Laserfest!

Seriously, laserfest!

I'm digging this fantastic history of the laser, courtesy of the American Institute of Physics. You should too.

Lets
Amplify the press for this
Stimulating feature on
Emitting coherent beams of
Radiation for 50 years.

Science and Spills

While we anxiously await a closer telling of the geologists in Afghanistan tale, there are some fascinating moments of science in action to be found in this gripping tale of Deepwater Horizon's last hours and immediate aftermath.

I had no idea how ridiculously huge and complex these drilling rigs are. I know that the federal government pitched deep sea exploration as a kind of parallel to space exploration in the second half of the twentieth century: exploring inner space. Sean Flynn draws on a similar metaphor: "Deep-sea drilling is a risky and complicated process, of course—the oil industry's equivalent of a moon shot—and it's vulnerable to all sorts of delays."

The scientists, as opposed to the engineers and technicians, only make a cameo here and they are set up against BP's official pronouncements on the volume of the leak. The problem of knowledge becomes: how do we settle on a measurement of oil flow at a mile and one half (8,000 feet) below the Gulf's surface. I post the relevant passage after the break, but the entire story---for all its detail and pathos---demands to be read. Read more...

Via.

The Spreading Poison
7 Days After the Blast
A small armada of oil skimmers and service boats are puttering about the Gulf of Mexico, attending to what is, officially, a minor ecological untidiness. The wounded Macondo well supposedly is trickling a mere thousand barrels of crude into the sea every day.
That is a ridiculous number, and an obviously ridiculous one, albeit less ridiculous than the one announced four days ago, which was zero. "The blowout preventer," Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry announced at a press briefing on Friday, April 23, "appears to be working."
It is important to note that Admiral Landry was not obfuscating. Rather, she—indeed, everyone—was relying on BP for information. The BOP is under a mile of water, in a dark and murky place that can be seen only by remotely controlled submersibles, which the Coast Guard neither owns nor operates. Visibility is so poor and the water so deep, in fact, that it required two days of searching to locate the capsized wreckage of the Horizon, which had burned for thirty-six hours before toppling into the waves.
The Friday briefing was not, primarily, about the potential environmental impact but was instead to announce that the Coast Guard was suspending its search for Shane Roshto and the other ten missing men. After twenty-eight sorties by plane and boat and helicopter covering a swath of ocean the size of Connecticut, "we have reached the point," Landry said, "where the reasonable expectation of survival has passed."
So that left the oil, or the threat of the oil. By Tuesday, a week after the explosion, when the BOP has clearly failed and the well is purportedly leaking only 1,000 barrels a day, crude the color of dime-store chocolate streaks miles of the surface in long, ragged ribbons. Approaching from the north, even a mile out, before the stink begins to sting the eyes, the water is divided by a stark and clearly defined line, a border of oil.
Given the undeniable silliness of its initial estimate, BP soon quintuples it to 5,000 barrels a day, another egregious lowball that for weeks will be repeated religiously by reporters, a fragment of boilerplate—210,000 gallons a day—in daily news reports.
Meanwhile, other scientists—oceanographers, environmentalists, an assortment of professionals who share no culpability in having punctured a hemorrhaging wound in the earth's surface—calculate much higher figures based on satellite imagery and a basic understanding of how the ocean functions. Oil bleeding out of a hole a mile down, for instance, will get swept into sub-sea currents and dragged Lord knows where; deep-sea pressure will make it heavier, less likely to rise; thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants, a toxin in their own right, break the crude into droplets that linger at staggering depths. In mid-May scientists will discover plumes of oil, miles long and miles wide, spreading at 4,300 and 2,600 feet below the surface.
BP, for its part, maintains that measuring the flow more precisely isn't possible (not true, but whatever), and in any case, what's the point? If it can't clean up 5,000 barrels a day, BP seems to be saying, what difference does it make if Macondo is spewing 70,000? To BP, for right now, it makes no difference at all, except that 5,000 isn't nearly so catastrophic a number. BP can't unwreck the ocean, and the damage, environmental and economic ruin on a heretofore unimaginable scale, will become apparent in time, when the lawyers and public-relations people are better equipped to deal with it.

Bankrupted by Scientific Complexity?

I glanced over the scientific/medical dichotomy in my last post. Now I see that Atul Gawande has attacked it head on. Science has made medicine effective, he says. It's also made it into a budget-bending Frankenstein.

In Gawande's words:

When we talk about the uncontrollable explosion in the costs of health care in America, for instance—about the reality that we in medicine are gradually bankrupting the country—we’re not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We’re talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity.

"Rare books on their way to the Internet Archive scanning pod"

That's right: we live in a world with scanning pods. How magical.

Those scanning pods are doing good work, too. The Center for the History of Medicine at Countway Library's terrific blog reports on the library's efforts to digitize their nineteenth century French works in obstetrics and gynecology. Those worried about corporate hegemony will be happy to hear that those books will land at the Internet Archive.

Lest our readers wonder what this has to do with "science" in "America," the Center's blog notes that "John Collins Warren, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other Harvard Medical School luminaries completed post-graduate studies in Paris."I suppose we could quibble that medicine ≠ science, but does anyone really want to have that argument?

