“I like to say, ‘Solving for space solves for Earth,’” said analog astronaut and geoscientist Sian Proctor, who has lived in a number of moon and Mars simulations on Earth. In such experiences, which can last from a few weeks to 500 days, participants conduct scientific research and also learn to live more cohesively. Analog missions advance human space exploration, and also, as Proctor pointed out, “all of that knowledge helps us become more sustainable here on Earth.”

Director of the ASU Interplanetary Initiative Lindy Elkins-Tanton agreed that working toward space exploration can lead to many different kinds of advancement—in terms of human inspiration, technology, and cooperation. Elkins-Tanton, who is also principal investigator of the NASA Psyche Mission—a multi-year, 800-person endeavor currently building the ship that is going to travel to a metal asteroid—said that preparing for such a mission helps us “see what we can do together and what we can achieve.”

One of the most pressing problems of this moment is ensuring the Earth’s survival. “How can thinking about space exploration make us live more sustainably?” asked the discussion’s moderator, Lisa Margonelli, senior editor of Issues in Science and Technology (and former Zócalo editor-in-chief).

Melodie Yashar, designer and co-founder of Space Exploration Architecture, is currently part of the Moon-to-Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technologies Project, a partnership working to establish a permanent and sustainable lunar outpost. “The only way to do that is to really think sustainably about the resources we launch, the materials we use that are local to the planet, and make the most of the resources that we have available to us,” she said. Yashar believes the work they’re doing in 3-D printing and manufacturing could disrupt construction on Earth as well. “The way we think about materials usage, the way homes and infrastructure here on Earth [are] built is a place where innovation should be fostered and is warranted,” she said.

But space remains the province of rich countries and people, said Margonelli. “How can something so elitist be used to address inequities?” she asked the panelists.

The dream of space continues to inspire people from around the world, said Elkins-Tanton. Plus, more and more countries are developing space agencies, which wealthier nations and organizations are assisting through programs like satellite ride-shares.

Pointing to the U.S. Space Force and Russia’s killer satellite, Margonelli pushed back: Can space be a place of cooperation or is it becoming increasingly “a lawless place of war and competition?”

“There are people all around the world and organizations springing up trying to ask this very question,” said Elkins-Tanton: “How do you create international cooperation in space when we haven’t really succeeded in that on Earth?” She added, “We don’t have a great system we can export; we have to create one.” But she’s optimistic that it’s possible, pointing to the Open Lunar Foundation and a recent TED Talk by a researcher there, Jessy Kate Schingler, on the subject of envisioning better rule of law on an interplanetary level.

The conversation shifted to address the responsibility of the private sector as it gets increasingly involved in the business of space.

Proctor believes that the private sector should follow NASA’s lead and keep research in the public domain—inspiring creativity and allowing “people to reuse, remix, revise, and develop the knowledge that’s being created.” Companies have to answer the question: “What are you giving back to humanity as you reach for the stars?”

Yashar wants to see collaboration and partnerships “represent the needs of many and not just a few,” she said, making a Star Trek reference. That means having “a very diverse group of people who are collaborating and who are having open and active dialogues” when it comes to the values that are carried and the priorities being pushed forward for space exploration.

The question of who is coming to the table is one of access—and education. “Do we need space philosophers and space lawyers and space poets and space engineers?” Margonelli asked the panelists.

Yashar said that it’s the engineers, by and large, who are the people deciding the future of interplanetary life—and they’re working alone. If that continues, she said, “we’re only going to end up with what we already know.” Making the conversation more interdisciplinary, with psychologists, anthropologists, artists, and others “can start to change that value system and really celebrate those other voices which from a traditional engineering workflow would not be recognized.”

The audience question-and-answer session asked the panelists to consider a number of worst-case scenarios, including whether we’ll be able to find another planet to live on if Earth becomes uninhabitable, what’s being done to keep space from becoming another war zone, and the implications of disturbing microbes on another planet.

The panelists were all adamant that we have to save Earth before we even consider making another planet habitable. As Proctor put it firmly: “Can you give birth on another planet? And if you can’t, sorry, humanity—you end here.”

“Right at this moment we can’t even send people to live temporarily on the moon, let alone find another planet and create generations,” said Elkins-Tanton. “We absolutely have to work on our beautiful Earth because that is the place.”

