Fifty years after President Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon, the space agency is at a crossroads. NASA is preparing to retire its final shuttle this summer, with no immediate plan to replace the agency’s only human space flight program. Amid so much uncertainty – and soul searching for the agency – NASA scientists still need working plans.

Many of NASA’s science goals come out of 10-year surveys, which are based on submissions from the broader science community and seek to establish consensus on research priorities. “I believe that a decadal timeline was selected because, for many grand challenges in science, a decade is kind of a minimal amount of time you have to look at to begin to derive some kind of answers,” says Elizabeth Cantwell, a National Academies board member, who recently co-chaired such a report for NASA.

Presidential terms, however, span eight years at most, Congress changes every two years, and the budget is up for consideration every year. These faster cycles can strain any long-term government project, but especially science programs that require methodical continuity.

‘Guided by Science’

Did Mars or Venus ever host watery environments that could support life? If so, did life emerge there? How did our largest planets and their satellite systems come together?

These are among the most important questions for NASA’s planetary sciences division to consider throughout the next 10 years, according to a new report on priorities for the planetary sciences, which scientists have been touring the country to discuss this spring. Designed specifically to guide NASA policies and programs, the survey was conducted by the National Research Council, which considered 199 white papers submitted by the scientific community as well as issues raised at more than a dozen scholarly town hall meetings.

“What we do must be first and foremost guided by science,” Steve Squyres, a Cornell University astronomer who chaired the survey, told a planetary science conference in March.

“This is an extraordinary thing,” he said. “It’s an instance where a federal agency looks to its constituents, to our community, for actionable advice on what they ought to do.”

Although the report was based on input from the scientific community, the completed product has to be sold back to those same scientists – the goal of many town hall meetings this spring. Next, the whole package has to be sold to Washington – every year. Squyres asked the scientists at the conference in March, especially those in the districts of lawmakers with appropriations clout, to lobby. “The most important thing that we as a community can try to do is to influence the budget process for the NASA planetary science division,” he said. “That means interacting with our congressmen and our senators.”

Paul Hertz, chief scientist of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, notes that the science mission doesn’t stand alone. “Of course national priorities get added on to the decadal priorities,” he says, noting that in 2004, President George W. Bush “adopted a new vision for space exploration, which changed the priorities for NASA and the allocation of money, and of course over the last year or two, things have changed a lot.”

Indeed, making long-range plans in a politically shifty environment is no easy task. That point was even more evident in another 10-year study the National Research Council recently conducted for the life and physical sciences research program in NASA’s Exploration Directorate. The program deals with science focused on the properties of space and zero-gravity, including their effects on human health.

Unlike most of the 10-year science studies that NASA and the National Science Foundation request, Congress called for this one, and the National Research Council was asked specifically not to consider costs in determining priorities.

“It was a pretty tall hill to climb to put together an integrated portfolio without considering budget in an environment where policy was changing frequently,” says Cantwell, the survey’s co-chairwoman, who is also director of mission development for engineering at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Getting There

Laying out priorities for a decade with uncertain prospects for human space travel also was a challenge. The report, starkly titled “Recapturing a Future for Space Exploration,” was written as NASA was winding down its space shuttle program. The last shuttle mission is scheduled to launch at the end of June, bringing to a close three decades of operations and 135 missions. After the shuttle Atlantis returns to Earth, NASA will not for the foreseeable future have a vehicle to carry its astronauts to space.

NASA had been developing vehicles under its Constellation program to support Bush’s vision for post-shuttle space exploration initially to the moon as a stepping stone to Mars. In 2010, President Obama called for the cancellation of Constellation, deeming the program too expensive and too far behind schedule. Legal and political knots held Constellation in limbo for months before it officially closed down this year.

The cancellation was a major shift. More than $13 billion had been spent on Constellation, as of April. (If dollars were years, that would be about the age of the universe.) The program also represented the agency’s nearest-term human space flight plans.

NASA’s 2012 budget calls for money to invest in flight systems that would take humans beyond low-Earth orbit, including a deep space capsule and heavy lift rocket, and research to enable the long journeys. But near-term goals are scant in the budget request. Obama is recommending a slight increase for exploration, but much of it is slated to go toward partnerships with the commercial space industry to get cargo and crew to the international space station – part of the president’s controversial push to privatize more of NASA’s work.

“This budget requires us to live within our means so we can invest in our future,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said when the 2012 request was released. “It maintains our commitment to human spaceflight and provides for strong programs to continue the outstanding science, aeronautics research and education needed to win the future.”

Obama insisted last year that he is “100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future.” He acknowledged a “sense that folks in Washington – driven less by vision than politics – have for years neglected NASA’s mission and undermined the work of the professionals who fulfill it.” And he observed that NASA’s budget “has risen and fallen with the political winds.”

The exploration study notes that NASA’s life and physical sciences program already was under pressure. In 1996, its budget was about $500 million, but in 2010, it was only $150 million, according to a draft of the report.

