Burning Man 2015

I just got back from Burning Man. It was awesome. But what IS Burning Man? Some kind of week-long drug-fueled hippy rave in the desert? Well, if you want it to be. 

Photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/105494084231616659850/BurningMan2015 

Burning Man is a choose-your-own-adventure in a brave, bold, experimental space. 70,000 people build a temporary city in the Nevada desert. For one week, at the end of August, Black Rock City is the third biggest city in Nevada. Burning Man has evolved a culture which is reflected by the 10 principles: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, Immediacy. The rest of this blog is devoted to trying to evoke my experience in this environment.

In 2014 I went to Burning Man. To prove this wasn't a mistake, in 2015 I went again. While it's true you only get one shot to do something for the first time, this time I resolved to try/do different things and, as much as possible, avoid retreading the previous year's experiences.

Burning Man 2015 was themed "Carnival of Mirrors," with appropriately named streets and art. I went to my usual costuming effort with a strong emphasis on keeping out the sun - long pants and a labcoat.

Rather than deliver a blow-by-blow account of all the stuff I've already forgotten, I thought I'd break this up thematically, deliver a series of anecdotes, and then eventually peter out like moisture in the desert.

Flying to Burning Man is fast, convenient, and trendy. So I drove with a bunch of undergrad friends in a heavily loaded truck and trailer, cruising up the 395 through heat, smoke, and geology to camp at Mono Lake, before continuing the next day through Bridgeport, Carson City, Reno, etc and, turning off at Fernleigh, joining the 100 mile line. By the time we had cleared the gate (no catastrophic rain this time) and offloaded, it was early on Monday morning. I took my beautiful bike and rode all over the playa looking at early art installations and trying to catch up with people I didn't yet know.

In 2014 I had camped at the airport and associated with Phage within The Institute Village, helping out with the Tesla coil and the Dr Brainlove art car/mutant vehicle. In 2015 I answered an advertisement in the "Jackrabbit Speaks" Burning Man newsletter, and was, after a long, arcane ritual, inducted into Accaplaya, the Burning Man a cappella group (with mysteriously transposed letter doublings). Having arrived on Monday, we rehearsed on Tuesday, performed a gig at Center Camp (Wednesday), Crossroads (Thursday) and Jazz Cafe (Friday) as well as numerous 'walk and sing' engagements. On Saturday we struck the camp, watched the Man burn, Sunday ate the remaining bacon (well, about 10% of it), and on Monday I left. 

It is difficult to describe just how awesome it was to sing with Accaplaya. We'd wander into a camp and ask if we could sing them a song. Usually they'd respond with 'oh, okay' and sit back with bemused and skeptical looks on their faces. We'd play the note, count the time, and immediately enter into one of our five rehearsed songs, pitch perfect 6 part close harmony. We got to see their faces transition from surprise to shock to disbelief to wonder to joy to tears, finish the song, and then be showered with whatever they had available. Bacon, snacks, or tequila were always welcome. More than one guy said through tears he'd been coming to the burn for 17 years and it was the most amazing thing he'd seen. Another camp was having a Prom Night and perhaps a dozen women of all ages in incongruous fairy princess dresses insisted we stay and sing the whole set. Another camp spontaneously jumped up and started an instant dance party half way through a song, which none-the-less we managed. Do Nothing Camp gifted us a ride on their giant swing, to which you are attached by the ankles before being whirled upside down 50 feet high.

I rode wonderbike out to the airport a few times to catch up with old friends and, on Thursday, give a happy hour talk (at the Acme Bomb Company Bar) on 'the complete history of life, condensed'. On Monday, I found my 2014 friend D at the airport, where she'd been promoted from ride wrangler to head logistics manager - and had effectively built everything. She was a bit stressed out so I hung out for a few hours, built her dome (with a bit of help), and judiciously distributed a few back massages. On Wednesday I took someone I found looking lost out at a pipe organ installation to the airport for the virgin burner ritual, in which you make a dust angel, ring a bell, and scream "I'm not a virgin anymore". I had never done the ritual myself, so I jumped in too, though by this point I had already reached dust equilibrium.

Speaking of dust, most days were WINDY, gusting up to 60mph, and visibility sometimes dropped to three or four feet. Needless to say cycling in these conditions occasionally lapsed to Type Two fun. I found a few sheltered places, met interesting co-shelterees, and then (literally) scattered to the winds. I set up my tent on Monday, by Tuesday things in it were dusty. By Wednesday it was no longer apparent that my tent contained things at all, but they could be located by memory. Yes, I paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege!

Changing environments rapidly is something I always find disorienting and isolating. I do it anyway when I go on long trips, but Burning Man was no exception. The first few days had their ups and downs. By Friday I was getting into the swing of things, which was lucky because it was my 28th birthday! The rest of the weekend was extraordinary, and not just because the wind and dust died down. Nevertheless, when exploring the Temple, a mausoleum in honour of friends and family who have died during the previous year, it struck me as worthy of further thought that so many people, perhaps 200,000 in the US, total, had the means and inclination to identify more strongly with a highly temporary, artificial, unsustainable week in the Nevada desert, than with the rest of their lives. I'm not suggesting this is a bad thing, just interesting. I hope our society in the 'default world' continues to evolve towards greater acceptance and free expression.

One of the highlights of Burning Man is "Big Art". Big Art is art that is big. Sometimes REALLY big. There are hundreds of mutant vehicles, which are essentially rolling sculptures for transportation, music, and prestige. Static installations dot the playa, most of them trying to combine elements of both day and night. My personal favourites include large buildings or structures that require non-standard interaction, such as climbing. Phage brought another bigger, badder Tesla coil this year to produce fabulously noisy music. Flaming Lotus Girls brought their Serpent Mother installation, a popular gigantic burning snake skeleton that kept me warm for hours at a time. At intervals, its central egg would open and shoot out 50 foot long jets of coloured flames. At the far end of the city is a place called the pinhole, a shaded area where you can quietly relax on dusty carpet and chill during the heat of the day. Also in deep playa was a gigantic metal mesh sculpture of a woman who moved with breathing and posture - somewhat disconcerting when first noticed!

Many art pieces contain elements of interactivity. The Phage Tesla coil had its tempo controlled by a mechanism inside a lightning-protected cage. Another camp within The Institute, False Profit, brought their Battle Blimps to the playa. A large dome with radio controlled Hydrogen filled blimps that fought to the death with hot tapers on their noses. Phage's Dr Brainlove, a giant climbable brain with 20,000 computer/brain controlled LEDs all over it, returned, bigger and badder than ever.

Accaplaya camp, it turns out, is infested with Australians. No fewer than five of us were running around. This is a bit of a worry, as I have been chronically Australian deprived for years, going so far as to watch Jim Jeffries on YouTube for a dose of the vernacular. W, M, A, and C indulged my rapid slide back to mystifying Australian slang, and I thoroughly enjoyed telling stories of the old country with them all.

One of the nicest things about the burn this year was serendipity. 

One of my favourite things to do is to go to the post office (BRC3PO) and volunteer to deliver mail. And also drop off my addressed post cards, which hopefully will arrive at their destinations soonish! The person inside (who is also a volunteer) will give you a stack of perhaps half a dozen letters, divorce notices, blackmail messages, packages, whatever, and you get to deliver them. Perhaps 2/3 of them are pretty straight forward. Ride your bike to the address, locate the camp, locate the person, deliver the message. Watch the surprise and joy and this meaningful human interaction. It also helps you get into the more remote parts of the city and explore - you never know what you'll find.

