Sounds pretty concrete to me. Who've you been listening to?
Compared to "inspire the next generation of explorers", that's nebulous? (current NASA mission statement). NASA's 1958 mission statement had some reasonably concrete content, referring to science and technology transfer, and "To explore, use, and enable the development of space for human enterprise." But "go to the moon" seems significantly less nebulous than any of those - you can't do it by just sitting around on this planet and thinking about it, for instance...
Richard Smalley (Nobel prize winner for buckyballs) was here a few weeks ago to talk about the energy problem. I definitely agree it's the most serious problem we face in the world today; replacing our fossil-fueled energy supply as sson as possible with something renewable or at least long-term sustainable (fusion) is absolutely critical.
Fusion has proved hard on Earth - but we already have an enormous working fusion reactor operating in our solar system, and all we really have to do is tap into that and we'll have more than enough energy, essentially indefinitely (or at least until we start trying to zip large objects around the galaxy at close to the speed of light - and by then we should have a bunch of other fusion reactors to tap into too).
Solar on Earth is hard because the sun moves around in the sky, and you have to deal with a variable supply and sunk capital costs that are only in use 25-30% of the time. An orbiting satellite in a high enough orbit can be in sunlight continuously for most of the year (geosynchronous orbit has sunlight something like 99.9% of the time).
Smalley's table of potential long-term sustainable sources is pretty short: Earth-side fusion, possible geo-thermal, solar on the ground, and solar in space (including lunar solar). Space solar power deserves a serious look - not of course that the new NASA program is actually doing anything about this right now (the Bush administration cut NASA SSP funding in 2001).
Constellation-X was not postponed indefinitely, just 2 years. Explorer mission funding is not on hold, but reduced (significantly this year, slightly in future years) which is expected to result in a 1-year delay in launches. The reason for these "cuts" is not entirely clear - if you look at the actual NASA budget numbers for the past few years, there has been a huge increase in the "science" portion of the NASA budget between 2000 and now, and the 2005 budget request just dialed that back a bit. In part this was to pay for "Moon-Mars", in part to pay the enormous costs for the shuttle return to flight and Hubble repair.
All the NASA budget graphs show strong continued support for science programs, so as far as I can tell all this doom and gloom from astronomers is a bunch of typical FUD... But I could be wrong.
Population is already close to stabilized worldwide, I don't know why people still argue about this. Increased energy intensity is central to development and standards of living, and this (and some of the other space options) provides far more energy than we have renewably available on Earth, therefore far better standards of living for all Earth's people. I think that's a good thing.
If we can reduce CO2 in the atmosphere we can make it more transparent (in the appropriate infrared frequency range), so less energy is stored on Earth's surface before it returns to space. That's what makes the difference.Adding new energy sources like fission or fusion only adds to the outgoing energy flow at parts per million levels, making essentially no difference to temperature on Earth.
It's politics. It's what's left unsaid that's the real killer. The so-called "clear skies" bill does little for real pollution control, and does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about global warming. They're making do-nothingism sound good. Looks like they fooled at least one person.
Actually, despite the hype, there's relatively little real R&D money going into alternative energy in the US, other than the nuclear options. The hydrogen car thing is funded at something like $100 million/year. Solar cells get about $80 million/year. Energy efficiency efforts get a few hundred million/year. Fusion gets a lot more than all those, if you include the inertial confinement stuff, at about $1 billion/year.
That's out of the Department of Energy budget, which is funded at well over $20 billion/year. Where does the rest of that $20 billion go, if not to alternative energy? Well, there's the fossil fuel R&D and subsidies. And then there's all the nuclear weapons work - WMD's right here at home... that's where the bulk of the money goes.
If a $10 million prize can bring in a hundred million dollars of R&D investment, a few of those could make an enormous difference to progress in alternative energy. Except for wind power (developed mostly in Europe) and some efficiency stuff like hybrid cars, there's been very little improvement in energy alternatives since about 1980.
there's Zero-G, which is offering flights now for just under $3000 per person. Ok, so it's not exactly going to space - but you get real weightlessness for the price!
After hearing that NASA wasn't going to fulfil his dream of routine spaceflight in his lifetime:
"The first choice was to give up, and admit that I would never go into space, never see that black sky. The other choice I had was to do something about it."
