FOR ECONOMIC RECOVERY, LOOK TO SPACE
From The Plain Dealer, 10 October 2002
From The Plain Dealer, 10 October 2002
http://www.cleveland.com/business/plaindealer/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/business/1034242417110840.xml
Winn L. Rosch
Special to The Plain Dealer
Advice to all those looking for a cure for the stumbling stock market and
stagnating economy - look up. Higher than that. Say about 238,000 miles.
The moon may be the answer.
Few people realize that the last economic surge as well as the other great
boom of the modern age - that of the 1960s - have roots in the moon race.
Many of the most exciting and profitable modern technologies had their
origins in the space program.
The list is impressive, everything from home smoke detectors and cordless
tools to heart pumps and protective clothing (like the moon suits worn at
your favorite hazardous waste site) have space-program beginnings. High on
the list are microelectronics and computers, the powerhouse of the most
recent boom years.
Total it all up, and you'll see the original moon program paid off big as an
investment. It cost billions but yielded trillions.
Now with the benefits of the original program fading, it's time to consider
doing it again.
"A lot of scientists would like to go back to the moon," said David
Williams, a planetary scientist at the National Space Science Data Center in
Greenbelt, Va. "We learned more about the moon from just those few years of
Apollo missions than we did in entire human history before that."
Sky-high payoff
But the real incentive is economic rather than educational. The challenge of
returning to the moon will inspire technologic advances like those of the
original effort of the '60s. Williams noted several areas of technology that
he believed would benefit from a new lunar effort.
Energy topped his list.
"I would want to have the most efficient and lightweight solar cells you can
possibly make," he said. "You still want solar cells for spacecraft, but you
would need them on a large scale to set up on the moon. And you would want
them to last for a long time and endure an environment that's both extremely
hot and cold."
Work developing the needed cells could lead to making terrestrial solar
cells more affordable - perhaps into a viable alternative to our dwindling
nonrenewable energy sources. They could help stall the greenhouse effect.
But solar cells can't supply all the energy needs for a lunar colony. Half
the time a moon base would be in the dark as the moon slowly rotates once
each month.
"Battery technology is one area where advances . . . would definitely be
required," said Williams. "Once it is night, moon colonists would have to
rely on stored energy. They would need batteries that would last for two
weeks under the extreme conditions of the moon's surface."
Any advances in battery technology might translate into better batteries for
other applications, for example in powering electric vehicles, which also
need extremely rugged, long-lasting power.
"You would also need to do more research in the stuff they did for Biosphere
2 into developing a self-sustaining environment," said Williams. "You would
want to grow some of your own food and produce some of your own oxygen. You
would have to develop technologies for large greenhouses with mixtures of
plants and gases."
With no chemical industry on the moon and delivery costs for fertilizers
that would be, in a word, astronomical, the needs of lunar colonization
could lead to advances in chemical-free farming and gardening.
Unpredictable profits
"The real advances would probably be things that you couldn't predict," said
Williams. "Living on the moon touches every single aspect of life - like
waste disposal, breathing and gravity. We know a little about what happens
under zero gravity, and it's not good. But no one has any kind of an idea of
what prolonged one-sixth or one-third normal gravity would do. Is it closer
to zero gravity or more like normal gravity? If you have any gravity at all,
it pulls blood to the legs. What happens in the in-between?"
Unfortunately, that knowledge and the rest of a renewed moon program would
be expensive. After all, economics are why we've not gone back.
Even thirty years ago when the Apollo missions were in full swing, the price
proved too high. Cost issues led to the cancellation of the last three
Apollo flights.
The three 365-foot-tall Saturn V boosters planned for those flights remain
as monuments to space technology, museum pieces in Alabama, Florida and
Texas.
"The thing that would really make a permanent kind of space program is to
find out whether there is profit in space. For example, going to Mars or the
asteroids to set up a base for mining," said Williams. "If someone found it
was profitable, the whole equation changes."
If history is any guide, however, the real profits will be found here on
Earth. The technological fallout from a renewed lunar program might just
bring another 40 years of economic boom.
Rosch is a Shaker Heights free-lance writer.
Copyright 2002, The Plain Dealer
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(6) 'FLY ME TO THE MOON' FOR CLEAN, RELIABLE ELECTRICITY
From Andrew Yee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Office of External Communications
University of Houston
Contact:
Amanda Siegfried
713/743-8192 (office), 713/605-1757 (pager)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 7, 2002
'FLY ME TO THE MOON' FOR CLEAN, RELIABLE ELECTRICITY
Moon-Based Systems Could Supply Solar Power to Earth
HOUSTON -- The key to a prosperous world is clean, safe, low-cost electrical
energy, according to University of Houston physicist David Criswell. And his
idea for how to get it is literally out of this world. For more than 20
years, Criswell has been formulating the plans and the justification for
building bases on the moon to collect solar energy and beam it through space
for use by electricity-hungry Earthlings.
Criswell will talk about lunar solar power systems at the World Space
Congress 2002 in Houston Oct. 10-19.
