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."

Top 100 Space & Astronomy Blogs

Check out this nicely annotated list of space blogs (including this one) on the find-schools-online.com website.

To this list I would add at least three more important links:

Space Transport News
Clark S. Lindsey provides one-stop shopping for breaking commercial spaceflight news and commentary, updated several times a day.

Space Today
Futron analyst Jeff Foust pulls together links to space news stories each day from around the Web.

Personal Spaceflight
Another site by Foust, this one devoted to his insights on commercial manned spaceflight news.

What else are we missing?

Inside: America's Secret Weapon Lab

I was a consultant on a National Geographic Channel special on DARPA called America's Secret Weapon Lab that premiers tonight. Show time is at 9:00 p.m. If you miss it, it's also on this Saturday, December 6 at 11:00 a.m., and Thursday, December 11 at 2:00 p.m.

I got the production team in the door at DARPA, and me at the same time, by pitching myself to DARPA director Tony Tether as one-stop shopping for good publicity for the agency. Tether gave me acccess to interviews and programs at the agency, and he got not just a book about DARPA, but a TV show as well.

Until the production team, Terra Nova Television, established its own relationships at DARPA, I acted as go-between. I also advised on good projects to shoot, suggested directions the show should go in and the tone it should take, provided some research help, and advised on the script.

It's a good show, and I think it represents the agency well. The focus, naturally for a television production, is on DARPA projects that are photogenic, including hypsersonic aircraft, exoskeletons, a novel swim flipper called Power Swim, and a rocket powered grenade stopper called Iron Curtain, among others.

In addition to some great footage of all that, the show includes interviews with DARPA director Tony Tether and many of the agency's program managers.

One piece of Tether's interview that did not make it into the final cut, though I pushed for it, was a wonderful moment when Tether asked anyone who had an idea for a DARPA project to email him directly at tony.tether@darpa.mil. He promised he would make sure any ideas sent to him would be considered. Great stuff, and a perfect summation of what the agency is all about.

XCOR Suborbital Tickets on Sale Now

I've just telecommuted in to a press conference in Los Angeles at which principals from XCOR Aerospace and Rocketship Tours announced that tickets for XCOR's rocketship-in-development are on sale now. Danish investment banker Per Wimmer also ceremoniously signed his consent form and was presented a giant first ticket, making him officially Passenger Number One.

Veteran travel entreprenour Jules Klar, credited with popularizing European travel for Americans in the 1960s, was introduced as the head of Rocketship Tours. "I did an enormous amount of due diligeance," said Klar of his decision to select XCOR as his rocketship provider of choice. He cited XCOR's 3,500 successful rocket firings since 2000 and the company's unmarred safety record as factors in his decision.

For their $95,000 ticket price, says Klar, passengers will get a "complete and total experience," not just the 1/2-hour run to space and back in XCOR's planned Lynx vehicle. After some basic physical and mental screening, said Klar, spaceflight participants will enjoy a 5-night stay at the Sanctuary Camelback Mountain Resort in Arizona, where they will start training that will at some point include acrobatic airplane flights.

Former Space Shuttle commander and XCOR chief test pilot Rick Searfoss will fly the two-seat Lynx to suborbital space with one passenger at a time. The passenger will sit right beside Searfoss in the cockpit to get the best possible view. That view from space, said Searfoss at the conference, is "virtually a spiritual experience." He called the view the best part of the experience, in fact, easily beating out the experience of going weightless.

Lynx passengers won't get much of a sensation of weightlessness anyway, since they'll be strapped into their seats the whole time, in contrast to the planned Virgin Galactic experience, which will include floating about the cabin of an 8-place spaceship. At $200,000 a ticket, the Virgin experience also costs twice as much.

XCOR chief Jeff Greason gave an update on his company's progress in building the Lynx. With design work completed earlier this year, the engineers and technicians at XCOR have started building the ship in their shop in Mojave, California, with first prototype engine "very shortly" to be put on the test stand. The company aims to fly the first test flight in 2010, with Wimmer to get his ride in 2011, if all goes well.

Want to ride? You can make a deposit and get on the passenger list for $20,000. Pay the full $95,000 up front to get priority seating. Call 888-778-6877 or visit the Rocketship Tours website for more info.

Direct from the Moon

I've just received a review copy of the upcoming National Geographic Channel program Direct from the Moon.

The piece kicks off the channel's Exploration Week on Monday, December 17, at 9:00 p.m.

Centered around stunning new imagery from the Japanese space agency's lunar satellite Kaguya (also known as Selene, and launched in September 2007), Direct from the Moon features new interviews from Apollo moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin and Jack Schmitt, as well as an intriguing set of interviews from the Japense researchers analyzing the data Kaguya is sending home.

