Two years ago, in these pages, I wrote about an amazing feat of robotic engineering.
It was the summer of Deepwater Horizon. We didn’t know the full extent of the spill at the time, which would eventually be tallied in millions of barrels of crude, but the horror was there for anyone to see: a volcano of oil erupting nearly a mile under the placid surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The public watched first with hope, and then with increasing disgust, as the British Petroleum corporation threw everything it had at the problem. Nothing went right. Blowout preventer valves couldn’t be shut. A containment dome dropped over the wellhead promptly froze solid. Heavy drilling fluids were pumped into the blowout preventer, an attempt at a so-called “top kill.” That failed, too.
A radical idea was floated: using an atomic device to try to seal the well. That’s how far the situation had unravelled: there was talk of nuking the Gulf!
On April 20th, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig had been engulfed by a methane fireball that killed eleven men. When the rig sank, three days later, all eyes turned to the wellhead five thousand feet below. At first, BP announced that there was no visible leakage. Then they said it was possible that up to 1000 barrels per day might be spilling out. A few days later, the number was revised upwards, to 5000. Week after week, it kept ballooning. April’s 5000 barrels a day became May’s 12,000; May’s 12,000 became June’s 35,000.
The final official estimate was a whopping 62,000 barrels of oil spillage per day. The fact that the announcements switched back and forth from barrels to gallons added an element of confusion. “60,000 barrels a day” certainly sounded a lot better than “2.5 million gallons a day.”
By the time the wellhead was finally capped on July 15th, nearly 5 million barrels — approximately 200 million gallons — of oil had fouled the Gulf, making it the worst maritime oil spill in history.
In the end, robots saved the day. We watched, spellbound, as they hovered around the plume, impervious to lethal extremes of temperature and pressure, doing the bidding of distant masters in an air-conditioned control room. A new blowout preventer with a cute, media-friendly name, “Top Hat Number 10,” was lowered onto the wellhead. The robots secured it; then, reaching out with cleverly articulating arms, they turned the valves, one by one, and shut off the oil.
I remember watching that silent underwater dance as it unfolded on the Internet and being reminded of another engineering triumph, the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts in their damaged capsule in the spring of 1970.
The dissonance between those two crises — one, a human rescue mission powered by American ingenuity and resolve; the other, perhaps the worst man-made environmental disaster in history, precipitated by greed, and amplified by finger-pointing and corporate double-speak — led me to write a column praising the engineers and robots, and vilifying the oil men.
Fast forward to last week, when I found myself watching another remote-controlled robotic ballet on the Internet. The backdrop this time wasn’t a murky, oil-poisoned sea, but instead the gentle curvature of the earth, set against the deep black of outer space. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule was creeping, meter by agonizing meter, towards the International Space Station.
The coverage on NASA TV (www.nasa.gov/ntv) was excellent. Multiple views from the space station were intercut with live video feeds from NASA’s mission control in Houston and SpaceX’s command center in Hawthorne, California.
There was a celebratory roar when the space station’s robotic arm locked onto the Dragon 2, and then another when the capsule was safely berthed to Harmony Node, the station’s “utility hub.” This was a historic moment for spaceflight: for the first time, a commercial spacecraft had been attached to the International Space Station. In other words, space exploration, formerly the province of nation-states, was now officially open for business.
It was a great triumph for SpaceX, which had, in six short years, transformed itself from billionaire Elon Musk’s vanity project into a serious government contractor, innovating along the way at the speed of Silicon Valley.
A feel-good moment for America, certainly, and a baby step in a new direction for our space program.
But after the euphoria passed, the victory began to feel a bit hollow. Robots are doing more and more for us, whether it’s a mile under the sea, in earth orbit, or even on the battlefield. This is all to the good. The mitigation of human risk is a worthy goal.
Even so, there was an important moment missing from the Dragon 2 mission: the one where the grinning astronaut floats through the capsule door, extending a hand in friendship to his fellow explorers.
I’d like to see a robot try to do that.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 07 June 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