Even the Canadians Claim Edison

Thomas Edison may have only come in ninth on the Atlantic's list of the top 100 most influential Americans, but amongst Victorians enshrined with their own museums or historical sites he takes the cake. Five North American sites, including Vienna, Ontario, lay claim to Edison's memory.

Check the full list of "shrines", which may serve many purposes, but clearly would serve well a geek planning her summer vacation.

US Geologists Discover Soviet Documents, Lithium Exploitation Ensues.

The New York Times gives the barest outline to a truly momentous piece of archival work, albeit one done by historians of another sort than usually reads here at Americanscience. This document digging will certainly raise the stakes for the US military, the Afghan government, and perhaps the Taliban as well. Cell phone battery manufacturers may be holding their breath too:

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

US geologists used "an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface" to confirm the earlier mineral findings. The Times calls it "the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted."

Still, this data languished for two years until the Pentagon's business development task force translated those geological maps into dollar signs. The geologists and task force now think that Afghanistan may become a major producer of iron and copper, niobium, and perhaps lithium.

Now that's my kind of story: intrigue in the archives; field scientists flying retrofitted planes; international exchanges; lost opportunities; geopolitical significance.

Decentering National Narratives and Historicizing the Shuttle

Our Scuttle the Shuttle series continues with a fortuitous offering from Asif Siddiqi, whose wide-ranging, thoughtful historiographic essay in the most recent Technology and Culture speaks to a debate we've already witnessed on this blog: can and should historians write histories of space exploration that do not privilege national narratives or boundaries (here, and in the comments)?

It's fascinating to see historians of science innovating in the growing field of transnational history (especially in justifying such an approach in thinking about the last century and a half, where the great and growing power of the nation-state encourages nation-bound histories). This essay provides a fine example of such historiographical innovations.


The question remains, though: how would this advice give us a new way of thinking about the decision to scuttle the shuttle?
I include a few highlights from Siddiqi's piece in the extended entry.

In his essay, Siddiqi considers the dominant approaches to the history of space exploration and notes their national variations:

Both the United States and the Soviet Union, then, the two earliest spacefaring nations, produced narratives on space exploration that were deeply grounded in domestic cultural discourses that simultaneously couched their achievements as if they had universal import. This dichotomy runs through most of the historiography on both the Soviet and American space programs. The grand narratives of each nation—frequently utopian in nature—rely on the assumption that each is the normative history of space exploration.

Drawing on the historiographical problems posed by writing the history of space exploration in India, Siddiqi argues for a postcolonial approach to space history:

This new postcolonial vision of space exploration is as much part of the fabric of space history as the more well-known American and Soviet models grounded in the cold war. These multiple perspectives on space travel suggest that our view of the long history of spaceflight may benefit from a standpoint that no longer privileges borders—demarcations that create rigid analytical categories such as ownership, indigeneity, and proliferation. The Indian space program was at the intersection of multiple flows of knowledge from a variety of sources, including, of course, local expertise. Likewise, the history of spaceflight has been part of a consistent flow of knowledge and technology across (geographical) space and time—among Germans, Soviets, Americans, British, French, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Israelis, Brazilians, and so on. By rethinking the relationship between modernity and the postcolonial state, postcolonial thought challenges us to rethink the connection between modernity and spaceflight, and, ultimately, to replace the “national” with the “global” when thinking of space exploration, an exercise that has become doubly important as dozens of developing countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are now spending money on space exploration.

Heading off critics who will rightly point out how crucial nations have been and still are to these histories, Siddiqi makes his case for maintaining national narratives, but only alongside a host of other equally important considerations:

I am not suggesting that we should ignore nations, national identity, or vital indigenous innovation. But I believe that nation-centered approaches, useful and instructive as they were, occlude from view important phenomena in the history of space exploration. My hope is that by deemphasizing ownership and national borders, the invisible connections and transitions of technology transfer and knowledge production will be become clear in an abundantly new way. Such an approach would inform a project encompassing the entire history of modern rocketry and space exploration, from the late nineteenth century to the present, focusing on Europe, America, Russia, and Asia.

American Birds

The Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati has posted a wonderful little exhibit full of illustrations from ornithological illustrators. It isn't unusual to see images from Audubon or Catesby, but it's refreshing to see a panoply of images of a single species from a variety of popular observers and illustrators. I think it would be a wonderful use of internet-space to construct a database of changing bird images over time. Check out the feature on the passenger pigeon for a hint of what I'm imagining.

Be sure to check out the "Birds for Children" section too. After all, as one steadfast supporter of the Forum could certainly remind us, a key to understanding science in America is understanding how it came to be taught. Also, the pictures look neat.

Drivers of American Space Policy

We began our "Scuttle the Shuttle" series with the question: how can we use history to better understand the recent decision to end shuttle missions?

Robert MacGregor kicked us off with a long set of suggestions in an e-mail to me. He suggested we should think about the peculiarities of 1960s politics, about the jobs created by aerospace spending, and about the narrative of the "space race." Instead of exploring these bigger narratives, I chose to highlight a side note that Bob made, in which he attempted to explain how naive narratives of colonization with a decidedly progressive bent may encourage Apollo conspiracy theorists.

