David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

This morning’s first plenary session was Carol Stoker of the NASA Ames Research Center, talking about the Drilling on the Moon and Mars in Human Exploration (DOMMEX) program from last season at the MDRS. The first half of her presentation was an overview of MDRS, which largely overlapped with my own presentation from yesterday, but I’m not going to fault her for that; she’s on deadline and probably wasn’t even here yesterday. It was interesting to see a different take on the same material, and (dropping modesty for a moment) to analyze the things that make my presentation more interesting and entertaining.

The DOMMEX part of the presentation was also interesting, because I’d read the emailed field reports and wanted to know more about it. Drilling will be an important part of any Mars mission (because so many interesting things are below the surface) and the DOMMEX experiments are intended to demonstrate different drilling technologies. The Mars Underground Mole (MUM), a self-driving impact-driven sampling robot, barely managed to embed itself completely in the soil, while a human-operated gas-powered backpack drill worked much faster and was more adaptable to unexpected situations. Bottom line: humans are more efficient and effective than robots. Other technologies tested included ground-penetrating radar and a manual core sampler (basically a small post hole digger, good for samples up to 1 meter in depth).

Dr. Stoker’s presentation was followed by a panel discussion on Obama’s new space policy. None of them like it, particularly for the cancellation of the Ares heavy lift vehicle. The good news is that the Senate doesn’t like it either and has restored funding for that program in their budget. We were all encouraged to write our representatives and ask them to support the Senate version of NASA’s budget.

Carol Stoker returned after that with a presentation on the habitability of the Phoenix Lander site. She went into some detail on the factors that govern habitability (defined as suitability for Earth-like microorganisms, either in the present or in the past), what the Phoenix lander did to test for them, and how the site stacks up on each of them.

The items required for habitability are: liquid water, energy in forms usable by living things, the presence of the chemical building blocks of life, and the absence of factors inimical to life such as radiation and toxins. Phoenix had an extensive suite of instruments to detect most of these things. Its landing site (selected for the highest concentration of ice outside of the north ice cap itself) had plenty of direct and indirect evidence of water; chemical energy in the soil in the form of perchlorates and iron; solar energy available for photosynthesis, plus mica rocks in the soil which are transparent to visible light but opaque to damaging UV; and most of the chemical building blocks of life (except for nitrates, which might be present but were not tested for). Unfortunately, temperatures at this near-polar location are too low for life most of the year. However, in the distant past Mars had a much larger axial tilt and during the northern summer this part of Mars could get warmer than Antarctica does on Earth today. The Phoenix lander site is more habitable than any other site visited and deserves a follow-up expedition to search for signs of ancient life below the surface (which ties into her previous presentation on drilling).

After that plenary session I stuck my head in on Mars Camp, a family-friendly event that was open to the public. It was just hopping with kids and parents, flying flight simulators, working in a glove box, directing robot arms, and enjoying an inflatable planetarium. A very keen addition to the conference. I also picked up a couple of cool Mars coloring books.

I skipped the afternoon program in favor of a visit to the Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a mere 15 minutes’ drive away. I’d been told that it has a better collection of airplanes than the Smithsonian, and I have to agree with that assessment. Here are just a few photos of some of my favorite bits:

The Bockscar, the bomber that dropped the Fat Man A-bomb on Nagasaki

A German V-2 rocket

A U-2 spy plane

The one and only Berlin Airlift Dog Parachute

An East German Trabant automobile and a section of the Berlin Wall (okay, this is not an airplane by any stretch of the imagination, but it is associated with the Berlin Airlift)

In the evening we had the annual banquet, with pretty good food and an awesome presentation by Dr. Carolyn Porco, director of the Cassini mission’s CICLOPS Saturn Imaging Team. Her collection of amazing images of Saturn, its rings, and its moons (over 60 moons are now known) was like a year of Astronomy Pictures of the Day all at once, and she was excellent at explaining what we were seeing and why it was exciting. I had not known that we learned some amazing things about Saturn’s rings at its equinox, when the sun shines directly across the rings and we can see the long shadows of any variations in height within them. The wobbles in the ring on either side of the moon Daphnis, for example, were revealed to be mile-hile walls of rubble thrown up by the moon’s passage (the ring itself is just 30 feet thick). I had also not seen the amazing photos from the surface of Titan returned by the Huygens probe, or the plumes of salty water erupting from the surface of the moon Enceladus.

