Ancient people saw them as messages from the
Gods, as supernatural winds that blew from the realm of spirits. Modern science has linked these polar light
shows, called auroras, to vast waves of electrified gas hurled in our direction by the sun. Today, researchers from a whole new generation
see this dynamic substance, plasma, as an energy source that may one day fuel humanity’s
expansion into space. What can we learn, and how far can we go,
by tapping into the strange and elusive fourth state of matter? A small cadre of scientists has come to Fairbanks,
Alaska… to realize what may seem an impossible dream… to revolutionize space travel. Dr. Ben Longmier and his team from the University
of Michigan have designed a whole new type of rocket engine that promises a faster and
more efficient way to get around in space. They are here to test components of this rocket
by sending them aboard helium balloons to an altitude of 30 kilometers… into the harsh
environment of space. Above the north and south poles, conditions
are about as harsh as you can get. Our planet is bombarded with a steady steam
of charged particles from the Sun. Earth’s magnetic field accelerates and channels
them, turning the night into a spectacle of color. While most astronauts train to live and work
in zero gravity, or to move around in bulky space suits, these would-be space explorers
are preparing to negotiate some of Earth’s harshest environments. Once they launch their payload, it will rise
slowly into the upper atmosphere. After drifting through the night, above 99%
of Earth’s atmosphere, the payload will detach from the balloon and parachute down
to the ground. Where it goes and finally lands will depend
on highly variable wind conditions. The team must be prepared to retrieve it across
a large stretch of Alaska’s snowy wilderness. To understand the revolutionary nature of
the idea they are pursuing, we go back to the dawn of rocketry. In over a hundred years, the technology of
a rocket has hardly changed. Fill a cylinder with volatile chemicals, then
ignite them in a controlled explosion. The force of the blast is what pushes the
rocket up. Nowadays, chemical rockets are the only ones
with enough thrust to overcome Earth’s gravity and carry a payload into orbit. But they are not very efficient. The heavier the payload, the more fuel a rocket
needs to lift it into space. But the more fuel a rocket carries, the more
fuel it needs. One of the fabled Saturn V rockets of the
Apollo era, for example, weighed in at 177,000 kilograms. Filled up with fuel, it weighed almost 16
times that. The space shuttle, with maximum payload, weighed
about 100 thousand kilos. Add tanks and fuel, and it lifted off at 2
million kilograms. Regardless of weight, for a spacecraft to
escape Earth’s gravity and go into orbit, it must reach a minimum speed of 40,000 kilometers
per hour. The energy needed to do that meant there wasn’t
enough fuel for a sustained acceleration to more distant planetary shores. Most missions beyond Earth have relied instead
on their initial launch speed to coast to their destination. The twin spacecraft of Voyager, for example,
did not have enough speed to reach its current position at the edge of the solar system. To give them a boost, flight planners sent
them into Jupiter’s gravitational field, using its pull to sling shot them out to Saturn. Voyager 2 got further assists from Saturn
and Uranus. Voyager 1 used Saturn to accelerate to almost
63,000 kilometers per hour. Ben’s rockets promise far greater gas mileage
than traditional chemical rockets, but with enough power to reach distant targets more
quickly. The idea is that once in space, his rockets
use electricity to create a weak force, which over time can accelerate them to very high
speeds. They run on the same fuel that nature uses,
literally, to power the cosmos. Not long after its explosive beginnings, the
universe was awash in vast stores of hydrogen gas. But even as the universe continued to expand,
gravity drew clumps of matter into ever-denser concentrations. The earliest stars took shape, immense balls
of hydrogen gas, hundreds of times the mass of our sun. As they contracted inward, they heated up
and ignited. Intense radiation now began to flow through
the voids. That had the effect, all through the universe,
of stripping electrons away from the primordial gas. The universe became filled, not with solids,
liquid, or gas, but with a fourth state of matter: plasma. On our planet, plasma occurs only in rare
circumstances: in a hot flame, a bolt of lightning, or in a blown electrical transformer. Made up of negatively charged electrons and
positively charged ions, plasma is in most cases electrically neutral since the charges
balance each other out. That led the physicist Irving Langmuir in
the 1920s to compare it to the clear liquid, plasma, that carries blood cells through our
bodies. The development of radio led to the discovery,
high above the Earth, of a natural plasma ceiling, the ionosphere. It hovers above us, reflecting some radio
frequencies and absorbing others. Its importance became clear when engineers
noticed that radio waves could, under some conditions, travel beyond our line of sight. They discovered that signals could be bounced
deliberately off this conducting layer, in what’s called “skywave propagation.” In World War 2, a whole new age of global
communications came of age when radio was used to execute complex worldwide logistics
of troop and ship movements. The presence of the ionosphere is due to a
steady stream of charged particles, or plasma, that comes from the sun. A spacecraft with complex computer components
must be able to survive constant exposure to these particles. As part of their design process, Ben and team
want to test some of the specialized components of their rockets in the plasma-fill environment
