30 November 2021. Spacecraft | Smithsonian
What the well-dressed spaceship will be wearing. Visiting the new Smithsonian futures exhibition.
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#1: What the well-dressed spaceship will be wearing
Space is well-known as a testing ground for new materials and new technologies. A piece at the IEEE’s Spectrum by a couple of MIT researchers, Juliana Cherston and Joseph Paradiso, outlines where the cutting edge is these days for smart materials. The next supply flight to the International Space Station (ISS) will include a couple of swathes of textiles embedded with impact and vibration sensors, which will be positioned on the outside of the Space Station.
For the next six months, our team will conduct the first operational test of sensor-laden electronic fabrics in space, collecting data in real time as the sensors endure the harsh weather of low Earth orbit... Our eventual aim is to use such smart electronic textiles to study cosmic dust, some of which has interplanetary or even interstellar origins. Imagine if the protective fabric covering a spacecraft could double as an astrophysics experiment, but without adding excessive mass, volume, or power requirements.
It turns out the the ISS is already wrapped in textiles, which I hadn’t previously realised. ‘Beta cloth’ shields the craft from over-heating and erosion. In effect, it is a second protective layer. What the MIT researchers are hoping to do is to make this layer work a bit harder.
(The International Space Station. Photo: NASA)
The current experiment emerged from a piece of rather more experimental work that MIT’s Responsive Environments Lab had been working on:
In 2018, we were knee-deep in developing a far-out concept to grapple an asteroid with an electronic web, which would allow a network of hundreds or thousands of tiny robots to crawl across the surface as they characterized the asteroid's materials.
As the researchers say in the article, this was “unlikely to be deployed anytime soon.” A visiting Japanese planetary scientist suggested the idea of bringing this closer to home on the International Space Station.
Over the course of the next year they’ll be prompting the fabric on the ISS to send them readings which will indicate how well the sensors and electronics are standing up to the battering they’ll receive in space. A separate experiment is already monitoring the wear and tear on the materials.
It’s a long article which goes into quite a lot of detail on the Lab’s history in working with these sorts of smart materials, and the experiments—and technical improvements—involved before they were ready for deployment in space.
The next step beyond this would likely to be use smart materials on spacesuits, giving wearers a much richer interface with their surroundings:
A few members in our group have worked on a preliminary concept that uses fabrics containing vibration, pressure, proximity, and touch sensors to discriminate between a glove, metallic equipment, and rocky terrain—just the sorts of surfaces that astronauts wearing pressurized suits would encounter. This sensor data is then mapped to haptic actuators on the astronauts' own skin, allowing wearers to vividly sense their surroundings right through their suits.
And the step beyond that might be to have more adaptive materials, that can sense external conditions and then respond to them:
We also envision building a system that can intelligently adapt to local conditions and mission priorities, by self-regulating its sampling rates, signal gains, and so on.
It’s always hard to tell how this research might translate to less expensive environments closer to home. Indeed, the researchers suggest that if anything, space might have been lagging behind earthbound applications. But it’s reasonable to assume that none of these are operating in the same demanding conditions that the International Space Station works in.
And the other thing I took away was how inter-disciplinary the work is:
Space-resilient electronic fabrics may still be nascent, but the work is deeply cross-cutting. Textile designers, materials scientists, astrophysicists, astronautical engineers, electrical engineers, artists, planetary scientists, and cosmologists will all have a role to play in reimagining the exterior skins of future spacecraft and spacesuits.
And of course, this complexity may be one of the reasons why research and innovation is becoming increasingly expensive—possibly at an exponential rate.
#2: Visiting the new Smithsonian futures exhibition
A guest post by Bryan Alexander
I mentioned the new Smithsonian futures exhibition here a couple of weeks ago. Since then the futurist Bryan Alexander has visited the exhibition with his son. He posted a short review on the Association of Professional Futurists’ listserv. With his permission I’m republishing this here. (AC)
(Photo: Smithsonian)
The exhibit consists of four rooms, each dedicated to a theme: unity, inspiration, work, and historical futures. Visitors can wander freely through the spaces. Open admission. The whole thing is small. If you know other Smithsonian museums, this was the size of one or two exhibits within those.
The historical room doubles as the entrance, and offers a few interesting displays, like a printout of the Apollo missions' computer manual (as tall as my son). It also has several machines where users can register their interest in the other rooms by gestures. Unfortunately this often failed. There was also a place for people to write down short thoughts about the future.
Many of the displays were historical, beyond the first room. There's Octavia Butler's typewriter, an early robot, a skateboard (I think just for creative inspiration and maybe play?), some older designs for air and spaceflight (a solar sail, the Bell air taxi).
Futures content was often focused on social justice and climate change. There was an interesting interactive device where you could adjust a computer voice to play it across genders, with a neutral position available (contra Siri and Alexa). Several displays celebrated black people. There were several displays about indigenous people, knowledge, and artifacts.
Other futures topics: one portrayed an aquatic settlement. Another item showed a robot designed to help agriculture. Related to that was an AI-based sculpture designed to alter its shape in response to audience motions. There were other ag-themed installations, such as a prototype seed storage unit. A mock-up hyperloop capsule loomed large.
I only saw one nod to space exploration, a new space suit, and that up against a sign calling for no space colonies. Nothing on demographics, life extension, politics, war, etc. Climate change wasn't depicted much as such - i.e., no visualizations of climate refugees, cities under water, etc; instead, there was a running theme of adaptation, including a project linking clothes washing with wetland restoration. Nothing on geoengineering that I saw.
There was a futures vending machine, but it was really a replacement for a gift shop. It sold exhibit-themed t-shirts, pads, water bottles, etc.
I enjoyed a display on using fungus as a building material, in part because the bricks generated in that process appeared in many other displays, unremarked, serving their supporting function. Other installation construction materials showed a lot of wood, keying into a sustainability theme.
There were several media tie-ins, the biggest being an incomplete look at futures design for a new Marvel movie, Eternals. That has some available bits, but the rest wasn't working, including an alternate reality feature.
There were some practical issues with the exhibit. Problems with technology occurred far too often, such as a robot designed to speak with people, but which usually misfired or didn't respond. Crowd flow around installations was awkward, with too many bottlenecks. Perhaps because we went on a weekend the whole thing was very crowded, which was both unpleasant on its own terms and anxiety-inducing during a pandemic: masks worn often, but not always; social distancing impossible).
Overall, I enjoyed the fact that the exhibit existed. I appreciated its desire to be interactive. Its scope is small, which means it might serve well as an introduction to futures thinking and content to those new to it.
Bryan Alexander is an American futurist with a specialism in education futures. His website and blog are here.
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