At the SPS 04 meeting we heard about a planned launch in a couple of years of something very similar - a suborbital rocket with 20 minutes or so in space at zero gravity, which will deploy a large triangular mesh intended to resemble a possible structure for a solar power satellite. Then two or three teams of robots will be competing to maneuver about this mesh under vacuum/zero-g conditions, and see how far/fast they can go, and what they can do. One of the teams involved spoke - they seem to have previously had something to do with playing Robotic Soccer.
They left out review papers - RMP is all review papers, as are occasional papers in the other journlas. Review papers have very distinct citation histories that would completely mess up this sort of analysis (and yes, they are generally much more highly cited than regular papers).
No, they don't pay for themselves in a year, but they do pay back the energy used in their construction. The rest of the construction costs take about 10 times longer to pay back.
Actually the "buffer area" and antenna area required should be considerably less than the area required for ground-solar, wind, coal mines etc. for the same annual energy production. And environmental impact should be minimal - the idea is to capture over 90% of incoming energy in the receiving array. Power levels in the center will likely be on the order of 10% of peak solar (but 24x7 rather than just in mid-day) so stray power would be 1% of peak sunlight, not enough to cause much damage to anything.
I wonder if the Big Problem is that many researchers are not comfortable with the cost and complexity of space research, and may therefore shy away from it.
I think there's some of this. The logical institutional sponsors would be NASA and DOE, but they don't work well together, and this doesn't fit logically really within either one's domain.
Economic energy intensity numbers mean you're using about 10 MJ for every dollar. Typical ground-side power plants cost on the order of $1000 - $3000/kW (nuclear on the high end of that, coal on the low end) which translates to 10-30 GJ/kW, or 10 - 30 million seconds - i.e. the energy payback is a few months to a year.
For a space power plant to be economically competitive, it's numbers had better be pretty close. Unfortunately right now space launch is about a factor of 10 too expensive, which puts the energy payback into the few to 10-year timeframe.
By the way, I'm the one quoted in the Wired article as saying $10 billion RD&D over 10 years would do the trick - but I don't remember saying it had to go through NASA! And yes, I will be in Spain at the meeting next week.
If we're building new space industries we clearly don't want just government money on it. But as you say, the current spending plan gives little money to the new initiative before 2010: why not get more of that money up front and get this thing moving a lot sooner? If the money is paying for services a competitive environment instead of cost-plus contracts, it'll only help. After all, even Elon Musk is getting both government and private contracts for his services.
This is an amazingly thorough review - thanks "code_rage"! And you've hit on exactly the point that disturbs me a bit too - if this is all so great, why aren't we planning to spend a lot more money on it, rather than just continuing in the same-old ho-hum manner in space? Perhaps the commissioners felt that was out of their scope, but that seem to be the substance of Kerry's complaint too - if we're serious about this, lets spend some real money on it!
My thoughts from a couple of days before the report came out are up on sciscoop - I think the report does adopt a lot of the "O'Neill" vision of space. Maybe it's our job to make sure the money really comes through now.
I've been involved in these discussions for years, and happen to work for one of the major scientific publishers. Unfortunately this meme that scientific publishing model is somehow unique with dastardly publishers standing in the middle extracting payments from all has become far too entrenched, but it's really not a unique sort of situation at all.
Simple counterexample where exactly the same model applies: the Olympics. Just as billions of dollars are spent every year by publishers on the process of selecting the best scientific articles to publish, billions of dollars are spent by the host Olympic organization every four years establishing a venue for the world's best athletes to compete. A lot of that money goes into things that might seem unimportant to an outsider, like buildings and computers and IT and security staff etc. None of the money spent on the olympics goes to the athletes who bring their talents - other than the small amount that goes into paying for the medals themselves. Athletes in fact have to pay their own transportation expenses (or usually their home country takes care of it) - and then all those spectators pay again for the privilege of watching them compete. And you who watch on TV are paying via the advertising you have to endure, who have paid the TV network that has paid the Olympic organizers for the rights to broadcast.
Obviously, it would be much simpler and more efficient for athletes to just record their best performances in whatever stadium is available, and post it up on a website - then every four years somebody just picks the best performances and awards medals. Simple, right?