I had convivial table companions for the banquet, handed out many business cards, and made some professional contacts whose potential is very exciting. About which more later, if any of them should happen to pan out. For now, to bed.

Today was my big day. Paradoxically, this means I don’t have much to say about it.

I presented my Mars Talk as the first plenary session of the day. It went well, there were no technical issues or embarrassing lapses, and I got a lot of compliments on it. I had been concerned that I would either say something technically or politically incorrect for this audience, but even those who had been to the MDRS themselves agreed that it really summed up the experience.

The panel discussion “The VASIMR Drive: Silver Bullet or Hoax?” consisted of four people who didn’t think it would work, and was harmed by starting off with a detailed and jargon-heavy technical discussion of the problems rather than Geoff Landis’s introduction to the concepts of electric propulsion in general and VASIMR in particular, which came third. Basically, the entire panel agreed that the powerful nuclear reactor necessary to power the thing could never be made lightweight enough to achieve the drive’s stated potential of reaching Mars in 39 days. Apparently the drive’s proponents argue that a nuclear reactor can be made that’s 100x lighter than current designs, which all four of the panelists believe is highly unlikely. It would have been nice to get a representative of the pro-VASIMR viewpoint on the panel.

Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin spoke about how NASA has spent about as much per year in inflation-adjusted terms since Apollo as it did during Apollo, but the last 40 years haven’t seen anything resembling that level of actual achievements, and the budget on the table right now does not have any US government capability to put people in space after the Shuttle is retired. Commercial space travel is all well and good, but Griffin argued that this capability is a critical function for the nation and should not be left entirely in the hands of private industry.

In the afternoon I attended several smaller presentations, including Geoff Landis’s entertaining talk about colonizing Venus. Although Venus’s surface is one of the most hostile places in the solar system for human life, above the cloud layer it’s actually quite pleasant, with reasonable temperatures and air pressure (though the air is carbon dioxide, you can live without an expensive and fragile pressure vessel) and you are protected from space radiation by the atmosphere. And floating in Venus’s atmosphere is easier than you might think; Earth air is much less dense than carbon dioxide, so on Venus it is a buoyant gas. A 400-meter-radius bubble of Earth air on Venus could lift the Empire State Building.

After dinner I was on the Sci-Fi Writers panel, also featuring Geoff, Mary Turzillo, and Robert Zubrin (whose published books include the SF First Landing as well as numerous works of non-fiction). It was two hours long and very, very basic by SF convention standards, but I think I aquitted myself well and at the end of it I sold a bunch of copies of The Mars Diaries and Space Magic.

This was followed by an entertaining presentation about “a century of Mars in the movies,” with posters and trailers for films from Edison’s A Trip To Mars (1910) to Disney’s Princess of Mars (2012?).

Tired now. Bed.

The day started off with a hotel breakfast, as my iPhone was dead and I didn’t yet have the convention restaurant guide. Once I registered (name badge, foil-lined cloth tote bag, recyclable pen, comb-bound program book, “Mars or Bust” button) there was coffee and milling about and I chatted a bit with Geoff Landis and Mary Turzillo before we all filed in for the first plenary session.

Robert Zubrin is an angry man. Or, to put it another way, he’s passionate and committed and enthusiastic about human exploration of mars, and frustrated by the blindness of those who don’t see how important it is or how badly they are going about it. NASA works best, he says, when it is given a strict goal and deadline and must focus all its efforts on that goal; he compared the current NASA funding model to stopping by a series of garage sales to see what’s available and then building a house from whatever you find. Apart from this, the bulk of his talk was an outline of the Mars strategy outlined in The Case For Mars and was not new to me, nor I suspect was it new to most of the attendees, but it got the conference off to a good start.

