Can NASA Save a Struggling America?

November 1st, 2010 by Guest Contributor

This special guest post comes to us from Rebecca D. Costa, author of The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction (more on Rebecca in the bio at the bottom).

If we took a moment to rank every government agency in the United States on the basis of tackling complex problems, NASA would have to be at the top of everyone’s list. Thousands of scientists and administrators work every day to successfully bridge the gap between science and the great unknown.

But perhaps more important than their ability to leverage science to push the boundaries of human achievement, NASA has proven time and again that they know how to execute. Imagine for a moment any other agency being charged with getting a 4.5 million-pound payload into outer space on a regular timetable. Never mind time and again performing these miracles on a budget.

But here’s the real kicker. About a decade ago the folks at NASA began worrying that America might be losing its love affair with space exploration. They saw budget cuts looming on the horizon and fewer and fewer cameras were showing up for the next shuttle launch. As the country became worried about more pressing issues such as record unemployment, terrorism, climate change and healthcare, NASA was becoming irrelevant.

So the agency started looking around for a little side project.

It didn’t take long for NASA to realize that renewable energy was the next big frontier. They were also pretty certain the answer would come from the greatest source of clean energy known to man: the Sun — something the folks at NASA felt they knew a little about.

So NASA quietly embarked on a program called “space-based solar.” They were determined to solve, once and for all, the growing need for clean, renewable energy, for the American people and every man, woman and child on the planet. Imagine the impact this would have in terms of clean water, hospitals, infant mortality, education and agriculture in even the most remote villages of the world.

The idea behind space-based solar was to install solar cells high above the Earth’s atmosphere where the yield is more intense. The energy would be transmitted in the form of diluted, harmless wavelengths to a small satellite dish attached to the roof of every home and business (think satellite TV dish). No more wires or dams or electrical towers strewn across the desert. No more coal-fired plants or nuclear power facilities. No more solar mattresses affixed to our rooftops. No brown outs, power outages or back-up generators. All of them gone, in an instant.

Sounds brilliant.

But what would you say if I told you that NASA has this technology today?

What if I said that NASA has been banging at the door of the U.S. Department of Energy for over a decade and no one will answer. Every time they get a foot in the door they are chastised for “mission creep” and “overreach.” NASA? Those scientists need to stick to pictures of Mars.

Time to sound The Watchman’s Rattle: Wake up, America!

As China takes the market for solar and wind technology right out of the hands of the DOE (just ask any venture capital firm specializing in clean tech – the writing is on the wall), NASA stands ready for a new mission: to leap-frog the worldwide hunt for renewable energy by initiating a full-scale space-based solar program. We have the technology, we have the resources, we have the need and the will – now all we need is for the Oval Office to run with it.

No country has a space agency more knowledgeable, powerful or successful than NASA and the time has come for the United States to leverage this untapped asset. Forget investing in more nuclear power plants or trying to manufacture solar panels and wind generators more cheaply than China. When you can’t compete nose to nose there’s only one thing left to do: change the playing field. And in this case, America owns the field.

Space-based solar is alive and well at NASA. According to senior scientists who don’t care to have their 30-year careers at NASA come to an end for spilling the beans, pilot programs could be up an running within one year. That’s right, just one year. Compare this to the four to five years it takes for a single new nuclear plant to become operational.

America: stop chasing the market. Get busy getting ahead of it. We have NASA to thank for an opportunity to eclipse every other energy solution here on earth.

Rebecca Costa is a sociobiologist whose unique expertise is to spot and explain emerging trends in relationship to human evolution, global markets, and new technologies. Costa joins distinguished business leaders, Nobel Laureates, scientists, innovators and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors from around the world to address growing concerns over dangerous threats such as global warming, pandemic viruses, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and failing public education. A popular speaker at thought-leader and technology conferences as well as major universities, Costa is the former CEO of Silicon Valley start-up Dazai Advertising, Inc. Costa’s clients included technology giants such as Apple Computer, Hewlett- Packard, Oracle Corporation, 3M, Amdahl, Seibel Systems and General Electric. She graduated from the University of California with a BA in Social Sciences. Rebecca Costa lives on the central coast of California.

For more information please visit www.rebeccacosta.com and follow the author on Twitter and Facebook.

Photo Credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center via flickr (CC license)

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Tags: NASA, Rebecca Costa, solar space station, Space, space solar, The Watchman's Rattle, The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction, US

About the Author

Guest Contributor

http://twitter.com/andywade andywade

I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’m not holding my breath. This would never happen in America because it would prove that government intervention and economic planning can work in a free society. Those things aren’t supposed to work anymore, despite the number of American footprints on the Moon and other evidence to the contrary – so they don’t.
http://spacesolarpowerinformationservice.blogspot.com Karen Cramer Shea

What is your evidence that NASA has an Space Solar Power Program?

When asked about space solar power NASA’s Chief technologist said it was non-commercial.

When the the most popular idea on the Open Government Ideascale for the government as a whole and for NASA was a space solar power conference, the NASA Open Government plan did not directly address the idea but did have the line “Some of the ideas submitted to the site were infeasible or otherwise unpractical for NASA to address, yet received a high number of votes.”

