Abstract
Rent-a-MiG
Over the past decade, more and more thrill seekers have been jetting to the former Soviet Union to fly MiG jets, train with the Spetsnaz (Russian special forces), or cruise on a nuclear icebreaker to the North Pole. All that's necessary is good health and a wad of cash.
Struggling to make ends meet, the Russian government and private concerns have directed a portion of the country's military and space resources toward tourism, culminating in what is expected to be the first privately funded, purely recreational flight to the International Space Station. (Millionaires Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth simply hitched rides on Russian missions.) Space Adventures Ltd., based in Arlington, Virginia, has already booked a Soyuz rocket with Rosaviokos-mos (the Russian space agency that says it is “committed to the future of private space travel” to bolster its budget) and set a launch date of early 2005. The rocket will carry two space tourists at $20 million a seat.
If $20 million sounds a little expensive, Incredible Adventures, Inc. in Sara-sota, Florida, offers all or part of Russia's cosmonaut training program, from rides on the space program's zero-gravity airplane to cosmonaut certification, at prices ranging from $3,000-$179,000. Depending on the program, participants stay from one day to more than six months at Russia's formerly secret cosmonaut training center, Star City, about an hour outside of Moscow.
Plenty of other Russian hardware and military services are for rent. Murmansk Shipping Lines refitted the Russian icebreaker fleet with tourist cabins as a means to supplement income when government funding dried up in the 1990s. Depending on accommodations (cabin or suite), $15,000-$20,000 buys a two-week North Pole cruise on the nuclear icebreaker Yamal, while $5,000-$9,500 buys a 12-day roundtrip to Franz Josef Land on board the smaller Kapitan Dranitsyn.
Incredible Adventures started its business in 1993 by offering rides in a MiG-25 Foxbat. That first ride has turned into “MiGs Over Moscow”–three adventure tourism programs featuring flights on six different MiGs, a visit to Russia's formerly top-secret Zhukovsky Air Base, and instruction from test pilots at the Gromov Flight Research Institute. All for a mere $15,950, a price tempting enough to lure a steadily rising stream of tourists.
The view from a MiG-25 Foxbat, 16 miles high.
“We've had several people go two or three times,” says Jane Reifert, Incredible Adventures president. “One guy's been back nine times.”
The success of the MiG program is one reason adventure tourism partnerships in Russia have spread. After the first Foxbat flights, Reifert's outfit was approached by Russia's space agency, army, and others looking for a chunk of global tourism dollars.
“They said, ‘Hey, how would you like to sell some of our stuff?’” says Reifert.
It also spawned a plethora of adventure tourism companies targeting Russian military and space operations–Space Adventures; Astronomical Tours, in Warrensburg, Missouri; and Moscow-based Kardin Trading Ltd., to name a few.
But the popularity of such trips and Russia's complicity have prompted interest from more than adventure tourism companies. Munich-based European Aeronautic Defence and Space (EADS), manufacturer of MiG jets, is developing a “Migbus”–basically a MiG-31 Foxhound equipped with a 12-person, glass-sided cabin–to take paying passengers 15 miles above the Earth's surface, right about where the sky transitions to the darkness of space. It's the same trip the Foxbat makes but with more fee-paying passengers per ride.
There's plenty to do for those who prefer to stay on the ground. Spetsnaz training–the brainchild of Denver-based Systema Group, a Russian martial arts school–is actually six programs: Russian Martial Arts, Viyaz AntiTerror Training, Russian Navy Seal Training, Spetsnaz Survival Training, Bodyguard Training, and Ryazan Airborne Training. Courses cover everything from driving light tanks, parachuting, and firing Russian machine guns to camouflage techniques, hostage rescue, and explosives training. The program, promotional materials say, is “as real as it gets”–participants train with Spetsnaz personnel at Spetsnaz facilities and sleep in Spetsnaz barracks. Vacationers “receive the same elite military training given to members of the Russian Special Forces” without “the psychological and physical stress.”