of our upper atmosphere. Those components will be mounted on a simple
frame attached by rope to a high-altitude balloon. The frame is also outfitted with an array
of novel sensors to take independent readings. One holds a colony of bacteria. The idea is that the bacteria itself can detect
radiation. So it mutates in a certain way or in a very
known way so that if you send it into an environment with a lot of cosmic rays and perhaps a lot
of x-rays from the aurora itself, it mutates. And so we’ll detect sort of the level of
radiation it’s exposed to by looking at these mutations after we’ve recovered the
baceria after flying them to the edge of space in one of these balloon capsules. Another is a series of tiny GoPro cameras
converted to record the intensity of infrared and ultraviolet light normally hidden to the
human eye. The team uses Argon gas to insulate instruments
against the cold, with chemical packets added for warmth. They stabilize the frame with tiny gyroscopes,
and outfit it with GPS devices for tracking. This team is doing much more than just designing
instruments to survive a rain of charged particles. Their goal is to design spacecraft that actually
harness the explosive properties of plasma. Unlike most matter on Earth, plasma conducts
electricity and responds to magnetic fields. In space, these properties influence the formation
of structures like galaxies and nebulae. And they play a role in some of the most violent
processes in the universe, such as the formation of a black hole. It forms in the wake of a giant star’s death,
when matter collapses into its core. It swirls in along what’s known as an accretion
disk. Magnetic fields take shape on the disk, rising
and twisting around the polar regions. They draw huge volumes of plasma up, then
shoot it out at high speeds. These plasma jets can extend far beyond the
largest black holes. You can see them blasting continuously from
the centers of galaxies, reaching thousands of light years into space. Studies of one giant nearby ball of plasma
show what a complex and volatile substance it can be. In the core of our sun, high heat and crushing
pressures cause hydrogen atoms to crash together. That sets off a nuclear reaction in which
hydrogen atoms fuse into heavier ones like helium and carbon, generating heat. This heat slowly rises to the surface of the
sun in vast plumes of plasma. You can see evidence of this process, called
convection, in a pattern of ever-evolving blobs known as granules. They are like the tops of thunderstorms. Even as energy builds within, the sun's gravity
and density can stifle its escape. What carries it out are magnetic fields. They twist and wrap around, channeling energy
to the surface. The fields can power immense loops of hot
gas, about 60,000 degrees Celsius, then rise up from the solar surface and fall back. The largest eruptions, called coronal mass
ejections, can reach up to 6 million miles per hour as they hurtle out across the solar
system. They can literally slam into Earth’s own
magnetic field. Because solar particles are charged, a portion
follows the orientation of Earth’s magnetic field lines. Finding an opening at the poles, these particles
race down into the atmosphere. You know this is happening when you see the
beautiful lights of the aurora borealis in the far north, or the aurora australis in
the south. They appear when charged solar particles collide
with oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere, causing them to glow blue, red, and green
depending on altitude. Flying 350 kilometers above the earth, astronauts
in the international space station watch in awe as the aurora shimmers, framed by the
glow of stars and cities at night. Back in Michigan, Ben and his team have set
up a lab to harness this strange substance in a whole new generation of rocket engines. The lab recalls an earlier period of space
exploration. It features a giant vacuum chamber, built
in the 1960s in hopes of winning a contract to test Apollo moon rovers. The chamber has given this small university
team the ability to accelerate their research into the physics of plasma and rocket engine
design. They are actually part of an larger community
of plasma rocket scientists… within NASA… and within private companies like Ad Astra
of Houston, Texas. Because plasma does not occur naturally on
Earth, the challenge is to create it, then harness it. The teams inject a gas, commonly argon, into
a chamber. They bombard it with radio waves, which strip
electrons from the gas and turn it into a plasma. The soup of electrons and ions accelerates
as it moves through a magnetic field generated by superconducting magnets. A second radio blast heats it up to a million
degrees Celsius. That’s enough to blast it out and propel
a spacecraft. The idea of using plasma to power rockets
is not a new one. The
Polish physicist Stanislav Ulam is said to have been inspired by atom bomb tests in the
1940s. He speculated that waves of plasma from small
nuclear detonations could propel a spacecraft to extreme speeds. In the 1950s, that idea animated dreams of
exploring the solar system in spacecraft like this 360-ton Mars-bound vehicle. The idea gained funding in the Orion project,
with the idea of driving a spacecraft with nuclear pulses and landing on Mars in only
a month. Concerns about radioactive exhaust helped
doom the project. Plasma rockets, energized by nuclear reactions,
were revived in the Daedalus and Nerva projects of the 1960s, and again at the beginning of
this century as part of a proposed journey to Jupiter’s moon Europa. Rising costs killed that mission. Newer plasma rocket concepts have switched
to solar energy to power their engines. Among the most ambitious, the DAWN mission
