gravity and head for a distant planet. On arrival the chips would rain down on the planet, analyze atmospheric or surface samples, and then signal to Earth if they’d found anything interesting.

Peck and his team are testing Lorentz propulsion in the lab, and if all goes well they have plans, ambitious plans, to try this method to go to Europa, probably not for ten or fifteen years. Here’s how it works in a little more detail. Thousands of chips are packed into the nose of a rocket and launched into low orbit. Each chip’s solar panel sends electrons to a capacitor which pumps them through a long trailing wire to charge up the chip. Then, in orbit, the Lorentz force acts on the charged chip through the magnetic field that nudges the space chip to a higher altitude. After about a year the Lorentz force will have given enough energy to the chip to free the tiny device from the Earth’s magnetic gravitational field.

Timed properly, the swarm will fly freely on a trajectory for Jupiter’s large moon Europa. After a two to four year journey, tiny thrusters adjust the chip’s heading as they approach Europa. They are too small to burn up as they enter the atmosphere, and with several thousand en route, the mission will succeed even if some chips don’t make it. The chips then collect molecules from the air or the moon’s surface for analysis. Micro-particles will stick to liquid on the chip’s surface which will be sucked inside the chip. The chip could contain miniaturized versions of PCR, the polymerized chain reaction device that’s used to look for DNA. So this is one of the ways we could look for life on Europa using tiny robotic spacecraft.

More generally, scientists have always taken advantage of the gains implied by Moore’s law, the doubling of processor speed and computing capability every eighteen months. But the second aspect of Moore’s law is miniaturization. Small devices use less power and they are cheaper to launch and accelerate to very high speeds. If other intelligent civilizations are exploring the galaxy, they’re probably not doing it with starships, they’re probably doing it with smart motes.

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I’d like to talk about the race for space, and I want to use that word in two ways. This week saw ambitious plans in space announced by the Chinese government.
When we think about the race for space, perhaps our perceptions are set by science fiction. We all know the bridge of the Starship Enterprise was very multicultural. There was the Russian Chekov. There was Scotty, who as actually Canadian but pretended to be a Scotsman, and it was fairly international. But Captain James T. Kirk was all-American, American to the core, and throughout that series there was a clear sense of the American projection of power into space.

America has led the space effort almost from the beginning, except for a decade or so when we were eclipsed by the Russians, and when most people think of the distant future of humans in space, it’s inevitable that they conflate human presence in space with the aspirations of the world’s greatest superpower. But what if things change? What if the distant future of space actually involves a different race, with perhaps the Chinese race taking over from us? Anyone who is paying attention to economics will know that China is gaining on us fast, and is poised to overtake us. In 2008, the GNP of China will eclipse Germany to become the third largest in the world. China’s GNP has been doubling essentially every three years since the early 1980s. Extrapolating past GDP rates into the future is risky, but under any of these extrapolations the size of the Chinese economy will surpass that of the U.S. in purchasing power terms somewhere between 2012 and 2015.

By 2025, China is likely to be the world’s largest economic power by almost any measure. This extrapolation is supported by different considerations, even taking into account the change of its economic nature in the political considerations. One of the projections of a major economic power is their military aspiration. Another is that of exploration. China now has put together a significant space program.

Their history was not that auspicious. It wasn’t until 1971 that they launched their first telecommunications satellite. In 1984, Ronald Regan offered to fly a Chinese astronaut aboard the space shuttle. China pridefully declined the offer. In 1995, their space program suffered a very public setback with the January 25 destruction of a Long March rocket that exploded fifty seconds after launch killing at least six people at the launch site and injuring dozens of others with falling debris. Also in that year, China and Russia signed an agreement to transfer space technology, and Russia agreed to help train China’s astronauts.

