A vaccine for malaria has been a long-time dream for researchers, but it’s no easy feat. Now, a new study on our most advanced vaccine shows its efficacy not only wanes, but it can also make some kids get more bouts of malaria later in life.
In a seven-year follow up of the Phase II trial of the RTS,S vaccine—the malaria vaccine that has been in development the longest—researchers found the vaccine significantly dropped in efficacy over time.
In fact, for some areas with high rates of malaria, the vaccine actually had a negative effect, according to the paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday.
“We don’t know the extent of the problem. I think it raises a question that needs to be followed up on,” Dr. Philip Bejon, Director of the Wellcome-KEMRI-Oxford Collaborative Research Programme and co-author of the study, told me on the phone from Kenya.
Early in the trial, the vaccine was fairly effective, with a 27 percent efficacy against a first episode of malaria after vaccination. But over time, the efficacy waned: By the end of seven years, the overall efficacy was 4.4 percent.
What’s more worrisome is that, in areas where trial participants had high exposure to malaria, there was a negative effect: Those vaccinated actually got more cases of malaria than the control group by the end of the trial.
The researchers dubbed this effect “malaria rebound.” This is because the vaccine protects against sporozoites—kind of the “baby” malaria parasites that enter the blood stream when an infectious mosquito bites a human—but it doesn’t produce immunity to the later stage parasites. When children with high exposure to malaria are vaccinated, they’re protected at first, but are not able to build up a natural immunity that comes from infection, and end up getting sick more often later, the authors suggest.
But Bejon pointed out that the results are far from conclusive. For one, the sample size was quite small, with only 312 children completing the full seven-year follow up.
“With the study size that we’ve got, I think all we can say is that there isn’t a clear benefit overall by the time you get to the end of seven years,” Bejon explained. “Because of the sample size, the confidence intervals for both the negative effect in the subgroup and the positive effect overall overlap zero. So the effect size we’re seeing is relatively marginal.”
The Phase II trial also only doled out three doses of the vaccine, but the Phase III trial used four doses with better success. Right now, researchers are following up on the Phase III trial to see the long term effects, the results of which will come out some time next year. In the meantime, the World Health Organization has approved a much larger pilot study of the vaccine that’s currently in the planning stages.
For a long time, a malaria vaccine has been the holy grail pursuit of public health research, and there are dozens of other candidates in the pipeline. Bejon said that this paper contributes to our understanding of this first generation vaccine, but that a vaccine was never going to be a magic bullet for malaria.
“You can get some quantifiable protection in the field with one antigen, so it’s really important to invest in this field to get better vaccines,” Bejon said. “But a malaria vaccine is only going to be useful in a setting where there’s already a malaria control program functioning. A vaccine would be an add on.”
Malaria Vaccine Can Cause Negative 'Rebound Effect,' Study Says
In the depths of New Zealand’s Waitomo Caves, fluorescent larvae offer a glimmering constellation against the darkness like glow-in-the-dark star stickers incarnate.
The trippy glowworms won’t stay luminous for long as they will eventually complete a disappointing metamorphosis into ever-obnoxious gnats. However, strolling through the vast caves, you’ll encounter the sheer spectacle of their youth. Clinging to the rocky ceiling by threads of their own silk, the larvae perform an eerie astronomical imitation to catch their prey.
As the moon and stars guide a moth’s linear direction, the larva’s star-like appearance confounds the insect and draws it towards the light. Then, in its final act of torture, it spools the moth up its crystal thread and devours it alive. All the while, these thousands of glowworms animate the cave’s ceiling with twinkling blue hues like something straight out of Spielberg’s mind.
Although scientists may understand why the tiny critters resemble a clear night sky, many details of their species remain a mystery. Perhaps most puzzling is the punctual dimming and brightening of each of the cave’s larvae colonies. It is an odd fact that each nest of worms glows in accordance with their own circadian rhythm given they will never actually observe the star’s daily patterns.
All in all, while these pseudo-space worms of the Waitomo Caves may look beautiful, their mystery and carnivorous appetite is the stuff of sci-fi gold.
These Cave-Dwelling Glowworms Will Give You The Creeps
Specialty dating site “Muslim Match” has been hacked. Nearly 150,000 user credentials and profiles have been posted online, as well as over half a million private messages between users.
