I couldn't let the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing pass by without comment, and not just because of what that event meant to a space-obsessed 11-year-old in 1969. Aside from numerous calls for an Apollo program for energy, or the periodic allusions to energy and climate change as the equivalent of the space program for our time, Apollo's extraordinary accomplishment might still have some lessons to teach us about what it takes to achieve goals of such a magnitude--as well as the proper limits of those lessons. It's also high time to give some serious thought to the role of space exploration in our future.
Although I had originally intended to post on this subject next Monday, on the anniversary of the day that Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, it struck me as more appropriate to commemorate the entire mission and the enormous effort that went into planning and executing it. I was pleased to find a website called "We Choose the Moon" that will retrace the events of Apollo 11 in real time, beginning exactly 40 years after the launch on July 16, 1969. NASA has put up a 360-degree interactive panorama of the lunar landing site, and the New York Times has extensive coverage. As interesting as these sites are, however, none of them can recreate the feeling of that long-ago summer, when families and neighbors gathered around their TVs--many of them new color sets bought for the occasion. That cohesion proved fleeting, and it seems almost alien today. Sadly, so does the remarkable combination of urgency and patient, meticulous planning without which the moon landing would have remained as impossible as it must have seemed a decade earlier.
When President Kennedy made his speech to Congress in 1961 setting the goal of landing on the moon within the decade, the technology to deliver that outcome did not exist. The first American manned space flight by Alan Shepard had taken place just three weeks earlier, and the first unmanned Saturn V moon rocket wouldn't be flight-tested for another six years. The financial cost of the moon landing program was so high--roughly $150 billion in today's dollars--because so much of it had to be designed and built from scratch, from the vehicles to the entire infrastructure to assemble, launch, monitor and control them.
It was also high because despite the intense pressure of needing to pull off this feat within eight years, it involved the step-by-step incremental development and demonstration of the capabilities that would ultimately be required. For example, the Gemini Program, involving 10 manned launches in 1965 and '66, was mainly intended to test techniques such as rendezvous, docking and spacewalking that were integral to executing the Apollo concept for going to the moon. Then, between the disastrous Apollo 1 launch pad fire, which forced NASA to redesign the Apollo capsule, and "The Eagle has landed", there were four other manned Apollo flights, each testing incrementally more complex elements of the lunar mission. This was the epitome of combining bold strategic planning with planning by doing; that much, at least, seems broadly relevant to our current energy situation.
The US moon landing effort of the 1960s created a vast technical and industrial pyramid. At its apex was the delivery of a cumulative total of 12 Americans to the surface of the moon and their safe return home. If Apollo 13 had not experienced its well-documented accident, and if the last four missions hadn't been cancelled and recycled into the Apollo-Soyuz demonstration of US-Soviet Detente, plus three visits to the Skylab space station, that figure might have reached 22. Yet as impressive and unprecedented as that was, and in spite of a host of valuable breakthroughs and spinoffs in electronics, medicine, and other fields, this is precisely where all of the analogies between energy and Apollo break down. Remaking our energy systems to provide the safe, secure, affordable and environmentally-sound means of energizing the entire economy--national or global, take your pick--will be nothing like making a few trips to the moon and then turning our back on it for four decades. It will require a durable bi-partisan consensus in government for at least a generation and enduring public support of a kind that NASA was ultimately unable to sustain.
At the same time, the US manned space program has reached an existential crossroads. The shuttle is on its last legs, and its planned replacement, the Orion/Ares system won't be operational until at least 2015. The International Space Station could be "de-orbited"--allowed to burn up in the atmosphere--as early as 2016 if new funding and a renewed purpose aren't found. This is the context for a blue-ribbon panel that will advise the administration on NASA's future direction. Ambitious plans for a return to the moon and an eventual manned mission to Mars look vulnerable to budget concerns.
