A Transformer Toy on the Moon

JAXA/TOMY/Sony/Doshisha University

I've been fascinated by space exploration all my life, and now that a significant part of my livelihood comes from writing about the subject, I follow it even more closely than ever. I'm fortunate in that the magazine I write for is aimed at school-age readers, who are intelligent enough to be excited by all things space and want to know as much as possible about it. On the other hand, it's depressing how little interest the "grown-up" media takes in the subject, often focusing more on its failures than its triumphs. This happened recently with the Japanese space agency's lunar lander, where the media seemed less interested in the fact that it was the most precisely executed robotic landing on the Moon to date than that it ended up "upside down" (or to be pedantically correct, rotated through 180 degrees instead of the planned 90 degrees).

Obviously this wasn't ideal, because it means the spacecraft can't do all the post-landing things it was meant to, but these were secondary goals all along. It was primarily a proof-of-concept demonstrator for the terrain-matching landing software, which worked perfectly. And ironically there was another thing that worked perfectly too - the very thing that gave the media their much-shared image of the "upside-down" lander. This came from a tiny gadget called LEV-2 (sometimes referred to as SORA-Q) which was ejected by the main lander just before it touched down. And this finally brings us to the point of this post, because LEV-2 was made by the TOMY toy company.

 It just happened that TOMY had exactly the experience that JAXA, the Japanese space agency, needed for LEV-2. Designed in conjunction with Sony and a university, this takes the form of a metallic sphere just 8 cm across when it's first deployed. But then, as shown in the picture at the top of this post - and mimicking the Transformer toys that TOMY is best known for - it changes shape, extending wheels on either side and revealing a camera hidden inside. It was this very camera that took the picture of the lander that's now been shared all over the world:

JAXA

 

Popular Science with a difference

Yet again I’ve been working so hard on my book about Pseudoscience and Science Fiction that I haven’t left enough time (or energy) to do a proper blog post this week. So I thought I’d just give a quick plug to three books by Brian Clegg that I’ve found very useful as reference sources:

• Final Frontier – the pioneering science and technology of exploring the universe
• How to Build a Time Machine – the real science of time travel
• Extra Sensory – the science and pseudoscience of telepathy and other powers of the mind

Despite their subject matter, all three of these books are about real, reputable science – even if they take pseudoscience and/or science fiction as a starting point for the discussion. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to understand the facts behind the speculations!

(Another of Brian’s books in a similar vein, Ten Billion Tomorrows, was mentioned in an earlier blog post)

Three difficult things that are easier than Mars One

Mars One, the reality TV initiative aimed at setting up a Martian colony twelve years from now, has been in the news again. Much of this recent publicity has been extremely negative, with scathing criticisms from various members of the scientific and aerospace establishments. For a project that needs a strong public image to secure investment, this kind of negativity is extremely damaging. In fact it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the project ends up collapsing, its supporters will no doubt blame the negativity of the skeptics, while the skeptics themselves will gleefully say “I told you so”.

Personally I never like being negative about other people’s bright ideas, but in the case of Mars One it’s hard not to be. The flaw lies not so much in their proposed solution, as in the problem they’ve chosen to solve. Getting humans to Mars is still beyond the capabilities of much more experienced organizations, such as NASA, Roscosmos and ESA, who have had far longer to think about it (the illustration above is from a study NASA did in 1964, over 50 years ago).

Rather than rehashing all the arguments for and against, I thought it would be fun to list three things that have never been done, but any one of which would still be a lot easier than setting up a human colony on Mars. Each of my three projects involves solving just a small subset of the problems facing Mars One, instead of having to solve all those problems simultaneously (and others as well).

1. Set up a human colony on the floor of the ocean. This is just as inhospitable to human life as the surface of Mars, so you need to address all the same problems of a safe, self-contained living environment. But the destination is a lot closer, so it’s easier to get material down there. We also know for a fact that there’s enough water, oxygen and food nutrients to sustain the colonists indefinitely (with suitable processing) – something that has to be taken on faith in the case of Mars One. The deep-sea environment is more interesting than Mars, too, teeming with unfamiliar life-forms that would make much better TV than the virtually dead world of Mars. Finally, a trip to the ocean floor doesn’t have to be a one-way one, so the colonists wouldn’t be doomed to die if and when the TV show was cancelled.
    
