SpaceShipTwo Unveiled

Congrats to Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites for last night's dramatic rollout of SpaceShipTwo in Mojave.

California governor Schwarzenegger was on hand to help christen the ship the VSS Enterprise, and then some 800 spectators partied on—at least until high winds forced them to evacuate. MSNBC's Alan Boyle described the scene:

Tonight's main event was a Virgin classic: Within minutes after the rollout, the tent was transformed into a lounge, complete with an ice bar, buffet and techno music on the public address system.

True to form, Scaled is keeping mum about the upcoming flight schedule, but based on SpaceShipOne's series of flight tests, Enterprise will likely go through captive carry flights (slung beneath mothership Eve), followed by unpowered drop tests before making powered flights that will lead up to a run to space.

Enterprise could send its first passengers to space as early as 2011. Three hundred passengers have already paid for the $200,000 suborbital flights, including London-based financier and adventurer Per Wimmer, who said in a press release yesterday,

Today's unveil of SpaceShipTwo means that we are now seriously close to getting into space. No more fancy powerpoints; we now have a full scale spaceship and a mothership and I am sensing the smell of rocket fuel.

Virgin chief Richard Branson called on President Obama yesterday "to embrace private space travel," according to Boyle. With NASA's space shuttles set to retire soon and development of the Ares replacement ships in disarray, he may not have a choice. Here's hoping he too smells the private space rocket fuel.

DARPA, GPS, and the wax cylinder

One of the listeners of my recent NPR interview has taken me to task for suggesting that DARPA (the subject of my new book) was crucial to the development of the Global Positioning System.

Roger Easton, Jr., professor at the Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, points out that the early DARPA-funded system on which I based my contention, TRANSIT, used an entirely different technology for establishing the location of ground receivers than today's GPS.

While TRANSIT was the first satellite positioning system (with launches beginning in 1959), its reliance on less-than-precise doppler shift measurements was rendered obsolete by later satellites using transmitted time signals for determining position. As Easton put it to me:

It is imprecise at best and incorrect at worst to say that Transit was a predecessor to GPS—the idea really did come from the Navy rather than from DARPA. To me, this would be akin to saying that Thomas Edison had a vital role in developing the iPod because his wax cylinder system was also capable of recording and playing back music.

Not incidentally, Easton is the son of Roger Easton, Sr., one of the pioneering Naval Research Laboratory engineers behind the idea of using satellite time signals (as in today's GPS) for navigation. In fact, Easton, Sr. holds a patent for the idea, "Navigation Using Satellites and Passive Ranging Techniques," number 3789409, filed in 1970.

Thanks for the correction, Dr. Easton. I'll be more nuanced in future statements (DARPA funded the first satellite navigation system, not GPS, along with the first small, lightweight GPS receivers, paving the way for wide use). I'll also correct the next edition of the book.

NPR interview and Department of Mad Scientists excerpt

You can now hear me on demand, talking about my new book on DARPA, The Department of Mad Scientists, on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

http://bit.ly/4EVBr9

Also on that page is the opening of the first chapter, which is about DARPA's Revolutionizing Prosthetics program.

The program is the most ambitious artificial limb project in history, devoting some $100 million to building an arm the looks, feels, and wears like a native arm.

Want more? Listen to me read from the intro in a clip on my home page:

http://michaelbelfiore.com/

I'm not texting, I'm driving!

Check out this video from a group of National Instruments engineers who rigged up a remote controlled car with an iPhone as the controller.

NI press rep Trisha McDonell tells me there are practical uses for this project: "these applications can help in autonomous vehicle research which are used in rescue missions."

Looks to me like these guys are just having a ball taking texting and driving to a whole new level. DO try this at home, they say. Just don't sue us if you run yourself over!

Happy 40th birthday, Internet!

Seed magazine has posted an excerpt from my new book about DARPA in honor of today's anniversary of the first connection on the Internet.

