http://mitworld.mit.edu/ MIT World media in category 'Exploration/Travel'. en-us Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:10:44 GMT Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/722 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/722 Astronaut Mike Massimino returns to MIT and shares his experience on the Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-125). Topics include the challenges of space walking while repairing the Hubble, having the right tools on hand for high stakes repairs, and the long hours of practice that lead up to the task.

As the first astronaut to Twitter from space, Massimino provides funny, personal and insightful anecdotes from the mission including the competition amongst his team to be the last human to touch the Hubble.

Accompanying Massimino on the mission was a rare book loaned from the MIT Libraries’ collections. The book, a limited edition facsimile of Galileo’s landmark publication “Sidereius Nuncius” (Starry Messenger), was chosen to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s astronomical research, the first recorded planetary observations using a telescope.

He presents the well-traveled book to MIT Libraries Director Ann Wolpert. She happily accepts the undamaged book and waives any late fees. The book traveled 5.3 million miles, making 197 orbits of the earth. It is now on display in an exhibit at the MIT Science Library. ]]> Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/700 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/700 Real-world practitioners of systems engineering/engineering systems describe how the young discipline has shaped their very large enterprises.

For the past 10 years, David Lehman has been incorporating key systems engineering ideas within MITRE Corporation. Successes include getting project leaders to think about engineering solutions in the context of political and economic organization, and learning how to communicate these solutions better. MITRE has talked to defense acquisition managers in the field to extract data and create models that get disseminated to other managers. But Lehman is disappointed that Defense Department acquisition methods are still large-scale, and unresponsive to swiftly changing situations. He’d like to show program managers how “to step outside what they’ve been taught,” and create incentives for doing the right things rather than “sticking with regulations.”

Robert Skinner, Jr. wonders if engineering systems approaches can help with some pressing questions: the way to mix transportation and land use decisions in urban areas, for instance, or government pricing strategies for surface transport. One nettlesome issue involves the right scope of analysis, says Skinner. Should researchers be looking at the components of the transportation system, or the whole enterprise? “As we move downward, uncertainty increases and the role of social systems and social science enters into it; politics upper and lower case becomes more significant.” And he adds, “We’re sorely lacking in analogs in the policy world to transmit complex engineering concepts. If analysis gets too far out ahead of the public’s and decision-makers’ ability to absorb it, it all comes to naught.”

“Why are so many complex systems behind schedule and over budget?” asks Heinz Stoewer. A single line of code missing can cause system collapse, says Stoewer. And big problems can flow from human shortcomings in calculations, accounting or risk management. Stoewer believes another reason for failure is that program managers and systems engineers “are too process focused,” and not well enough aligned. They may lack sufficient depth in the key discipline of their projects, leading to faulty product design or production. To improve the chances of success, Stoewer emphasizes the importance of early phases: “I can tell you two dozen programs in trouble because they’re…making enormous efforts trying to get things right when they’re almost done.”

By 2020, Joel Moses hopes that engineering systems will be recognized “as having made significant contributions” to health care, energy, environment, financial services and the military. To achieve such an impact, the field should focus on “maybe the key issue” of system architecture. Each engineering field thinks of architecture in different ways and groups must communicate better with each other. Moses believes educators should teach “what makes for a good system architect,” and that “systems thinking is important, but not enough.” A good system architect sees things holistically. Moses notes as well, “the difference between designing a one-off versus a family of systems.”

]]> Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/691 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/691 While Arnold Barnett acknowledges addressing the same questions around flying year after year (“Does he ever change his schtick?”), he advertises some new twists this time ‘round. Barnett remains remarkably consistent, though, in his quite sunny assessment of the current state of aviation safety -- even after a recent string of air accidents.

Wielding statistics and the occasional wisecrack, Barnett arrives at his destination by way of a series of dialectical questions. How safe is it to fly now? Doesn’t that depend on how we measure aviation safety, and which statistics are the most informative? You could look at such metrics as fatal accidents per flight hours, or hull loss per 100 thousand departures, or passengers killed to passengers carried. Barnett proposes instead the “imperfect but meaningful” statistic of death risk per randomly chosen flight, which among other conceptual advantages, deals with the odds of being killed -- a factor with “intuitive appeal.”

Barnett’s numbers: From 2000 to 2008, someone who chose a U.S. jet flight at random would sustain an accidental death risk of 1 in 23 million (there were 3 crashes in 69 million total jet flights). There’s a much greater likelihood an American child will become president (one in 2 million) than die in flight.

Death risk statistics from the 1960s through today have improved steadily, plateauing in the current decade due to the unprecedented tragedy of 9/11. Currently, there’s a one in 10 million risk of death by jet in U.S. flight, around 1 in 14 million for other developed nations (the developing world’s aviation risk poses somewhat greater hazards: one in 1.5 million). Says Barnett,“Despite recent suggestions to the contrary, regional jet flights are not less safe than national airlines.”

While “fatal accidents on first world jets are on the verge of extinction,” Barnett worries about an increase in runway collisions, as the global economy improves. He hopes technological advances will address these concerns. The greater challenge comes from terrorism, which he feels sure will continue to target aviation. Using a cost benefit analysis, Barnett dispenses with proposals to ban laptops on flights, and also dismisses the idea of faster, more effective responses to terrorist attacks, which often come in clusters. Ultimately, our “optimal strategy might actually be to do nothing, except hope.” Perhaps we should come to view aviation dangers as Californians regard the threat of earthquakes: Take precautions but acknowledge “we have to take certain risks in life if we’re going to have lives worth risking.” ]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/680 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/680 Linda Mason was originally going to make a case study of Bright Horizons, her $1.3 billion, early childhood care business, but reconsidered in light of the current economic crisis -- to the benefit of her audience. Instead, she takes up her own story as a recession-era entrepreneur who built several hugely successful, socially oriented ventures, navigating very real pitfalls and challenges along the way. Her “nonlinear path” yielded important life lessons, which she shares in this talk. Some highlights from her story:

Mason took a major detour from a planned career in management consulting when she and Roger Brown, who was to become her husband, left Yale in 1979 with their MBAs to work in Cambodian refugee camps. After a year, they returned to corporate life. But some time later, she and Brown experienced a watershed moment at a New Year’s Eve party, realizing their years of accumulating money and frequent flyer miles left them “depressed.” They determined that night to make a change.