So why do we still spend all that money on the spectacle? Hmmm.
Everybody should understand we have a fusion reactor with a proven record of reliability - 5 billion years worth, so far, just 90 million miles away. All renewables (except geothermal and tidal power) are simply mechanisms for harnessing the power of our solar system's enormous reactor.
The two fundamental problems with Earth-based renewables are that the sun's energy is (1) quite diffuse by the time it reaches us, and (2) subject to day-night and seasonal variations. If we collect the energy in space, instead of on the ground, #2 is not a problem at all, and #1 is just a matter of distance from the sun. Renewables frequently have a third problem: (3) the energy is collected far from where we need it, and requires efficient transmission. For space, #3 can be resolved with wireless power transmission techniques, but there efficiency has not been proved over such long distances and high power levels.
Unfortunately, real renewable solutions (as opposed to the hydrogen myth), and space solar power in particular, have been starved for funding since about 1980. I just attended a meeting of space advocates and chatted at dinner with one of the few people who has been, off and on, working on SPS designs since about 1992. He's become very discouraged, because no proposal he has prepared on the subject has been funded for years; he's been spending his time on some mostly unrelated projects (solar electric propulsion).
The prime person at NASA involved in space solar power, John Mankins, hasn't been allowed to work on this since about 2001; he's involved in the new space exploration office, so I think that's good for him, but not for the field. All in all, total spending on the idea since 1980 is less than 1/1000th of what has been spent on fission and fusion R&D.
This book, based on a 1998 workshop, came out last year; I reviewed it for sciscoop. It's an excellent summary of all the available options for dealing with the global rise in CO2 levels, including new energy solutions. Quantitative, with all the major options represented, it's a real eye-opener.
For one thing, it turns out a major problem with nuclear energy is the cost of building plants - nobody in the West seems to have been able to build nuclear power plants for a capital cost that comes close to competing with the fossil fuel plants or even almost all hydro-electric installations. Wind can be installed cheaper than nuclear now. But lots of other issues there too.
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Sounds pretty concrete to me. Who've you been listening to?
Compared to "inspire the next generation of explorers", that's nebulous? (current NASA mission statement). NASA's 1958 mission statement had some reasonably concrete content, referring to science and technology transfer, and "To explore, use, and enable the development of space for human enterprise." But "go to the moon" seems significantly less nebulous than any of those - you can't do it by just sitting around on this planet and thinking about it, for instance...
The best site on this I'm aware of is Spencer Weart's history:
The Discovery of Global Warming.
A quarter-million words on why scientists know that the climate is changing, and how they know that we humans are the main cause.
Richard Smalley (Nobel prize winner for buckyballs) was here a few weeks ago to talk about the energy problem. I definitely agree it's the most serious problem we face in the world today; replacing our fossil-fueled energy supply as sson as possible with something renewable or at least long-term sustainable (fusion) is absolutely critical.
Fusion has proved hard on Earth - but we already have an enormous working fusion reactor operating in our solar system, and all we really have to do is tap into that and we'll have more than enough energy, essentially indefinitely (or at least until we start trying to zip large objects around the galaxy at close to the speed of light - and by then we should have a bunch of other fusion reactors to tap into too).
Solar on Earth is hard because the sun moves around in the sky, and you have to deal with a variable supply and sunk capital costs that are only in use 25-30% of the time. An orbiting satellite in a high enough orbit can be in sunlight continuously for most of the year (geosynchronous orbit has sunlight something like 99.9% of the time).
Smalley's table of potential long-term sustainable sources is pretty short: Earth-side fusion, possible geo-thermal, solar on the ground, and solar in space (including lunar solar). Space solar power deserves a serious look - not of course that the new NASA program is actually doing anything about this right now (the Bush administration cut NASA SSP funding in 2001).
Constellation-X was not postponed indefinitely, just 2 years. Explorer mission funding is not on hold, but reduced (significantly this year, slightly in future years) which is expected to result in a 1-year delay in launches. The reason for these "cuts" is not entirely clear - if you look at the actual NASA budget numbers for the past few years, there has been a huge increase in the "science" portion of the NASA budget between 2000 and now, and the 2005 budget request just dialed that back a bit. In part this was to pay for "Moon-Mars", in part to pay the enormous costs for the shuttle return to flight and Hubble repair.
