PISCES will be posting our presentations on their website shortly, but in the meantime here's a link to the presentation I gave last week at the PISCES 2012 conference on the Big Island.
Btw, Buzz Aldrin was in the house and gave a great presentation on his Mars Cycler concept. I think Buzz can talk orbital mechanics all day long. It was an honor to have him there, and a pleasure to have several good conversations with him (mostly about scuba diving in New Guinea and Fiji!).
Keith Veronese at io9 has a good backgrounder on the potential for Helium-3 (3He) to be used in future 2nd generation fusion as a clean solution to Earth's looming energy conundrum. Veronese's essay over-simplifies a bit - which is ok by me given that it's intended for a broad audience - but overall does a pretty good job of hitting the major points. Not too enthusiastic, not too skeptical... just about right.
Some excerpts:
If you watched the movie Moon, you remember Helium-3 as the substance Sam Bell was sending back to Earth, during his onerous three year tenure on the Sarang lunar base. Helium-3 is not a piece of science fiction, but an isotope of helium that really could provide for all of our energy needs in the future. With absolutely no pollution.
...
The Helium-3 fusion process is not simply theoretical — the University of Wisconsin-Madison Fusion Technology Institute successfully performed fusion experiments combining two molecules of Helium-3. Estimates place the efficiency of Helium-3 fusion reactions at seventy percent, out-pacing coal and natural gas electricity generation by twenty percent.
...
Obtaining helium-3 from lunar regolith will not be an easy task. Best estimates of Helium-3 content place it at 50 parts per billion in lunar soil, calling for the refining of millions of tons of lunar soil before gathering enough Helium-3 to be useful in fusion reactions on Earth. Should we be so eager to strip mine the moon and destroy its surface to provide a clean energy source for Earth?
...
The first nation (or conglomeration of nations) to establish a Moon colony and begin mining operations will likely set the standard for control of resources on the Moon, especially if exploration of the Western world plays a role as precedent. Let's hope the nation has kind, altruistic motives at hand - otherwise, we might be better off with a private company (as in Moon) making it to the Moon first, with an intention of harvesting its resources.
Chris Lewiki of Planetary Resources introduces the Arkyd 102 mini-satellite. PR plans to launch a swarm of these low-cost telescope satellites in the 2014-2015 timeframe, both to identify the size and location of near-Earth asteroids in order to calculate their orbits, and to use light spectra to determine those asteroid's composition. These low-Earth orbit satellite telescopes are also capable of Earth observation. The data they gather can be sold to universities, businesses, and government - all part of PR's short-term business model in addition to their more well-known long-term asteroid mining plans.
Planetary Resources introductory promotional video below. Obviously there are lots of technical hurdles (as well as financial ones), but this is great stuff.
I wasn't sure until their announcement, but it seems that this endeavor will be solely robotic in nature. (In the Q&A, they did say they may collaborate with NASA on future manned asteroid missions. Indeed, the entire venture is proposed as a public/private partnership.) But if they are successful, Planetary Resources will establish the infrastructure that will enable a fuel depot strategy for human exploration of points beyond. Getting whatever metals they may be able to produce for the Earth market will be very costly to return given current technology. Billions of $$$ of platinum metals back on Earth would be phase two (and tricky). Harvesting water, electrolzying that into hydrogen and oxygen to create fuel depots is highly likely to be the major part of PR's initial phase of their business model. PR would be able to provide gas and water to NASA and others in cislunar space, and human spaceflight will become vastly more economic.
Yes, this will be very technically challenging - and expensive. I recognize it's far easier said than done. But not only do we need this kind of can-do, get-big-stuff-done thinking - we need a hell of a lot more of it.
An impressive group of entrepreneurs and investors led by Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson and including Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, director James Cameron, Charles Simonyi, and Ross Perot Jr. will hold a press conference next week to announce a new extraterrestrial mining venture called Planetary Resources, Inc. The presser will be on April 24 at Seattle's Museum of Flight.
The Planetary Resources press release says that
the company will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources’.
If successful, the venture would extend the Earth's econosphere beyond geosynchronous orbit into cislunar, lunar, and deep space. Technology Review speculates that this endeavor
...sounds like asteroid mining. Because what else is there in space that we need here on earth? Certainly not a livable climate or a replacement for our dwindling supplies of oil.
Peter Diamandis gave a TED talk in 2005 on the desire for wealth being the next great motivation for space exploration. He specifically mentions asteroid mining and notes that "everything we hold of value on this planet — metal and minerals and real estate and energy" are available in "infinite quantities" in space.
My plan is to actually buy puts on the precious metal market, and then actually claim that I'm going to go out and get one. And that will fund the actual mission to go and get one.
Nickle-iron resources would certainly imply asteroids, but he also makes a slightly tongue in cheek reference to wanting to "make a beeline for the moon and grab some lunar real estate". So pace Tech Review's comment, that could mean helium-3 (fusion energy) or platinum group metals (hydrogen energy). Or eventually some combination of those.