I would be remiss if I didn't also mention the enormous potential of space to contribute to solving our energy and environmental problems. Whether in the form of space-based solar power or potential deposits of exotic nuclear fuel on the moon, the long-term solutions to the earth's environmental challenges and resource needs must eventually capitalize on the boundless energy and materials available outside our atmosphere. I'm also mindful of the profoundly-expanded perspective that space exploration has provided us. The widely-recognized "Earthrise" photo from Apollo 8's trip around the moon in late 1968 probably did more to awaken our environmental consciousness than a thousand speeches and rallies.
With the economy sunk in a deep recession and the country grappling with the seemingly intractable issues of health care, gargantuan deficits, and a looming retirement crisis, I can't imagine a better time to recall a moment when we proved that we could accomplish almost anything, if we set our minds to it. I don't know how much the media intends to play up this anniversary. NASA certainly has big plans. Although 50th anniversaries tend to make bigger splashes, the ages of the Apollo 11 crew and the surviving scientists, engineers and others who made their journey possible preclude waiting another decade to stage a proper celebration of their achievement. I'm looking forward to explaining to my daughter just how thrilling it was to watch that first fuzzy broadcast from the moon.
Showing posts with label apollo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apollo. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Monday, July 21, 2008
Changing Our Energy Diet
Over the weekend I participated in a panel discussion on space-based solar power (SSP) at a space-development conference, for the second time in as many months. My presentation focused on what it would take for a new source such as SSP to find a place in our energy diet, which will be changing at the same time that the technology for producing power in space and sending it to markets here on earth develops. The audience of entrepreneurs and space professionals was quite engaged by the idea that SSP couldn't just be a space project; it had to be a viable energy project, too. These same challenges apply to any new energy technology with a long development period, including some that are much more established than SSP. But with politicians, pundits, and experts of all stripes telling us we must rapidly shed our addiction to fossil fuels, the inertia of our present energy diet remains the under-appreciated elephant in the room.
I began my brief remarks with a simple pie-chart showing US energy consumption for 2007, based on data from the Energy Information Agency of the US Department of Energy. As replicated below, it showed the breakdown of our primary energy supply--the raw energy going into power plants, factories, and oil refineries for further processing into fuels, electricity and materials, along with the contribution from nuclear power plants and those energy sources that produce electricity directly, such as hydroelectric dams, solar panels and wind turbines. Despite the recent, breathtakingly-fast growth of wind and solar, and the tremendous success of the nuclear industry at squeezing more output from its 104 existing reactors, the low-emission portion of our energy diet only accounts for 15% of our primary energy needs, and less than a third of our electricity demand, with 93% of that coming from mature hydropower and nuclear sources.
I began my brief remarks with a simple pie-chart showing US energy consumption for 2007, based on data from the Energy Information Agency of the US Department of Energy. As replicated below, it showed the breakdown of our primary energy supply--the raw energy going into power plants, factories, and oil refineries for further processing into fuels, electricity and materials, along with the contribution from nuclear power plants and those energy sources that produce electricity directly, such as hydroelectric dams, solar panels and wind turbines. Despite the recent, breathtakingly-fast growth of wind and solar, and the tremendous success of the nuclear industry at squeezing more output from its 104 existing reactors, the low-emission portion of our energy diet only accounts for 15% of our primary energy needs, and less than a third of our electricity demand, with 93% of that coming from mature hydropower and nuclear sources.
US Primary Energy Supply
As in a diet, not all calories are equal or interchangeable. The 39% of this diet supplied by oil cannot be replaced by renewable sources of electricity without a lengthy and dramatic change in our vehicle fleets, because oil accounts for less than 2% of our electricity generation, and there's very little of it left to displace from the power sector. Nuclear power and natural gas already accomplished that task over the last several decades. The much bigger challenge now is to shift the roughly 97% of transportation energy currently derived from oil to other sources--either electricity in the view of Al Gore, Dr. Andrew Grove and others, or natural gas, as suggested by T. Boone Pickens. But as we make that shift, we can't leave the portions of our economy that will still depend on oil high and dry. We must continue to provide enormous quantities of petroleum, even as we work aggressively to shrink its share of our diet and expand the portion supplied by sources that don't emit greenhouse gases or contribute to our trade deficit. It is fundamental to the nature of oil production that if you don't keep drilling, its supply quickly dwindles.