was sent into orbit aboard a Delta 2 rocket in the year 2007. It then headed out on a ten year mission to
the asteroid belt. It uses only about 10 ounces of xenon gas
fuel per day. With engines designed to fire for over 2000
days, over time it is expected to gain an additional 38,000 kilometers per hour. After a gravity assist from Mars, Dawn arrived
at the asteroid Vesta in 2011. It spent a year mapping its surface and seeking
clues to its interior structure. Now headed for Ceres, a dwarf planet located
within the asteroid belt, Dawn will be the first probe ever visit. Made up of rock and ice, Ceres may well have
an internal ocean of water and ice. It takes us back to the formation of the solar
system, when objects like this grew and developed into planets. Long range missions like Dawn are just one
of many uses for plasma rockets. So nasa launches spacecraft with ion engines
and hall thrusters on board. Almost every new geostationary satellite that
a company will invest in and put up in orbit will have some sort of electric propulsion
device on board to do station keeping, to do little changes in attitude and maneuvers
to keep it in its geostationary orbit. NASA is planning to use a plasma rocket to
do some even heavier lifting, as early as 2016. Flying at an altitude of three hundred fifty
kilometers, the International Space Station whips around the Earth every one and a half
hours. To stay aloft, it must maintain a speed of
28,000 kilometers per hour. But its solar panels and crew modules smack
into so many tiny molecules in the upper atmosphere that it gradually slows down and loses altitude. To stay aloft, the station uses up around
4,000 kilograms of fuel per year. That fuel must be flown up from Earth, which
in turn reduces the amount of food, water, people, and equipment that a resupply mission
can deliver. The idea is to use a plasma rocket to help
boost the station to a higher altitude, powered by electricity generated by solar panels aboard
the station. Plasma rocket builders like Ben hope to one
day scale up the technology to power a long-range human mission. After weeks spent accelerating in earth orbit,
the rocket would make a break for Mars. Cutting flight time from a year to several
months would lower costs and crew hazards. In the meantime, Ben has his sights set on
what he sees as an even larger revolution in space exploration… using plasma rockets
to power a fleet of miniature spacecraft. Ben’s rockets are so small they can fit
into your carry-on luggage. So here we have a cube sat. This is a small spacecraft, it’s total mass
would be something on the order of 5 kilograms, that's about 10 pounds. It’s 30 centimeters x 10 x 10. This is considered a 3U spacecraft , 3 units
of 10x10x10. And we’d like to send this small spacecraft
up with one of our new propulsion elements in it. This is a rapid prototype propellant tank. So we would use this tank to store our propellant. Initially we have an idea to use a very simple
propellant. The NASA craft Dawn uses the inert gas, Xenon,
as fuel. Ben’s team has turned to another type of
fuel, that’s more compact, can store more energy, and is less volatile. Distilled water. We’ll ionize that propellant with radio
waves and that will form a plasma, so we’ll strip off some electrons. We'll have this sea and collection of ions
and electrons. We accelerate, we superheat that plasma and
then we accelerate it through a magnetic nozzle. The plasma never touches a material boundary
so it never cools off. All of that could be contained within the
spacecraft so the propellant tank is designed to be the right size and dimension and we
have a propulsion module within the cube sat itself. This is an early prototype circuit board,
just this component, that would sit inside the cube sat and it would take the DC power
from some sort of solar panel on the surface, change that DC power into our radio waves
that we need to ionize the propellant into a plasma. We then shoot this plasma out the back and
we apply just a little bit of force, it’s not a whole lot, it’s something like the
force of a sheet of paper sitting in your hand. And because there’s very little drag in
space, we apply this small amount of force applied over a very long amount of time to
accelerate to very high velocities with this spacecraft. So if we do that we can send these little
micro spacecraft, nanosats, we can send them to places like the moon, we can send them
to mars, and someday we’d like to send them even as far as Jupiter and maybe put some
little sensors on board and be able to detect possible life on some of these moons near
Jupiter and Saturn. So instead of a 1 billion dollar nasa mission
to explore the moons of Jupiter, we can get away with something like a million dollar
spacecraft mission with one of these small sats. So that’s the real advantage, being able
to have a very low barrier to entry financially and technologically to make some of these
innovations really quickly, go fly them, go fly often, and make these discoveries. Already, hundreds micro, nano, and even smaller
satellites are in orbit. They get into space by piggy backing on commercial
or government launch vehicles. Their missions range from communications and
intelligence to Earth imaging. Because the cost of building them is so low,
the number of tiny satellite missions is on the rise. With an array of plans already materializing,
the team is tapping into satellite traffic and orbital communications systems. Ben and his team plan to start with a series
of orbital missions, then to go interplanetary. Ben imagines that his little group could take
center stage in a project that space visionaries have long seen as essential to the quest to
extend our eyes and minds across the solar system. We also envision that a large cadre of these
