A Key to Entertaining Education

Most people of my generation has at least some experience with edutainment games. Primarily at school, but sometime at home as well depending on what our folks wanted to learn, we'd be set in front of the keyboard and given leave to play a "game" that was teaching us something at the same time... the problem is that a lot of the time edutainment games just weren't very good, sacrificing the entertainment aspect for the education aspect. In fairness, though, it's rather difficult to build a non-transparent edutainment game, something that's fun in spite of being educational.

One way to get around this is to build a game that is not itself educational, but which requires learning specific skills in order to succeed. Kerbal Space Program, an awesome spaceflight simulator game I've written about before, is one of these. As your rockets become more and more sophisticated and your flights become more and more ambitious, you can't help but learn about things like orbital mechanics, the way thrust works in a vacuum, and how difficult some things really are to pull off successfully. Like, say, moon landings. So far we've had six successful moon landings, and when you have even a bit of experience with a game like Kerbal Space Program, you know that it's a testament to the skill of everyone from Neil Armstrong to Gene Cernan that not a single moon landing ended with twisted debris strewn across the surface. The most successful of my first six moon landings were qualified by "included the fewest number of explosions." A powered descent on an airless world takes nerves of steel; Neil Armstrong's heart was doing 156 beats per minute during the final descent of Apollo 11. This is not simple stuff.

That, in itself, is an important lesson - building up one's understanding that even if someone knows how to do something, that does not make it easy.

Making a successful Mun landing: hard. Making sure you have enough propellant left to get home: also hard. Going by the crew portraits, I think Jeb is the only one who truly grasps this. Kerbal Space Program is © Squad.

It's easy for us to make grand leaps of logic out of ignorance. To think that anything we don't understand is hard only because we don't understand it, and for someone who knows what they're doing it's child's play. The hard fact is, just because you know how to do a difficult thing doesn't make it stop being difficult, it just makes it stop being practically impossible.

That's a worthwhile education on its own, an idea of what it's really like up there - an appreciation for how difficult some things really are. I'm guilty of that, even just in the context of Kerbal Space Program; I really believed there was a chance that with the smallest fuel tank in the game only one-quarter full, I could not only establish a stable lunar parking orbit but execute the burn to get the crew home. What actually happened was that the fuel was exhausted barely after ascent had begun, and shortly thereafter the Mun gained a new crater. Brutal, unforgiving physics demonstrated how deep in error I was.

So I tried again, with a bigger fuel tank for the descent module. Wouldn't you know it, not only did I manage to land it safely, but took off again and brought the crew all the way home with just a sliver of fuel, despite the Mun swinging around to screw up my trajectory. That single mission taught me more about how spaceflight really works than an entire childhood spent reading starcharts and science books. There is a certain viscerality when you're actually doing these things, or as close to actuality as you can get through a computer screen.

This is what edutainment should be. Not just games where you shoot enemies by solving mathematical equations at them - things that are fun on their own, but demand comprehension of the underlying subject in order to succeed. That's how new things are learned and lessons are retained. A greater understanding of things like this means a people that's equipped to comprehend the way the world works, and that's just what we need in this sort of century.

The Wonderful, Wonderful Q Machine

People are always looking for the next big way to get something from nothing. We've seen it again and again in the financial world, with banks filling their coffers from trading toxic assets that weren't actually worth anything to begin with, and it's there in the history of space exploration too. Space is big, space is vast, space takes a long time to get through; just think of how much easier everything could be if you could get through it fast. It's too bad space doesn't work the same way as Earth does - if you want to move through a vacuum, the only way we've got is to throw crap out the back of your ship in a stunning proof of the Newtonian principles of action and reaction.

People tend to chafe at this. As a result, there's never any shortage of inventors who claim to have built something that would shatter the foundations of modern physics - a reactionless drive, a mode of thrust that doesn't throw any crap out the back of the ship. Considering that ships would need to carry a hell of a lot of crap with them to get anywhere in a reasonable time, a reactionless drive would really make things a hell of a lot easier for those spaceship engineers.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the standard bearer of the field was the Dean drive, a purported reactionless thruster that was championed by John W. Campbell and G. Harry Stine over at Analog, presumably because they really wanted to believe. The drive has since been demonstrated to not be a drive at all, its thrust illusory based on friction with what it's sitting on... not exactly workable for a space drive.