Tom Friedman's column in Sunday's New York Times drew a parallel between Mr. Gore's ten-year goal for ending our use of fossil fuels and President Kennedy's commitment to reach the moon in a decade. Unfortunately, this analogy breaks down once it gets past the R&D stage. I regard our accomplishment of landing two men on the moon 39 years ago yesterday as the pinnacle of the 20th century. It was a remarkable feat, requiring billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, and support staff of every description, yet it ultimately only put 12 Americans on the lunar surface. We're talking about displacing 85% of the current energy diet of a nation of 300 million people that accounts for between a fifth and a quarter of global GDP. Doing that within a decade wouldn't just be moonshot-impressive; it would require a flat-out miracle.
Friday, April 04, 2008
The Mobilization
I'm accustomed to seeing proposals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making the US energy independent that assume it will all be a stroll in the park, requiring only the expenditure of a few more billions each year for R&D, after which some clever folks will transform energy the way they did the internet. Few critics of the status quo seem to grasp the scale of the global energy economy, nor has the media done a good job of explaining it to the public. The industry has tried, but let's just say it's not currently well-positioned to influence opinion in that regard. So imagine my surprise to encounter an argument that comprehends the scale of the challenge all too well, and yet finds the task not only worth doing, but doable. That's just what I see in this recent op-ed by Bill McKibben, of Middlebury College. He suggests that the appropriate model for transforming our energy systems is not the Manhattan or Apollo Projects, but the New Deal and World War II.
That's a truly mind-blowing notion. It's one thing to imagine that for a few hundred billion bucks, spread out over a decade or so, we might break our hydrocarbon addiction and embrace a cleaner world, with wind and solar energy powering an all-new fleet of electric vehicles, perhaps with plug-in hybrids as a transitional technology. Mr. McKibben suggests that what is needed is orders of magnitude bigger than that, and frankly, given the scale of a global fossil fuel economy that delivers 14 times as much energy as all the hydro-electric dams in the world--our oldest and still largest renewable energy technology--that sounds realistic. Nor is he alone in reaching this conclusion. Dr. Joseph Romm, a former DOE official and prominent environmental blogger, has also suggested the need for a World War II-sized effort, involving the construction of up to a million wind turbines globally.
I recently heard a comparison between the number of wind turbines necessary to power a new generation of US vehicles and the number of aircraft the US built from 1941-1945, which amounted to 275,000 fighters, bombers and transports. Now, I actually think that this could be done, and under the more pessimistic scenarios of climate change it might just be what is required. However, I do not see anything approaching sufficient motivation or the sense of urgency necessary to transform our economy to such a degree. Consider that in order to build all those airplanes and the other means of defeating Germany and Japan--with more than a little help from the USSR and the British Empire--we turned over a third of the economy to the war effort, with the federal government's share of GDP exceeding 40% from 1943-45--about twice the current level. Whole sectors of the economy ground to a halt, including the production of civilian automobiles. And that was at a time when manufacturing accounted for about twice as large a share of GDP as it does today, albeit with much lower productivity.
In 2004, energy expenditures accounted for 7.4% of GDP. With higher prices, it's probably closer to 10% today. Just our net imports of crude oil and petroleum products amount to 3% of GDP, at today's prices, compared to about 1.5% in 2004. But there's a real question about how much of our total economy we can devote to energy production, without crowding out the parts that turn energy into higher value outputs of goods and services. How much investment can we divert to creating a green energy economy, while maintaining large parts of the hydrocarbon economy during a transition that could last a decade or more? And the starting point for this effort would be an economy that is already running enormous fiscal and trade deficits, and facing the dramatic and entirely predictable expansion of government obligations to an aging population.