Soon after, Save the Children called, looking for help dealing with the terrible famine sweeping western Sudan. Mason and Brown had 24 hours to make up their minds: There was “no time to make a list of pros and cons. It was a fork in the road, and we knew it was the path we were to take,” says Mason. This experience taught her, “It’s sometimes important to leap before you look.”

Management skills came in handy as the team set up a complex food distribution operation, one that challenged relief organization orthodoxy. This experience, which at the time “seemed crazy and risky,” fueled Mason and Brown’s next move in 1986: addressing the shortage of high quality child care in the U.S. The couple turned their Cambridge home into a start up headquarters, and developed a business plan, which they sold to enthusiastic VCs. But corporations balked at buying in, viewing the fledgling Bright Horizons team as “flaky Peace Corps types.” Mason, reflecting on this period, counsels “do your homework extremely well, then be very, very stubborn.”

As New England sank into a recession, and their idea faced collapse, the duo transformed crisis into opportunity. They summoned all their energy for a final effort, marketing onsite childcare to real estate developers looking to attract businesses. In 1990, four years after starting, Bright Horizons was in the black. The two ran the business for 15 years, when they moved onto other interests. “Discover your passions,” Mason advises, and combine them with your skills “to give your life meaning.” ]]> Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/668 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/668 William Gerstenmaier knows the U.S. space program inside out -- both literally and figuratively. As a 30-plus year veteran of NASA, Gerstenmaier has managed the operational dimensions of the space shuttle, international space station, and other space flight missions. For this talk, he dissects a problem that recently grounded the shuttle, coming at it from the perspective of both an engineer, and a top-level manager with responsibility to the highest levels of government.

Gerstenmaier presents his case “as it unfolded,” for a behind-the-scenes view of how NASA keeps its aging shuttles aloft. His account begins in 2008, after a shuttle flight revealed something wrong with flow control valves essential to the shuttle’s hydrogen system. These valves are connected in a closed loop to the main engines, via a 170-foot length of pipe, through all manner of twists and turns, and frequently subjected to very high pressures. Gerstenmaier describes the series of tests his engineering teams performed, over long days, weekends and holidays, to determine what precisely had gone wrong, and the risks posed by potentially faulty equipment.

NASA engineers ruled out wiring problems, but discovered during an “x-ray of the plumbing” a chunk missing from one of the valves. They examined the problem from a structural dynamics standpoint: could the “flow through the plumbing” have made the valves vibrate violently? The same valves had been in use since 1981, but perhaps a “failure associated with an extremely resonant condition that could occur periodically” was responsible.

Gerstenmaier’s team shot particles through a simulated piping system and then used a scanning electron microscope to detect valve damage. They also analyzed historical failure data, which suggested that valve cracks might be a “high cycle fatigue problem,” and could therefore possibly occur during any flight. Gerstenmaier felt bound to “ground the fleet,” until engineers figured out a way of screening for damage in the valves pre flight.

A flash of unorthodox thinking led engineers (unbeknownst to Gerstenmaier) to buy a common bolt tester, which permitted them to get a comprehensive picture of the valves in working shuttles without removing or damaging them. After running numbers around flight risk, and many discussions with his engineers, Gerstenmaier felt they’d arrived at a rationale to resume flying.

Says Gerstenmaier, “I can tell you, I wasn’t looking out the window in Florida. At the shuttle launch, I was looking at data of the flow control valves and watching the pressures … I knew what I needed to look at in terms of the data. An engineer’s tendency comes through.” ]]> Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/601 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/601 Happily for human spaceflight, Dava Newman and her students enjoy working in such laboratories as NASA’s “Vomit Comet.” Newman’s work aims to provide a better understanding of how humans can withstand the rigors of space missions. Her decades studying human physiology and performance in extreme environments may prove key not just to the success of reaching Mars this century, but to improving the quality of life for people disabled by disease or accident on Earth.

Studies of astronauts in flight, training on Earth, and on long engagements at the International Space Station, reveal “significant physiological deconditioning,” Newman says. Microgravity produces musculo-skeletal loss, especially in the vertebrae and leg bones, as bipeds become “more like snakes, using a swimming type of motion.” Muscles also atrophy from 20-30%. It’s possible some of this loss could be restored once on the moon (where people are 1/6th their weight), or on Mars (3/8th their Earth weight). But Newman wants to do something about these conditions before humans reach these destinations.

She’s working on such countermeasures as unique spaceflight exercises, special drugs, human augmentation, next-generation spacesuits, and creating artificial gravity. She shows a nifty, pedal-powered artificial gravity device on which an astronaut spins, to combat deleterious physiological effects. Newman says it takes the brain around 30 days to adapt to zero gravity, and to switch back to Earth gravity. Our astronauts don’t get the hang of being home right away. Says Newman, “The funny thing is when a crew comes back, and they let go of their toothbrush and it just falls down.”

Newman provides a fast history of the spacesuit (including a giant, white spherical ball from the ‘60s and a shrink-wrap version from the '70s), before introducing her bio suit, the result of many experiments, including hanging people from the ceiling, to simulate moon walking. Her outfit comes with a mechanical counter pressure system, and biosensors to maximize mobility and minimize energy consumption. Newman hopes to modify this gear into a smart suit to help children with cerebral palsy achieve more normal locomotion.