All the NASA budget graphs show strong continued support for science programs, so as far as I can tell all this doom and gloom from astronomers is a bunch of typical FUD... But I could be wrong.
Population is already close to stabilized worldwide, I don't know why people still argue about this. Increased energy intensity is central to development and standards of living, and this (and some of the other space options) provides far more energy than we have renewably available on Earth, therefore far better standards of living for all Earth's people. I think that's a good thing.
If we can reduce CO2 in the atmosphere we can make it more transparent (in the appropriate infrared frequency range), so less energy is stored on Earth's surface before it returns to space. That's what makes the difference.Adding new energy sources like fission or fusion only adds to the outgoing energy flow at parts per million levels, making essentially no difference to temperature on Earth.
here's the poll results... Main site - poll is halfway down on the right.
It's politics. It's what's left unsaid that's the real killer. The so-called "clear skies" bill does little for real pollution control, and does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about global warming. They're making do-nothingism sound good. Looks like they fooled at least one person.
Actually, despite the hype, there's relatively little real R&D money going into alternative energy in the US, other than the nuclear options. The hydrogen car thing is funded at something like $100 million/year. Solar cells get about $80 million/year. Energy efficiency efforts get a few hundred million/year. Fusion gets a lot more than all those, if you include the inertial confinement stuff, at about $1 billion/year.
That's out of the Department of Energy budget, which is funded at well over $20 billion/year. Where does the rest of that $20 billion go, if not to alternative energy? Well, there's the fossil fuel R&D and subsidies. And then there's all the nuclear weapons work - WMD's right here at home... that's where the bulk of the money goes.
If a $10 million prize can bring in a hundred million dollars of R&D investment, a few of those could make an enormous difference to progress in alternative energy. Except for wind power (developed mostly in Europe) and some efficiency stuff like hybrid cars, there's been very little improvement in energy alternatives since about 1980.
there's Zero-G, which is offering flights now for just under $3000 per person. Ok, so it's not exactly going to space - but you get real weightlessness for the price!
Putting dreams into actions - gotta love the guy!
Last night in fact: here.
This is very encouraging news - but just because corals will survive doesn't necessarily mean we will...
Oil is still at record high prices by the way...
At the SPS 04 meeting we heard about a planned launch in a couple of years of something very similar - a suborbital rocket with 20 minutes or so in space at zero gravity, which will deploy a large triangular mesh intended to resemble a possible structure for a solar power satellite. Then two or three teams of robots will be competing to maneuver about this mesh under vacuum/zero-g conditions, and see how far/fast they can go, and what they can do. One of the teams involved spoke - they seem to have previously had something to do with playing Robotic Soccer.
See this story over at sciscoop - and thousands more for breaking science news!
They left out review papers - RMP is all review papers, as are occasional papers in the other journlas. Review papers have very distinct citation histories that would completely mess up this sort of analysis (and yes, they are generally much more highly cited than regular papers).
No, they don't pay for themselves in a year, but they do pay back the energy used in their construction. The rest of the construction costs take about 10 times longer to pay back.
Here's the link - yeah it's closer to a blog than slashdot, but it's community edited!
Actually the "buffer area" and antenna area required should be considerably less than the area required for ground-solar, wind, coal mines etc. for the same annual energy production. And environmental impact should be minimal - the idea is to capture over 90% of incoming energy in the receiving array. Power levels in the center will likely be on the order of 10% of peak solar (but 24x7 rather than just in mid-day) so stray power would be 1% of peak sunlight, not enough to cause much damage to anything.
I think there's some of this. The logical institutional sponsors would be NASA and DOE, but they don't work well together, and this doesn't fit logically really within either one's domain.
Economic energy intensity numbers mean you're using about 10 MJ for every dollar. Typical ground-side power plants cost on the order of $1000 - $3000/kW (nuclear on the high end of that, coal on the low end) which translates to 10-30 GJ/kW, or 10 - 30 million seconds - i.e. the energy payback is a few months to a year.
