| Wednesday,
January 26, 2006
Energy, Space, and getting around Pournelle's Iron Law
The Iraqi War continues, but we don't do anything about the underlying
causes of the war, which is our dependence on the Middle East for vital
resources. If we were independent of Middle Eastern Oil, the Arab world
would have to develop a real economy, learn to make things and sell them,
and in general live with the rest of the world, instead of supporting people
with too much time and too much money. They might actually learn to extract
the oil themselves, which would require that they develop some actual
capabilities other than bomb making and persuading young people to blow
themselves up and kill policemen, or sit on the floor learning the Koran, or
turning out Wahhabi preachers.
Yes, I know, it's a bit more complicated than that, and there exist
within the Arab culture some normal middle class people (middle class: those
who possess the goods of fortune in moderation; democracy: rule by the
middle class -- Aristotle). But the enormous prices the West pays for the
oil distorts everything, and forces us to pay far more attention to the
Middle East than we should.
And, as I said in A Step Farther Out about 30 years ago now, the key to
energy independence is to exploit the resources of space: energy and
material resources. About 90% of the resources easily available to humanity
are not on the Earth at all. Easily exploited: once you have decent reusable
ships for going to orbit and returning (energy cost for a pound to orbit is
about the same as energy cost to fly a pound from Los Angeles to Sydney)
it's about as easy to mine the Moon as to mine the sea floor. Of course that
requires using Lunar resources to bring Lunar resources to Earth, but there
are plenty up there. It's all been studied in vast detail. Just that no one
cares much, and we have NASA to stifle any actual attempt to do anything
with space.
But we could. We could have space solar power satellites. We could have
Moon bases. We could have Lunar colonies, mines and energy farms on the
Moon; indeed we could have had all those NOW had we not put NASA in charge.
NASA's goal is to employ its standing army. Once that goal is accomplished
it can do things, some spectacular, but Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy
applies at NASA in spades with big casino. Those whose interests are in
furthering the organization rather than its goals always get in charge of
any bureaucracy, but at NASA they have control almost as tight as their
counterparts in education.
I said back in A Step Farther Out that there were three great examples of
the futility of vast centralized bureaucracies: the Soviet system of
agriculture, the American System of Education, and NASA. One of those has
crumbled, and while the Ukraine has not returned to its pre-Stalin status as
the breadbasket of Europe, production is higher than under Communism. There
is no longer one big central Soviet system of agriculture. In America,
though, the education establishment, and NASA/Aerospace Industry are even
more centralized and accomplish even less than when I first wrote all that.
The remedy is simple and we all know it. We could break NASA's iron hold
on the future of the human race in a decade, and it wouldn't cost as much as
we currently hand over to NASA to employ the standing army. Indeed, we could
continue to hand NASA the money for its jobs program. My total program would
cost less than $200 Billion Dollars over a ten year or so period. This
sounds like a lot of money, but it's not when you're already spending
Trillions per year.
I've said it all before, but it bears repeating:
Prizes, and X programs.
Prizes:
In all cases, no money to be paid to anyone until the prize is won, other
than trivial administrative costs for a skeleton staff that can verify that
the prize conditions have been met. A couple of million a year to NSF and
the National Academy of Sciences would take care of that.
LUNAR BASE: under $20 billion
To the first American company to put not fewer than 31 Americans on the
Moon and keep them there continuously for a period of three years and one
day, $10 billion. To the second American company to meet that condition, $5
billion. To the third, $3 billion.
Note that it is highly likely but not certain that in establishing the
Moon Base one or more companies would develop low cost ways to access orbit.
To be sure of that, though:
ACCESS TO ORBIT: under $10 billion
To the first American company to put three humans in orbit and return
them safely to Earth 18 times in one year using the same spacecraft (90% of
the entire system other than fuel to be identical; multiple stages allowed
but each stage must be recoverable; the 90% applies to the system as a
whole), $5 billion dollars. "Put in orbit" is defined as completing three
orbits of the Earth. For the second American company to do so, $3 billion.
To the third, $1 billion.
SPACE SOLAR POWER: under $20 billion
To the first American company to deliver to Earth continuously for one
year at least 250 Megawatts of electric power deliverable to the standard
power grid, $10 billion. To the second, $5 billion. To the third, $2
billion.
Prizes defeat the Iron Law by remaining goal oriented. There is nothing
to guarantee that once the prize is won, the bureaucrats won't take over the
winning organization; indeed they very well may do so; but meanwhile the
goal has been achieved. And who knows, once an outfit wins such a prize,
there may be some more spark left in it. Organizations don't have to decay
into bureaucracies, although they usually do when the goal focus is gone.
We continue with:
X PROJECTS: $50 billion total for about ten such projects.
X projects are by definition under 4 years in duration and have a simply
defined set of goals. Their whole purpose is to build the project, test it,
and disband: to defeat the Iron Law by not forming a bureaucracy in the
first place. There is no permanent organization, there is only a goal.
I can think of a dozen such projects off the top of my head, but the
easiest way to do this is to give each of the armed services a small budget
to develop their own wish list, and ruthlessly reject any schemes that are
not real x projects.
A few examples:
Continue DC/X to built the SSX that Hunter, Graham, and Pournelle sold to
the National Space Council in 1989: a 600,000 pound GLOW VTOL rocket with
the goals of: Savable; Reusable; Higher; Faster in that order. The notion
was to determine the best mass fraction we could achieve with that weight of
vehicle. It would need 12 to 16 engines, and developing the plumbing and
control for ganging that many engines would be one of the major
accomplishments. It would fly incrementally, as did DC/X, with evaluation
after each flight. Build three tail numbers as with nearly all true X
projects. The cost would be in the order of $5 billion, which is high but
much of that is due to the cost of running government-sponsored programs;
the costs include some measures for training the design and construction
team since we seem to have lost all the old X project people.
Do it at Edwards, quietly and without a lot of publicity, and get it
flying.
I am sure the Two Stages to Orbit, and the Horizontal Landing advocates
can describe their own favorite project for about the same amount, and I'd
be in favor of funding that too; but these should be done by the individual
Services, or a command, not as a central DARPA projects; although I'd settle
for DARPA as the sponsor if the alternative is not doing it.
As I said, I can think of other X Programs off the top of my head, as can
many of you, and as can many in the space development community.
The entire package above, both X Projects and Prizes, would cost some
$100 billion over a period of 6 to ten years, and it would change the world
far more profoundly than the Iraq War will. It would bypass the
bureaucracies, and by example perhaps show how other great measures could be
achieved. The cost is trivial: that is, if the prizes are won we can cheer
because what we are doing at present won't get us those benefits for those
prices; and if the prizes are not won, the cost is very low to nil since no
one is subsidized for spinning wheels.
It only takes doing it.
Addendum on Energy Sources
Space power alone cannot quickly end our dependence on Middle East
energy. That will require, among other things, a program to build nuclear
fission power plants and make use of much of the weapons grade material we
salvaged when we stood down from the Cold War. The program would cost
between $100 to $200 billion over a five year period, but if based on a
standard 1000 megawatt design, we could build 100 of those in considerably
less than five years -- assuming the legal eagles don't destroy the project.
There may need to be a billion or so earmarked for that. Energy independence
is a national security issue and needs to be treated as such.
We've discussed this in other places, and will again. But moving ahead in
exploiting space resources would go a long way toward ending our involvement
in the Middle East.
(We also have mail on this;
actually the mail got me in the mood to write the above.)
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