No, no, it wasn't Al Gore who created the Internet. It was the Advanced Research Projects Agency, today known as DARPA. Way back in 1969, a couple of researchers at UCLA sent the first message between networked computers of disparate types. It was part of a project called the ARPANet, which formed the basis of the modern Internet.

DARPA book now available

My book on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is now available in print, electronic, and audio form.

The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Shaping Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs is the first mass market book on the Department of Defense Agency that gave the world the Internet, GPS, stealth technology, and lots more.

Listen to me read in this excerpt from the unabridged audiobook and then browse the printed version.

Quantum to Cosmos Festival

The Quantum to Cosmos Festival starts today in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It's ten days of presentations, panel discussions, movies, demos, and a whole lot more sponsored by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

You can catch most of the events live online at the festival website at http://q2cfestival.com/. For instance, tonight at 7 Eastern, 10 physicists talk about the future of their field.

Tune in to XPRIZE founder and CEO Peter Diamandis on Sunday at 1:00 PM. His topic: "The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent it Yourself!"

I'll be there starting on Thursday, October 22 at 8:00 PM on a panel with Hod Lipson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Cory Doctorow on the Robotics Revolution and the Future of Evolution, which will also be broadcast as part of The Agenda with Paikin throughout the Toronto area.

2009 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards

Last night at the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards, Dean Kamen delivered the most eloquent appeal for getting kids interested in science and technology I've yet seen.

His remarks took the form of his acceptance speech for the Leadership Award. He was speaking off the cuff, but this is something he's been thinking about and actively working on for the last twenty years.

"This biggest problem this country has is a cultural problem," he told the gathered award winners and guests. The problem as he sees it is that we idolize entertainers and sports figures instead of "things that matter."

"We will make clean energy for everybody," he said, "for the six billion people. We will bring into reality all the things that we're now talking about. But to really make that happen, to dramatically increase the odds of that happening, the first thing that we need to do is mobilize way, way, way more kids to really embrace what is on the pages of Popular Mechanics."

Who's telling kids, particularly women and minorities and inner city kids around the united states, 'these other things, they're fun, they're pastimes, you know, but the probability you'll ever make money in sports is way lower than the probability you'll win the state lottery? If you want to develop a muscle, how about trying to exercise the one between your ears? Besides, thinking is the only sport where humans play in the unlimited category. I mean, you think that football player's big and tough, put an elephant on the field. You think that track star is fast, put a gazelle on the field.'

That's why Kamen has developed robotics as a contact sport for students, called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).

Meantime, Kamen's company, DEKA Research, and all the other award winners brought their inventions to show off--including, yes, this flying car by Steve Saint parked in front of PM headquarters, the Hearst Tower.

One of the demos was hands on; I got to try out the future of video games, Project Natal. It's a system, built for the Xbox 360, that uses the human body as the input device. No more mashing painful little chicklet buttons in arcane combinations to punch, fly, shoot, or whatever. I drove a video game car simply by making steering motions with my hands and thrusting my foot forward to operate an imaginary gas pedal. It's the iPhone of the video game world, and it will instantly render all other systems obsolete.

X PRIZE five year anniversary

On this day five years ago, Brian Binnie won the Ansari X PRIZE by hurtling out of the atmosphere faster than a rifle bullet. It was the second time in less than a week that SpaceShipOne made the trip from Mojave Airport, fulfilling the prize requirement for a back-to-back flight by a commercial spaceship.

Even as Brian was circling to his high altitude launch point attached to the belly of White Knight, down on the ground I was closing the deal for my first feature story in a national magazine. Brian's triumph was mine as well; the X PRIZE launched my career as a journalist.

In that moment, anything seemed possible, even a struggling science fiction writer with a theater degree becoming a nationally known aerospace journalist.

Brian tells the story of our generation's moon shot on the Huffington Post. I never tire of him describing the "blessed peace and quiet and the instant karma of weightlessness."