Launched in 2000, Muslim Match is a free-to-use site for people looking for companionship or marriage. “Single, Divorced, Widowed, Married Muslims :: Coming together to share ideas, thoughts and find a suitable marriage partner,” the site's Facebook profile reads.
Motherboard obtained the full dataset of just under 150,000 user accounts as well as the cache of private messages. Every email address Motherboard randomly picked from the dataset was linked to an account on Muslim Match.
Hunt pointed out that the data includes whether each user is a convert or not, their employment, living and marital status, and whether they would consider polygamy. He also noticed that some of the email addresses are marked as “potential users.” It’s not totally clear why someone might be marked as a “potential” user.
One file also contains around 790,000 private messages sent between users, which deal with everything from religious discussion and small talk to marriage proposals.
“I wanna marry you if u agree I send my photos and deatails [sic],” one message reads.
“You will enjoy when u speak to me,” another reads. “i am genuine and truthful and am seriously seeking a right muslimah who could be a friend, a companion to hold hands thru journey of life and beyond.”
Some of the messages appear to be spam, having been sent in quick succession and containing the exact same content. (On its homepage, Muslim Match warns of an increase in fake users.)
The dataset also includes a number of shorter messages that appear to be from an instant messaging function.
"I feel disappointed but the site didn't seem to be secure in the first place. They never used https."
Using information within the dataset, Motherboard was able to link private messages with specific users. By cross-referencing the different files, it was possible to find out the username of the person who sent the message, as well as their logged IP address and poorly-hashed, MD5 password. Some of the messages also include extra information, such as Skype handles, which users have exchanged.
Judging by the IP addresses, Muslim Match's users are based all over the world, including the UK, Pakistan, and the US.
The Muslim Match hacker may have used SQL-injection—an ancient but commonly effective web attack—to obtain the data, judging by the format the files are in.
Motherboard managed to speak to one Muslim Match user, and Hunt reached two additional users who were happy to talk.
“I feel disappointed but the site didn't seem to be secure in the first place. They never used https,” Zaheer, a current user, told Motherboard in an email, referring to the protocol used for encrypting traffic and especially website login screens.
When asked if he had any privacy concerns, another user called Rook said he found the news “Very scary. There is so much intimate information placed on [this] website to begin with, when you are genuine about finding a perfect match.”
The administrator of Muslim Match did not respond to multiple emails and messages sent through the site, and all of the company's listed phone numbers are disconnected. The site's social media profiles have not been updated since June 2014.
But after being contacted by this reporter, Muslim Match went temporarily “down for maintenance” on Wednesday. Shortly after, the site was back, but stated it was taking a short break for Ramadan.
The lesson: Here, a site let its users down by not taking security very seriously (the lack of HTTPS stands out). Users should scope out a service they intend to use beforehand: Does it use encryption on login screens? Is it a forum based on a vulnerable piece of software like IP.Board? These checks could come in especially handy with services that deal with as much sensitive information as dating sites.
Another day, another hack.
Hacked: Private Messages From Dating Site ‘Muslim Match’
Species are disappearing at speeds unseen since previous global extinction events, and there’s little doubt that humans are to blame. Biologists estimate that dozens of them vanish every single day, which is nearly 1,000 times the rate of extinction levels predating modern Homo sapiens. Our heavy-handed impact on Earth’s ecosystems is now so noticeable, it’s even been labeled as its very own epoch: the Anthropocene.
But man-made ecological damage doesn’t always come in the form of extinctions. Instead of succumbing to the pressures of human activity, some species are rapidly evolving. This relatively new—and deceptively catastrophic—adaptation, called “human-mediated speciation,” was explored in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
When a plant, animal, or bacteria undergoes “speciation,” its evolutionary lineage will split off into two or more unique gene pools. Sometimes, this results in a noticeable difference between the two lineages, but other times, discrepancies are harder to find. As Scientific Americanonce pointed out, orcas (Orcinus orca), which biologists long-believed to be a singular type of whale, have actually been branching off for hundreds of thousands of years into distinct species with their own traits and traditions.