In Brief
Flying high
If you really want to see the next solar eclipse, you'd better hope the flight's not sold out–and that your wallet is stuffed with cash. On November 24, a Qantas 747 will fly over the Antarctic to view an eclipse lasting approximately 2 minutes, 36 seconds. A spokesperson for Melbourne's Croydon Travel explains that by viewing the eclipse in flight you can eliminate the worry that bad weather will spoil the fun. With tickets ranging from $900 in economy to $7,500 in first class, the flight will cost from $5.80 to $48 for every second of eclipse-viewing time. As a bonus, though, an aerial tour of Antarctica will be thrown in for free (antarcticaflights.com.au).
Speak of the devil
Even as the September/October Bulletin noted that France had needed to shut down nuclear plants one dry, hot summer when river levels dropped too low to safely handle still-heated water discharged from reactors, it happened again. This year's heat wave baked southern and central Europe, and reduced water levels in rivers used to cool France's nuclear reactors. Only this time, the French government allowed three plants to discharge water at temperatures considered unsafe for the environment–scientists say fish are endangered when water temperatures exceed 82 degrees Fahrenheit. At the Blaye nuclear facility in southwestern France, water temperatures in the Gironde estuary rose from 76.3 degrees Fahrenheit on July 31 to 81.9 degrees on August 10, even before the discharge restrictions were removed. The heat also caused Germany to shut down its oldest nuclear plant and relax discharge temperature rules in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg (Associated Press, August 12).
A word to the wise
This summer, the British and U.S. governments were revealed to have relied on obviously forged documents suggesting that Iraqi agents had purchased uranium ore in Niger. In fact, the phony documents were one of the main reasons they argued that Iraq presented an imminent danger. But Niger's government wanted to make clear that it would never divert ore from its legal contracts. Hama Hamadou, the prime minister, said that his government had never even talked with Iraq, and he called on Tony Blair to produce the “evidence” that Blair claimed confirmed the sale. At that point, the United States dispatched Herman Cohen, a former assistant secretary of state, to Niger's capital, Niamey, to deliver a message to the small country highly dependent on international aid. As interpreted by one unnamed Niger official, Cohen's message, delivered in late July, was “shut up.” The official added that “everybody in Niger knows what the consequences of upsetting America or Britain would be” (London Sunday Telegraph, August 3).
Our animal friends update
The rabbits near the Dounreay nuclear plant in Scotland have been declared not very radioactively contaminated after all, and safe to eat (BBC News, September 3). Meanwhile, Bechtel, the contractor tearing down the H Reactor at the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington State, has encountered dozens of radioactive wasp nests. The wasps are being trapped for testing, and the nests buried in a low-level radioactive waste facility (Tri-City Herald, August 18).
Nothing is their fault
Post-war Iraq has offered the administration an opportunity to parcel out no-bid contracts to its oil-company friends. Even better, in May the Bush administration issued Executive Order 13303, which grants blanket legal immunity to those corporations, extending indefinitely a previous U.N. grant of limited immunity (to clear the way for humanitarian assistance purchased with oil revenues), which would have expired on December 31, 2007. On August 15, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), a government watchdog organization, issued an analysis of 13303. GAP, which is seeking to investigate the order's origins, described it as “a thinly veiled attempt to suspend the rule of law” for the lucky companies.
Everything but the thyroid gland
Documents released in August by Britain's National Archives show that in 1955 British scientists planned to test the feasibility of feeding the population radioactive meat–an experiment deemed necessary to plan for disruptions in the food supply in the event of nuclear attack (Independent, August 27). No documents are available, however, indicating whether the test was ever conducted.
Where's it going now?
The amount of money the Bush administration has requested for classified programs is at the highest level since 1988, according to a report prepared by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. But unlike the 1980s–when it was widely suspected that classified funds were being spent developing stealth aircraft such as the F-117 fighter and the B-2 bomber–today it's anybody's guess where the estimated $23.3 billion in the Pentagon's 2004 black budget is going.
The spring/summer semester of Spetsnaz training was completely booked despite minimum class sizes of 10-25 people. Courses run about $5,000 each, including airfare, meals, uniforms, and accommodations. There's only one hitch: $5,000 may buy you transportation, food, and instruction, but you have to supply your own combat boots.
Paul Rogers is a Chicago-based freelance writer.
A new wave of energy
That's where the technology stood until the 1960s, when the first commercial tidal power plant was built near Saint-Malo, France, where it has been functioning for more than 37 years without missing a tide. But damming an estuary or tidal basin with a barrage has both environmental and commercial drawbacks. Both fish and boats like to go in and out with the tide.
