Space exploration and biology make up inseparable parts of the future

Brandon D. Chase

With objectives ranging from a permanent human presence in space to an intelligent, worm-like machine exploring the surface of Mars, the U.S. aerospace program will excite the public and the scientific community alike in the coming years, while ensuring American leadership in a world economy, said NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, during his plenary lecture in November at ASME's International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in Orlando, Fla.

But, Goldin warned, that will happen only with an immediate shift in the way technological advancement is conceived and pursued. Technologies will have to mimic the complexities of the biological world, something that will occur only through a meaningful cross-pollination among the fields of biology, engineering and physical science.

Goldin, the NASA Administrator for seven years, is an advocate of interplanetary space travel who played a major role in establishing the International Space Station and an ongoing series of robotic missions to Mars.

During his plenary address, Goldin discussed where the American aerospace program should be going and how best to get there (see "The Great out of the Small," Mechanical Engineering, November 2000, page 70).

NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin

Self-sufficiency will be essential for all projects, according to Goldin, whether they involve a machine slithering across Mars, a probe landing on an asteroid, or a submarine exploring a suspected ocean on Jupiter's fourth moon, Europa. At these distances from Earth, active control becomes impossible and mission control irrelevant.

Achieving self-sufficiency, Goldin said, will require producing robots that are capable of assessing their environment and making decisions on how to proceed; creating machines capable of self-diagnosis and self-healing; and designing propulsion methods that achieve a good fraction of the speed of light.

New materials must be developed to withstand the harsh environments of foreign atmospheres. Meanwhile, said Goldin, the total power consumption of these systems must be decreased by a factor of 1,000, reducing energy demands to levels consistent with self-sufficiency.

Nothing short of a wholesale revolution in technology is needed, Goldin said, in the burgeoning fields of biotechnology, genetic algorithms, information technology, nanotechnology and neural networks.

Genetic algorithms and neural networks, he said, hold the promise of computer systems that can learn and adapt, outperforming our current systems with millions fewer lines of code.

Nanotechnology will explore the possibility of building microstructures one atom at a time and, from those, constructing macro-structures that are 100 times stronger than steel at one-sixth the weight, Goldin said.

For Goldin, the vital link is between biology and biotechnology. From informing researchers about the nature of intelligence, to understanding the computational efficiency of the brain, to explaining how a firefly converts chemical energy into light energy with an efficiency close to 100 percent, the capabilities of future technologies will hinge upon how well the lessons of biology are incorporated into research.

So, Goldin said, one of his goals for NASA is that within the next decade, one in three NASA hires should have formal and extensive training in biology.

Yet Goldin fears that these fields are being given short shrift in American education and industry, to the point where the country's position as a global technological leader is becoming endangered.

That spells trouble not just for the space program, the Administrator said, but for the economic health and stability of the United States as a whole. "We are not invested in the future like we should be," he said.

As an example, Goldin pointed to the waste of a computing industry that spends $5 billion to build a chip factory and is facing a future of $50 billion factories, yet, despite a well-known and rapidly approaching physical limit to silicon chip miniaturization, spends only hundreds of millions of dollars researching new computing technologies.

Soon, Goldin said, "We will be at the physical and economical limits of what we can do, and lose the unbelievable productivity we have that drives our economy."

Instead, Goldin encouraged institutions, both public and private, to balance short-term endeavors with long-term, high-risk/high-payoff research. Such foresight, he said, will ensure a healthy future.

But beyond financial support, this technological revolution will require a shift in the thought and training of engineers. In Goldin's future, there are no boundaries among biology, physics and technology.

Engineering will begin at the quantum and atomic levels, progress to the molecular and phenomenological, ultimately reaching process simulation and systems development. Here, Goldin said, the multidisciplinary mind becomes indispensable.

Not only will scientists and engineers need to develop multidisciplinary skills, but professional and academic institutions will have to integrate related departments. "You can't just have nanotechnology by itself, biotechnology by itself, or information technology by itself," Goldin said.

The integration of those technologies will create the power to create "interdisciplinary research networks of people who understand these three critical technologies and bring them together into the normal engineering environment."

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