Michael Belfiore - The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs

I FIRST MET THE AUTODOC in a science fiction novel. Back then it was on a starship, and it allowed its user to live practically foreverpretty much a requirement for interstellar travel, even at near-light speeds. Now I was seeing it in the flesh, as it were, squatting in a corner of a Silicon Valley laboratory, looking like a giant mechanized insect with its mouth parts and legs poised over an operating table.

The body on the table, like the robot, was artificialplaced there to show what an actual human being would look like in that setting. My tour guide was a forty-seven-year-old mechanical engineer talking a mile a minute, pointing out a cabinet full of surgical supplies and a swing-arm nurse built on the frame of an industrial robot used to working more on cars than on human bodies, and explaining how the system worked. It didnt take much imagination to bring the scene alive in my minds eye.

The patient, gushing blood, near death, would be tossed onto the table, none too gently, given the circumstances: massive hemorrhaging that had to be stopped immediately. Strapped down, breathing shallowly, the injured man wouldnt flinch as the robot maneuvered its grasping parts over his wounds. The mini CT scanner attached to the table would slide down the length of the mans body, feeding data to the robots computer brain. Then the robot would get to work, first jabbing the patient with a needle, then deftly threading a line through his vascular system, guiding it unerringly to the weakly pulsing artery that was pumping the mans blood out over the table and on to the floor.

A pause, while the robot worked invisibly inside the mans body. And then the flow of blood would shut off as abruptly as a turned faucet as the robot plugged the leak. Whirring and clicking, the robotapparently satisfiedwithdrew its graspers and pulled out the bloody line, replacing it with a simple IV. At an unspoken command, the robot nurse swung over to the supply cabinet, picked up some sutures, and swung back to the robot surgeon. Then it pulled one of the surgeons arms off and plugged in a fresh one. The surgeon picked up a suture with its new hand and made quick work of sewing the patient up. Time elapsed from diagnosis to completed surgery: approximately two minutes. And another soldier would live to fight another day.

Want to try it? the engineer was asking.

Of course, I said.

He seated me at a table before another robosurgeonthe latest prototypehelped me position my hands on a pair of metal grips, and had me lean forward so that I could look through the binoculars on the console in front of me. I was instantly transported across the room to another table, where a slab of simulated flesh awaited my ministrations with needle and suture of my own. I saw the table and its simulated patient in full 3-D color, and my hands registered every bump and jerk as I less than expertly maneuvered my robots graspers and tried to sew. I wasnt just watching a science fiction novel come to life now, I was in one.

My visit to the robot surgeon was just one stop on my odyssey through the startling and mind-bending world of an obscure government agency almost no one I speak to casually has heard of but that has affected all of our lives in countless ways. Have you used the Internet? A computer mouse? A satellite-based navigation system? Thank the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. My mission in writing this book was to find out what projects the agency was working on today that could prove as influential as those past projects, and meet the people bringing them to life.

I FIRST STUMBLED on DARPA while reporting on the worlds first privately funded manned space flights. It was June 22, 2004, in Mojave, California. The TV crews had cranked down their satellite dishes and folded their tents and driven back to L.A. in their trucks and vans, followed closely by the thousands of spectators in their RVs and cars. The windswept little town in the Mojave Desert one hundred miles east of Los Angeles had, in just a day, returned to its usual near-emptiness, punctuated by the sound of the wind whipping flagpoles and the occasional roar of jet engines and the growl of piston engines from airplanes taking off and landing at the airport. Which was now a spaceport.

The day before, SpaceShipOne had carried a man, sixty-three-year-old Mike Melvill, outside the atmosphere for the first time. The ship had been conceived by an airplane designer renowned for his shockingly innovative approach to engineering and built by his small company, Scaled Composites, headquartered on the airports flight line, for a mere $25 million. That was half the retail price of a Boeing 737600 airliner. The little spaceship that could, hand-built of carbon-fiber composites, flew three times the speed of sound, faster than any civilian craft yet built. While still far slower than the Mach 25 speed necessary for reaching orbit, SpaceShipOne nevertheless breached the atmosphere and allowed Melvill to float, weightless, for four minutes. News of the achievement now blared in headlines around the world. But I alone, it seemed, among the journalists covering Melvills flight, had returned to Mojave the next day to see what a more or less ordinary day looked like at a commercial spaceport. There was no one around. The place might as well have been a ghost town. Everyone was inside, out of the desert sun, working in their hangars and offices during just another day.

I began by checking out a rocket company called XCOR Aerospace. As it turned out, that was as far as I got that day. Though one would never guess it from its outward appearance, XCOR Aerospace represented the hopes, dreams, and potential of an age of private space travel as well as any other group of aerospace mavericks, including Scaled Composites. XCOR Aerospace occupied a featureless blue hangar dating from the Second World War. A sign on the door featuring a stylized rocket plane logo was all that distinguished the place. I walked into a battered lounge that was trying without much success to be a lobby. Framed magazine article reprints about the company hung on the walls, including pieces about a home-built airplane the companys engineers had hot-rodded up with a pair of rocket engines and dubbed the EZ-Rocket.

The heart of the operation was an open hangar in which working areas and workbenches had been laid out along the sides. There I met a friendly middle-aged engineer named Aleta Jackson, who I later learned possessed a keen intellect and not a little of the sense of humor required of anyone who has devoted her life to the fulfillment of a dream most people think impossible. She was about as far removed as one could imagine from the stereotypical picture of the fabled steely-eyed missile man of the previous generation, who had started the first space age, the one run by massive government programs, but she was no less committed to the dream of space flight. Without routine, regular, reliable access to space, I think this planet is hosed, she told me simply. Weve got to have it, and the sooner we get it, the better off everyones going to be.