Space And The Environment

Environment is very important to many people, and showing environmentalists about the potential benefits of space can build support for it. Jeff Krukin says that he asks people "where does space begin?" If you consider it only a hundred kilometers over our head, then it seems a lot closer than many perceive. Has two speakers on this subject.

Molly Macauley has done a lot of work on the economic aspects of environmental policy, and will be talking about the economics of space power. John Mankins formerly of NASA is now head of the Sunsat Energy Council.

Mankins: Talking about Sunsat, which was formed in 1978 by SPS inventor Peter Glaser. Only NGO set up to promote the provision of clean energy from space. Has long been an advocate of the types of New Space activities being highlighted at this conference. Notes that Peter Glaser doesn't travel much any more, but is still energetic in research and promoting the idea. Also notes that Bill Brown, of Raytheon, who was a pioneer in wireless power transmission, is no longer with us (and that Tesla's ideas came first, but they were omni-directional, whereas the Raytheon concept was pointable). Concept wasn't treated well in the seventies for a variety of reasons, some political, and says that it has been politically incorrect to talk about this technology for years as a result of the seventies studies. Despite this, demand for energy is growing, and continues to grow, with the dilemmas of other solutions. Showing limits of terrestrial solar power given intermittent and geographical availability of sunlight. Hydropower is perfect, but also limited. Space solar power has a very complex trade space (including not just designs, but market demand, cost to orbit, energy density for safety, etc.) The reference design solution that resulted from all these trades in the seventies was a series of very large (gigawatt class) satellites in GEO, with large antenna (order of a kilometer) that must be flat to a centimeter or two (fraction of a wavelength). This architecture has a vey high pre-power cost (hundreds of billions of dollars). There were other technical problems but the up-front cost was the biggest issue.

In the mid-1990s, NASA revisited the concept (the "Fresh Look Study") to see if tech advances through the eighties and nineties could result in new approaches. They came up with something called "intelligent modular systems). Uses skydivers as an example of such a system. Insects do it all the time. Self-assembling arrays of systems of systems could build very large structures that didn't require the high up-front infrastructure investment. In 1980, the NRC panned SPS, and recommended no further work. In 2000, they were much more positive. "Technical roadmap feasible, costs reasonable through the first round." But all work stopped within a year or two anyway.

Summary: we need energy, it's more feasible to talk about this now, and we should consider this again.

Molly Macauley of Resources for the Future. Came to space economics by accident back when Comsat was still a quasi-government agency, and proposed a dissertation on the economic value of geostationary orbit, which was accepted. Then she discovered Resources for the Future, which has thought about space as a resource in itself. She went there for a postdoc, and stayed. Saying that she's been doing work on the economic implications of third-party risk for the FAA regulation. We're still living with the effects of the Three-Mile-Island effect, and only now is the nuclear power industry recovering from false perceptions of safety on the part of the public.

She has been doing work on SPS economics at the urging of John Mankins, and has some data. Her work was funded by NSF, NASA, and by Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) [note: I was unaware that EPRI was interested, and find this encouraging].

SSP is large scale, and unlikely to be a US-only system. Looking to the southwest, Midwest, Germany, and India general markets, and looking at the relative advantage of SSP compared to other energy technologies. Acknowledging difficulties of managing all the uncertainties in such studies, and are doing probabilistic analyses, and expertise in the energy industry. Can start to use known economic data like prices per ton of carbon as carbon trading markets develop.

To stack the case for SSP in an initial run, they imposed carbon penalties on other technologies as part of their studies. People think that wind power is ugly and noisy, and it kills birds and bats, precluding wind development. They looked at a host of other energy concerns for other energy technologies. They also considered the political and security implications of relying on the Middle East for hydrocarbons. Notes that electrical energy can be decoupled from these concerns (though an in-space source of power controlled by an international consortium can also have energy security concerns and notes that SSP itself may have environmental issues). Also, we will still be vulnerable to terrorism against the grid.

