John C. Mankins, NASA’s 25-year veteran, reveals how thin-film solar arrays and giant reflectors could power Jupiter missions with sunlight, debunking past claims of solar energy’s space limitations while proposing microwave/laser beaming to Earth—potentially delivering hundreds of gigawatts for decades. Modular designs and launch systems like StarTram (electromagnetic tubes) or maglifters (5–10-mile catapults) could slash costs, but NASA’s focus on short-term shuttle replacements stifles innovation. Despite callers’ wild theories—from NASA’s 1970s UFO TV shows to cosmic magnetic grids for interstellar travel—Mankins insists space solar power remains the safest, most scalable solution, with Earth applications requiring ground-based concentrators. The ISS, a $100B+ asset, should stay funded as a testbed for electric propulsion and robotics, not be cannibalized for new vehicles, he argues, while noting NASA’s limited but growing incentives for private innovation. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, 7,107 islands, Manila, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, yet another weekend underway.
Hello, everybody.
This program heard from coast to coast and coast to coast and ocean to ocean, virtually around the world.
It is my honor and privilege to be escorting you through the weekend and whatever the weekend brings now.
In the next hour, we're going to have a NASA employee on 25 years with NASA, including 10 years with JPL.
So we'll, of course, be forcing him to open the secret NASA UFO files for the first time tonight, a little later.
Just kidding, sort of.
How you doing, everybody?
He's really going to be talking about solar power in space.
Now, as you know, NASA has always thought that anything past low or even a higher orbit would require some sort of nuclear power.
And in fact, they proved that by launching a number of nuclear-powered space vehicles.
But they appear to be changing their mind now.
And John Mankins is an advocate, indeed, of keeping nuclear stuff out of space, I think, and going ahead with solar power.
Now, let's look around at the world right now.
Oh, wait.
We did.
Aaron and I went to Hong Kong for three days this past week.
And I'm happy to report Hong Kong is indeed still there and still thriving.
However, there are some notable changes in Hong Kong.
We had a blast about, I would say, and this is no small matter, about 40% of the factories that had previously been in Hong Kong are now destitute, closed, empty, broken out windows, that kind of thing.
It's all gone to the new territory.
What they call the new territories, which really are the old territories, Shenzhen up in that area where all the factory work is going on.
I guess the population has gone from about a couple of hundred thousand.
I'm now referring to Shenzhen when I was there, to about 10 million people.
So from the last time I was in China to this trip, the population went again from about, to give you an idea of the scale of the change up in the economic areas, economic zones, it went from about 200,000 to about 10 million people.
Digest that one.
I think the last time I was in Hong Kong was prior to the 97 reversion to China.
No signs really in Hong Kong of the Chinese getting particularly communist in Hong Kong at all.
It's still the very economic, bustling place it always has been, and absolutely beautiful.
The interesting part was the second day, a big tropical storm came rushing in, and oh my God, we had a schedule to go on a tour of, you know, Victoria Peak, the normal thing in Hong Kong.
For those who haven't been there, I'll get some pictures of Victoria.
In fact, there is a picture right now up on my webcam slot.
Little slip of the tongue there.
My webcam slot of me taken by Aaron on the Hong Kong ferry.
We were on Hong Kong Island, and we didn't know what else to do.
We saw ferries leaving, so we had no idea where it was even going.
So we just hopped on the ferry and merrily went across the water, and we had no idea where we were, so we dared not get off the ferry, not knowing when it might come back.
So we just sat there looking innocent while everybody else got off, and then we rode the ferry right back to where we came from, safely.
It was a lot of fun.
We had a blast.
I've got probably 150 photographs, good, high-quality photographs, and I'll try and get some of them up as time goes on.
Looking briefly at the world news, family begs attacker to return Missouri baby.
Union, Missouri, a grandmother of a newborn girl stolen from a rural home pleaded Saturday for the baby's safe return as authorities search for an abductor who stabbed and seriously injured the infant's mother before fleeing with the child.
The family's in agony, it was learned at a news conference, please just give that baby back.
Pope Benedict sincerely regrets offending Muslims with his reference to an obscure medieval text that characterizes some of the teachings of Islam's founders as, quote, evil and inhuman, end quote.
Vatican said that on Saturday, but the statement stops short of the apology demanded by Islamic leaders around the globe.
They're angry, very angry.
In fact, the anger is very intense.
Pakistanis kill, or attacked, rather, five churches in the West Bank and Gaza over the remarks made by the Pope on Tuesday.
So they really are angry.
Hurricane Lane slammed into Mexico's Pacific coast and then got weak, came ashore as a Cat 3 storm, really messed up Mazatlan and all the tourists there.
Now downgraded to a Category 1 storm.
I guess you all know about the E. coli scare by now.
Shoppers changing their buying habits Saturday as spinach, never one of my favorites anyway, pulled from grocery store shelves because of the outbreak of E. coli bacteria that had killed one person and sickened more than 100 others.