2. Establish a permanent base on the Moon. Technologically, this is easy – it’s basically the same as building the ISS, but a quarter of a million miles away instead of in low earth orbit. A quarter of a million miles may sound a long way, but the journey is more than a thousand times shorter than the Hohmann transfer orbit to Mars. On top of that, there are several opportunities to launch lunar missions every month, whereas Mars missions are limited to brief launch windows every two years. Even more importantly, the low lunar surface gravity means that getting people back to Earth is nothing like as difficult as it is from Mars. So rather than having to set up a permanent colony, you can rotate crews the same way they do with the ISS. In terms of reality TV this is great news, because it means you could run monthly competitions where the prize is a trip to the Moon. Lots of people willingly pay large sums of money each week to play the lottery, and I’ll bet many of them would do the same for a chance to visit the Moon (and appear on TV into the bargain).
    
3. Send low-budget robot probes to Mars with a better than 95% success rate. That’s the kind of reliability that would be needed for crewed missions, but it’s only ever been achieved for top-of-the-range spacecraft like the Curiosity Rover – not the sort of budget hardware that a private venture like Mars One will have to use. As a general rule, Mars missions have a depressing tendency to fail – the overall success rate is just 47%. Unlike the previous two items, I’m not suggesting this one would make a good reality TV show. Quite the opposite, in fact – it’s all about rocket science, which is virtually guaranteed to have viewers switching to another channel. But that’s an important point in itself. While there’s plenty of human interest involved in setting up a Martian colony, there’s a lot of boring science and engineering too – and it’s the science and engineering that’s going to end up eating up all the money. It would be a lot smarter, in my opinion, to pick something like the ocean floor or lunar project, which offers the same level of human interest with far fewer technical challenges.

Blowing up the Moon (again)

A few days ago, the Daily Telegraph ran a piece under the sensational heading “US planned to blow up a nuclear bomb on the Moon”. The strapline included the phrase “according to reports”, giving the reader the impression this was News when in fact it was nothing of the kind.

Exactly the same story, in greater detail, appeared in the January 2003 issue of UFO Magazine. Despite the cover date, this would have been on the newsstands in late November 2002 – exactly ten years before the Telegraph piece. It isn’t just that it was a similar story – it was exactly the same story. The Project designation (A119) and the name of the informant (Leonard Reiffel) are identical in both accounts. And the one in UFO Magazine is honest enough to admit it was old news even in 2002 – it ascribes Reiffel’s public revelation of the project to “14 May 2000”. The events themselves, of course, happened way back in 1958.

The reason I remember this is because I had a letter on the subject printed in the following issue of UFO Magazine. In retrospect, I’m not sure I got my facts right – but it’s still worth reproducing (see scanned image), if only for the editorial reply from the late and very much missed Graham Birdsall. “A respected physicist” is the nicest thing I’ve ever been called by someone who wasn’t after money!

The point I was trying to make was that Reiffel’s reference to a “mushroom cloud” suggested there was an atmosphere on the Moon. I don’t think this is necessarily true. While the classic image of the broad, flat-topped mushroom cloud requires interaction with an atmosphere, you would probably get something that could loosely be described as a “mushroom shape” even on an airless world like the Moon.

In any case, the letter was tongue-in-cheek – jumping on the bandwagon of saying “Look at all the things NASA is lying to us about”, which was the mainstay of UFO Magazine in those days. In reality, I firmly believe that any erroneous or contradictory statements made by NASA (or any other government organization) are far more likely to be due to the bungling incompetence of low-level officials than a coordinated top-level conspiracy.

Theoretical Crankology

The biggest problem with being interested in anomalous phenomena is that people assume you’re a crank. There’s good reason for this, since many of the most vocal proponents of the subject really are cranks. But just what is a crank, and how do you tell the difference between a crank and a serious researcher? For a long time I thought this was one of those grey, subjective questions that it’s impossible to answer, but it’s just occurred to me that there might be an objective, black-and-white criterion after all. It all comes down to what a person finds interesting, and what they find boring. Anomalies don’t exist in isolation, but they can only really be understood in a wider context (for example, cryptozoology in the context of mainstream zoology, ancient aliens in the context of ancient history, etc). My theory is that serious researchers will be as interested in the broader context as they are in the anomalies, while cranks are bored to tears by the context -- which to them is just an irrelevant waste of time.

