The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs

263 Pages·2010·1.26 MB·English

by  Michael Belfiore

The Department of Mad Scientists
How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs
Michael Belfiore
For Jade Star
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction

01 An Arm and a Leg
02 A Special-Projects Agency
03 The Intergalactic Computer Network
04 The Robot will See You Now
05 Backseat Drivers
06 Crazy-Ass Things
07 The Final Frontier
08 Power to the People

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by Michael Belfiore
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the support of DARPA director
Tony Tether, DARPA public affairs officers Jan Walker and her staff, and the
DARPA program managers and contractors who granted me interviews. I thank
them for taking a chance on me and this project. I also want to thank my editor at
Smithsonian Books, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, whose keen editorial eye and
intuitive understanding of what I wanted to accomplish unerringly guided the
ultimate shape of the book. Thanks also to my agent, Linda Lowenthal of the
David Black Literary Agency; Seth Fletcher and Bjorn Carey, who assigned me
stories on DARPA topics for Popular Science; Leander Kahney and Noah
Schactman, my editors at Wired News; my wife, Wendy Kagan, for her support
through another book project; and finally to my good friend Harry LeBlanc for
suggesting a variation of the subtitle.
INTRODUCTION
I FIRST MET THE AUTODOC in a science fiction novel. Back then it was on
a starship, and it allowed its user to live practically forever—pretty much a
requirement for interstellar travel, even at near-light speeds. Now I was seeing it
in the flesh, as it were, squatting in a corner of a Silicon Valley laboratory,
looking like a giant mechanized insect with its mouth parts and legs poised over
an operating table.
The body on the table, like the robot, was artificial—placed there to show
what an actual human being would look like in that setting. My tour guide was a
forty-seven-year-old mechanical engineer talking a mile a minute, pointing out a
cabinet full of surgical supplies and a swing-arm nurse built on the frame of an
industrial robot used to working more on cars than on human bodies, and
explaining how the system worked. It didn’t take much imagination to bring the
scene alive in my mind’s eye.
The patient, gushing blood, near death, would be tossed onto the table, none
too gently, given the circumstances: massive hemorrhaging that had to be
stopped immediately. Strapped down, breathing shallowly, the injured man
wouldn’t flinch as the robot maneuvered its grasping parts over his wounds. The
mini CT scanner attached to the table would slide down the length of the man’s
body, feeding data to the robot’s computer brain. Then the robot would get to
work, first jabbing the patient with a needle, then deftly threading a line through
his vascular system, guiding it unerringly to the weakly pulsing artery that was
pumping the man’s blood out over the table and on to the floor.
A pause, while the robot worked invisibly inside the man’s body. And then
the flow of blood would shut off as abruptly as a turned faucet as the robot
plugged the leak. Whirring and clicking, the robot—apparently satisfied—
withdrew its graspers and pulled out the bloody line, replacing it with a simple
IV. At an unspoken command, the robot nurse swung over to the supply cabinet,
picked up some sutures, and swung back to the robot surgeon. Then it pulled one
of the surgeon’s arms off and plugged in a fresh one. The surgeon picked up a
suture with its new hand and made quick work of sewing the patient up. Time
elapsed from diagnosis to completed surgery: approximately two minutes. And
another soldier would live to fight another day.
“Want to try it?” the engineer was asking.
“Of course,” I said.
He seated me at a table before another robosurgeon—the latest prototype—
helped me position my hands on a pair of metal grips, and had me lean forward
so that I could look through the binoculars on the console in front of me. I was
instantly transported across the room to another table, where a slab of simulated
flesh awaited my ministrations with needle and suture of my own. I saw the table
and its simulated patient in full 3-D color, and my hands registered every bump
and jerk as I less than expertly maneuvered my robot’s graspers and tried to sew.
I wasn’t just watching a science fiction novel come to life now, I was in one.
My visit to the robot surgeon was just one stop on my odyssey through the
startling and mind-bending world of an obscure government agency almost no
one I speak to casually has heard of but that has affected all of our lives in
countless ways. Have you used the Internet? A computer mouse? A satellite-
based navigation system? Thank the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, or DARPA. My mission in writing this book was to find out what
projects the agency was working on today that could prove as influential as those
past projects, and meet the people bringing them to life.

