[wordup] Microspace Vs. Terror

[Adam Shand]

Via: ptp at lists.spack.org
From: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-02b.html

Microspace Vs. Terror
by Rick Fleeter
Herndon - Mar 5, 2002

Linoleum. 15 years of watching teachers etch chalk on blackboards,
watching black minute hands on round white faces tick, sitting on
plastic, writing on that amoeba-like blob of formica protruding out from
the vicinity of my cramped right elbow, feet planted on Linoleum.

Eyes fixed on Linoleum - decades honing eye contact avoidance. I open
the final exam book - there's only one question - Design a
microsatellite system to fight terrorism.

My eyes trace the fine lines which separate the Linoleum squares and I
wonder about Linoleum - anything is better, more interesting, more
tractable, than another three hour exam.

Microsatellites can't differentiate between shoe rubber and C-4
plastique. They can't detect biological warfare agents or weapons.
Satellites - our professional lives - reduce to 2 applications - remote
sensing and communications.

On the comms side, I could create a massive swarm - hundreds of small
apertures, phase locked to create an adaptive array antenna that can
hear faint earthbound radio communications. Or we could remotely sense
something - troop movements, missile launchers, maybe.

My pentel is not motivated to write. Macrosatellites do those things
already, and every so often, somebody who understands just a little
about the system finds a work-around, and the headlines remind us that
all our money and power can't buy a finger to stick in every hole in
every dike.

I think about Mad Magazine - Spy Vs. Spy - A single ironic statement
sketched for 30 years by a Cuban refugee, on the futility of measures
and countermeasures. Back in the '60s I laughed at Spy Vs. Spy - now I
am it. Design a microsatellite to fight terrorism. Until the first time
it works, and then the terrorists work around it, and then we go around
the loop again.

Measures and countermeasures are useless against an enemy whose hate is
so intense that it will die just to incur a relatively small loss, even
an inconvenience, or the creation of a doubt, on our side.

Nice philosophical end run, but it's thirty minutes down, and everyone
else in the room is writing and drawing and calculating. Probably they
are creating harmonic orbits, constellation maintenance algorithms,
ranging, and deployable antennas.

I've got to put something on paper... Gravity Gradient vs. Al Queda.
It's too ridiculous.

I consider the heroic, but ultimately self destructive, protest of the
blank bluebook. I'll be a hero - an academic terrorist - killing my
grade for the cause of nihilism. No - I already tried that last
semester... which is why I need these three credits.

Why do they hate us? Nobody knows. My mother told me, filled with
contempt when I missed swim practice because one of the older guys who
had a license and a car forgot to pick me up, that dependency breeds
contempt. Bicycles are all about freedom from dependency - on parents,
on oil companies, on repair shops.

Probably a lot of things breed contempt, but that's the only wise saying
I know about contempt. Do they hold contempt for us because we have
Microsoft and Dell and Apple and we run the World Wide Web? Do they hate
us because if you want a ride into orbit the West is your only ticket?
Do they hate us because of MIT and Caltech and Princeton and Stanford -
because we write the instruction books for all the cool toys? Because
we're born speaking English, C++ and IPO?

INSERT IMAGE of spuntik here
I scribble a faceted sphere - a soccer ball satellite. Some antennas -
dipoles are easy to draw. solar panels on the hexagonal facets. Some of
them are blank - flat panel L-Band antenna, I write in neat draftsman's
print.

How does L-Band fight terror? I cover the page with assorted satellites
- GAS Can shaped cylinders, deck of cards, 40 x 40 x 60 Ariane ASAP
prisms, ALEXIS-like bodies with orthogonally deployed solar panels.
Orbcomm hockey pucks.

The Wizard of Oz says what they've got, that I don't have, is a diploma.
He's got that right. And what have I got, that terrorists don't have?
The keys to the technology castle.

Well, thank God for that or we'd all be in big trouble, right?

Microsatellites used to make sure terrorists don't have microsatellites?
ITAR in Orbit - that creates the safe world of the 1960s we're all so
nostalgic for, when instead of hundreds of terrorist cells all over the
world, we just had the Soviets, and maybe the Chinese, aiming a few
thousand nuclear warheads at our major cities.

I doodle flags on the flat panel antennas on the satellites -
Afghanistan, Iraq... I don't know the flag of Sudan - so I doodle
S-U-D-A-N in blocky letters with Marvel Comics style shadowing.

I'll defect to the other side - Microsatellites as tool of terror. Maybe
reenter them on command - or maybe pre-programmed in case they bomb my
cave - to pock the evil West with deep craters. But - that's just
ballistic missiles lacking warheads - not microspace. George Bush is
already on to that one.

US - the land of lawyers, or so they say in Japan. Lawyer jokes -
lawyers are easy to hate - except your own lawyer after a big company
steals your idea, or a car knocks you off your bike. Lawyers are easy to
hate - except your own lawyer. That's what a lawyer will tell you.

