Category Archives: science

Remembering William Anders

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There is a cliche that says a picture is worth a thousand words. The picture above has generated millions of words, I’m sure. Some believe this photograph, known as “Earthrise,” is the most famous and influential photograph ever taken. It is certainly one of my favorites.

All of that comes to mind as I ponder the fact that the man who took that famous image has died. Astronaut William Anders was ninety years old.

Tragically, Anders lost his life on June 7, 2024, in a plane crash. He was piloting a small plane over the waters north of Seattle. Anders was the sole occupant of a Beechcraft T-34 Mentor which crashed in what the National Transportation Safety Board described as “unknown circumstances” around eighty feet from the island. The retired Major General graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1955 after which he joined the Air Force as a pilot, before being selected as an astronaut in 1964. In this capacity he was the lunar module pilot for Apollo 8 which orbited the Moon 10 times without landing, before returning to Earth. Seven months later Neil Armstrong became the first person to step foot on the Moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission. NASA has posted a video Remembrance of Anders.

“Earthrise” holds a special place as a symbol of space exploration and our perception of Earth as a singular, interconnected ecosystem. It’s a testament to humanity’s ability to transcend boundaries and view our home from a completely new perspective. So, while it may not be the single most famous photograph ever taken, it is certainly among the most iconic and enduring images of the 20th century.

As an astronaut aboard Apollo 8, Anders, along with his crewmates, achieved the monumental feat of becoming the first humans to leave Earth’s orbit and circle the Moon. Anders’ contributions to space exploration were not just limited to his time in orbit. His dedication to advancing human knowledge and his commitment to sharing the wonders of the universe with the world continued long after his return to Earth.

“The Apollo 8 crew took on [one] of the hardest, highest-risk missions one can imagine,” Dan Dumbacher, CEO of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, told Smithsonian magazine in an email. “Because of the pressures of the space race, the mission objective of orbiting the moon was set just four months before [Apollo 8] was scheduled to launch,” Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of the Apollo collection at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, write in an email to Smithsonian magazine. “This timeline required intense training and focus from the crew. As the first mission of its kind, it also required tremendous bravery.”

Earthrise was taken on December 24th, 1968. It happened a few minutes after 10:30 am Houston time, as Apollo 8 was coming around from the far side of the Moon for the fourth time. Mission Commander Frank Borman was in the left-hand seat, preparing to turn the spacecraft to a new orientation according to the flight plan. Navigator Jim Lovell was in the spacecraft’s lower equipment bay, about to make sightings on lunar landmarks with the onboard sextant, and Bill Anders was in the right-hand seat, observing the Moon through his side window, and taking pictures with a Hasselblad still camera, fitted with a 250-mm telephoto lens. Anders saw the earth, and thought to grab from Lovell the one camera loaded with color film.

The photograph was made into a postage stamp in 1969 and galvanized the environmental protection movement, appearing on posters during the first Earth Day in 1970, theNew York Times’ Richard Goldstein reports. In a 2015 interview with Forbes’ Jim Clash, Anders said: “The view points out the beauty of Earth and its fragility. It helped kick start the environmental movement.” Together, the Apollo 8 crew members—Anders, Lovell and Borman—were named the Time magazine “Men of the Year” for 1968. Later, Anders served on the backup crew for the Apollo 11 mission.

Following Apollo 8, Anders one and only journey into space, he served as the executive secretary for the National Aeronautics and Space Council from 1969 to 1973. He also held high-ranking positions within the Atomic Energy Commission and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and for a little over a year, from 1976 to 1977, he was the U.S. ambassador to Norway.

Today, the Earthrise photograph and the camera Anders used to capture it are on display in the “One World Connected” gallery at the National Air and Space Museum.

The best quote about the impact of Earthrise on humanity came, fittingly, from Anders himself:

“We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth,”

William Anders

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TicTok Turmoil

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As of February 2023, the social video app TikTok said it had approximately 150 active monthly million users in the United States. This number is projected to increase by over five percent year-over-year, reaching 170 million users in 2024. Extremely popular with younger digital audiences, TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media apps in the United States. The United States has the largest TikTok audience of any country. And that scares the hell out of many, including the members of Congress.

The concerns stem from TikTok’s Chinese owner, a company named ByteDance, and a 2017 Chinese law that requires companies to share data with the ruling Communist Party if requested. The fear is that this could allow user information like locations, private messages, and biometric data to potentially be handed over to Chinese authorities. There are some cases where social media information has been used to pressure or even blackmail. TikTok has already faced several lawsuits related to data privacy violations. In one, a class-action lawsuit alleges the app collects biometric data from users without proper consent and shares it with third-party companies.

“TikTok is essentially a tool for China’s totalitarian surveillance state, putting our kids’ private data at risk,” argued Brendan Carr, a Republican commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission who wants to ban TikTok from the U.S. Congress has now agreed. In April, Congress approved a bill known as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” that gives ByteDance two options, sell TikTok to an approved buyer or face a ban in the United States. The bill passed on a 352-65 vote. President Joe Biden signed this legislation into law.

