How space could liberate us from Mideast oil

As we wage war in the oil-rich Middle East, we are also painfully investigating the deaths of our peacetime heroes aboard the space shuttle Columbia. Important debates are now under way over the wisdom of the missions for which we endanger the lives of both astronauts and soldiers.

By ERIK BAARD HoustonChronicle.com

Little considered, however, is how much space could contribute to real national security if we were to use solar power stations in Earth orbit to achieve energy independence at home. That goal, which is within our technological grasp, would be truly worthy of great risk.

Huge photovoltaic arrays could beam clean, safe and reliable energy down to the electricity grid through either very weak microwaves or more intense lasers. Other "green" and independent energy sources, like terrestrial solar power, wind and tidal turbines, biomass and small-scale hydroelectric dams can’t support the needs of nearly 300 million people with a developed economy. Nuclear reactors have proven politically unpalatable for a generation, especially given the terrorist threat. Hydrogen fuel cells aren’t an energy source but are more akin to batteries because it takes more energy to produce them than can be put to work. Batteries and fuel cells, though, are the mechanisms through which sunlight and fossil fuels become fungible.

Solar power satellites would play to America’s industrial and technological strengths while we still have a lead over the Chinese, who have announced their intentions to use lunar bases for energy production and mining. Work at the University of California at Irvine promises a breakthrough in self-assembling solar modules, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has operated new generations of robots on the space station.

The Air Force recently demonstrated a type of microsatellite that could conceivably perform equipment inspections in orbit and open the way for remote-controlled repairs. Our leadership in aerospace engineering, software design, materials science, electricity infrastructure and photovoltaics would also be reinforced. Even hydrogen for fuel cells could be cracked out from pools of water by energy targeted down at them from satellites.

Benefits extend beyond energy security and environmental protection: Satellites for defense, telecommunications and science could draw power from such stations. Energy could also be directed at receivers or "sails" aboard spacecraft for interplanetary propulsion.

Up-front expenses would be high, enormously so. Joel Sercel, director of Caltech’s Laboratory for Spacecraft and Mission Design, said a constellation of solar power satellites would be "like an Alaska oil pipeline from space." As with that massive enterprise, federally guaranteed, low- interest loans should encourage private industry to invest. The Alaska pipeline cost just under $23 billion to construct; a student study in Sercel’s lab calculated that the price tag on launching components of a solar power satellite, using existing means, could reach $22 billion.

That could prove cost-effective in the long run because the resource, the sun, is more bountiful than Alaskan reserves and the hardware to maintain the tap is more durable. It also is preferable to endless entanglement in the oil regimes of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet Union.

Yale University economist William Nordhaus predicted in an American Academy of Arts and Sciences report that costs for the Iraq war could reach $150 billion, and more than $100 billion to rebuild that nation. But clearly we need cheap, unmanned space access. This was obvious even in 1968, when Peter Glaser, a technologist at Arthur D. Little, a technology/research firm in Cambridge, Mass., conceived of this energy system. Every review since, including a 2001 evaluation of

NASA’s power satellite work by the National Research Council, has noted considerable progress on all fronts but this one. Humans may very well have a role in construction, but it must remain merely supportive.

Other concerns will be raised as well. For health and environmental reasons, the transmission frequency of the energy beamed to Earth could be made so weak that a person or animal passing through would be utterly unharmed, though absorbing such diffuse energy would require receivers, called rectifiers, miles across. But because the energy being sopped up for the grid would be outside the visible bandwidth, the land beneath them would still be valuable for manufacturing and agriculture. Such gentle wavelengths also assuage fears of an orbiting "death ray" weapon. A laser would require far less land but necessitate safety cut-offs.

Many of our greatest astronauts, including six of the seven serving aboard the Columbia’s final mission, have been military officers. They have also been awed by the revelation of a world below without borders. It seems right and just that if such men and women are to risk their lives to conquer space, it should be to better our nation in a way that saves the lives of future soldiers. A new American purpose in space, energy independence, can be our generation’s most inspiring challenge.

Baard is a New York-based freelance writer who reports on science topics.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1832489