“Researchers must have a reasonable level of confidence in the sustainability of research funding if they are expected to direct their laboratories, staff and students on research relevant to space exploration,” the draft says. It stresses the need for a coherent research plan that is given appropriate resources. “This is especially noteworthy in light of the frequent and large postponements that NASA’s exploration-related goals have experienced over the past several decades.”

Whims of Washington

NASA is no stranger to the whims of Washington. The first major shift in policy occurred shortly after President Eisenhower left office.

Historians describe Eisenhower as a reluctant father of the U.S. space agency. The Soviet Union’s successful launch of sputnik in October 1957 forced his hand, and NASA opened for business one year later. Eisenhower was more interested in a robotics-based space program, with a focus on spy satellites, historians say. He allocated the agency only about 0.5 percent of the federal budget – its lowest funding share, until recently.

If sputnik was a driving force in the creation of NASA, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin likely drove the timing of Kennedy’s moon speech. Gagarin became the first human in space after successfully orbiting Earth in mid-April 1961. A month and a half later, Kennedy asked Congress to fund a project to land a man on the moon “before the end of the decade” – the Apollo program.

“That was the first time when a new administration came in and sharply changed the direction for space policy from a previous administration,” says Howard McCurdy, an American University professor and author of several books about NASA, referring to the fledgling agency’s first presidential transition. “President Kennedy originally contemplated setting the landing-on-the-moon deadline in 1968, to avoid a change of administration.” McCurdy says the end of the decade was chosen with the “general presumption that the next president would not cancel a program so close to its completion.”

Eisenhower continued to believe the mission was a waste of money: “Spending $40 billion in a race for national prestige is nuts,” the former president was quoted saying in a 1963 Popular Science magazine article. Putting a man on the moon actually cost $25.4 billion, according to figures NASA gave Congress in 1973. That’s still no small number, especially at the time. NASA’s budget grew to nearly 4 percent of the entire government budget in the mid-1960s – its all-time high – enabling the space program to put a man on the moon in 1969, within the deadline.

Kennedy actually started to step back from his ambitious plan, reaching out to the Soviets before his assassination. “In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity – in the field of space – there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in September 1963. “I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon.”

McCurdy questions whether the United States would have made it to the moon by the end of the decade if the president had not been assassinated. “When Kennedy realized how much it would cost to go to the moon, he looked for an exit strategy,” he says.

Nearly every administration has tweaked or outright changed the NASA of its predecessor, and Congress has been quick to throw in its own 2 cents. Obama’s break with Bush on NASA policy was severe, but not without precedent, and the decrease in the NASA budget – as a percentage of the entire federal budget – follows a trend rather than sets a new direction.

Lawrence Livermore’s Cantwell notes the deleterious effect policy shifts can have on science, especially for longer-term programs, such as a Mars mission. “If research starts every few years, when a president is so inclined, and then it ends, it will always be 30 years out,” she says. “Science needs some continuity of thought in order to move forward.”

McCurdy is doubtful of such continuity: “The long-range vision of returning to the moon and going to Mars – that overlaps four or five presidential administrations, providing ample opportunities to delay and change the plan,” he says.

Looking Up

Roger Launius, space history curator at the Air and Space Museum and formerly NASA’s chief historian, is more of an optimist. “I think we set priorities all the time, and they – generally speaking – are maintained over the long haul,” he says, noting that the Apollo mission lasted until NASA scientists determined after six piloted moon landings it was not a sustainable program. The space shuttle program has spanned a remarkable eight presidential administrations, far exceeding its predicted life.

Launius argues that 10-year surveys can help scientists make their case to politicians. “They serve as a rallying point for the community engaged in this stuff to make sure that they don’t twist in the wind when there’s a new Congress or panel in the White House.”

The astronomy division of NASA’s science directorate has been using the surveys for nearly 50 years to prioritize popular and successful projects, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Other science divisions began using them more recently. The planetary science survey that went on tour this spring, for instance, was the second such report.

NASA’s Hertz says the previous planetary sciences study predicted the priorities in that field that developed during the past 10 years. “Almost everything we did came from the priorities in the decadal survey,” he says.

“From my view, the place where we didn’t do everything within the decadal survey has to do with the things that required more money than we had available,” Hertz says. “But that’s not priorities. Priorities are different than budgets.”

Launius suggests lawmakers have been the thorn for the agency’s productivity:

“Where NASA’s had the most trouble has been when Congress has placed on it certain restrictions that it’s had to adhere to,” he says, such as when lawmakers stipulate money must be spent within a particular year. NASA is generally permitted two years to spend appropriated money, and freedom to spend in unequal sums is important for contracting purposes, according to Launius.

American University’s McCurdy says the problem is in the process. “If we’re looking for solutions, the gremlin in this story is the annual appropriation,” he says. “Congress basically reviews every space program every year.” McCurdy thinks bonds might be a better way to fund NASA.

Launius dismisses existential concerns about NASA. “It is asked to do far too many things with far less money than is required,” he says of the agency, but he notes there is no opposing force in the way there is for other parts of government that do science-based work, such as the Environmental Protection Agency. “Even when there are serious campaigns to do wholesale changes, most of them don’t come to pass,” he says.