About 1/3 of the letters are badly addressed and thus impossible to deliver. Well, not quite! You can take the letter to the computers at Playa Information and type the camp name, or the addressee's name, into the database and see what pops up. Usually, nothing. So, you check the map, ask around, gather clues, explore in likely looking regions of the city, and, sometimes, you find the destination and success is yours! On one occasion I was able to deliver a postcard with only a single name, but there's a better example I'm going to share here. I had a postcard addressed to someone at a camp called The Pink Hole (because we're all grownups here, except the kids), located (allegedly) at 1pm and Inner Circle. Well, there's a place called The V Spot there, but that's for organizing volunteers - it's not a camp. Someone thought it would be connected with Greeter Camp. After about 6 attempts to deliver this postcard over two days, I was back at Playa Info around midnight, and didn't want to get back on my bike right away, so I decided to walk around. In the back of the Playa Info shed was a room with pinking colouring - could that be it? Out the back was Lost and Found, still nothing. Beyond that, wandering around, I found a small cluster of hexayurts (heat resistant tents made of foam and mylar) and some people sitting around a food and drink-stuffed table watching the moon climb over the mountains. "Good evening, what camp is this?" "The Pink Hole". It had been hiding under my nose the whole time. I ended up discussing the merits of free-solo rock climbing with one of the ladies there for about an hour, and then went to bed. Over the week I was able to successfully deliver ALL the dead letters. 

What, you want more serendipity? My friend D, the airport logistics manager, was camped with Dogpilot, and they both managed to schedule a fight in Death Guild camp's Mad Max-themed Thunderdome on DPW family night to help them blow off steam. After this fight, which was, by all accounts, epic, D was cooling off in a nearby bar when two American Sign Language (ASL) speaking girls showed up. With a book, a pen, and some patience, they became firm friends. I later met the three of them at the airport while waiting to give my talk on the origins of life on Thursday, and we had a good chat. It turned out they had an ulterior motive to be at the airport - they were looking for the pink lady who organizes ride gifts. Well, last year, D wore a pink tutu and was the ride wrangler, and they found each other, after only about 3 hours of Twitter-like conversation.

One of the nicest surprises of the whole event was my friend C showing up on Saturday. Intermittent text message capability led us to meet up around 6, I managed to crash my bike with her on the handlebars shortly after, and she convinced me to stay one more day to drive back to LA on Monday.

In the meantime, Accaplaya struck camp and then departed en masse for the Man Burn. This is the biggest party ever. All the mutant vehicles circle up around the central sculpture, wooden, more than 100 feet high. At 9pm the festivities begin, only adding to the stochastic background of thumping techno. By 9:20 the Man raises his arms, the fireworks begin, several giant fireballs get things going, and then, eventually, the burning structure collapses. Not long after, robots cajole the burning pieces into a pile and the bacon cooking can begin. People sit around the house-sized pile of coals and celebrate the oxidation of a symbol representing (inter alia) parts of the former self best left behind. After the burn, I located the Serpent Mother, keeping warm as the night plunged towards freezing. They eventually put on their multicoloured flame-thrower show (possibly the third most awesome thing that happened that day), after which I hopped between burning art pieces for warmth before retiring for the night.

On Sunday, I enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere as more than half the city departed, MOOPed (picked up trash including stray hairs and splinters), explored the remaining art of the city. At dusk I made dinner from some pasta on my jetboil, finishing just in time to walk to the Temple burn. Unlike the previous night, people sit at the given distance, and shut up. The Temple celebrates the lives of departed friends, and the finiteness of human consciousness. Its burning is a time for relatively somber reflection. Unlike last year, both the Man and the Temple collapsed relatively quickly, the crowd moved in and began a very slow anti-clockwise circling walk around the burning embers. Post burn, I located the EDM (electronic dance music) confinement zone, and like moths to the flame followed the Robot Heart art car. 

Words cannot convey just how awesome (in every sense) this creation is. Perhaps originally a bus, today Robot Heart is a wall of 24 inch sub-woofers with high-fi mid range and tweeter cones on the side, which can produce probably 130dB from 1Hz to 30kHz with no distortion. Arriving early in the night, the music was still relatively light and trancey. At some point the bass kicked in like thunderclouds rolling through the landscape, and I retired to a more boppy location beneath an amazing laser light show. I shed my insulation and danced until the dust was hammered to mirror smoothness. 

Monday was time to depart. Dusty human and gear moved smoothly across the playa as the already-hollow remnants of Black Rock City receded into the distance. In a Reno cafeteria, I marveled at: floor! ceiling! walls! doors! windows! lack of dust! electricity! running water! internet! soap! flushing toilets! food that wasn't bacon!

The dust persists. I will find it in my things for months to come. But even if I never go to Burning Man again, will the dust ever leave my mind?

Ephemerisle 2015

What is Ephemerisle?

Photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/105494084231616659850/Ephemerisle2015

Seeking to answer just this question, last Saturday I woke at 4am, got on a plane, met P at SFO, rented a car, and drove out to Paradise Point Marina, near Stockton. There, we were given a simple task - load the contents of a few trucks onto five waiting houseboats.

On the first pass we were so successful that, laden beneath 20,000lbs of 3/4" ply, the houseboat engines were too submerged to be used. Weight redistribution followed, meaning more lifting of things, powered by Clif bars and snacks.

The evening eventually approached and we motored out to our anchorage site, a few miles to the west, where levees convey the tidal Sacramento delta inland between sunken fields. The next big flood will be a lot of fun!

Once safely moored, we began a suicidal work effort to deploy all the loaded goodies, including hundreds of truck inner tubes needing inflation, into a series of floating platforms interconnected by floating bridges. No drills were dropped into the soup, but one or ten screws were over-screwed, leading to spontaneous tube deflation. Over the next few days, this process continued, trading inexperience for sunburn, sweating through the day and hunting moths by headlamp at night.

Relative scarcity of mobile phone coverage meant interaction with fellow humans in direct line of sight. It took about 30 seconds to walk from one end of the steadily evolving ephemeral isle (see what I did there) to the other. We broke our evenings of work to consume amazing cooked food and/or snacks, talk with other similarly crazed people, and assiduously avoid literacy. Adding people on facebook the following week has been a lot of "That's how they spell their name? Woah!"

Ephemerisle is a ~6 year old experiment in techno-anarcho-libertarianism, where enthusiasts build a temporary floating city, or city of cities, in one protected cove. I was part of Elysium, the most absurdly over-organized contingent, although probably 20 autonomous units eventually compose Ephemerisle. It's an exercise in sea-steading, an experimental political idea. Somewhat ironically, the most successful (by some metrics) islands are the ones with the most comprehensive governance structure. There was, however, plenty of room for political diversity. Perhaps 3 years ago, the event grew to the point that all the houseboats were rented. Hence the floating platforms to make more room. These kinds of events, of which Burning Man is probably the most iconic, are very interesting places to witness the spontaneous creation of a culture.

The climate was perfect, the sunsets sublime, and no shortage of opportunities to rip off the sun-protective layer and swim a few laps in the refreshingly cool water. The moon, Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus lit the evening sky.