But that’s the past. In this current decade, China has been going it alone, and they’ve been surging in their capability. It was a shock and a surprise to some people when October 2003 China became the third country to send an astronaut into space aboard Shenzhou 5. Their current plans are strikingly ambitious. China has plans for a space station orbiting the Earth, a Chinese Moon colony, and a joint China-Russia explorer to Mars. If all goes well, the spacecraft that was launched last week will spend the next year orbiting the Moon mapping the surface and looking for resources. Next, the Chinese hope to send an unmanned rover to the Moon by 2012 with a robotic mission to bring back samples by 2017.

Officials have recently backpedaled from goals of putting a taikonaut, which is the Chinese version of an astronaut or cosmonaut, on the Moon by 2020, but analysts believe that it is still a pressing ambition. Dean Cheng, a Chinese military analyst for the CNA, a private research corporation, says, “If China can go to the Moon, eventually with a manned program, it will represent the ultimate achievement for China in making it essentially the second most important space power, behind us and accomplishing what even the Soviets could not.” According to Cheng, the Chinese are embarking on a systematic space program the world has not seen since the 1960s, and for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. is facing real competition. That may explain why the head of NASA Michael Griffin recently warned, quote, “China will be back on the Moon before we are. I think that when that happens, Americans will not like it.”

There could be more at stake than just lunar boasting rights. It’s very unlikely the Chinese will land at Tranquility base and pull down the Stars and Stripes, but the goal could be mining resources. One potential fuel source is helium 3. Helium 3 originates in the Sun and is deposited in the Moon’s soil by the solar wind. It’s estimated that there are up to two million tons on the Moon but virtually none on the Earth. If we can ever get helium 3 and helium 3 to fuse together, it’s nuclear power without waste. There is no radioactivity associated with that reactor. The key, however, will be to develop a fusion reactor, which might be able to be done within fifteen to twenty years in tandem with a program to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon. Four tons of helium 3 would be enough to supply all the power needs for the United States for a year. That’s just two shuttle payloads. This is a potent resource, and it’s probably one of the reasons China is exploring space and heading so strongly to the Moon.

Chinese State media reported last month details of a new rocket with enough thrust to put a space station into orbit. When it’s developed, the Long March 5 will have almost three times the power of existing rockets. China had always wanted to be part of the International Space Station, but was always denied, partly, it’s believed, because of U.S. concerns. So China once again is going to go it on their own and develop their own space mission.

At a recent news conference from Chinese Space Administration, the quote was made, “China has always adhered to the principle of peaceful use of space,” but the spokesman made no mention of China’s satellite-killer missile which was tested earlier this year destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite in a low-Earth orbit. That plus the fact that Chinese Space Administration is controlled entirely by the military has many in Washington worried about where the Chinese are headed. Technologically, the Chinese are still behind the United States, but analysts warn that will not last much longer. It appears that early in the twenty-first century we are heading for a new space race, one where we may be in the unfamiliar role of being second fiddle.

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This week I’d like to celebrate an anniversary that occurred this fall, an important milestone in the history of space exploration. A mission that was supposed to last only five years is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. Scientists continue to receive data from Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as they approach interstellar space. These twin craft have become a fixture of the pop culture, inspiring novels, and playing a central role in TV shows, music videos, songs, and movies from the 80s and 90s.

Many of these fictional works focus on what would happen if an alien race were able to locate the Earth via Voyager’s famous Golden Record, which includes a selection of sounds and images of the Earth. The selections portray people young and old, male and female, not to mention examples of other species. They include information about every continent on the planet, as well as our exact location in space. The images are also designed to show the human spirit of adventure when exploring our own planet.

Earlier NASA missions included plaques with information about the Earth too. This spurred John Casani, Voyager’s first project scientist, to appoint astronomer and author Carl Sagan to head a committee to come up with a message for Voyager. In his book Murmurs of Earth, Sagan described how the committee created the record and selected its contents. Physicist Frank Drake suggested the idea of a record that would have pictures on one side and sounds on the other. The group had less than six weeks to come up with a record to represent the entire population of Earth. A long-playing record may not make aliens think we were very advanced so it’s more of a statement of optimism than a serious attempt to communicate. It will take thousands of years to reach even the nearest stellar system; the chances of extraterrestrials finding the message are extremely slim. However, the Voyager Golden Record has become an icon.