Erik Conway, historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, took a moment out of his well-deserved celebration over the release of Merchants of Doubt---co-written with Naomi Oreskes---to take me to task in the most productive of fashions. Erik shows exactly how many fascinating angles I passed over. Consider this bit from the end of his comment:

To historicize the Shuttle decision by comparing it to earlier colonization attempts is to impose a historical narrative that conceals more than it reveals. But the decisions made by several administrations to try to replace the Shuttle were shot through with conflicts over the militarization and / or weaponization of space, over whether we even need to continue putting humans into space given the growing capabilities of robotic explorers, over the proper role of government in space activities, and with interagency rivalry.  Too, there’s a large historical question hovering around the willingness of government agencies to misrepresent the true cost of space technology to Congress and the White House.

The Cold War, weapons platforms, and the growing grip of neoliberalism inside in the Beltway have been far more important drivers of American space policy. These are where the interesting historical questions about Shuttle replacement lie.

Wow. Keep reading for Erik's entire note, including a nice brief summary and analysis of the shuttle decision. It's worth reading.

The previous post suggested that we should frame the decision to replace the Space Shuttle, America’s space truck, in the larger narratives of white colonization of the non-Caucasian world.  I’m going to reject that set of narratives out of hand, because it was never the policy of the U.S. Government to colonize.  The Apollo program was approved by the Kennedy administration, and was continued in the Johnson administration, as a Cold War technical stunt, intended to demonstrate American technological mastery. While many people within NASA (Von Braun, of course) saw Apollo as a prelude to human expansion off Earth, that’s not why it was funded.

President Nixon cancelled Apollo in 1970, shortly before the flight of Apollo 13. He had campaigned as a fiscal conservative, devoted to balanced budgets, and Apollo made for a high-profile budget reduction. Apollo had only briefly found majority public support, for a few months around the Apollo 11 landing, and after that its public standing plunged. Less than half of all voting Americans thought Apollo was worth their money, presaging a long-standing political problem for space advocates. Americans often have grand space dreams, but aren’t willing to pay for them. Nixon saw a great deal of political risk in continuing Apollo, and little in killing it.

It took another 2 years, and, as Tom Heppenheimer has pointed out, a deepening aerospace industry recession, before Nixon approved Apollo’s replacement, the Space Shuttle. It was, quite famously, a Shuttle-to-Nowhere, because Nixon didn’t approve the companion space station. In fact, the Shuttle he approved was a politically compromised vehicle.  It was not the highest performance Shuttle concept; it also wasn’t the lowest operating cost Shuttle concept. It was the lowest development cost concept—in other words, Nixon accepted higher operating costs, knowing his own administration wouldn’t be the one paying those costs.

The Shuttle first flew in 1981. The first administration to decide to replace the Shuttle was Reagan’s. By 1984, it was already clear that the Shuttle’s high operating cost and unreliability was undermining that administration’s own space fantasies.   Reagan sold America on “strategic defense” from space—“Star Wars.” As both I and Andrew Butrica have already written, the Shuttle’s inability to deliver low cost space access set the Reagan administration off in search of cheaper launchers. The National Aerospace Plane was one of those proposed replacements. Sold at a $3 billion price tag, its cost estimate ballooned over $30 billion before it was cancelled.

But the effort to replace the Shuttle continued. The George H. W. Bush administration embarked on the “National Launch System” development, cancelled in the Clinton administration. The Clinton administration fixed on a program called “Orbital Space Plane,” cancelled early in the George W. Bush administration. And, of course, the George W. Bush administration set out on the Constellation program to return to the Moon.

It remains to be seen whether Constellation lives or dies, though I personally hope it dies. The Constellation architecture was a political design, intended to maintain the Shuttle’s own Congressional alliance. (Ask yourself “why do the Powerpoint pictures of the Constellation rockets have a big orange tank in the middle?” The orange foam was the result of a mistake in the Shuttle design having to do with the boil-off rate of the cryogenic fuels. Why keep it?? It’s a visible symbol of political continuity on Capitol Hill, that’s why). That alliance has kept the US going around in circles for the last thirty years, but seems incapable of propelling NASA beyond low Earth orbit. If there’s to be a human future in space, the Shuttle’s political alliance needs to be either expanded or replaced with one more powerful.

To historicize the Shuttle decision by comparing to earlier colonization attempts is to impose a historical narrative that conceals more than it reveals. But the decisions made by several administrations to try to replace the Shuttle were shot through with conflicts over the militarization and / or weaponization of space, over whether we even need to continue putting humans into space given the growing capabilities of robotic explorers, over the proper role of government in space activities, and with interagency rivalry.  Too, there’s a large historical question hovering around the willingness of government agencies to misrepresent the true cost of space technology to Congress and the White House.

The Cold War, weapons platforms, and the growing grip of neoliberalism inside in the Beltway have been far more important drivers of American space policy. These are where the interesting historical questions about Shuttle replacement lie.