LAUREL, MARYLAND -- A tsunami of change is coming. And space exploration will never be the same.
Self-healing spacecraft are to mend themselves like human skin. Event horizons around massive black holes can be imaged. Space probes will trek interstellar distances traveling within bubbles of plasma.
Welcome to the world of crystal ball gazing, NASA style.
Space agency chief, Daniel Goldin offered his visionary views Tuesday, speaking here as a colloquium guest speaker at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "Dreaming is okay in the 21st century," he emphasized.
Goldin recalled the Albert Einstein remark: "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
But the future is coming soon, the NASA administrator said, "and we as a country need to be ready."
"Together,
nanotechnology, biology and information technology form a powerful and intimate scientific and technological triad that will enable the advanced aerospace systems of the future. I call it the golden triangle," Goldin said.
Out to launch
Starting from the ground up, quite literally, NASA needs trustworthy and low-cost space access.
Goldin said he took on the top NASA post to lead America to Mars. "We’ve had a little diversion because we can’t build
launch vehicles," he said.
"Our goal is not evolutionary progress in our vehicles through updates," Goldin said. Rather, revolutionary second- and third-generation launch vehicles are mandatory, he said, geared for high reliability to perform hundreds of missions and able to lower launch costs to a rock bottom $100 per pound (per 0.45 kilogram) into low Earth orbit.
The
space shuttle is 100 times more expensive.
Also, today’s first-generation launch vehicle, the space shuttle, has the probability of a major failure from one part in 200. Astronauts flying the shuttle have a 100 times higher probability of a major problem than a jet fighter in warfare, the NASA boss said.
"We want to take the probability of a major failure of today’s space shuttle from one part in 200 to one part in 10,000, and eventually to one part in 1,000,000 with about the same reliability of today’s commercial aircraft," Goldin said.
View from here
A number of high-tech
spaceborne telescopes are within NASA’s grasp, Goldin said. Not only will such instruments help to understand the origin, evolution and destiny of the universe and the fundamental physical laws that govern it, but also search for other Earth-like planets and life itself.
In the future,
x-ray systems -- offering improved spatial resolution at a factor of nearly 10 million over the now-orbiting Chandra telescope -- might be able to image the event horizon of a massive black hole. That’s the spot where matter disappears from this universe as it "falls" into the singularity.
NASA is already at work on the Micro-arcsecond X-ray Imaging Mission (
MAXIM) -- a constellation of x-ray telescopes.
"Perhaps if we are successful in this area, it will enable us to image the event horizons around massive black holes," Goldin said. "That is spectacular. It’s a dream, but we are going to figure out how to pull it off," he said.
Stab in the dark
Also on tap is thin-mirror technology.
Goldin foresees as many as 100 very large reflectors, spread out over thousands of miles (kilometers) of space. Working collectively, the light gathering power of the array "could resolve continents, mountain ranges and oceans on planets within 100 light-years of Earth, if they exist," he said.
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One light-year is the distance that light travels in one year -- about 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).
Yet another stab in the dark is detecting gravity waves. That’s a job for NASA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (
LISA), Goldin said.
"By using gravity waves, we can even begin to probe beyond the microwave background barrier to just 300,000 years after the Big Bang and push backward in time to almost the very moment of the primordial explosion itself. This is just 10 years out. It’s not decades away."
Brain power
NASA is also eyeing a host of nanotechnologies and bioelectronic systems.
For instance, tiny cylinders of carbon atoms -- carbon nanotubes -- can be used to build structures 100 times stronger than steel at one-sixth the weight. A single-stage reusable launch vehicle constructed of carbon nanotube filaments, the NASA chief said, would be about 80-percent lighter than the aluminum launch systems in use today.
Future robotic rovers must carry a range of built-in smarts.
In the not too distant future, Goldin believes,
robots will be imbued with built-in abilities to express fear and emotion. All the better for making on-the-spot judgments to avoid hazardous terrain.
Be it a precipice on Mars or dangerous
fractures on icy Europa, a robot far from Earth must be able to recognize when it is in trouble, Goldin said.
For revolutionary computational thinking, look no further than the brain. The
NASA administrator said the human brain appears capable of a million more operations per second than computers of the day. It uses massively parallel connectivity and seamlessly integrating multi-sensory information and stored knowledge.
"The brain does all this while consuming only watts of power. We simply do not know how to create a similar computational engine within the limitations of silicon chips. Biology is the answer," Goldin said.
"It is my deep conviction that advances in biology will bring about the technology revolution of the 21st century, akin to the impact of Newton’s laws of gravity in the 1600s, Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism in the 1800s, and Einstein’s laws of relativity in the 1900s. It is time to put biology on an equal footing with physics and chemistry as the underpinning of
advanced technology," Goldin said.
"God has every basic patent. All we have to do is copy them."
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