Ann Druyan, who was creative director of the project and later married Sagan, says, “It’s a classic message in a bottle. The likelihood of finding it is small, but the payoff is so huge if it’s found.” Ed Stone, the project scientist of Voyager and a former JPL director, explained that although there’s no chance of it being found realistically, the record is really a message to ourselves. “In a sense,” he says, “it’s a unifying message from the Earth. It contains greetings in many languages, music from many cultures, and images that portray our home planet. It’s our attempt to say what is the Earth, and it’s a record of who we think we are.”

Druyan says, “The record represented the idea that science and technology could come together with art. It’s one of the few totally great stories that we have about humans. It cost the taxpayer virtually nothing. Nobody got killed. It was a way to celebrate the glory of being alive on this tiny blue dot in 1977. It was the most romantic and beautiful project ever attempted by NASA. It had the sounds of a kiss, a mother saying hello to her newborn baby for the first time, all that glorious music.” She said, “Remember, this was during the Cold War. Everyone was living with the knowledge that fifty thousand nuclear weapons could go off at any time, and there was a lot of angst about the future. This was something positive, a way to represent the Earth and put our best foot forward. That was irresistible.”

Along the way the Voyager Record and other messages sent into space have had their share of criticism. Some people have questioned the musical taste of the selections. Done as it was mostly by slightly older people, it didn’t represent all musical genres, although it was fairly international. Other people criticized the choice of a record which after all represents an obsolete technology even on the Earth. However, the record had a gold cover which inside contained instructions on how to play it. We presume an alien would dumb down their technology to be able to play a long playing record. The record was a nice bringing together of different people and different cultures.

One of the back stories of this was Carl Sagan’s son Nick who was six years old in 1977 when the Voyager Record was assembled. The record features a recording of him as a child saying, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.” This is what the younger Sagan has to say now, “I had no sense of the magnitude of it at the time.” Sagan actually partly followed in his father’s footsteps by pursuing a career as a science fiction writer. He says, “Literally, it was my parents putting me in front of a microphone and saying, ‘What would you say to extraterrestrials?’” Sagan said he began to realize what the record meant as he got older, and as a teen he started to realize what a strange and wonderful honor it was. “It has been a challenge for the rest of my life to live up to that honor. It’s always there in my subconscious,” he said. “My dad inspired so many people to do so many great things, to not take things at face value and look at evidence, and to search for the truth. It’s something I look to as a beacon.”

Sagan said that he and his father discussed the Voyager discoveries in the context of their search for life. They got excited when the spacecraft photographed Titan and Europa, and Sagan noted a change in his father as the years went by. “One of the things that surprised him was that we didn’t find life during his lifetime,” says Sagan. “He started to realize that if there’s no other life out there and life is so rare, we need to protect ours. I saw a shift in him. That’s when he became more socially and politically conscious.”

In the end, Sagan’s son believes that Voyager and other extraterrestrial missions are important because of their process rather than their discoveries. He says, “The question is, what’s it all about? If we do find life, it will change us, but it will not change things also. The act of looking will tell us much, and we will learn more about ourselves.” So this mission celebrating its thirtieth anniversary is a way of looking out and looking in at the same time. It’s one of the best things happening in the space program.

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This week’s news comes from the outer reaches of the solar system. JPL released some newly assembled radar images from the Cassini spacecraft that provide the best view so far of the hydrocarbon lakes and seas on the north pole of Saturn’s moon Titan. Another new radar image reveals that the south polar region also has lakes. These images give new insights into the cycling of hydrocarbons on Titan, which are in some ways analogous to the water cycle on Earth. Titan is a uniquely active environment in the solar system, along with Io as another example with its active volcanoes. Titan is the only moon known with a significant, substantial atmosphere. Scientists think that it might in some ways resemble aspects of the early Earth and provide clues of how precursor molecules for the origin of life were formed.

