Philippa Kaur

The compelling story of how Elon Musk’s relentless quest to get humans to Mars helped SpaceX succeed against the odds makes great reading in Eric Berger’s book, Liftoff

Space

17 March 2021

By Paul Marks

Crew Dragon in spacedcphoto/Alamy
Liftoff: Elon Musk and the desperate early days that launched SpaceX
Eric Berger

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William Collins
IN THE autumn of 2008, a Falcon 1 rocket built by a maverick start-up called SpaceX lifted off from Kwajalein Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean and made it all the way to Earth orbit. After three earlier attempts had failed, it meant Elon Musk‘s 6-year-old firm suddenly moved from being a mere wannabe to a space-flight player to be reckoned with.
But it had been a close run thing. In Lift Off, Eric Berger’s compelling history of SpaceX’s early days, we discover what few knew at the time: if that fourth flight of the Falcon 1 had also failed, the company could easily have gone bust.
It was vital that the rocket reached orbit because it was powered by SpaceX’s home-grown, ultra-efficient kerosene/oxygen Merlin rocket motor. Nine of these would be needed for the much larger rocket that cash-rich clients like NASA wanted to use to send cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) – and, later, crewed missions. If Falcon 1 hadn’t shown that the motor could power a rocket to orbit, there might not have been a Falcon 9, the rocket that has become the backbone of SpaceX’s business.
Berger chronicles the amazing human and technological struggles that led to the success of the launch. To be convincing, he needed unprecedented access to Musk and, perhaps more crucially, to the key propulsion, avionics, structural and launch engineers behind Falcon 1.
After tracking them all down, Berger captured their entertaining warts-and-all stories of potentially avoidable foul-ups, the details of which make this book an essential, unofficial reference text for what to do (and not do) as space flight goes commercial.
What drives SpaceX, Berger writes, is Musk’s relentless quest to get humans to Mars as soon as possible. That means two things: a laser-like focus on hiring the smartest engineers, and adopting ultra-fast engineering techniques.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket explodingSpaceX/UPI/Shutterstock
Musk comes across as a fiercely demanding boss, and the lengths he goes to hand-pick talent are revealing. On one occasion, he called Google co-founder Larry Page to ask if a senior Google staffer could work from a Los Angeles office instead of a Silicon Valley one so that the staffer’s spouse could work for SpaceX. Page agreed. When an academic found that five of his 10 students had gone to work at SpaceX, Musk is said to have got in touch – not to explain, but to find out where the other five went.
Engineering rockets faster, however, means eschewing traditional aerospace processes in which design engineers can spend careers “creating stacks of paperwork without ever touching hardware”, says Berger. Musk’s approach involves testing systems early, designing out flaws so each version becomes more reliable.
“At the time of writing, three prototypes of the firm’s Starship Mars rocket have exploded spectacularly”
It also means not being afraid to fail – and fail SpaceX has. From running out of liquid oxygen on the launchpad – which boiled off, as it took too long to fix software-related shutdown bugs on the launchpad – to fuel lines leaking due to salt corrosion in the tropical air of Kwajalein, the company has experienced a litany of errors.
But SpaceX has gone on to shake up the industry by cutting the cost of launching satellites threefold, developing a staggering ability to land rocket stages that its competitors still ditch, as well as flying astronauts to the ISS from US soil on its Crew Dragon for the first time since the space shuttle retired.
The firm’s army of online fans seems to be getting used to its “go fast, break things and fix them” process. Attempts to land Falcon 9 rocket stages failed many times before success dawned. At the time of writing, three prototypes of the firm’s Starship moon and Mars rocket have exploded spectacularly. All of which makes it a particularly good time to publish Liftoff, the fascinating backstory of why SpaceX does it this way.

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Josie Ford
Concrete lunacy
Feedback was delighted to see the spirit of 1950s sci-fi alive and well in our news section last week with a story about building concrete towers that could stretch many tens of kilometres high on the moon.
We are far from disputing the conclusions of the team from Harvard University, that the relative lack of things such as gravity, wind, seismic motions and planning permission on the moon would allow such huge edifices. Still, we look forward to the lively debate a few decades after the towers’ erection on the merits of lunar brutalism as an architectural style. At least if the decision were eventually made to blow them up again, towers on the moon would presumably just float away.
We are slightly nonplussed by another aspect of the story, however. The main purpose of the towers would be to hang solar panels off to generate energy for a lunar base. But with a 17-kilometre-high tower requiring a million tonnes of concrete, we rather wonder where the energy comes from to make the concrete. A smaller tower?