What fires Newman up the most is exploration, something she’s passionate about, having circumnavigated the globe on a 1 1/2 year voyage. Mars is within reach --“We’re up to the task” -- but we may have to accept that maybe everyone doesn’t come back alive, says Newman. Yet, “what’s it worth if we can really find evidence for the origins of life three to four billion years ago on Mars. That’s huge!” ]]> Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/567 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/567 Frederick Salvucci’s perspective on transportation development is an amalgam of civil engineering, history, economics, policy, and not least, the direct impact on people’s lives. Here he surveys the evolution of transportation in Boston and beyond from the 1830s to the present.

Salvucci covers significant junctures in transportation history, beginning in the 1830s with horses pulling streetcars on wagon wheels, then steel wheels. In the 1870s, electrification of streetcars alleviated the phenomenon of overworked horses succumbing in the streets, causing both traffic jams and a public health hazard. “It was a really messy affair,” Salvucci says.

By World War I, automobiles increasingly crowded Boston streets, competing with streetcars and encouraging the growth of suburbs. Salvucci acknowledges urban planner Sam Bass Warner, Jr.’s book Streetcar Suburbs for telling this story. Not only the location of housing was affected. On the outskirts of Boston, at the ends of the radial subway lines, amusement parks and dance halls arose, luring city dwellers.

With the Eisenhower administration came the interstate highway system, inspired by the model of the German Autobahn. Salvucci characterizes this period as a time when people held “an unprecedentedly high belief that the government is capable of doing things; not exactly where the government reputation is today!” This roadway network forms the basis of the trucking industry, the "way the American economy moves today," says Salvucci. He commends Eisenhower for accomplishing “something impressive…a whole different economy out of this major investment of the public sector.”

But highway construction also eliminated jobs and razed neighborhoods. An automobile- dependent society rediscovered the virtues of public transportation. Salvucci credits Massachusetts GOP governors John Volpe (1960s) and Frank Sargent (1970s) with enlightened views promoting mass transit, though he admits “I don’t usually say good things about Republicans” unless they’re dead.

Salvucci also pays homage to activist Catholic priests fighting for the interests of residents in Boston neighborhoods threatened by destructive road construction plans. He singles out Richard Cardinal Cushing as “a rough justice guy.”

The lecture concludes with the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife, whose complementary tastes Salvucci borrows as a parable for the necessity of balancing and integrating priorities. Land use planning, transportation development, economic growth, and the welfare of individuals are inextricably intertwined. ]]> Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/555 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/555 Fred Salvucci ponders the role of contingency in history, and in the evolution of Boston and its transportation system. He starts from the time the glaciers pulled back from Boston, leaving a soggy near-island and a river for the first white settlers to contend with. “The reason the city is here because of an accident of history,” he says. In the 1600s, “when the English first came, they made a mistake,” Salvucci reports. Thinking that the Charles would run deep and wide for a thousand miles inland, offering vital trade routes, the English hunkered down.

Once they realized their mistake (the Charles is about a foot deep in Watertown, MA, six miles away), the settlers built on the resources at hand, which included enormous stocks of cod and good ship-building lumber. The “poverty of a place forces skills, which in turn makes the place not poor,” says Salvucci. These Protestant settlers also set about, in near record time, establishing schools like Boston Latin and Harvard.

Boston’s rapid expansion and prosperity led to innovations such as filling land, which in turn led to unexpected transportation developments. The first commercial use of rail in the New World, Salvucci tells us, was to haul in granite for the Bunker Hill monument, and to bring dirt from the suburbs for Boston builders. When people realized they could use the new technology to transport farm products, the Boston & Worcester Railroad was born. But the idea of moving people around didn’t emerge until the 1800s, when the concept of living one place and working in another led to streetcars in Boston and elsewhere. Around 1900, Boston led the nation with the first subway (“a little dinky one”) running just two blocks. In two decades, the guts of the city’s subway system emerged, making Salvucci’s own Big Dig project appear modest in comparison (adjusting for inflation).

Salvucci remarks on the numerous cases of “indirect causality” through human history, how things “built in ways that are unanticipated and probably unanticipatable.” In 1865, there were no electric street cars. By 1900, U.S. East Coast cities were covered by them. In 1900, there were 2,000 autos in the U.S., and by 1920, there were so many cars that city rail networks began dying out. Don’t be fooled into thinking you can “predict tomorrow based on yesterday plus a small delta,” warns Salvucci. ]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/539 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/539 Even if humans could breathe under water like fish, we might not want to become permanently aquatic. “Believe it or not,” says James Morash , “the deep ocean is kind of boring,” covered as it is by so much sandy sea floor. And yet there’s much to be learned about this terrain, which was a mystery to humans up ‘til the last century. As Morash points out, ocean systems are increasingly of interest to climate change scientists, and to researchers interested in the impacts of warming on marine ecosystems.

It has proved too dangerous and expensive, Morash tells us, to send humans inside submersibles to carry out much of this painstaking and time-consuming underwater research, so engineers have been designing vehicles that can do much of the work in our stead. The first generation of such vehicles required cables for power and commands from the surface, and with cameras and lights, were “not much more than flying eyeballs.” The cables proved a major limitation, constraining the vehicles operating scope and getting in the way in rough seas.