To be honest, I didn’t really come up with this idea myself, but I got it from a recent blog post by Nick Redfern. He was talking about some of the more annoying traits of ufologists, and one of these was the fact they never “turn off the ufologist switch”. Well, I think serious ufologists do, but the cranks certainly don’t.

There are plenty of really interesting things to see in the sky besides UFOs. A ufologist who wants to be taken seriously ought to be a half-way decent plane spotter and a half-way decent amateur astronomer -- at least to the point of knowing where to look for Venus, Mars and Jupiter on a particular night. Many of them do, of course... but not the cranks. I’m suspicious of anyone who thinks planes and planets and re-entering space junk are simply “boring” things that debunkers use to explain away UFO sightings.

There’s a similar situation in cryptozoology. One of the reasons I have so much time for Jon Downes and his colleagues at the CFZ is that they’re as happy talking about insects and spiders and amphibians as they are about monsters. These are real creatures, which may be rare or outside their natural habitats -- but they’re not cryptids by any definition. Yet it’s only by understanding the behaviour and ecology of known species that you can have a hope of understanding the unknown ones. In a recent article, Jon described himself as a “naturalist, cryptozoologist and journalist”, in that order: he put naturalist before cryptozoologist. Now, that’s my kind of anomalist -- and there’s nothing remotely cranky about it. A crank is someone who thinks there are only two species of creature in the woods: (a) Bigfoot, and (b) everything else, which is simply a distraction and a waste of time.

I often get accused of being a skeptic, but that’s not true (well, I suppose it’s true from the point of view of the sort of cranks I’m talking about, but it’s not true from any rational point of view). I’m interested in physics (in fact I’m reasonably well qualified in it) and I’m convinced there are major discoveries waiting to be made in areas like gravitational control and inertialess propulsion. But I’ve got no time for the countless internet cranks who claim to have proved Einstein wrong, yet can’t even get the units on each side of an algebraic equation to agree -- let alone understand the finer points of tensor calculus.

I’m also a believer in ancient aliens. Well, perhaps not ancient aliens, but certainly an advanced level of technology (or paranormal equivalent thereof) in certain ancient civilizations. But that comes from a wider interest in ancient history -- trying to understand it in its own context, identifying where there are apparent anomalies, and looking for an explanation of the anomalies. That’s quite different from a crank’s approach, which is the other way around altogether -- starting with the assumption that extraterrestrial visitation is an indisputable fact, then looking for evidence of it and dismissing everything else as an irrelevant waste of time.

[For anyone who is wondering, the photograph above—which die-hard ufologists will find utterly uninteresting—shows the re-entry and breakup of an ATV unmanned resupply craft. Perfectly explicable, therefore only of interest to non-cranks!]

London versus the V-2 rockets

The V-2 rocket offensive launched by Nazi Germany in the closing months of the Second World War was one of the most fascinating episodes in 20th century military history. The rocket technology used in the V-2s was years ahead of its time, and led directly—through the exploitation of captured rockets after the war—to both the US and Soviet space programmes. But the V-2s were more than just geeky technology—they were terrifying killing machines, that arrived without warning and were more than five times as lethal as the same amount of explosive delivered by more conventional means.

One of the most interesting things about the V-2s is the combination of secrecy and scepticism that surrounded their development and initial deployment. In the 1920s and 30s, many scientists were dismissive of the very idea of long-range, liquid fuelled rockets, and claimed that they only had a place in children’s science fiction stories. Astonishingly, even after the V-2s started to crash down onto London, it was two months before the British government reluctantly acknowledged their existence. During this time, the outbreak of sudden devastating explosions—sometimes several a day—was officially attributed to “exploding gas mains”. Why was the government so slow to admit that such a serious threat existed? One reason was that the allies were officially supposed to be winning the war, and such negative publicity would be bad for the country’s morale. But another factor was that any public announcement would be picked up by the Germans, and the government didn’t want the enemy to have any information on where the rockets were landing.

You can read a lot more about this subject in a short ebook I’ve just written in the Bretwalda Battles series: The V-2 Offensive on London. This is metaphorically “hot off the press”, and is currently only available in Kindle format from Amazon.com and Amazon UK, and in other formats direct from the distributor Smashwords. But it will be released by iTunes and other retailers over the next few weeks.

Incidentally, all of my self-published ebooks are now available on iTunes -- I’ve set up a new Books page on my website with links to all the detailed information.

