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.