environmentalists get it backwards

environmentalists get it backwards

(via Curmudgeon's Corner)
Friends of the Earth sent out a press release on the day of George Bush's announcement of the new Moon, Mars, and Beyond initiative. They basically argue against going into space until earth's problems are all solved. They also rail against Bush for (rightly) not ratifying Kyoto.

In the process, they miss the whole point. The new space exploration vision is NOT "spending huge sums of money sending people to Mars". That money would get spent anyhow; NASA has spent half a trillion dollars over the last thirty years to do no more than go around in circles. And it will get about the same amount over the next 30 years; the EPA would be defunded before NASA. At least the new space initiative provides NASA with a direction.

And it is a direction that embraces private enterprise. That equals infrastructure, both here on the ground and in earth orbit; it is the simplest way to keep overall costs down.

This infrastructure would develop alongside the moon, mars, and beyond projects, and would enable other projects. Most notably among these other projects is what ought to be the Holy Grail of the environmentalist movement: one or more space-based solar power satellites.

Such satellites would be extremely large and flimsy, and would of necessity be mostly made up of material mined off the earth, derived from near-earth asteroids and lunar material. It would simply not be economical to launch all that mass through the earth's atmosphere, climbing a steep gravity well.

Energy collected at the satellite would be beamed down to earth in the form of microwaves (which do not interact with the atmosphere) to a "rectenna" on the ground. The rectenna is merely a wire mesh with lots of diodes, suspended above the ground. Light and rain could easily pass right through the rectenna, and the land underneath could be used as farmland with no risk to plant, animal, or human life. The rectenna directly converts microwaves into electricity.

Such a satellite would forever free us from the use of fossil fuels. It would also free us from the use of hydroelectric or nuclear power. It would provide the energy to crack water for the production of hydrogen for automobiles.

But the only way such a satellite will come to pass is if the power of the free market can be brought to bear. That is the most important part of the new space initiative, the private sector. And the private sector cannot get into the space business unless NASA's priorities change from what they have been for the last 30 years.