A Virtual Spaceship

Last month, the BBC ran a show called Stargazing Live over three consecutive nights. The middle instalment was the most interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it featured a surprisingly (for television) level-headed segment about UFOs, featuring cameos by David Clarke and Mark Pilkington. Secondly, a young astrophysicist from Oxford University called Andrew Pontzen showed a computer simulation of galaxy formation (the screenshot above is taken from a clip he posted on his YouTube channel).

The simulation interested me because that’s the sort of thing I did for my PhD thirty years ago... except that in those days we had to wrestle with mediaeval technology, so the results didn’t look as impressive (example on the left, complete with hand-written labels). But the principle was exactly the same. In one of Andrew’s videos (called “This is a Galaxy”), he uses graphics technology to fly through a simulated galaxy. The result is enormously impressive, but he wasn’t the first to have this idea. I looked back through my thesis, and found the following:

“I devised an interactive program based on GAL64, which produces axonometric projections [of the simulated galaxy] on the screen of the Vector General unit at the University of Manchester Computer Graphics Unit. Unlike the GAL64 views the magnification and viewpoint of these pictures are not fixed, but can be set arbitrarily by means of the Vector General hand control units. Because the operation of the program thus bears a marked similarity to piloting an intergalactic spaceship, it was given the appropriately spaceship-like name of VALKYR.”

Why did I call the program “VALKYR”? I don’t think it stood for anything, unless I made up some extremely contrived acronym. It’s just that in those days, program names were limited to six characters (I told you the technology was mediaeval). I was a big fan of Wagner at the time, and that was the closest I could get to “Valkyrie”!

In those days, my science fiction reading inclined towards the arty end of the spectrum, with authors like Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard. However, I discovered long afterwards that a much more downmarket writer named Alfred Coppel did write a couple of stories featuring a spaceship named Valkyr -- “The Rebel of Valkyr” in 1950, and a sequel “Forbidden Weapon” the following year. As you can see from the scan below (taken from the British Edition of Marvel Science Stories), Valkyr was an appropriately mediaeval spaceship!

Searching for alien artifacts

For many people, the very idea of needing to search for alien artifacts is ludicrous. After all, alien spacecraft can be seen in the skies of Earth every day of the week, and virtually every archaeological specimen older that three thousand years was fabricated, if not by extraterrestrials, then by dim-witted humans under the guidance of extraterrestrials. So for people who think along those lines, there's nothing to search for: the Earth is already overflowing with alien artifacts. But scientists (who are part of the Conspiracy) aren't allowed to admit that -- they have to look further afield. I've just been reading three fascinating articles on the subject at arXiv.org:

The first paper is called On the likelihood of non-terrestrial artifacts in the Solar System. It's based on the idea that the most probable type of artifact would be an unmanned space probe between 1 and 10 metres in size. The authors use my favourite mathematical formula, Bayes' Theorem, to estimate the probability that such a probe exists in the Solar System but has not yet been detected (I'm annoyed by this, because I could easily have done the calculation myself, but I wasn't clever enough to think of doing it). They conclude that the probability that there are no NTAs ("non-terrestrial artifacts") waiting to be found on the surface of the Earth is 75%, that there are none on the surface of the Moon is 65%, and that there are none on the surface of Mars is 50%. But when it comes to the remainder of the Solar System, it's a different matter altogether: the authors say they "have almost no confidence that NTAs are absent".

There is a natural tendency to assume that any advanced alien civilization would send out interstellar space probes, just as we would ourselves if we had the money. But what if the aliens simply stay at home and mind their own business? We might still be able to detect their "artifacts", as shown in the second paper: Detection Technique for Artificially-Illuminated Objects in the Outer Solar System and Beyond. In this case, the artifacts in question are city lights. The night-side of the Earth (the side facing away from the Sun) is covered in bright little pinpoints of light -- and these add up to quite a lot of light coming from a place that, according to the laws of nature, should be pitch black. Any planet with a reasonably advanced civilization is likely to be the same, giving it a characteristic signature in terms of both the intensity and the spectrum of the light emitted.

The first two papers assume the aliens are at the same technological level as ourselves, or slightly ahead of it. But what if they were millions of years ahead? A really advanced civilization might be capable of harvesting the entire energy of a star, or of manipulating the structure of space-time. This possibility is addressed in the third paper: Black Holes: Attractors for Intelligence?