And then, my God, that view! Separating the black void that is space from the peaceful panorama below is a thin blue electric ribbon of light that is the atmosphere. For 4 minutes I got to soak it all in. I tell you, one cannot be unmoved by the experience!

After I helped file a story for Reuters, I drove up the coast to my family's vacation spot near Santa Barbara, and my wife and I made our first baby. Which is why my book Rocketeers is dedicated to "my X PRIZE baby."

Transhumans in Woodstock

I love this town. Last night, just down the road from my office on Tinker Street, in the same studio where I recorded this video, a group of world-class thinkers in applied science fiction came together to talk about what it means to be human.

Ray Kurzwell, James J. Hughes, and Martine Rothblatt concluded that we are little more than the processing power of our neurons--a function that will soon (by 2029 says Kurzwell) be duplicated by machines. All we'll have to do to back up the wetware between our ears will be to gather as many bits of information about our behavior and memories as possible and feed them into a database.

The one hold out was Wendall Wallach, who questioned whether human emotions will ever be duplicated by machines. "Human beings are evolved, biochemical, emotional instruments out of which higher order rational faculties came in a much later stage in that development--really, in the last 50 to 100,000 years. Our rational faculties are not distinct from our emotional beings."

To which Kurzwell responded, it is true that emotional, empathic thought is the cutting edge of human cognition."But it's not something mystical or magical, it's something the brain does, it's something we can understand and recreate and enhance."

The film 2B, produced by Rothblatt and addressing these issues in dramatic form, followed the panel discussion a couple of hours later.

First poet in space

Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté blasted off for the International Space Station this morning aboard a Russian Soyuz space capsule.

He'll spend a week and a half in orbit on what he's calling the first poetic social mission from space. The event will culminate in a 2-hour performance from space and around the world called Moving Stars and Earth for Water, to be webcast live on October 9 at www.onedrop.org.

From the program on the web site:

The artistic core of the show will consist of a poetic tale written especially for the occasion by renowned novelist and Man-Booker Prize-winner Yann Martel. The tale will be gradually revealed as the program takes us through 14 cities around the world and will bring together personalities from different backgrounds such as Former U.S. Vice president Al Gore, U2, Tatuya Ishii, Peter Gabriel, Patrick Bruel, Shakira, A.R. Rahman, Julie Payette and many others who will join voices with Guy Laliberté to celebrate water.

This is an exciting moment for those of us with an artistic bent; one of our own gets to, in the words of pioneering commercial astronaut Mike Melvill "touch the face of God." For the first time someone with the training, passion, and experience needed to do justice to the transformative power of the overview effect will have the opportunity to do so. I can't wait to see what he comes up with.

SpaceX preps for Falcon 9 launch

SpaceX has been busy since my visit to company HQ for my recent Popular Mechanics article.

I've just received a progress report from the company, including some gorgeous photos of vehicle assembly and testing in progress.

The Falcon 9 launch vehicle is getting ready for its maiden flight from Cape Canaveral some time in the next few months. On board will be a test version of the Dragon capsule that NASA has hired to ferry supplies to the International Space Station beginning in 2010 or 2011.

From the progress report:

Though it will initially be used to transport cargo, the Dragon spacecraft was designed from the beginning to transport crew. Almost all the necessary launch vehicle and spacecraft systems employed in the cargo version of Dragon will also be employed in the crew version of Dragon. As such, Dragon's first cargo missions will provide valuable flight data that will be used in preparation for future crewed flight. This allows for a very aggressive development timeline—approximately three years from the time funding is provided to go from cargo to crew.

Note the tell-tale window in the upper right of this photo.

It's a wrap for DARPA audio book

I've just finished reading the audio version of my book on DARPA, The Department of Mad Scientists, for Random House Audio.

My director, David Rapkin, seemed particularly taken with the chapter on the Urban Challenge, DARPA's autonomous vehicle race.