"Prosperity for everyone on Earth requires a sustainable source of
electricity," Criswell says. The World Energy Council, a global multi-energy
organization that promotes the sustainable supply and use of energy for the
greatest benefit of all, agrees. The WEC's primary message is that
affordable modern energy services for everyone -- including the two billion
people who have no access to commercial energy -- are a key to sustainable
development and peace throughout the world. See
http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/publications/default/stat2002.asp for
details.
Criswell estimates that by the year 2050, a prosperous population of 10
billion would require about 20 terawatts of power, or about three to five
times the amount of commercial power currently produced.
The moon receives more than 13,000 terawatts of solar power, and harnessing
just one percent could satisfy Earth's power needs, he says. The challenge
is to build a commercial system that can extract a tiny portion of the
immense solar power available and deliver the energy to consumers on earth
at a reasonable price.
"A priority for me is getting people to realize that the lunar power system
may be the only option for sustainable global prosperity," Criswell says. He
contributed a chapter to a new book, Innovative Solutions for CO2
Stabilization, published in July, which addresses major aspects of
sustainability and global commercial power. See
http://uk.cambridge.org/engineering/catalogue/0521807255/
Criswell's lunar-based system to supply solar power to Earth is based on
building large banks of solar cells on the moon to collect sunlight and send
it back to receivers on Earth via a microwave beam. Solar cells are
electronic devices that gather sunlight and convert it into usable
electricity. The microwave energy collected on Earth is then converted to
electricity that can be fed into the local electric grid.
Such a system could easily supply the 20 terawatts or more of electricity
required by 10 billion people, Criswell says. The system is environmentally
friendly, safe to humans, and reliable since it is not affected by clouds or
rain, either on the Earth or the moon, which essentially has no weather.
The moon continuously receives sunlight, except once a year for about three
hours during a full lunar eclipse, when stored energy could be used to
maintain power on Earth, Criswell adds.
The system could be built on the moon from lunar materials and operated on
the moon and Earth using existing technologies, he says, which would greatly
reducing the cost of the operation. He estimates that a lunar solar power
system could begin delivering commercial power about
10 years after program start-up.
Technology under development at UH increases the options for successfully
building a lunar power base. UH researchers at the Texas Center for
Superconductivity and Advanced Materials (TcSAM) are developing
nanotechnology techniques that could transform the lunar soil into solar
cells.
"The raw materials needed to make solar cells are present in the moon's
regolith," says Alex Freundlich, research professor of physics, who has
examined lunar material to determine whether it contains the necessary
ingredients for making solar cells. He, research scientist Charles
Horton, Alex Ignatiev, director of TcSAM, and a team of NASA-JSC and
industry scientists also have used "simulated" moon soil to determine how to
go about
manufacturing the solar cell devices on the moon.
"Our plan is to use an autonomous lunar rover to move across the moon's
surface, to melt the regolith into a very thin film of glass and then to
deposit thin film solar cells on that lunar glass substrate. An array of
such lunar solar cells could then be used as a giant solar energy converter
generating electricity," Freundlich says.
Criswell, who has a Ph.D. in physics from Rice University, began thinking
about lunar-based power systems more than 20 years ago when he was an
administrator at the Lunar Science Institute, now the Lunar and Planetary
Institute. For about seven years at the institute, Criswell was
responsible for reviewing nearly 3,400 NASA proposals for lunar science
projects.
"I really got to know the peer-review process and I learned about all
aspects of lunar science," he says.
For the past 10 years, Criswell has been director of UH's Institute for
Space Systems Operations, which receives funding from the state for
space-related research projects conducted by faculty and students at UH and
UH-Clear Lake in conjunction with NASA-Johnson Space Center. See
http://isso.uh.edu
NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: A publication-quality photo of UH researchers with a
solar cell device is available at
http://www.uh.edu/newsroom/wsc2002/wsccriswell102002.html
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* LETTERS TO THE MODERATOR *
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(7) RE: OCEANIC IMPACT SIGNATURES AND PERMIAN EXTINCTIONS? (ed't)
From Hermann Burchard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Dear Benny,
concerning OCEANIC IMPACT SIGNATURES AND PERMIAN EXTINCTIONS? Adrian Jones
states [CCNet Oct 8, 2002]: ".. Siberian Traps (continental).." Actually,
there seems to be sufficient data to show that there was a Sibirian ocean,
but no continent prior to 250 Ma. The continent of Sibiria was sutured to
Asia only in late Jurassic times. The traps are formed from magma erupted in
an oceanic environment, with a spangling of micro-continents [cf work on
Uralian eclogites by fellow Oklahoman Mary Leech, Stanford Univ and UC Santa
Barbara]. See my CCNet note of 17 September 2002 for details and
http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/Releases/1999/Jan99/r011999a.html
More details are in my CCNet notes 27 Apr, & 2 May 2001, 11 June 2002, etc
passim.
The eruptions of a plume or plumes from impact(s) in the WSB (and S Kara
Sea) most likely created the continent. in the first place.
I do realize this is hard to reconcile with geologists' traditional
uniformitarian views.
Cheers and best regards,
Hermann