Since evolution is such a difficult process to quantify, especially over shorter periods of time, biologists at the University of Copenhagen decided to investigate whether recent known species adaptations could have occurred as a result of anthropogenic stressors. What they discovered was resounding evidence for human-mediated speciation because of habitat disruption, invasive species, domestication, hunting, and hybridization (think: “pizzlies” and “grolar bears”).
One of the most obvious drivers of speciation is the destruction of ecosystems by the combined forces of climate change, natural resource extraction, development, and the introduction of harmful invasive species. Along these lines, the study found that 38 species—for example, the brown anole (Anolis sagrei) in Hawaiʻi and Taiwan, and cane toads (Rhinella marina) in Australia—showed signs rapid evolution following their introduction to foreign environments. Nearly 70 percent of invasive plant species in Australia, many of them unfit for the region’s arid climate like the trampweed (Facelis retusa), changed at least one morphological trait, or structural feature, over a period of 150 years.
More interestingly, when a deadly South American pathogen called the “myxoma virus” was transplanted to Australia during the 1950s to control wild rabbit populations, within a year, the rabbits had begun to co-evolve alongside the virus, developing a resistance to it. According to the study’s authors, evolutionary changes like this aren’t uncommon but often go unnoticed among species that aren’t considered “economically important.”
Domestication is another likely cause of speciation, and considering that humans have “tamed” 474 animal and 269 plant species over the last 11,000 years, its effects are well-documented in modern species like the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris). A side effect of this practice, however, is that humans now also interact with species considered “pests,” such as agricultural weeds, which has weakened the selective pressures that previously kept them under control.
Number of recorded animal and plant species extinctions; number of recorded established invasive species; number of domesticated species. Light grey, since AD 1500; dark grey, during the Holocene. Chart: Proceedings of the Royal Society B/J. W. Bull et al.
“We also see examples of domestication resulting in new species. According to a recent study, at least six of the world’s 40 most important agricultural crops are considered entirely new,” said lead author Joseph Bull, a postdoc at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, in a statement.
“In this context, ‘number of species’ becomes a deeply unsatisfactory measure of conservation trends, because it does not reflect many important aspects of biodiversity. Achieving a neutral net outcome for species numbers cannot be considered acceptable if weighing wild fauna against relatively homogenous domesticated species.”
Even humans are falling victim to their own ecological manipulation. Right now, bacterial resistance to over-prescribed antibiotics is one of the most serious threats to public health, according to the World Health Organization. The microbe responsible for gonorrhea and Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are just a few of today’s “superbugs” that have evolved a resistance to most medications. Treatments can now require the use of multiple antibiotics to compensate for the likelihood that one or more might fail.
While the addition of novel species might seem exciting or beneficial during a time of mass extinction, Bull and his colleagues encourage the scientific community to consider the net worth of anthropogenic change, rather than just its artificial contributions. Wild species can’t simply be replaced with new ones, and the biological consequences these organisms pose to complex, and often fragile, ecosystems is dangerously unpredictable.
“The prospect of ‘artificially’ gaining novel species through human activities is unlikely to elicit the feeling that it can offset losses of ‘natural’ species,” Bull added.
“Indeed, many people might find the prospect of an artificially biodiverse world just as daunting as an artificially impoverished one.”
Humans Are Now Causing Species to Artificially Evolve
A resident of Portland, Oregon who calls himself “Drone Man” has spent the last few weeks using a drone to surveil what he believes is an illegal, boat-based bicycle theft ring.
Earlier this week, Drone Man says a person on one of the boats finally lost his cool and began firing a gun at his drone, in a story that highlights many of the legal issues concerning hobby drones.
Oregon’s mooring laws make it legal to live on a boat floating in Portland’s Willamette River, which has given the city a population of transient boaters who often call themselves pirates.
Not everyone is a fan of these people, however. Drone Man has been posting videos of their settlements online to “document environmental destruction.”
In the latest video, he hovers above a few boats containing several old bikes and bike parts, some people rummaging around, and what look to be normal floats and ropes you’d have on a boat. Eventually, a man emerges from one of the boats and pulls out what looks to be a rifle.