On Tuesday morning, it was time to move on. I said goodbye and P and I motored back toward the bay area, the island not entirely complete. I stopped off in Pleasanton, watched Terminator 5, and caught up with my friends M and B, who live in nearby Dublin. The following day M and I walked the nearby golden hills. Later that day, I reconvened with another friend and drove back to LA, skipping my flight in preference for door-to-door service and less ear-popping company.

And there the story ends.

Or does it?

The following Saturday was THE day of the event - one day before deconstruction. I had a hankering to see what the completed island looked like, so I took another friend (C) and a trusty aeroplane and, after a delay caused by my phone ceasing to work, flew back up there. We picked up a solid headwind on the eastern side of the California central valley, took a quick detour up to Yosemite valley, then zoomed down to sea level (+500 feet) to overfly the island, take pictures, and then land at a nearby airfield. 

If only I had a sea plane! We took and Uber to the marina, then waited for a ferry out to the event. Once there, our ferry made a stop on a large research vessel boat, stranding us short of our goal by about 200m. I had non-waterproof stuff, so couldn't just swim. Eventually we made it, said hi to all the people, admired the finished product, lamented the untimely death of the sanctuary, and then ferried back out to the marina. We hitched a ride to the airport, refueled, and were on our way.

The sun gradually set as we screamed down the western side of the central valley, flying the direct GPS route back to El Monte airport. A long flight afforded C a great opportunity to practice following the needle, and I had enough time to practice tweaking the trim and balance for more airspeed. Soon enough we came down over the mountains and landed, with only 10 more errands to run before sleep.

Needless to say, I took things easy the following day!

Mum and Dad visit the USA

Photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/105494084231616659850/MumAndDadVisitUSA 

On May 14, 2015 I successfully defended my PhD at Caltech. This was, in hindsight, a good thing as my parents B and A were due to arrive the following month in June for my graduation ceremony and some reckless hedonism. If, for example, it was deduced that my research had violated the laws of physics, it may have put something of a dampener on things.

I have lived in the states for nearly five years. During that time I've had many friends visit from remote parts of the world, allowing me to hone my hosting skills and find out the coolest things to do. Typical visits lasting a very intense long weekend, I had become accustomed to offloading guests to their departing flight on a stretcher, with months of counseling to follow. During all this time, my parents had managed to visit but once, and half-heartedly at that. Indeed, they had never stepped onto the Caltech campus. I looked forward to the opportunity to envelop them in my various shoes for five weeks, one for each year I had spent here! Saving the best to last, I developed a program of events and travel that, I am pleased to report, has succeeded in completely removing my parents' purpose in life since their return to the antipodean continent.

At 2:00pm PDT I drove the rental zipcar down the 105, deftly weaving between traffic for, indeed, five years is nearly long enough to learn how to drive on the wrong side of the road. To my right (at 2 o'clock, fittingly) a white and red behemoth festooned with the iconographic kangaroo flared over runway 24R and, fortunately, taxied clear with no spontaneous and day-ruining explosion.

Not long after I located B and A, recently disgorged from said behemoth, conveyed them and their tightly packed rolling bags to the parking structure, and began the drive back to Pasadena. With only one short 25 minute interlude to talk to Telstra about how roaming might, hypothetically, work in a world with useful customer training, I endeavoured to relate how LA, that giant, frenetic metropolis of freeways and overstressed geologic faults, manages to fit together. Once in Pasadena, we stopped off at the keystone of everything California and a relatively good jetlag antidote all-in-one, the local Whole Foods store. Said B "I can't believe how cheap their groceries are!" and proceeded to sluice pallets of cherries and raspberries and bananas and other peculiar "foods" that aren't corn chips into the shopping cart (that's American for trolley) while I attempted to navigate clear of the homeopathy section, get some of my own food, and then escape unscathed.

Back at the manor, I dispensed towels, sheets, door keys and individually annotated neighbourhood maps. That evening, we just happened to have the annual a capella concert in which our group sang a variety of songs. My parents, still reeling from the flight, Whole Foods, and life in general, pronounced the concert "unbelievably excellent," a standard hitherto broached only in my 4th grade performance as a tree. We drove to Yoshida sushi and began the (ultimately futile) project to fatten me up.

I had allocated several days to recover from jetlag and visit all the amazing shops in Pasadena, but B and A couldn't wait to start. Single-handedly (okay, six hands were involved) we revived the southern Californian economy, then retired for an excellent roast lamb dinner with M. Having exhausted shopping options, we spent the following day in down town LA, taking a walking tour and then experiencing Uber for the very first time. Minds were blown, but not for the last time. 

By Monday it was time for a Caltech tour - so much the better because there were a few other humans wandering about. For any casual time traveler who has stumbled upon this blog, Caltech campus in summer 2015 is not known for its crowded, teeming buzz of activity. Most people are indeed on campus, sequestered in various vaults of science and emerging only furtively to quiver their whiskers with the resident mutant squirrels. We departed Caltech at 4:45 and spent much of the following two hours reveling in that greatest of attractions LA is famous the world over, the traffic. Arriving with enough time to grab a burger ('Murica!), we followed up with a tour of the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, delivered by rapidly rising systems engineer R, and with all the detail you can imagine. Minds 0, blown 5 (?).

Tuesday seemed like a nice day, so I took my parents to El Monte airport, strapped them into an equally unenthused C-172 and obliterated the last dregs of my life savings flying the four of us (3 humans, one bucket of bolts) over Los Angeles, Long Beach, out across the Pacific Ocean and back to Australia. Or rather, Catalina Island, which is somewhat closer. Wind was across the runway so we didn't land for a burger, but rather flew around admiring the incredible land forms before returning, flying around Pasadena and the mountains, and landing with nary a wheel squeak. That evening we enjoyed dinner al fresco at the Rath before, inexplicably, water began to fall from the air. 

Wednesday was an unbelievably dull day. At 1pm, there was the Dynamic Explosion concert as Fluid Dynamics farewelled departing members (i.e. me), singing my arrangement of Pentatonix's "Love Again," and earning me a teeshirt inscribed with the eminently wearable (and apparently earned) letters "(B)ASS." It's American for humour, don't worry. After the concert we immediately shot up the hill to JPL. JPL, or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is the Caltech administered NASA center responsible for much of modern robotic space exploration, including the Mars rovers. My friend H agreed to meet us and show us all the cool stuff, including the Mission Operations Control Room, the high bay spacecraft assembly facility, the Mars Yard, and some of the resident deer. It was well received! But because the day had been so overwhelmingly, stiflingly dull, that evening we drove two hours up the hill to Mt Wilson, a historic telescope facility above Pasadena responsible for discovering, inter alia, that the universe had more than one galaxy, that the galaxies were moving away from each other, the big bang, the sun's magnetism, and so on. Today, you can rent a telescope for an evening for a reasonable price between 25 awesomely nerdy people. There's nothing more fun than sitting in a cold circular room with cool people eating snacks and looking at light from quasars more than 3 billion light years away, and thus more than 3 billion years old. We also got a good look at Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sombrero galaxy, and numerous other things of which eyes don't make much but nevertheless it's super cool to use our evolved sensory organs to perceive glowy things so amazingly far away.

