Space Frontier Research Articles

Strange matters: undiscovered ideas at the frontiers of space and time

Strange matters: undiscovered ideas at the frontiers of space and time

The Pull of Weird Horizons

Strange Matters . Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time. Tom Siegfried. Joseph Henry Press (National Academy Press), Washington, DC, 2002. 317 pp. $24.95, C$34.95. ISBN 0-309-08407-5. In this discussion of "dark matter" and the reconciliation of Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum mechanics, science journalist Siegfried blends accounts of active research with summaries of the historical paths that have led to it.

The Advent of Space Weapons

The issue of space weaponization is an increasing concern. Current debates become convoluted over differing definitions of ‘weapon’, ‘space’, and ‘space weapon’, as well as differing perceptions of current international laws, policies and capabilities. This article attempts to lay a clear foundation for the debate. An unambiguous definition of space weaponization illuminates the fact that space is currently militarized but not weaponized, and so clarifies the fundamental issue: can we reasonably expect to form a secure international environment on the frontiers of space without weapons available to those who would seek to secure that environment? The work proceeds to delineate the poles of this debate. The conclusion is ambivalent, favoring the theoretical position of banning space weapons but questioning the practicality of accomplishing it.

Human exploration and development of space: using XML database Space Wide Web: Space Wide Web by adapters in distributed systems configuration from reusable components

Human exploration and development of space will involve opening the space frontier by exploring, using and enabling the development of space through information technology, while expanding the human experience into the far reaches of space. At that point in time we assert that the current primitive World Wide Web (Web) will be replaced and dramatically expanded into an Interstellar Space Wide Web (SWW). The current state-of-the-art low-orbits communications satellites constellations will be dramatically expanded to higher orbits and to orbits supporting work on other remote human colonies. This will be necessary in order to furnish in a human-friendly way the necessary software and information that will be needed in support of Interstellar Space Wide Information Technologies. Many of the problems encountered in conceiving of, modeling, designing and deploying such a facility will be different from those problems encountered in today’s Web. Future research and development work will be to identify some of these problems and to conceptually model a few of their solutions. In this work we describe research into the development of scalable tools and techniques that reduce the effort associated with component integration, both with respect to network environments and with respect to other components within the application. Our approach is also targeted at increasing the reusability of software components and software architectures. Our research is to investigate current problems in leveraging adapters as a means to configure of large-scale Next Generation distributed systems software from reusable architectures and components. Our approach to solving this problem is through the development of a novel configuration model and network-aware runtime environment called SWWACXML, for Space Wide Web Adapter Configuration eXtensible Markup Language. SWWACXML provides support for cross-layer architectural configuration at both the application level and the level of individual network connections. The language associated with this environment captures component interaction properties and network level quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. Adapters will be generated automatically from SWWACXML specifications. These adapters are part of the SWWACXML runtime system. The runtime system includes facilities for automatic configuration and runtime reconfiguration, as well as efficient management of network connections and QoS options. This facilitates reuse because components are not tied to interactions or environments. Another aspect of this work will focus on development and experimentation with a novel Web-based interaction paradigm that allows client adapters to tailor themselves to servers at runtime. One of the strengths of our approach is that clients do not have to be tied to specific servers at implementation time. Rather, a client’s adapter loads an SWWACXML configuration page from the server. The SWWACXML configuration page defines the appropriate interaction, including management of heterogeneous network QoS options. We believe our approach is amenable to facilitate a style of dynamic reconfiguration, where clients can at runtime change server, communication or interaction protocol. Future researchers and developers will design and implement the SWWACXML system in a distributed test-bed. They will develop performance analysis techniques to judge the success and efficiency of our approach.

Fostering links between environmental and space exploration: the Earth and Space Foundation

The links between Earth and space exploration occur across a broad spectrum, from the use of satellite technology to support environmental monitoring and habitat protection to the study of extreme environments on Earth to prepare for the exploration of other planets. Taking the view that Earth and space exploration are part of a mutually beneficial continuum is in contrast to the more traditionally segregated view of these areas of activity. In its most polarized manifestation, space exploration is regarded as a waste of money, distracting from solving problems here at home, while environmental research is seen to be introspective, distracting from expansive visions of exploring the frontier of space. The Earth and Space Foundation was established in 1994 to help further mutually beneficial links by funding innovative field projects around the world that work at the broad interface between environmental and space sciences, thus encouraging the two communities to work together to solve the challenges facing society. This paper describes the work of the foundation and the philosophy behind its programmes.