“I could hear the gunshots plain as day, and there were about 10,” Drone Man wrote to me in an email. “Dude also was screaming like a boss in a fantasy RPG: ‘Show yourself coward!’ *bang* ‘COME ON OUT’ *bang.*”
“I did not set out to provoke people to shoot my drone,” he added. “That was a surprise.”
On the Portland subreddit, Drone Man accused the people on the boats of operating a floating bicycle “chop shop” in which stolen bikes are stripped down to their parts and sold.
“How many loose bike parts do you have on your boat? Unless you race bikes I doubt you have 10 wheels and 4 loose frames at your disposal,” the pilot told me in an email. (He declined to give his real name, and posted on Reddit that he’s hiding his identity using the anonymizing browser Tor.) “It is meeting the hobos more than halfway to assume that their cache of bike parts is legit.”
But the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Department told Motherboard that the drone pilot is mistaken.
“We know the boats he’s talking about—it is not a bicycle chop shop. It’s a well-organized family that lives on the boat,” Steve Alexander, the sheriff’s public information officer, told me. After officers took a closer look at the videos and spoke to people on the river, the department declined to open an investigation.
In that context, Drone Man isn’t investigating homeless bike thieves, he’s repeatedly surveilling people who are legally living on a boat under the guise of “documenting their effect on the environment.” (Motherboard editor Michael Byrne watched the video and pointed out that “this video which apparently is meant to reveal such destruction, was taken literally a quarter mile from this, a marine terminal specializing the import of fucking coal tar.”)
Image: Michael Byrne/Google Maps
It’s legal to fly a drone above the river, and it’s legal for the operator to publish his videos. If the people on the boat did in fact fire at the drone—there’s no sound in the video, though it does appear like they are aiming a gun at the drone—well, then that is illegal.
The vast majority of drone pilots are doing things with their drones that won’t raise any eyebrows. But they have also enabled operations that—while technically legal—certainly fall in a moral gray area. In some cases, people have basically become private investigators who have broad First Amendment protection to both take video and upload it to the internet.
“River hobos destroy the river, I document their effects on the environment. The problem is only getting worse and the city is doing nothing about it.”
In Oklahoma City, a man named Brian Bates has made it his mission to surveil sex workers and report them to the police. In California, a man named Daniel Saulmon flies drones over cops to surveil the surveillers. Now this Portland drone operator has repeatedly turned his drones on transient boaters.
“River hobos destroy the river, I document their effects on the environment,” the drone pilot told me. “The problem is only getting worse and the city is doing nothing about it.”
Three other videos he’s posted to YouTube show “hobo island settlements” and more evidence of what he says are bike chop shops.
State anti-voyeurism laws generally make it illegal to photograph people if they’re in their own homes or otherwise have a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The Willamette River is a public place, and the pilot’s right to upload video he takes in public airspace is protected by the First Amendment.
Twelve states, including Oregon, have passed drone privacy laws, but none of them would have made these types of flights illegal. The Oregon law, for instance, only bans photos or videos taken surreptitiously from a drone “for the purpose of arousing or gratifying the sexual desire of the person”—and only apply if the person has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Legislators, privacy advocates, and drone enthusiasts have failed to find any sort of middle ground when it comes to passing laws that would protect privacy without destroying the drone industry or trampling on the First Amendment.
Because neither the pilot nor the people on the boat filed any sort of official complaint, this particular incident will fall by the wayside unless it happens again. For now, the pilot is allowed to continue flying over the river, and he’s allowed to keep posting videos on YouTube and speculating about what the boaters are doing on Reddit. Crazy story, though.
Which Is Worse: Shooting a Drone, or Being Surveilled by a Redditor?
That’s what astronaut Stanley Love told me on Monday, a day before the test of a rocket booster that will propel the space shuttle’s successor into the void. An executive at Orbital ATK, the company that built the booster, also told me that if I wore loose pants, they would wave in the wind from the blast. I wasn’t sure whether to believe them or to consider their statements the inadvertent propaganda of the excited.
Not that I wasn’t excited for Tuesday’s test. I was. I grew up watching shuttle launches from my backyard in Central Florida, about an hour from Kennedy Space Center, but I hadn’t ever been this close to explosive rocketry. The test, in which Orbital ATK would fire the booster for two minutes, until its propellant ran out, would occur just over a mile away from the viewing area.