Science priorities don’t change very quickly, according to Hertz. “They don’t have anything to do with administrations, or how the economy is doing, or what the budget is, or which party is in power, or when the next election is,” he says. “Now, we as a government agency have to execute a program for the American people. We have to plan on timescales that are shorter than a decade, and so we have to do our planning more frequently.”

At least five Earth-sized planets appear to be orbiting their stars at just the right distance to host liquid water, NASA said Wednesday, announcing a significant step in the agency’s search for extraterrestrial life.

The Kepler telescope gleaned an extraordinary amount of new information in less than two years of Earth orbit, observing a small slice of the Milky Way galaxy.

The discoveries include whole solar systems and planets close enough to each other to give scientists clues about what they are made of — thus how hospitable to life they may be.

“Not only is Kepler telling us about planetary systems of a type that we had no idea existed, but right now it’s providing our best clues on the composition of these planets as individual worlds,” Kepler scientist Jack Lissauer said Wednesday at a briefing to announce the discoveries.

Several hundred new “planet candidates” — they are, for now, just known to be celestial bodies — bring the Kepler mission discoveries to 1,235 possible planets, potentially tripling the count of extra-solar planets from the current 519.

Of those bodies, 68 are about the size of Earth, and five of those Earth-sized bodies were observed in what scientists call the “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface.

“If we find that Earth-sized planets are common in habitable zones of stars, it’s very likely that life is common around these stars,” Kepler scientist William Borucki said Wednesday.

Before Wednesday, there were only thought to be at most two extra-solar planets in their system’s habitable zone.

Another 49 planet candidates were found by Kepler in the habitable zone, but their enormous sizes suggest big, gassy planets more like Saturn, which, regardless of their distance from their star, cannot sustain life.

The Kepler mission has also turned up 170 stars that appear to be orbited by multiple planets. Such systems are crucial because the planets’ effects on one another’s orbits allow scientists to glean more information about their environments.

“We’re studying systems of planets,” Mr. Borucki said, describing multiplanet systems as “the most valuable things that we can find.”

The largest such system so far has six planets orbiting a star dubbed Kepler-11.

“The five inner planets are essentially close together, something that we didn’t think would happen for worlds of this size,” Mr. Lissauer said. The planets’ proximity means they are disturbing one another’s orbits enough to determine what they might be made of, he said.

The inner two possible planets of this system could be mixtures of rock and water or rock and gas, while the outer planets are large for their mass and must be made of large parts hydrogen and helium, Mr. Lissauer said.

Such a pattern would be similar to our solar system, which has four small, rocky “inner planets” (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) and four large, gassy “outer planets” (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune).

However, our own solar system also suggests limits to Kepler’s discoveries. For example, Mars and Venus are on the edge of our solar system’s habitable zone and even have water (if not in liquid form), but neither has known living beings. Also, being hospitable to life doesn’t necessarily mean hospitable to intelligent life, but possibly just to simple forms such as bacteria.

Kepler cannot determine whether these planets do have the kinds of atmospheres and carbon contents necessary for advanced life forms.

Still, Yale University astronomy professor Debra Fischer said the system orbiting Kepler-11 is an enormous discovery.

“It shows that planetary systems with several small planets like our own seem to be common,” she said. “The adjacent neighborhoods in the galaxy look a lot like our own neighborhood. I think that’s encouraging and important if we’re trying to make extrapolations about the formation of planets elsewhere and perhaps life.”

Ms. Fischer said she is amazed at the number of possible planets — especially Earth-sized planets — the mission has discovered since the orbiting observatory was launched in March 2009. She had expected the discoveries to come in slower, over the course of years.

“Kepler’s blown the lid off of everything we know about extra-solar planets,” she said.

The Kepler observatory uses a telescope that measures light to monitor the brightness of more than 156,000 stars. Orbiting planets block some of that light, causing stars to appear to dim at regular intervals.

The telescope remains constant over the same small patch of sky, about a four-hundredth of the total sky.

This batch of data has undergone only preliminarily analysis and, now that the entire astronomical community has access to it, it is expected to turn up many more discoveries, especially some refining our understanding of Wednesday’s data.

“The stars that surround us have a huge number of planets and candidates for us to look at,” Mr. Borucki said. “Kepler is a step in the exploration of the surrounding galaxy to find life and the extent of life in our galaxy.”

Although Titan’s water is frozen as solid as granite, many other conditions conducive to life exist on the moon. Here’s a story I wrote about the possibility of lightning there. Lightning may have sparked life on Earth — and, perhaps, Titan?

“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

Meanwhile, Businessweek notes a shift in focus for seed sellers, including Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta, all of which are working on drought-resistant crops.

With agriculture accounting for 70% of global freshwater use, “The biggest single issue in farming going forward is…water availability,” says Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant.

[Note: I made a small edit for precision]

Funny how people forget the day before yesterday but remember not to trust US clean energy opportunities. A Deutsche Bank study last fall found North America to be a relatively risky bet as far as green investment goes.

The study (.pdf) also found that Spain triggered a downturn in the solar market when it reduced its solar subsidies in 2008, but demand picked back up once policies stabilized.