Note however that the technical challenges of mining an asteroid are very high. The very low gravity conditions are riskier and require untested methods than similar kinds of proposed mining endeavors on the moon. We've been to the moon, it has gravity. We haven't been to an asteroid, and stuff floats around. At the ILRP Summit Meeting last year I had a conversation with someone from NASA Ames about a proposed concept to essentially put a big bag bubble over a small asteroid to allow processing its minerals without stuff flying off and becoming a hazard to the spacecraft. Mining the moon would seem much more feasible in the medium term, although an asteroid would largely avoid the international kerfluffle that is likely to surround a property/resource claim on the moon.
My first take is that asteroids are still NASA-level stuff, but A. I would love to be wrong or B. perhaps they're envisioning this as some sort of NASA-private partnership. We shall see. But what a fascinating and unexpected announcement. Given the caliber of the individuals involved in this venture, this is exciting stuff. Tickets are available, and I will be there at the streaming.
Media Alert (via Technology Review and Parabolic Arc) after the jump. Hat tip to Doug Messier at Parabolic Arc where I first heard of this item.
Rand Simberg got some press attention the other day with his proposal to advance property rights in space, but I'm only now getting around to mentioning it. Simberg's essay itself is worth reading, as is Dunstan's rebuttal. But rather than summarizing the debate, I point people to Jeff Foust's excellent summary of the current discussion over at Space Review. Although I never thought I'd have much to agree with coming out of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which published Simberg's paper), I applaud both Simberg and CEI for raising the issue.
I'm not sure where I come down on this yet. To make spaceflight a viable, sustainable endeavor, it will have to be more than just exploration for exploration's sake or science for science's sake: people will have to make money off of it. And to do that there will need to be some kind of legal recognition of, and protection for, extraterrestrial activities in order that private companies will be willing to invest their capital in such enterprises.
But whether or not land ownership is the best solution is unclear. Perhaps a different model, such as legally recognizing resource tenure would be more appropriate. This would allow companies the right to harvest and sell resources (oxygen, hydrogen, H20, platinum group metals, helium-3, what have you) without actually owning the land. And there also should be some element of legal responsibility to limit damage to extraterrestrial environments (ex. you shouldn't be able to remove an entire mountain range, or detonate your own nuclear device). Michael Listner - who unlike myself actually specializes in space law - has good insight into such issues, and I expect (and look forward to) his perspective on this in the near future.
A story on this over at Wired Science following the jump:
Significant amounts of water exist on Mars, sequestered within hydrated minerals and stored in the planet's crust. John Matson reports.
Scientific American, March 26, 2012
Mars today is pretty dry. But billions of years ago, water flowed across the red planet. It ran in rivers that carved deep valleys. And it may have even filled a Martian ocean inside what today look like the remains of ancient shorelines.
So where’d all the water go? Some of it is locked up in polar ice caps. But much more may be buried in the ground.
You are very unlikely to spend your retirement years on a space station parked at L5. Or L4 or L1 for that matter.
And even if, theoretically, we did create such space colonies, it wouldn't solve Earth's overpopulation problem.
Watch the fascinating 5-minute NASA video from 1975 on space colonization below. Nate Berg at The Atlantic notes that this film was "the product of a 10-week NASA program in the summer of 1975 that pulled together engineers, scientists, architects and students to imagine convincing ideas about how humans might be able to live in space for long periods of time on a large scale." "Taurus" was conceived as a one mile diameter, doughnut shaped (i.e torus-shaped - hence "Taurus", get it?) space station that could permanently house 10,000 and was situated in L5 orbit, a gravitationally stable sweet spot in between the Earth and the moon. It would be constructed from lunar-mined ore, powered by solar energy, and its colonists nourished by a 100-acre farm.
Such grand deep space colonies didn't happen for reasons I outline below. Space colonization as a solution to global overpopulation - which is part of what sparked such ideas back in the day - isn't viable. One day, probably a very long time from now, we may create O'Neill Cylinders with thousands of people living in them - but if we do it won't be to solve an overpopulation problem on Earth.
As the world hit 4 billion people in 1975, a great number of people worried about Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich's warnings in the late 1960s that the looming world "population bomb" would inevitably result in the starvation and deaths of "hundreds of millions of people" by the end of the decade.
Obviously that Malthusian catastrophe didn't happen (fortunately!); Ehrlich and others failed to appreciate the major increases in agricultural output brought about by Green Revolution technologies. Agricultural research began in the 1940s and 1950s to develop new high-yield varieties of wheat, rice, corn and other crops, combined with increased availability and adoption of irrigation technology, fertilizers and pesticides. Beginning in the late 1960s, that research started to pay off. By the mid-1980s, global crop yields had more than doubled, thus staving off the predicted famines. (Side note: all of those advances - from research to irrigation infrastructure to fertilizer - were greatly facilitated by Western aid subsidies to developing countries.)
