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."

Comments

Should be more like this

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:Should be more like this

[Bogtha]

if anything comes of this nanotech effort, NASA should sell the technology to private industry as fast as possible.

Sell? The public funds NASA. NASA's research should go back to who paid for it instead of locking it up within one company. I thought the USA was supposed to be a capitalist society? Let anybody use this new technology and there will be competition instead of one company doing everything.

Re:Should be more like this

[WindBourne]

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.

You make it sound like challenger and columbia were slow mistakes. There were not. The shuttles have a known set of issues. All mechanical things do. We are asking the most complex piece of equipment ever built to work in the harshest of environments. All of the issues with each shuttle were known way ahead of time. In both cases, engineers wanted to either delay and/or inspect. The problem in BOTH of these, was that people in charge were politicians. In the case of the colmbia, o'keefe had apointed a set of yes men who had less engineering and more "management/polical" experience. They were happy to ignore the suggestions, advice, and even pleadings of those below them to please those above. NASA did not screw up. O'keefe and his political appointees did. Likewise, the same for the challenger. The real lesson from colmbia will be that real engineers need to be put in charge, not "managers".

Re:Should be more like this

[suitepotato]

It should be sold, as in licensed, and not merely given away as that generates licensing revenue for the government which if the laws covering it were written right, would allow a lessening of general tax revenue being sent to NASA proportionate to licensing income to a certain point above which NASA reaps the excess to expand their operations.

It should of course be in the domain of the executive and legislative branches as per usual as to international licensing/sharing of data gleaned from NASA work.

NASA should be in the business of straddling the line between government operations and private operations as a bridge between our heavy/technological industries and the government so that what we as taxpayers invest comes back to us in the form of improvements in our standard of living. It will never be NASA taking us to the moon for vacations. It will be private companies. We shouldn't do anything that cuts off or otherwise puts off that eventual future.

Re:Should be more like this

[WindBourne]

But tell me, do you have any evidence of your accusation?

First off, I have worked with NASA, so I am biased.

Read the Columbia report. If you read it, they point their fingers in a number of direction, but in the end, they point to the very top management as being the crux of the problem. Basically, it nicely says that they did not listen to those below them. It was the same issue with with challenger. The people up top were threatening the engineers with their jobs if they did not go along with the go decision. In the both cases, the top people were light-weight engineers (and some were none engineers).

A good example of how inept O'Keefe was, is that he was willing to accept that the shuttle would end in 2010, but new rockets would not be ready until 2012. IOW, there is a deliberate 2 year minimum window where the USA can not put man into space. That is totally ridiculus. Worse, he was not working towards encouraging the private world to step forward.

As to the current guy, well, they are night and day. Michael Griffin is highly educated, loads of research, and generally a yearning to return to space. Mike is part of Mars Society and Planetary Society. Mike has spent his life either researching, managing, or both. Assuming that GWB and congress do not get in the way, we are going places (and even if they get in the way, he may steamroll over them assuming that he is not fired).

I have made no bones in my past postings what I think about Bush. If you look at my foes, all but one are because I spoke out against GWB and his policies. All the funnier, because the 2 presidents I hate the most (reagan and current bush), I ended up working on DOD and intel world related projects, that I thought were horrible (but they were very cool jobs with loads of academic stimulation).

Obviously thinking along the lines of...

[Anonymous Coward]

"So these atom things... just stuff spinning around other stuff right? Okayee, we're in business!"

Re:I say, awesome.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Well, they seem to have trouble exploring the infinitely large, so they may have better luck with the infinitely small...

What about nano-economics?

[pieterh]

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.

Re:What about nano-economics?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

First of all, up to recently, space exploration was an activity that can't possibly be boosted by competition. Totally New Things[tm] usually come from government-funded research labs, such as the ARPANET, the moon landing program, etc... That's because such ground-breaking experiments can only be put together at a complete loss. Once the road is open, let competition pave it.

Secondly, it's true NASA today is stifled by a risk-avoiding attitude, but that's only because the administration (and the public) doesn't really have a strong desire to go to space, therefore any small problem leads to a reduction in NASA budget. The great things NASA did in the past were done because the administration just had to achieve what Kennedy promised, otherwise they'd have lost the race to the moon. In that light, loss of astronauts and giant rockets exploding right and left weren't very big concerns compared to losing face with the USSR. Nowadays, there is no USSR to compete against.

Re:What about nano-economics?

[MichaelSmith]

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.

I think science is totally broken because of the secretive, competitive approach which scientists take to towards their work.

Science is not really a commercial activity, people who spend 10 years working on something and lose in the last month to another team can have their entire career at risk over small issues of secrecy and professional ethics.