Thursday heralded the beginning of the graduation procedure, with a graduate luncheon. I'm pleased to report that B and A conducted themselves acceptably and were introduced to various deans and other people who hopefully won't be that sad to pass me off to be someone else's problem. Friday I woke up from my sleeping position on the floor behind the couch (not a joke) to see none other than my sister A's face staring down at me with an expression of confusion and harsh judgement, or perhaps that's just how things look before my non-existent coffee. Turns out she'd decided to show up secretly to my graduation to surprise me. I have no idea from where she gets such crazy, outlandish ideas! Friday was also B's birthday, so I gave him a small radio controlled quadcopter. Hard to believe such things can exist and fly but they do! So we had a lot of fun flying them around and trying not to crash. Later that day I disappeared to Caltech, wrapped myself in mostly black polyester until my visage became like that of a penguin, disguised myself among hundreds of other similarly attired individuals, sat in the sun, and eventually walked towards a distinguished fellow saying my name, shook hands, and then sat down again. At last, the wavefunction had collapsed and I was a DOCTOR. Life goal achieved. Life now meaningless. 

Well, one week down, four weeks to go. I'd nearly exhausted my collection of cool things to do, but not quite. We managed to schedule a Tesla test drive (I was able to sneak my photo from the "known abusers of test-drive protocol" board in the nick of time), wherein B drove the (then) top of the line Tesla for about 20 minutes as A and I squirmed in the back seat like a bug in a sample drawer. The Tesla Model S is an engineering masterpiece that accelerates faster than falling. Some time that weekend we also collected a rental car (a brand new black Kia Sorento with 30 miles on the clock), visited the La Brea tar pits, got stuck in traffic, packed our bags for an epic road trip, partook in the strange, arcane ritual of the Ocsi Bacsi ceremony.

We put A (sister) on a plane, and started the drive. This is going to be a list of places we visited, because I don't have the RAM necessary to describe every stop. First up was Vasquez rocks, purplish in the morning light, then the wasteland of California City. Quail Creek deposits at Red Rock canyon, Fossil Falls, Lone Pine, Alabama Hills, Whitney Portal, Manzanar, the Bristlecone Pines (up to 4800 years old), ALMA, deep springs valley, Waucoba lake bed, and finally to Bishop, where we stayed in the Hostel California. Not quite what Trip Adviser had led my father to expect, we walked into the living room to see a series of people lying on the floor watching TV, not moving, their tie-die shirts blending with the carpet. Bishop is a popular break-point on the John Muir trail - I had done part of the Camino de Santiago and understood precisely why they were reposed Australian-style, their heads beneath their feet. 

We slept on tie-die sheets and crept out early the next morning to explore the Long Valley caldera, its cracked and pitted floor still steaming from a gigantic eruption 80,000 years ago. We began with a soak in the natural hot spring as the sun rose over the mountains, traipsed around Little Hot Creek and Hot Creek, climbed to Convict Lake as the sun lit deliciously the famous roof pendant. Further up the road we took the cable car/gondola to the top of Mammoth Mountain, checked out Obsidian Dome, Panum Crater, Mono Lake tufas, and then drove across the spine of the Sierras on one of the most amazing roads ever, through the Tioga pass past Tenaya lake and down into Yosemite valley. A short walk in the valley, dinner, and then out into Oakhurst, where we watched Valley Uprising in the hotel. The following day we backtracked to explore Yosemite more fully, after which we dropped in at the recently revamped Sierra Sky Ranch, found some giant sequoia trees, and then drove across the central valley to San Jose. Dinner with family friends - I took the opportunity to point out the ISS racing over Mountain View. 

The following morning we met Australian friends D and L for a fabulous brunch, no less than 3000 calories each. Barely adequate, in other words. Then up to SF, where I set B and A loose on the waterfront district for adventures, while I took off to Treasure Island to help build a pirate ship for Ephemerisle, the subject of my next blog post. That evening we caught up with C and M and had dinner at a nice Greek restaurant near the Palace of Fine Arts before retiring for the night in perhaps the least inspiring hotel I've ever seen. 

We continued north to Marin, taking a turn about the bay in another friends palatial motor yacht, before heading to San Rafael, site of the northern-most Spanish Mission in California, where we stayed with some friends. B and A took off on a tour of various wineries while I stayed put and worked on my application for the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship, which was desperately in need of attention. 

The next day it was time to depart so we headed east once more through Davis, Sacramento, and Placerville/Hangtown, the diggings, and up over the mountains to Lake Tahoe. That afternoon we hiked up to Eagle Lake before an evening walk to Nevada, an incredible Mexican dinner, and a very comfortable sleep in a hotel made entirely of recycled materials. 

We crossed the divide and drove down through Bridgeport to Mammoth, where we endured hopeless internet and somehow managed to avoid being savaged by the rampant bears that infest the entire area. The following morning we explored Mammoth Lakes, visited the Scheelite Tungsten Mine, resupplied in Bishop, drove south through Lone Pine and up over the Darwin Plateau, across the Panamint Valley, and into the maw of the Dragon at Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley. The temperature was only 113F/44C, so when I took a photo of B and A with my thermal camera, they were the coldest things in frame. I was (somewhat unusually) unable to locate any fluorescent scorpions with my UV light, and the stars were obscured by bushfire smoke, but we did manage to find one lonely pup fish in Salt Creek, one of the most desperate places on Earth - the tiny number of surviving species underscoring the place's general inhospitability.

The following day we explored Death Valley by mule/modern SUV, taking in Ubehebe Crater (in which I was taken by the urge to run to the bottom), Scotty's Castle, Devil's Golf Course, Badwater, Zabriskie Point, Dante's View, and Amargosa/Death Valley Junction, including the famous opera house. On to Vegas!

At B and A's insistence we went to Las Vegas to stay in the Parisian casino, and percolate in the frothing, writhing humanity that is the strip. After a mad dash of several hours we found our concert on the first night was abruptly cancelled - could it have anything to do with the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage across the US? The following day I hid from the world and worked on NASA application, while B and A attempted to have themselves the wonderful time they were convinced would occur if only... 

That evening we took a limo across to the Rio where we saw Penn and Teller, which was really amazing. My mind was blown. The following morning my spirits lifted considerably as we left Vegas in our dusty wake at 85mph. We took in the Valley of Fire at dawn, with its incredible Navajo Aztec sandstone rocks in ocher red between blue plants and numerous small critters clinging on. Further north, the 15 passed through the Virgin River canyon as it wound its way up onto the Colorado Plateau. We had an amazing lunch at St George before driving on through Hurricane, the Coral Pink sand dunes (which has a cool visitor's center) and up to Bryce canyon. That evening we stayed in a small motel, dreams of impossible shapes and rocks - a good warm up for the road down into Zion canyon. Tunnels, checkerboard butte, and the shuttle into the canyon. We had a good lunch, saw the Narrows, hanging gardens, and Angel's landing, from below. I pulled out my geology text book and we started to mark off the formations present in the grand staircase national monument as we headed south back towards Vegas. A billion years of stacked rock tells the story of 1/4 of the Earth's history all in one place.

Time was running short and we lacked time to properly drive to the Grand Canyon, but we could hardly miss that, the grand finale of all rock-holes large and small. I booked a helicopter ride, subsequently postponed by storm activity. We stayed the night in Boulder City, I continued to feverishly read The Martian to my parents, and we had a good dinner. Burgers, naturally.

Up early the following morning, we flew a tiny helicopter to the entrance of the Grand Canyon, just barely scratching the surface. To be sure, we missed a few other things to save for the next trip, but flying the length of the Grand Canyon would take hours whereas Zion, Bryce, and Yosemite would take minutes. The time had come, we drove south from Vegas to LA, down the terrifying Cajun pass, across the San Andreas fault and back to Pasadena. 16 days and 3200 miles of adventure. 