Their numbers show that if SSP can come on line by the 2020-2030 timeframe for on the order of $0.11/kW-hr, it can be competitive in the markets examined. However, cleaner power may come to have higher value in the future, (as long as it's as reliable as current sources). Additional model runs are asking other what-if questions. She does think that SSP looks a lot better than it did in the past, but other technologies are advancing as well, so SSP has to look over its shoulders at the competition.

Howard Bloom says that everything in Gore's film is wrong, and all of the implications of it are wrong. He's been getting convinced by Paul Werbos that ethanol and methanol are viable fuels for automobiles. Howard had also been skeptical about SSP until Paul started to convince him. He's also been convinced to some degree by Feng Shu (risk analyst at NASA, in the audience). He's now come up with a simple plan--concentrate energies for the next ten to fifteen years on biofuels (many cars could be made biofuel capable, meaning that they can automatically run either biofuels or gasoline, with automatic detection, which has resulted in a forty-percent)

Our civilization doesn't seem to see a future for itself and thinks that it deserves to die for its sins (which is what most of his friends believe). Citing Declaration of Independence, The Astonishing Rise of the Roman Empire Which Stayed On Top For About Twelve Hundred Years (he thinks the book was misnamed), and the Wealth of Nations. He thinks that the misnaming of Gibbon's book resulted in a false paradigm that our nation must fall.

Need to tell people to look up, that the sun is shining, that we have an endless supply of energy in space. Also point out that there are lots of materials up there as well, so we don't have to schlep everything up.

But none of this is what he came to talk to us about. (Getting back to Gore's book).

He's a Democrat, and voted for Gore. But he disagrees with the notion that nature is nice, or that we should buy into the Garden of Eden myth. Mother Nature has thrown eighty ice ages at her creatures, many mass extinctions, lots of space dust. There's lots of strange galactic weather out there, and that will have a much larger effect on our environment than anything we could do. The notion that if we just cut back on carbons, Mother Nature will be good to us, and Bambi's mom will live, is ludicrous.

Cell and DNA partnership is responsible for the vast majority of life. Life has been trying to find itself as many nooks and crannies as possible before the next catastrophe comes. Every pollutant turns out to be an energy source. Cyanobacteria are converting energy, excreting stuff, and one bacteria fart doesn't make any difference, and trillions don't make a difference, and trillions of trillions don't make a difference, but when you make enough, it's a massive pollutant, which resulted in a huge die off. The cells that could process this oxygen thrived, and some of those that couldn't were absorbed into larger organisms where they could survive. So stopping out industrial pollution is pointless when it comes to weather change.

What does this have to do with SSP and the Moon?

Every location that is now a coastal area will be beneath the sea or atop a mountain. We can't count on the Midwest always being a grain belt. They'll eventually be swamps, or deserts.

His notion is floating cities. Gerard O'Neill proposed this for space, but it can be applied to earth as well. Putting New York on a floating vessel will be almost impossible. But not completely impossible. Citing condominium cruise ships, and oil rigs, designed to survive almost any kind of weather that can be thrown at them. The reason we wouldn't sign Kyoto was that it would cost a fortune, and did nothing to stop India or China. It would have been a huge mistake.
We want to find nooks and crannies where life can survive, and can't afford to throw money at the wrong things, like Kyoto.

SSP is something that can grab the imagination of the public, because the public wants to be free of the constraints that the current energy system put on them. It can be a beacon in the sky, and it's an excuse to get O'Neill's colonies into space. The moon has the materials to do this as well, and to get us to Mars. A vessel the size of this hotel (the Flamingo, in Vegas) could be sent to Mars for very little propellant, with solar sails and ion drives.

We don't want Big Brother providing us with our energy source, and India doesn't want the DoD to turn off its power. Proposes decentralizing and having munipalities put up satellites on their own. Wants massively parallel processing, where everyone puts up their own system, and just like the internet, it's robust and not subject to crash. John Mankings points out that decentralization is practical for localities, but not individual house. To get the kind of precision needed for households implies lasers and a high power density.

Howard proposes a conference on the four-step program he just laid out (space settlement, SSP, biofuels, and not sure what the last one is). [Sorry, this stuff is coming out like a firehose, so I'm not necessarily doing justice to it.]