Now Spain is reducing solar-energy subsidies again as it tries to avoid a Greek-style debt crisis, but solar-energy investors may be getting sick of the policy ride.

“They’ve put the fear of god into all these investors,” Paul Turney, CEO of Madrid-based Solar Opportunities told Bloomberg News. “By the time they’ve finished dithering around, they’ll have hurt their credibility so badly that no one will want to invest.”

Spain is trying to convince investors of its responsibility here, to avoid any debt-crisis contagion, calculating that solar investment either isn’t that big a deal or already had it too sweet and will come around to the new reality.

The question now is: Will the cutting of green energy subsidies itself become contagious, putting the sub-industry on shaky ground around the world because it’s the first thing scared governments cut?

The decision demonstrates Apple’s power to change the nature of the Internet — and kill a format, though it’s not totally for sure Flash will die, insofar as it hasn’t happened yet.

The absence of Flash on the Apple devices — and the implications of this absence — didn’t go unnoticed. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo asked a few months ago if the iPad would kill Flash.

Earlier in the week and unrelated to the Flash issue, Jon Stewart said Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one, but now Apple is the too-powerful bad guy (for backing a police search of a blogger’s home) while Bill Gates of Microsoft is saving the world. Here’s the (Flash) video:

[Update: Maybe Jobs can't initiate the demise of Flash after all. FTC and Justice Dept weigh antitrust inquiry.]

Chuck Nelson mined coal seams deep below the Appalachian hills of Boone County, West Virginia, for nearly 30 years before dark powder and chemical particulates drove him from his home – and to the other side of the contentious coal debate.

“Whenever the wind would blow, it would bring big clouds of black dust that would cover everything in your house,” Mr Nelson, 52, said. “We didn’t want to leave, but then again, if you stayed there, you’re breathing this fine dust. The dust you’d see on your table and stuff wasn’t the dust that was hurting you – it was the dust that you can’t see, thefine particles.”

Although the dust that hounded Mr Nelson and his neighbours was coming from a coal-cleaning facility, the retired miner says the mining of coal – especially the mountaintop removal method, which reshapes vistas, annihilates ecosystems and, in some cases, poisons water – is similarly destroying communities throughout the region.

Mountaintop mining involves clear-cutting mountains and removing their peaks to get at relatively thin seams of coal that are often high quality but too shallow to deep mine. The extra dirt and rock is dumped in nearby valleys, where it can clog streams.

Despite the efforts of mining companies to clean up exhausted mountaintop mine sites, the most biologically diverse temperate hardwood forests on Earth are, for the most part, replaced with non-native grasses and invasive shrubs, and toxic sludge ponds dot the landscape, according to Vivian Stockman, of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

The mining method that has divided West Virginia and other Appalachian coal states is just one facet of a debate that is gearing up to be as heated as health care reform, as lawmakers consider climate-inspired legislation that would fundamentally redefine the nation’s relationship with coal.

Coal has been dubbed the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. Deep mining is dangerous work and surface mining is environmentally hazardous, cleaning it requires toxic chemicals, and in the United States, coal burned for fuel releases more than a third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions, which cause global warming. Worldwide, coal burned primarily for fuel is responsible for about 20 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Pew Center on Climate Change.

Burning coal also lets off air pollutants, such as sulphur and nitrogen oxide, which have respiratory and cardiac health implications, according to Alan Ducatman, a doctor and professor at the University of West Virginia.

Coal and mining also release mercury, selenium and other elements and compounds that poison water, cause illness and deform fish.

“Extraction, transportation, the cleaning, the burning – every bit of it kills people,” Mr Nelson, the retired miner, said.

Still, Americans and the rest of the world depend on coal. It is the source of about half the nation’s electricity and about 40 per cent of the world’s electricity, according to the US government and the Word Coal Institute. The United States is sitting on about a quarter of the world’s coal reserves, and US coal alone has more potential energy than all of the world’s known recoverable oil together, although reserve estimates may be undergoing a downwards revision.

“We are the Saudi Arabia of coal,” Barack Obama, the US president, said during his campaign last year, acknowledging US dependence on the fuel source when he vowed to fund research on technology that would capture the carbon dioxide released by burning coal and store it instead of letting it into the atmosphere.

His administration has already pumped billions of dollars into such research, and more is likely to result from legislation in Congress now, though it could be years or even decades before wide use of this “clean coal” technology is possible.

The House of Representatives narrowly passed a climate bill last month and the Senate is expected to consider similar legislation when it returns from recess in September. Debate could turn passionate, partly because there is a huge chasm between liberal and conservative views about what is necessary to minimise climate change, and also because oil companies and other industry groups are organising their employees and others to protest against the legislation.

This week about 3,500 energy workers attended an anti-climate-bill rally in Houston, Texas. The rally, sponsored by a coalition of oil and other companies and groups, was reportedly part of a multistate campaign opposing the bill.

In line with Mr Obama’s campaign promises, the legislation requires the implementation of a cap-and-trade system that would require heavy polluters to purchase the right to emit greenhouse gasses beyond a set allowance. The companies would presumably pass those costs on to consumers, and the system would admittedly change the way coal businesses operate.

