Space Development

On occasion I’ve commented about global warming and climate change, following which my published opinion has generated an assortment of “conversations” with various acquaintances (some of which get fairly heated in their own right). So… Yes, I do think we’re moving into a period of climate change for whatever cause. And no, I do not think that this climate change is solely caused by the activities of humanity. I do believe that we’re not helping things any at all with our extensive use of fossil fuels, but our total impact is pretty small compared with that of nature. After all, how much CO2 does just one forest fire dump into the atmosphere, or perhaps just one volcanic eruption? There are a lot of really big forest fires every year, all over the world, and not just a few active volcano’s dumping mega-tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

I’ve also made comment about our nearly total dependence on fossil fuels, which I’ve never been very happy about either. For one thing they’re not renewable, so we’re going to run out eventually, and at the rate we’re using them probably sooner rather than later. For another, they’re much more valuable as raw materials for industry than they are as fuels for a Sunday afternoon drive. So why do we keep burning them for fuels? Because they’re about the most concentrated form of “portable” energy available to us at present, they’re easy to handle, and they’re cheap, despite the prices we see at the gas pump or the monthly electric bill. Still, with dwindling resources, I’d rather work on solving the problem now, rather than wait until we’re out of gas and have to start a scadzillion dollar government “crash program”.

Consider, we’re running out of domestic oil, and our tar sands and oil shale deposits don’t even rate a distant second place. We can of course continue importing oil from OPEC, but being at the tender mercies of the Islamic world doesn’t strike me as a good idea if national security is a concern. Coal fired power sources “could” take up the slack, but they’re rapidly becoming political suicide due to environmental considerations. Nuclear power would be an ideal interim power source, but we still have the almost superstitious public fear of “radiation” to overcome. All of the bio-fuels share a common drawback, in that they require high class (i.e. food grade) raw materials. With six billion people on this planet, food is getting scarce in many places, a problem that can only get worse if we start turning food into biofuels.

Wind power, tidal power, geothermal power… all are non-starters due to various technical limitations and high costs. Certainly they work to some extent, and make quite interesting demonstrations, but they are not a viable source of power for today’s energy starved hi-tech world. Fusion power and the theoretical “zero point” energy are to far down the pike to even be considered at present. Ground based solar power would pick up part of the load, temporarily. But solar arrays require direct sunlight to operate, leaving us with a major problem during the hours of darkness. What are we supposed to do, shut down the entire country at night?

It would appear that either we develop an effective alternate source of power, or we will soon be forced to turn yet again to the horse and buggy, along with candle lit evenings.

Finally, I’ve commented about the possibility of an electricity dependant economy rather one based on the burning of hydrocarbon fossil fuels. Last week I mentioned electric cars for local use. I’d think we all know that the electrics, and even the hybrids we see occasionally are at present more of a curiosity than a serious means of transportation. They do meet all the requirements for a “run to the store and grab a loaf of bread” car, but I for one wouldn’t want to start for Lewiston in what’s essentially an oversized golf cart that I’ll probably forget to plug-in and recharge the battery! Besides, contrary to some advertising claims, today’s electric vehicles are no more environmentally friendly than the gas burners! We have to “plug them in and recharge the battery” remember, and just where does that electricity come from? For most people it comes from a fossil fuel burning power plant, that’s where! Someplace, coal or oil is being burned (and dumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere), so that I can feel good about my “environmentally friendly” electric car while I go get that loaf of bread. Ahh… what’s wrong with this picture?

So, I guess we need to get our electricity from an environmentally friendly source, which may prove somewhat difficult. One interesting technology is OTEC, or Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. OTEC utilizes the difference in temperature between warm surface water and cold deep sea water to drive an enormous low speed turbine. Unfortunately it’s not a mature technology at present, it’s terribly inefficient, and would cost billions to construct a decent size OTEC power plant.
Then we have my favorite, Solar Power Satellites, or SPS for short. Space based solar power systems appear to possess many significant environmental advantages when compared to alternative approaches to meeting increasing terrestrial demands for energy. The idea of an SPS has been around since the 1960’s when Dr. Gerald O’Neil developed the “High Frontier” concept of colonizing space with really big space stations. An SPS consists of a huge array of solar cells in sun synchronous Earth orbit. The output of the solar array is converted to microwave power, and transmitted (like radar waves) to a ground station, where it’s converted back into electricity and fed into the power grid. Since the idea first surfaced, building an SPS has been pretty well out of the question due to the high cost of launching the heavy equipment into space. Over the last forty years however, we’ve developed efficient thin film solar cells, lightweight microwave systems, and inflatable space structures which would greatly reduce the cost of an SPS to only a portion of what it would have been in the 1960’s, and seriously reduces the required launch efforts as well. It’s technically feasible to build an SPS today, and supply a few giga-watts of power to our economy, per unit on orbit. After all, space operations are no longer an arcane science, but simply a matter of engineering. However, when we consider the $2,500 to nearly $10,000 per pound cost of putting anything into orbit, an SPS is not yet economically feasible.

Personally I consider space development and resource exploitation to be the single most important long term requirement facing not only the United States, but the entire world as well. Certainly I support the Return to the Moon initiative, along with manned Mars exploration. But NASA’s intended function is not and has never been space exploration, but rather NASA was chartered to research and develop safe, efficient, and cost effective methods to advance the technologies of air and space flight, leaving space exploration and development to private concerns. Development of manned space flight is crucial to our species, but with today’s launch costs, it “ain’t gonna happen”, until NASA starts getting serious about doing their intended job, and developing low cost space access. Perhaps we should remind our congressional representatives of that fact.