But fear not! We may yet be able to transform submarines into spaceships! Because, ladeez and germs, here comes... the QDrive! It is, according to the website, some sort of radiation pressure thruster designed in such a way that a "differential in radiation pressure generates an unbalanced force that creates thrust... without use of propellant." It's being developed by Cannae LLC, a company apparently focused solely around the development of the drive, presumably deriving its name from the Battle of Cannae out of the hope that the modern scientific orthodoxy will play the part of the Romans, and that the metaphor will not go any further than that... after all, Rome eventually annihilated Carthage.

That's incredible, folks! Just imagine what you could do with something like this! Those QDrive people must be just bursting with ideas...

...well, okay then! (Screen capture from QDrive website.)

The most important sentence in the entire sphere of science, I believe, is this: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you claim that there's an invisible pink dragon living in your garage, you'd better have some good information backing it up if people don't want to think you're crazy. If you claim that pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year is having no effect on the planetary climate whatsoever, it behooves you to offer an explanation for what it's doing instead. And if you've put together a machine that appears to give you something for nothing, it's your responsibility to look very, very closely at it.

I'll admit, not all thrust modes use propellant in the "throw crap out the back of the ship" sense. Solar sails are the usual suspect here; they generate thrust by the pressure of radiation in the solar wind. I note that this is rather similar to the explanation as to how the QDrive works - all I'll say is that not only am I not a physicist, I don't even play one on TV.

Nevertheless, for something like this it's only proper to be skeptical. If an actual reactionless drive ever comes along, it would thrust past skepticism.

An Elevating Sense of Perspective

Some of the most valuable things are those that can teach without you realizing it. On the surface you're just playing a game or having a fun time, but in the hours and days afterward the content of that game percolates in your mind, bubbles and eventually boils over into a realization that you wouldn't necessarily have had without that original impetus.

Kerbal Space Program, the launch-to-orbit sandbox alpha game I reviewed here last week, works like that for me. Sure, the education it provides about rocket engineering and basic orbital mechanics is obvious, even though the lessons - like how the most fuel-efficient way to deorbit is to thrust retrograde at apoapsis, thus lowering your periapsis into the atmosphere, and not simply just thrusting directly toward the planet - aren't necessarily so, given the vast disconnect between our day-to-day experiences on a planetary body and the way things work out there in space.

No, what Kerbal Space Program really helped reinforce for me was a humbling sense of perspective. Now, this ain't no Total Perspective Vortex - it's ordinary, and in that respect, for me it's that much more powerful. One moment your capsule can be in a stable orbit, nearly even circular, far above the world; the next your engine is roaring with the deorbit burn, and only a few moments after that, the command pod parachutes to a safe landing - sometimes in the middle of the ocean, without even a scrap of land on the horizon. Yet only five minutes ago you were up so high that you kept missing the ground and could see an entire continent in a single gaze. I can't help but think that it doesn't seem possible that in less time than it takes to peel the potatoes for dinner, the capsule was up there in orbit; with the familiar world reasserting itself around you after landing, this whole business of "orbit" and "space" almost feels like a dream.

It all looks so small from up here...

My opinion: this is something that more people need to experience, to have that feeling of descending from the heavens to Earth, to watch the world go from something you can see all at once to something that surrounds you and enfolds you and becomes your entire universe. I think we dearly need that humility if we're to prosper in the years and decades ahead, if we're ever to go beyond societies dominated by avaricious corporations and greedy, skittish stock traders and all the other sorts of people who don't care one whit about the consequences of their actions... because, in the grand scheme, their actions are unimportant. You cannot, unfortunately, say the same thing about the consequences of those actions.

The world could be a better place if people could be elevated, if people could see it in a different way. If they could get a broader sense of perspective - to help understand the things that, in the end, are truly important. But it's a world we couldn't easily realize. Some people - be they iron-fisted dictators, money-chasing plutocrats, or whatever else they may be - are supremely wedded to the idea of the world as it seems.

(Incidentally, for the KSP players looking for suggestions on rocket-building - since I know from the search terms that there is no shortage of you all - here's the details of Adventurer III, my current reliably-to-orbit rocket: Stage 6, 4x KSP-30 Solid Fuel Boosters, each equipped with SAS modules and decorative nosecones, attached to the Stage 4 fuel tank by radial decouplers; Stage 4, one 4X-800 Liquid Fuel Engine Cluster fueled by two FL-R1000 Fuel Tanks, topped by a 1X3 Module Adapter Shroud; Stage 2, a NERVA Mk. I Nuclear Thermal Rocket Engine fueled by one FL-T500 Fuel Tank and topped with one SAS module and a stack decoupler. The command pod is also equipped with a parachute. Aside from the NERVA's fuel tank and the SAS modules, this rocket is entirely built with equipment from Sunday Punch's parts pack. To install, just unzip the .zip file into your /Kerbal Space Program/Parts directory.)