The second plenary speaker was William Borucki, the Principal Investigator for NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope mission. Kepler is a deliberately unfocused telescope, peering Mr. Magoo-like at the stars as opposed to Hubble’s tight focus. But the area of sky that Hubble can see at any one time is the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length; Kepler can look at over a hundred thousand stars at once, gathering just a little bit of data about each one.

The purpose of this exercise is to find Earth-sized planets orbiting in stars’ “habitable zones” (close enough to the star that water is a liquid, not so close that it’s a gas) by examining the light output of each star over time. If the light shows a small dip at regular intervals, that might be a planet crossing in front of the star’s face. (The exact size and shape of the dip are used to distinguish a planet from a companion star.) Of course, this only works if the stellar system in question is edge-on to us, which is only a small fraction of them, which is why so many stars must be examined.

It takes at least three occurrences of such a dip before you can be fairly sure that you’re seeing a regular pattern; four is better. This means that to find Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone (which, given a star like the Sun, means the planet’s orbital period is around one Earth year), you’ll need to look for at least several years, and the Kepler telescope is funded for 3.5 years. But in its first 43 days of operation it found over 300 candidate planets, five of which have already been confirmed. Because of the short observation period, the planets discovered so far all have orbital periods of just a few days, which means they orbit very close to their star, which means they are very hot (some are above the melting point of gold). They are also huge — much bigger than Jupiter — which had been thought impossible. Some scientific theories will have to be rewritten, which is rather the point.

The third plenary speaker was SF writer and NASA scientist Geoffrey Landis, who gave an extremely entertaining overview of what the Mars rovers have been up to in the six years since he last appeared at this conference (which has an annoying tendency to conflict with the Worldcon). The basics were familiar to me, but he had lots of cool details I didn’t know. Opportunity, for example, landed smack dab in the middle of a small crater, which was named Eagle Crater to honor this hole-in-one feat. When Spirit landed the geologists cried “It has everything we need in a landing site!” By which they meant rocks. Unlike Earth, Mars has three kinds of clouds (dust, carbon dioxide, and water vapor). “Mars is not the red planet; it is the butterscotch planet.” (The name of the color is actually “adobe-orange.”) Spirit hasn’t been heard from since March but it’s still midwinter, it might wake up as early as September. Opportunity, still going, sees a dark rock sitting atop the sand every mile or so — these are nickel-iron meteorites! Some are 500 pounds or more. And the Curiosity rover (2011) is the first rover that can defend itself; it has a powerful laser designed to drill through rocks.

The morning’s final plenary speaker was Charles Doarn of the University of Cincinnati, talking about Telerobotic Surgery in Extreme Environments. It was an interesting talk, and I live-tweeted it like the others, but it’s getting late so I’m not going to attempt to summarize it.

I had lunch with Geoff and Mary, again at the hotel restaurant, then decided to blow off the afternoon program in favor of getting my iPhone fixed. My main motivator was the scary idea of taking the trip back to Portland without my primary information, entertainment, communication, and navigation device. The drive to the nearest Apple store, in Cincinnati, took about an hour, which is what it might take me at home to go to the most distant Apple store in town (which I have done upon occasion, when the others were sold out of the product I wanted) with traffic. Once there I was met by a bright and knowledgeable fellow within five minutes of my Genius Bar appointment. He confirmed my suspicion that the phone had suffered a hardware failure and that it was still under warranty (with 63 days to spare!) and sent me away with a brand new one, just the same as the old one, at no cost. Missing the afternoon program seems a fair trade-off for restoring the device that acts as my clock, calculator, map, camera, calendar, address book, email client, Twitter client, music player, games machine, blog reader, e-book reader, and… oh yeah, phone!

In the evening we had a reception with cocktails and reasonable amounts of pretty good food, which turned into the Mars Society’s annual “town meeting”. There was more program after that, but I returned to my room to rehearse my Mars Talk, which I will be giving first thing tomorrow morning.

