Burt said he would call a big news conference and, with all cameras rolling, he would loudly announce, “This is stupid!!” Then he would return to work. Griffin himself made a similar comment on Sept 27, 2005, "The space shuttle and International Space Station — nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades — were mistakes.”
The shuttle has cost the lives of 14 astronauts since the first flight in 1981. Roger Pielke Jr., a space policy expert at the University of Colorado, estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on the program since its inception in 1971. The total cost of the space station by the time it's finished — in 2010 or later — may exceed $100 billion, though other nations will bear some of that.”
Founded in 1982, Burt’s prize winning firm, Scaled Composites, has an unmatched record of continuous safe and profitable operation – no mean feat for the aerospace industry – or any industry. Respect for Burt’s opinion about NASA’s questionable direction, deserves far more scrutiny and discussion.
NASA provides thousands of jobs for many congressional districts. However, aerospace employment has been in decline for fifty years and Burt is right. We can and must demand more for $16 billion than broken dreams and cute new pictures of heavenly bodies. The mission which NASA’s engineers, contractors and scientists, as well as private space companies like Burt’s and our college kids should be pursuing is clean baseload power for our nation’s and the world’s future - Space Solar Power (SSP) from Geosynchronous Orbit (GSO).
First, a brief recap of the looming problems SSP can directly address:
- Peaking global oil production – If you haven’t studied this increasingly intense debate recently, read some of the excellent new interviews available such as Matt Simmons, president of the world’s largest energy investment bank at: http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/2006/ 0429simmons.html Robert Hirsch reported to Congress that 33 out of 48 of the largest oil producing countries have hit peak. Also will require much more than a decade to transition our civilization away from our oil dependence. Nothing close to the massive efforts needed have begun, although many short-term efforts at conservation and mitigation are underway. See www.odac-info.org Listen to Congressional testimony at http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/hearings/ 12072005Hearing1733/hearing.htm This week’s According to the Financial Times: "Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, has struck a $2bn deal to buy about 100,000 barrels a day of crude oil from Russia until the end of the year.” Can Venezuela meet their current contracts? http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=31765
Rising CO2 from our fossil-fuel-based energy is causing other great problems:
- Weather – As global sea surface temperatures have increased over the past 36 years, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has nearly doubled, though the total number of hurricanes has dropped since the 1990s. Swiss Re projected in March, 2004 that “natural disaster costs threaten to spiral out of control, to $150 billion a year in 10 years … forcing the human race into a catastrophe which we can lead ourselves into or avert.” We now know that their prediction was far too low: “2005 was marked by record losses from hurricanes in the North Atlantic, with insured losses exceeding US$ 83 billion.” This means $350 billion in uninsured economic losses, e.g., including lost profits, lost business opportunities, etc.
- “The ocean current that gives Western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age. A new study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.” A warmer North Atlantic apparently means more, and more powerful hurricanes. It may also be related to the record cold winter temperatures experienced in Russia this past year (2005-2006).
- The ocean’s pH has become 30% more acidic due to the rising CO2 chemical burden it must bear. This affects calcification by organisms including phytoplankton and zooplankton, a major food source for fish and other animals hoping to consume fish.
- Declining nutrition – Rice and wheat both have been shown to decline in nutritional value when tested under doubled CO2 as plant-available nitrogen, for making protein, decreases. CO2 will reach those values in mid century, at current growth rates.
- Finally, until we have a clean alternative to nuclear energy, we will not be able to prevent nuclear proliferation, even to terrorist sponsoring nations, such as Iran, North Korea and others.
Pressures to respond to cleaning up fossil fuel emissions of CO2 are not new, but have been disastrously unsuccessful and ineffective. In 1997 many American utilities were pressured to clean up their generation by moving to (cleaner) natural gas. (Natural gas emits 68% less CO2 than coal, per Btu.) The US electric power industry responded by building over 200,000 MW of new gas-fired capacity between 1998 and 2002.
This sharply increased natural gas demand. And supplies could not keep pace. Prices soared. Natural gas prices went from $1.96 per thousand cubic ft in 1998 to $7.51 (2005 average) Stabilization to earlier prices is not in sight.
In 1998 the widely referenced USGS / EIA forecasts had claimed there were 35 billion barrels of oil equivalent gas in Mexico — in other word, there was plenty of low cost gas available in North America they reported. But in 2003 the USGS revised their estimate downward to 6 billion barrels of oil equivalent gas in Mexico. Bad gas gauge? No, this is commonly accepted in the oil and gas industry!
Outside North America global reserve data is of extremely poor quality. But 200,000 MW of electric generation was built and operating! The US was blessed with the warmest January on record in 2006, otherwise we would have seen crippling natural gas prices this winter. This bad data problem is shared with oil, also another reason we don’t know and won’t know if we have passed global peak oil production, until it’s too late.
We must demand and meet higher environmental standards and stronger assurances of energy security and reliability. We must reforge the foundations, direction and charter of America’s energy and space development policies toward SSP construction - the only long-term solution for these many problems. Some have suggested nuclear power is the clean safe solution:
“Britain’s recent and comprehensive Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) reports that doubling their nuclear capacity would make little impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035. Some say nuclear is a more secure source of energy than hydrocarbon supplies from unstable regimes. Proponents say it could generate large quantities of electricity while helping to stabilize carbon dioxide CO2 emissions. But the SDC report concluded that the serious risks of nuclear energy outweighed its advantages.