Separable-entangled frontier in a bipartite harmonic system

We consider a statistical mixture of two identical harmonic oscillators which is characterized by four parameters, namely, the concentrations (x and y) of diagonal and nondiagonal bipartite states, and their associated thermal-like noises (T/a and T, respectively). The fully random mixture of two spins 1/2 as well as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) state are recovered as particular instances. By using the conditional nonextensive entropy as introduced by Abe and Rajagopal, we calculate the separable-entangled frontier. Although this procedure is known to provide a necessary but in general not sufficient condition for separability, it does recover, in the particular case x=T=0 (for all a), the 1/3 exact result known as Peres' criterion. This is an indication of reliability of the calculation of the frontier in the entire parameter space. The x=0 frontier remarkably resembles to the critical line associated with standard diluted ferromagnetism where the entangled region corresponds to the ordered one and the separable region to the paramagnetic one. The entangled region generically shrinks for increasing T or increasing a.

Book Review: New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender

Book Review: New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender

Highly reusable space transportation: Advanced concepts and the opening of the space frontier

Revolutionary changes in how cargo and people are transported into space are needed to enable the affordable development and exploration of space in the 21st century. Diverse efforts to achieve major, but incremental Earth-to-orbit (ETO) improvements in the relatively near term have been undertaken in recent years in the US, including the Department of Defense evolved expendable launch vehicle system development project. The NASA-industry reusable launch vehicle (RLV) program is addressing this challenge for the mid-term. The RLV program will validate the technology to enable industry to develop all-rocket reusable launch systems that can deliver payloads from the current Civil Needs Data Base in the 20,000–40,000 pounds class and smaller to low Earth orbit (LEO) at costs of approximately $1000–$2000 per pound. This represents a factor of 5 (or more) reduction below existing launch services. This “next generation” improvement in launch capability is a vital element of the US National Space Transportation policy for current and planned government and commercial payloads. The longer-term challenge is also being addressed. During 1995–1997, NASA conducted the highly reusable space transportation (HRST) study project to address the longer-term challenge: how to achieve an additional factor of 10 reduction in launch costs—to approximately $100–$200 per payload pound to LEO—thus enabling a revolutionary expansion of space activity and enterprise. The HRST study has identified a “grand strategy” for achieving these cost goals, based on pursuing a revolutionary advance in main propulsion architectures and technology for ETO systems to enable a dramatic improvements in subsystem operability. The HRST study has examined diverse approaches, including combination propulsion systems, combined cycle propulsion, launch assist systems, and revolutionary rocket propulsion. An integrated assessment has been conducted, including both the concepts defined as part of the study as well as past concepts. This assessment suggests that the cost goals of HRST are achievable within the next 10–20 years if appropriate technology investments are pursued. This paper provides a summary report on the results and findings of the HRST study project.

Astroenvironmentalism: The Case for Space Exploration As An Environmental Issue

Astroenvironmentalism is a concept that applies the values of environmentalism and preservationism to developments in space exploration, commercialization, and militarization. It can be both an umbrella term to describe a variety of issues about space exploration as well as a component of the ongoing public debate about the environment. The most important struggle is to prevent space from becoming a new battleground-we need to keep nuclear energy out of space. This article discusses the responsibility of keeping space free of environmental hazards and debris. A case is made for astroenvironmentalism to be included in the public consciousness on the environment and the establishment of ethical guidelines to avoid environmental disasters in space. Astroenvironmentalism, an argument to apply the values of environmentalism and preservationism to developments in space exploration, militarization and commercialism, is not a new idea. But recent developments in space exploration suggest this perspective is not widely acknowledged enough by those who envision taking steps to enter space. Environmentalists did not take a stand on these issues over the last few years, which was unfortunate because this was a topical time to argue that space should be an environmental issue. Astroenvironmentalism is an addition to present efforts, but also an umbrella term to describe a variety of related concerns held by many players in the environmental arena. Since mankind made such a mess of this planet and is now paying the environmental price for the damage, this topic is of extreme importance because we must avoid making the same mistakes in space as we have on earth. At issue are the environmental consequences of the steps we are about to take in entering space. The adaptation of environmental concerns to developments in the exploration and commercialization of space fit surprisingly easily. Astroenvironmentalism is another re-formulation of the associated environmental concerns involving a space wilderness to protect, rather than a to exploit. As I have outlined elsewhere (Miller, 1999), some of the concerns of astroenvironmentalism can include: Keeping the space surrounding the Earth clear of pollution, debris, and garbage. Efforts are necessary so we do not add to the reservoir of human waste and machinery left behind by space explorers. Such debris could cause damage to satellites and the space shuttles. Remembering and teaching the lessons learned from terrestrial conservation and preservation struggles of the past and applying them to the new frontier of space, that is, considering space and the celestial bodies pristine wildernesses that need to be protected rather than frontiers to conquer. Tracking and monitoring the environmental damage caused by the fuels used for space expeditions, that is, making space agencies adhere to the restrictions of environmental impact statements. In particular, it would be worthwhile to reduce the amount of plutonium that is being used in case of a mishap that would result in plutonium entering the atmosphere. Treating the Moon, Mars, Venus, and other planetary bodies as wildernesses that need to be protected, that is, arguing against the idea to terraform these celestial bodies. Terraforming introduces atmospherecreating life into the barren celestial bodies in the effort to make these celestial bodies more amenable to human settlement. Terraforming is presently being explored despite the fact that we have not thoroughly explored these planets for indigenous life. Creating a set of ethical guidelines to protect the life that we encounter elsewhere, that is, study and protect rather than just study. The creation or re-publicizing of ethics applied to these concerns would be welcome. Creating safeguards to insure there is no contamination of celestial bodies, that is, safeguarding against the introduction of non-terrestrial life to and from celestial bodies. …