Two new approaches take the tidal energy-generating mechanism off shore, where fish and boats aren't trapped by a large dam. They just go around it.
Residents of Britain's Devon coast, where two British companies have teamed up to build the world's first offshore tidal energy turbine, will be the first to benefit from these new tidal technologies. Sited about a mile offshore of Lynmouth, the single 11-meter blade will be capable of generating 300 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power about 75 homes. “We estimate that there are at least 10 gigawatts of power available from tidal power in the U.K.,” Martin Wright of Marine Current Turbines, Ltd., told BBC News in June.
But what about the poor fish that might get caught in the blades? There's little danger of that because the blades rotate relatively slowly, about 20 revolutions per minute.
This fall the U.S. Navy will test a more portable approach to tidal power generation at its Hawaii Kaneohe Marine Corps Base, according to the August 4 Honolulu StarBulletin. The navy wants to know if the ocean swells that make Hawaii a surfer's paradise can be tapped for electricity. If so, it will be a boon to deployed naval vessels whose captains may not want to depend on foreign sources of power when harbored abroad.
The navy awarded New Jersey-based Ocean Power Technologies a $9.5 million contract to test if bobbing buoys tethered to the ocean floor can generate cheap and clean power.
During the first phase of the project, Ocean Power will tether one of its “PowerBuoys” 9-12 feet below the surface in 100 feet of water. As each swell passes, the buoy will move up and down a rigid pole, which will move hydraulic fluid to a generator on the ocean floor. The power produced by the PowerBuoy is enough to power five to eight homes.
The blades of the Lynmouth tidal energy turbine being submerged off the English coast.
If the company can develop a 100 kilowatt-hour model, it said, the cost of production will drop from 7-10 cents per kilowatt-hour to less than 4 cents, which is cheaper than electricity generated from fossil fuels, the wind, or the sun.
Ocean Power executive Charles Dunleavy said that waves passing through a 10-square-mile area of ocean could power the entire state of California.
Facing facts, big brother butts out
As reported last year, Tampa, Florida began experimenting with Visionics Corp.'s “FaceIt” system in the summer of 2001 (see “Did You Pack Your Own Bags?” March/April 2002). In two years, though, the security camera system that scanned the streets of Tampa's Ybor City section–theoretically matching faces in the crowd with a database of 30,000 mug shots of miscreants–failed to identify anyone actually wanted by the authorities.
Early on, the system did misidentify a local construction worker. FaceIt fingered the man as wanted in Oklahoma for felony child neglect, although he had never been to that state and had no children (“Stop That Face,” November/December 2001).
“It didn't work.”
Late this summer, Tampa police finally scrapped the program, to the widespread approval of its many critics (Associated Press, August 20).
A few days later, officials at Boston's Logan Airport admitted that they had ended a test of two other face-recognition systems, one supplied by a Massachusetts company, Viisage Technology, the other by a Minnesota firm, Identix. Those systems were tested with a database that included pictures of only 40 airport workers. In the test, the workers' faces were scanned as they went through two airport checkpoints; the failure rate for this limited test was nearly 40 percent.
Officials at Logan were apparently reluctant to announce the results of the test, which was completed more than a year ago. The report was finally made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act request (USA Today, September 2).
Oh well, maybe Canada will have more luck using face recognition to keep track of its globe-trotting citizens. In August, Canada issued new guidelines for passport photos, prohibiting pictures featuring smiling, frowning, scowling, or glaring faces. Only closed-mouth, “neutral” expressions will be allowed, in an effort to reduce the chance they are misidentified by “biomet-ric security devices” (Globe and Mail, August 27).
Edward Teller
At 18, Teller went to Germany to study chemistry and mathematics, gained his PhD in physics under Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig at the age of 22, and then worked in Göttingen on polyatomic molecules with James Franck. He loved the pre-war German physics community, and later wrote that those were such happy years that he barely noticed the rise of Adolf Hitler. In Germany, and afterward in Copenhagen, he acquired two friends–Lev Landau and George Placzek–whose fearful experiences with Soviet communism impressed him indelibly.