The images that we’re seeing now were sent back from an October 2 flyby where the primary goal was the hunt for lakes at the south pole. The new mosaic has been stitched together from radar images from seven Titan flybys over the past eighteen months and it shows a north pole pitted with giant lakes and seas, at least one of which is larger than Lake Superior. About half of Titan’s north polar region has been mapped by Cassini’s radar instrument, and about fifteen percent of that region is covered with what scientists interpret as liquid hydrocarbon lakes. The lakes and seas are very common at the high northern latitudes of Titan, which is mired in the depths of winter now. Scientists say that it rains methane and ethane there, filling in the lakes and seas. These liquids then carve meandering rivers and channels on the moon’s surface.

Now Cassini is moving into unknown territory, the south pole of Titan. One of the mission specialists said, “We wanted to see if there are more lakes present, and sure enough there they are, three little lakes smiling back at us.” Titan is indeed the land of lakes and seas, and it will be interesting to see the differences between the north and south polar regions. Scientists have made progress in understanding how these lakes have formed. On Earth, lakes fill low spots or are created when local topography intersects a groundwater table. Mission specialists now think that the depressions containing the lakes on Titan may have formed by volcanism or a type of erosion called karstic on the surface, leaving a depression where the liquids can accumulate. Karstic lakes are common on the Earth. For example, Minnesota and central Florida have hundreds of lakes like this.
The lakes observed on Titan appear to be in varying stages of fullness suggesting their involvement in a complex hydrologic system akin to the Earth’s water cycle, and that really does make Titan unique amongst the extraterrestrial bodies of the solar system. The lakes seen so far vary in size from the smallest that can be observed, about a kilometer square, to greater than a hundred thousand square kilometers which is slightly larger than the great lakes in the Midwest U.S. Of the four hundred observed lakes, seventy percent of their area is taken by large seas. These flybys will continue, and they will continue to pencil in our view of this strange world. Titan’s nitrogen atmosphere, its geography, and its complex weathering are familiar, but the chemistry is completely different.

Another story this week from Cassini involves the surprising moon Enceladus, which was shown to have jets of fine icy particles spraying up. Members of the imaging team have used two years worth of data from the geologically active moon to find the sources of the most prominent jets sprouting from the moon’s surface. They compared these surface source locations to hotspots that had been previously detected in 2005. They found that almost all the jets appear to come from four prominent tiger stripe fractures in the moon’s active south polar region, and in almost every case in the hottest areas detected by Cassini’s infrared spectrometer.

This is the first time that these visible icy jets have been tied to the tiger stripes. Scientists suspect that these jets collectively feed a plume that towers thousands of kilometers above the moon. This is the first proof, however, that makes a causal connection between the jets and unusual heat radiating from the fractures. All the measured jets fell on a fracture, but not all jets fell on a previously discovered hotspot, and so the team concluded there are other hotspots to be found. The possibility suggested by the imaging team is that the jets may erupt from pockets of liquid water. That, together with the unusually warm temperatures and organic material detected by Cassini in the vapor accompanying the ice particles, pushes this small Saturn moon into the spotlight as a potential habitable zone object, but what happens beneath the surface to power the jets remains a mystery.

Carolyn Porco, lead of the imaging team on Cassini, says, “These are findings with tremendously exciting implications. To say that I’m eager to get to the bottom of it would be a cosmic understatement. Do the jets derive from near surface liquid water or not, and if not then how far down is the liquid water that we all suspect resides within this moon? Personally, I’d like to know the answer yesterday.” Me too, but patience is required. The next opportunity for answering these questions will not be until March 2008, when Cassini dips low again over Enceladus and flies through the plume. Astronomers will be waiting anxiously for this moment to learn more about the most intriguing small moon in the Solar System.