Morash and his colleagues have been cooking up a new generation of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which resemble the rovers operating on Mars. They’re fitted out with batteries, acoustic telemetry, and on board computers. “What you have is a vehicle that is happy to drive above the sea floor for hours at a time, taking endless photos of bare sand until it happens across something more exciting like a deep water coral reef or a shipwreck.” Applications for AUVs include essential, drudge missions like taking water quality samples over a wide patch of ocean, at different depths, or remote monitoring of coral reefs for decay and seasonal changes. The oil industry uses AUVs for maintaining offshore oil rigs. The Navy has requested an AUV that might serve as a disaster response platform in case of a flood, to test a watershed for “spreading pollution plumes” or to identify other waterborne hazards. And Morash’s colleagues are testing another AUV in the MIT alumni pool that is designed to dive quickly down to coral communities that serve as fish nurseries, places so deep that life is based not on sunlight but on chemosynthesis. ]]> Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/513 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/513 In spite of its old age, the Second Law of Thermodynamics “is alive and kicking,” says
Max Tegmark, stimulating research on “really, really big puzzles.” In Tegmark’s case, “big” encompasses the cosmos, and investigating the entropy of the universe offers one path into understanding “how we started out.”

Tegmark frames his talk with paradoxical questions: Why is entropy so low, and why is entropy so high? The first question is “crucial to understanding the arrow of time,” and involves the microscopic definition of entropy. 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang, entropy in the observable universe is in “the ballpark of 10⁸⁹ bits -- crudely speaking, a google.” This is much lower than the theoretical limit to how much entropy our cosmos could contain. Also, Tegmark wonders, why has our solar system ended up so far from thermal equilibrium, since when the universe was younger, the temperature was almost the same everywhere?

It turns out that in cosmology, unlike classical physics, atoms start out at uniform density and end up, abetted by gravity, “clumpy,” with gas getting denser and forming stars. Tegmark shows a supercomputer simulation of this process, which depicts the evolution of a universe with galaxies and solar systems like our own. Different temperatures in the universe aren’t due to magic, he says, just Einstein’s theory of gravity and basic gas physics.

But, Tegmark ponders, why was the universe uniform in the beginning? One “crazy sounding answer” involves inflation. A tiny region of space much smaller than an atom, which is very uniform and very dense, begins to expand exponentially, until it makes up all space in our known universe. It gets weirder. Tegmark invokes inflation to explain not only the low entropy of the cosmos, but its high entropy as well. That same 10⁸⁹ bits can also be viewed as “such a big number that it suggests…that we’re in some kind of multiverse, or some much larger reality than what we can observe.” The initial conditions that make up these 10 to the 89th bits “just tell us where in space we live, our address in space.” We should call the Big Bang “not the beginning but the end of inflation in this part of space. … If we zoom out in the universe, we should expect to see much more entropy.” If you don’t get this intuitively, that’s OK, Tegmark reassures us, but “if we categorically reject ideas in science just because they feel crazy, we will probably reject whatever the correct theory is, too.”

]]> Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/476 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/476 In customary, loose-limbed form, Arnold Barnett reprises two of his favorite themes: improvements to the U.S. Electoral College, and aviation safety.

First up, Barnett’s suggested fix for national elections, which through the “fun-house mirror” of the Electoral College, permit winner-take-all results. His formula involves a weighted vote share, akin to the weighted average professors use for determining a course grade. His equation would shift power to smaller states, without slighting the larger ones -- while still closely following the popular vote.

He then offers an abundance of statistics that should relieve antsy air passengers of much anxiety. The precise metric Barnett has settled on, “death risk per flight, in first world domestic passenger services,” has improved 70 fold since the 1960s, when a passenger had a one in 1 million chance of dying in a plane crash. Says Barnett, “When you consider all the things that can go wrong in jet aviation that would lead to death of passengers, the fact that the risk level is now one in 70 million constitutes the 8th wonder of the world.”

While air travel to developing nations does not provide as much reassurance (the chance of dying in a plane crash is one in 2 million these days), the numbers show steady improvement, and Barnett’s research demonstrates it doesn’t much matter whether a passenger flies the local carrier, or a ‘first-world’ airline.

The real risk in air travel comes from threats posed by terrorists and criminals, and Barnett doesn’t provide much solace in this quarter. He dismisses one suggestion that laptops be eliminated in airline cabins, because “work you can’t do on a plane is time you can’t spend with your kids at home.” On the other hand, positive bag matching, which all U.S. carriers used to practice, would be another helpful layer of security. Barnett believes that “labor relations in the airlines are so brittle that they are afraid to ask baggage handlers to take on an additional task.” He’s worked out the math, and shown that should one airliner be blown out of the sky, and three others set to go off within minutes, “realistically there’s nothing we can do—there’s not enough time to communicate a credible warning to lead to measures to reduce the risk to other planes.”

Yet, even though the risk of terrorism is greater by far than the risk of dying in an accident, “we can’t give up flying because of it.” Concludes Barnett, “We’re in an uncharted area -- making judgments to continue to live our lives, and making adequate precautions, and we don’t know what that means.”

]]> Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/415 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/415 Joe Haldeman provides a sneak preview of an upcoming novel whose story plays out in MIT’s past, present and distant future. In his conversation with Henry Jenkins, Haldeman admits that he has “a lot of fun with the sociology of being in this joint.” He also discusses the history of his genre, and his own literary approach.

“The thing about science fiction,” says Haldeman, “is that it’s a form of writing but it’s also a way of looking at things – a mode of thought.” Early sci-fi writers sought to educate young people, and direct them toward careers as scientists or engineers. Not all of the writing was stellar. Some of the “old stuff can be ugly stuff,” he says. Haldeman can’t read the Foundation trilogy now – “My eyes lock,” the writing’s so bad. But some of the stories from the 1930s inspired the scientists on both sides of World War 2, those behind radar, the atom bomb and Germany’s V1 and V2 rockets. Today, as fewer people read novels, Haldeman says, science fiction has become less important. “The idea that science fiction can educate isn’t there anymore.”