David hung on my every word, having me retake every sentence or phrase in which I hesitated, mispronounced a word, or otherwise stumbled.

The result should be a smooth listening experence, with nothing in my delivery to distract from the text.

The four days of recording were hard work, but a lot of fun, making me nostalgiac for my theater days.

Now it's up to the editors to put the 11-some-odd hours of audio book together in time for its release on iTunes November 1.

DARPA/EERC green jet fuel wins Popular Science Best of What's New

This summer, Flometrics launched a sounding rocket from the Mojave Desert powered by a 100% vegetable oil fuel. Flometrics president Steve Harrington tells me the rocket performed better than expected; the supersonic flight tore the tail fins off the sucker.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency commissioned the fuel from the Energy and Environmental Research Center in North Dakota as part of its BioFuels program. The green jet fuel represents a major breakthrough. It's the first fuel made from 100% renewable feedstock to meet the specs for military JP-8 jet fuel.

To pull that off, EERC had to create a new process for turning veggie oil into a hydrocarbon fuel without relying on the standard biodiesel manufacturing process that has the oil reacting with alcohol. EERC's Chris Zygarlicke told me yesterday that instead, his team uses a thermochemical process and secret catalysts to turn veggie oil into isoparaffinic kerosene, and then "upgrades" that with cycloparaffins.

The result is a green biofuel that meets all the specs of petroleum-derived JP-8, meaning that it remains fluid down to -47 degrees F and packs a lot of energy into a relatively small volume.

If you've ever tried to run a car on biodiesel in a cold climate, you know how useful a fuel like this could be--and how good for the environment. Next step for EERC and DARPA: develop techniques for manufacturing the stuff in volume at less than $3 a gallon, and then it's goodbye Middle East oil dependence, hello homegrown green fuel industry.

I lobbied my editors at Popular Science to give the fuel a Best of What's New award for this year, and I was gratified when it made the cut. Look for it in the December issue.

DARPA audio book

I'm commuting to New York City this week to record the audio version of my book about DARPA, The Department of Mad Scientists, for Random House Audio.

It will be available as an iTunes download when the print version releases, October 20.

My director is Grammy Award winner David Rapkin, a twenty-plus-year veteran of the business who's not only taken the trouble to read the book before our sessions, but actually to research the correct pronunciations of all the people and places mentioned in it. It's a treat to work with him.

Tip of the day, courtesy of Mr. Rapkin: cure distractingly audible stickiness of the mouth by chewing Granny Smith apples. You can just make out the apple David gave me on the table to my right in the picture.

Ghost

One of the great joys of my work is that I get to meet some truly extraordinary people. Fred Burton got wind of my upcoming book on DARPA and sent me a copy of his Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent.

Ghost is one of the best books I've read in some time, a brilliant work of riveting you-are-there reporting, full of heart, humor, and unflinching telling details of our country's war on terror.

Burton was a counterterrorism agent working for the State Department in the 1980s and 1990s, and investigated many of the chilling events that foreshadowed 9/11. His and his colleagues investigations of such events as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing revealed a widespread, well-funded terror network well in advance of 9/11 that kept them awake at night worrying about not if the next strike would occur, but when.

A book that focuses so intently on such nerve-jangling material would be a bitter pill to swallow without the emotional depth Burton brings to the table, not the least of which is his well-developed sense of humor. Here he describes opening a file folder on his first day on the job:

I lift it up and examine its contents. Whatever is inside looks like a dried-up mushroom.

"What is this?" I ask myself softly.

Gleason overhers me and replies, "An ear."

First day on the job, and I'm holding a human body part. The Alice in Wonderland experience is complete. I've gone down the rabbit hole.

I continue to hold the ear. Miss Manners doesn't cover this sort of scenario. What should I say? How should I react? I'll wing it.

"So, did you cut this off a suspect?" I ask Gleason.

He is not amused.

