Trek Inspires "Breakthrough" Research

A program at NASA specifically charged with the task of turning science fiction concepts such as those in Star Trek into reality was the topic of a full page article in the Los Angeles Times Wednesday titled "Science by Scotty."

"Capt. Kirk clenches his jaw and barks out the command for warp speed. The stars whoosh past as the crew shoots through space faster than the speed of light," begins the article by P.J. Huffstutter which uses common Trek-isms to illustrate its points (it used a picture of the Enterprise NX-01 with the caption "Make It So") and quotes Star Trek's foremost science authority.

The story points out that American astronauts won't be "beaming down to planets" anytime soon, as NASA needs to find a way to travel at nearly the speed of light and develop a practical power source to accomplish that, before exploration of the Final Frontier can begin. But one scientist at the space agency "is boldly going where no scientist has gone before, heading a team of more than a dozen fellow researchers who try to turn the fantasy of 'Star Trek' and other science fiction into practical reality for NASA space explorers."

"This is about emerging science and pushing the boundaries but in a realistic way," said NASA aerospace engineer Marc G. Millis. "We're not asking anyone to develop a warp drive."

Millis heads the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, operating on a shoestring budget at NASA's John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. He solicits ideas from the scientific community as to how to tackle such questions as interstellar space travel, and since the program's inception in 1996, hundreds of serious ideas have poured in. Millis has narrowed the offerings to five projects to focus his limited resources on.

"Millis' philosophy was that he wanted to deal with fringe physics," said Harry Ringermacher, a physicist with General Electric who received a grant from the project. "'Fringe' doesn't mean crackpot. It means nonmainstream physics. The point was to get really new concepts out there."

Ringermacher's study experiments with the manipulation of electromagnetism in the space-time continuum to create a slight physical shift that could have implications for advanced space propulsion. Another Breakthrough-funded project tests a theory that gravity can be manipulated using magnetized superconductors. The program has also funded work on "quantum tunneling" — an apparent faster-than-light phenomenon — and experiments dealing with changing the inertial mass of a future starship.

So far all the tests have yet to produce positive results.

"These things can't be answered overnight," Ringermacher said. "You need time, and yet there's pressure to finish the experiment, because you know that the money could run out."

And there are some skeptics in the scientific community who consider the Breakthrough research nonsense. One university physics department chairman was shocked by the amount of Star Trek paraphernalia at a 1997 gathering of scientists sponsored by the project. "I walked into the room and there had to be 50 various models of the U.S.S. Enterprise and posters from the show everywhere," he said. "I really began to question the seriousness of the research."

But the project's reputation for investigating esoteric science does give Millis, an avid movie fan, an interesting relationship with Hollywood. The article states that screenwriters often come to Millis' office seeking the latest out-there research that they can then incorporate into their scripts.

Andre Bormanis, story editor on Enterprise who has also been Star Trek's science consultant since 1993, is quoted, "We call NASA all the time." While developing the original TV show in the 1960's, Gene Roddenberry made a practice of tapping scientists for material, Bormanis pointed out. "Gene insisted on maintaining some sort of scientific credibility," he said. "The question was the same then as now: What might be fun that we haven't seen on the show, that's real?"

Although NASA funds the Breakthrough project at a tiny fraction of what it spends on other endeavors such as one Space Shuttle launch, even that shoestring budget is in danger from agency-wide belt tightening. But Millis is determined to keep the mission going, so he has partnered with the Ohio Aerospace Institute to form a nonprofit consortium to solicit private donors to keep the futuristic research alive. It's a fulfillment of the calling he found as a child when the Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon.

"My impression as a kid was that this was a big, grand challenge," Millis said. "It was a steady march to do something interesting and honorable; for a nation to conquer the frontiers, instead of conquering each other."

More News from NASA

It appears that the space shuttle program won't be scuttled in the wake of the Feb. 1 Columbia disaster nearly as long as it was after the 1986 Challenger accident. NASA officials are already making plans to return the shuttle fleet to active duty as early as this fall. "The team will prepare for a safe return to flight as soon as practicable," read a March 12 memo from William F. Readdy, NASA's associate administrator for space flight. "As a goal, the SSP (Space Shuttle Program) shall plan for corrective actions and reviews which support a launch opportunity as early as the fall of 2003." The full Associated Press story can be found at CNN.com/Science & Space.

Of course, the investigation continues as to why Columbia broke up during re-entry, and part of that investigation will involve the Space Shuttle Enterprise, which was named after Captain Kirk's starship (and is seen in the opening title sequence of the current show Enterprise). Aviation Week & Space Technology is reporting in its March 17 issue that critical wing and landing gear door sections from the Enterprise — now housed by the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum — will be tested to help determine whether "aging spacecraft" factors such as materials degradation could have played a pivotal role in the tragedy. The Enterprise never flew in space, but its landing characteristics were thoroughly tested, and parts of its wing mechanisms are as old as those on Columbia. Therefore, it could yield clues on whether the age of the hardware was a factor in the Feb. 1 tragedy. More information is available in a Business Wire press release.

SETI@Home Ramps Up to "Stellar Countdown"

If you have one of those screensavers that uses your computer's idle time to process signals received by Puerto Rico's Arecibo radio telescope, your participation has helped launch the next step in isolating possible radio sources from alien intelligence. The SETI@home project, sponsored by The Planetary Society and based at the University of California-Berkeley, will get exclusive use of the Arecibo observatory, the largest in the world, for three days starting March 18 for its "Stellar Countdown" effort. The SETI team will use the dish time to re-observe about 150 of the most interesting radio sources found out of the billions detected since the distributed computing project began in May 1999.

Candidate radio sources were chosen on the basis of several criteria, including the number of times a signal was detected, the strength of the radio source, proximity to known stars, the type of star, and the presence of known planets.

Dan Werthimer, chief scientist of SETI@home who will lead the team at Arecibo, said, "I believe that we will likely discover extraterrestrial civilizations in the next hundred years. Even if we don't find a signal from ET this time, I'm optimistic in the long run, since our search capabilities are doubling every year."

More information about SETI@home and the "Stellar Countdown" can be found at www.Planetary.org/StellarCountdown. "SETI," if you're not familiar with the term, stands for "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence."

Discuss these topics at the Star Trek message boards!