Were we done yet? NO! We had yet one more week to spend! 

I felt we needed to do some more adventuring, so we dropped A at the Huntington and B and I went to the airport to go flying down to Anza Borrego Desert and the Salton Sea. Many of my pilot friends don't understand why I keep flying there. It's a nice playground for a plane and the landscape is otherworldly. Mesas, buttes, canyons, mud volcanoes, giant salt lakes, patchworks of golf courses interspersed with windmills and sand dunes, all crammed between gigantic sheer mountains. After crossing the Banning Pass on our return I suggested a touch and go at Ontario airport. By the time we were cleared we were 8000 feet above the glide slope, which wasn't really a problem - I got to practice an emergency descent. We also kissed the pavement at Brackett airport before returning in one piece to El Monte. We collected A and took a nap.

The following days wrapped up loose ends and ran errands. In the meantime, my very patient housemate A and I were selling furniture and packing to move out the following week, so at some point couches, tables, and desks abruptly disappeared, to be replaced by my supply of trusty lawn furniture! Saturday was July 4. We ploughed on through The Martian before heading back to the airport. I flew my parents as the sun set over to the Rose Bowl where we circled the fireworks show for an hour. The lights came out and we cruised back toward El Monte over a spectacular view. On the tarmac fireworks exploded on all sides, causing B to remark "It's like Apocalypse Now." Negative, father, Apocalypse Now is like this. 

On Monday we returned to the airport. I took D and L flying around Pasadena, passed my annual check ride, and B took a flying lesson, including landing the plane, stalls, and so on. We dropped in to the health center at Caltech to meet the nurses and partook of a free magic show at Caltech. The magician did a trick much like one of Penn and Teller's, but only inches from my face. It was remarkable. 

At long last, Tuesday July 7 had rolled around. We packed and headed off to LAX. I got only slightly lost on the way, caught in reverie over the failed SpaceX launch. At the airport, B and A discovered the flight had been cancelled and they'd been bumped. Would they like to stay in LA forever, they were asked? Negative, and an alternative flight via Brisbane was arranged. I cruised back to Pasadena, alone once more. During the following days I packed what was left of grad life into a handful of recycled boxes and moved on to the next adventure.

John Nash dies in NJ car accident

Article originally published in The California Tech on June 1, 2015

John Nash dies in NJ car accident

Casey Handmer

On May 23, John Nash and his wife, Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé, died in a traffic accident in New Jersey. Two other people were injured. Nash was returning from a trip to Norway, where he had been awarded the Abel Prize in recognition of his extraordinary career and contributions to the field of mathematics. Nash's life was memorialized by the 1998 book and 2001 film A Beautiful Mind.

Nash was born in West Virginia in 1928, and attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) where, his interests evolving, he switched majors from chemical engineering to chemistry, and finally to mathematics, graduating in 1948 with a B.S. and M.S. He followed this with graduate work at Princeton University, earning his Ph.D. in 1950 at the age of 21. His 28-page doctoral thesis (https://goo.gl/IJC4mB) introduced non-cooperative games and the Nash equilibrium, for which he subsequently was awarded one-third of The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1994.

Nash was hired by MIT in 1951. In 1952 he fathered and subsequently abandoned his first son, John David Stier. His summer research work on games and the Cold War for RAND Corporation came to an end in 1954 when he was stripped of his clearance after being arrested in a homosexual sting operation at the height of the McCarthy-era hysteria. In 1956 he proved Hilbert's 19th problem, only to find an independent solution had been published by the Italian mathematician Ennio de Giorgi just months before.

Around this time, Nash met Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé, an MIT-educated physicist originally from El Salvador. They married in 1957 in a Roman Catholic ceremony, despite Nash's atheism. In 1958 he was tenured at MIT, but by 1959 his mental illness began to manifest. Nash resigned from MIT and underwent sporadic treatment for schizophrenia for much of the next decade. His second son, John Charles Martin Nash, was born soon after his first admission. Although Alicia and Nash divorced in 1963, he ended up boarding in her house following his release from his last hospitalization in 1970.

While he never stopped mathematical research entirely after the sudden onset of his illness, his gradual recovery during the 1970s and 1980s saw a second blossoming of his mathematical creativity and a series of productive collaborations, initially using email. During the 1990s, he resumed some teaching duties at Princeton and, in 2001, Nash and Alicia remarried. Nash has stated that through his recovery he learned to manage the societally challenging aspects of schizophrenic behavior while trying not to restrict his incredible creativity.

While Nash is best known for his work on games theory, with 21 publications he made an array of astounding and sometimes baffling contributions to many other areas of mathematics. His recently declassified work on cryptography in the early 1950s was decades ahead of its time. His proposed encryption/decryption algorithms, while different from RSA or GPG, are similarly based on the concept of computational hardness and have since been shown to be as effective.

He made contributions to algebraic geometry and topology, and work in geometry produced the Nash Embedding Theorem in 1966, which showed that every Riemannian manifold can be isometrically embedded into some Euclidean space. Constructive proofs soon followed and today it's possible to visualize the embedding of a square torus in 3D space.

Image: http://hevea.imag.fr/Site/Images/vue8.jpg

Visions of the future with Kim Stanley Robinson

Article published in The California Tech on 27 May 2015.

Visions of the future with Kim Stanley Robinson

Casey Handmer

Last month I sat down for an interview with celebrated Californian science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson to explore his thoughts and visions of the future.

Casey Handmer How do you describe what you do? Why do you write science fiction?

Kim Stanley Robinson I write science fiction as a kind of realism, in most of my books. I do that because I think science fiction is the best literary form for realist art in our era.

CH While your 20 or so novels have been very well received, the most surprising thing about exploring them is that their style is less uniform and more experimental?

KSR  The narrator for most of [my latest novel,] Aurora, is an artificial intelligence that is running the starship. So that computer has to learn to write a novel. It runs through the history of English prose and novel techniques, starting with primitive realism. Finally, in the interstellar medium at the end of the novel there's just a stream of consciousness of the artificial intelligence. It was so much fun to write.

CH Your Mars trilogy is still remarkably scientifically accurate, despite being published more than 20 years ago. Nevertheless, about those windmills in Red Mars…

KSR The first edition was full of errors ― I made about 300 corrections. After the 18th printing of Red Mars in paperback, there's a set of corrections listed at the end that have to fit the pages like a crossword puzzle, to keep the pages the same length.

CH Haha, I think "after the 18th printing" is the perfect answer to the pedants. It's art, you know. At some point you say, "I'm telling a story." I tell stories all the time. You don't tell exactly what happened. You take key things and relate the narrative, that's the important part.

KSR But with science fiction, you want to keep from throwing people out of it, or else people can get annoyed. Readers fall into a dream state of reading, but if they get cast out of it because of something being wrong, they can get angry, or amused, at the author. It splits according to the character of the reader.

CH I appreciate the effort to get the technical detail right; it's a colossal pain. Your work is rightly renowned for its attention to detail and very hard science fiction attributes. Why do you see technical accuracy as a necessary part of the craft?

KSR As an example, abandoning Earth [in the 2014 film Interstellar] is somewhat of a moral hazard. The general population is bad on these issues, in terms of what is possible and what is not. Science fiction has this general danger, because many people say, "Oh, that must be possible" because it got written up.