For a space power plant to be economically competitive, it's numbers had better be pretty close. Unfortunately right now space launch is about a factor of 10 too expensive, which puts the energy payback into the few to 10-year timeframe.
By the way, I'm the one quoted in the Wired article as saying $10 billion RD&D over 10 years would do the trick - but I don't remember saying it had to go through NASA! And yes, I will be in Spain at the meeting next week.
I should point out mhmealling has some good commentary of his own here.
If we're building new space industries we clearly don't want just government money on it. But as you say, the current spending plan gives little money to the new initiative before 2010: why not get more of that money up front and get this thing moving a lot sooner? If the money is paying for services a competitive environment instead of cost-plus contracts, it'll only help. After all, even Elon Musk is getting both government and private contracts for his services.
This is an amazingly thorough review - thanks "code_rage"! And you've hit on exactly the point that disturbs me a bit too - if this is all so great, why aren't we planning to spend a lot more money on it, rather than just continuing in the same-old ho-hum manner in space? Perhaps the commissioners felt that was out of their scope, but that seem to be the substance of Kerry's
complaint too - if we're serious about this, lets spend some real money on it!
My thoughts from a couple of days before the report came out are up on sciscoop - I think the report does adopt a lot of the "O'Neill" vision of space. Maybe it's our job to make sure the money really comes through now.
I've been involved in these discussions for years, and happen to work for one of the major scientific publishers. Unfortunately this meme that scientific publishing model is somehow unique with dastardly publishers standing in the middle extracting payments from all has become far too entrenched, but it's really not a unique sort of situation at all.
Simple counterexample where exactly the same model applies: the Olympics. Just as billions of dollars are spent every year by publishers on the process of selecting the best scientific articles to publish, billions of dollars are spent by the host Olympic organization every four years establishing a venue for the world's best athletes to compete. A lot of that money goes into things that might seem unimportant to an outsider, like buildings and computers and IT and security staff etc. None of the money spent on the olympics goes to the athletes who bring their talents - other than the small amount that goes into paying for the medals themselves. Athletes in fact have to pay their own transportation expenses (or usually their home country takes care of it) - and then all those spectators pay again for the privilege of watching them compete. And you who watch on TV are paying via the advertising you have to endure, who have paid the TV network that has paid the Olympic organizers for the rights to broadcast.
Obviously, it would be much simpler and more efficient for athletes to just record their best performances in whatever stadium is available, and post it up on a website - then every four years somebody just picks the best performances and awards medals. Simple, right?
So why do we still spend all that money on the spectacle? Hmmm.
Everybody should understand we have a fusion reactor with a proven record of reliability - 5 billion years worth, so far, just 90 million miles away. All renewables (except geothermal and tidal power) are simply mechanisms for harnessing the power of our solar system's enormous reactor.
The two fundamental problems with Earth-based renewables are that the sun's energy is (1) quite diffuse by the time it reaches us, and (2) subject to day-night and seasonal variations. If we collect the energy in space, instead of on the ground, #2 is not a problem at all, and #1 is just a matter of distance from the sun. Renewables frequently have a third problem: (3) the energy is collected far from where we need it, and requires efficient transmission. For space, #3 can be resolved with wireless power transmission techniques, but there efficiency has not been proved over such long distances and high power levels.
Unfortunately, real renewable solutions (as opposed to the hydrogen myth), and space solar power in particular, have been starved for funding since about 1980. I just attended a meeting of space advocates and chatted at dinner with one of the few people who has been, off and on, working on SPS designs since about 1992. He's become very discouraged, because no proposal he has prepared on the subject has been funded for years; he's been spending his time on some mostly unrelated projects (solar electric propulsion).
The prime person at NASA involved in space solar power, John Mankins, hasn't been allowed to work on this since about 2001; he's involved in the new space exploration office, so I think that's good for him, but not for the field. All in all, total spending on the idea since 1980 is less than 1/1000th of what has been spent on fission and fusion R&D.
For one thing, it turns out a major problem with nuclear energy is the cost of building plants - nobody in the West seems to have been able to build nuclear power plants for a capital cost that comes close to competing with the fossil fuel plants or even almost all hydro-electric installations. Wind can be installed cheaper than nuclear now. But lots of other issues there too.