News and first-hand observations from a freelance space and technology reporter (Popular Science, Wired News, others) on commercial spaceflight, thinking machines, hypersonic jets, bionic limbs, and other world-changing projects.
Last month I visited the project's headquarters at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where I snapped this picture of the robot surgical system at the heart of the program.
Rick Satava, an Army surgeon, started what became Trauma Pod at DARPA in the 1990s. He left DARPA for the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command just before a successful Phase I demo at SRI last year.
What you see here is a modified da Vinci Surgical System (developed at SRI and commercialized by Intuitive Surgical) poised over a fake patient, with a robot scrub nurse awaiting instructions in the foreground. Phase I answered the question "can a robotic system treat wounded soldiers in the battlefield?" with an unqualified "Yes."
Next steps: take the remote human surgeon out of the loop by completely automating several of the most essential trauma operations, and then shrink this stuff down to a size that can roll on an armored personnel carrier or fly in a black hawk helicopter.
The goal is to enable soldiers on the battlefield to load wounded comrades into the trauma pod and have the system go to work immediately patching up hemorrhaging blood vessels and collapsed lungs, buying precious minutes in which to get to a field hospital.
Battlefield trauma surgery is just the beginning, Satava tells me. He envisions a day when surgeons compose operations on computer systems much the way writers like me use word processing software to write articles.
Here I am test-driving SRI's latest surgical robot, the M7, in a photo by SRI public relations consultant Deborah Lacy. Just like word processing? Let's just say it's a good thing there wasn't a real patient on the table. You can see the instruments I'm remotely manipulating on the monitor behind my head.
Satava's surgeon of the future (50 years from now, Satava figures) would work on a three-dimensional representation of a patient created from a head-to-toe CT scan. After perfecting the operation, he or she would hit a command to "print" the procedure on the actual patient. As Satava put it to me:
You...send the image to the surgeon. He spends a few minutes and gets...exactly what he wants without damaging the patient--being able to edit it and then just send it out--and bing, bing, bing, it’s all done by the robot immediately.
The advantage, says Satava, will be surgery done up to 12 times faster and 15 times more accurately than by an unassisted human surgeon. In other words, a procedure that takes an hour in today's operating rooms could be shaved down to just 5 minutes.
Look for me on the Fox Business Network this Monday morning, July 21, at 7:30 a.m. on a breakfast show hosted by Charles Payne.
I'll be on in the studio for a few minutes to talk about the emerging commercial spaceflight industry, including news from Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace and a new edition of my book Rocketeers.
Watch this space for a link to the segment after it airs....
---Update on July 21--- Not quite as much time as I had hoped for for the segment--they seem to have been running late and had to truncate the time alloted to it.
Still, they brought in Diane Murphy, veteran space business communications executive and SpaceX's new communications director via satellite. She was in excellent form, in spite of having to appear in a Los Angeles studio at 4:00 a.m. Nice job, Diane!
Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to plug the new edition of my book Rocketeers. Watch for a post about that soon.
I'll be on Woodstock's own TV station tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time as a guest on Bill Pfleging's Tech Attack. Tune in live at www.woodstocktv.org, and call in to join the conversation at 845-679-7777.
This is as close to home as it gets for me. The studio is just down the road from my house, right next to the playground where I walked my daughter during yesterday's break in the cold weather, and it's practically in the ball field where the Dalai Lama spoke last summer.
Bill's a good friend of mine, Woodstock's resident computer tech guru, and a fellow writer. He and his wife Minda Zetlin recently published a highly entertaining book about technologists' and managers' failure to communicate called The Geek Gap.
This will be a fun show, very informal, and we'll have a full hour to engage in some lively dialogue about cheap access to space, why geeks and suits have trouble understanding each other, and whatever else our callers want to talk about.
This one's for my friend Ben Zackheim, who wanted to see the results of the office overhaul I did at the beginning of the year.
Here's a little tour for those of you who are also interested:
Mac: After five-plus years, it was time to upgrade my desktop computer. I'd had such a great experience with my iPhone that I upgraded to this iMac. I do believe I have purchased my last PC.
Laptop: I'd already upgraded my laptop to this HP. Nice machine, great for watching movies, okay for traveling on assignment. Too bad it runs Windows Vista, the worst operating system I've used since Windows 3.1. It's counter-intuitive, locks me out of essential settings by default, required uninstalling a raft of craplets, and until I could figure out how to stop it, interrupted my work constantly to install endless updates and automatically reboot. I've had my Mac for probably a quarter of the time (a month and a half), and already I'm using it with much greater facility. And I've been a dedicated PC user since the days of DOS.
Office phone: Two lines, one for home, the other for Skype--which I use as a portable office line--keep the middle-of-the-night calls from antigravity researchers in Taiwan from waking up my family. I'm not joking. Skype interfaces with the phone through a converter box behind the video phone.