An accretion disk around a black hole is the most efficient source of energy in the universe. Such disks are known to exist in low-mass X-Ray binary (LMXB) systems, as shown in the NASA artist's impression on the left. It's conceivable that such systems could be created artificially by a sufficiently advanced intelligence -- but even naturally occurring ones might attract advanced civilizations to their vicinity, in order to tap into the readily available energy and possibly for other uses as well (such as time travel or ecologically friendly waste disposal). Even without understanding the details of the alien technology, the paper suggests that we might be able to detect it through anomalies in the energy flow from LMXBs.

Moon Aliens

A few years ago I bought a second-hand copy of a book called Secrets of our Spaceship Moon by Don Wilson. This was first published in the USA in 1979, but the copy I bought was the British Sphere paperback from 1980. Inside it I found a newspaper clipping from the Sunday Mirror (a downmarket tabloid here in the UK) dated 9 September 1979. Headed "Moon Aliens: Riddle of two UFOs in crater as Apollo made historic landing", it cites various dubious pieces of evidence suggesting that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin encountered extraterrestrials while they were on the surface of the Moon in 1969 (see scan below -- click on the image for a larger version).

The alleged Apollo 11 encounter is discussed in Secrets of our Spaceship Moon (it's even mentioned in the teaser paragraph on the first page), but it's pretty tame compared with some of the book's other "revelations". One of the later Apollo missions found a discarded glass bottle on the Moon, while another produced metal shavings while drilling into its crust. Early reconnaissance photographs revealed huge monuments, pyramids and other structures on the surface. As far back as the 1920s, coded radio signals were received from an alien satellite in lunar orbit. In 1968, a male-female pair of Soviet cosmonauts landed on the Moon a year before Apollo 11, but the man was killed by a "mechanical monster" and the woman was forced to return to Earth alone. To top everything, as the title of the book suggests, the Moon itself is a hollowed out artificial megastructure of alien origin. NASA knows this, but insists on concealing the truth for nefarious reasons of its own.

You might think that all this comes from the author's imagination, but actually all the claims in the book are carefully referenced to third-party sources. It's just that the sources aren't especially reliable. The information about the metal shavings, for example, comes from an unnamed "high school student". Now call me an old cynic, but I don't find that overwhelmingly conclusive. And one of the sources for the Apollo 11 UFO sightings is Otto Binder, described by Don Wilson as a "former NASA researcher and writer". I'm not sure about the "former NASA researcher" part, but Otto Binder certainly was a prolific writer. Most of his output was science fiction, written under the pseudonym of Eando Binder (originally shared with his brother Earl: "E and O Binder").

In 1969, Binder wrote a novel called Menace of the Saucers (left) and its sequel Night of the Saucers. These are interesting because they're among the very few adult science fiction novels which buy wholeheartedly and uncritically into the UFO paradigm. The two books are full of references to "real" ufological cases and associated anomalies -- including lunar ones. At one point in Night of the Saucers, the hero (a skeptical journalist turned believer) says to his alien wife (a member of the Galactic Vigilantes) "By the way, Lunar Orbiter Two, in 1966, photographed perfectly shaped domes on the Moon, and also strange spires. The domes had moved, when next photographed. Anything of yours?" -- to which she answers "Yes, they are our mobile Moon bases, plus antennas, with which we keep a long-range check on Earth".

Hyperbolic Orbit

On 5 May 1961, as the result of a short trip on the end of a rocket, Alan Shepard became an instant celebrity and one of the greatest American heroes of the twentieth century. But was he really the first American in space? Personally I think it's an exaggeration to claim this... a Myth-conception created by a mixture of Cold War politics and the media's ignorance of science. If you're going to talk about space travel, you need at least a basic understanding of Newton's Law of Gravitation.

Shepard's trajectory in May 1961 was parabolic, the same as a ball thrown into the air, or any other object which is launched upwards with less than orbital velocity V_o. To enter Earth orbit (as Yuri Gagarin's Vostok spacecraft did three weeks before Shepard's flight), the trajectory must be an ellipse, which requires the speed to be somewhere between V_o and escape velocity V_E = √2V_o. If the speed is greater than V_E the object will escape the Earth altogether on a hyperbolic orbit.