Before closing, Margonelli asked the panelists what questions they have about going into space that aren’t being talked about enough.

“As we achieve more and more in space exploration, how do we make sure the benefits accrue more evenly to those who are on Earth?” asked Elkins-Tanton.

Yashar wanted to know how we can ensure that the institutions contributing to the narrative of space exploration “are passing on knowledge in a way to ensure that younger generations can also contribute equally and in a fair way to what the future will bring?”

And Proctor voiced the question that the panelists grappled with throughout the night: “What does a just, equitable, and inclusive space look like?”

The post Can Earthlings Save Our Planet, Achieve World Peace—And Make a Home on the Moon? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m what we call an “eclipse chaser.” It’s a self-appointed title. On the website I run, eclipse-chasers.com, I host a log where people from all over the world can record how many they’ve seen. The highest right now is 33 total eclipses. It’s a place online for people like me, people who spend all their vacation time and travel money to observe these indescribable phenomena.

I spend the day before, and then the morning of an eclipse, in nervous anticipation. Every cloud could be an advance scout for an army coming over the horizon. Wind changes are a big deal. Small alterations in humidity are noted. Should we move? Should we set up here? Will it be clear?

In the minute before first contact—that moment when the moon touches the solar disk for the first time—my anticipation grows. Then comes that first little dark edge across the sun. That little bite confirms that the numbers are right. Relief.

The author on his first eclipse-watching trip in 1972. Photo courtesy of Bill Kramer.

Slowly the moon covers the last of the bright sun and the light falls off quickly. Sunset colors fall across any clouds that may be in the sky. If you are looking in the right direction and have a great view you might even see the moon’s shadow racing across the land towards you. Or you might see shadow bands moving across a flat area like vaporous ghosts making the light shiver around them.

And then the eclipse goes total. It’s dark yet not pitch-black. The horizon glows. Bright stars appear. The sky takes on a deep blue color. And where the sun once shone is a black circle surrounded by a shiny white corona—the circle of solar gases. It’s a magical eye floating in the sky. Streamers of light extend like glowing hairs. Time seems to flip into hyper-drive. Before you know it the eclipse is ending.

The finale is the best part. It only lasts a few seconds. The solar disk peeks out. The light from that one speck of sunlight quickly overwhelms the corona. The effect is called the diamond ring because that is what it looks like.

I don’t have a favorite eclipse among the many I’ve seen. All of them are great. And all of them are different. An eclipse chaser can look at a photograph and say, for example, oh yeah, that’s from the 1983 eclipse in Indonesia. Somebody might ask how I know. Well, because each corona is different. The corona is constantly changing.

Most eclipse chasers will tell you their first eclipse was the best. I was in elementary school when I developed an interest in astronomy and I got involved with the local astronomy club at Youngstown State University. In 1970 some members came back from an eclipse on the eastern coast of the United States, talking about what a great experience they’d had. The director of the planetarium said that he was organizing a cruise to intercept the next total eclipse, in 1972, when I would be 13 years old. I got down on both knees and begged my parents. They agreed and my parents and I were among the first ones to sign up.

We saw that eclipse in middle of the North Atlantic. In 1973 we went to Western Africa to see the next one. Then we didn’t see another one until 1980.

An image of totality from the author’s first eclipse-watching trip in 1972. Photo courtesy of Bill Kramer.

I was lucky in my profession: I majored in computer science, graduated from an engineering school with a computer science and engineering degree, and started my own business in 1985. So I had some flexibility. Whenever it was economically feasible I’d go to see the next eclipse. When my wife and I were first getting serious she found a book at my place—a NASA publication of upcoming eclipses, with a sticker over the front that said “Bill’s travel guide.” She had to know how it was.

So I kept chasing eclipses with my wife, and when we had kids we dragged them along. This summer our grandson, who was just born in November, is going to see the eclipse. So it’s a three-, four-generation tradition.

I particularly remember the eclipse of ’99. When we got back from our trip, we found out my dad had died the day after. I didn’t get a chance to tell him how it had gone and I felt bad about that. It’s one of those things that hits you. So my wife and I decided then, hey, let’s try to see all of the eclipses from now on.

I’ve missed a few, though. Sometimes it’s a question of weather. In 2015 there was an eclipse in March visible from Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago. I skipped that one. Many of those who went saw their cameras malfunction due to the low temperatures.

