Category Archives: Space

Space, Technology and Society

Is Usenet Dead?

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Apparently not yet, but as far as my usage of it is concerned, it’s on life support. As the article points out, it doesn’t help that ISPs don’t support it properly. I gave up on AT&T once I realized that they’d outsourced it, and basically didn’t care whether it worked for their customers or not, and use GigaNews now.

Anyway, my biggest use of Usenet is sci.space.*, but I’ve cut way back on my participation there, because the signal/noise ratio has gotten so low, with many of the best long-time members of the newsgroups having gone to greener pastures (for example, Henry Spencer hasn’t posted there in many moons, which is a little ironic, considering that whenever I used to point out that Usenet was dying, he would reply that people have been predicting the death of Usenet for decades). It’s mostly loonytunes now, like Brad Guth and Ian Parker, and the Elifritz troll, with little substantive space policy discussion. I do think that the center of gravity of serious space discussion has shifted to the web, regardless of whatever else is still happening with NNTP.

Economics, Space

Space Power Beaming Concept Proof

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On p.38 of this presentation, there’s a breakdown of the contributions to the cost of Space Solar Power (SSP). Not surprisingly, the installation is more than half of the cost and another 20% is manufacturing cost of the solar array.

If we extract out the solar generation from SSP and instead of an antenna, have a passive microwave reflector, we can potentially get the cost of the reflector down to less than $1 billion. Let’s say it’s a flat spinning <8 gram per square meter perforated mylar single-mission heavy payload to GEO straw man. If we spend $1 billion on a ground-based microwave antenna and another $1 billion on a rectenna, we have a 1 GW system that can function as transmission for a 40-year straight-line cost of 1.5 cents/kwh which is about 30% of the cost of SSP per watt with the viable scale of capital needed much smaller. (If you need a VC return, the price must be closer to ten cents per kwh.) The reflector would not be at capacity so additional transmission can be achieved for 2/3 of that. 1 GW beaming for $3 billion would be a pretty satisfying proof of concept. There's plenty of power on the ground to beam to space that's cheap so the proof of concept can be economically viable at this scale. At Hawaii's buy price of more than $0.30/kwh and New Mexico's sell price of less than $0.10/kwh it would pay for itself pretty fast. Space power beaming would therefore be shown to be economically viable without the space generation and thus be valuable as a proof of concept for transmission alone.

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

Obama’s Space Pro-Activity

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The Obama campaign seems to have gotten way out front of the McCain campaign on space. The problem is that, like its domestic policy in general, McCain doesn’t seem to have a coherent policy with regard to civil space. He’s going to freeze discretionary, which includes NASA, and whether NASA will be exempt seems to depend on which campaign aide you ask. And regardless of how much money is spent, the campaign is equally vague on how it is spent, and what the near-term and long-term goals of the expenditure are. On top of that, the McCain campaign has lumped in the new Obama proposal to increase the NASA budget by two billion with a lot of so-called liberal spending proposals. As Jeff Foust notes, it’s a little mind blowing, politically.

Obama, after having gotten off on the wrong foot with the initial idiotic proposal to delay Constellation to provide funds for education, seems to have actually gotten inside McCain’s OODA loop on this issue. The McCain campaign really needs a smart political adviser in this area (as Obama apparently has now with Lori Garver, who seems to successfully jumped ship from Hillary’s campaign), but there’s no evidence that they’ve come up with one yet.

Of course, it’s not an issue on which the election will hang, probably not even in Florida.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a little more at NASA Watch. It seems to be a disconnect between the McCain campaign and the RNC. Which, of course, doesn’t make it any better, or excuse it.

[Another update a few minutes later]

Well, this would seem to clarify the McCain position:

Perhaps more important were McCain’s remarks on Wednesday that only the Pentagon and veterans would see a budget increase in his administration because of the high price the proposed economic bail out. Everything else – including, presumably, NASA — will be frozen or cut. Several space advocates in Florida and Washington DC expect the worst.

As I said, it isn’t clear that space will be a key issue, even in Florida. But if the McCain campaign position is that the budget is going to be frozen, they should at least put forth a description of how they expect, and will require, NASA’s priorities to change to accommodate it. So far, there’s zero evidence that they’ve even given the matter any thought.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Seven Apollos

Alan Boyle has come up with a new set of science-project-based monetary units to get our heads around the costs of the bailout.

This sort of thing provides support for the politically naive argument for more money for one’s pet project, e.g., “we could do seven Apollos for the cost of one Iraq war–surely we can afford at least one.” But federal budget dollars aren’t fungible, and the political importance of various choices isn’t necessarily consistent, either, due to the vagaries of how these decisions are made. Note also that, at the time, getting to the moon in a hurry was important for reasons having little or nothing do to with space. It’s unreasonable to expect those particular political stars to align again.

Not to mention the fact that because we were in a hurry, we chose an architecture and path that was economically and politically unsustainable. Just as NASA’s current path is, which is no surprise, considering that they chose to recapitulate Apollo, rather than building an incremental affordable infrastructure that would provide the basis for true spacefaring.