Haldeman revels in the real world of science, especially at the far edges of research where astonishing discoveries are made. “I get more damn ideas out of popular science magazines,” like Scientific American. An article in Sky and Telescope, and a visit to a Boston science museum exhibit on preserved human bodies inspired a new story on non-carbon based life forms that live in a different timescale from humans.

Haldeman is determined to get both the science and fiction right, and he writes things he’d like to read. “I get so bored with cardboard characters…essentially giving a lesson.” He’s a big fan of Ernest Hemingway. As a Vietnam veteran who has written a number of war stories, he admits that “writing about war is the first natural, emotional thing to do,” but he resists getting too analytical about his work.

Today, Haldeman views science as under attack: “Religion is out of hand on a lot of different levels, and science fiction is a tool against religion,” he says. “Science fiction is a tool for rationalism, for a rational approach to solving life’s problems.”

]]> Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/391 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/391 The sign-up sheet for astronaut school is likely to grow even longer after viewing Stephanie Wilson’s reality video about her 13 days in space. Wilson, a self-described “robo chick,” served as a specialist in July 2006 on one of NASA’s return-to-flight test missions following the Columbia accident. She narrates a video account -- a day-to-day diary –- of the work, and fun, she and fellow astronauts engaged in.

Much of Wilson’s job involved using a robotic arm to help unload supplies onto the International Space Station, to which the shuttle Discovery was docked for several days. When she wasn’t helping transfer 28,000 pounds of food, gear and experiments, she was assisting crew members on space walks, during which they assembled another piece of the space station and tested a putty-like material for repairing cracks and holes in the shuttle's delicate heat tiles. Wilson, who was operating a 50-foot long robotic boom arm for these jobs, describes the challenge of functioning in “45 minutes of day and 45 minutes of night,” as the astronauts swiftly circled the earth. “It got very cold and dark, and my colleagues said it was very lonely to be at the end of a bendy stick.”

Wilson’s video clearly demonstrates the awesome solitude of these spacewalkers, as well as the mundane, almost household nature of their chores: Astronauts used tools resembling cordless drills to assemble new hardware onto the space station. Her footage also reveals the camaraderie and joy of life above earth. She takes us spinning like a fish through the submarine-narrow chambers of the attached shuttle and space station, and we view astronauts in zero gravity play with floating balls of water containing air bubbles, and attempt to catch myriad M&Ms in their mouths. Wilson herself performs a flipping sequence, admitting, “There’s a child in all of us.”

To Wilson’s clear regret, this may be her last shuttle flight. After a mission, an astronaut goes to the bottom of a long list of flight aspirants. But more to the point: NASA, facing budget cuts and the mandate of lunar and Mars missions, will retire the shuttles in 2010, with the goal of sending a new vehicle up in 2014. During the interim years, Russia’s Soyuz space ships will exclusively bear the burden of transport to the space station. ]]> Tue, 19 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/381 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/381 In a trio of mini-talks, Arnold Barnett applies statistical analysis to some of society’s most confounding challenges. He first takes up the minority achievement gap -- the apparent under-performance of black and Hispanic students on standardized tests in comparison to white and Asian students.

In his own work in a suburban school district in Chicago, Barnett discovered that white children were only slightly ahead of black children in 8th grade math tests. When Barnett analyzed historical data, he found a similar small lag. His school research does not support other studies that suggest that “black kids who do well tend to do less well over time...” Barnett says, “If we’re going to understand what the problem is, we need to look at data to distinguish what seems to be true from that which is a matter of conjecture.”

Barnett offers a practical remedy to “the funhouse mirror of electoral politics,” the Electoral College system. Since small states, whose voices carry so well in the Electoral College, will never accept its termination, Barnett recommends a weighted vote share system. Just the way a grade in a course might be calculated by giving 50% weight to the final, 25% to homework and 25% to a mid-term, Barnett imagines each state retaining a weight equal to its current share of electoral votes -- but at the same time, each state would also be weighed by its actual popular vote share. Barnett says the “greatest obstacle to getting a system like this seriously considered is that lots of incredibly intelligent people get totally flustered by mathematics.”

As for aviation security, Barnett’s final subject, the statistics on avoiding another air-based terrorist attack look rather dismal. He finds “certain U.S. security decisions hard to understand.” In particular, abandoning the requirement for positive passenger bag match seems an open invitation for a terrorist to sneak explosives onto a plane. Relying exclusively on the explosive detector “becomes something of a roulette wheel.” He also sheds scorn on new trusted traveler programs, which are all too likely to accept “sleeper terrorists” such as those who bombed the London Underground. ]]> Mon, 08 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/352 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/352 While Michael Griffin sees a wealth of reasons for space exploration in general and returning to the moon in particular, NASA must still manage on a tiny portion of “the national treasure.” This 7/10th of a percent of the national budget – the equivalent of each American paying 15 cents every day – “is not an expenditure we should do without,” Griffin asserts. We are driven to investigate beyond earth because curiosity and the desire to master new territory are “wired into our DNA.” But Griffin finds great value in the “opportunity for benign cooperative American leadership.” Space exploration strengthens the nation, society and the human species, he says.

