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The Genesis Strain

The "FBC" Strain
by Jeffrey F. Bell
Honolulu HI (SPX) Sep 10, 2004
"The Andromeda Strain" was one of the few hokey science-fiction movies that I spent money to see in a theater as a kid. It left such a weak impression in my memory banks that a month or two ago I actually watched the whole thing again on cable TV.

It's a typical forgettable low budget 1970s SF film with bad acting, crude sets, and ridiculous science. A reentry vehicle from a mysterious military spacecraft lands off-course in a small desert town and is opened by a curious idiot. A deadly form of space life is released and instantly kills off most of the town's inhabitants.

The usual cast of brilliant but eccentric scientists, gruff but efficient generals, and ignorant but well-meaning politicians battle to save the human race from annihilation. It turns out that the space mission was an attempt by those stock villains the Military-Industrial Complex to find new biological weapons.

My reaction after my second viewing of "The Andromeda Strain" was, "I sure hope the Genesis return capsule doesn't crash and spill its solar wind samples all over the desert, because it would remind people of this awful film, the silly novel it was based on, and the inherent danger of returning extraterrestrial materials to Earth."

As it so often does these days, NASA made one of my nightmares come true. The very first US unmanned sample return mission ended in a webcast fiasco, with the RV wobbling across the clear Utah sky like a defective flying saucer and crashing with a gigantic splat. The capsule was torn open in a manner reminiscent of the "Project Scoop" vehicle in the movie. The crash site is even on Dugway Proving Ground, the principal test site for the US biodefense program. Many bad movies have been based on space missions; Genesis is the first time a real mission has copied a bad movie.

This failure is very painful to me because Genesis addressed very important science goals. In my misspent youth I was an apprentice solar spectroscopist for several weeks, and developed a strong skepticism about the published composition of the solar photosphere. Later on, as an asteroid scientist, I saw elaborate models of the composition of the planets derived from this unreliable data. Every few years a new solar composition would be published and most of this work would have to be redone by the cosmochemical theorists. The Genesis mission promised to end this endless cycle of error by providing direct sampling of the sun.

Now that dream lies shattered in Utah. NASA officials are putting up the usual false front, claiming that useful data may still be extracted from the breached and dust-filled capsule. These are the very same officials who demanded the construction of a Class 10 Clean Room at JSC Building 31 to prevent any contamination of the solar samples, and revived the old midair capsule snag technique because they claimed that even a soft parachute landing would damage them. No scientist worth his salt will trust any supposed data that might be published from this mission.

Depressing as this is, the long-term policy implications are even worse. A very similar capsule is still heading for Utah aboard the Stardust spacecraft with our first samples of comet dust and interstellar dust. The chances are good that its parachute system contains the same defect that caused the Genesis crash. Engineers are furiously studying the problem, but there is nothing to do but cross our fingers and hope for the best.

In my last years as a space scientist, I was involved in several proposals that planned to use the same basic return capsule to return samples from Phobos, Deimos, or asteroids. We had dozens of meetings and telecons to plan these missions, but I don't recall ever discussing any details of the return capsule with the engineers. We scientists just assumed that this technology was all debugged in the Discoverer/CORONA program and was now routine.

But the hard truth is - nothing is ever routine in space engineering. You may have flown hundreds of spy satellite reentry capsules back in 1960-1980, but that says nothing about the reliability of the new design you produce in 1995. The 1995 capsule will use new parts because the parts that were commercially available in 1960 can't be found in 1995 (except in the CIA museum). The new design has to be completely tested from scratch, and the final test needs to be an actual space mission. You start over at the bottom of the learning curve all over again. And there is no chance that the NASA of 2005 will fund 13 consecutive unsuccessful test missions like the CIA of 1960 did with CORONA.

The biggest victim of the Genesis crash is Mars Sample Return. The astrobiology crowd has just been blown up by their own petard. For the last 15 years they have encouraged people to believe that live alien germs are likely to survive on Mars. And the more people believe this, the more people have worried about The Andromeda Strain scenario. Over the same 15 years, NASA has created a "Planetary Protection" bureaucracy that minutely investigates any proposed sample return mission for any possible danger to Earth's biosphere. It's a classic Catch-22 situation: the more interesting Mars looks, the harder it is to study it.

