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NASA Supporting Nanotech Development
It doesn't come easy writes "In laboratories around the country, NASA is supporting the burgeoning science of nanotechnology. The basic idea is to learn to deal with matter at the atomic scale -- to be able to control individual atoms and molecules well enough to design molecule-size machines, advanced electronics and "smart" materials."
NASA excells when they are funding or developing something totally new. They are not so good at mundane operational issues.
For example NASA let SRB O-ring problems creep up on them over many years. Same thing with TPS damage by foam. They don't deal with things which change slowly over time. They work on feel, rather than analysis.
But as developers of totally amazing stuff (Mercury, gemini, Apollo, Shuttle) they do very well.
My advice: if anything comes of this nanotech effort, NASA should sell the technology to private industry as fast as possible. Get out of the operational side and start developing the next big thing.
Back to the shuttle. Once the system was developed it could have continued to be funded and regulated by one or more Government departments, I just don't think NASA is the department to do the job.
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If there's one lesson that the shuttle sage should have taught NASA - even without the many other demonstrations from around the world such as Japan's 5th Generation Computing, the EU's Eureka programme, etc. - is that large-budget top-down science does not produce value for money.
The best motor for innovation is competition, and the main problem with NASA-style science is that it eliminates scientific and engineering competition and replaces it with burocratic competition. Real progress is made by small teams that see risk as opportunity, while NASA-style science is done by large teams that see risk as something to be avoided at all costs.
Let's see research conducted around a much more open competition for the available money, provided more in the form of prizes and awards and less as research grants.
Let's stop paying people on their skills in writing grant applications and start rewarding people for their ability to think in creative and useful ways.
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I wonder if we will ever get to the point of nanotechnology described in Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age, where we have complete control of atoms and can buld infinetly strong structures infinetly small.
If we do the problem of sending vehicles to X will be much easier to due the fact that there would not be hardly as much inertia to overcome.
Its pretty obvious why NASA has there hands in nanotechnology development.
My advice: if anything comes of this nanotech effort, NASA should sell the technology to private industry as fast as possible. Get out of the operational side and start developing the next big thing.
You hit the nail on the head and frankly I think NASA should be doing EVERYTHING this way. NASA should just open up everything they do outright for licensing by private parties, from the rocket boosters to the robot technology on up.
If you look at the state of private space development, NASA is basically already acting as R&D for these people, who are looking at the overengineered overcareful things NASA has done and trying to recreate this as something relatively efficient or sane for private business; however NASA is not being very helpful as such because we don't have their exact designs, so to some degree the people trying to reengineer this stuff for the private sector (1) have to work in the dark, creating designs from scratch and (2) are limited to the outside fringes of industry because people in "big business" are not going to be terribly comfortable with unproven technology such as Mr. Rutan and co. are working with.
We should look at NASA for what it is-- a subsidised R&D department for an economy which doesn't have the courage to do hard or weird things on its own-- and make that explicit. Make it like the NSF for technology/engineering development, with the focus on space exploration because that's a problem at the edges of engineering that tends to uncover problems no one else has with solutions everyone else can use (see: mars robotics, apollo computer etc), but with a stated mission of getting the technology they create into the hands of private developers as soon as it's created.
When it come to the applications suitable to NASA, i.e. infinitely strong materials with almost no weight, It is more important to be able to control the actual bonding of atoms rather the atoms themselves.
If you could bond two atoms together where the bonding forces are greater any force know to man, then you could every object one atom thick and indestructible.
Imagine the bullet-proof clothing you could make out this or the weight of a spacecrafts fuel tank, or the weight of anything for that matter.
Every time NASA comes up lately I see a bunch of libertarian extremists ranting about how public space programs are so evil and we need to destroy them so private space programs can flourish, and a bunch of NASA fanboys ranting about how the private space programs suck so much and they need to get out of the way so NASA can work.
WTF?
Why can't we have a great public space exploration program AND great private space development? We may not have either right now, but I don't see any reason we can't have both. In particular I don't see why either public or private space development is helped by trying to demolish or tear down the other one.
True, that's the pure premise of nanotech, but it doesn't seem to work like that. I'm an organic chemist, so most of this materials stuff isn't in my domain, but I do read and understand most of the journals. And the flaw is that because governments and the appropriate bodies love nanotech as a buzz word, far too many researchers use the term overliberally, and corrupt it's true meaning.
Nasa has every right, and should be at the forefront of research into new materials et c. But this is materials chemistry/physics/engineering. Not nanotech.
Give a man a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. (Terry Pratchett)
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