Joel Garreau

Launching a 20 kilometer high blimp

August 27, 2014 in Hieroglyph

Turns out there is an existing market for a long-term platform 20 kilometers up (like Neal Stephenson’s Tall Tower), according to The New York Times. And it may attract NASA money.

The idea is to make commercial a really really high-flying blimp. “Stratospheric airships could give us spacelike conditions from a spacelike platform, but without the spacelike costs,” said Sarah Miller, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Irvine, talking with the New York Times’ Joshua A. Krischaug in August 2014.

“Really, there are two very broad scientific applications of stratospheric airships,” said Jason Rhodes, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a co-author of a study for the Keck Institute for Space Studies. The paper, published in February, found that conventional space satellites could cost up to 100 times as much as low-altitude, nonstratospheric airships. (There have been too few stratospheric airships to analyze their cost, according to The Times.)

“You can look up and do astronomy, or you can look down and do earth science,” Rhodes said. And oh yes, the military was very interested in funding this until the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wore down.

It’s not trivial to make an aircraft that can maneuver itself, stay in one location, remain 20 kilometers up for very long periods, and then land itself and its payload gently, the Times article reports. Among other things, when the lifting gas gets hot in high-altitude sunlight, it wants to expand a whole lot – possibly rupturing the blimp. And when it gets cold, the blimp gets, um, flaccid. But these obstacles can and have been overcome for a period of up to eight hours. So it is possible.

And its creators are following a very Hieroglyph-like path to making it happen. They are appealing to NASA’s imagination.

“Dr. Rhodes proposed that NASA fund a Centennial Challenge to bring engineers back into the airship market,” according to The Times. “Centennial Challenges offer millions of dollars in prize money to civilian teams that build innovative technologies for NASA missions. Over the next few months, Dr. Rhodes will research and refine the rules of the challenge, and explore how to push the limits of airships’ payload and endurance. If NASA accepts the terms of the challenge, the race for a science-worthy stratospheric airship will begin shortly afterward.”

This just leaves a few questions: Would they like to tether their blimp to our tower? And…how big a King Kong would it take to complete the tableau?

Image credit: Keck Institute for Space Studies/Eagre Interactive

Author
Joel Garreau
Joel Garreau is a student of culture, values, and change. Joel's latest book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies, and What It Means to Be Human, takes an unprecedented, sometimes alarming, always spellbinding look at the hinge in history at which we have arrived. For hundreds of millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward at altering our environment in the fashion of fire, agriculture, or space travel. Now, for the first time, we are increasingly aiming inward at modifying our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, progeny and possibly our immortal souls. Radical Evolution is about altering human nature -- not in some distant tomorrow, but right now, on our watch.

1 Comment »

Response to “Covenant”

August 22, 2014 in Responses

What I love about Hieroglyph and about the Center for Science and the Imagination is that I totally believe that you can’t have better futures without better dreams. With Hieroglyph, the idea is not that we’re utopians; it’s that we’re thoughtful about how things might go right. And that’s incredibly important. There are some turning points in history recently which were basically failures of imagination and failures of optimism. The challenge is for us to think big and think rigorously and think smart because lazy dystopianism is child’s play.

I read through “Covenant” several times asking myself, “Why did she choose that title?” A covenant is an agreement between two parties; it’s a legal term. I think what Bear is trying to communicate is that there is an agreement here between the protagonist’s two selves: the psychopathic male that she was and the new person she has become. If I were writing an undergraduate paper about this story – and I guarantee that there will be a whole lot of them – I would write about the covenant that is established between these two selves.

“Covenant” is such a well-done piece of fiction. It’s not at all a utopian vision, nor is it dystopian. It walks the line very nicely between portraying a future that’s great, that’s really aspirational and one that’s horrible, that you’d never want to see happen. It walks that line in a lovely fashion, and that’s one of the things that I like about it most.

Joel Garreau is the Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. He is the author of the books Radical Evolution, The Nine Nations of North America, and Edge City: Life on the New Frontier.

Author
Joel Garreau
Joel Garreau is a student of culture, values, and change. Joel's latest book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies, and What It Means to Be Human, takes an unprecedented, sometimes alarming, always spellbinding look at the hinge in history at which we have arrived. For hundreds of millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward at altering our environment in the fashion of fire, agriculture, or space travel. Now, for the first time, we are increasingly aiming inward at modifying our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, progeny and possibly our immortal souls. Radical Evolution is about altering human nature -- not in some distant tomorrow, but right now, on our watch.

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