“The coal industry is under attack and West Virginia is ground zero for that attack,” Bill Raney, the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, an industry group, wrote in a recent editorial for an industry publication called Mountaintop Mining.

West Virginia produces more coal than any state besides Wyoming, where the geology dictates a type of mining that has not drawn as much criticism from environmentalists and neighbouring rural populations as mountaintop removal has in Appalachia.

Speaking at his office in Charleston, West Virginia, Mr Raney said the climate bill in Congress had not been thought through. “It punishes the American people,” he said, referring to higher electricity costs for consumers. “I can’t see punishing the American people in this kind of economy.”

He also worries about those working in the mining industry. Although the number of direct miners in West Virginia has fallen from a peak of 120,000 in the 1920s to fewer than 20,000 today, Mr Raney says speciality contractors – electricians, mechanics, engineers, lorry drivers – make up another 35,000 jobs in a state with a population of about 1.8 million.

In his editorial, Mr Raney said, “left-wing radicals, professional protesters, a biased news media, federal agencies and the Obama administration” are attacking the coal industry with the goal of “bringing an end to the use of coal as an energy source”.

Indeed, that is what some people want. Al Gore, the former US vice president, supports moving towards an energy grid fed entirely by renewable fuel sources, such as the sun, wind, geothermal energy and water. He has said it is impossible to keep burning coal without sequestering the carbon dioxide, and that is not a technical reality at this point. “‘Clean coal’ is like ‘healthy cigarettes’ – it does not exist,” he said last year.

Greenpeace’s Michael Crocker worries that carbon sequestration technologies will come too late to avert climate disaster. Greenpeace and other environmental groups opposed the House bill, saying it set emissions caps too low and then further undermined the already lenient targets by letting polluters offset their emissions with activities that reduce greenhouse gases.

“It’s a massive giveaway to the coal industry – there’s just no getting around it,” Mr Crocker said. “It’s light years away from what the science says is needed. It’s a transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to companies that are already doing quite well.”

Dan Weiss, of the Center for American Progress, supports the current legislation and notes that even if Americans were weaned off coal, the fossil fuel would still be used in other countries, notably China and India, which together account for nearly half of coal consumption and are building new coal-powered plants at a blistering rate.

“We do need to develop carbon-capture-and-store technology, not only for the United States, but so it can be used in other counties as well,” he said.

Mr Nelson, the retired miner, maintains that coal, left alone in forest-covered mountains, is the best possible carbon sequestration, but he acknowledges that at this point, the United States is far too dependent on coal to just quit using it.

“You can’t just shut it down, because it supplies our electricity,” he said. “But we need to phase out coal because of the climate crisis. We want them to deep mine, if they’re going to mine.”

* The National

On my first morning in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, I read in the English-language newspaper that a Frenchman overdosed to death at my overly drug-friendly hotel, so I found myself a new hotel – one that wasn’t in the guidebook but seemed nice and only cost $3 a night – and I had already paid, showered and taken a nap before I awkwardly figured out I was in a brothel. The next day, I met a motorcycle taxi driver named Eagle. It was January 2000.

Eagle was one of a pack of motorcycle taxi drivers who lingered in front of the guesthouse I finally settled on – the only guesthouse the guidebook called “wholesome,” the only adjective I was in the mood for just then. He designated himself my tour guide for a day and took me to Tuol Sleng, or S-21, the Phnom Penh school building that the Khmer Rouge converted into a torture factory in the late 1970s.

He said he had attended school in this very building for a year before the Pol Pot years, and I couldn’t decide if that was true or just a line for the tourists. Maybe he could have attended that school but didn’t, maybe guys like him attended that school, maybe he was nowhere near that school at that time or maybe he really attended the school. No way to know.

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge regime – a communist faction of Khmer people – which ruled Cambodia for just a few years in the late 1970s and in that time managed to kill about 20 percent of the population with war, genocide and ill-conceived social policies.

Hundreds of mug shots of tortured prisoners just moments before their executions hang in the former school building, now a museum. The Khmer Rouge made records of many of the 12,000 to 17,000 male and female Tuol Sleng victims, and this was just one of scores of torture centers throughout the country. Some of the women were photographed with babies that shared their mothers’ fate. In one photo, the child is not pictured, just a little arm reaching up to a mother whose beaten eyes stare ahead into the camera.

When I emerged from the tour, shaken, Eagle was out front waiting for me. He asked if I wanted to go to the killing fields next, the mass grave site just outside the city for the bodies of the Tuol Sleng victims. I hadn’t realize he would be waiting for me but agreed to see the grave site and hopped on the back of his motorcycle.

Just outside the city, we came to a fork in the road, and Eagle slowed down.

“Why are you stopping?” I asked.

“I just wondered which road you wanted to take,” he said in English that was worse than that.

“What do you mean?” I asked, annoyed and maybe scared. “You know we’re going to the killing fields.”

“Yeah, but maybe you changed your mind. If we go that way,” he pointed to the right-hand tine of the road fork, “we could go to the firing range and shoot guns. If we go that way,” pointing to the left, “there are killing fields. You choose.”