CH That's interesting; so science fiction authors have a social responsibility to build a realistic future world?

KSR It's very common for physicists to say that [because of future ecological disaster] 90% of humans will die. It's an absurd thing to say because it creates a general distrust and hatred of science. It's also a science fiction statement. When people say science fiction statements as though they were solidly scientific statements, like the nature of a physical law, then they're in the nature of a hoax which can be a dangerous hoax.

CH So sea levels will rise 15 feet over a decade, or a century?

KSR I know what you're saying, but we will adapt. We have to, just like we breathe. We are primates, we have done it all along. I object to the political program where [we] just give up, keep burning carbon because we like it, or we can't stop. It's defeatism, a pseudo-philosophy, a pseudo-realism.

CH Well, even if only a tiny fraction of humans will ever be able to leave the Earth, what is your view on human colonization of space?

KSR I like the idea of going to the moon; I like asteroids. And obviously, I like the idea of Mars. Whatever works, as far as I'm concerned. More is better; let's do it all. Robotic exploration, such as at JPL, is fine too. This idea that manned space exploration will save civilization and it has to be humans colonizing space and blah blah blah, the Wild West metaphor, all that is terribly lame thinking.

CH Seems more likely to be analogous to the Soviet expansion through the tundra.

KSR Good luck with that!

CH Technological and very expensive. But possible. So, what's next for you in terms of writing?

KSR I'm getting close to being done!

CH You set out a program 30 years ago?

KSR No, I just don't want to repeat myself. I'm interested to do all the subgenres of science fiction and make one significant contribution to each of the ones that I like. I've done an alternative history, I've done the solar system, I've done the planetary colonization, I've done time travel, I've done the prehistoric novel. I always thought that was a really important subgenre of science fiction because of archaeology, sociobiology and evolution. That was Shaman, my most recently published novel. And Aurora is what I have to say about going to the stars.

CH You need warp drive or lots of antimatter. The speeds and energies involved ― there are certain physical limits which are hard to get away from.

KSR I don't think it's going to work, but fortunately there's more to Aurora than that!

CH It seems like a long shot with any current or projected technology. But we don't know enough to see far enough to know that it will always be impossible.

KSR Technology is a challenge which is a physics thing. There's a tendency for physicists to talk about physics and all other things in terms of physics, which everything ultimately comes down to. But the problems for interstellar travel for humans are biological, sociological, ecological, and psychological. On all these levels, it's in terrible, terrible trouble.

CH We are just thinking meat ― it's too many orders of magnitude beyond our ancestral activities. More locally, though, for the first time in the history of the universe, as far as we know, humans have enough industrial capacity and coordination to colonize other planets. Do you think we'll be able to colonize Mars before something else goes seriously wrong?

KSR The best analogy for Mars is not the New World, so colonization is not the right word. A better analogy is Antarctica, so yes, we can set up scientific stations there, similar to McMurdo and other Antarctic stations, any time we decide to pay to do it, with the years of work needed also. We are definitely robust enough to do that, and JPL would be a big leader, as it has been. But colonization implies many people, and therefore terraforming, really, to make that place livable. So that's a 10,000-year project, maybe, worth doing when we have a stable civilization here on Earth. Worth thinking about now, too. The long perspective is often useful.

CH One consistent theme of your work has been an exploration of post-capitalist societies. Post-capitalism as a term sounds a lot stranger than it should be, but people aren't often thinking about a future system. In your view, what are the key strengths and weaknesses of capitalism as a system?

KSR Its strength is that it is a legal system and as such can in theory be modified for the better by legislating different laws. This is an advance over the sheer force and nepotism of feudal and earlier economics. It has another strength that is at the same time a weakness, which is that it crowdsources human desires to make prices for goods and services, so that what people want tends to create prices in a market.

CH What's wrong with that?

KSR The problem is people can want impossible things ― possible for individuals maybe, but impossible for group and planet over time. Thus we systemically underprice most commodities and services because the pressure of supply and demand favors buyers over sellers. The worst underpricing involves natural resources, externalized in accounting but not reality, and human labor, which is scared into cheap misery. But as these are the two most important resources, pricing both at predatory dumping prices…

CH Predatory dumping?

KSR Charging less than it costs to make to drive competitors out of business, means that we live in a multi-generational Ponzi scheme, and it's the generations to come who will take the hit. That hit is starting now. Another weakness is the way the laws of capitalism unconsciously reproduce laws of gravity such that accumulated capital has more power to accumulate than smaller masses of it. So the rich get richer and the poor poorer, as demonstrated by [Thomas] Piketty, though also recognized in [other, older economic systems].

CH Caltech students do not have much political power, but they are at the forefront of technological innovation. We've already seen some examples of IT-leveraged economic innovation, such as Uber, Airbnb, bitcoin, etc., that have circumvented or short-circuited our largely moribund legislature. Some wildly successful Silicon Valley companies have succeeded mostly in enriching themselves, but the capacity still exists for the next generation of engineers to have a prominent voice in the future they design and build for the rest of us. Do you think it's possible for a less wasteful, less greedy economic model to outcompete capitalism on its own turf?

KSR Yes to that last, except with this cavil: capital can try to buy the legislatures that make the laws that run capitalism, in which case, any other system will be handicapped because the rules make the game. So the question becomes, "Is democracy real, or does accumulated capital, or oligarchy, run our governments?" This is the battle being fought in our political life now, everywhere.

CH Can the dreams of post-capitalist America left be realized through technology rather than policy?

KSR More generally, how can we price goods and services if we decide that the market systemically underprices things and is destroying the biosphere and human lives?  Especially when there is currently no central planning system that could work to replace the market? This to me is the big "technological" question, and I do think it's a scientific question in systems design involving feedbacks of all kinds, as well as a political question.

CH Where does Caltech fit in this?

KSR So it is not outside the Caltech purview by any means to be asking, "How can we realistically change the global system to something more sustainable?" and then regard [capitalist] economics not as a field itself but rather a meta-field, a very big and important social science that can benefit from rigorous studies from the hard science angles. The Caltech political economists can do a projective project of designing stepwise reforms to a sustainable post-capitalism. I imagine something like first anti-austerity, back to Keynesian macroeconomics. Then social democracy, Scandinavian style. Then socialism, meaning public utility districts in USA-speak. Then some X system that we can only call post-capitalism at this point, because it doesn't exist yet; but it needs to be sustainable, and just.

CH Well that's certainly thought-provoking stuff! Thank you for your time, and perhaps we'll see you hiking in the Sierras.

Next Generation Mars Lander and Return Vehicle

Next Generation Mars Lander and Return Vehicle

Concept development: Casey Handmer

What is this?

This is a new spacecraft concept capable of landing on the surface of Mars and eventually returning to Earth in essentially complete form. This spacecraft, the Wide lifting bodY Vehicle for Earth ReturN or WYVERN, is envisioned as a versatile chassis capable of a wide variety of missions with minimal changes. While many sizes are possible, such a spacecraft must meet the following requirements:

• Low ballistic coefficient. Mass/heat shield area < 250kg
• Rocket powered soft landing without parachutes or inflatable components, for reliability.
• A stable, low form factor on the surface, even on sloped ground.
• Capability to be launched from Earth in one piece, without assembly or fueling in orbit microgravity.
• Reusability. The spacecraft should be capable of flying a configuration which permits return to Earth for reuse, utilizing the Martian atmosphere to synthesize fuel for the return flight.
• A monolithic heat shield (no hatches, windows, doors, etc) that is not ejected, so it can be reused on return to Earth.
• Adequate fuel capacity for single stage return to Earth, requiring approximately 7.8km/s of delta-V.
• Significant cargo down mass capability, ideally measured in 10s of tonnes, and a large fraction of launch mass.
• In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) capability.