In the future, two boosters exactly like this one will provide around 80 percent of the lift that NASA’s Space Launch System rocket—and the Orion habitat that will soon(ish) be packed with humans and astronaut ice cream—from the ground. For every second of their mayfly-short life, the boosters will eat through 5.5 tons of propellant. Once spent, they will dive from the main rocket’s sides back down to Earth. The rocket itself will continue to fire, carrying future astronauts to deep-space destinations.
For this test, though, the booster was battened down to the ground, held horizontal so that it fired into a hillside and stopped from doing the one thing it wants to do: move.
*
The next morning at 5:00 AM, Highway 83—a two-laner running to and from Promontory, Utah—was already busy. Locals were already setting up umbrellas and Coleman grills on the side of the road, making breakfast and waiting for the 8:05 AM skyfire.
There’s not a whole lot to see on 83 besides desolate desert mountains and patches of salt. It’s beautiful in the way of Mars. But then a sign of life rises from the sagebrush: Rocket site, it says. It’s the only hint that you’ll soon come upon a giant aerospace complex, plopped on a hillside.
“You want to make rocket motors in the middle of nowhere where you don’t disturb anyone,” Kent Rominger, a former astronaut and current vice president of strategy and business development at Orbital ATK, explained in a briefing.
Photo by the author
A few miles after the sign, a “rocket garden” of old space-tubes does appear, as do the neutrally colored buildings where engineers make new versions of such things. Some buildings’ sides have building-sized American flags painted on them; one has a roof-high radiation symbol.
Inside this architecture, engineers construct the SLS boosters and concoct the propellant, which begins as a Play-Doh-like pseudoliquid and hardens into the consistency of a (highly flammable) pencil eraser.
I sat in a viewing area at Orbital ATK’s complex as the Sun rose, its rays growing hotter and hotter as we waited for the booster test through an hour-long delay resulting from a computer glitch. In those extra 60 minutes, I began to feel the anxious kind of excitement a person endures in line for a new roller coaster. What does it feel like to have your fillings rattled? What does it mean to witness the destruction of 1.5 million pounds of propellant? Were my jeans loose enough to wave in the wind?
Engineers fixed the computer, and the countdown resumed. And when the red numbers approached single digits, a voice from the sky (okay, from speakers) boomed over the crowd, a gathering of NASA and Orbital ATK employees who had worked on the booster, aerospace officials of all sorts, and current and former astronauts.
For Love, this was a particularly powerful moment. Someday, he very well could ride on the Space Launch System and feel this booster not from a mile away but from just below his body.
I put my camera down and just watched. It was raw power, refined.
Everyone, wearing complementary Orbital ATK ballcaps to block the Sun, stared at the hillside where the booster was bolted. At T-minus three seconds, two seconds, one, it was inert, plain, looking from a distance like a segment of some oil pipeline.
But just after the clock reached zero, a cone of fire shot from the booster, turning it into something else. A monster? A god? Definitely something alive. The cone grew, then stabilized, keeping its shape as new fire flowed out, like a river. But a silent river.
The sound did not reach the viewing site for a few seconds. But as a cloud of smoke began to rise, the sound—pressure waves, remember—pounded over us, its volume amped up because the booster was firing against a hillside, which pushed more pressure waves back at us. Love’s words, and the executive’s assertion, whispered creepily in my head. Rattle your fillings, ruffle your trousers.
I had time to think of all this because the river of fire just kept flowing. Which was strange. Because it is an explosion, albeit a controlled one, you expect it to boom and then stop like a bomb, like every other explosion you have seen. I put my camera down and just watched. It was raw power, refined.
*
Someday, two of those raw, refined boosters will fire not into a bunch of desert dirt but into a launchpad, propelling humans into space. The US government hasn’t been able to launch its own astronauts into space since 2011, when the shuttle program ended. But the SLS will change that, and send them farther than ever before.
These boosters use shuttle components, although Orbital ATK reengineered a lot of their innards and added another segment to give them more thrust. The company that is now part of Orbital ATK (but was once just ATK and, before that, Morton-Thiokol and, originally, simply Thiokol) also made the shuttle’s boosters. That, and the specifics of the June 28 test, bring back a tragic memory for the company.