At the peak of the Apollo Program, NASA's budget consumed 5% of the federal government's expenditures, putting it somewhere around 1% of GDP. Devoting a similar share to new energy today would come to $150 billion per year, 30 times larger than the Department of Energy's 2008 budget. Ramping that up to World War II scale would put it in the vicinity of several trillion dollars per year. That is a long way, indeed, from the view of the UK government's Stern Report that addressing climate change would require around 1% of global GDP. So far, most of the campaign rhetoric about expanded energy and climate programs, as ambitious as it might be, falls well short of the relative commitment we made to landing on the moon, and even that will face opposition. While I understand the arguments of those suggesting the need for a de facto wartime mobilization to combat climate change, there is simply no way to ask the American people to undertake something of that magnitude, when we are still struggling to pay for the extension of the renewable energy tax credit, and before we have even taken our first steps on an emissions cap & trade.
That's a truly mind-blowing notion. It's one thing to imagine that for a few hundred billion bucks, spread out over a decade or so, we might break our hydrocarbon addiction and embrace a cleaner world, with wind and solar energy powering an all-new fleet of electric vehicles, perhaps with plug-in hybrids as a transitional technology. Mr. McKibben suggests that what is needed is orders of magnitude bigger than that, and frankly, given the scale of a global fossil fuel economy that delivers 14 times as much energy as all the hydro-electric dams in the world--our oldest and still largest renewable energy technology--that sounds realistic. Nor is he alone in reaching this conclusion. Dr. Joseph Romm, a former DOE official and prominent environmental blogger, has also suggested the need for a World War II-sized effort, involving the construction of up to a million wind turbines globally.
I recently heard a comparison between the number of wind turbines necessary to power a new generation of US vehicles and the number of aircraft the US built from 1941-1945, which amounted to 275,000 fighters, bombers and transports. Now, I actually think that this could be done, and under the more pessimistic scenarios of climate change it might just be what is required. However, I do not see anything approaching sufficient motivation or the sense of urgency necessary to transform our economy to such a degree. Consider that in order to build all those airplanes and the other means of defeating Germany and Japan--with more than a little help from the USSR and the British Empire--we turned over a third of the economy to the war effort, with the federal government's share of GDP exceeding 40% from 1943-45--about twice the current level. Whole sectors of the economy ground to a halt, including the production of civilian automobiles. And that was at a time when manufacturing accounted for about twice as large a share of GDP as it does today, albeit with much lower productivity.
In 2004, energy expenditures accounted for 7.4% of GDP. With higher prices, it's probably closer to 10% today. Just our net imports of crude oil and petroleum products amount to 3% of GDP, at today's prices, compared to about 1.5% in 2004. But there's a real question about how much of our total economy we can devote to energy production, without crowding out the parts that turn energy into higher value outputs of goods and services. How much investment can we divert to creating a green energy economy, while maintaining large parts of the hydrocarbon economy during a transition that could last a decade or more? And the starting point for this effort would be an economy that is already running enormous fiscal and trade deficits, and facing the dramatic and entirely predictable expansion of government obligations to an aging population.
At the peak of the Apollo Program, NASA's budget consumed 5% of the federal government's expenditures, putting it somewhere around 1% of GDP. Devoting a similar share to new energy today would come to $150 billion per year, 30 times larger than the Department of Energy's 2008 budget. Ramping that up to World War II scale would put it in the vicinity of several trillion dollars per year. That is a long way, indeed, from the view of the UK government's Stern Report that addressing climate change would require around 1% of global GDP. So far, most of the campaign rhetoric about expanded energy and climate programs, as ambitious as it might be, falls well short of the relative commitment we made to landing on the moon, and even that will face opposition. While I understand the arguments of those suggesting the need for a de facto wartime mobilization to combat climate change, there is simply no way to ask the American people to undertake something of that magnitude, when we are still struggling to pay for the extension of the renewable energy tax credit, and before we have even taken our first steps on an emissions cap & trade.
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