This blog does not really venture into the world of
obituaries, but today there will be an exception, for Sir Patrick Moore, a man
who helped to inspire generations of would-be astronomers to look up to the
skies, and to take an active interest in the world of science in general,
passed away shortly after midday. It was only earlier this week that he graced
our screens on The Sky at Night, a programme of which he had been the host
since its inception in 1957, almost six months before Sputnik inaugurated the
Space Age. Would Moore have thought, that at the relatively youthful age of 34
he would still be presenting the show right up until his death some 55 years
later at the age of 89? No other television programme around the globe has possessed
the same presenter for such a long period.
Sir Patrick was renowned for his mild eccentricity as
exemplified in his wearing of a monocle, and to a lesser extent, his virtuoso
xylophone playing. He was also a politically active man over many decades, and
the views that he held were very much unlike those of a stereotypical BBC
presenter. Whilst, as might be expected of many a BBC host, he was an opponent
of fox hunting and blood sports in general, he was also a strong Eurosceptic
and an admirer of Enoch Powell. In the 1970s, he held a staunch
anti-immigration position, and was Chairman of an entity named the United
Country Party before its merger with the New Britain Party. Later, he was to
become a keen advocate and patron of UKIP. Sir Patrick was refreshingly out of
kilter with the BBC mainstream, and was a man who spoke his mind. His presence
will be missed. Who, if anyone, will now take on the mantle of the BBC's elderly champion of non-PC attitudes?
This evening, Channel 4 starts its series 'Alien Investigations' in which it examines a number of famous (amongst ufologists and cryptozoologists presumably, as I hadn't previously heard of them) cases involving the alleged discovery of 'aliens' here on our planet. Whereas advances in planetary science, biology and genetics suggest that our galaxy is likely to be teeming with life, at least of the primitive bacterial variety (it is rumoured that we me be receiving an announcement from NASA shortly regarding the discovery of signs of extant life on Mars thanks to the Curiosity mission), that is quite different to stating that we have been visited by creatures from another world. The latter cannot be ruled out of course, but the evidence to date is lacking. Whatever happens to be revealed in the programmes that comprise this series, they are ought to make for a few evenings' good entertainment, even if they do little other than shed a little more light upon the social, cultural and psychological aspects of the belief in alien visitation.
The clip below provides a flavour of the first episode.
Review of Part One
As anticipated, the programme
turned out to provide the best part of an hour’s engaging entertainment,
focusing as it did upon three alleged alien sightings, with two of them
furnishing specimens of the alleged aliens that could be subjected to
scientific examination of one sort or another. All three originated in the
Americas: the first from Metepec in Mexico; the second from the Cuzco region of
Peru, and the third from Montauk on Long Island in the USA.
Images of all three alleged aliens
looked intriguing, and it was the stories attached to the Metepec ‘alien’ that
proved to be of most interest. Eyewitnesses claimed that in May 2007 a ranch
hand was startled to discover the ‘alien’ captured in on of his rat traps
(which for all the world resembled a miniature early nineteenth-century
mantrap). In all, there were five witnesses who claimed to have seen it alive,
with the animal being described as about 19 inches long (the remains certainly
didn’t seem to be that large, so perhaps they meant to say centimetres) with a
hairless pink body and luminous eyes. It made a noise that nobody could
identify. The remains looked interesting, and a number of 3-D scans had failed
to ascertain what it was. Its spine bore some human characteristics and it
possessed humanlike hands, but no opposable thumbs (the thumbs were
incomplete). On the second night after its discovery, it was stated that the
creature was “drowned in acid”, which seems rather cruel. Drowning is bad
enough, but why also add to its distress by using acid? Another such ‘alien’
was said to have been sighted on the ranch eight days later.
Initial tests upon the Metepec
‘alien’ allegedly suggested that it may have possessed a ‘human mother’, and
the ranch owner where it was caught died two months after the event in a
freakish and explosive car accident. Conspiracy theorists attributed this to
alien revenge, whereas the more prosaic explanation centred upon a debt that he
owed to gangsters. In all, some six tests were conducted upon the Metepec
specimen, a number of them suggesting that its DNA was very close to that of
humans, and indeed it was, for the final test revealed it to be a marmoset.
Moreover, its skull matched that of a marmoset. Towards the end of the
documentary, Angel Nuñez revealed that he had faked the whole affair, using a
buffy tufted marmoset. Being a primate, it should therefore not come as a
surprise that its DNA was close to that of humans.
The Peruvian ‘alien’ was found at
an excavation on a mountain some 70 miles away from Machu Pichu amidst
‘fragments of meteorite’. The narrator noted the widespread belief amongst Peruvians
and traditional Inca culture that their origins lay in the stars. The mummy
that was discovered possessed a peculiarly elongated skull together with what
appeared to be adult teeth and yet an open fontanelle. A Peruvian Ufologist
named Dante Dios Tambini claimed to be convinced that it was an alien, and also
produced some alleged footage of a UFO (which looked as if it was simply the
product of pointing a handheld imaging device at the full Moon in daylight and
waving it about) and a picture of an alien (nothing more than a red blemish
atop a picture of a stone shack).
The narrator noted that skull
deformation of this sort had been practised in a number of cultures for at
least 9,000 years in Africa, including in Ancient Egypt. Closer to home, the
Huns too practised this type of skull deformation in the fifth century. The
remains of the Peruvian ‘alien’ were not submitted to testing, but according to
Dr Anna Williams, it appeared to be a deformed child of about the age of six,
judging by the state of its teeth. This seemed a far more likely explanation
than the artist’s impression of a large-eyed ‘grey’ (or ‘gray’ I suppose
Americans would term them) that was provided alongside the skull.
The third and final case was that
of the so-called Monatauk alien washed up on a Long Island beach in July 2008.
Once again, a number of conspiracy theories circulated, the most favoured being
that this (and two subsequent carcasses) were aliens, and another being that it
was the freakish product of US military experiments in labs on Plum Island that
from 1953 until 1969 conducted biological experiments focused upon the
poisoning of Soviet livestock presided over by an ex-Nazi scientist just to add
a little additional lurid colouration to the tale. Although the carcasses
looked odd, why anyone should have thought that they might be ‘aliens’ baffled
me. A number of zoologists concluded otherwise: partially decomposed racoons.
Not as exciting as an extraterrestrial, but a rather more convincing
explanation.
All in all, the programme
illustrated the public hunger for tales of alien visitation, a contemporary
phenomenon that could be said to parallel the mediaeval thirst for miracles and
visions of the Virgin Mary. It would seem that our own scientific age is giving
birth to its own set of folk beliefs, fuelled by a voracious media and the
general public’s desire for strange and fantastical tales.
Following the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet, NASA has decided that it wishes to outsource its supply missions to the International Space Station (ISS) to the private sector in a bid to cut costs. Space X was selected as the private company most likely to be able to perform this task, and this morning it was due to launch a demonstration mission to the ISS. Unfortunately for Space X, the launch was aborted owing to an engine problem, so its Falcon rocket and cargo-carrying Dragon capsule remain on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. Rocket science never has been easy or cheap.
Although the Space X system, providing that it can prove its capability, will be cheaper than other launch systems, ultimately it must be viewed as a stopgap technology that needs to be superseded if the costs of exploring and utilising space are to be made somewhat less than astrononomically expensive. With the recent successful testing of the Skylon spaceplane's SABRE engine system, such a new era could be just around the corner, with British engineering and manufacturing leading the way.
Recent news concerning the testing of the SABRE engine demonstrated the exciting potential of this revolutionary piece of British developed (although ESA funded) technology. Although it is as yet still in its experimental stages, should tests go to plan the Skylon spaceplane for which it is designed could fundamentally transform the launching of satellites and other cargoes into low-Earth orbit. Coming as it did during the same week as the announcement that a private consortium is to take the first steps towards the exploitation of near-Earth asteroids for their raw materials, the era of space exploration could be revitalised, with the economic potential of space beyond low-Earth orbit being explored for the first time. Unlike asteroid mining however, Skylon holds out the prospect of providing a faster return on economic investment.
The real potential of the Skylon concept derives from its prospective ability to repeatedly loft cargoes into space for a mere fraction of the current cost owing to the fact that it requires neither booster rockets nor massive amounts of liquid fuel, instead taking much of the fuel that it needs direct from the atmosphere. Estimates suggest that it could cut the cost of satellite launches from £15,000/kg to £650/kg. Moreover, this ability to transport heavy cargo to low-Earth orbit also allows for the possibility of the orbital assembly of spacecraft designed for deep space flight, thereby dramatically reducing the cost both of human and robotic exploration of the Solar System. Skylon could be adapted to transport up to 24 passengers into low-Earth orbit, dwarfing the capability of other existing launch systems as well as the now-retired space shuttle fleet.
After the excitement of the Space Race of the 1960s culminating in the Apollo Programme, there has been something of a lull in manned spaceflight, with human missions instead concentrating upon orbits a few hundred miles above our heads in Soyuz capsules, Skylab, Mir and most recently the International Space Station. Although the Obama administration has set the objective of sending a manned space mission way beyond the orbit of the Moon to explore an asteroid, no firm date has been set, and it will not take place until the 2020s at the earliest.