Speaking of which… it’s time for bed. G’night!

Here I am at the hotel in Dayton, Ohio for the Mars Society conference. Eastbound travel across the country really kills a whole day, between the hours spent in the air and the three-hour time difference, plus because of ridiculous airfares to Dayton I had to fly to Cincinnati, rent a car, and drive an hour and a half from there. The trip was pleasant, though, and as I drove through the curiously familiar cityscape of downtown Cincinnati I found myself singing a peculiar mix of “Skullcrusher Mountain” (which is what had just come up on my iPhone) and “WKRP in Cincinnati.”

The heat and humidity here are beastly but fortunately everything is air-conditioned.

Halfway to Dayton, for no apparent reason, my phone suddenly popped up a message: “Restore required; cannot make or receive calls.” It showed No Signal, but the music kept playing and, fortunately, I remembered that all I had to do was get off at exit 51 and the hotel would be right there.

In the last ten miles I was treated to an increasingly-spectacular aerial display of lightning. Some folks like thunderstorms; I’m not one of them. They terrify me. But even I have to admit this one was amazingly pretty. No rain, nor thunder; just lightning.

There are two Marriotts at Exit 51. Fortunately, the first one I tried knew of this situation and provided easy directions to the correct one.

Once I got to the correct hotel, I tried rebooting my phone but it was extremely sad and cried for its binky iTunes. iTunes, however, wanted nothing to do with it, saying that I had to enter the passcode on the phone, which the phone refused to present a keypad for me to do. Fortunately, I had access to the Internet from my computer and was able to Google for a solution, which involved putting the phone in Recovery Mode.

Restoring a dead phone in Recovery Mode requires downloading the latest phone OS from Apple (I’d been planning on waiting until 4.1 to update but oh well.) At the moment I’m waiting for the OS download to complete; it should take another 75 minutes or so. Hope this works! Being without my phone for this weekend would really bite.

The lightning and thunder have been storming away up there with increasing vehemence.

Oops, the lights just flickered and the wireless Internet went out, interrupting the download. Fortunately the wired Internet is still there and I was able to restart the download (another 70 minutes, sigh). I’m going to post this while we still have power…

Day after tomorrow I head off to lovely Dayton, Ohio for the Mars Society’s annual conference, where I’m an invited speaker. I’ve never attended this conference before, nor have I ever visited Dayton. The only person I’m sure will be there whom I know is Geoffrey Landis. Anyone within the sound of my blog going to attend, or know someone who is, or have advice to offer about the conference or the city?

Back from the Washington Coast where Jay Lake and I were “writer gurus” at the annual Writers’ Weekend. Jay and I each led two critique sessions for 3-5 stories each; I gave two lectures (on plot, and on using props and sets to define character and build emotion) and gave my Mars talk. Delicious meals were provided by our hosts. The rest of the time we walked on the beach, swam in the pool, relaxed in the hot tub, and talked.

The conversation ranged widely, from hardcore writing and publishing advice to extremely silly. One of my favorite moments was a series of Other Sith Lords, including Darth Congruous, Darth Corrigible, and the ultimate winner of them all Darth Sectivorous. At one point someone came up to a group and asked what we were laughing about, and we told her “Thundercat slash.” “It’s a gas, gas, gas?” she replied without missing a beat. I ’bout died laughing. And one of our host’s nieces introduced us to a Salish word pronounced, approximately, “lobstaboot,” which means “don’t do anything you’d regret” and which we used as a farewell for the rest of the weekend.

Sometimes I worried that Jay and I were dominating the conversation, but then I realized that the Jay and David Show was part of the point of the whole exercise. This made me feel weird, but over the weekend several people came up to me and told me that they found my critiques, lectures, advice, and blogs useful, so what the hell.

Good critique, good food, good chat, I made new friends and got to know old friends better. What’s not to love?

