Five Billion Years of Solitude (30 page)

“Is that all?” Stahl asked.

“Is that all?!” Mountain was flabbergasted.

“Matt, the
Ares V
will be so damn big we could just put a Gemini in it,” Stahl explained. Soon, the Institute was concocting plans for ATLAST.

“That was the ‘holy shit’ moment, when we understood major progress in space science could occur simply by NASA getting new rockets,” Mountain recalled. “A Gemini mirror is big, stiff, and you can easily test it on the ground. It’s a much simpler system than something lightweight and segmented like JWST. A Gemini mirror only costs $20 million! You can just pack the whole thing into the rocket, light up the blue touch paper, and suddenly you have an 8-meter in space!”

Mountain’s optimism for the “big rocket” approach had dimmed, however, with Constellation’s constant overruns and eventual cancellation. Out of the ashes, in 2011 Congress had assembled plans for a
nearly identical rocket, the Space Launch System, but he was not convinced the replacement would ever fly. NASA optimistically estimated its development costs at nearly $20 billion. Operating the rocket over a program’s lifetime would probably require tens upon tens of billions more, yet it would most likely launch only once per year. Critics called it the Senate Launch System. Like its predecessor, it appeared to be a pork-barrel project designed less for affordable orbital transit and more for delivering jobs to the districts of influential members of Congress. The nascent rocket’s fate would be determined by politics, not science and engineering.

As Constellation fell into its death spiral, Mountain and others at the Institute had sought a cheaper, alternate path to big mirrors in space. Perhaps there were ready ways to make large telescopes lighter and less expensive while also preserving their ultraprecise figuring. On the ground, newer observatories had decades earlier abandoned thick, rigid, monolithic mirrors for ones that were thin, flexible, and segmented. The new mirrors were cheaper but also floppy and easily deformed by shifting winds, changing temperatures, and a telescope’s pointing slews. The secret to their success was “active optics,” arrays of computer-controlled actuators mounted on each mirror’s back that performed what astronomers call “wavefront sensing and control.” Monitoring waves of light as they propagated across the mirror, a computer could manipulate the actuators to change the mirror’s shape and orientation, precisely counteracting any detected deformities. The JWST’s segmented mirror of beryllium hexagons already incorporated active optics to a limited degree in its design, allowing for periodic on-orbit adjustments on a timescale of days or weeks. To make larger mirrors that would still fit within the size and weight limits of existing launch vehicles, mission planners would have to use flimsier, lighter materials that would develop deformities even in the vacuum of space, requiring constant correction from complex active optics systems.

Lightweight, flexible, large mirrors in space stabilized by active optics seemed to be a game-changing idea, except for one crucial detail:
they were unproven. To Mountain’s knowledge, no one had ever flown such systems in space before. Developing and flight-testing the necessary technologies could prove very expensive and time-consuming, potentially eliminating the immediate benefit of using lighter mirrors. Mountain and his peers tempered their enthusiasm, until they noticed something curious: a shopping spree by major defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. In recent years the aerospace giants had bought up a string of smaller companies that specialized in manufacturing either lightweight mirrors or active optics systems.

“Astronomers aren’t the only people interested in large space telescopes,” Mountain told me later in his office. “We’ve been talking about NASA, but there is another, much more well-funded government agency which tends to look down rather than up.” He was referring to the secretive U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, the NRO. He arched an eyebrow, and noted that the Hubble had been an offshoot of the NRO’s once-classified “Keyhole” series of spy satellites. “I don’t have the security clearances, and I’d like to keep it that way, but you don’t need security clearances to calculate what aperture size is required if you want Hubble-style image quality and need to avoid someone hiding from you by taking out their watch to time the passage of a satellite overhead.” In a geostationary orbit nearly 36,000 kilometers (22,000 miles) above the Earth’s equator, a satellite would move at the same rate as the Earth turned, effectively hovering in the sky over a fixed point on the planet. To gain useful high-resolution images of the Earth from such altitudes, Mountain implied, would require a mirror on the order of 10 or 20 meters in size. Placed in geostationary orbit over three or four strategic geographic regions, such mirrors could serve as unblinking sentinels, constantly monitoring nearly the entirety of the Earth’s surface.