Developing a foothold on the moon will afford humans experience in operating away from earth’s environment, helping to develop the technology needed for opening the space frontier -- practice for Mars and beyond. Griffin provides details on emerging models for a new crew exploration vehicle and booster rockets. NASA is attempting to take advantage of earlier designs for the sake of economy and speed – “architecture with as little fuss and bother as possible, maximizing the use of things we already own.” There will be plenty of commercial opportunities in these public missions, with NASA seeking to purchase launch and communication services as soon as available. And he envisions promoting international cooperation by offering seats in the lunar lander in exchange, in one example, for help in setting up a lunar habitat. “We don’t want to return to the days where NASA does everything,” says Griffin. ]]> Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/339 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/339 Chris Kraft manages to present in a single event the ultimate in engineering case studies, as well as an insider’s history of 20th century space missions and a pep talk for Aero-Astro students. This blunt raconteur describes the challenges of the earliest space pioneers. His story begins with Project Mercury in the 1950s, whose space task group of 35 included eight secretaries. “We were capable people but didn’t know a damn thing about how to fly in space,” recalls Kraft. How would they communicate with a man in orbit, or assess his health? Most doctors thought when an astronaut left earth’s atmosphere, “he’d be a blithering idiot.” Air to ground communication in those days consisted of 20 words of teletype. “How do you make real time decisions in those circumstances?” muses Kraft. He proudly describes assembling the Mission Rules book, “probably the smartest thing we ever did,” which attempted to address all conceivable malfunctions on a space mission. This was an early example of systems engineering, says Kraft.

When President Kennedy challenged NASA to get a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, “Chris Kraft did not know how to determine orbital mechanics from 30 seconds of radar at Cape Canaveral. I thought the president was a little daft.” Suddenly, there were a whole new set of problems, such as how to make sure a craft aimed at the moon did not just hit it. In the Gemini and then Apollo programs, Kraft’s team solved innumerable and breathtakingly difficult issues. “We did a lot of things by the seat of our pants because we didn’t know any other way. We did it by feel, by having seen the past and doing things the right way.”

Kraft has some harsh words for the current state of space exploration. He can’t countenance NASA’s abandoning the space shuttle. “We seem to have a great propensity in this country for building something wonderful, great and high performance and throwing it away….Golly, my mother would have gone bananas!” He believes that NASA could have made the shuttle much more efficient to fly, and used it as a key element in the new race back to the Moon and to Mars. Kraft doesn’t believe this program will get off the ground—mainly because NASA hasn’t built anything new in 25 years, “and they’ve forgotten what it takes to do it.” The next space mission, whatever it turns out to be, will depend on the current crop of young aerospace engineers. “Go do it, don’t be frightened to fail,” exhorts Kraft. “You learn more from your failures than from your successes.” ]]> Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/337 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/337 As eager as he is to invent robots that can travel to a moon of Saturn or Jupiter, and function autonomously in these hostile environments, Rodney Brooks would love a shot to explore space himself. “I made an offer to Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergei Brin that if they would fund a one-way mission to Mars, I’d go on it,” says Brooks. But he knows that robots are cheaper to send than us, “big bags of skin with biological processes requiring replenishment of all sorts.” Under the Bush Administration, NASA first laid out an ambitious program in robotic technology, involving sending machines to reconnoiter the moon and Mars and prepare habitation sites for humans. “Robots would dig channels, then lower habitation modules into them, and when people come, they’d live like moles underground,” says Brooks. But why send people at all if these robots can accomplish so much? It turns out that there’s a dangerously long lag time between sending a command to a robot and having the machine perform a function. Ultimately, human senses and timing will be needed on site.

But now NASA’s grand robotic research plans are on hold, says Brooks, blocked by the difficulties and enormous expense of designing a new launch vehicle. The future of sophisticated robotic work seems earthbound, says Brooks. First, there are military innovations -- Congress has mandated that by 2015, 1/3rd of all US military missions should be unmanned. Also, the oil industry is pushing for machine-based solutions to such gritty problems as deep-ocean drilling and oil-well maintenance. And don’t forget the new billionaire space cowboys, who dream of mining platinum fields on asteroids (for fuel cells on earth), or building space tourism businesses. But, Brooks reminds us, we have a way to go: After 40 years of research, “the generic object recognition that a two-year-old child could do, we can’t do with our robots.”

]]> Fri, 03 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/331 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/331 What does it take to achieve the impossible? The lure of a lucrative payoff or of worldwide fame, and a talented team who simply say, “Enough is enough, we’re going to change things.” That’s the perspective of Diamandis and the X Prize Foundation, whose original $10-million award went to Bert Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, which on October 4, 2004, became the first private manned spacecraft to exceed an altitude of 100 km twice in as many weeks. The X Prize Foundation’s goal is to make space flight a near-commonplace human activity. NASA’s current costs to launch each shuttle run $1 billion. Diamandis imagines it should cost “100 bucks per person in the future on a space elevator, or through some breakthroughs in physics.” Commercial ventures will help drive this revolution -- whether they are rides on the Soyuz craft, or the acquisition of vast mineral resources in space. A small asteroid, Diamandis notes, is worth “20 trillion dollars in the platinum group metal marketplace”.

While the X Prize Foundation believes “human destiny is in space,” it also aims to achieve comparable breakthroughs on earth, deploying cash rewards and generating an international buzz around conquering such global problems as the environment and energy. You put up a prize to get “unconstrained thinking,” says Diamandis, and you create inspiration and hope, as people “risk everything for something they believe in.” ]]> Tue, 03 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/314 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/314
“You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.”

While Dr. Seuss may not have been a direct inspiration, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” seems especially suited to these four “brainy and footsy people” with exceptional reach.

Take Bradley Carl Edwards, who is designing a space elevator 62 thousand miles long, made out of a three-foot wide ribbon of carbon nanotubes, with one end attached to earth and the other sticking out in space. Send up solar panel satellites and you’ve got a constant, inexpensive supply of power for the world.

And there’s Dava Newman, who is working on a spacesuit made out of liquefied polymers and electro active materials. Her “shrink-wrapped” Biosuit system is intended for “extreme explorers” on multi-year missions to the moon and beyond, who need second skins to augment human performance and minimize bone and muscle loss typical in low gravity environments.