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Appropriate units
We apologise to any readers left perplexed by our failure to express anything in that last snippet in multiples of Burj Khalifa[s]. After all, reader Gregg Mitchell points out, this is now the go-to unit for largeness in any number of areas: height, mass, volume, hubris.
He cites the example of the controversial Site C hydroelectric dam being constructed in his neck of the woods in British Columbia, Canada, reported by a local newspaper to have used 6 Burj Khalifas of concrete. Site C’s price tag – as Gregg points out, we can only imagine sardonically – has also doubled from 5BK to 10BK.
Rather more homely and human-scale, almost, is the Sky News headline “Iceberg size of Bedfordshire breaks off from Antarctica“. Ceri Brown writes in from Haverfordwest, Wales, presumably in a fit of pique, to ask how many Bedfordshires there are in a Wales. About 16.8, Ceri – do you need that in Burj Khalifas?
Spreading the seed
In considering blowing up concrete towers on the moon, we hadn’t quite considered the full range of uses they might have been put to.
A paper submitted to a virtual session of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Aerospace Conference, “Lunar Pits and Lava Tubes for a Modern Ark”, points out that life on Earth faces potential existential inconveniences, from asteroid impacts to nuclear war. Our response, it suggests, should be to construct a lunar repository of reproductive cells from humans and other species, from which we might reseed Earth after the balloon’s gone up.
Having now reached the relevant point in the presentation, we see that the proposal is to establish the lunar sperm bank not in a tower, but in a natural hollow space beneath the moon’s surface. So do carry on.
Don’t stop moving
“The perpetual motion machine returns!”, Don Simpson shouts joyously. He brings news of the TRIAD power cube, a game-changer in the world of generators whose “zero back-EMF technology allows for unimaginable efficiencies to be obtained”.
Feedback has a rule of thumb for imaginable power efficiencies: start at 100 per cent and then subtract some, because thermodynamics. At least the makers of the TRIAD power cube are upfront about not being 100 per cent sure how their device achieves “Efficiencies in excess of 400% >”, besides negating the law of magnetic induction.
Sadly, the device, a snip at just £5999.99 – keep the penny, thanks – is only available on pre-order pending full development. Don’t call them, they’ll call you.
Shoe boot other foot
An even more joyous throng forms in our inbox at the widely reported news last week that Terry Boot has replaced Peter Foot as finance director of UK retailer Shoe Zone. Other media having exhausted the various permutative puns the story afforded, we note quietly that Foot only joined the company in July 2020. This suggests that, while perhaps good for a bit of publicity, our old frenemy nominative determinism might have its limits as a commercial strategy.
We can only hope that Boot puts his best foot forward and avoids quickly getting the… now, stop it. Thanks to our friends on four continents who sent that one in. Definitely a case of don’t call us – oh, you have.
Mouths of babes
In the UK, Census Day fast approaches – or, should you be reading this after 21 March, has hurtled straight past. Roger Morgan from Presteigne, Wales, is impressed with the confidence that the UK Office for National Statistics shows in the educational attainment of the nation’s youth.
Its “What you need to know” guide sets out questions that those under the ages of 5, 3 and 1 need not answer. The under-3s, for example, are exempted from the question “How well do you speak English?” – or indeed Welsh – although they are, presumably, expected to at least understand it well enough to know they need not answer it. Particularly consequential is the instruction “those under one year old do not need to answer question 13”. Question 13 is “One year ago, what was your usual address?”.
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You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

The wild scheme of Ross Ulbricht, a young physics grad who set up a massive online illegal drugs market, keeps us hooked to the bitter end in Silk Road, a fictionalised version of his story

Humans

17 March 2021

By Linda Marric

Nick Robinson as Ross Ulbricht, founder of the dark web marketplace Silk RoadVertigo Releasing
Silk Road
Tiller Russell

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Vertigo Releasing,
streaming from 22 March
IN OCTOBER 2013, Ross Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI and charged with money laundering, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. Two years earlier, Ulbricht had launched the Silk Road, the first modern dark web market, known for selling drugs that are illegal in the US.
Suddenly, users could order any illicit substance they wanted from dealers online and have it delivered, no questions asked, to their homes by the US Postal Service the very next day.
Ulbricht’s site operated as a Tor hidden service, making it easier for its users to browse it anonymously and conduct all their transactions using untraceable cryptocurrencies. Within a few months, Ross had amassed a huge following under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts (a reference to The Princess Bride movie) and a small fortune in bitcoin thanks to an article about the site, which appeared in the now defunct Gawker blog.
But what was the route that took a twentysomething, middle-class physics graduate from Texas to the FBI’s most-wanted list?
In Silk Road, the movie version of the story, writer-director Tiller Russell (whose catalogue includes Night Stalker: The hunt for a serial killer, a four-part exploration of the crimes of Richard Ramirez) maps out Ulbricht’s trajectory from law-abiding citizen to drug player in this flawed crime story. It is based on “Dead End On Silk Road: Internet crime kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s big fall”, a Rolling Stone article written about Ulbricht by David Kushner.
The film opens at a branch of the San Francisco Public Library in 2013, where Ulbricht (Nick Robinson) is being trailed by undercover federal agents hoping to catch him red-handed logging onto his site. Then it flashes back to a couple of years before that, to a Texas bar where gaudy libertarian show-off Ulbricht is attempting to smooth-talk his way out of an awkward political exchange with Julia (Alexandra Shipp).
Soon the two become inseparable, and when he jokingly suggests launching a website from which dealers can easily sell drugs, both Julia and Ulbricht’s best friend Max (Daniel David Stewart) are happy to go along with his wild scheme.
Although we are cheekily warned from the start that “this story is true. Except for what we made up or changed”, there are clearly some aspects of the tale that are simply there to pad out an otherwise stale and meandering screenplay. For example, a subplot featuring a brilliant turn from Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) as crooked cybercrime agent Rick Bowden often feels superfluous.
Robinson gives a suitably nervy and understated performance as the anti-hero you wish you could root for. It is this moral ambiguity that gives the film the edge it needed, but it is a shame that more isn’t made of this by Russell. Elsewhere, Paul Walter Hauser (I, Tonya and Richard Jewell) gives another scene-stealing turn as hapless Utah hacker Curtis Clark Green, Ulbricht’s employee.
Overall, Silk Road often seems unsure where its sympathies lie, and this is its main problem. Having said that, there is just enough here to keep those who are unfamiliar with the story hooked till the bitter end. Just don’t go expecting anything as good or full of cracking dialogue as David Fincher’s The Social Network or you will be sorely disappointed.