In recent years, Burton's been working for STRATFOR, a group Burton calls the world's finest private intelligence firm. He's on sabbatical now, serving as the Assistant Director of Intelligence and Counterterrorism for the Texas state police.

I asked him whether we're any safer now than before 9/11. "Depends upon how you look at the threat," he told me. "We are battling transnational criminal gangs from Mexico, border violence, orchestrated 'hits' on US government informants on U.S. soil, violent street crime, lone wolf concerns (jihadist and white hate) and terrorist organizations in countries like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Indonesia and Afghanistan." Great.

However, he says, "I believe we are better today then before 9-11 in certain areas, such as strategic analysis. However, human intelligence collection (HUMINT) and tactical analysis remain problematic."

SpaceX propulsion chief explains Merlin

Tom Mueller Describes Merlin Engine
brought to you by Livescribe

This month's issue of Popular Mechanics has a feature by me about Space Exploration Technologies, the startup that might just end up building America's next orbital spaceship--and provide charter flights to NASA.

I told the SpaceX story in my book Rocketeers, but I've been angling for years to land a magazine story to cover it. In particular, I wanted to go deeper into the meeting of minds between company financier Elon Musk and propulsion chief Tom Mueller. The two met in a workshop where Mueller was building the world's biggest amateur liquid fueled rocket engine, and Musk asked Mueller, "Can you build something bigger?"

Read the story online at http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4328638.html.

The online version of the story includes an innovative feature that I pushed hard for: a pencast of Mueller explaining the inner workings of the workhorse engine he and his team designed and built for SpaceX.

If you don't know what a pencast is, you're in for a treat. Livescribe, a Silicon Valley startup, has created what I call the Super Pen (actually known as the Pulse), which allows handwritten notes, doodles, sketches, or anything else you can make with a pen, to be linked with audio being recorded by the pen at the same time.

This has quickly become an indispensable tool in my work as a journalist. When someone I'm interviewing says something I know I'll want to play back later, I just jot a quick reference note, and then later, whenever I tap the pen to that place in my notebook, the recording of that particular place in the interview plays back.

You can also upload pencasts to the Web, which allows you to hear an interview playing back in a Web browser and watch the sketches and notes being drawn and written out in real time. This gives you a you-are-there immediacy I don't believe can be captured any other way. Check out the Mueller pencast here and tell me if you agree.

If you want to see more of these pencasts included with Popular Mechanics stories, let the editors know by adding a comment to my story at http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4328638.html.

Kepler Space Telescope on Nat Geo Channel

NASA's Kepler space telescope, launched in March and returning data since June, gets star billing on "Alien Earths" premiering on the National Geographic Channel tomorrow night at 9 PM Eastern and Pacific time.

Launch footage, animation of the probe in operation as it trails the Earth in a solar orbit, and speculation from researchers about what it will discover bracket an engaging program on the search for extrasolar planets similar enough to Earth to perhaps support life.

The search centers on planets in the so-called Goldilocks zone around stars where conditions are neither too cold nor too hot to sustain life--perhaps not life as we know it, but life nevertheless. To date, gas giants, like Jupiter, have been the focus of the search for extrasolar planets because their large size renders them detectable by ground-based telescopes, mainly via the wobbling they produce in their parent stars.

But the new, space-based telescope should be able to find rocky planets the size of Earth by monitoring the changes in luminosity in stars within its 100,000-star field of view as planets transit in front of them. This is a chore akin to detecting the flickering of a searchlight caused by a moth flying past, according to one of the researchers interviewed in the program.

Another researcher speculates that every star in the galaxy may well host at least one Earth-like planet, which would yield 400 billion such planets all together. Researchers expect Kepler to find at least 50 of them.

It would be an astonishing achievement bringing us one step closer to discovering that we are not alone in the universe, which is why I'm nominating Kepler for this year's Best of What's New issue of Popular Science.