Natural Selection Foods, LLC, recalled its packaged spinach throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico as a precaution after federal health officials said some of those hospitalized reported eating brands of prepackaged spinach distributed by that company.
A text message sent by a kidnapped 14-year-old to her mom led to her rescue Saturday when police found her in a hand-dug booby-trapped bunker.
My God.
Elizabeth Scholl's message also led investigators to name a suspect in her September 6th abduction.
Police were searching a wooded area where the girl was found for 37-year-old man named Vincent Flyaw, I believe it is, and Kershaw County Sheriff Steve McCaskill.
Mexico extradited accused drug kingpin Francisco Rafael Arno to the U.S. on Saturday, making him the first major drug lord to be sent north.
Today's trial on drug charges, Mexico's extradition of the man who once ran the Felix drug clan was a victory for U.S. officials who have been pushing Mexico to send them more drug lords.
I wonder how they figured out which drug lord would be the one.
Probably stood around with a bunch of straws.
And the short one drawn by the drug lord, he was the one to go.
Who knows?
At any rate, ladies and gentlemen, in a moment we will look at other, and I must add, very, very interesting news not normally covered by others.
The End Just a quick note, many of you writing to me and asking, how am I doing on my quitting smoking?
Well, pretty well, actually, as it goes.
I was unable to find any gum.
I'm using nicotine gum here in the Philippines, but they don't seem to sell it.
It may be here somewhere in the Philippines.
I don't know where.
But I did indeed find a supply in Hong Kong, so onward I go.
The one area where I'm unable to...
My...
The one exception to that seems to be radio.
My radio bone is so totally connected to my smoking bone, I just don't know what to do about that.
In other words, when I'm on the radio, it's just been so many years that I just don't know how I'm going to change that.
I can't readily chew gum while I'm on the air.
And even if I could.
Anyway, that's kind of where I am.
I've done well, but I have not cut the final tie.
I broke this story last week, and I want to give it to you in detail now.
I think it's a big story.
Lake Superior, UFO, found near F-89 jet.
Divers from the Great Lakes Dive Company claim to have located a U.S. Air Force F-89 scorpion jet fighter about 500 feet deep in Lake Superior, 200 feet away, is a strange metallic disc-shaped object, almost, almost, and that's a key word, buried in the sand.
Several years ago, the author of this had interviewed a radar operator from the 665th Radar Squadron whose GCI call sign was pillow.
It was located at Kelmut Air Force Station.
It juts out into Lake Superior.
He was assigned there at the time of the crash and claimed UFOs were frequently seen on radar coming in and out of the lake.
That's in and out of the lake, not over it, but in and out of the lake, mind you.
He personally had received calls from the Upper Michigan Police claiming they were observing UFOs flying over them at low level.
You may recall that big flap.
Two F-89 aircraft from the 433rd Fighter Interceptor Squadron were lost on the same day on 23 November of 53.
Shortly after noon, an F-89 Scorpion from an Air Force base in Madison, Wisconsin with Lieutenant John Schmidt and Captain Glenn Collins took off to test some newly installed engines.
Witnesses below reported hearing an explosion.
Then the jet crashed into a marsh, killing the crew.
F-89 aircraft were assigned to the 433rd Fighter Interceptor Squadron at the Air Force Base, but several were moved north on temporary duty to King Cross Air Force Base, Michigan.
Here we go.
It was less than six hours after the crash that the radar operators on Michigan's upper peninsula spotted a UFO in restricted airspace over the Sioux Locks at Sault Ste.
Marie.
An F-89C operating from King Cross Air Force Base was scrambled to intercept a large unidentified flying object that radar had indeed spotted over the Sioux Locks.
First Lieutenant Felix Monkla, I hope that's right, Monkla, I believe it is, was a pilot, and 2nd Lieutenant Robert Wilson was a radar intercept officer chasing the UFO that headed west over Lake Superior.
Lieutenant Monkla's last words from the cockpit were, quote, I'm going in for another look, end quote.
That was it.
The radar operator claims the F-89 jet was followed on the radar screen at pillow until its image merged with the blip.
Then it was lost.
That odd radar image of the mystery craft seemed to virtually swallow the F-89.
Then both disappeared from the screen.
It's fueled theories over the years that the F-89 was destroyed by a UFO.
The Air Force incident report reads actually as follows, summary.
Aircraft took off at 2322 Zebra, Zebra rather, 6.22 p.m. local time on 23rd November 53 on an active air defense mission to intercept an unknown aircraft approximately 160 miles northwest of King Cross Air Force Base.
The aircraft was under radar control throughout the interception.
At about 2352 Zebra, the last radio contact was made by the radar station controlling the interception.
At about 2355 zebra, the unknown aircraft and the F-89 merged together on the radar scope.
Shortly thereafter, the IFF signal, that's the radio Signal, the active radio signal, disappeared from the radar scope.
No further contact was established with the F-89.
Approximately 100 characters at this point in the official report are excised.
