From: agae@elder.lle.rochester.edu (Andres C. Gaeris)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: A personal report on the World Space Congress
Keywords: IAF, World Space Congress
Date: 8 Sep 92 21:45:16 GMT
Reply-To: agae@elder.lle.rochester.edu (Andres C. Gaeris)
Organization: UofR Laboratory for Laser Energetics


 
        As a vacation I went to the World Space Congress both to fulfill
my longed desire of attending an IAF Congress and at the same time knowing
the Empire's capital.
 
Considering I payed only $25 for my registration at the WSC (I am a graduate
student at UoR), that Washington is the American city that most looks like my
old own city (Buenos Aires), the Smithsonian Air & Space museum, the Space
Exhibition at the Convention Center, the Mars Rover rally and the receptions
to the participants, this vacations was not only enjoyable but a bargain!
 
        In the minus side I was appalled by the poor scientific level of the
papers presented in the sessions I was most interested. As a plasma physicist
that got into this subject after reading an article of Wolfgang Moeckel
(_The Next 25 years of Planetary Exploration_, A&A Nov71) on the future of
physical propulsion as the only way of going to deep space, I feel a profound
interest on any non-chemical propulsion method or technique (including
Astrodynamics and space power systems). Besides the dream of interstellar
flight is one of my most cherished ones so I went mainly to advanced propulsion
sessions of the IAF/WSC.
 
        The scientific/technological quality of the papers seemed to go
inversely proportional to the distance the authors pretend to reach or the
power/energy levels they pretend to obtain. Now let me describe what was
going on in the main three sessions I attended.
 
        The following text it is a very opinionated commentary of what I saw
at the WSC. Somebody could be offended/offuscated/upset about my views, but
I do not want to initiate any kind of flame war. So take it or leave it, but
please do not flame. Anyway, I am only a graduate student and I do not pretend
any expertise outside my field of study.
 
DISCLAIMER: THE OPINIONS, COMMENTARIES AND BAD JOKES APPEARING IN BOTH THE
PRECEDING AND FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS ARE OF MY ENTIRE RESPONSIBILITY.
THE UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER, THE LABORATORY OF LASER ENERGETICS OR THE DOE
ARE NEITHER RELATED NOR AWARE OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS POSTING.

S.1 ADVANCED PROPULSION
There was very competent (and encouraging) papers describing current research
in plasma and ion thrusters from people at NASA Lewis, JPL, Stuttgart and
West Point. It seems that arc-jets and ion thrusters are a sufficient mature
technology to work but nobody wants to pay the penalties of being the first
non-experimental user of this gadgets.
 
Jordin Kare made a very exciting presentation about laser-heated rockets for
ground to orbit launch. I found Kare's work particularly atractive due my
current association to both very high power lasers and laser-produced plasmas.
 
A. Bolonkin (from the research lab of the AES<- somebody knows what AES stands
for?) presented a paper on the new fashion on sails-magnetic ones, but he was
so boring (he read the paper) and the trasparencies were so ininteligible
that I suffered a momentaneous brain disconnection and I cannot recall anything
about his work except the criticism done by Giovanni Vulpetti during the Q&A
time about the unworkability of magsails inside the Saturn's orbit due to the
formation of bow shocks between the solar wind and the sail's magnetic field
(I need some time to digest this comment, including to get a copy(es) of the
Zubrin/Andrews paper(s)). For the Argentinian slang speakers in the net I
cannot resist to add that Bolonkin's paper honored the author's surname 8-)
 
A pair of very enthusiastic researchers from Berkeley (Carpenter) and McDD
Space (Deveny) gave a really well researched talk on magnetic-mirror fusion appl
ied to propulsion with an eye to SEI missions.
Even when I am a little skeptic (mostly due to my plasma physics professors
telling me insistently that only tokamaks and laser-ICF work) about the
feasibility (even in the long-term) of this kind of magnetic fusion
configurations, it was noticeable the good level of detail and effort put by the
se guys, making this one of the highlights of this session and the other
physical propulsion presentations.
 