From Mean Variance Space to Mean Skewness Space - Implications for Simultaneous Risk Seeking and Risk Averting Behavior

I propose that the utility function of an economic agent will be concave for wealth below the current wealth and will be convex for wealth above the current wealth. This utility function allows the agent to display simultaneous risk averse and risk seeking behaviour. The cubic utility function and the inverse hyperbolic tangent utility function are examples of such utility functions. For an agent with such an utility function, the expected utility of wealth is independent of the second moment about the current wealth. For such agents, the mean-skewness space is relevant in understanding behaviour. In equilibrium, the efficient frontier in the mean skewness space is either concave and downward sloping or there are at best two portfolios in equilibrium.

The application of Pareto methods to multidisciplinary design optimisation

AbstractMultidisciplinary design optimisation (MDO) provides a framework for the timely exchange of data necessary to support the highly integrated tasks typical of aerospace design. This will help reduce the duration of the design cycle and improve efficiency of the final product. Well implemented MDO capabilities will play an increasingly important role in DERA's activities to support the definition of future system requirements and the assessment of new equipment.The framework in which an MDO approach is realised must be flexible and accommodate the diverse range of individual discipline-based tools that contribute to the overall process. This paper describes DERA's activity within the EC Framework IV ‘FRONTIER’ project to investigate the use of modern graphical user interface (GUI) methods and genetic algorithms (GAs) for the combined aerodynamic and structural design of a modern combat aircraft. The application of the techniques to identify a Pareto frontier in high level design objective space that represents the boundary beyond which improvements cannot be made without sacrificing one or other aspect of overall aircraft performance is described. The scope of the methods as an aid during the definition of system requirements and for the evaluation of trade-offs during the concept assessment stage of a project is discussed.

Book Review: New frontiers of space, bodies and gender

Book Review: New frontiers of space, bodies and gender

A binary classification methodology applicable to defects detection. Boosting algorithms

This article presents a binary classification method which is used in defects detection. It's presented as recursives “boosting” algorithms which allow us to obtain a precise discriminating function by combination of hypothesis and rules with moderate accuracy. This approach permits the study of random phenomena governed by nonparametric laws and a direct decision for the observations classification and the determination of frontiers in an observation space. The various analyses which will be developed are illustrated by simulations making it possible to evaluate the possibilities of the method.

The ethical dimensions of space settlement

While proposals for settling in the space frontier have appeared in the technical literature for over 20 years, it is in the case of Mars that the ethical dimensions of space settlement have been most studied. Mars raises the questions of the rights and wrongs of the enterprise more forcefully because: (a) Mars may possess a primitive biota; and (b) it may be possible to terraform Mars and transform the entire planet into a living world. The moral questions implicit in space settlement are examined below from the standpoints of four theories of environmental ethics: anthropocentrism, zoocentrism, ecocentrism and preservationism. In the absence of extraterrestrial life, only preservationism concludes that space settlement would be immoral if it was seen to be to the benefit of terrestrial life. Even if Mars is not sterile, protection for Martian life can be argued for either on intrinsic or instrumental grounds from the standpoints of all of these theories. It is argued further that a strict preservationist ethic is untenable as it assumes that human consciousness, creativity, culture and technology stand outside nature, rather than having been a product of natural selection. If Homo sapiens is the first spacefaring species to have evolved on Earth, space settlement would not involve acting `outside nature', but legitimately `within our nature'.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: New Frontiers in Space, Bodies and Gender, RosaAinley (Eds.). Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano, Geographies of Resistance, Steve Pile and Michael Keith (eds.), BorderMatters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, Jos David Saldvar BorderTheory: the Limits of Cultural Politics, Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, (eds.)