I FIRST STUMBLED on DARPA while reporting on the world’s first privately
funded manned space flights. It was June 22, 2004, in Mojave, California. The
TV crews had cranked down their satellite dishes and folded their tents and
driven back to L.A. in their trucks and vans, followed closely by the thousands
of spectators in their RVs and cars. The windswept little town in the Mojave
Desert one hundred miles east of Los Angeles had, in just a day, returned to its
usual near-emptiness, punctuated by the sound of the wind whipping flagpoles
and the occasional roar of jet engines and the growl of piston engines from
airplanes taking off and landing at the airport. Which was now a spaceport.
The day before, SpaceShipOne had carried a man, sixty-three-year-old Mike
Melvill, outside the atmosphere for the first time. The ship had been conceived
by an airplane designer renowned for his shockingly innovative approach to
engineering and built by his small company, Scaled Composites, headquartered
on the airport’s flight line, for a mere $25 million. That was half the retail price
of a Boeing 737–600 airliner. The little spaceship that could, hand-built of
carbon-fiber composites, flew three times the speed of sound, faster than any
civilian craft yet built. While still far slower than the Mach 25 speed necessary
for reaching orbit, SpaceShipOne nevertheless breached the atmosphere and
allowed Melvill to float, weightless, for four minutes. News of the achievement
now blared in headlines around the world. But I alone, it seemed, among the
journalists covering Melvill’s flight, had returned to Mojave the next day to see
what a more or less ordinary day looked like at a commercial spaceport. There
was no one around. The place might as well have been a ghost town. Everyone
was inside, out of the desert sun, working in their hangars and offices during just
another day.
I began by checking out a rocket company called XCOR Aerospace. As it
turned out, that was as far as I got that day. Though one would never guess it
from its outward appearance, XCOR Aerospace represented the hopes, dreams,
and potential of an age of private space travel as well as any other group of
aerospace mavericks, including Scaled Composites. XCOR Aerospace occupied
a featureless blue hangar dating from the Second World War. A sign on the door
featuring a stylized rocket plane logo was all that distinguished the place. I
walked into a battered lounge that was trying without much success to be a
lobby. Framed magazine article reprints about the company hung on the walls,
including pieces about a home-built airplane the company’s engineers had hot-
rodded up with a pair of rocket engines and dubbed the EZ-Rocket.
The heart of the operation was an open hangar in which working areas and
workbenches had been laid out along the sides. There I met a friendly middle-
aged engineer named Aleta Jackson, who I later learned possessed a keen
intellect and not a little of the sense of humor required of anyone who has
devoted her life to the fulfillment of a dream most people think impossible. She
was about as far removed as one could imagine from the stereotypical picture of
the fabled steely-eyed missile man of the previous generation, who had started
the first space age, the one run by massive government programs, but she was no
less committed to the dream of space flight. “Without routine, regular, reliable
access to space, I think this planet is hosed,” she told me simply. “We’ve got to
have it, and the sooner we get it, the better off everyone’s going to be.”
Everyone?
“You can do so much more if you have routine access to space,” she
explained. “You can bring back resources that we don’t have.”
For instance?
“One carbonaceous chondrite asteroid three kilometers in diameter will
probably produce as a by-product more gold than has been mined to date on the
Earth.”
XCOR’s chief engineer, Dan DeLong, likewise subscribed to an all-
encompassing belief in the transformative power of affordable access to space.
“It’s almost a religious thing,” he told me when he joined me and Jackson there
in the XCOR shop. “You have to believe. You have to be an optimist. Obviously
if we wanted to start a company just to make money, we would have done
something much easier.”
Lofty though their dreams might be, the rocketeers of XCOR took a very
practical and workaday approach to the problems of affordable access to space.
They needed investors, so they built their EZ-Rocket technology demonstrator,
showing not only that their dreams were built on sound engineering principles,
but that rockets could be safely flown as an ordinary part of a viable business.
Further demonstrating the safety and reliability of their rockets, the team built a
“tea cart” rocket, a small, fifteen-pound thrust, ethane-and-nitrous-oxide-fueled