I’ve never been clouded out and been unable to see an eclipse. Germany in 1999 was the closest I’ve come to that, but it’s never actually happened. Knock wood.

Probably the most difficult eclipse trip I’ve been on was in Zimbabwe. We landed in Harare, missed our connecting flight to Bulawayo, and had to rent a bus for a group of 20—on a Sunday morning—then switch to a caravan of smaller vehicles. My wife and I rode in the luggage car, which broke down a couple of times before we reached the lodge after dark. All this after an overnight flight from London. The next day every vehicle in our caravan broke down. We ended up observing the eclipse at a road rest area—that is, a giant baobab tree. We thoroughly enjoyed the eclipse, under clear sky, and have many memories to share with those 20 eclipse chasers.

Eclipses bring together professional astronomers and amateur chasers like me. There’s a lot of cooperation and citizen science. This summer the Citizen CATE experiment will collect video recordings of the eclipse from citizens across the United States, so scientists can watch about two hours of inner corona dynamics.

The author watching the partial phase of the 2016 eclipse through binoculars with removable solar filters. Photo courtesy of Bill Kramer.

Sometimes we meet at conferences to discuss logistics and science. A grad student might say, “I’m doing work on the F-Corona, specifically in the transition zone, so if you could take photographs of this exposure I’d really appreciate it.” An amateur can send in pictures and get a mention in some scientific paper. It’s fun. And that’s how science gets done.

Because I love math, one of the things that always enthralled me about eclipses is how they are calculated. How do astronomers confirm the timing so precisely, down to the second? I started reading books on how to do it, and then wrote computer programs on how to do it.

For the August eclipse, we’ll just be with friends and family. We’ve found a location just north of Nashville because two years ago my wife and I drove the eclipse path all the way from Wyoming back through Kentucky to check out different location options. Of course, if the weather doesn’t look very good at that location the night before—I’ll use satellite data to check—we’ll get on the road to a better spot. At least I will! I can’t guarantee that my daughter and grandson are going to want to do that. They may say “Nah, it’s not worth it.” I’ll be saying, “Yeah, it is.”

I’m looking forward to this one because we’re bringing a lot of people who have never seen an eclipse before. It’s always fun to get their reaction immediately after totality. So what did you think? “It’s nothing like you described.” Well, yeah, but how can you describe it? There’s almost a religious epiphany that occurs. It’s the eye of God looking down on you. There’s nothing that really puts words to it. They just say, “I had no idea.” And then “When’s the next one?”

I love that. “When’s the next one? Where is it?”

The post Confessions of an Eclipse Chaser appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With the drama unfolding on their television screens, the attention of millions was focused on a single event—a single step, really—for the first time. It was one of the first grand, extended global social media events of our modern era, much bigger than a Super Bowl Sunday.

But landing on the moon almost didn’t happen—not for the public, anyway. While Armstrong and Aldrin were preparing to make one of the biggest celestial moves of a lifetime, NASA’s small and dedicated marketing team was preparing to make another major move on the ground: televising the event.

Looking back on the moon landing, it would seem almost unfathomable that NASA administrators would have missed the mark to use live television to capture that historic moment, but they nearly did. Unlike recorded video, which had to be returned, developed, and shared after the fact, live television would allow viewers to watch in real-time. Many NASA engineers argued that live footage was a waste of valuable weight and crew focus and would require too much time and money to develop the technologies to broadcast live news feeds from the moon. Most of the original Mercury 7 astronauts and their bosses insisted, with good reason, that operating and performing for television cameras during their missions would unnecessarily detract from the important work at hand.

Embedded within NASA’s formative charter was a congressional mandate to report—freely and openly—the program’s activities and accomplishments to the world, unlike the secretive, closed military program in the Soviet Union at the time. “I insisted,” said Julian Scheer, the head of NASA Public Affairs during Apollo. He would not accept any dissent, either from the engineers or some of the astronauts. “They could never see the big picture. But they weren’t landing on the moon without that camera on board. I was going to make sure of that. One thing I kept emphasizing was, ‘We’re not the Soviets. Let’s do this thing the American way.’”