To escape Hitler's anti-Semitism, Teller and his wife Mici came to George Washington University in 1935 at the invitation of George Gamow.
October 5, 1994: The father of the U.S. H-bomb pats a model of the Russian version in Chelyabinsk
Gamow's way of doing physics–Teller wrote that he generated a new theory every day–was congenial to Teller, and they wrote a number of papers together.
By the time he joined the Manhattan Project in 1943, Teller was already more interested in developing a bomb based on the fusion of light atoms, or a hydrogen weapon, than he was in the atomic bomb. He helped Robert Oppenheimer recruit others, but when Oppenheimer preferred Hans Bethe as head of the theory division, he was bitterly disappointed.
Oppenheimer allowed Teller to set up his own group of a dozen or so mathematicians to work on thermonuclear problems, and he set aside an hour each week to meet with Teller and listen to his ideas. Priscilla Duffield, Oppenheimer's secretary, says that Oppenheimer did not resent Teller's demand for special treatment, but something in Oppenheimer's elegant solution rankled Teller nonetheless.
When the Russians set off their first atomic test in late summer 1949, Teller happened to be in England, seeing Klaus Fuchs, with whom he had become friendly at Los Alamos. That fall, he, along with Ernest Lawrence, Luis Alvarez, and Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss, lobbied successfully for accelerating the development of the hydrogen bomb as the answer to the Soviet atomic bomb.
Teller probably possessed a keener insight than his American colleagues into what Soviet scientists and Stalin's industrial machine were capable of. Landau's imprisonment and the purge trials of the 1930s had also hardened his attitude toward the Russians.
Teller's life was filled with contradictions. In 1945 he criticized Oppenheimer and other members of the Interim Committee for advising the U.S. government on the use of the atomic bomb. He argued that physicists should eschew politics and devote themselves solely to physics, yet in the ensuing half century he engaged in politics more assiduously, and to greater effect, than any other scientist in memory. He railed against government secrecy, yet benefited vastly from the secrecy that enabled him, falsely, to claim sole credit for the H-bomb rather than share it with Stanislaw Ulam, the mathematician whose contribution made it possible. Finally, as greatly as Teller enjoyed the colle-giality of German physics before the war, he was to shatter the community of physicists in his adopted country.
Teller destroyed, or attempted to destroy, the three men who stood in his way in the decade between 1944 and 1954. In return for Oppenheimer's failure to make him head of the theory division at Los Alamos in 1944, he wrought his revenge in the 1954 hearings that took away Oppenheimer's “Q” clearance. Avenging himself on Norris Bradbury, post-war director at Los Alamos, for refusing to appoint him head of the thermonuclear program in 1951, he left the lab and engaged in the high-level back-stabbing that resulted in the creation of a second lab, especially for him, at Livermore. Then there was the troublesome Ulam, who proved in 1950 that Teller's idea of the “Super” was infeasi-ble and then went on to discover two of the three concepts essential to building the radiation implosion bomb. In interviews and in his writings, Teller tried to erase Ulam from the history books.
Many of Teller's actions in the political world were equally destructive. When a test moratorium was under consideration in the late 1950s, Teller and Ernest Lawrence persuaded President Dwight D. Eisenhower that continued testing was needed to develop a “clean” bomb that would produce little or no radioactivity, a bomb that turned out not to exist. When test-ban talks became mired on the issue of inspections, Teller, with Albert Latter, argued that a Soviet device, if detonated in a large enough cave, might be indistinguishable from an earthquake, thereby squelching another opportunity to eliminate testing.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, Teller promoted one dubious scheme after another, culminating in the nuclear-powered X-ray laser. Although successfully sold to the Reagan administration as a component of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the device itself was a failure. While I was interviewing Teller in 1988, he took a phone call from his pro-tégé Lowell Wood, who was reporting on a visit to the Pentagon in which Wood had tried to sell yet another of their voodoo schemes, “Brilliant Pebbles.”
Teller was incorrigible, and he rarely learned from his mistakes. For years he sonorously predicted that the Soviet Union was about to finish us off. When, instead, the Evil Empire collapsed, no one was as astonished as he.
Priscilla Johnson McMillan is completing a book on the Oppenheimer hearing and the development of the hydrogen bomb.