The Mutara Nebula

Nebulae have always fascinated me.  Their ghostly presence, their spectacular glow, and their role as birthing places. and sometimes grave markers, for stars give them an appealing mystery that even solar systems cannot match.  The placement of one of the epic battles of the Star Trek universe, pitting James T. Kirk against the "superior intellect" of Khan, only enhances this impression in my mind. 

I have tried to determine if there is a known nebula that matches the Mutara, to no avail.  Yet the pictures of nebulae generated by the newest generation of space telescopes gives flight to the imagination, as more and more details jump out about these intriguing celestial bodies.  These sharper and sharper images may well reveal new secrets about their particles, composition, and origin.  Perhaps they will suggest to us new interpretations about the relaltion of distant nebulae to the origin of our own solar system and those in our vicinity, such as the Centauri systems.  

It's uncertain how soon, if ever, we may ever come to visiting our galaxy's nebulae up close.  Recently I met the husband of a relative who had spent his career working with NASA and its space flight systems.  Specifically, I wanted to ask him about information I had seen about the renewed interest in using atomic explosions to power future space flight from Earth to neighboring planets.  He confirmed to me that this technological dimension, first brought up in the 1950s, was back on the examining table for projected trips to Mars and beyond.  

The concept of using a big explosion or explosions to send a rocket into space is not, of course, totally new.  As early as the seventeenth century Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac has his travelers use a sort of rocket, made from fireworks destined for the midsummer festival of St. John, to reach the Moon, after their original evaporation-powered vehicle failed to make it further than Quebec. Two centuries later Jules Verne sends spatial explorers to our satellite in a projectile shot out of a giant post-Civil War cannon constructed near the site of today's Cape Canaveral, Florida.  While both of these futurists anticipated some details of the eventual missions that reached the lunar surface in the 1960s, each had its impractical tongue-in-cheek aspects that were fortunately not duplicated in real life.  As for the idea of using nuclear explosives to send astronauts far beyond Earth orbit by setting off a series of blasts that would be absorbed by some sort of cushion and turned into thrust for a launch vehicle containing human passengers, there are also some formidable engineering and biological obstacles to overcome.  Anyone who has visited World War II bunkers along the Atlantic Wall or the Siegfried Line can understand that even the shock of 155 mm howitzers or 15 inch naval ordinance can kill all the inhabitants of a structure even before it cracks into pieces.  And those shells are mere spitballs compared to nuclear explosions, or even the advanced bunker busters sowing terror around the world today.  Besides, solar radiation is already a concern for astronaut survival, much less the addition of deadly gamma rays produced in near proximity.  Whether we can "bomb our way" through our own solar system is hardly a given at this point.

In the absence of near-light or faster-than-light speed craft, the nebulae of our region of space seem to remain so many gleaming eyes and beckoning limbs inviting us into a realm beyond our reach.  However, the never ending quest of discovery will not be easily quenched as long as humans carry the instinct for curiosity.  Once we truly start to reach out to the universe for knowledge without expecting it to provide a quick fix for our earthbound piccadillos, we may at least be able to stare straight into those eyes and touch those limbs out in the depths of space time.