The last space solar power program I heard NASA had was a voluntary effort which NASA Administrator Griffin shut down.

I was surprised to hear the Department of Energy thinks that NASA doing space solar power is mission creep since the Department of Energy won’t do space solar power because it is space.

Where on NASA.gov is the space solar power information you describe in your comment? I could not find it.
Alex

Good article, but I am usually very very skeptical of “holy grail” or “smoking gun” renewable energy solutions that solve the energy question and are supposedly full scale replacements of existing technology. I really want to believe you but I don’t see any sources in the article linking somewhere I can see the exact energy output, losses through this “wireless” conversion process, how large this array would have to be to provide enough energy to power America, etc. I would understand that this could be something that must remain secret since 30 year NASA vets apparently could lose their job for giving specifics, but some kind of interview outline or SOMETHING tangible that could count as evidence?
- Alex
  
  Also, if this array is supposed to replace existing energy for all US homes or something like that eventually, wouldn’t it need to be so large that it would block out the sun? I mean, it is a solar panel collecting sun energy but i see this thing being so large that it would be like a constant solar eclipse. Sounds like science fiction but who knows?
  - Brian
    
    If you look at the space required to provide power to the US if high efficiency solar panels were used it is a square only a few hundred miles to a side. If you put this high enough in orbit that it was never shaded (appropriate tilts etc) then it would no doubt be visible and might cause some interesting shadows once in a while but would not result in a permanent solar eclipse. If this were really a concern we could simply loft it into orbit around the sun trailing earth and beam the power from there.
    The main advantages of this system is that you get power constantly, you get more power per unit of solar panel, and the panels will last longer (hopefully) in space.
    The big problem is that it is very,very expensive to put stuff in orbit. I have yet to see a cost benefit analysis on all of this but I imagine the payback period (assuming the panels last long enough) is longer than ground based solar with appropriate grid modifications and storage.
    That said it might still be a good idea now and will certainly happen if we ever engineer a cheap enough way of getting the materials up there (space cannon, space elevator etc).
- Rebecca Costa
  
  Alex,
  You make excellent points. If you are interested in more information about the space-based solar technology I describe NASA has information posted on their web page – there is also quite a lot of info available from Canada, China and Japan on similar programs they are working on. The truth is, if there is just one single area of leadership the U.S. still retains it’s our dominance in space exploration – other countries cannot touch our record. Furthermore, NASA is the only government agency which has proven that it can prevail over extremely complex, multi-variable problems time and again. In this way, they have the processes in place to lead America out of the gridlock we are currently experiencing in Washington and into a new era of clean energy from space. But please don’t take my word for it. There is a lot of primary source material available which describes the state of space-based technology: your concern over enormous arrays was true at one time, but new technology has caused the yields to become exponentially more efficient in recent years and this trend will continue. . .
  
  Best to you and keep on rattling!
  - DH Stevans
    
    I’d truly like to believe you, but this article is long on promise and short on detail. Please give technical references where these promises are supported by figures. Otherwise, it sounds like a Ronald Ray-gun Star Wars pitch.
    
    In TWR, don’t you claim that a sign of impending doom is “the substitution of beliefs for knowledge and fact.”? OK, we believe in NASA; so give us some fact. For example, technology to beam down power requires stringent controls to prevent divergent beams from wreaking havoc at unintended targets like aircraft. Has this issue been resolved?
    
    The absolute worst situation occurs when belief in technology (and desperation for a solution) blinds the public to the consequences of their choices.
  - http://twitter.com/andywade andywade
    
    It’s political – Government’s not supposed to work, so any government agency that actually delivers is quietly shut down. Same with the NHS here in Brit, when an overarching, monopolistic and therefore obviously BAD government agency has provided quality free healthcare for every citizen since 1948. That’s not supposed to work! So it’s quietly being wound down and replaced with private contractors.
    
    The politically acceptable solution that panders to government’s and people’s prejudices and assumptions about economics is to give a lot of free money to private business in the form of tax breaks and wait for them to create alternative energy – which might work, but to be honest I don’t think it’s the optimum solution; while private business has in the past done large scale infrastructure coverage is liable to be patchy and lossy as the profit motive causes much leakage in the form of, well, profits.
    - Anonymous
      
      Well put.
      
      It’s a tragedy, eh?
      
      Guess people figure that someone could be getting rich off the ones that work.
Paul Marshall

Space based solar is not a free ride with regard to global warming. If you are redirecting energy to earth that would have bypassed it you are increasing net energy gain. Has anyone done a study that considers that affect?
- jfincannon
  
  No need to worry about global warming being made worse, with enough energy (from whatever source) you can extract as much CO2 as you want. Also, someone was worried about shadows. Well, enough shadowing from giant solar arrays in LEO may reduce the net solar input onto Earth so that might help you out.
  
  The problem (besides high launch costs and maintainability and survivablity) is beaming the energy. You can’t just have an antenna on your roof because of the high fluxes of energy to feed a home power needs and the need to have aircraft fly over head as well as birds. No, you have to build giant antenna grids on the ground and maybe in deserts to collect microwave energy beamed from orbit such that the flux levels are safe enough to not disrupt the climate or be unsafe.