You could tell the self-named Eagle liked this joke, this irony. You could tell it thrilled him to pick up wholesome guests from the wholesome guesthouse and show them the fork in the road – firing range or mass grave. He had crazy, likable eyes.

After I saw the killing fields and the human-skull-filled, glass pagoda memorial, I let Eagle choose our next destination. He took me to watch the sunset at one of many huts along a road that overlooked a corn field. The shacks didn’t have walls, just mats on the floor and hammocks. We ate corn on the cob and drank coconut milk from the shell as the round and fuzzy sun set into a pre-industrial haze.

Some Cambodian college students arrived shortly after us, and Eagle proudly told them I was living in China, which I was at the time. About half of the students were studying Chinese, and the other half English. I spoke my limited Chinese with some of them and used limited English with others, switching back and forth, having them translate from one or the other language to get the meanings across.

One boy told me that their futures weren’t hopeful. They would graduate from college, he said, but there would be no jobs for them. Some of them would try to leave Cambodia, he said, and some would get bad jobs, and some would get no job.

The boys were lying in hammocks or relaxing against the hut’s tree-trunk posts, telling jokes and laughing with an authenticity that seemed to belie the bleakness. How is it that these genuine smiles didn’t contradict hopelessness?

Back at our end of the hut, Eagle told me Cambodia was finally peaceful, but it was more fun to fight. His smile was warm in the late-afternoon light.

By the time Vietnam took down the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Eagle’s’s entire family was dead, he said – his mother, father and four siblings. He was strong, crazy, and he had nothing to lose. Skirmishes between the Vietnam-backed troops and Khmer Rouge holdouts continued for more than a decade, sometimes bordering on all-out civil war. Eagle joined the Vietnam-backed forces and wandered through the jungle fighting. After each battle, the winner would hold a big party, he said, and often everyone could attend it.

Eagle: Killing, drinking, and, when things were just right, Vietnamese girls, too.

He told me he saw me arrive at the guesthouse the day before. “You were wearing all black,” he said.

“Yeah, that was me,” I said. (I was wearing a long, black silk skirt and a black tank-top, my attempt at traveler-chic.)

“During the Pol Pot years,” Eagle explained quietly, “everyone wore all black.”

“Oh, god,” I said. “So I shouldn’t wear all black.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You can wear what clothes you want.”

“But I shouldn’t wear all black,” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s your decision.”

Eagle took me back to my guesthouse, and I left early the next morning to travel north and then back to China.

*********************

The next time I was in Cambodia, more than six years later, in the spring of 2006, I looked for Eagle in Phnom Penh. I had only known him for about six hours, but he was the only one I knew at all in Cambodia, and the reason I never wore all black anymore.

Whenever I saw a group of motorcycle taxis or tuk-tuks – open-air taxi vehicles – I asked if they knew Eagle. Finally, I went back to the wholesome guesthouse where I first met him.

As I climbed the guesthouse stairs, I thought to myself that Eagle might be dead because he was so wild and crazy. But then again, I thought, after surviving the Khmer Rouge and nearly two decades of fighting, what could possibly have gotten to him in the last six peaceful years?

“Eagle’s sick,” the guesthouse owner said. All of the motorcycle drivers who used to hang around the guesthouse six years ago got sick. All at once. Most of them died.

AIDS? I asked.

Yes. (Cambodians often avoided direct reference to the epidemic, I found.)

They all got money from the tourists and would get very drunk, the owner said.

Ladies, of course not drugs, he said, with surprise that I would ask.

The guesthouse owner said Eagle drove a tuk-tuk now – a step up from a motorcycle. Later that night, I met a tuk-tuk driver who seemed like the kind of guy who would know Eagle. He did. He told me Eagle was fat now – which meant healthy, I knew – and he agreed to help me find him the next day. When I got to the designated meeting place the next day, Eagle was already there.

He said he remembered me, but I wasn’t totally convinced. Back when I first met him, he would take people to the museum and corn field almost every day, making each tourist’s visit to Cambodia feel unprecedented. How could he remember every one of us? Still, he was clearly happy to see me. He was the type to welcome an old friend any day. He drove me to a nearby café.

At first he wouldn’t admit he had AIDS, and I didn’t tell him that I already knew. He referred to a sickness that nearly killed him and left him bed-stricken for several months in 2005, but he said it was from too much drinking and smoking.

I asked if he was taking medicine, and he pulled from his pocket a tablet in a little baggie. I asked if he had to take that medicine for the rest of his life, and he said he did. (When he finally admitted he had AIDS, he said he knew I knew when I asked about the meds.)

Everyone in town knows Eagle’s sick, and the town is no stranger to the disease. I saw a billboard advertisement for an anti-retroviral drug claiming to be better than the rest. The country is making strides, though. In the mid-1990s, nearly half of Cambodia’s brothel workers were HIV positive and 80% of police and military men reported that they used prostitutes regularly. While the men still go to prostitutes, the sex workers – some of them unionized, even though prostitution is technically illegal – now required condom use, and this was accepted as a right. A local paper said a prostitute in the countryside stabbed her trick because he refused to wear a condom. The police weren’t sure who to punish.

