Be a virtual rocket scientist
Posted: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 7:36 PM by Alan Boyle
Linden Lab |
Virtual-reality rocket-builder Jimbo Perhaps takes Rocketeer students to his secret
Second Life hangar to show them a space shuttle under construction.
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"Can anyone tell me what is the rocket equation?" the teacher asks. "That's a hard one," one of the students says. Then the teacher starts giving hints: "I use force to power my rockets. Force depends on the mass of the rocket."
Finally, another student types out the answer: "Thrust equals dM/dt (-vrel)."
I can already tell that I'm out of my depth. Thank goodness that most of the class time is taken up in rocket rides, launch-pad tours - and levitating from one cool spaceship to another. Levitating is the easiest way to go on a class field trip when you're in the virtual world known as Second Life.
During today's first class, Second Life's most prolific rocket-builder showed us many of his computer-generated creations - including a space shuttle taking shape at his secret hangar - and taught us a little real-life rocket science along the way.
In this virtual world, users are represented by online avatars that may or may not look like your real-life persona. To talk to others, you just type your comments into an online chat window. And if you want to whisper to a classmate, you can send an instant message that no one else can "hear."
Second Lifers convert real money into virtual dollars to purchase clothes, hairstyles, homes - and yes, even the occasional launch vehicle. (I have yet to spend a single Linden dollar, although I really must do something about my generic jeans-and-T-shirt look.)
If you've been by Second Life's International Spaceflight Museum, you've probably seen one of Jimbo Perhaps' creations. He built more than half of the 100 or so historic spacecraft on display, ranging from the Soviet N-1 moon rocket to the space shuttle.
Right now, Perhaps is working on the piece de resistance: a space shuttle model with engines that fire, payload bay doors that open and hundreds of other moving parts. The virtual contraption is being constructed in Perhaps' floating hangar from more than 1,000 "prims," or virtual building blocks. That makes the shuttle so heavy in Second Life's computer universe that it can't actually fly.
You can blast off on many of the other rockets, however, simply by counting down to zero. And that was part of today's lesson as well: Students were invited to sit right on the top of a rocket's nose cone, ignite the engines and see how far they could rise.
"The apogees will differ because each of you is a different size and is wearing a different number of prims," Perhaps explained.
Even though Second Life is a completely make-believe world, the physics can be real if you write the code that way. And that's the educational point behind Perhaps' exercise.
In real life, Jimbo Perhaps is Jim Botaitis, a 45-year-old Canadian civil engineer and model decal designer. He may not be a rocket scientist, but he has enough model rocketry, engineering and scripting under his belt to create rockets that soar the way the real things do - even to the point that they're affected by the wind direction in Second Life.
Tsiolokovsky's rocket equation is built into the coding for the rockets, and Perhaps also sprinkles his space-tourist spiel with references to other rocket resources. As the four-week class proceeds, Second Life's "Rocketeers" will be learning more about how to build Second Life spaceships and animate them with First Life physics. Classes are conducted on Tuesdays and repeated on Thursdays.
If you're a Second Life user, you can link up with the class by searching for "The Rocketeers" among the virtual world's groups (Edit > Search > Groups > Search for "Rocketeers"). But if dM/dt isn't exactly your cup of T, there are plenty of other educational opportunities in virtual reality.
The science-related opportunities in Second Life are on the rise as well: On Saturday, the 46th anniversary of NASA's first manned spaceflight, Spaceport Bravo, is due to have its grand opening at the International Spaceflight Museum. There'll be lectures on astronaut Alan Shepard's historic flight as well as Mars exploration, dark matter and dark energy.
Also in Second Life, SciLands, a recently created mini-continent devoted to science and technology, is ramping up with participation from the space museum as well as NASA's Ames Research Center, the Exploratorium and other research and educational groups (PDF news release).
The University of Denver's Jeff Corbin (a.k.a. Zazen Manbi), a co-founder of SciLands, said that Second Life can serve as "a spectacular supplement" to the educational process. He's already talking about setting up a virtual tour to the creation of the universe, and he's looking into using Second Life simulations to teach students about real-life nuclear physics.
"It's a little safer," Corbin told me, "and you don't have to get an avatar badged to do an experiment."
Second Life's simulated world gives Jimbo Perhaps' real-life alter ego a way to follow through on the interest in astronomy and space he's had since he was a child - without having to bend real-life metal or grind real-life mirrors.
"I'm not messing with wiring or sheet metal," Jim Botaitis told me in a telephone interview today. "I'm just doing it all through programming."
Jimbo Perhaps may know more than anyone else about building rockets in Second Life. But Jim Botaitis knows that Second Life will have to give way to real life someday - maybe next year, maybe a few years from now. That's why teaching the Rocketeers is so important.
"I'm aiming to find people in Second Life who can surpass me, who can do better than I can do," Botaitis told me. "Real life takes over eventually. I'm hoping to pass all this on to the younger folks who might have the same kind of enthusiasm for the space program."