TikTok swiftly filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. The company arguing the bill violates constitutional protections of free speech. TikTok says the law represents an “unprecedented violation of the First Amendment. This dispute presents a series of novel issues. I would hesitate to predict the eventual outcome, which might take several years to materialize. TikTok contends that banning the app infringes upon users’ right to free speech. By preventing Americans from accessing TikTok, the lawsuit states, the law restricts their ability to express themselves on the platform.

TikTok also asserts that it has taken steps to protect American users’ data. The company emphasizes its commitment to safeguarding user privacy and argues that the ban is unnecessary. But TikTok in some ways undermines its argument by supplementing its legal efforts with a massive public relations push, appealing directly to its American members to lobby their legislators on the company’s behalf. It has aggressively recruited small-business owners and influencers to advocate for preserving TikTok as a vital part of their lives. Members of Congress reported they had been inundated by these appeals.

Strictly on First Amendment grounds I would be inclined to side with TikTok, even though the Chinese would never permit an American company to operate in China the way TikTok operates in the United States. But this issue goes well beyond the First Amendment. Going back to FCC Commissioner Carr, he referred to TikTok as a “clear and present danger to America’s national security”. Carr says the new legislation is based on TicToc’s “malign conduct, not its content.” Carr argues that TikTok’s content acts as a “sheep’s clothing” concealing a “sophisticated surveillance app” underneath. According to him, TikTok gives the Chinese government a major tool for influencing American public opinion.

I am also disturbed that Chinese children see at home a different TikTok than the freewheeling unedited forum American children see. To me that is an admission by the Chinese that they use TikTok to influence opinion in the United States, particularly among its youngest and most vulnerable citizens. Over and above ByteDance’s Chinese ownership and China’s track record of alleged data theft and espionage in recent years, I have concerns TikTok’s recommendation algorithm could be manipulated to promote disinformation or propaganda. Americans already have enough disinformation.

As a matter of law, the fusion of economic and national security considerations has led to increased scrutiny of cross-border investments. The phenomenon of “national security creep” has expanded the scope of review and regulation in such transactions, emphasizing the delicate balance between economic interests and safeguarding national security.

This will be an interesting case to watch.

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It’s Back!

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Right on the money. Just as planned, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx satellite dropped its sample capsule on the Utah desert where it was quickly recovered. It should contain a sample taken from the asteroid Bennu.

The NASA recovery team took the sample container from the OSIRIS-REx satellite to a temporary clean room on the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range.

The clean room was set up specifically for this purpose and was ready to receive the capsule. The sample container was secured and the area around it was deemed safe before the recovery process began. The team placed the 100-pound capsule into a metal cradle and wrapped it in multiple sheets of Teflon and then a tarp. The capsule was then wrapped in a harness and secured to one end of a 100-foot cable hanging from a helicopter. The helicopter transported the capsule to the temporary clean room on base.

In the clean room, the capsule will be disassembled and packaged in parts for transport to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, its permanent home. Scientists will analyze the rocks and soil from the sample for the next two years at a dedicated clean room inside Johnson Space Center. The sample will also be divided up and sent to laboratories around the globe, including OSIRIS-REx mission partners at the Canadian Space Agency and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

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Star Stuff

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On Sunday September 24, 2023, just before noon eastern time, a sample capsule containing about one pound of the asteroid Bennu should arrive in Utah. Go ahead. Back up. Read it again. Amidst all the angst of our everyday lives, which is the usual subject of this column, we have a wonder like that to contemplate.

The capsule will have come from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx was launched on September 8, 2016, flew past Earth on September 22, 2017, and rendezvoused with Bennu on December 3, 2018. It spent the next two years analyzing the surface to find a suitable site for landing.

On October 20, 2020, OSIRIS-REx touched down on Bennu and successfully collected a sample. Though some of the sample escaped when the flap that should have closed the sampler head was jammed open by larger rocks, NASA is confident that they were able to retain between 400 g and over 1 kg of sample material, more than the 60 g (2.1 oz) minimum for success.

The sample capsule will be released when the spacecraft reaches an altitude of 63,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. The capsule will then be sent spinning towards the atmosphere below and will pierce Earth’s atmosphere at 10:42 a.m. EDT, coming to rest near a military base in the Utah desert. A recovery team will board four helicopters and head out into the desert to retrieve the capsule as quickly as possible to avoid contaminating the sample with Earth’s environment. Once located and packaged for travel, the capsule will be flown via helicopter to a temporary clean room on the military range, where it will undergo initial processing and disassembly in preparation for its journey by aircraft to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the sample will be documented and distributed for analysis to scientists worldwide.

There have been previous missions that have returned samples from outer space to Earth. Between 1969 and 1971, the Apollo program carried out six missions to the surface of the moon. The astronauts brought back a total of 842 pounds of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand, and dust from the lunar surface.

NASA’s Stardust mission, launched in 1999, flew past the comet Wild 2, collecting thousands of dust particles from the comet’s coma and returning them to Earth for laboratory analysis. Japan’s Hayabusa, launched in 2003, successfully returned samples from the asteroid 25143 Itokawa in 2010. Japan’s Hayabusa 2 returned samples from asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2020.

If successful, OSIRIS-REx will be the first United States spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid.

All these missions have significantly contributed to our understanding of asteroids and the early solar system. The samples returned by these missions provide valuable insights into the composition, structure, and history of asteroids, as well as clues about the formation of our solar system and the origins of life on Earth.

Bennu was chosen as the target of this study because it is a “time capsule” from the birth of the Solar System. Bennu has a very dark surface and is classified as a B-type asteroid, a sub-type of the carbonaceous C-type asteroids. Such asteroids are considered primitive, having undergone little geological change from their time of formation. In particular, Bennu was selected because of the availability of pristine carbonaceous material, a key element in organic molecules necessary for life as well as representative of matter from before the formation of Earth. Organic molecules, such as amino acids, have previously been found in meteorite and comet samples, indicating that some ingredients necessary for life can be naturally synthesized in outer space.

Which doesn’t mean we will find a place we can relocate to in our neighborhood any time soon.

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Warnock, Geschke, and Adobe

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I was sorry to hear about the recent passing of John Warnock. I have a feeling many of you do not recognize that name. Nor will you recognize the name Charles Geschke, who was Warnock’s business partner and who died in 2021. But I am quite sure you recognize the name PDF. And the PDF is without question Warnock and Geschke’s greatest invention.

Warnock and Geschke were pioneers of the high-tech computer revolution. Like most successful entrepreneurs, they identified a problem and set out to solve it. Unlike most of the visionaries who made the west coast their home, Warnock and Geschke were quiet, unassuming, and shy.

In the 1990s, even though I was the New York based bureau chief for public television’s Nightly Business Report, I was allowed to travel to San Francisco every December and set up shop for a week at the Fairmont Hotel. We covered an annual Business Week conference titled, “The Digital Economy.” But we also spent a few days visiting the headquarters of Silicon Valley trailblazers and telling their stories.

Almost to a man, and they were almost all men in those days, they were thrilled to sit down in front of our camera to brag about their inventions. Warnock and Geschke were exceptions. They were happy to welcome us to the San Jose headquarters of Adobe, the company they founded in 1982. But they wanted us to interview their employees, the developers and product managers. It took a lot of persuasion to get the two founders in front of our camera. That was rare then and it remains rare today.

Warnock and Geschke met while working at the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox, now part of SRI International. At Xerox PARC they developed a page-description language, something designers would use to instruct Xerox’s new laser printers how to draw a page. In those days virtually every different model of printer responded to a separate set of drawing commands. Warnock and Geschke’s vision was to create a standard every printer could follow. Xerox did not agree and kept their invention for use on Xerox equipment only.

So, the two left Xerox, started their own company, and created a new language which they called Postscript. A revolutionary breakthrough in printing technology, PostScript was the first printing software that enabled users to print pages that included text, line art and digitized photos. Adobe let all content creators use Postscript without a licensing fee. But they designed, and sold to the printer manufacturers, the circuits which interpreted Postscript and generated the signals the printer needed to generate the page. Apple and the Apple LaserWriter were the first company and product to use the system. With this, modern desktop publishing and word processing programs were born. By 1987, Adobe’s PostScript had become the industry-standard printer language.

Adobe did not stop there. Adobe Illustrator was released in 1987. Photoshop in 1990. The PDF came in 1993. The Portable Document Format was designed to allow the exchange of electronic versions of pages regardless of the software or device which created them or the printer or display which regenerated them without compromising the original. As Adobe’s Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology, Bob Wulff, describes it, “PDF allows the user to view a file precisely—down to the pixel, essentially, of what the author had intended.”

Today the PDF is ubiquitous:

  • PDF has become the standard file format for sharing documents. Businesses, schools, governments, and individuals use it all over the world.
  • PDF is also used to create electronic books.
  • PDF is a secure file format, which makes it ideal for sharing sensitive documents.
  • PDF is easy to use and can be viewed on any device.
  • PDF has had a major impact on the way we work and collaborate. It has made it possible for people to share documents more easily and securely.

Warnock and Geschke are gone now. But Adobe’s legacy of innovation continues. It has, for example, been actively applying artificial intelligence techniques throughout its product line. That is a story for another time. And it has revolutionized its business model. Most of its products are now in a bundle, Adobe Creative Cloud, for which Adobe charges a monthly subscription. Other companies are adopting variants of this model, known as Software as a Service.

By the way, Warnock and Geschke may have been camera shy, but once I got them to agree they produced a great interview. It almost always turned out that way when I had a reluctant subject. I checked in with both men every now and then over the years. They were pioneers of the computer age. Think about them when you print on your laser printer. They will be remembered.

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