How is it done today - what are limits of current practice?

Currently, spacecraft are landed on Mars using Apollo-derived truncated conical capsules, parachutes, rockets, and airbags or skycranes. Current limitations include:

• Mass - Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) represents the largest payload to date, of approximately 900kg, and represents an upper limit on the capabilities of aeroshell, parachute, Earth-launched payload fairings, and rocket landing system. Specifically, 900kg is not nearly enough to land humans.
• Locations - Mars’ thin atmosphere greatly restricts the sites where it is possible to land, effectively eliminating the ⅔ of the surface that is above datum.
• Return capability - no existing or proposed Mars spacecraft can leave the surface. Even proposed sample return missions use bespoke staged solid fuel systems with minuscule upmass capability (<10kg)

What’s new in WYVERN - why will it succeed?

Specific innovations include:

• Form factor - we exploit the differing requirements of various stages of the mission to provide a long, wide, and flat form factor that acts as a lifting body during entry.
• Descent and landing profile - by orienting the spacecraft to enter the atmosphere on its back, then roll 180 degrees before a rocket powered landing, the spacecraft is always in a stable configuration and ideally positioned on the surface to protect the heat shield while enabling loading and unloading of cargo.
• No parachutes or inflatables - hypersonic parachutes for large payloads are difficult to test, heavy, too unreliable for human cargo, and ultimately unnecessary.
• Very large included delta-V - with 7.8km/s of delta-V in launch configuration, the spacecraft is capable of returning to Earth from the surface of Mars with up to 25% of dry mass as cargo. Detailed mass tabulation is included below.
• Reusable, multipurpose airframe saves development costs for different missions while also being scalable.
• Unparalleled cargo capacity given rocket launch mass - 20% of low earth orbit capability vs 5% for MSL.

Who cares? What difference will it make?

Current and planned missions to Mars both robotic and crewed are fundamentally limited by the requirement of multiple unique specialized spacecraft, each of which requires separate design, testing, and all of which form single points of failure. None of these spacecraft are particularly versatile, few form a fundamental design which can be updated or improved without substantial redesign and development costs.

The proposed design will form a basic chassis with raw capabilities that can be customized in many directions without requiring redesign of the mission-critical components: entry, descent and landing, propulsion, guidance, navigation and control, and so on. Mass analysis below indicates that as a one-way lander with 50T gross mass, it can deliver ~25T to the surface. With in-situ resource utilization for return fuel manufacture, it can deliver ~15T and return ~5T to Earth, as well as the reusable spacecraft. It can also readily perform missions in the Earth-moon system.

What are key unknowns?

• Minimum viable structural mass. While using a pressurized methane/oxygen tank as a structural backbone, is it possible to complete the rest of the structure with enough margin for landing and launch? Preliminary mass analysis included below suggests it is possible.
• The design requires the development or adaptation of high Isp (380s) methane-oxygen engines each delivering a relatively small ~130kN of thrust.
• Returning the spacecraft to Earth requires the synthesis of fuel and oxidiser on the surface of Mars, which in turn requires a substantial quantity of electrical power, totalling approximately 150kWyears for the 50T design reference. Realistically, this can only be provided by a space reactor such as the SAFE-400. Such reactors have been developed but never flown.

How much time and money is required?

The spacecraft is estimated to be similar in weight and materials to a mid-size jet aircraft such as the 737, with commensurate development and construction costs. With cost of development amortized over many missions, this represents a substantial (> order of magnitude) improvement in cost over other proposed Mars mission architectures, such as SEI or Constellation, which involve much more complicated conops, greater mass, and less versatility.

Preliminary analysis

I'm a physicist, not an expert digital modeler or authority on hypersonic aerodynamics. Nevertheless, it is possible to present a rough sketch of WYVERN in various configurations.

Entry configuration:

The central blue cylinder is fuel tank, mostly empty during the outbound voyage, with several magenta domes partitioning it into different sections. Green cones are rocket engines. Blue triangles are tails to shift center of drag behind center of mass. Brown marks the edge of the vehicle envelope, with a basic flattened triconic profile and heat shield on the bottom.

WYVERN in landing/launch configuration:

Here, WYVERN has inverted to land with engines facing down, and heat shield facing up. With clearance beneath and a spread, stable posture, WYVERN is ideally suited for the loading and unloading of cargo without a crane and/or 15 floors of stairs.

delta-V summary

Earth surface - LEO: 9.3-10km/s. 9.3 for KSC to non polar orbit.

LEO-Earth C3: 3.3km/s. (Optional solar electric propulsion)

Earth C3-TMI: 1km/s (180 day trajectory, for 2 year free-return).

Total from booster(s): 13.6km/s

TMI-Mars surface: aero direct entry + mid course corrections + terminal velocity to landing ~0.83km/s.

Total from WYVERN outbound: 0.83km/s

Mars surface-LMO: 4.1km/s.

Flat ascent penalty: 0.03km/s (for having rockets fire perpendicular to axis).

LMO-Mars C3: 1.4km/s

Mars C3-TEI: 1.5km/s (190 day trajectory, 0.9km/s minimum for 280 day trajectory)

TEI-Earth surface: aerobraking + mid course corrections + terminal velocity to landing ~0.8km/s.

Total from WYVERN+ISRU: 7.83km/s.

A single stage flight from Mars’ surface to Earth’s surface requires approximately 7.8km/s of delta-V, at best. Given eight advanced methane-oxygen engines with an Isp of 380s, the requisite mass ratio is 8:1. That is, a mass of x landing on Earth requires a launch mass of 8x, or 7x in fuel and oxygen. An initial:final mass ratio of 8:1 (for soft-cryo props) is small by comparison with the 23:1 ratio achieved by modern booster rockets, such as the Falcon 9 first stage.

Mass allocation

By combining the structural elements of fuel tanks and airframe, WYVERN achieves a much lower dry mass than more conventional designs.

Component	Mass (kg)	Analogous existing hardware and mass
Fuel/ox tank	5600	Falcon 9 second stage dry mass 4900kg
Non tank structure	5000	40’ shipping container 3800kg steel
Main rockets	8x125	RL-10 has similar thrust and use parameters
RCS	500	Dragon Draco RC system
Solar array	1000	50kW at Mars orbit with 100W/kg at LEO
Heat shield	2400	300m^2 of PICA-X
Avionics/GNC	200
ISRU - Reactor (nuc)	500	SAFE-400 120kW reactor
ISRU - Feedstock	8500	7500 H2 for 150000 CH4/O2 + margin
ISRU - Reactor (chem)	500
Fuel/Ox mass	150000	21400kg gross mass to Earth. 180m^3 storage
Spare/cargo upmass	5700	15700 dry mass
Spare/cargo downmass	15800	50000kg entry mass includes 10000kg EDL fuel and 9500 kg ISRU components

Mass summaries throughout duration of full mission

Note that these figures are for the Mars lander only. They do not include the mass of the LEO-TMI booster(s), outlined in the configuration section.

