Honeybee Robotics has created hundreds of state-of-the-art robotic devices and artificial intelligence mechanisms for military, academic and industrial clients, but the Brooklyn-based company is probably best known for the work it's done to equip NASA's Mars rovers with robotic life detection components.
It's a task that has to be considered against the backdrop of the mind-blowing images the rovers – Spirit, Opportunity and, most recently, Curiosity – have transmitted back to Earth over the last decade of vast, orange, unremittingly lifeless vistas. Earlier this year, Honeybee was instrumental in the Curiosity rover's discovery that water once moistened those vistas.
"I think personally that there probably was at one time life on Mars, but that is totally a guess," says Stephen Gorevan, the cumulus-haired Chairman of Honeybee Robotics, a former horn player and jingle writer who launched the company out of his Lower East Side apartment with a friend from music school. Despite working as a rocket scientist for the last 25 years, Gorevan remains plain-spoken and earthy.
"It takes six, seven, eight months to travel through space to get to Mars, but in another sense it's our next-door neighbor. Earth is teeming with life. Why wouldn't a little bit have bled over?"
Gorevan believes the U.S. will send a manned mission to Mars by 2035. The main problem with sending people to Mars is the same problem he has encountered with robots – getting them back.
"Think about how complicated it is to launch a rocket from Cape Canaveral," he says. "You essentially have to bring that whole operation to Mars to be able to launch the rockets to get ... people back to the Earth."
There is one scenario that simplifies the problem of getting people back to Earth and that is making Mars a one-way trip.
"To me, it would be not unrelated to people making the trek across the Atlantic 300 and 400 years ago where they weren't going to come back to the Old World. They were going to the New World to stay."
Apparently, a lot of Martian hopefuls are fine with that. The rate of volunteerism for one-way Mars colony missions is skyrocketing. The Mars One Foundation, a nonprofit group that plans to send teams of four on one-way Mars missions, reportedly got 200,000 applicants from more than 140 countries.
"Some people think that the rovers that we presently have on Mars are actually doing reconnaissance for manned missions to the red planet," says Gorevan. "In a way, I think that's true because we're looking around. We're detecting if there's water below the surface with the Curiosity rover. We're also detecting the radiation environment to see what kind of radiation levels astronauts in the future will be exposed to when they go to Mars and perhaps live for extended periods on Mars."
Over the last 25 years, Gorevan and the Honeybee Robotics team have perfected aerospace-class drills, corers and other sample-collection devices to an extent that's made them NASA's go-to source for sample acquisition, transfer and processing tools. While Brooklyn may seem like an unusual location for NASA's robotic right arm, it enables Gorevan to work where he lives and diversifies the talent pool from which he can draw.
"New York's been good for us," says Gorevan from his Brooklyn Navy Yard headquarters – the company also has facilities in Pasadena, California, and Longmont, Colorado. "Instead of going to Silicon Valley or the Southwest, where there are great swathes of aerospace industry. Some people want to come to New York. We've been able to attract terrific talent here."
Beyond a location with maverick appeal, Honeybee offers it's engineers the chance to work on some of the most exciting aerospace projects of our time. The company is currently developing systems for future missions to Mars, Venus, the moon, two Jovian moons, and a smattering of asteroids and comets. As commercial space travel takes off, opportunities in the private sector are also developing for Gorevan and his team. Indeed, things are looking up in the world of space exploration and you might say Gorevan's over the moon.
"As I'm speaking these words, we've just had a fly-by of Pluto by the New Horizon spacecraft and I think it's stunned the world," he says on a sweltering Navy Yard pier where war ships were built over the last two centuries. "These are destinations that we couldn't even contemplate back in the '60s when the Apollo program was in full swing. I think we have lots of exciting opportunities ahead of us in NASA research development and exploration. I think a lot of it is going to be robotic."
For those who want to get a close-up look at some of the company's work, Honeybee Robotics will be exhibiting at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum's Space & Science Festival. From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in Hangar 3 on Saturday, July 25, learn how rovers drill into rocks on Mars, and speak with engineers who operate the rover Curiosity. And at noon on Saturday, also in Hangar 3, learn the history of exploration on the red planet with details about Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), a set of instruments on the Mars rover Curiosity.
Check the full schedule for Space and Science Festival events from July 23-26.