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This weekend is a momentous anniversary in the history of space, not just in the history of space but in the history of humankind and human civilization. Fifty years ago, the fourth of October 1957, the first artificial satellite was launched: Sputnik, a new moon. Those people who were alive in that moment knew that it wasn’t a wondrous sight. It wasn’t a brave new dawn. It was the incipient rise of fear and paranoia in the United States because it was the agent of the Cold War.

Sputnik was an unassuming little device, a simple metal sphere weighing about a hundred and eighty pounds and not even two feet wide, made of highly polished aluminum to better reflect sunlight and be visible from the Earth. The Russians put two radio transmitters with whiskery antennas on it beeping signature frequencies that ham radio operators could pick up to confirm the achievement. The Russians clearly intended Sputnik to be a statement of their technological prowess and its profound military implications to put bombs in space, but even they didn’t quite anticipate the frenzied response that it caused in this country.

Various commentators have described how the United States was flung into a frenzy by the launch of Sputnik, and of course it took a couple of years before the United States recovered in the space race. John Kennedy was just a junior senator from Massachusetts with no particular interest in space at the time Sputnik was launched. Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong were test pilots with no idea eventually they would be landmark people in the race to space. When news about Sputnik’s launch reached Alabama where Werner von Braun was working, he was beside himself because he knew that his adopted country could have beaten the Russians into orbit if the Pentagon had allowed him to work with the Jupiter-C missile that he had been testing.

To make matters worse, the first American attempts to go into space were mostly disastrous. Finally, in January 1958, the Americans launched Explorer I, boosted into orbit with a multistage version of Mr. von Braun’s Jupiter-C, but by then the Russians had already put a dog Laika into orbit, which was a forerunner of human spaceflight. The race was on. It was an incredible wake up call.

In a recent piece in the New York Times, John Noble Wilford asked, “What would have happened, one of the might-have-beens of history, if America had deployed the first satellite?” It’s likely that there wouldn’t have been an Apollo program, but once Sputnik was launched, there was no stopping the momentum of the space race. Many people still remember the ringing words of John Kennedy committing the United States in less than a decade to land on the Moon. The quote was “This goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” The space race was phenomenally short in its peak phase barely twelve years from the wake up call to that first walk on the moon, but what an amazing ride it was.

As an aside, we know that there’s roughly a quarter of the general public that don’t believe the moon landings actually happened, think that they were faked, a fraud by the government. Of the moon landings, three are sharply etched in memory. The Apollo 8 astronauts, the first to reach the Moon and leave the Earth and look back on it from behind. That date, December 1968, not coincidentally was the start of the environmental movement. Then Apollo 11, the first steps on the Moon. And finally, near the end, when the attention was already waning amongst the public, Apollo 13, a failure of a mission but a real drama that involved everyone in the risks of space.

So what’s happened since then? We haven’t been to the Moon for a very long time. Space science definitely benefited. The 70s and 80s were times when we explored the solar system. Carl Sagan wrote, “Of this golden age of planetary exploration, in all the history of mankind there will only be one generation that will be the first to explore the solar system. One generation for which in childhood the planets are distant and indistinct disks moving through the night sky and for which in old age the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration.” It seems like we’ve only taken our baby steps.

The relevance to astrobiology is obvious. Humans are smart and have been capable of great things for thousands of years, but leaving our planet is a very, very young endeavor, barely fifty years old. It’s impossible to tell what the next fifty or a hundred years will hold. Space visionary science fiction writers have been impatient at the slow progress in the last few decades, but let’s listen to Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, a man of few words. “I think we’ll always be in space. It’ll take us longer to do new things than the advocates would like, and in some case it will take external factors or forces which we cannot control and can’t anticipate that will cause things or not to happen. We were privileged,” he says, speaking of his own generation of astronauts, “to live in that thin slice of history when we changed how man looks at himself and what he might become and where he might go.”