- Research by the SDC suggests that even if the UK's existing nuclear capacity was doubled, it would only provide an 8% cut on CO2 emissions by 2035 (and nothing before 2010).
- No long-term solutions for the storage of nuclear waste are yet available, says the SDC, and storage presents clear safety issues.
- Cleaning up UK’s 16 nuclear plants could cost more than £70Bn ($US130Bn), according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
- If the UK brings forward a new nuclear programme, it becomes more difficult to deny other countries access to nuclear energy technology.
Our Cold War drill of nuclear brinksmanship has not been solved; instead the nuclear battle has infected other nations and the energy front, notably Iran and North Korea, with China and other nations not far behind. Until we can successfully point to a better answer, which is SSP, we will fail to stop the spread of nuclear waste, nuclear weapons, nuclear health issues, escalating nuclear fuel worries, and soaring nuclear decommissioning costs, as the Brits are now struggling just to measure. Nuclear power is not the answer to our critical need for safe clean baseload energy. The real answer is that nuclear power plant 93 million miles away, our sun:
With Space Solar Power,
Nuclear waste problems
Nuclear fuel supply worries
Nuclear proliferation problems
Nuclear decommissioning costs
Evaporate …
The only ground presence of SSP is an antenna, (called a rectenna), to receive the power and connect it to the power grids. The massively expensive suggestion of redesigning our power grids for distributed power generation – rather than our current design of major plant power sources – would not even be necessary. This savings alone is worth dwelling on.
Can we really build SSP now? No company(s) or government agency is chartered or capable of assuming the immense financial risk of initiating construction of an SSPS. It would be like asking a company to build Hoover Dam, the Transcontinental Railroad or the Interstate system without Federal assistance. There are simply too many engineering, financial, regulatory and managerial risks for any group to undertake SSP today.
America has faced just such challenges before ... There is a tried and true vehicle, however that could initiate SSP construction today, just as it did in surmounting all those previous challenges. The key is chartering a public/private Congressionally chartered corporation, like Comsat Corp., which was chartered in 1962 to respond to the Russian Sputnik threat – the first communications satellite. It would have all the requisite advantages provided to Comsat. Comsat Corp. opened space to the diverse $100 Billion per year communications satellite business we have today.
A company we call Sunsat Corp. could be chartered – another public/private Congressionally chartered corporation dedicated to building the solar power satellite business. It would have that single purpose. Several subsidy bridges would have to be built as part of this legislation. These would also help refocus our current space program to a real space mission – making Burt Rutan and America’s young folks happy – with a relevant space program again.
The criticism leveled against SSP is that the current prices of space photovoltaics, space transportation, and other necessary commodities is too high for SSP to be profitable. We agree. With zero dollars budgeted for SSP by the US government again this year, we will continue making zero progress toward the magnificent promise of SSP.
If we keep doing the same things, which is nothing, especially NASA’s mind-numbing lack of mission, we will get the same result, – increasing energy, environmental and related problems with no solution in sight. The correct response to this criticism is additional, concomitant legislation to provide an 85% subsidy for space photovoltaic array purchase to new private or public/ private businesses, such as SunSat Corp.
A 50 % subsidy for established space businesses would further increase space photovoltaic array manufacturing. These funds would go to businesses buying space photovoltaic arrays. This would lower costs, increase business and bridge the cost gap for Sunsat Corp.
The chart below shows the subsidy bridge needed for Sunsat to help space photovoltaic thin film producers meet the massive demand and lower cost required. Similar subsidies for ground solar photovoltaic are now provided by many other states, topped by the landmark $3.2 Billion California Solar Initiative.
In the same way, similar learning curves, like Moore’s law, describe other dropping costs of technology with increasing volume, such as the low cost potential available to cut the cost of access to orbit if higher flight rates are achieved by reusable launch vehicles, especially private launch vehicles. A dozen other orbital space pioneers, led by Elon Musk and his reusable vehicle Falcon, are seeking to overcome policies and prices all but blocking new vehicle development in a dismally poor launch market outlook (due to high costs) with their new generation of private reusable launch vehicles.
We recommend legislation concomitant with Sunsat Corp. to provide an 85% launch subsidy to new private or public/ private businesses, such as SunSat Corp, which are contracting for space transportation and 50 % launch subsidy to established businesses contracting for space transportation.
For comparison, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airports each logged nearly a million takeoffs and landings in 2005.
New generation vehicles – some already in design – would drive the cost lower when higher flight rates are reached. Doubtless many other new space businesses would benefit including lunar development, which has been suggested as a better source of space photovoltaics and materials. But Sunsat Corp, would have one focus only – clean baseload solar energy from GSO to power planet earth.
Sunsat Corp. would need approximately 42,000 flights per year to GSO, of ten metric tons each. (Compare this to the millions of airline flights scheduled daily globally.) Prices would quickly fall once subsidies established market volume.
As Robert Hirsch has pointed out in Congress, nothing is being done to avert the approaching disaster. Together we solve these immense problems, motivate our kids and establish an important mission for our aerospace pioneers by chartering Sunsat Corp.
Call or write your Congressmen:
www.congress.org
Ask them to sponsor the Sunsat Act. A draft copy is available at
www.sspi.gatech.edu/sunsat-how.pdf