Naked Science: Living on the Moon

The National Geographic Channel is showing a not-to-be-missed program on returning to the moon, this time to stay.

Naked Science: Living on the Moon airs on Sunday, July 19 at 9:00 p.m. Pacific and Eastern time, the day before the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing by Apollo 11.

I got a review copy of the show, which is a well balanced treatment of what's required for going back to the moon, setting up a permanent base, and eventually building a self-sustaining economy with a frontier settlement. As I expected, NASA gets top billing with its planned Constellation mission for returning astronauts to the moon some time in the next decade. But the show's producers don't treat NASA as the end-all-be-all for manned space flight, and herein lies its main strength.

Instead, the show acknowledges the past contributions of NASA, treats its current plans, and also points out that other nations such as India and China are in the running too, as well as private companies, setting the stage for an exciting next couple of decades in space.

Peter Diamandis, founder of the X PRIZE that helped launch the private space race gets air time, as does Rick Tumlinson, co-founder of the Space Frontier Foundation.

"Today there are twelve hundred billionaires on this planet," says Diamandis. "And what it used to take a large government agency to do, a small group of dedicated individuals with the right computational capabilities can now do."

With that, the show makes the case for not just going back to the moon, but that the profit motive makes it inevitable. Exceptional animations round out an inspiring program that should be required viewing for anyone who questions the value of continuing to reach beyond planet Earth.

SpaceX first operational satellite launch

Last night Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) launched its first operational satellite from its pad in Marshall Islands. This is the first time that a privately funded liquid fuel rocket has achieved this milestone.

This was the fifth launch of the Falcon 1 rocket and the second time it succeeded in reaching orbit (the last payload was of a dummy satellite).

It's another vindication of SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk's plan to revolutionize space access with cheaper, more routine access to space, and it couldn't come at a better time--as the independent Human Space Flight Review Committee prepares to advise the White House on the future of America's national space program.

SpaceX's next launch will be a test flight of its Falcon 9 rocket. Powered by 9 Merlin engines, one of which drives the Falcon 1, the Falcon 9 is designed for nothing less than human space flight, with a potential crew of seven astronauts.

The company is already working under a $1.6 billion contract to deliver cargo to the International Space Station after the space shuttle retires next year (Orbital Sciences Corporation has a similar contract).

SpaceX hopes to go beyond mere cargo flights to the station, however. As I saw on a recent visit to SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne, CA, all of the company's Dragon crew capsules--even those intended for cargo--will have windows....

Len Kleinrock describes the birth of the Internet

Leonard Kleinrock, who published the first paper on packet switching in 1962, and who led the ARPA-funded team at UCLA that made the first connection on the Internet, described the scene to me on the phone to me a few minutes ago.

Sitting at a computer terminal at UCLA on October 29, 1969, one of Kleinrock's team members typed two letters that were received via the infant Internet by a computer up the California coast at the Stanford Research Institute. The connection worked beautifully for those two letters--before the receiving computer crashed.

The UCLA team had been trying to send "LOG" as in "LOGIN" (the "IN" would have been sent by the other computer). "We didn't have a tape recorder, or reporters or anybody else--just myself and one of my programmers there," Kleinrock told me. "We didn't understand PR or media--press--the way that Alexander Graham Bell did or Samuel Morse or Armstrong. Those guys were smart. They had it all prepared. But it turns out that the message is probably the shortest, most prophetic message you can have created by accident. The fact is those first two letters spelled a beautiful word: 'Lo,' as in 'Lo and behold!'"

Kleinrock tells the story, complete with whiteboard diagrams, in this video from UCLA:

SpaceShipTwo Engine Tests

Virgin Galactic put out a press release last week along with this video about the successful conclusion of the first round of rocket motor tests for its SpaceShipTwo passenger ship, being built by Scaled Composites.