On January 28, 1986, the temperature at Kennedy Space Center was around 28° F, colder than any previous launch. Officials decided to launch the Space Shuttle Challenger anyway. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the craft broke apart, killing all astronauts aboard.
An investigation called the Rogers Commission revealed administrative, cultural, and interpersonal problems that contributed to the disastrous decision. But from a technical standpoint, the cold had crippled the rubber O-rings that held the boosters’ segments together, and the failed O-rings had caused the failure of the shuttle.
Ice on the Challenger launch tower hours before launch. Photo: NASA
I thought of these O-rings during the test in Promontory, while the booster continued pouring fire into the landscape. Because while it was quite hot outside, the event was actually a “cold test,” meant to see how the booster will behave at around 40° F, the lowest temperature it can be conditioned, which is 12° F warmer than its launch temperature. (After being fired, the booster cranks up to around 6,000° F—hot enough to boil steel.) Engineers had housed it in a hyper-air-conditioned building since April, chilling it to the core to get it down to the low end of its temperature range and see if it would hold up.
No one, in my two days on site, mentioned this connection to the past, and I didn’t ask. Even if it probably would have been the responsible journalistic thing to do, I didn’t want to inquire about their worst day on these so-far happy ones. It’s a painful part of history—the company’s, NASA’s, spaceflight’s, lots of individual human beings’—and one that could have been avoided. Still, I could not have been the only one thinking of Challenger.
“You’re never going to get all the unknowns out of it.”
Safety and chopping down risk are always on NASA’s and Orbital ATK’s front burners. Signs everywhere at the Promontory site say so. Even the free hats they gave us say, “Test before flight.”
Love wants to fly, and he knows that to fly means to accept risk. “You’re never going to get all the unknowns out of it,” he says. “NASA promised to make [SLS] 10 times safer than the shuttle, but that’s not possible with the technology.”
If he gets the chance, he’ll go. And with SLS, he and astronauts present and future will have more destination options.
*
The SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever, capable of carrying meatbags to lunar orbits, asteroids, and Mars. The Orion capsule, which will sit tiny atop the rocket like the finial on a flagpole, is the place the space-faring humans will live, work, play, and probably also cry and fight.
NASA has planned SLS’s first mission for late 2018. Crewless, the system will go around the Moon and then come back home. Four years later, NASA plans to use SLS to launch a probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa, to learn about its crusty ice sheet, the ocean that lies beneath it, and where best to land a future life-seeking rover.
And then, later in the 2020s, SLS will get its first passengers—a four-person crew, shot around the Moon. A few years later, another crew may explore an asteroid previously tugged into lunar orbit, as part of the Asteroid Redirect Mission. NASA bills these activities as preparation for SLS’s eventual trips to Mars—they are testing their system and their humans in harsh environments far from Earth. It is all part of the#journeytoMars.
The missions’ utility and momentum vectors have still drawn criticism, as has the lack of more missions and the design and contracting of SLS. The Verge called it “the rocket without a plan,” while NASA Space Flight noted two years ago that the agency is “searching for missions to solve flight-rate dilemma.” Twitter complains that NASA is on a #journeytonowhere. NASA's former deputy administrator Lori Garver said in 2014 that NASA should cancel SLS.
But Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, considers the SLS’s current design to be the best, and most cost-effective, of the options they investigated. He admits an existential threat to SLS is possible, especially because of the upcoming presidential change. The president provides Congress with a budget request, and Congress has to amend (or not) and then pass that federal budget. Projects and programs can technically get cut any time. The Obama administration, for example, killed the future-human-spaceflight program that preceded SLS, called Constellation, in fiscal year 2011, after four years of development.
Hill feels good about the administration transition, however. He believes that SLS is demonstrating and delivering on its promises, and says that the team has good, concrete stuff to show for themselves. “We’ve got a lot more there,” he says.
This test, this booster and its futile flaring, are part of that there.
*
After two minutes of rocketfire, the cloud of smoke had grown apocalyptic, but the flames started to subside. The roar quieted. The fillings stopped rattling. People put down their cameras and looked at each other, then back out at the rising grey residue of space success.