To enlightened astronauts like Tom Stafford, television’s value proposition was clear: “The American public was paying for Apollo and deserved as much access as it could get,” Stafford said. “They should see the wonders we saw. Photos and movies were great, but nobody saw them until after the mission was over. What better way to take viewers along to the moon than by using color television?”

“Without television, Apollo would have been just a mark in a history book,” says Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon during Apollo 17, when reflecting on the importance of television on board Apollo. “The thing that meant so much and brought so much prestige to this country is that every launch, every landing on the moon, and every walk on the moon was given freely to the world in real time. We didn’t doctor up the movie, didn’t edit anything out; what we said, was said.”

So NASA’s small public affairs team, spread over 14 installations nationwide, got down to business, working long and hard to ensure that the world was informed and engaged using media outlets and other NASA-affiliated contractors’ public affairs employees.

“We sure didn’t do the PR job by ourselves,” remarked Chuck Biggs, a NASA Public Affairs Officer during Apollo. “We needed representatives from Rockwell, Martin Marietta, and all the other contractors to do the job. By head count, we had more contractors’ public relations people than we had NASA public affairs employees.”

Operationally, NASA public affairs chose pioneering tactics now called content marketing, an approach that doesn’t overtly sell a product or brand. Rather than just promoting their cause, NASA used its resources to educate the media, who became surrogate spokespeople for the program and kept the story in front of a voracious public, both nightly on television and daily in the newspapers.

Embracing the content marketing technique, NASA operated its public affairs as if it were a newsroom—staffed not with Mad Men-era advertisers and public relations agents, but with highly qualified ex-journalists. They were professional storytellers, operating as news reporters embedded inside of the agency. As ex-newsmen, they understood what the broadcast and print media needed in terms of content, so they selected and pushed stories in various languages and formats that could slip easily into the news streams of the day. It wasn’t just that they were good writers, but they were also newsmen who understood the power of storytelling and the importance of access to live, unedited, real-time events.

“The core contingent of NASA Public Affairs people were ex-newsmen,” recalled Jack King, head of public affairs at Kennedy Space Center during Apollo. “We were good writers, and we knew the news business. That made a major difference in the whole operation.”

“We are not doing what is known in the public relations business as flackery or publicity or propaganda,” said Scheer. “We are simply not in this kind of business. We are a news operation. We don’t put out publicity releases. We put out news releases.”

Keeping a global audience engaged over a decade—from 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced his goal of landing a man on the moon, to 1972, when Apollo 17 became the last lunar landing mission—was not easy then and is not easy now. Long-term engagement requires creating a shared, communal experience that resonates with the audience. Due to NASA’s use of television, this experience was not only shared by its own engineers, but by millions of people worldwide.

I call the generation that took part in this shared experience—my generation—the “Children of Apollo.”

Apollo’s place in our collective memories is chiseled there because we experienced it together. NASA didn’t just send three men to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission, they sent more than 600 million of us—men, women, and children from all over the globe—to the moon and back, thanks to live television.

The post NASA’s Other Moonshot Helped Revolutionize Marketing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rays of light during monsoon rains over the Catalina Mountains outside Tucson, Arizona.

This obsession with desert rain also meant it was hard to resist dreaming about the possibility of rainstorms on Titan, my favorite moon of Saturn, which I was studying (and continue to study) through the NASA and European Space Agency Cassini-Huygens mission. But we knew from data gathered in 1980 by Voyager—the first spacecraft to visit the Saturn system close-up—that there was essentially no water in the moon’s nitrogen atmosphere because it was too cold.

So what would rain on Titan even be made of? Methane takes water’s place on the moon as cloud-forming gas, and thus would be the main ingredient of raindrops, if there were any. And because nitrogen is so soluble in methane, each droplet of rain would have to be 20 percent nitrogen, as opposed to Earth’s droplets, which carry carbon dioxide but essentially no nitrogen. How would these exotic methane rains behave? Would they be gentle and steady, or violent downpours like those in the desert?

First, to know if rain was even a possibility, we had to figure out where the methane on Titan was and wasn’t. Voyager told us that the lowermost part of the moon’s atmosphere was not saturated in methane; the “humidity” (which means the ratio of the methane in the air to the amount required for saturation) at the equator was about 50 percent. That’s not a desert—more like New York City or Chicago. Saturn is almost 10 times farther from the sun than Earth, so there is not as much solar energy to warm the air and push it upwards to the altitudes where clouds can form (and then release its moisture as rain when it cools). It seemed that for any rain to get going, special conditions—mountain ramparts to force moist air upward, and seasonal shifts in winds and sunlight—would be needed.