Mission stage	Mass (kg)	Explanation
Low Earth orbit	50000	Falcon heavy launch
Trans-Mars Injection	50000	TMI with separately launched booster
Mars Atmospheric Entry	50000
Mars surface after landing	40000	10000kg for 830m/s delta-V during landing
ISRU fuel	30000	Methane, taking volume 71m^3
ISRU oxygen	120000	Basic stoichiometric ratio, 105m^3
Pre Mars launch dry mass	21400	Structure and return cargo
Pre Mars launch gross mass	171400	Requires 6x110kN thrust minimum to lift off
Trans Earth Injection	26200	4800kg of props remain for Earth EDL
Earth atmospheric entry	26200
Earth surface after landing	21400	800m/s of delta-V remain for landing

ISRU components

The ISRU unit consists of a chemical reactor, a nuclear reactor, associated plumbing, and hydrogen feedstock. It generates methane and oxygen via the Sabatier reaction and Reverse Water Gas Shift reaction according to well understood principles. In the context of a manned mission, the reactor would be deployed by remote control on the surface prior to fueling and activation. A solar array can provide auxiliary power during cruise or on the surface, though does not produce nearly enough power to complete ISRU within the ~500 day window between landing and return to Earth. A scaled down WYVERN for sample return could use a large, disposable solar array on the surface for ISRU power. If the mission profile calls for two WYVERNs; one Earth return vehicle to land two years earlier and produce fuel before the crew transport WYVERN arrives, then the reactor only needs to go with the first vehicle, and can stay on the surface, fueling the crew transport vehicle after the mission has concluded. Later, the crew transport vehicle could fly additional samples back or function as a backup.

Entry, descent and landing profile

WYVERN employs an innovative, back first entry profile. WYVERN’s heat shield forms the roof of the spacecraft in standard landing configuration. With a hypersonic L/D ratio of ~2.5, WYVERN is capable of skip entry and substantial cross-range performance. During supersonic cruise at terminal velocity (~500m/s), WYVERN completes a 180 degree roll, pitch up maneuver, and retropropulsive descent and landing using four clusters of 2 130kN redundant high Isp methane oxygen motors analogous to Dragon V2. Powered flight continues for around a minute, first decelerating at full power, then descending under controlled flight to a soft landing. In more detail, with a peak thrust of 8x130kN and an initial mass of 50T, WYVERN can decelerate at 21ms-2(much greater than Mars’ surface gravity of 3.8ms-2), taking roughly 30 seconds to slow down from terminal velocity to begin a powered descent at reduced thrust.

A basic simulation of WYVERN entry using banking to suppress hypersonic skipping until around 1000m/s, where the barrel roll may be performed during a natural peak in the trajectory. MSL’s entry profile, computed using the same simulation and publicly available data, is included in red for comparison.

Launch profile

WYVERN launches from Mars in its horizontal configuration. Mars’ atmosphere is thin enough that there is no substantial performance impedance from climbing to orbital speed with the flat side up. Total delta-V loss is less than 30m/s compared to vertical orientation, or -6m/s for no atmosphere.

Internal configuration

Different internal configurations can be built within the framework formed by the aeroshell, central fuel tank, and propulsion units.

Possible configurations include

• Self contained sample return mission with ISRU. Capable of delivering 15T to the surface, returning 5T of samples and/or mission hardware. 15T could include several rovers with specialized instruments, a substantial drill rig, even a small synchrotron.
• Self contained crewed mission with ISRU. With 15T down mass and 5T return mass, a single WYVERN is capable of supporting a crew of 4 or 5 for a complete 2.5 year mission.
• One way crewed mission. Remove the ISRU mass penalty and receive 10 additional tons of down mass, to possibly include more crew, more supplies, or more Mars cars.
• Earth-return vehicle (ERV) crewed mission. Launched autonomously to Mars, the ERV WYVERN produces fuel on the surface before the crewed WYVERN departs from Earth. With 15T of spare down-mass, the ERV can also deliver substantial cargo in support of a surface mission.
• One way cargo. Without ERV hardware, WYVERN is capable of delivering 25T to the surface of Mars, and also contains roughly 350m^3 of pressurizable volume.
• Self contained crewed mission without ISRU. If return fuel is present on Mars’ surface, either prelaunched or premade, WYVERN can complete a mission without bringing ISRU hardware, with 25T of down mass and 5T of upmass.
• Orbital shuttle. WYVERN could readily function as a shuttle to deliver payloads to or from Mars orbit from the surface. Downmass remains at 25T, upmass increases due to the decreased delta-V required. Surface to Low Mars Orbit is 4.1km/s, allowing a cargo upmass of 58T, given an incremental engine upgrade. Surface to Mars C3 and back to surface, such as required to dock with a large interplanetary spacecraft in a highly eccentric orbit, is 6.3km/s, allowing an upmass of 20T. Intermediate missions fall between these two extremes.
• Trans Mars Injection booster. If WYVERN was launched to LEO from Earth by Falcon Heavy, it would require a vacuum booster stage to get to Mars. Three WYVERN-based booster stages, each launched with 125T of fuel by (possibly boosted) Falcon Heavy (preserving 55T after self-boosting to orbit), could dock with the crewed WYVERN in LEO and boost it to Mars. Two booster WYVERNs would fall back to Earth and land immediately, while the last booster WYVERN and the crewed WYVERN would then fly to Mars, where the booster stage would aerobrake or use a fly by (or both) to return to Earth via free-return or a Venus conjunction-class orbit, in time for re-use in the next launch window. Alternatively, a single booster with electric propulsion could gradually lift WYVERN into cis-Lunar space, before adding crew and burning chemically to TMI.
• Lunar lander. With 150T fuel capacity, WYVERN could also land on the Earth’s moon and return in a single stage. If fueled on the moon, WYVERN could transport 120T of cargo from the moon to Earth, though could propulsively land with only 90T without engine modifications. If flying from trans-Lunar Injection to the moon’s surface and back to Earth’s surface, a fully fueled WYVERN could transport 35T of cargo. This cargo could be increased for non-time sensitive payloads by using 3-body interactions in the Earth-moon system.

Scaling

Given a more capable Earth-LEO booster, the WYVERN design can be readily scaled up. Released information suggests a SpaceX BFR LEO capability of 200T. This would enable direct launch of one WYVERN to TMI, or a similar profile to that outlined above with a single WYVERN scaled up by a factor of 4, which would transport 100T cargo to the surface. The only relevant design constraint in scaling is ballistic coefficient, which dictates that a high capacity Mars lander must be, on average, no thicker than a few meters in the transverse direction.

Radiation

With 8.5T of H2, 8T of O2, and 2T of CH4, as well as stores of water or food, there are ample quantities of low atomic mass nuclei to form a radiation shield for coronal mass ejection-type radiation during the outbound voyage. On the return voyage, reduced quantities of fuel and oxidiser (1T CH4, 4T O2 plus consumables) still allow for adequate radiation shielding of roughly 25g/cm^2 of shield wall.

Solar radiation fills the half-space in the direction of the solar magnetic field, where a gyroradius of about 1000km prevents a strictly ‘line of sight’ shielding methodology.

http://www.spaceflight101.com/falcon-9-v11.html

http://www.spaceflight101.com/dragon-spacecraft-information.html