The space race is young. Only a few hundred people have left the Earth, but we imagine that in centuries ahead, it will become a routine thing spreading through the population. And that point will have been reached, we think, by many creatures on many planets out there in the universe. So being at this special point in time and commemorating fifty years in space is interesting, because it’s the beginning of a very long journey.

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It seems exciting to live the life of an astronaut, and to be in space, but there is something extremely clumsy and inelegant about the spacesuits they have to wear. Those of us who remember the Apollo astronauts sensed the euphoria of being on the Moon, but there were these people galumphing around slowly in their clumsy suits imagining the mission controllers cringing at the ease with which they could fall over and the fatal outcome of even a small puncture in the suit.

Astronauts have been lumbering around in the same heavy, energy-sapping suits for forty years. Well, Dava Newman, who’s a professor of aeronautics at MIT, wants to change all that. She and her team of researchers have just unveiled a promising new prototype called the BioSuit. It’s sleek. It’s white. It’s clingy, and its revolutionary design has the potential to make astronauts feel as agile as Spider-man. The new spacesuit is made of an elastic, skintight material, light enough to allow astronauts able to run, walk, or even climb mountains on a moon or a planet. These are acts that are physically impossible using the Tin Man design of NASA’s current spacesuit.

The form-fitting suit is not just a pretty photo-op. It keeps astronauts alive by creating what scientists call mechanical counter pressure, which balances the pull vacuum of space. The spacesuits today use gas pressurization. They essentially create a miniature Earth-like atmosphere inside the suit, which exerts appropriate force on the astronaut’s body. The system works, but many scientists consider it out of date because of the bulky equipment and life support that it requires. That weighs almost three hundred pounds.

Referring to current designs, Newman says “These suits are fine for space shuttles or stations but not for exploration.” In fact, estimates show that astronauts typically end up spending seventy to eighty percent of their energy just moving around in their suit. The new suit creates the same kind of pressurized environment simply by wrapping layers of specially padded nylon and spandex fiber tightly around the body. This method has been worked on by Newman for seven years. When the material is properly wrapped, it creates a mobile, skeleton-like shell that protects and supports the astronaut. When the new suit rolls out each one will be tailored to an individual astronaut like a snug wetsuit or a second skin.

There’s enough suit pressure to counter the vacuum of space, but to work the BioSuit needs to exert close to one third of the pressure exerted by the Earth’s atmosphere. So far the researchers haven’t been able to reach that level and they don’t know what the problem is, but they suspect it’s something to do with the suit’s pattern. Aside from its more appealing profile, Newman says the BioSuit will be safer for astronauts than the old suits. Currently when an astronaut’s suit is punctured, he or she simply has to go back to the base to undress or decompress. With the new suits, astronauts could slap a patch on over the tear.

The BioSuit also provides resistance that helps the body maintain muscle mass, and that’s important since astronauts lose about forty percent of their muscle mass during space travel. So if this suit doesn’t end up making it to Mars, researchers say it could be used by athletes in training. Newman still estimates that this new suit is about ten years away from being ready for prime time, but if astronauts ever want to take more than a few steps and explore on Mars or other moons, they will need these new suits.

This leads to an astrobiological thought. What if alien creatures of some advanced function and form could develop skins that were like a BioSuit? We usually think of planets or moons that don’t have much atmosphere or are near vacuum as being uninhabitable places, but we can imagine situations where under the surface they could exist. Think of the tiny Tardigrade, which has its own phylum. This creature has a separated, segmented body, eight legs, one gonad, and an exoskeleton called a tun. A skin is just one form of an exoskeleton, and a tun is a Tardigrade solution. But a BioSuit, if it could be developed by nature, would be even more impressive. What would habitable mean now? BioSuits will let humans exist on the surface of planets where they couldn’t normally live. Perhaps other advances creatures have used similar strategies.

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