small spacecraft could form what would be an initial interplanetary internet. You can think about a large number of these
spacecraft orbiting the earth, orbiting the moon, being spread out between earth and mars,
and providing little data relays between all of these positions so we can get a lot of
data back and have the beginnings of a real solar system internet going beyond the Earth. Back in Alaska. Their latest payload has flown all night at
an altitude of over 100,000 feet. Then in the low air pressure, the balloon
burst and the payload parachuted to the ground. From GPS signals given off by the payload,
they have a good idea of where it is. But that doesn’t mean retrieving it will
be easy. Now we're right here. And see where it says Sled Road? That's the trail we're going to be following
down. John knows where there's a cut off that's
going to take us off that Sled Road over to Dune Lake. And this little pond or lake right here just
to the west maybe a mile north is where we believe the target is. So we're going to come down here, we're going
to look for the turn, head off to Dune Lake and then we're going to be off trail from
here all the way up to here. Wow. About five miles Okay. Then we're going to have, both Hans and I
have these GPS locater devices… So we've got our first payload, Aurora One,
that we are going to go recover and track. You see snow machines to recover. We've got two expert guides that go track
these things for a living. One guy is a retired military helicopter pilot. And we've got GPS units, all the coordinates
plugged in. We're about 26 miles from here as the crow
flies. We're about thirty, thirty-five miles by trail,
the last five miles being really off trail so we're going to have to break new trail. The plan is to navigate well-worn snow trails
and get within striking distance. But if the payload has landed away from the
trails, they’ll have to brave wilderness landscapes and deep snows. It takes nearly all day to get to a point
about seven miles from the payload. Team members set out across hills and ravines. They get to within two miles. With time running out, they turn around. It's not going to happen today. We're going to go back, recoup, probably send
a skeleton team down tomorrow and try for a second recovery. Really disappointing we couldn't get there. I feel like we're so close. this thing came 50 miles from the initial
launch site. It was floating around in the atmosphere for
ten hours, and it's so frustrating to get to within two miles. The next day, a long hike on snowshoes finally
gets them to the payload. Later on they’ll say it was worth the effort. One of Ben’s goals is to help boost a whole
new approach to space travel that’s now emerging. May 2012 marked a major milestone in the rise
of free enterprise in space. The SpaceX Company successfully docked an
unmanned space capsule with the International Space Station. It followed that up six months later with
the first commercial resupply mission. That’s just the beginning. NASA is looking to companies to supply orbital
launch services, and to be long-term partners in future manned missions beyond the moon. Hoping to make big bucks, companies are developing
orbital habitats and space planes, laying the groundwork for missions geared to mining,
exploration, and even tourism. To Ben, this new race to space will go to
the swift and the innovative. Today, because of weather and winds, he and
his team have chosen to launch their payload from the spectacular Ruth Glacier in Denali
National Park. Amid the rugged terrain, this immense river
of ice sweeps down into a perfect natural runway. The payload and frame have been preassembled. The team makes a few last-minute adjustments. They inflate the balloon with helium gas. With dusk approaching, balloon and payload are ready. Off it goes. The balloon drifts up through the dense polar
air. With night falling, it rises up to the edge
of space. Meanwhile, overhead, a solar storm is raging. Aboard the International Space Station, astronaut
Don Pettit is making observations of northern aurorae to complement what Ben’s team finds. He passes over the Arctic several times during
the balloon’s flight. The auroras he photographs are an indicator
of the amount of solar particles that will pummel Ben’s rocket components. This is a time of high solar activity, approaching
the peak of an 11-year cycle. The Arctic Circle is framed by a ring of dancing
auroral lights. Curtains of green and red and blue drape our
planet’s graceful curve. This university-based experiment operates
on the remote edge of modern science… dominated by large international projects such as the
Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station or the Large Hadron Collider. So this technology that we are trying to miniaturize
is significant in the sense that it sort of opens up new frontiers, in the same way that
miniaturizing computer technology to a point where it fits in your pocket. Everyone carries around a cell phone. They have these miniature computers. It does a lot of data processing. It gets you to your destination by GPS. That sort of technology didn't exist 20 or
30 or 40 years ago when you have these big mainframe computers that were at national
labs. So we’re trying to change the paradigm of
space exploration from the national lab case to the cell phone case, the miniature case,
to be able to do a lot more and to improve our capability as a species. Working small, Ben’s team believes they
are onto something big. Their goal is not only to open new avenues
of space exploration, but to actually seize the initiative. It’s a romantic idea of individuals challenging
the odds and striking out to new frontiers. With technologies that are getting smaller
and more powerful, the obstacles to private space exploration appear to be falling. Who will hold back this new breed of explorer?