An open source approach in science would accomplish two things:

1. You could easily prove who had what idea first
2. Scientists could immediately build on the work of others without being accused of plagurism

Right now, working in science is too much of a risk for people in some fields; particularly biotech. Why devote your career to something when you are judged by a first past the post system?

Re:What about nano-economics?

[A beautiful mind]

Real science is what you've described.

Commercialized science is not science, just refining.

Re:What about nano-economics?

[Kaenneth]

Hopefully China will have some manned missions soon, to give the U.S. Space program a kick in the pants.

Re:What about nano-economics?

[Jeremi]

I'm quite amazed that 40 years after we walked on the moon, we are ending the programme, because of falling chunks of foam.

You don't think 24 years is a good run for a single spacecraft design? Hell, most car designs don't last half that long, and they are much simpler. It's time to move on to something better.

Re:What about nano-economics?

[happyemoticon]

Furthermore, many corporations are terrified of technology which fundamentally transforms the market. Granted, this is not science per se, but it still represents a way in which corporations have a vested interest in iterative, trivial progress. They expect to extract all of the money they can from a particular technology before cooking up the next one: stable, predictable, and stagnant. Yeah, it's old hat, but look at the internet revolution: Xerox dropped the ball because they had a vested interest in stability.

I wonder...

[Ichigo Kurosaki]

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.

Re:I wonder...

[Master of Transhuman]

Just to comment on one point, it's pretty much established - Drexler pointed it out in his seminal nanotech work, "Engines of Creation" - that it will NOT be possible to produce "infinitely strong structures infinitely small."

It will be possible to produce materials that are stronger than at present, but there is a physical limit. (IANAP - I Am Not A Physicist - or ME - Materials Engineer)

Drexler's first work covers the possibilities of nanotech very well, although do note that he warns that he describes some applications in contexts that might in fact be made obsolete by nanotech.

Nanotech - otherwise known as Chemistry

[PDoc]

Fir gawd sake! Dealing with matter on an atomic level has been around since Newton's time - and in it's modern incarnation since the late 19th century. It's called chemistry. Using macroscopic tools to inact precise molecular interactions and rearrangements. You know it's gone way to far when simple crown-ether derivatives get renamed "molecular cages" or worse "nano capsules" in an attempt to get funding. Want some funding for your research proposal? Drop in "nano", "bio" and "green" a few times, loose any detail of what you're acutally trying to do, and no problem...

Re:Nanotech - otherwise known as Chemistry

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Nanoscience/Nanotechnology is the intersection of Physics, Chemistry, and/or Biology. It is when two or three of these fields is combined synergistically.

Yes, the study of small things has been around for hundreds of years. But you will find that within the last 100 years chemistry and physics have grown in their tangents. Nanoscience is putting them back together along with biology.

Re:Nanotech - otherwise known as Chemistry

[QuantumG]

An idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about gets modded up by other idiots who don't know he's an idiot. Gotta love Slashdot. It'd be funny if it didn't remind us so much of the US congress.

Re:Nanotech - otherwise known as Chemistry

[PDoc]

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.

Re:Nanotech - otherwise known as Chemistry

[Teclis]

Ahh, Classic ignorance.

Oh so many times I've heard this arguement. I'm a researcher in Surface Science and I look at atoms and molecules all the time. Chemical synthesis is very amazing, I give you that. Being able to attatch specific functional groups to complex molecules is no small task. However, the controlled manipulation of these molecules and atoms in physical space is not something that classical Chemistry can do. It's tools developed by engineers and physicists that are now allowing the next generation of nano-technology. STM and AFM are examples of two very powerful (but each with its own weaknesses) tools. The state of the art can be described as cave men tools trying to build a sky scraper. It's not going to happen. But we continue to use these tools and develop them until we have tools good enough to do what we need. Now, back to chemistry. There are now several groups in chemistry who use the tools developed by physicists to study chemical properties. An example is controled chemical reactions on surface step edges, very interesting stuff. Now I ask you, what is the difference between this reaction and the reaction done in a beaker 100 years ago?

The key difference is that we have nano-scale control of the atoms/molecules. I would hardly call mixing two beakers of solution together (OK, a bit simplified, but you get my message) nano-scale control.

Well, for one thing, we can now observe intemediate states and control reactions like never before. We can induce reactions at will and hopefully, (the big one) Manipulate (with control) reactions in a way we could never do before. Imagine building DNA without enzymes to cut and paste like a Frankenstein. COMPLETE control of the nano and sub-nano scale is far from here. But we are making progress like mad. 25 years ago, nobody would have thought this possible, but it's now happening. It's a bit scarey to think of the materials we can make, but it's exciting to think of the possibilities. Sure Chemistry has been good to us, and yes we need it, but there is no possible way that Chemistry alone, as practiced for so long can accomplish what modern Physical Chemistry (or Chemical Physics) can do.