Not too many technical details here, so I did some digging to find out more. Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn referred my queries to Mark Sirangelo, manager at engine contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation. Sirangelo gave me just a few more tidbits before passing me on to Scaled Composites president Doug Shane, who told me simply, "Sorry, but we’re not able to provide any further information at this time."

Scaled kept mum throughout the development of SpaceShipOne, the first privately built ship to send an astronaut out of the atmosphere, and its managers want to do the same here. The involvement of Virgin Galactic in this project has pushed the door open a little further, but only to a point.

"These were the first full scale live fire of this version of motor system and fuel," Sirangelo told me in an email exchange. The tests began last December and concluded last month, he said.

"The primary goals were to obtain actual information regarding motor and fuel performance from the research conducted over the past year regarding the search for the optimal combination of subsystems, fuel choice and overall motor design." In other words, the tests allowed the team to nail down the design choices they had made on paper and get the data they needed for tweaks before the next phase of testing.

"I can't commit on the next round of tests at this point," said Siranangelo.

It seems likely that the next round of tests will ramp up to full-duration burns; when I asked Sirangelo whether that had been accomplished during the recent tests, he mutely referred me to videos showing a burn of about 20 seconds. SpaceShipTwo's motor will need to fire for several times that duration to send its paying passengers into space.

"There has been a tremendous amount of work completed on the entire program," Sirangelo told me, "and we all can see the first revenue flight in the not to distant future. It is amazing when one steps back to realize what we are doing and to see the dream many of us had turn into reality. We are thrilled to be part of making space history."

DARPA book's new table of contents

My book about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, now not only has a cover, but a finalized table of contents as well.

Full title: The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs

Publisher: Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins

Publication date: October 20, 2009

Table of Contents:

Introduction
How I came to write the book and why DARPA may just be the most important government agency most people have never heard of.

Chapter 1: An Arm and a Leg
DARPA's quest to build a prosthetic arm as functional as a native one, and why cutting-edge military hardware development doesn't have to break the national budget.

Chapter 2: A Special Projects Agency
DARPA's origins in the Cold War as America's first space agency.

Chapter 3: The Intergalactic Computer Network
How DARPA funding launched the Internet and interactive computing, and how its current experiments in information technology could change your life.

Chapter 4: The Robot Will See You Now
DARPA helped set the standard in today's surgical robots. Now for the next step: autonomous surgical suites that bring the hospital to trauma patients, instead of the other way around.

Chapter 5: Back Seat Drivers
Ten days in the desert with the self-driving cars that will redefine the great American obsession.

Chapter 6: Crazy-Ass Things
DARPA's longest-serving director and his quest to bring back the exuberance that marked the agency's early days.

Chapter 7: The Final Frontier
How DARPA is getting back into the space access business after ceding its original mission to NASA.

Chapter 8: Power to the People
Super-efficient solar cells, jet fuel made from vegetable oil, and DARPA's mission to remove energy as a source of world conflict.

DARPA book cover

My DARPA book now has a cover. Thanks to Harry LeBlanc for suggesting a variation of the subtitle. Now it's off to copyediting and fact checking, and we're on schedule for October's publication date.

Jade Star Belfiore

My second daughter, Jade Star, was born Saturday, 3/28/09, at 4:19
a.m. She was 6 pounds, 11 ounces.

She made a dramatic entrance; Wendy and I only barely made it to the
hospital in time after a very short labor. Jade was in Wendy's arms
within 10 minutes of our hitting the door.

Both Wendy and Jade are in perfect health. I'll bring them home this
morning, after taking our 3-year-old, Amelie, to daycare.

Space Dominance

Popular Mechanics made my roundup of spacefaring nations and their current capabilities the top story on popularmechanics.com today.

With the Space Shuttle set to retire next year, the Russians getting increasingly focused on manned commercial spaceflight, and ambitious government space programs ramping up around the world, we're definately heading into a new era.

Ticket to Ride

Popular Mechanics has made my first published piece for them the lead story today on popularmechanics.com.