rocket on a rolling cart similar to those used to wheel room-service meals to
hotel rooms. In fact, the team actually did fire their device in a hotel ballroom.
“And we did it with fire marshal approval,” DeLong said, rightly proud of the
achievement. “The fact that we had fire marshal approval is what impressed the
investors.”
I found this juxtaposition of outlandishly ambitious goals with basic,
commonsense business principles and everyday problem-solving inspiring.
Unlike Scaled Composites, XCOR did not have a single angel investor with
plenty of disposable cash. Its investors expected a return on their investment, it
was hoped sooner rather than later. That didn’t bother Jackson, DeLong, or their
colleagues. Fresh from the disappointment of being part of a rocket company
called Rotary Rocket that had burned through some $30 million in financing
without a working spaceship to show for it, the group now subscribed to a “small
is beautiful” philosophy. “Having too much money probably causes more
companies to fail than having too little money,” DeLong asserted. “You never
learn thrift if you start out with too much money.”
The XCOR managers’ solution to their cash-flow problem was to find
individual customers who also needed some of the technologies XCOR wanted
to develop. Their relatively modest first space milestone was a two-seat rocket
plane that would take off from a runway on rocket power, without the
encumbrance of a jet-propelled mother ship to reach the same kind of altitudes
and speeds as the jet-plane-plus-rocket-plane SpaceShipOne system. The rocket
plane, Jackson and the others hoped, would find markets among space tourists
and among scientists wishing to fly microgravity experiments more cheaply than
had ever before been possible. Until they got there, the XCOR engineers hoped
to turn enough of a profit in developing some of the technology behind their
planned spaceship to fund the development of components for which they either
could not or preferred not to find customers.
At the time of my visit, the XCOR engineers were well along this path
toward commercial spaceflight. They were then finishing development of a
piston-driven liquid oxygen pump. Not exactly the headline-grabbing project
that SpaceShipOne’s flight was, but in its way, an important development
nevertheless, at least as far as people who understood rockets were concerned.
People such as the program managers of an obscure research-and-development
agency called DARPA. DARPA had invested $750,000 toward getting XCOR’s
new pump to work, and now they were watching their investment pay off.
At the time I didn’t register much about DARPA other than that it was one of
XCOR’s major customers and that it was a government agency. I had started
writing a book about small entrepreneurial spaceship companies such as Scaled
Composites and XCOR, and it seemed to me that the private sector was where
the action in space was, not government programs.
The commercial space flight industry had gotten off the ground with the $10
million Ansari X PRIZE for the first privately funded space shot. The prize
stipulated that the winner receive no funding of any kind from any government;
the prize’s founder, Peter Diamandis, believed that the main reason space flight
wasn’t more affordable and commonplace was that government space programs
had stifled the innovations that would have made it so. The X PRIZE
competitors were inclined to agree with him, and writing about the X PRIZE
competition and its aftermath, so was I.
And yet, much as I sought to dismiss it, DARPA kept popping up as I
researched my book Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders,
Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space. There it was funding Space
Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, founded and led by Elon
Musk near the Los Angeles International Airport. Musk had made a fortune by
co-founding PayPal and then selling it to eBay in 2002, and now saw space
travel as humankind’s best hope for surviving the kind of environmental
upheavals that had wiped out the dinosaurs. Musk wasn’t just shooting the moon
—he wanted to go all the way to Mars, and hoped to provide the technological
infrastructure to allow others to settle there permanently. No mere pipe dream,
SpaceX had $100 million in working capital contributed by its founder alone,
and it was far along in building and testing a rocket called the Falcon 1. Musk’s
team of highly competent engineers, many poached from SpaceX’s big
competitors, also believed the plan would work. And so did DARPA, which
became SpaceX’s first customer, for a demonstration launch of Falcon 1.
And DARPA was funding yet another space start-up, AirLaunch LLC,
founded by former Rotary Rocket CEO Gary Hudson, whose mission was to
drive down the cost of launching satellites by dropping rockets off the back of C-