From such a system, you could run, but you couldn’t hide, Mountain intimated. The weight reductions possible through active optics would be “what lets you actually launch the bloody things” on existing rockets. In all likelihood, the technologies for active optics and lightweight mirrors
in space were more mature than publicly known, and if eventually declassified could greatly benefit science and society. Mountain extolled the possible virtues: besides imaging alien Earths, the light-gathering power of an 8-meter or 16-meter mirror would revolutionize the rest of space-based astronomy, allowing astrophysicists to witness the formation of supermassive black holes and probe the cosmic distribution of dark matter. More generally, he said, large, cheap mirrors could also prove useful for beaming solar power to receiving stations on Earth, or for monitoring our own planet’s changing atmosphere at the resolution of individual clouds to constrain weather forecasts and climate-change projections.

Some months after my discussion with Mountain, the NRO presented NASA with a smaller but still significant gift: two unused space telescopes and related hardware sitting in a restricted clean room in upstate New York. The NRO considered the telescopes obsolete, and rather than keep them indefinitely in storage, chose to offload them on the nation’s struggling civil space agency. Each telescope was outfitted with a Hubble-size, Hubble-quality 2.4-meter primary mirror—suitable for a host of astronomical observations but too small to be of obvious use in characterizing potentially habitable exoplanets. NASA would need to spend money on launch vehicles and instrumentation to properly utilize the NRO observatories, but the gifts freed up at minimum hundreds of millions of dollars that the cash-strapped agency could, if it chose, devote to developing technologies for larger, life-finding telescopes. Whether NASA would actually make that choice, however, was far from guaranteed.

“One of the problems we have at the moment is that NASA has yet to make up its mind what it wants to be when it grows up,” Mountain told me during our discussions. “It’s still very much in this mode of boys and their toys, of big rockets as jobs programs. NASA needs a more enduring vision than that, but it can’t change without consultation with Congress and the American people. Ultimately, going out and looking for life, whether around other stars or on other planets in
our solar system, that’s an infrastructure that can create powerful partnerships between the agency’s human spaceflight and scientific sides! That same sort of partnership was why the Hubble mission was so successful. Hubble had no peer because we could visit and renew it.”

As he spoke, Mountain gradually slipped into a more colloquial vernacular, as if leveling over a beer with a skeptical Texas congressman. “So, for example, NASA wants to go to Mars. Well, they ain’t gonna get to Mars before 2030, right? So what else are the astronauts gonna do in the meantime? You’re not gonna get people to Mars building things smaller, you gotta build ’em bigger. Big infrastructures in space for commercial, scientific, and defense applications—that’s the future. Maybe the astronauts should get even better at assembling big systems in space. Maybe the agency should invest in robotically servicing these big structures. Maybe we should better leverage our investment in the International Space Station. Oh, and by the way, we’ve got a great idea you can do all of that with.”

Conceived in collaboration with three NASA research centers, the Institute’s idea was called OpTIIX, a convoluted acronym for the
Op
tical
T
estbed and
I
ntegration on
I
SS e
X
periment. Proposed for launch to the ISS as early as 2015, OpTIIX would be a low-cost, scalable platform for testing the assembly and active correction of a lightweight, flexible, segmented mirror in space. Its 1.5-meter primary mirror would be composed of six fully actuated 50-centimeter hexagonal segments, each manufactured from sheets of silicon carbide glazed with atom-thin layers of vaporized metal. Collected starlight would bounce from the primary mirror up to a smaller secondary mirror, then back down to a series of tertiary “fast steering” and “pickoff” mirrors that would compensate for jitter and channel the light to cameras for imaging and wavefront control. Star trackers and gyroscopes would work in tandem with a latticework of lasers beamed across the primary mirror to precisely point the telescope and maintain its optimum figure. Thanks to those technologies, OpTIIX would deliver clear images of stars and galaxies despite being bolted to the outside of the ISS, which at any given
time would be jostling and bucking in sympathetic frequencies with its cargo of noisy, weighty, rambunctious astronauts. If necessary, the astronauts could perform spacewalks to repair or upgrade the system, but OpTIIX would be designed to allow fully robotic assembly and maintenance as its modular pieces were ferried up to orbit.