The truth of the final exam is: I can't even figure out how to terrorize
anybody with a microsatellite. I will never work on another damned
microsatellite, I swear. Just let me out of here - I'll reincarnate with
a major in Hispanic Studies. Or Urban Planning.

Technology is so very easy to hate - - yeh, like when your kid is sick,
dying, but their kids have doctors and hospitals and vaccines. Engineers
are easy to hate when they build airplanes and missiles and guns - or
even when they build cars you couldn't buy with 20 years' salary.

Teachers - hateable - when the only ones you have are agents of the
State. Universities are easy to hate - if you've never had the gift of
four years to live at one, to learn how to access the world. From the
outside a University is just a leisure palace for over-rich semi-adults
avoiding responsibility.

My spherical satellite is store and forward comms. Definitely '70s Amsat
technology. My deployable solar panel satellite - space research from
the '80s "proof that something useful can be done for 250 kg" campaigns.
The GAS Can cylinder - microgravity of the '90s "space factory" era.

I do a Clementine style launch envelope filler - 1.5 meter remote
sensing plus hyperspectral - "let's not admit that making money on
remote sensing went down with the dotcom bubble".

My bluebook is filling, but not with ideas. And my three hours? - almost
gone says the orange Ironman Timex. I can hear its tiny second hand
tick. I am the Space Odyssey of 2001 - a year late - squeezed between an
infinite plane of linoleum below, and accoustile florescent above. Soon
I will realize, sitting on white French furniture in my evaporating dorm
room, that these three hours, and my life, are over.

In my open-book self-pity, I understand one thing. I understand who I
am, and the ridiculous role written for me to fill in the aerospace
cosmos: I'm the piano man of microspace - ready with a tune for every
occasion - astronomical all-sky monitoring, or low res earth
observation.

Or just hum a few bars and I can embellish with X-band rangefinding
transponders, triple junction photovoltaics and Power PC image
compression platforms with watchdog timers up and down the computing
hierarchy.

Aerobraking, solar sailing, nitrous catalyzing, software frequency
synthesizing. Does Mozart really make you smarter? Not in my case
apparently - any more than weight lifting makes you swim faster. Mental
effort makes you smarter, and physical effort makes you faster.

Building technology, even 2nd rate Hyundais derived from old GM drive
trains and abandoned Japanese body molds, makes you a technologist. And
if you are a technologist, can you hate technology? If you are an
engineer, can you dis' engineers? If you are a teacher, can you reject
teaching? If you live on campus, isn't the University home?

Microsatellites are not a micropore filter through which no terrorist
can penetrate. They aren't a sensor so finely tuned, so precisely
pointed, and so acute that any plot is laid bare via its evil stray
photons, phase coherently amplified in a sparse orbiting array.

I name my erstwhile proto-satellites - they are the C major scale of
space - so basic, so obvious, so naive. Kandahar. Tehran. Basque.
Mogadishu. These are my anti-terror tools?

No. Not the satellites - the hardware is always a measure awaiting a
counter measure. People are the anti-terror weapon that can't be
countermeasured - people arguing over gravity gradient versus single
momentum wheels, calculating link margins and modeling vibration
response.

People who deeply understand NiCads and Gibbs Free Energy feel pain when
a battery is needlessly discharged. Chasing capital in Silicon Valley
can create a hatred of VCs - until you succeed, or you understand why
you failed - this time.

People who own homes don't overthrow the governments that issue their
land deeds and pay the police who protect them - that's what Freddie Mac
says. Maybe people who own a stake in technology don't use it to kill
technologists - and don't conspire to destroy what they have struggled
to master, to control, to rend unto them that which its master deserves.

Microspace is useless against terrorism, I scribble with 4 minutes left
on the clock, oblivious to Linoleum. But it coopts the human tendency to
subjugate people, it redirects it to the subjugation of things into our
service.

Microspace is the indoor beach - the warm pool with the tiled wade-in
area - that invites a three year old to love the water. Once that
transaction happens, the quest for speed, for 25 meters of deep water
with wave-suppressing lane-markers, and solid, square walls, Paying $10
to dive into a cold chlorinated batch of waves at 6:30 in the morning
because you want to.

"Time!" - the first word out of the TA in 3 hours. Shoes, boots, sandals
- they are scuffing my linoleum. I blink at the accoustile and
florescent skyscape - a prayer to the god of the closed book final.

Microsatellites Vs. Terrorism... vs. my bluebook is what really matters.
Nobody's going to fund any of these virtual spacecraft anyway. I drop my
exam book on the table thinking - the writing is desperate - but
inspired. My doodles may be kind of catchy.

But there's no orbital mechanics, no mass, link, bit, DeltaV or power
budget. There's no obvious structure - mechanical or otherwise. I hope,
maybe, to have at least complicated the grading curve.

Rick Fletter is president of AeroAstro.