NASA's down to earth focus

“What most people don't know is that our efforts to open the space frontier are largely based on our quest to understand our own planet,” NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin said on January 10 at the American Meteorological Society meeting in Long Beach, California.Goldin said the agency's commitment to studying Earth's climate will help weather forecasters make better predictions.

Multiobjective programming using uniform design and genetic algorithm

The notion of Pareto-optimality is one of the major approaches to multiobjective programming. While it is desirable to find more Pareto-optimal solutions, it is also desirable to find the ones scattered uniformly over the Pareto frontier in order to provide a variety of compromise solutions to the decision maker. We design a genetic algorithm for this purpose. We compose multiple fitness functions to guide the search, where each fitness function is equal to a weighted sum of the normalized objective functions and we apply an experimental design method called uniform design to select the weights. As a result, the search directions guided by these fitness functions are scattered uniformly toward the Pareto frontier in the objective space. With multiple fitness functions, we design a selection scheme to maintain a good and diverse population. In addition, we apply the uniform design to generate a good initial population and design a new crossover operator for searching the Pareto-optimal solutions. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can find the Pareto-optimal solutions scattered uniformly over the Pareto frontier.

By airship to the North Pole: an archaeology of human exploration

The North Pole has long been a lure for adventures. It has drawn those looking for a northwest passage to rich Asian trade routes, and it has attracted those simply hunting fro fame and the glory of being the first to get there. By the end of the 19th century, hundreds had lost their lives pursuing the quest. Inspired in part by the fantasies of Jules Verne and others, the search had intensified to such a degree at the turn of the century that royalty, explorer clubs, and newspapers were funding expeditions. Newspapers in the United States and Europe could not get enough material to satisfy the hunger of their readers for more. This volume chronicles the adventures of Swedish engineer Salomon August Andree, who made the first failed attempt to reach the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon in 1897, and of American journalist Walter Wellman, who organized and led three unsuccessful air expeditions from 1907 to 1909. The book investigates the stories behind the quests to reach this remote and inhospitable outpost by air and examines how those stories were created and reported by the press. P.J. Capelotti takes readers along of the archaeological remains of early polar aviators, the first such study by a professional archaeologist. He looks at the aviation science of these attempts, as well as the brilliance and folly of those who led them. What he uncovers allows readers to reflect on the distortions of the written historical record, particularly unkind to Wellman, and what that may tell us about our own age of exploration as we look to the last frontiers in space.

Engineers’ Dreams: Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and Astrofuturism in the 1950s

All Men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dustyrecesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; butthe dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act theirdreams with open eyes, to make it possible.(T.E. Lawrence [1926] 1991, 24)In the years following the end of the Second World War, the locus ofAmerican dreams of adventure and conquest shifted from the great Westernfrontier to the final frontier of space. The large-scale systems of industrialproduction and the new technologies of rocketry and nuclear powerdeveloped during the war had finally removed space travel from the realmsof science fiction into that of practical engineering. As a result, images of afuture in space became increasingly visible in American culture, culminatingin the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA) in the late 1950s. Paradoxically, much of the credit for popularizingthe idea of an American future in space belong to two German emigres,Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley. Between them, these two men dominatedAmerican popular science and science fiction. Their influential body of workis the foundation of what I call astrofuturism, a technological vision whichreorganized old narratives of conquest and Utopia around new technologies.

Establishing protective long term measures after severe nuclear accidents using multiple criteria.

This paper proposes a methodology supporting decisions on protective measures following severe nuclear accidents and demonstrates its use. A multicriteria decision analysis approach is adopted where value tradeoffs are postponed until the very last stage of the decision process. All feasible solutions are implicitly considered and evaluated in the chosen criteria. Technically inferior solutions are excluded. Only the non-dominated or efficient solutions forming the "efficient frontier" are retained and presented to the decision makers. Implementation of inefficient solutions is in this way avoided. A choice among the efficient solutions, although it implies value tradeoffs among the multiple criteria, avoids the direct and apriori assessment of preferences. An interactive computer package has been developed with which the decision maker can choose a point on the efficient frontier in the consequence space and immediately see the corresponding alternative in the decision space. The methodology is demonstrated through an application on the choice among possible protective measures in contaminated areas of the former USSR after the Chernobyl accident using as criteria the collective effective life-time dose received by the population and the cost associated with each possible decision.