“We are at the limit of what the present paradigm of heavy launch vehicles and restricted folding geometries can do,” Mountain said after a time, reverting to his professorial mode. He gazed out his office windows, past a windowsill lined with five framed pictures of his family. The morning’s fog had boiled off beneath the weak winter sun, revealing a sere landscape of bare trees and dormant grass.

“Right now we build and test space telescopes on the ground, then fold them up to fit inside a rocket. Right now, without bigger rockets, you can’t get much bigger telescopes. Things like OpTIIX could be the beginning of a scale-invariant process of building bigger and bigger space telescopes, because you take out all the extreme tolerances. If you think about it, for the ground we don’t assemble and test a telescope in a big basement somewhere then cart it up to a mountaintop, do we? No, of course not. We assemble it piece by piece on the mountaintop on the assumption we can then bring its components into alignment. Technical concepts like active optics let you assemble, align, and upgrade your telescope right where it belongs—in space. You can imagine putting things together by robots or astronauts or some combination, and then you just keep on going. You keep on going. You could scale up your telescope almost to infinity.”

I asked Mountain how likely he thought it was that this vision would come to pass. He furrowed his brow and dragged a hand over his jaw, producing a sound like dry, windblown leaves.

Americans could well choose to further divest from space science, he finally said, seeming to address his ghostly reflection in the glass windowpane. “The reality is, we’re using federal money, and an awful lot of it. If that money leaves, it doesn’t necessarily come back. It flows elsewhere, into other priorities, which I’m not necessarily objecting to.
But you can imagine the discontinuous change. A lot of the capability we’ve built up could go away quite quickly. On the other hand, an argument can be made that investing in science and technology, space science as one part of that, is precisely what has kept this country going and can keep it going into the future as other economies rise—China, India, Europe, and so on. The real issue for me is, is the position we’re in part of a natural evolution, or is this just a lucky event?”

In Mountain’s view, the golden age of Hubble and the other great observatories was a fortunate aberration, something just as much a product of geopolitics and economics as it was of pure technological development and scientific progress. Its genesis could be found in the formative events of the latter half of the twentieth century—the Baby Boom, the Cold War, the Space Race. Astronomers had harnessed that unlikely coalescence of opportunities to create for themselves an almost-mythical dreamtime, a radiant era in which the boundaries of technological capability slipped beyond the mundane realm of Earth, and the horizons of scientific discovery reached the edge of the known universe. And now, perhaps, it was all at an end.

“Lyman Spitzer came up with the idea of Hubble in 1947, and we finally got the Hubble launched in 1990,” Mountain said. “But if we hadn’t had the space shuttles, if we hadn’t had the Department of Defense developing its spy satellites, making Hubble a reality would probably have taken several decades more. That’s the sort of era we’re returning to, in my opinion. We spent a fortune on Hubble, but it generated its own momentum. It gave us Compton and Chandra and Spitzer and some completely new technology. It gave us JWST, this amazing, huge cryogenic infrared telescope. That was the aberration, that was the Baby Boomers at work. And now they’re going away, and we’ve spent almost every single penny we’ve got, and we’ve got a new generation facing this fundamental shift. It’s hard. . . . What astronomers need to recognize is that once a project’s budget reaches a billion dollars, it enters a whole new realm where other factors besides pure science come into play. The science becomes a necessary but not sufficient condition. That’s really
why you and I are talking like this right now.” He turned away from the window to face me.

“Someone must explain that understanding how the Earth works in fine detail and mastering space technology is actually pretty good for everybody involved. Someone should say that finding life elsewhere could be a humbling experience that would be good for humanity as well. Maybe it could finally give us the kick in the pants we need to fully realize that we could screw up
everything
if we don’t get our act together. When Galileo lifted that little telescope up to his eye, he didn’t quite know what he was doing, but he unleashed a revolution. Maybe we’re on the verge of another one. We are now beginning to appreciate the complexity of the Earth system, and we are faced with controlling that complexity. We are now realizing that biology and astrophysics are intimately linked. These are hard concepts, but we need to master them as a species to survive. Otherwise, you know, maybe we will find life out there that arose independently, but that would actually be really bad news. Think about it: if extraterrestrial life is everywhere, but sentience and technology are nowhere to be seen, that probably means societies like ours don’t survive very long. Instead, they self-annihilate. If we master all this complexity, we don’t have to be in that position. We should battle this push toward the small, this turning inward.”