Entitled "Space: The Crucial Frontier", 1981 saw the release of a substantial report by the grandly named Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy. The council, chaired by Jerry Pournelle had coalesced from an earlier group advising the incoming Reagan administration's transition team. The 1981 report would be the council's first major public publication.
"PREAMBLE
Space is potentially our most valuable national resource. A properly developed space program can go far toward restoring national pride while developing significant and possibly decisive military and economic advantages.
In exploring space we will rediscover £rontiers and more than frontiers; we can rediscover progress. The exploitation of space will have far-reaching historical significance. The statesmen who lead mankind permanently to space will be remembered when Isabella the Great and Columbus are long forgotten."
https://space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Crucial-Frontier-1981.pdf
Much of the report and most of the subsequent discussion about Citizens Advisory Council has focused on overt military uses of Earth's orbit and it's (disputed) influence on the Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) aka "Star Wars". Baen Books would later publish a book authored by Pournelle and Dean Ing, entitled "Mutually Assured Survival" based on the report and heavily focused on space weaponry.
The problem with looking back at a group like this is it is hard to untangle the hype from the actual impact. Was the group really instrumental in influencing Reagan towards SDI or is the claim really an attempt to make the group seem more influential. The same is true with SDI itself, while the program delivered very little, defenders of Reagan's policy have suggested that mere possibility of the US gaining some of the technology under development helped pressurize the USSR in ways that helped pave the way to the end of the Cold War.
Personally, my opinion is that all of this was mainly hype at both levels. SDI was an expensive flop and in so far as it had an impact, it raised cold war tensions higher for a period until it became obvious that it was going nowhere.
However, reading the report decades later, I was struck by a section on a technology I remember reading about when I was kid but have heard little about since. One of the recommendations of the report was:
"The Council recommends that Space Solar Power technology studies be funded at a level of $30 rnillion per year for the next five years"
Orbital solar power stations, even with 1980's solar powers, would be able to generate huge amounts of energy. Above the atmosphere, solar panels would receive far more energy than the same panels on the ground. The report was very excited by the idea:
"SPS could become the cleanest and most economical source of renewable power ever discovered; thus the potential payoff is very high. Meanwhile, the technologies developed in SPS studies will be valuable for the entire space program."
The fundamental problem of space-based solar power was also its main advantage. The power stations had to be in orbit and being in orbit has two issues: going up and going down. Going up was the issue of getting large numbers of solar panels into orbit and assembling them into an array to form the power station. Going down was the issue of how to get all that energy back down to Earth.
The construction problem in particular was why the report suggested firstly a five-year study of the technology before any commitment to an actual space-based solar power initiative. The report noted that construction might require a fleet of larger space shuttles capable of ferrying materials into orbit. Alternatively, if a moon base was established, the solar power station could be constructed on the Moon using lunar materials. Both suggestions hint at the complexity of the construction.
The orbiting power station would deliver power back to Earth via a narrow beam of microwaves to a receiving station on the ground. That part of the technology is where the narrative shifts from friendly solar power to what sounds like death rays from above but (apparently) this could be kept to relatively safe levels.
This idea of orbital solar power stations did not eventuate, as readers will have noticed but they share qualities with other ideas suggested both in the report and in the book Mutually Assured Survival.
- Big engineering solution to social/political issues
- Requires and adds to a broader physical infrastructure in space
- Requires large government investment in research and eventual construction.
There's not a lack of faith in the power of capitalism but the implication is that the initial government spending would create the right circumstance for corporate space exploration and commercial exploitation. In Mutually Assured Survival the section on Solar Powered Satellites in chapter 6 is part of a wider discussion on private companies engaging with space commerce.
"The Birth Of Space Industry
As we might expect, private companies are studying space-derived benefits for profits in the near term. McDonnell-Douglas focuses on electrophoresis for the space manufacture of pharmaceuticals; Westech Systems wants to grow large silicon crystals; Boeing wants a biochemical lab, Battelle Columbus Labs would produce biomedical materials, and GE is looking at the manufacture of latex spheres for blood-flow experiments."
Mutually Assured Survival p130, Jerry Pournelle & Dean Ing, 1984 Baen Books
Interestingly, the space based solar power idea is not entirely dead. A group at Caltech launch a small prototype module into orbit in January this year on a Space X falcon rocket. So while the report scores few points in terms of feasible 1980's policy, it isn't way off as a piece of futurology.
Even so, the Caltech example is only a prototype and the progress made by the group was initially due to a private donation.
"May 2013: Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Company and life member of the Caltech Board of Trustees, and his wife, Brigitte, who is a Caltech trustee, make a $100 million investment that helps form the Space-based Solar Power Project (SSPP)."
https://www.spacesolar.caltech.edu/timeline
More relevantly to the theme of these loosely connected essays is the additional funding the group received a couple of years later:
"April 2015: A research agreement between the Northrop Grumman Corporation and Caltech provides up to $17.5M for the development of scientific and technological innovations necessary to enable a space solar power system."
The press release from Northrop notes the long collaboration between the arms manufacturer and Caltech.
"Caltech and Northrop Grumman have a long history of collaboration, dating back decades to joint work between Professor Theodore von Kármán and Jack Northrop. Von Kármán was a scientist and engineer who directed Caltech's Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory during the 1930s and later co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Northrop was an aviation pioneer who in 1939 founded the Northrop Corporation, one of the legacy companies that united to become Northrop Grumman. This unique $17.5 million initiative is one of the largest corporate sponsored research projects Caltech has undertaken in recent years."
https://news.northropgrumman.com/news/releases/photo-release-space-solar-power-initiative-established-by-northrop-grumman-and-caltech
"Co-founded" brings this essay back in a arc to Jack Parsons.
A real estate mogul donating money, a private university providing expertise, a major engineering firm helping with manufacture and a private rocket company launching the prototype into space! Surely a vindication of the power of free enterprise to innovate and push humanity into the future! It's a few decades than I would imagine Pournelle would have wanted but I also imagine he'd have been delighted by this combination.
It's an illusion of course. The bulk of the financing and the very existence of several parties is absolutely dependent on government money. Space X relies on government contracts. Northrop Grumman's major customers are governments. The project exists because of a decades long relationship between US military ambitions and corporate and academic institutions that support it.
It would be easy to call that relationship "fascism" and if anybody wants to advance that argument I'm not going to disagree. However, I don't think it sheds much light on this specific arrangement. Stratocratic capitalism (a term I made up) is a system where major public endeavours are funded and run by private businesses that are funded by public money devoted to military spending. It sits in a remarkable space in which its adherents can believe in small government, the virtues of free market capitalism, individual liberty and spending huge sums of money on Stalin-sized techno-future projects.
Once channelled through these channels even renewable solar energy becomes acceptable.
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