Kerbal Space Program: Rocket (Explosion) Science!

When I was young, I thought the shuttle was the future. It was reusable, you see, and glided back to Earth after a successful mission - not like those blast-apart rockets they showed in old movies and TV shows, which weren't new and thus weren't as good. Today, we're on the cusp of another Rocket Age. With the Space Shuttles at rest after thirty years of flight, the business of boosting crap from Earth into space is once again purely the domain of the rocket. The towering stacks of boosters and fuel that flung men to the moon forty years ago are once again the kings of the spaceways. What better time than this to not only celebrate the new ascendancy of the rocket, but gain a more personal appreciation of what it means to get one of those beasts to lumber off the pad?

Or, alternatively, to find dark humor in how those beasts lumber off the pad, immediately start swooping and diving with all the majesty a drunken eagle while the hapless crew screams in terror and you fight to keep control, only for it to punch a new crater into the land seventeen seconds later?

Kerbal Space Program has that.

Under development by Squad Games of Mexico City, Kerbal Space Program is a free-to-download game centered around the establishment and management of an entire space program so that the small, green, cylinder-headed Kerbals can "fulfill their ultimate mission of conquering space." Right now the game is in a bare-bones alpha stage, and presently functions as a wide-open sandbox focused on the construction and launch of spacecraft out of a variety of parts - some included with the basic game, others created by members of the community and made available for download. There are no challenges yet except what you make for yourself; perhaps you start with building a rocket that doesn't immediately explode when the motors start running, and go up from there.

That's not to say it's necessarily easy, though. There is a steep learning curve here, and it's definitely not for everyone. Kerbal Space Program does not pull its punches as far as physics is concerned, to the extent that the center of mass for your rocket will change as its fuel is expended. It hasn't been described as a "Von Braun blooper reel" for nothing. My current bugbear is making it into orbit of Kearth, a rather salubrious world about an order of magnitude smaller than Earth and home of the Kerbals. Once you've got a fair grasp on how to build non-explosive rockets, it's fairly straightforward to build one capable of reaching orbit; actually reaching orbit is something else again. There's a very good reason that NASA uses computers. Even if you do make it into some kind of orbit, it's easy to be left with too little fuel to execute a deorbit burn and return to the surface - leaving those poor Kerbals stranded up there, until the seals on the command pod start to break.

Which is, incidentally, not that hard to imagine. Kerbal Space Program is based around the idea of a rickety, ramshackle space program on the cheap, where you build rockets out of parts found lying by the side of the road or built in a junkyard. It actually reminds me of The Wings of Honneamise in some respects - a shining representation of that belief that we can get anything we want if we want it badly enough.

Planet Kearth is blue, and there's nothing I can do...

Kerbal Space Program is one of those rare games that, just by playing it, you can't help but learn something. You learn about how rockets are staged, how solid-fuel rockets compare to liquid-fuel ones, what it means to enter into an orbit, how to steer a craft tumbling in three dimensions. I think it's got great promise as an educational game in its own right - twelve-year-olds would love it.

Aside from the fierce learning curve, which is more than understandable for a game that approaches rocketry in a rigorous way, I can't think of any complaints I have about Kerbal Space Program that aren't a result of the extremely early state the game is in. Sure, it's difficult to get into orbit when you have look up velocity and altitude tables to figure out whether or not it's a stable one, but I have confidence that some kind of trajectory indicator will be added in a future update. Considering that the game will eventually include missions, space stations, and voyages to other worlds, it's a bit out there to expect players to entirely eyeball their flights into orbit. The finished game will be a pay product, but this original sandbox version will be free forever - and hell, this is a game that I'm eager to buy.

By the way, once you make it into orbit, here's a tip: don't try landing on the night side of the planet. Something's bugged in the game's collision detection there. Your command module will explode upon landing regardless of whether or not you remembered to install and activate the parachute.

My recommendation? Sit back, put on "Space Oddity," "Rocketman," or "Yakety Sax," depending on the tenor of the mission, and help the Kerbals swim in the cosmic ocean. It can be downloaded from the main Kerbal Space Program website here, from its mirror here, or torrented here.

Get this game. GET IT!

HEAT-1X Wave

Here's something you won't find in the Globe and Mail. To be honest, I'm having difficulty finding any reporting on it from North American sources; the New York Times may have something, of course, but I haven't read it out of principle since they decided to start their paywall off in Canada and only Canada. But as to what you won't find - it's simple. As of yesterday morning, the Danish space program has taken one step closer to the heavens.