But the eventual success of the green revolution wasn't immediately apparent back in the mid-1970s. Fears of a Malthusian catastrophe, combined with the amazing success of the Apollo program, sparked the notion that perhaps the only solution to global overpopulation was to build self-sufficient (or what we now call "closed loop life support") space colonies. These ideas were popularized by Princeton physicist and space activist Dr. Gerard O'Neill. Oh, the optimism of the day. But these were were not just ahead of their time; they were also quite unnecessary, as global economic and agricultural growth since that time has shown.
But here's the but. Roger Martin from Population Matters notes a quote from Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for his critical contributions to the Green Revolution. In his Nobel acceptance speech Borlaug said, "I have only bought you a 40-year breathing space to stabilise your populations."
In an essay noting our reaching the 7 billion person mark last month, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert wrote that:
[Bill Gates and others] have pointed out [that] just to keep per-capita food production constant in the coming decades will require a second “green revolution.” (The first one increased global grain yields by roughly two per cent a year from 1950 to 1990.) This will have to be accomplished under increasingly trying circumstances. An analysis in Science concluded that rising temperatures have already begun to depress global corn and wheat production. Another analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, warned that, owing to global warming, corn and soybean crops in the U.S. could decline by as much as eighty per cent by the end of the century.
Part of what made the first green revolution possible was a sharp increase in the use of phosphorus-rich fertilizers. Thanks to this increased use, experts say, reserves of phosphorus are now being exhausted. Foreign Policy has called this “the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.” Other essential commodities that could similarly run short include oil, water, and arable land. Jamais Cascio, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future, an offshoot of the RAND Corporation, put it this way recently on the Times Web site: getting to ten billion “would be a sign of successful navigation of this century’s problems.”
Many writers make the inarguable point that Malthus (and Ehrlich) were wrong. They were, in the sense that they underestimated technological advances that allowed the population curve to continue its upward trajectory for far longer than they imagined. But their basic point is correct: given limited resources and relatively fixed technological constraints, there is an upper limit to how many people the Earth can support. And even the original green revolution can't continue, since increasing water scarcity, salinization, soil loss, input shortages (such as phosphorus) and other problems put limits on even the best of current technology.
The planet has a carrying capacity. Whether the number is 8 billion, 10 billion, 15 billion or more is probably not something that would be wise to test.
We're gonna need a bigger boat. But that's not possible. And not only that - there are no life rafts, either. Space colonies aren't going to solve our problems. Earth is the only spaceship the vast, vast majority of us will know.
I think space technology might be critical to solving many problems here on Earth. But as a solution to overpopulation - no. Space technology can, maybe, help us address certain resource shortages. (If somebody finds economically viable amounts of phosphorus on the moon, that might really be something to write home about.) [Added 12/12/11: I'm being facetious; phosphorus is not found in great quantities on the moon.]Mining the moon for Helium-3 has applications for medical imaging devices as well as a source of possible aneutronicnuclear fusion. Dennis Wingo has written about the abundance of platinum group metals. And finally, there are rare earth elements.
But even beyond possible space resource utilization, it may be that the sustainable living technologies that the world will need to allow several billion Chinese and Indians who expect, demand, and can afford American standards of affluence, will have to be developed through space programs. Technology doesn't necessarily develop just because there is a theoretical need for it; often there must be an external catalyst to make it possible. But more on that idea later.
Gerard O'Neill was an impressive visionary, but he lived a hundred years ahead of his time. And while I like and respect many modern-day O'Neillians, such visions are at best premature. But perhaps more importantly for current space policy, their message is not one that will advance space exploration. People want tangible benefits from space - back on Earth.
But orbiting massive space colonies are a nice fantasy.
Japanese construction firm The Shimizu Corporation is proposing to build the Luna Ring - a belt of solar cells around the Moon’s equator. The solar cells would convert the sun's electricity to powerful microwaves and lasers and beam it back to Earth where it would be converted back into electricity at terrestrial power stations. Shimizu claims that the Luna Ring could meet the entire world's energy needs.
My first reaction is to say that I'll start taking this seriously when Shimizu - which according to Wikipedia "has annual sales of approximately US $14 billion and has been widely recognized as one of the top 5 contractors in Japan and among the top 20 in the world" - puts up a sizeable amount of its own cash into not just a conceptual design, but starts building something and talking to SpaceX or MoonExpress.
Technological and financial issues aside, this not completely crazy. The Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011 wasn't just about the initial trauma. It's turning into a series of rolling traumas, as neighborhoods even as far away as the Tokyo Metropolitan area are finding radioactive hotspots in parking lots and schoolyards. The food supply is partly contaminated - for God knows how long. This was a watershed event in Japanese consciousness, and there is an unmistakeable shift in popular opinion away from nuclear power, which has been main source of electricity since the 1960s.
Post-Fukushima Japan is likely to start making large and smart investments in non-nuclear sources of energy. Whether or not the Luna Ring is something that will ever get off the ground or not is another question. Stranger things have happened, but it's premature to take this as anything more than a concept at this point. However, for many reasons - most importantly the climate change-driven imperative to move towards zero-carbon sources of energy, I do think it is wise to start looking closely at space solar power. Collaborating with Japan would be a great place to start.