As you may know, I’ve never been an advocate of self-publishing. There’s a huge difference between printing a book, which is something that’s easy today with web-based print-on-demand services, and publishing a book, which involves selection, editing, promotion, and distribution. Self-publishing, in my view, is no road to riches.

However, there are some projects for which self-publishing is the way to go. That is, those cases where the physical artifact of a printed book is desired, and/or where there is a small but known audience. Personal memoirs, local histories, and charity cookbooks are excellent projects for self-publishing. You won’t make a lot of money at it, but you’ll get the satisfaction of sharing a printed book with your friends and relatives.

It is for this reason that I have created The Mars Diaries.

The Mars Diaries is nothing more nor less than a trade paperback collecting the blogs of the Mars Desert Research Station’s Crew 88. The content is the same as what you could find at Bianca’s, Laksen’s, Paul’s, Diego’s and my blogs, and the pictures are in black and white. All I’ve done is collect them in one place, put them in chronological order, and format them for print. Well, I also got Lynne Ann Morse and Kate Yule to translate Bianca’s and Diego’s blogs into English — that’s something you won’t find online.

The main purpose of this book is to have a physical souvenir for the crew, and their friends and families, of our adventure on “Mars.” But as long as I’ve gone to the trouble of putting this volume together, I saw no reason not to make it available for anyone who wants to buy a copy. You can order one yourself, if you like, from lulu.com:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-mars-diaries/11784405

It’s only $20, and shipping is currently free. If you order a copy, please do let me know how you like it.

P.S. I did this project in Microsoft Word, for reasons that seemed valid when I started. I’m proud of the end result, but I have to say that the experience might just be the straw that makes this camel delete the last bits of Microsoft software from his Mac and use something else instead. Anything else. Maybe a sharp stick and a piece of leather.

Lately I have been feeling like a WINO — a Writer In Name Only. Since my trip to “Mars” in January I’ve been spending a lot more time being an Author (traveling, speaking, signing) than being a Writer (actually putting words on paper).

The Author thing is a lot of fun and very rewarding. I got a thank-you card from the Clarion West students for the talk I gave there, which was extremely touching, and the feedback I’ve gotten from my Mars talk at the Nebulas has been overwhelming. The Mars thing has been my entree to so many experiences I would not have had otherwise — the TV appearances, my turn on stage at Ignite Portland, the Shuttle launch, and many more. But it’s also quite tiring. It seems to take me a week or so to completely recover from a trip out of town, even longer if I gave a speech, and in the last few months I’ve found myself heading out again right after that. So I’ve only been writing once a week, at the Tuesday afternoon writers’ coffee shop get-together. If it weren’t for that goad I probably wouldn’t be writing at all.

I really feel like a wimp by comparison with Jay Lake, who seems to write every week more than I have in the last six months, despite the ravages of chemotherapy. His amazing persistence in the face of the many blows cancer has dealt him is awe-inspiring.

I did write an outline and the first ten thousand words of a YA SF novel and got them critiqued. Based on the feedback I received, it needs a lot of work, and I’ve been reluctant to tackle that. I just need to pull up my socks and do it.

I also wrote two short stories in that time. One of them, “Citizen-Astronaut,” won second prize in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest (I just got the prize package of Baen books and schwag) and is currently seeking publication. The other one, “Floaters,” just today sold to the Drabblecast podcast. It should appear in August.

And I’ve kept the stories I wrote last year (and earlier) in circulation. “Finding Joan,” the story I read at Wiscon in 2009, sold to the new online market Daily Science Fiction, which hasn’t yet begun publication but pays eight cents a word. Another story was rejected with a note that described it as “powerful,” but too disturbing for the editor because it raised personal issues. I have high hopes for that one.

On reflection, I guess all in all I’ve been doing pretty well.

The Author thing continues. Tomorrow I head to the Washington coast to be “writer guru,” along with Jay Lake, at the annual Writers’ Weekend. Two weeks after that is the Mars Society convention, and three weeks after that we leave for Australia.

I hope to do some work on the YA SF novel while traveling. We’ll see.