Yes, Denmark has a space program... of a sort, albeit entirely unlike any other space program in the world today. That's because not only is it a private venture by Danish citizens, the Danes in question are also volunteers and amateurs. The non-profit organization Copenhagen Suborbitals organized the project; you may recall that I wrote about their first, ultimately unsuccessful, launch last year.

On Friday, the Danes didn't make it to space - but they did leave the surface. From a launch platform in the Baltic Sea off Bornholm, HEAT-1X successfully launched, went supersonic, and ultimately reached an altitude of 2.8 kilometers; not exactly kissing space, but pretty good for the first shot of a group of volunteer rocket scientists. As the launch occured around 7:30 Pacific Time, I wasn't awake to watch it - so here's a video.


So what does this mean - aside from the fact, of course, that rockets are awesome? For one part, it's a powerful reminder of just how far we've come in the last seventy-five years; Doctor Goddard never had anything this sophisticated, and the German program that would eventually create the V-2 had the resources and backing of a government behind it. We're in a different stage of rocketry now. The big questions have all been solved, thanks mostly to NASA; the challenge has shifted from science to engineering. Building the damn things is the more daunting part of a rocket launch now. This is just the first step in their program; with this success behind them, they're going to build to go higher and farther, with the ultimate goal of sending a human into space.

I don't think anyone really thought there was ever a place for non-governmental or non-corporate rocketry, considering that rockets tend to be beefy and expensive things. The only alternate voice I recall coming across was a short story in, I believe, a 1980s issue of Analog where basically the entire US space program had been run on an amateur basis, resulting in a world where even the Boy Scouts operated their own space station. At the time, I thought the idea was somewhat unrealistic.

If that's the case, then all Copenhagen Suborbitals had to do was change the nature of reality. In some respects, that's exactly what they did. Space launches are no longer something that can "of course" only be done by governments or powerful corporations. With enough support and enough drive, maybe all we need to get beyond the world is each other, working together toward one goal.

It's people such as these - people such as us - who build the road to the future.

Passing the Torch of the Stars

The Augustine Commission, set up to review NASA's spaceflight goals and provide potential alternatives if necessary, presented its conclusions last week, and while it will likely be some time before President Obama makes a final decision on it, the implications are still percolating across the internet. The document is about a hundred and seventy pages, so it'll take me some time to go through it, but at least they didn't hide the general thrust of their argument. Human spaceflight isn't dead - far from it - but the Commission believes that NASA's current goal of a renewed lunar exploration program is ill-founded, and prefers a "flexible path" that would take astronauts to near-Earth asteroids or the moons of Mars - visits to Luna and Mars themselves would, for the foreseeable future, be confined to orbital missions only, to spare the expense of fuel necessary for landing and takeoff.

I do have my disagreements with the Commission's findings as I currently understand them, as I believe a lunar facility would be advantageous: both in terms of low-g research impossible to conduct on Earth or the International Space Station, as well as resource gathering that could support future space endeavors with materials that does not have to be hefted out of Earth's gravity well. Fortunately, the situation today is not the same as it was in the 1970s - when it comes to the potential of activity beyond low Earth orbit, NASA is no longer the only game in town for the foreseeable future.

A Mercury-Atlas rocket in the Kennedy Space Center Rocket Garden, February 2005

Take China. I know that China has made statements about how it would like to be involved in the International Space Station project, but at this point I don't think it's very likely that Beijing would be let in. Beyond that, I don't think defusing that sort of international competition in space development would be a good long-term thing. China has plans to orbit a space station of its own as Project 921-2, with the first element potentially launching as early as next year. A Chinese lunar mission is a natural follow-up, and if the Augustine Commission's report gains traction in Washington, the next boots on the moon likely will be Chinese ones.

I do wholeheartedly agree with the Commission on its view toward low Earth orbit transport. Its conclusion is that NASA should get out of the space trucking business entirely, and leave LEO crew and cargo flights to commercial providers. SpaceX, after its successful Falcon 1 launches in 2008 and 2009 and with the heavy-lift Falcon 9 set to light off from Cape Canaveral at the end of November, seems almost ready to take over this responsibility. Really, at this point it's the most sensible thing. Until now, NASA has been the workhorse because only NASA had the capability to do it, and there are those in Washington and elsewhere who do not particularly relish having to rely on the Russian Federation to maintain the American manned spaceflight program.

NASA blazed the trail, and now other organizations can carry the load. It's high time that NASA pass the torch to the companies and focus its time, money, and effort on what it was always meant to do - extend the horizon further and further.