Russia and China are currently the only nations capable of sending humans into space. If the investment for Skylon can be found, the UK should be joining them within the next decade or so. It is important that this opportunity to make the country a leading spacefaring nation should not be lost, for it holds significant economic promise. This is the type of project that ought to be supported by funds from the proposed National Investment Bank, thereby providing our people with the opportunity to benefit from supporting productive capital investment in hi-tech industry at home. Our engineering and manufacturing sector needs to be revitalised to secure our long-term economic recovery. It would be a tragedy were the primary beneficiaries to the development of this technology prove to be investors from the Arab petro-states.
Below is a concept video of the Skylon spaceplane in action.
Izvestiia has announced that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitrii Rogozin is planning ‘a series of scientific conferences’ with key personnel in Russia’s space sector, and has suggested that Russia ought to examine the possibility of establishing a manned scientific base on another planetary body rather than seek to extend the life of the International Space Station (ISS). In response to questions fielded by journalists regarding the future of manned spaceflight he stated:
“Let’s say, if we are speaking about the ISS, is there a point in continuing this programme as an international expedition which orbits around the Earth? Then again perhaps, in fact there would be sense in attempting to address such [scientific] questions by locating a station of this type directly on other planets. It needs to be considered.”
The first of the projected conferences will take place in April, with a view to determining ambitious goals in space exploration.
Whereas Russia remains the only participating nation capable of launching humans to the ISS since the retirement of the US shuttle fleet, its recent endeavours in space exploration have been inglorious. The late ambitious Phobos-Grunt Mission which was intended to travel to the Martian moon of Phobos, collect a sample from its surface and return it to Earth, managed to get no further than Earth orbit following a hardware failure after its initial launch. The doomed orbiter and lander therefore suffered the indignity of a fiery re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere, where it burned up over the Pacific.
NASA and ESA planetary missions have been far more successful than their Russian counterparts, and although the Russian Space Agency – Roskosmos – currently enjoys a good reputation in launching human and inanimate cargos into low-Earth orbit, the glory days of the Soviet space programme are long gone. Rogozin however, evidently views space exploration as a matter of national prestige, and is thus looking at increasing the space sector’s profile. Such an approach of course is not new, and politicians of all stripes and hues in a number of countries over the years have appealed to the spirit of exploration and innovation to justify ambitious space programmes that have often promised more than the Earth (Mars to be precise in the cases of Bushes senior and junior, and then an asteroid and Mars by Obama), yet have delivered precious little since the heated rivalry of the Space Race in the 1960s.
The global economic crisis has had a particularly negative impact upon NASA and ESA, with each agency scaling back its programme of exploration, both manned and robotic, owing to budgetary retrenchment. Plans to send humans to Mars - overseen by rocket ace Wernher von Braun – were already in existence in the early 1970s, with the intention being to undertake such missions later in the decade or in the early 1980s. However, as the Apollo Programme fizzled out amidst public indifference to the last manned lunar missions, NASA’s vision shrank, with the manned space programme thereafter being confined to low-Earth orbit. NASA’s subsequent glories have been in the robotic exploration of the Solar System, through missions such as the two Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens (in conjunction with ESA) and various rover and orbiter missions to Mars. By comparison, the Soviet Union’s and Russia’s record in planetary exploration has been dismal, with the majority of their orbiters and probes failing, although their Venera landers did manage to yield a first glimpse of the hellish Venusian surface.
Whilst both NASA and ESA have been scaling back their ambitions, new spacefaring nations – China and India – have been scaling up theirs. It is China in particular which now appears to wish to leapfrog the established space powers, having already established its own manned launch capability and having concrete plans to create its own orbiting space station in the near future. China has also declared its intent to send taikonauts to the Moon by 2025, and to then establish a lunar base. Under George Bush, NASA had pledged to return to the Moon by 2019 and to build a lunar outpost by 2024, but the Constellation Programme was scrapped as too costly under the Obama administration. Obama instead expressed the oft-repeated desire to send a manned mission to Mars, but at some unspecified point in the 2030s or even 2040s. In the interim, the objective of a manned deep space mission to an asteroid was declared, but once again, without any firm dates or realistic budgetary commitments. It therefore seems likely that it will be China’s ambitions in space which will serve to kick-start any potential serious non-robotic exploration of the Solar System.
Rogozin, as a Russian of a nationalist bent, clearly finds the prospect of manned space exploration an alluring one. Quite how much valuable data has been mined from the imperfect analogue of a mission to Mars provided by the Mars 500 Project which concluded in Star City just outside of Moscow last year remains to be seen, but perhaps it has spurred Rogozin and others within Russia’s space sector to reconceptualise what may be possible in the near future, with a view to once again putting Russia at the forefront of cutting edge science. So, despite the unpleasant, smelly and not to mention dangerous reality of life away from Mother Earth, we could yet live to see human feet once again making bold impressions in the lunar dust, and possibly alighting for the first time on the surface of another planet: Mars.
Phobos-Grunt: Russia's latest failed space mission
