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....