Eagle left me briefly at the coffee shop and drove home to get some pictures of his family and a few from when he was really sick the year before. When I knew him, he weighed 61 or 62 kilos (about 135 pounds), he said. At the lowest point last year, he was at 38 kilos (83 lbs). Now he was up to 58 kilos (127 lbs) – or, as his friend said, “fat.” He was skin-covered bones in the pictures, for which he still managed a warm smile, lying on the floor of his apartment.

Eagle infected his wife, who still hasn’t shown any symptoms but is under the clinic’s supervision as well. She’s not mad, he said, just sad.

*********************

Eagle had faced the real prospect of death, some doubt about wanting to live, a renewed dedication to his life and family and a lot of time to be honest with himself. He peppered conversation with philosophy: “We all come into this world and must die one day,” he said. “It’s a Khmer saying, but maybe the translation isn’t good.”

Raised Hindu, not Buddhist like most Cambodians, Eagle embodies the cultural hodge-podge that his country has been since ancient times. The Hindu influence on Cambodian people, art and music, while half the country’s college students are studying Chinese, is an example of why continental Southeast Asia is called “Indo-China” – the blending of Asia’s two giants.

Old enough to remember the worst of his country’s recent history, Eagle’s story is intertwined with Cambodia’s.

Before the Khmer Rouge, he said, his father had worked for the government, first under King Sihanouk and then under
U.S.-backed Lon Nol, who took power in a coup in 1970, the year America admitted to bombing Cambodia’s border areas and the communists were going crazy and gaining crazy strength in Cambodia’s countryside.

Before the Khmer Rouge, Eagle had more than 200 relatives in Phnom Penh, he said. Few survived the 1970s.

Vietnam finally invaded Cambodia in 1979, ending Khmer Rouge rule, and shortly after that, millions of displaced Cambodians tried to return from their countryside slave camps to their home towns and cities. By the time Eagle got back to Phnom Penh, somebody else was living in his house. A godfather secured for him an apartment in another part of the city, he said. Everybody just lived where they could, he said. A housing grab.

The international community largely opposed the Vietnamese invasion – even though it ended genocide – because it was a reminder of the Vietnam War, which people were trying to forget. The Vietnam War wasn’t about Vietnam so much as it was a fight against Soviet expansionism. It was the Korean War in Vietnam, with seeds of the clandestine operations in Central America that came later.

By the time the Americans left Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975, China had already split with its only fellow communist behemoth and one-time big brother, the Soviet Union. On principle, China liked communists more than capitalists, but it liked non-Soviet communists best of all. The United States liked capitalists better, but if it had to be communists, the non-Soviet kind were better.

This was part of the backdrop of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 and of warming Sino-U.S. relations in general. It was the closest the giant enemies – the U.S. and China – had come to a shared attitude in a long time, and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge communists were détente profiteers: Both the U.S. and China preferred the independent Khmer Rouge in Cambodia over expanded Soviet-backed Vietnamese occupation.

According to Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Becker, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said later: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot…Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could.”

On January 1, 1979, the U.S. established formal diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China, finally recognizing the 30-year-old communist victory in China’s civil war and moving the embassy from Taiwan to Beijing. Although Soviet expansionism was still considered a threat, the Vietnam War had been over for years.

Nine days later, Vietnam “expanded” into Cambodia — the country already held sway over neighboring Laos. Saving the Cambodian people from large-scale genocide may have been an afterthought or a happy byproduct of the invasion. Possible direct reasons for the invasion include the Khmer Rouge’s slaughtering of Vietnamese in Cambodia and the fact that the massacres had started leaking over the border into Vietnam itself.

A little more than a month after Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia, China launched a retaliatory invasion into Vietnam, with 85,000 to a quarter million troops, depending on who’s describing it. The conflict resulted in 20,000 to 50,000 deaths, depending on who’s talking. Then China withdrew, and both sides still claim victory.

Vietnam went on to occupy Cambodia until 1990 – when the U.S.S.R. dissolved and its aid to Vietnam dried up. That’s when the United Nations swooped in with $2 billion to ensure free and fair elections in Cambodia in 1993. Most of the money went to more than 20,000 international soldiers and civilians who oversaw the spectacle, and some in Cambodia complained about that, noting that it was during this time, with a heavy international military presence, that AIDS really got its foothold in the country.

The elections were initially called a success, though the runner up, Hun Sen, maintained power and eventually secured his position with a coup five years later. How much the well-intentioned United Nations intervention helped Cambodia has, in retrospect, been questioned. In 2006, Hun Sen was still in power, and the United Nations was back in Cambodia, this time helping to set up tribunals to prosecute aging Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes.

The regime’s No. 1, Pol Pot, had died in 1998, and really there were just a handful of guys left to participate in the belated trials, which were aimed at the leaders, not the “victim-perpetrators” – often poor, rural teenagers who were forced, maybe brainwashed, to carry out the atrocities.