The story explores possible ways to get to space on the cheap--really cheap--like 20 bucks for a trip to suborbital space.

I also provided initial research help on last month's cover story, the one with the shuttle-derived ship taking off in the screenshot.

I have more Web stories for PM in progress and a spread in next month's magazine. Stay tuned!

Space & Technology Copywriter

Today I launched some upgrades on my website to reflect a new focus for my work: high-tech copywriting.

I've been engaged in marketing and public relations writing in one form or another since 1995, when I became a freelance technical writer for companies like Northwest Airlines and Target. I moved next into public relations writing, still with an emphasis on technology.

When SpaceShipOne left the planet in 2004 with the first commercial astronaut on board, I jumped at the opportunity to cover the story and others like it as a freelance journalist for media outlets like Reuters, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, New Scientist, Financial Times, and many others. Along the way, I've written two books on advanced technology development for HarperCollins.

At the same time, I kept my hand in PR writing through the partnership I run with my wife, fellow writer Wendy Kagan.

Now I'm combining the two threads of my work as a writer by offering copywriting services to organizations engaged in advanced technology development.

This is an exciting direction for me. It means I get to get to spend more time with some of the most exciting business ventures on (and off!) the planet. At the same time I won't always be tied to the dictates of magazine and news publishing.

Visit the new Copywriting Services page on my website, or read the free white paper I've just posted about Selling Breakthrough Technology to learn more.

License to Thrill

The article I wrote on what it takes to be a commercial spaceship pilot for the March issue of Air & Space is now available online.

The piece was a ball to write--I got to try out the centrifuge at the National Aerospace Training and Research Training, or NASTAR, Center, an experience I highly recommend--especially if you can get someone else to foot the bill!

You can read the whole text of my article at the Air & Space site, but unless you pick up the printed magazine, you'll miss out on one of the best features--gorgeous portraits of spaceship pilots Brian Binnie, Mike Melvill, Pete Siebold, Rick Searfoss, and a few of the new Virgin Galactic pilots by Chad Slattery. The one shot of Searfoss that's on the site doesn't do the spread justice.

Oh, and there are a couple of shots by yours truly in there too.

Now on Twitter

At the instigation of my friend Ben Zackheim, I've started a Twitter feed that will keep you up-to-date on my progress as I finish my DARPA book as well as other projects I'm working on.

See the widget that appears to the right of this post to for the latest.

In case you're not familiar with Twitter...it's a blog-like service for publishing snippets of information--no more than 140 characters at a time. Which makes it ideal for updates about ongoing projects. "Tweets" are easy to write, easy to read, and easy to publish.

Tony Tether Staying on as DARPA Chief

I learned this week from DARPA public relations officer Jan Walker that Tony Tether, the agency's director, will remain in charge when Obama takes office as President. "Dr. Tether will be here after Jan. 20, and there's no formal date on which he plans to leave," Walker told me in an email.

In my past conversations with Tether, he's made it clear that he didn't expect his directorship to survive the changing of the presidential administration, no matter what party the new president belonged to (Tether's a G. W. Bush appointee and a Republican).

A new president generally boots everyone from the old administration, but Obama's doing things his own way, also keeping Bush's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, on the job, along with a lot of other top Pentagon officials.

Tether is DARPA's longest-serving director, in office since 2001. Most DARPA directors have stayed in only two or three years, and the agency's program managers typically serve terms of three to six years, a trend Tether cites as one of the agency's strengths. The people running the agency's programs get in to get their pet projects done, and then get kicked out before they have a chance to get entrenched in the bureaucracy and start worrying more about their jobs than the groundbreaking research and development they manage.

“You know,” Tether told me, “I used to always say that the greatest thing about DARPA is that no one's been there long enough to screw up up. Unfortunately, I've been here so long there are people who have said to me, 'Hey, you remember when you said that, Tether? Well, you know, aren't you getting close to that time?'”

It also might be a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."