Or Penelope Boston, whose investigation of our planet’s harshest caves is leading to models for human habitation in subterranean lava tubes on Mars. Deploy “microbots” to reconnoiter for danger and signs of life in these deep and dangerous places, suggests Boston, then develop life support mechanisms in preparation for human colonies on other worlds.

Are these merely flights of fancy? Robert Cassanova thinks not. His NIAC serves as incubator to these “really good revolutionary ideas,” which he believes stretch the imagination but that will also end up as credible technologies. ]]> Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/307 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/307
“This is a strange and paradoxical time,” says moderator Peter Senge, in which people live “more and more in each other’s backyard”-- interdependent globally but also fragmented by economics and politics. Senge believes “working across boundaries is the defining challenge” of our era.

Ron O’Connor is a pioneer in the practice of crossing boundaries. While volunteering as a medical student in Nepal 30 years ago, he observed devastating mortality rates that could be eradicated if up-to-date public health measures were implemented. But he also understood that Westerners couldn’t simply go in and impose solutions on a different culture. “We’re seen as a big gorilla knocking over small helpless countries.” The organization he founded assists and trains native communities and leaders to put their own health solutions in place. In a Bangladesh family planning effort, O’Connor was “thrilled to see illiterate village women organize themselves” and halve their fertility rate over two decades.

In Frannie Leautier’s job, she’s forbidden to “influence via money….just through ideas.” “I can’t rely on much more than people talking to each other and making decisions together,” she says. So her clients’ perspective and needs come first. In Sri Lanka, for instance, where Leautier’s group lived for two weeks in a poor village, she learned that providing running water was less essential than creating two ponds: one for people and the other for elephants.

Jeremy Hockenstein says he’s “inspired by people who have overcome much more than me and worked harder than I ever had.” A visit to Cambodia introduced Hockenstein to large numbers of poor people “trying to learn computers, and English” but for whom no jobs existed. He decided to launch a data entry business dedicated to providing some of the neediest Cambodians with decent livelihoods. Digital Divide Data trains and hires disabled people and women rescued from sex trafficking, among others. They work six-hour days and go to school. Says Hockenstein, “We measure ourselves by how many go on to better jobs in the future.” ]]> Tue, 26 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/279 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/279 Somehow Arnold Barnett manages to massage the subject of airline accidents into a breezy and sometimes comforting talk on statistical probabilities. In decades of research, he has taken firm hold of the metrics of measuring mortality in flight. While there are many ways of looking at the grim numbers, Barnett has developed his own preferred ratio, which looks at “death risk per randomly chosen flight.” Applying this approach, Barnett has come up with very reassuring statistics: The death risk per flight on first world domestic jet services, for the period of 1990-1999, was 1 in 13 million. To the air averse, Barnett offers that “a citizen is 2.5 times as likely to win the jackpot of the Massachusetts state lottery as to perish on his or her next flight.” For the four years between 2000 and 2004, there were zero accidental deaths in 70 million first world flights. Airline safety has tangibly improved, says Barnett. But security is another matter entirely: “We lost it all on a Tuesday in September,” he says. While we’ve “brought accidents to the brink of extinction”, we haven’t solved our problems “dealing with the forces of evil.” He strongly urges the reintroduction of positive passenger-baggage match, which he believes will deter terrorists who may use flawed explosive detection devices “as roulette wheels.”

As for fixing the Electoral College, which he likens to tilting at windmills, Barnett proposes applying a weighted average. This would “all but eliminate the worse consequences of the winner take all rule.” The biggest drawback? “People have difficulty with mathematical ideas. And this sounds complicated.” ]]> Mon, 25 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/231 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/231 Nothing could stop Mike Fincke (MIT ’89) from joining his 15th reunion – not even a 200-mile-high earth orbit. Fincke began a six-month stint as science officer and flight engineer on Expedition 9 to the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2004, and stole a few moments from his hectic schedule to greet fellow alumni. In addition to discussing the mission’s science, which includes examining fluids in a microgravity environment, and working with tiny space satellites that might one day help astronauts perform routine maintenance, Fincke extols international collaboration on the ISS. “MIT set me up nicely to be ready for this next wave of globalization… Our Russian, European and Japanese partners will help expand human presence in the skies, on the way to the moon and stars.”]]> Wed, 29 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/224 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/224 The events of 9/11 unleashed a flood of security measures across all dimensions of daily life, many of them aimed at averting repeat attacks on aircraft. So you might imagine that the risks of flying have been much reduced. You’d be wrong, says Arnold Barnett, who has scrutinized the changes in air security regulations, and found them wanting. The cost of another airplane attack, to the airline industry alone, would run around $5 billion. Yet, says Barnett, the government has actually cut four security measures that, according to his cost-benefit analysis, amount to less than the price-tag of a successful terrorist attack: checking photo id’s at airport boarding gates; posing baggage questions to airline passengers; positive bag matches with checked luggage; and a continued ban of U.S. mail on passenger aircraft. While no traveler appreciates delays boarding a plane, and while the minutes of such delays add up to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, citizens would no doubt prefer that all reasonable efforts be made to avoid another tragedy. Relying on airport “sniffer” dogs, computer profiling and better screening devices will not be enough to forestall a terrorist strike, Barnett predicts.]]> Wed, 29 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/225 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/225 A word of warning from inveterate traveler Ralph Gakenheimer: Never ride a bicycle around downtown Shanghai. The explosive growth of cars has resulted “in mayhem” for cyclists and pedestrians. In China, there are 1.8 bikes per family, yet municipal governments eager to encourage industrial growth repress bicycles in favor of cars. Air and noise pollution are increasing all over China, much of Asia, and India, as cities double in size every few decades, sprawl over surrounding countryside, and citizens flock to motorized transport. Gakenheimer encourages testing out “congestion pricing”— taxing the use of the densest roads at the most traveled times to regulate flow and create order; bus rapid transit systems to “help keep city centers alive;” and land use planning to contain the spread of cities over agricultural lands and natural resources.]]> Mon, 10 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/197 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/197 Riccardo Giacconi has probably seen deeper into the universe than any other human being. He has conducted his explorations not with the naked eye, but with a series of increasingly sensitive detectors, relentlessly searching for the source of cosmic x-ray radiation. In this first-person account of pursuing one question for 40 years, what emerges most clearly is the kind of focus, determination, and invention required to make discoveries in the Nobel Prize league. Giacconi confesses that “X-ray astronomy is not easy” – an admirable understatement – but he succeeds in proving three key points: from the Uhuru satellite to the Hubble and Chandra telescopes, the success of experiments depends as much on brilliant instrument design as on data analysis; individual, identifiable galaxies are the source of the universe’s x-ray radiation background; and so we are now “looking at objects whose nature we do not know” – objects that the next generation of astronomers will understand only if they have the resources to build new instruments. ]]> Mon, 26 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/174 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/174 This panel delves into both the fabled and likely future of air travel. As a boy, Joseph Corn treasured the Popular Mechanics issue whose cover featured a man parking a helicopter in the garage. America’s romance with aviation, which started soon after the Wright Brothers’ flight, wasn’t just about hardware or transportation, says Corn, but about a utopian dream. Air travel would bring about a world of peace and brotherhood – a dream, says Corn, shattered by the dropping of the nuclear bomb. Jane Garvey reminisces about Y2K knuckle-biting – she was bravely aloft on New Year’s Eve 1999. The tremendous growth of regional jet travel and urban hub congestion will shift aviation to rural communities, Garvey projects, but believes no new runways will be built without strong local commitment.