The tribunals were controversial in Cambodia. Some feared they would be as arbitrary as the genocide itself: Some Khmer Rouge leaders would be punished; some of the leaders had already died natural deaths and received full Buddhist funerals.

While some Cambodians felt the trials were too little and too late, others argued that without them there could be no rule of law in the country. If the national villains – some of whom still roamed the country freely – were not brought to justice, there was no disincentive for any crime.

I was trying to get a sense of how ordinary Cambodians felt about the United Nations’ tinkering in both 1993 and in 2006, when the team was significantly smaller but still comprised of well-paid experts who kept their earnings in foreign bank accounts so they could buy foreign houses and ice cream later.

(Of course people should be able to make a difference in the world and still buy a house in their own country. But the world’s pay disparities get confusing when you consider them from different angles. A week of U.S. unemployment benefits was at that time roughly equivalent to the average Cambodian’s annual income.)

Eagle didn’t blame the international community for spreading AIDS in Cambodia. I asked if he profited at all when the U.N. oversaw the 1993 elections.

Not directly, he said, smirking and looking down.

Was it drugs? I asked.

Oh, no! he said.

Eagle said he made money selling large, American-made guns (he didn’t know the model names) to Americans who figured they’d be able to get them back across the borders because they were U.N. or military or I don’t know what. Using his army connections, Eagle said, he bought these guns from unofficial arsenals for $10 apiece and sold them for $300 to guys who figured they could get upwards of $1,500 for them back in the States. Here’s my parents’ tax dollars at work, I thought: Trickle on down and then back around, why not?

Eagle asked if I thought he was a bad man.

I don’t care if you sold stupid guns to stupid Americans, I said.

My country already had too many guns, he said, ready with the argument he probably gives to all the anti-arms-dealing types.

*********************

For all his wild-eyed adventures, Eagle learned some English and managed to do all right for himself. He was now waking up at 4 a.m. every morning to get the tourists to their 7 a.m. flights, careful to take his medicine at exactly 6. He had cheated on his wife with all kinds of girlfriends – some Cambodian women seem to expect as much – but he managed to stave off AIDS until affordable medicines were available, and for that he was unbelievably lucky.

A few days before I found him again, Eagle found out he qualified for free medicine for the next three years. He had been paying about $40 a month for nearly a year – a significant sum for a guy who drives people around town for a dollar or two a ride and makes $5 a month for displaying an ad for a tourist restaurant on the back of his tuktuk.

I’m not sure how he qualified for the free drugs. He said it was because he answered questions right, but he got all shy about telling me what the questions were. Condom this, condom that. (It couldn’t have taken him a year to pass such test, I thought.)

He invited me to accompany him to the clinic where he got his monthly checkup. It was a lovely place, with an open-air lobby and delicate stone gardens – donated by the Japanese. From there, we went to Pharmacies Without Borders on the other side of town, but they wouldn’t give him the medicine without his wife present to verify that he took his medicine every day. He said I could sign, but they said it had to be his wife, and I felt stupid for being there at all, butting in where I don’t know a thing about anything.

Eagle’s wife went with him the next day, and I visited the family that afternoon. His wife bowed to me, hands in prayer position, and I reciprocated. When we got to their second-floor apartment, she sat on the cool green-and-white tiled floor while Eagle and I sat in wicker chairs. Their ten-year-old son came in after a few minutes and ran to his mother’s arms.

The boy went to the calendar on the wall, and I asked Eagle what he was doing.

“He wants to come with me next time I go to the clinic,” he said.

Perhaps, I imagined, this was because Eagle had to explain that he had taken me to the clinic the day before, and the boy wondered why a stranger should get to go when he’d never been.

Eagle showed me his medicine – made in Mumbai – and also pictures of his wedding and his life, pointing out the people who were now dead. On the wall was a foot-long lead pencil that said Australia all over it – a gift.

I can live now, Eagle said, with a kind of gratitude and awe.

Epilogue

A year and a half later, I returned to Cambodia and found Eagle drunk and flirty. He again told me I could write about him, but this time he asked me not to mention the AIDS part of his story as he gave me a knowing smile. I had a feeling he thought that little detail wouldn’t help him get new girlfriends, a feeling he was seeing new girlfriends.

I didn’t ask him if he had started seeing girlfriends again because I couldn’t bear to. As long as I didn’t know for sure, I could be disappointed in humanity in general, disappointed in the mere possibility, which seemed easier. But my disappointment was still palpable. Even the most extremely broad and inclusive morality would require the extramarital girlfriends of a guy like Eagle to know about his disease.

I still intended to tell the whole story, to the extent that I knew it. I felt I could have used his real name, because I had prior permission, but when I decided to write this epilogue, including speculative suggestion, I decided to change his name throughout the story. In real life, Eagle’s name is much better.

A friend of mine observed that even in his inability to change his ways or seize a transformational moment, Eagle again seemed intertwined with the larger story of Cambodia, which remains one of the poorest countries in the world, it’s economy fueled in large part by charity workers, many of whom doubt the place will ever actually change.

For me the verdict is not yet in. Eagle may have simply been in a rut when I last saw him. Maybe the next visit will be better.