The show is worth watching just for two sequences alone: an Earthrise, from which the shot above is a still, and a 3D terrain map of Tyco crater revealing the terraces, valleys, and central peak in never-before-seen detail.

Tyco seems to have been formed by an impact roughly around the same time as the Yucatan Peninsula impact therorized to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

But while the terrestrial impact crater is hidden underwater, Tyco is naked for Kaguya, and now us, to see, and to draw conclusions from about what happened here on earth so long ago.

Going back even further, one Japanese researcher interviewed for the program, has concluded that lunar and terrestrial strikes originated from the asteroid belt, and that leads to the intriguing idea that iron from asteroid impacts interacted with elements in Earth's early oceans to create amino acids, the building blocks of life.

Exciting as it is, Direct from the Moon feels like it's trying to do too many things at once in the mere 50 minutes alloted to it: is it an Apollo documentary? A back-to-the-moon call to action? Or a presentation of exciting new findings made possible by Kaguya?



I'll never get tired of Apollo eye candy, and I could watch those segments all day. Nor will I ever tire of hearing Aldrin et al describe what so very few humans have ever seen before.

But the new data streaming from Kaguya and the scientists interpreting it deserve a show of their own. These (to American audiences) new faces and hardware exploring the moon, the unprecidented detail of the 3D images taken from Kaguya's 60-mile orbit, the new theories about the Earth-moon system's origins and what they can tell us about how life started here on Earth, all should provide fresh inspiration for a new generation of explorers.

As Adrin says in the program, "That satellite has improved our understanding, our definition of just what the surface of the moon really looks like. And it ought to stir the imagingation in any human being."

DARPA book complete

I'm in a blissful lull now, awaiting my editor's feedback before starting revisions on my book about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The book runs just under 300 pages without notes and other back matter. Some other stats:

Working title: The Department of Mad Scientists: Inside DARPA and How It Shapes Our Technological Future

Tentative list of chapters:

1: An Arm and a Leg
DARPA and the military industrial complex, advanced prosthetics, and why DARPA may just represent the best use of our tax dollars.

2: The Sky Is Falling
President Eisenhower, Sputnik, and how ARPA became America's first space agency.

3: The Intergalactic Network
ARPA invents the Internet, GPS, and stealth airplane technology, and then wonders what the hell it's for after the fall of the Soviet Union.

4: Crazy-Ass Things
Tony Tether takes over DARPA with a mission to bring back the era of visionaries with their hair on fire, and after 9/11 becomes DARPA's longest-serving director.

5: Back Seat Drivers
Ten days in the desert with 35 driverless cars and their humans.

6. Bot on Bot Action
The robot cars go head-to-head in DARPA's first robotic street rally.

7. The Final Frontier
Back in space, DARPA launches satellites on the cheap and discovers the secret of hypersonic flight.

8. The Robot Will See You Now
Robotic surgery comes of age; up next: surgery as word processing.

9. Power to the People
Behind the scenes at perhaps DARPA's most important project yet: getting us energy security now.

Pub date: Fall 2009

Publisher: Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins Publishers

Jim Benson Has Died

I've just heard the sad news that Jim Benson, founder of SpaceShipOne rocket contractor SpaceDev has left this world. He was 63 years old. From a SpaceDev announcement released today:

"SpaceDev Founder and Board Member James Benson, 63, died peacefully in his home. Benson was diagnosed in 2007 with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor, the cause of his death early this morning."

Jim was a passionate advocate for the commercialization of space and he started his company in Poway, California to help make it happen with affordable micro satellites built with off-the-shelf components and hybrid fueled rockets. SpaceDev won the competition to supply components for SpaceShipOne's rocket motor. Just how much of the rocket SpaceDev contributed was a source of contention between Benson and SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan that led to a falling out between the two.

Popular Science editor Eric Adams and I were struggling to get a good view of the final SpaceShipOne launch on October 4, 2004 when Jim grabbed the two of us and snuck us through a hole in the fence to allow us to escape from the media viewing section into the VIP section. I felt like a kid sneaking over the schoolyard fence after hours. Jim's unquenchable boyish enthusiasm certainly contributed to that feeling.

A few months later, I drove out to Poway to meet Jim at his office and he gave me a tour of the shop where the fuel had been molded into SpaceShipOne's rocket motor and he took me around the offices and satellite mission control center at SpaceDev. Back in Jim's office, Jim proudly showed me his tattered Science Fiction Book Club membership card framed on his wall.

Jim had been inspired to get into space as a boy, and he never lost that sense of wonder and excitement for the final frontier, nor was he afraid to share that passion with anyone he met. He will be missed.