Armed with these ideas and my picture-window view of the desert mountains, I worked with Maria Awal, a master’s student in atmospheric sciences, to model what it would take for methane rainstorms to form on Titan. We found that a rising column, or “plume,” of methane-rich air that was buoyant compared to its surroundings would be needed, and that Titan’s atmosphere could in fact create one. But the distant sun could provide only enough energy to trigger one or two storms anywhere on Titan at a given time. In other words, Titan storms, if they existed, had to be sporadic but violent—gully washers of the true desert style.

What about the nature of the raindrops? Shortly before he arrived at our laboratory, the planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz speculated that they must be giant and flattened, falling so slowly that the storms that produced them might drift away before the drops even hit the ground. And those drops that evaporate in the dry air—which might be most of them—leave behind “ghost droplets” of ethane—a sister molecule made from methane’s destructive encounter with ultraviolet sunlight high up in the atmosphere.

With Lorenz and another scientist, Caitlin Griffith, who came to Arizona in 2002, our Tucson lab became a thundercloud of research on Titan’s storms as we awaited an up-close and personal view of the moon. That view would come from Cassini-Huygens, the Saturn-orbiting spacecraft launched in 1997 that carried a probe designed to land on Titan. The mission would tell us whether all our guesswork was right or wrong.

In 2004, Cassini-Huygens dropped into Saturn orbit. Early images of Titan showed a south pole bathed in early summer sun with masses of slow-moving convective clouds. Evidence of dark spots under the clouds led us to wonder: Could those be ponds of methane that collected after storms? When Huygens made its descent through Titan’s atmosphere the following year, one of its instruments measured the amount of methane at different altitudes in its descent, and found that it was quite a bit higher than typical cumulus clouds on the Earth.

Most striking were the pictures taken during descent. As the probe drifted over a rocky hill—the rocks on Titan are actually made of extremely chilled water ice—at roughly the cruising altitude of a jetliner, it captured a series of vein-like channels, carved into the hillside in just the way one would expect from rainfall. Bathed in the dim twilight from a distant sun, they had to be caused by streams of methane as they ran down to a dark plain—the signature of occasional and intense methane storms.

The Huygens probe captured this image of Titan’s landscape as it descended through the moon’s atmosphere.

As the seasons changed, Cassini saw vast clouds, covering thousands of miles of terrain, appearing and disappearing around Titan’s equator. They left behind a dramatically darkened surface, which then brightened again. We know that moist soils on Earth look dark in space when they are doused with rain, so why couldn’t Titan’s icy “soil” be darkened by intense methane rain?

What the spacecraft had found was an active methane weather pattern—yes, clouds and rain—on a moon a billion miles from the Earth. Mars has dust storms, Io has volcanic eruptions, and Pluto may have methane snow, but Titan is the only place we know of in the solar system that has liquid rainfall like we have on Earth. Only Titan has environments that allow clouds to make rain, which carves out gullies and valleys in the landscape, ultimately to find its way to the polar seas—seas, as Cassini has discovered, that are so vast that they contain hundreds of times more hydrocarbon in the form of methane than all the known oil and gas reserves on the Earth. What secrets do they hold?

Five years ago, I left the Sonoran desert for wetter and cooler climes back east. The snow outside my window in Ithaca, New York, has no analog on Titan—it’s too warm for methane snow anywhere there. But Titan’s methane cycle has almost everything else that Earth’s hydrological cycle has—clouds, rain, streams, rivers, and seas. (Titan just lacks the globe-girdling ocean.) Titan is our home world transcribed into a minor key. The only witnesses have been our robotic emissaries Cassini and Huygens. Will human eyes someday witness firsthand a Titan monsoon rainstorm?

As I think back to that Tucson office with the panorama of summer thunderstorms moving off the Catalina mountains, I conjure up a fantasy of the future: a lonely base halfway across the solar system with a picture-window view of methane rain falling on an icy hillside, perched next to the final resting place of the Huygens probe, an artifact from long ago.

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