The adjective "hyperbolic" can also mean "of exaggerated importance" (from the noun hyperbole, normally shortened to hype). In this sense, Alan Shepard's flight was hyperbolic as well as parabolic!

I don't mean to belittle Shepard personally -- after all, he was just doing a job, and had no control over how that job was presented to the world by NASA or the news media. Arguably, his flight required far more courage than Gagarin's had, since the latter had the benefit of a well-designed, well-engineered spacecraft that virtually flew itself, and was always well within its operational envelope. Soviet cosmonauts were never bothered by Shepard's oft-quoted worry that "every component was built by the lowest bidder"!

The Redstone rocket used for Shepard's mission (and Gus Grissom's similar flight a couple of months later) was designed in the early 1950s as a short-range ballistic missile, and was (in engineering terms if not in visual appearance) only a slight modification on the German V-2 rocket of World War 2. Test flights of captured V-2s in the late 1940s achieved similar altitudes to Shepard's flight, yet no-one at the time described them as "flights into space". Some of these flights even carried monkeys and other animals as passengers, with no great media fanfare. Under normal circumstances, I'm sure that Alan Shepard's mission would have been seen as "just another test flight"... if it hadn't been for the exigencies of Cold War politics, which demanded an instant U.S. response to Gagarin's flight into space!

Eventually, in February 1962, an American did make it into orbit: John Glenn, boosted into space by an Atlas rocket which was far more powerful than the Redstone. As a space-obsessed but scientifically ignorant schoolboy in the 1960s (from which period the postcard above dates), Alan Shepard was one of my great heroes, and I could never understand why grown-ups made such a fuss about John Glenn... after all, he was only the third American in space, wasn't he? And if the Americans really believed that Alan Shepard's flight was on a par with Gagarin's, they wouldn't have made a fuss about John Glenn either!

Novel space technologies

The main difference between space technologies in the real world and in science fiction is that real world technologies have to work, whereas SF technologies don't (that's why Star Trek has got warp drive and NASA hasn't). You might think it would be pretty risky to build a spaceship based on a description from an SF novel, and you'd be right. On the other hand, amongst all those way-out ideas, there might be some pointers to a future breakthrough...

That's obviously the way the European Space Agency was thinking when they set up the ITSF (Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction) database in 2001. Divided into categories such as Communications, Robotics, Materials, Propulsion and Space Transportation, the database is a repository of ideas from such Great Thinkers as Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

I even submitted one item myself, taken from Ian Watson's thoroughly bizarre novel Alien Embassy (1977). In this, the participants indulge in Tibetan sacred sex rituals in order to project their astral essences to the planets of other star systems (all the enlightened races in the Galaxy do this). Believe it or not, the item did make it into the ITSF database (minus one or two of the more technical details), but under Feasibility they put "not able to judge". They probably didn't even try it!

Dinosaur Orbit

My PhD is in galaxy dynamics, which probably explains why I'm unemployed at the moment. However, it also means I know how to calculate orbits, and the one illustrated here is an oddity I stumbled on back in the 1980s when I was doing postdoctoral research. I call it the "dinosaur orbit" because it's the sort of thing the dinosaurs could have done just before they became extinct, around 65 million years ago... if they'd had a spaceship that is, and pointed it in the general direction of the Galactic Centre.

With a judicious choice of speed and angle, the spacecraft would have flipped around the Galactic Centre and be just about arriving back where the Earth is now (the latter having moved, together with the Solar System as a whole, on its own orbit). The graphic is a real simulation result, not a sketch -- but to get the boomerang effect you need to have a really massive black hole right at the centre of the Galaxy. Without this, the spaceship wouldn't be deflected enough to come back to the right place.

Phony space missions

The six-man crew of the MARS-500 mission entered orbit around the red planet yesterday, after eight months in space. Presumably they do actually know they haven't moved an inch from the test facility at Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems, but the situation is reminiscent of at least two science fiction stories in which the crews of simulated space missions weren't so fortunate. The characters in Isaac Asimov's "Ideas Die Hard" (1957: reprinted in The Winds of Change) think they're on a flight to the moon, but actually they're guinea pigs in an experiment on the psychological effects of space travel. But that's nothing compared to J.G. Ballard's "Thirteen to Centaurus" (1962: reprinted in The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard), where the non-existent voyage is going all the way to Alpha Centauri, and the experiment has already been underway for fifty years (and the crew are into their second generation) when the story takes place!