Re:Nanotech - otherwise known as Chemistry

[QuantumG]

No offense, but what you're arguing is that people are abusing the word nanotechnology to get funding whilst claiming that nanotechnology is just chemistry. i.e., you're assigning malice to people based on an argument founded in ignorance. Yes people get funding to do things which are not related to nanotechnology in the slightest just because they throw "nano" into the title of the funding application, but have you considered that maybe they, like you, actually think nanotechnology is related to their field? Nanotechnology is the study of precise control of molecular scale systems. Eric Drexler's work is nanotechnology. Ralph C. Merkle's work is nanotechnology. To claim it is just organic chemistry is naive.

hmm

[NanoGator]

Why do I have the feeling that before too much longer, 'nano' will be the next big buzzword? Buy the new 'NanoPod Video Player!'

Okay, sorry, I have nothing interesting to say about this article. Just remembering the good ol' days when every new exciting tech began with an E.

NASA should be an IP clearing house

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Well...

[Ichigo Kurosaki]

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.

"Grey goo" will increase space travel demand

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like an ingenious marketing ploy to me.

Once nanobots take over this planet in the form of Grey Goo... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo Organic life's only hope for survival become space travel.

I just don't get this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Wow

[unts]

Nanotechnology is going to be huge!

End result

[AtariAmarok]

"As the result of a miscalculation involving metric vs imperial units, the entire NASA shuttle fleet was swallowed by a small dog"

Oil is the ticket

[Sgt_Nikon]

Forget uses for NASA, how about create some nano machines that can create crude oil from garbage! All they need to do is rearrage the garabage molecules into crude oil or maybe hydrogen. Then the we can support our retarded "throw-away" society.

Re:What about nano-economics? - mod parent down!

[davids-world.com]

Sorry, but have you actually worked as a researcher somewhere?

Science is pretty much open source, in most fields. The Nanotech people might be a little more secretive because the commercial application is so close, and of course the commercial research and development groups don't publish a lot of papers, but in general I wonder how you've come to think that.

I don't know of anyone who was been working on something for 10 years secretly. I don't know anyone who would have a name in the field, attend conferences and get research grants without publishing one's work.

And pretty much every researcher already works by building on the works of others. Science has used the open source principle ages before any software engineer was even feeding a machine with punchcards.

nanotech reference from 1919

[johnrpenner]

>> spoken in 1919:

At the present time the Earth is going through its Fourth Round, and
this is the mineral. During this time it is the task of mankind to work
upon the mineral kingdom... We are now in the midst of this activity,
and in the course of the next epochs, THE EARTH WILL HAVE TO BECOME
COMPLETELY TRANSFORMED, SO THAT EVENTUALLY THERE WILL BE
NO SINGLE ATOM ON THE EARTH THAT HAS NOT BEEN WORKED ON BY MAN.
In earlier times these atoms became more and more solidified; now however
they are becoming increasingly separated. Radio-activity did not exist in
earlier times and could not therefore be discovered. It has only existed
for a few thousand years, because now the atoms split up more and more.

(Foundations of Esotericism, Oct.5-1905, Rudolf Steiner Press, pp.66-67)

NASA's Vision - Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm

[jamrock]

NASA's support for nanotech R and D is not surprising, given their concepts for the future of space exploration. A cornerstone of this new initiative depends completely on nanotechnology [or more properly molecular engineering] namely ANTS, the Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm. NASA's ANTS site has very nice overviews and movies of the concepts and potential missions, in particular PAM, the Prospecting Asteroid Mission.

Briefly, PAM envisions spacecraft in the shape of a cube with a 10 cm edge, each with a mass of 1 kg. Constructed mainly of carbon nanotubes in autonomous space-based factories, a thousand are assembled into a cube with a 1 m edge and launched from the Lagrange points on a 2 1/2 year journey to the asteroid belt. Each 1 m cube separates into its component sub-cubes, each of which deploys a solar sail. The 1,000-strong swarm separates into subswarms, each of which seeks out and surveys a single asteroid. All data collected during the survey is entrusted to a single cube, which then returns to earth for recovery, while the remaining members of the subswarm move on to another target and repeat the process. Fascinating QuickTime movies are available on the site.

Podcast from NASA Nano-dude.

[Matt_Joyce]

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail585.htm l