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."