Nerd Word of the Week: Sensawunda

Sensawunda (n.) - Sci-fi slang term for sense of wonder, used to describe emotionally stirring or intellectually stimulating concepts depicted within speculative fiction. Golden Age science fiction is often lauded for its surplus sensawunda, with point-of-view characters constantly amazed at the scope, scale, and strangeness of creatures, locales, and technologies featured in these sci-fi stories. A.E. Van Vogt's Empire of Isher series is often cited as a classic example of a sensawunda tale, as are the various Heinlein juveniles like Rocket Ship Galileo and Farmer in the Sky. To this day, the original Star Wars is held up as the paramount cinematic example of sensawunda, even if its various prequels utterly failed to live up to this standard.

Contemporary science fiction is often criticized for lacking sensawunda, especially as concerns fashionably cynical or jaded protagonists who are never amazed or inspired by their objectively fantastic and extraordinary experiences. Many critics have cited this sensawunda deficit as the reason why fantasy has overtaken science fiction in mainstream literary success, with the Harry Potter phenomenon --  and its willing embrace of sensawunda -- serving as exhibit A. Moreover, many modern characters are meta-aware, often acting as if they know they are in a fictional setting and using their knowledge of standard spec-fic tropes to navigate and outsmart the challenges of their own stories. This has the effect of being alternately hilarious (in the case of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series) or diminishing of the story; if the main character does not take it seriously, how can the reader? Iain Banks and John Varley have consciously tried to recapture the sensawunda flair of these classic sci-fi tales, with Varley explicitly channeling Heinlein juveniles in his Red Thunder and its sequels, and Banks engaging in gleeful Golden Age romanticism in his novel Feersum Endjinn.

I bring it up because: Today is the 51st anniversary of the incorporation of NASA, and if ever a real-world entity attained and then lost a sensawunda, it's the American space agency. While NASA is objectively doing faster, better, cheaper space exploration today with its advanced satellites, deep-space probes and robot rovers, it has lost the pioneer flare (and bottomless Cold War budget) that captured the imagination during the heady days of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. The upcoming Project Constellation and its Ares V rockets and Altair and Orion spacecraft harken back to the golden age of manned spaceflight, but no one is certain they will ever actually get built and, if they do, whether they'll feel just like a remake of a classic tale that has, sadly, loss it originality and sensawunda. Let's hope the critics are wrong, because the world is a brighter place when our reach exceeds our grasp, and the sky is filled with manned rockets daring for the stars.

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Nerd Word of the Week: Lofstrom loop

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Lofstrom loop (n.) - An enormous man-made magnetic track designed to launch payloads into orbit without the use of conventional rockets or propulsion systems. And by enormous, we mean puts-some-mountain-ranges-to-shame gigantic, with oft-cited estimates of a Loftsrom loop's necessary dimensions placed at 2000 kilometers long and 80 kilometers high. Some weather systems could pass cleanly underneath a Loftsrom loop. These structures are also known more simply as launch loops, but are often identified with electrical engineer Keith Lofstrom, who fleshed out the physics behind this pharaohic rocket-replacement system.

A Lofstrom loop works by magnetically rotating a belt along its entire length, sort of like a hybrid between the checkout line out the supermarket and a Japanese bullet train. The motion of the belt is what keeps the loop aloft in near-orbital space, since there's no way to build a self-supporting 80 km-high structure with known materials. Ironically, a Loftsrom loop is a simpler and cheaper alternative to the more popularly known space elevator, as the loop doesn't require placing any part of its structure in space, and doesn't (theoretically) require any knew materials for its construction -- just insane, science-fictional boatloads of money, and a constant 200 megawatt power source that never, ever stops. Oh, and you have to build it over the ocean because the loop's collective inertia rivals that of a small nuclear weapon's force output, so a cable break could theoretically wipe a small city off the map if you built it over a residential...er...continent.

I bring it up because: Today is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. On July 16, 1969, one of only 13 Saturn V rockets ever built hurled into space the first manned mission to the surface of the moon. It cost over $45 billion in today's money to design and build the fleet of Saturn Vs, and 40 years later, we still don't have any better vehicle than the massive controlled-explosion skyskrapers we call rockets to put payloads into space. Oh, and that "next generation" launch program called "Apollo on steroids" that will produce the Ares V rocket and the Orion/Altair vehicle fleet? Charles Stross rightly points out that the kind of NASA that could build that rocket is long gone, so the next great rocket will never be built. If we're going to get back into space in a serious, manned-expedition way, it's going to take a radical new technology, and maybe even a loopy one.

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