Video phone: This Ojo video phone displays full motion video with sync sound and requires no computer. Currently my little girl's grandparents are the only people I know with the same unit, so they're the only ones we can call on it. Looks like from its website that the company that makes it is going down in flames, so even that limited usage is coming to an end, making this a $300 paperweight.
Inspiration: The Alex Ross print of mild-manned Clark Kent pulling off the impossible transformation into Superman keeps me going through difficult deadlines. A cover for one of my PopSci stories, blown up and framed, features the enticing headline above the magazine title, "How Cannibalistic Spider Sex Can Make You a Genius," reminding me to keep my sense of humor.
Current reading: Michael J. Neufeld bills his 2007 biography of rocket pioneer Werhner von Braun as the most comprehensive treatment of his topic ever. He may just be right. More on that in an upcoming post.
Whodathunkit. The little town of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada hosts a world-class research institute attracting physicists from around the world to probe the mysteries of the universe.
I've just returned from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, where I got the royal treatment--my own private office, limo rides to a fro, continuous access to an open food bar, and an audience of hundreds for my talk on private space travel.
As John Matlock, public relations director and my host at the institute put it, the place is competing with similar facilities in such renown tourist destinations as Paris and New York for brain power so they pull out all the stops in making researchers and other guests welcome.
The building itself is a marvel of glass and steel, filled with light, somehow providing the quiet and privacy needed to think big thoughts while conveying a sense of openness that allows conversations in public areas to flow naturally into secluded alcoves complete with fireplaces and leather armchairs.
My favorite feature is the blackboards seemingly on every available wall, most, like this one in the Black Hole Bistro on the fourth floor, filled with equations jotted by wandering physicists. The effect is to transform abstract thought into exquisite works of art, well-lit and prominently displayed, as in an art gallery.
Next time your travels take you to Toronto, build in enough time for the hour-and-a-half drive to Waterloo for one of the Institute's public events. It'll be an experience you won't soon forget.
Meanwhile, I'll link to the video of my own talk when it's posted on the Institute's website.
I was busy last Wednesday. Not only did I live blog the unveiling of SpaceShipTwo on Wired.com, but I also reported on the event on camera. Wired posted the resulting video, produced by Randi Himelfarb, on YouTube.com last night. Click the image to link to the video.
When I first saw the title of this book, I read it as "The 4-Hour Work Day," and I still thought it was outrageous. But no, this entrepreneur-turned-author really does aim to show you how to work a 4-hour work week.
I'm a great believer in the power of books to change your life, and I just couldn't pass this one up. Turns out it's well-written, funny, and full of good ideas. And, yes, it has changed my life.
The book's central premise is that the 8-hour work day is an artificial construct, that there's no reason on Earth why you have to work the same schedule as everyone else.
Hell, I've known that my entire working life. I've never held a full-time job, preferring instead to pick up short-term engagements that will allow me to pursue my own goals. I started out as a temporary secretary while still in college, switched a few years later to contract writing because it allowed me to work at home, and never looked back.
Ferriss goes further than that, though. Slip away from the watchful eye of an employer, and there's no reason on Earth why you actually have to do the work yourself. Hire it out. Better still, hire it out to someone making pennies on your dollar. To someone, say, in India. In other words, outsource your work.
Well, I'm not about to outsource the writing of my magazine articles and books. But the idea intrigued me. Why not outsource whatever else I could? Case in point, I've been invited to deliver a PowerPoint presentation at the Perimeter Institute next month, complete with exciting photos and video clips.
Even as a temp, I never worked with PowerPoint much. In my previous life as an actor and playwright, I always avoided what theater folks call "tech" as much as possible. Tech goes wrong. Tech relies on techies to run those lights and sound cues. Tech costs money. So I distilled theater to its most basic elements: one man in a room in front of an audience. No props or costume changes, and only a single, straight back chair for a set.
I've taken a similar tack with my book-related talks. Until now. These guys want PowerPoint with video, and by God, they're going to get it. I gave an Indian outsourcing firm Ferriss recommends in his book a whirl. They did okay, about what you'd expect from a temp flying by the seat of his pants. I could relate.
But it still wasn't what I wanted. So I went local, hired my buddy Mark Greene at Pecos Pictures to work it out. He's a video guy. He knows this stuff. Sure, he costs more than the generalists in India, but he's worth it.
My friend and fellow writer Jeff Davis is a big believer in hiring local whenever possible. It's a way to give back to the community that supports you, he says, and it gets you better quality work. I think he's on to something there.
I'm just finishing up a chapter in my DARPA book on the Trauma Pod project.
Satava's surgeon of the future (50 years from now, Satava figures) would work on a three-dimensional representation of a patient created from a head-to-toe CT scan. After perfecting the operation, he or she would hit a command to "print" the procedure on the actual patient. As Satava put it to me:
