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.