Allen Haggerty says that with only five airplane manufacturers left, expect streamlined plane travel -- you get to your desired destination more directly but without amenities. Some new and different planes are in the works: the Airbus A-380 will carry 555 passengers, with less noise than a 747. Boeing is designing a cargo plane called “The Pelican,” which will have a 500-foot wing span and length greater than a football field. ]]> Wed, 07 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/171 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/171 Among the “tragedy of errors” that doomed the space shuttle Columbia, perhaps the most damning were NASA’s organizational blunders. Sheila Widnall served on the board investigating Columbia’s destruction in February, 2003, and she can describe the technical failures that led, moment by moment, to the ghastly trail of debris across the western United States. But the investigation board traced the roots of this disaster to NASA’s “culture of invincibility,” years in the making. Well-intentioned people, Widnall states, became desensitized to deviations from the norm. NASA managers treated repeated anomalies -- such as foam smashing into shuttle tiles on take off -- as “maintenance turnaround events.”

Foam striking protective tiles on the leading edge of Columbia’s wing led to the horrors of re-entry: gases in excess of 5000 degrees F entered through a possibly 10-inch-wide breech in the wing, melting sensors and internal structure, sending the shuttle out of control. The failures that led to this moment, are both engineering system failures, and human communication failures.

Widnall and the investigation board recommend independent safety oversight for shuttle flights; NASA leadership that heeds minority points of view and doesn’t let scheduling or budget pressures define space missions; and routine inclusion of engineers who have the right to address both technological and operational issues of a flight.

FURTHER READING:
For a recent article on the Columbia tragedy by William Langewiesche in The Atlantic Monthly, go to Columbia's Last Flight: The Inside Story of the Investigation—and the Catastrophe it Laid Bare

Link to Transcript]]> Wed, 10 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/167 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/167 High hopes meet high frustration in this panel, whose participants collectively yearn for a new vision to guide our space program. Andrew Chaikin recommends a three-step self-help regimen to move the program forward: lowering the cost of access to space (the going rate is 10 thousand dollars per pound!); embracing “outside-the-box” ideas; and engaging in a national conversation about space. Supriya Chakrabarti predicts that in around 30 years, NASA will be deploying robotic terrestrial planet finders and using the moon for both tourism and commercial development like mining. This will be possible if in the short term space scientists look for low-cost launch options, which might include exploiting existing missile technology. Richard Binzel puts the odds of a civilization-threatening asteroid impact in the next 100 years at one in a million, but believes the odds are a whole lot better that human beings will be exploring asteroids in space. We’ve got a leg up since we’ve already sent robot reconnaissance to the moons of Jupiter. If we’re worried about catastrophic asteroid strikes, Binzel says, we should start taking incremental steps, such as putting nuclear reactors in space to power vehicles for long inter-planetary journeys. ]]> Wed, 05 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/159 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/159 Thirty years after he served on the final Apollo mission, Harrison Schmitt has turned once more to the moon – as a critical resource for scientists and as a potential source of unlimited clean energy. He shows NASA footage of his moon walks, as he and Eugene Cernan contend with low gravity to collect soil and rocks. These samples have enriched three decades of research on the origins of our solar system and even life on earth.

Schmitt, a geologist by training, collected orange glass-like material from the Grand Canyon-sized Valley of Taurus-Littrow, one of the many enormous impact craters pocking the moon—a similar cratering period on earth billions of years ago left deposits of clay minerals that may have catalyzed the synthesis of the first organic molecules—the beginning of life. Some moon rocks have registered abundant amounts of helium 3. Recent experiments on this form of helium suggest it might prove to be a source of radiation-free, fusion-generated energy. Schmitt believes that private investors, tantalized by the possibility of mining the moon, will usher in a new era of lunar exploration.]]> Sun, 29 Jun 2003 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video http://mitworld.mit.edu/video ]]>