I cannot say the same about the closing paper of the session, mainly because
the fusion scheme elected to analyze was the plasma focus, that had a moment
of popularity as a would-be fusion reactor configuration at the late 60's,
due to its compacteness and high power density, but it has been completely
discredited among the plasma community as a viable reactor since then because
the inherent MHD instabilities of the Z-pinch configuration in which it is
based. Without some experimental breaktrough giving some orders off magnitude
improvements on plasma stability, any plasma focus device is only a cheap
and compact gadget to study plasma physics and to generate high intensity
neutron pulses and not a serious way to fusion rockets.
 
F.1 EXPLORATION IN THE PLANETARY RANGE
F.2 EXPLORATION FROM PLANETARY TO COMETARY RANGES
Even with these titles it was pretty obvious from the names both of the papers'
contributors and the attendees to the sessions that these were the usual IAA
interstellar flight time slots. The most speculative and risky papers appear
here and I found myself very dissapointed of the pre-screening of the
presented papers. I believe that there are enough and respected contributors
to the field (R.L.Forward, R.W.Bussard, G.Vulpetti, L.R.Shepherd, A.R.Martin
among others usually publishing at Acta Astronautica and JBIS) to do a careful
refereeing and selection of papers and avoid some of the misleading and in
one case completely absurd contributions to these sesssions.
 
F.1
Matloff and Cassenti proposed a scheme to mine He3 using a pair of magnetic lens
es to focus the solar wind flow in a collector (other new fashion among
space industralization fans. Hey guys! How you pretend a D-He3-based fusion
economy when we are 10 years or more of demonstrating D-T fusion breakeven
scientifically and this milestone probably will be done with reactors
unworkable from the engineering standpoint? Any attempt to predict what will
go with fusion in the next 50 years is mostly technology-fiction and even
program insiders -both magnetic and ICF- acknowledge that with the current
levels of funding and technology commercial fusion reactors in the near future
is some kind of rainbow chase). Again G.Vulpetti commented about the
infeasibility of this magsail methods (see Bolonkin's paragraph). Cassenti
emphasized the possibilities of using this design for a toroidal uniform
magnetic lens as part of a Bussard-ramjet scoop.
 
The dynamic duo of interestellar flight, Martin and Bond made a competent but
unimaginative presentation about coupling an ion thruster currently manufactured
ky UKAEA Culham (were both of them work) to a state of the art but unbuilt
SP-100/Topaz-like nuclear reactor called Dragon, with interest to catch a
 
contract for the JPL's 1000 AU mission. I found this paper a little too
routine (not counting on the advertisement content for the UKAEA line of product
s) for two luminaries as Bond and Martin, who have me used to more
spectacular and always very good and comprehensive contributions.
 
A paper on a Martian Manned Excursion Module was given by R.J. Zhitz of
the Moscow Aviation Institute, but again the combination of monotonous
reading with poor transparencies send my brain to other realms of the mind
and my body to look for a cup of coffee, so I do not have any opinion on this
paper, except that Russian (and other East-Europeans) must improve their
presentation skills if they want to reach their audiences.
 
P.A.Hansson made an interesting and audacious presentation of the role
of miniaturization and nanotechnology on the future advance of space
instrumentation and probe design, but I am not knowledgeable in these
matters so my opinion is as good a anybody else's.
 
Finally for the F.1 session, V.J.Modi gave a very heavyweight talk on
attitude control and propulsion of space vehicles using solar radiation
pressure. Pretty interesting and really good technical stuff.
 
F.2
I lost the first one on Artificial jets as propulsion of cometary riders
because I was late. I catch a little of the last moments of it and the Q&A
part, but I do not have any elements for a responsible comment.
 
The Zubrin paper was superb from the presentation point of view (this guy
really knows how to catch the attention of his audience) but I found it
flawed in approach. It discuss the use of unknown ultra-dense stellar objects
(white/brown/black dwarves, neutron stars, black holes) in the near-solar
neighborhood for perigee-kick gravity assists for interstellar missions.
The paper is interesting, the ideas are relevant but the methods are poor.
Calculating orbits near high gravitational fields using classical mechanics
or special relativity is at best inaccurate and as the last case (black hole)
analyzed by Zubrin can be completely wrong (v-infinity speeds greater than c
are predicted for some orbits!). As my GTR knowledge is today non-existant
(but it will be some at the end of this semester) and besides I could not
afford a copy of the paper, I can not be more explicit about where is the
mistake in Zubrin's calculation, but obviously he is using the wrong model
for this problem.
 
H.D. Froning spoke about the neccesity of launching an Interstellar Exploration
Initiative, now! ;-) Any further comment from me would be insulting for
the author of otherwise a very enjoyable presentation that esentially was not
more than an exercise of wishful thinking (but anytime some guy
come speaking about field propulsion, hyperspaces and quantum vacuum energy
ramjets and the necessitiy of funding research of this my stomach revolves,
I get a cold fever and I must see the current NSF/DOE/NASA budget to recover
myself with a reality shock).
 
I am being insulting now because I felt insulted when hearing this nonsense.
C. Poher from CNES/Aerospatiale at Cannes-La-Bocca, France (probably affected
for the excess of sunlight at the Cote-Azur) presented a paper(well...)
with the title _Universons, a possible key to interstellar exploration_
This guy invented a theory of gravitation of his own, which contradicts any
current experimental evidence from both GTR and Quantum Mechanics. Again
G.Vulpetti came to the rescue and clobbered the guy with a  set of very good
questions and counterexamples. It is a shame that this kind of crap appears
in this conference, because my colleagues in Physics and Astronomy use this
comtemptible examples of crankpottery to discredite the scientific value of
these sessions in particular and of the IAF Congresses in general. Does
somebody suggest a way to comunicate to the IAF or IAA committees relevant
to these sessions the damage that papers like this one do to the
credibility of these organizations?
 
After that A. Ewing refreshed the air with a short nice competent work on
solar sail parametrization.
 
Finally G.Vulpetti introduced the concept of staged propulsion (that is a
generalization of the usual fuel staging), and then provided us with a
bunch of colorful (literally) examples of missions using combinations of
solar sails/NEP for missions to the heliopause and beyond. Really good
stuff, with good scientific and technical fundaments.
 
At the end of each presentation there was a Q&A period, usually used by
L.R.Sheperd to do some interesting and appropiate comment, by Vulpetti to
argue (with great authority) about some weak point of the past paper and
for a annoying crank to illuminate us with some irrelevant and inane comment
of his own.
 
One thing I notice after enduring both F.1 and F.2 in their entire duration
was that the audience was thinning more and more with time, going from ~25
people at the beginning to no more than a dozen at the end. Was the
audience voting with their feet?
 
I attended only two other IAF sessions(Nuclear power applications and space in
cinema and photography) but I would not comment on them.
 
As friend of one of the leading SETI researchers in Argentina I was in some
way an informal member of the Argentinian delegation to the SETI session
organized by the IAA/COSPAR/IAF/NASA/AIAA. Of course I was introduced to all
the SETI-set (and I got a photograph with George Mueller, who opened the
session, thing that  had me smiling two days but considered irrelevant to my
astronomer friends) and I was witness of a lot of the behind the curtains
talks. The feeling I got from all this is that now SETI is fashionable for
some sectors of the radioastronaomical community and a lot of guys that five
years ago would not have paid any attention to the search programs now are
trying to jump into the SETI bandwagon (and catch the research grants!).
Considering that the field is mostly hot air (and it reflects in the low
quality of the papers presented -again the French are talking nonsense,
introducing numerology into a fact-poor subject) I can not understand the
hype that SETI produces, unless you want to see it as an exercise on
publicity and marketing for certain brands/names of this self-advertised
community of scientists.
 
        You will be asking what I found positive about WSC?
- The International Space Exhibition
- The talks with the participants outside the sessions.
- Washington DC
- The Smithsonian museums
- The atmosphere of comradeship and collaboration for the most exciting
goal you can imagine: THE CONQUEST OF SPACE.
 
Even with the shortcomings about the sessions contents I found myself
mesmerized with the WSC and I will attend again anytime this events repeat
near my workplace or I could afford to go.
Andres C. Gaeris
agae@lle.rochester.edu
 
Newsgroups: sci.space