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Amazon Prime Video
Watch
Invincible, available from 26 March on Amazon Prime Video, animates Robert Kirkman’s long-running comic about an ordinary teenager whose father just happens to be Omni-Man, the world’s most powerful superhero.

Watch
Rob Dunn, co-author of the new book Delicious with Monica Sanchez, speaks about the deep history of flavour and the role it has played in human evolution. Online from the Royal Institution in London at 7 pm GMT on 23 March.

Read
A Thousand Brains: A new theory of intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, inventor and neuroscientist, explains how the brain builds not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know.

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Amazon Prime Video
Watch
Invincible, available from 26 March on Amazon Prime Video, animates Robert Kirkman’s long-running comic about an ordinary teenager whose father just happens to be Omni-Man, the world’s most powerful superhero.

Watch
Rob Dunn, co-author of the new book Delicious with Monica Sanchez, speaks about the deep history of flavour and the role it has played in human evolution. Online from the Royal Institution in London at 7 pm GMT on 23 March.

Read
A Thousand Brains: A new theory of intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, inventor and neuroscientist, explains how the brain builds not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know.

More on these topics: More

How old you feel matters for how long you will live. Here’s how you can reduce your psychological age

Health

17 March 2021

By Graham Lawton

People who feel younger than their years tend to live longerskynesher/Getty Images
“AGE is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
This nugget of wisdom, often attributed to Mark Twain, has been turned into many an inspirational internet meme over the years. As a 51-year-old who is starting to feel the gathering momentum of the inevitable slide, it strikes me as little more than a platitude that makes people feel better about getting old.
But according to a growing body of research, there is more to it than that. Subjective age – how old we feel – has a very real impact on health and longevity. People who feel younger than their years often actually are, in terms of how long they have left to live.
The question of what controls our subjective age, and whether we can change it, has always been tricky to address scientifically. Now, research is revealing some surprising answers. The good news is that many of the factors that help determine how old we feel are things that we can control to add years to our lives –and life to our years.
We have known for a while now that simply counting the number of years someone has been alive isn’t necessarily the most accurate way of gauging longevity. Biological “ageing clocks” measure various markers in the body to see how far along the physical ageing process we are (see “Old bones?“). But we also know that physical ageing is not the be-all and end-all. Gerontologists recognise that just as we can make generalisations about the ways that physical ageing affects our bodies – a … More

By Krista Charles

When you fall, your leg muscles activate differently to try to keep you balancedJustin Paget/Getty Images
Miss a step when walking down the stairs and your legs will attempt to recover your balance after the unexpected fall – but how? The key to remaining upright seems to be in the way our calf and foot muscles are activated.
“One of the things we know about human locomotion is our ability to stay on our feet, upright, is pretty remarkable, but we don’t understand a lot about how we achieve this,” says Taylor Dick at the University of Queensland in Australia.

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To find out more, she and her colleagues conducted an experiment that involved attempting to make people fall over. The researchers had 10 people jump in place on top of platforms that were sitting on a device measuring the forces exerted by each foot individually. They then removed the platforms without warning.
As participants tried to retain their balance, the researchers used electromyography and ultrasound sensors on their legs to track muscle activity and changes in muscle length.

They determined that experiencing an unexpected drop automatically increases the timing between when the muscles in our legs and feet first activate and when they reach their shortest length.
This in turn enables the foot muscles to absorb and dissipate energy more effectively, allowing us to recover from the drop.
The team also found that while opposing muscles normally contract in turn when walking, both groups of muscles contract at the same time during an unexpected drop.
In cases where you aren’t able to successfully recover and end up falling, Dick says it may be because a different strategy is used, one that relies on signals travelling from your leg muscles to your brain and then back to your leg muscles. This may take more time than it does to travel the distance to the new “lower” ground.
She hopes that this research can inform the design of lower limb assistive devices, such as prostheses and exoskeletons, that can help people navigate staircases and move over uneven terrain.
Homayoon Kazerooni at the University of California, Berkeley, says that the insights into the timing changes of human muscle activation could lead to better exoskeleton designs, including control algorithms that offer better stability over unpredictable terrain, or at least help with recovering from a fall.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.0201

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