The Genesis fiasco makes planetary protection even more of a hot-button issue. If Genesis had been carrying a Mars sample it would be blowing all over Salt Lake City by now. The public will rightly question any proposal to bring Mars material back to the Earth's surface by such an unreliable means. Early plans for MSR envisioned the spacecraft braking itself into Earth orbit and the sample being examined in a lab on the Space Station (equipped with a nuclear bomb like the underground lab in "Andromeda Strain"??). Nobody even considers that option these days, since the braking fuel has to be hauled all the way to Mars and back and grossly increases the mass and cost of the vehicle.

The Mars bug community has a phony answer to the back-contamination issue: sterilize the sample container with a gamma-ray source during the long trip back to Earth. Mars Sample Return is already the most difficult unmanned space mission ever proposed, but this requirement would make it practically impossible. The radiation source has to be strong enough not only to kill actual living cells, but to deactivate viruses, prions, or similar non-living but biologically dangerous material. The complex mechanisms in the spacecraft have to be hardened against this gamma flux, in addition to possible solar proton storms like the one in October 2003 that knocked out the Japanese Mars probe Nozomi. And gamma rays are far more penetrating than the feeble alpha particles put out by isotope heaters and RTGs. Much of this radiation would escape through the lightweight structure of a spacecraft. Ground crews and launch equipment would have to be protected with lead or tungsten.

Prions are not just a hypothetical threat in the wake of the "Mad Cow Disease" debacle. All over the USA, farm herds are being tested for this disease that scientists and government officials assured us: 1) could never infect humans, 2) could never spread from the UK to North America, and 3) could never spread from Canada to the US. Will the public be willing to bet the whole human race on similar assurances from scientists and officials with a strong vested interest in flying more Mars missions?

The answer to that is clearly no. Only a few years ago, NASA assured us that it was perfectly safe to swing the Cassini spacecraft close by the Earth with a load of Pu-238 on board because "all planetary spacecraft are navigated with errors of less than 1km." This confident statement was still posted on several NASA websites when a much larger error sent the Mars Climate Orbiter crashing into Mars. We've learned by hard experience that the worse conceivable error will eventually be made. Safety regulations for all human technologies from steam boilers to fission reactors are crafted on this assumption.

There's another approach to dealing with the planetary protection problem that is most identified with Mars Society head Bob Zubrin: the Big Lie. Zubrin's books and presentations are filled with bogus reasons that Mars life must be harmless. Mars life evolved independently and is so unlike Earth life that the two couldn't interact in any harmful way. Or Mars life is constantly falling on Earth in the form of Martian meteorites without causing epidemics. The fact that A) there is no hard evidence for either of these ideas and B) they are blatantly self-contradictory doesn't faze Zubrin. He is a man with a Holy Mission that can't be stopped by minor quibbles like the possible extinction of the human race.

In Zubrin's more insane rantings, he actually implies that any concern for the possibility of a devastating Mad Martian epidemic is a sign of the very cultural decadence he detects in the modern West, which is his reason for establishing a new Utopian society on Mars.

"Real men like me and Oswald Spengler don't worry about such mundane things, we just Press on Regardless like the old-time heroes. Our superior Marsmen of the future won't care what happens to the degenerate remnants of the human race stewing in their own excretions on Earth." It's a very 19th-century philosophy.

The bottom line is: Genesis means there won't be a Mars Sample Return or any manned mission to Mars until the day that it is absolutely clear that Mars is lifeless.

Meanwhile, Hollywood is fully-funded for a re-make of the The Andromeda Strain and the Grand Daddy tale of all evil Martian potboilers - The War of the Worlds - which ironically concludes with the Earth bugs beating the Mars bugs.

Jeffrey F. Bell is a former space scientist and recovering pro-space advocate.

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High Technology Vs. Space Travel
Honolulu HI (SPX) Sep 07, 2004
One of the many false ideas people have about space travel is that it is leading the human race ahead boldly into the future, hand-in-hand with high technology. This is another one of those old chestnuts from the 1950s that simply isn't true anymore, but still lingers in peoples' minds and makes it difficult for them to think clearly about space, writes Jeffrey F. Bell.



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