Even if you were skeptical of NASA’s plan and some of its ways of working, and even if you didn’t much like to have moments of high emotion in public, it would be impossible to feel stoic about such a show of power—and here I guess I am talking about myself. The booster may have remained unmoved, but I didn’t.
We did that, I thought. We’re going places.
And the people around me had actually done that. Some of them might actually be going to those places.
Photo by the author
The viewing area cleared out fast, people going back to their lives, or home to relax, or out to celebrate. Although they might slack for a day or two, that won’t last long. “Next week, we’re all going to still keep working,” Bruce Tiller of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, told reporters.
But Mike Fuller of Orbital ATK did say of the test, pardoning his own pun, “It reignites the enthusiasm.” The day-to-day of any job can wear on a person. But knowing your job results in Tuesdays like this one, which result in human space exploration, it reminds you, he said, “Oh, that’s why I’m working here.”
The smoke continued to drift and dissipate, some heading in the direction of the Great Salt Lake, not many miles but a long drive down a washboard gravel road. If you travel along that road, you’ll hit the Golden Spike monument before you hit the lake.
Photo by the author
In May of 1869, right here in Promontory, the railroad system became transcontinental. A train and its track from the eastern side of the country faced off with a matching set from the western side. The two were separated by ground the length of just one missing railroad tie. The Reverend John Todd literally married the two tracks, joining them with some nice words and a spike of gold.
Wedding the lines was a small, ceremonial step. But having them be wedded was a giant leap not just in human travel, but also for our conception of what distances are insurmountable. A human could cross the continent in a reasonable amount of time. That human could also go home again.
If you keep driving, you’ll go past ranches and ranches until you hit the shore, which is an otherworldly bed of salt that extends a couple hundred yards toward the water. And if you trek out to that water, you’ll see how halophilic microbes have turned the liquid pink. Watermelon waves wash over bulbous, fractal salt structures. Small cliffs of crystal crumble into the tinted water when you step on them.
It looks—truly—like someone else’s planet.
An Afternoon With the World’s Most Powerful Rocket Booster
Given this ancestry, perhaps what makes NASA's newly announced X-plane, the X-57 Maxwell, so striking is that the concept is built around what's kind of just a normal-ass general aviation airplane. Its kin may be found among workaday Cessna flight trainers just as much as the myriad delta-wing jet-powered bombers filling out the ranks of the X-plane program. In fact, the plane itself will be nothing more than a Tecnam P2006T, what's been described as an "entry level" twin-engine aircraft.
The X-57, however, will have been a bit modified. For one thing, the design has 14 engines, not two. And it will run entirely on electricity, hence the "Maxwell" (for James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who theorized electromagnetic radiation). It will have no room for passengers or cargo or much of anything besides a pilot—the interior will be almost completely occupied by huge, heavy batteries (800 pounds).
Image: NASA Photo/Lauren Hughes
All of those tiny engines will be mounted on super-skinny NASA-developed wings. 12 of them will be used only for gaining speed on takeoff, while the two engines mounted on the far ends of the wings will take care of in-flight propulsion. While electric planes are nothing new, the Maxwell will be what few (if any) of them are: fast. It's not racing a jetliner by any means, but the X-57 will cruise at 170 miles per-hour, handily beating out the 43 mph of the Solar Impulse (not that it's a race).
What makes the Maxwell an anyplane is ultimately less its P2006T airframe than its intended purpose, which is practicality. As noted in a NASA press release, the distributed engine architecture of the plane should result in a five-time reduction in energy required to power a private plane at the same cruising speed. It's hoped that the Maxwell will form the early foundations of a quiet, clean, and energy-efficient regional/short-distance airliner. This will take some serious advances in fuel cell/battery technology, but it's hard to think that electric-powered flight isn't foretold, at least for flights within about 100 miles (which is still a lot of regional flights).
“If batteries continue to be on the same rapid increase in energy density that they have been on over the past 10 years or so, one can envision five to 10 years out in the future the battery technology would be such that this particular aircraft could be enabled for a commercial-type aspect,” Matt Redifer, the chief engineer on the project, told the Washington Post.