One can only imagine what that might have said.
An extensive aerial search has revealed no trace of the aircraft.
The aircraft and its crew are still missing.
On 23 November 53, F-89C serial number 51-5853A was scrambled by GCI from Kincross Air Force Base, Michigan at 1822 Eastern Time to intercept and identify an unknown aircraft flying over Lake Superior.
The interceptor became airborne.
From original radar control of the aircraft was maintained.
GCI and at 1841 Eastern, control was transferred.
The aircraft was flying at 30,000 feet at this time.
At 1847 Eastern, the aircraft descended to 7,000 feet to begin the interception.
Location of the aircraft was then about 150 miles northeast from King Cross Air Force Base and over northern Lake Superior.
At 1851 Eastern, the interceptor pilot was requested to turn to a heading of 20 degrees to the cutoff vector.
This is all official stuff, folks.
After the turn was completed, the pilot was advised the unidentified aircraft was at 11 o'clock, 10 miles distant.
In other words, look.
Radar returns from both aircraft were then seen to merge.
The two blips unexpectedly merged into one.
The radar return from the other aircraft indicated it was continuing on its original flight path, while the return from the F-89 disappeared from the GCI station radar scope.
Thanks here to the USAF accident report, minus about 100 words.
The Chicago Tribune reported 11 aircraft and numerous boats were searching for the F-89.
A spokesperson at the field in Madison, Wisconsin gave the Associated Press this official press release, and it's basically the same thing.
A jet two aboard vanishes over Lake Superior.
The plane was followed by radar until it merged with an object 70 miles off.
I believe it's Kinoa Point in Upper Michigan.
I know I'll get email on that.
Later, the U.S. Air Force denied, get this, denied the F-89 had merged with anything, and it claimed the unknown aircraft being intercepted, now listen closely, was a Royal Canadian Air Force Dakota C-47 serial number VC-912 flying from Winnipeg to Sudbury, Canada.
The Canadian government, however, claimed their aircraft was never over the water, couldn't have been involved.
Search for the missing aircraft was conducted by both the USAF and RCAF aircraft without any success.
You can visit Lieutenant Monklov's memorial headstone at Sacred Hard Catholic Cemetery in Louisiana, Mooreville, Louisiana.
It reads, in loving memory of Gene Felix Monklov, Jr., 1st Lieutenant, United States Air Force, born October 21st, 1926, disappeared November 23rd, 1953, intercepting a UFO over the Canadian border as pilot of an F-89 jet plane.
Now, all of this was just a mystery until along comes the Great Dive Company.
It says it's been overwhelmed by emails concerning the object that is believed to have hit the F-89C and caused it to crash.
Representative Adam Jimenez stated, quote, we didn't notice the object at first when we discovered the plane.
You see, they found the plane, and of course, that went flashing across the world, and everybody thought, ah, mystery over.
The UFO did not eat it.
It just crashed.
However, he goes on, when we did a detailed search surrounding the aircraft, trying to locate the missing wing, seems a portion of the side scan came back distorted in an area near the wreckage of the F-89.
We focused on the area, tried to scan it with a Shark II, but had no luck.
It was still distorted.
One of our team recalled F-89s were known to carry nuclear weapons called a Genie rocket, though this rocket was not deployed until later versions of the F-89.
We didn't know if some sort of covert testing might have happened, perhaps on earlier versions, and that might be what was causing our experimental issues.
Returning with the Geiger counter later in the day, we put that theory to test.
Nope, no radiation levels detected.
Initially, the object appeared to be large and almost teardrop in shape.
It was only 212 feet from the F-89.
Remember, folks, they found an object, a teardrop-shaped object, that close to the F-89.
Nothing else was close.
He added, the scan showed something very interesting, a plow mark trailing behind the object as if it had crashed.
The plow mark caused us to focus our immediate attention on the object.
We lowered our ROV remotely operated vehicle to it and confirmed that the mystery object was metallic, had a strike mark that matched the missing wing hole on the F-89.
It's possible the missing wing may be underneath the mystery object.
The section of the object that is visible above the sand is approximately 15 feet long by 8.4 feet wide, and as previously mentioned, has a teardrop shape.
However, this may be just the tip of the iceberg with the majority of the craft hidden below tons of sand.
Except for the wreckage of the F-89 scorpion and the unidentified object, there is nothing else on the lake bottom for miles and miles.
Our conclusion is it would be highly coincidental for this object containing a suspicious strike mark and plowed sand near the F-89 to not have anything to do with its crash.
Quote, we'll have to wait until next year and for the new dive season for more answers about this mysterious object and the fate of the crew of the F-89 Scorpion.
So I very much wanted to update you on that story.
And that is as much as I have up until this moment.
Listen, the summer of 2006 was the warmest June through August period.
Make that the second warmest June through August period in the continental U.S. since record keeping began in 1895.
So over 100 years of record keeping, ladies and gentlemen.
And this last summer turns out to have been the second warmest of all time.
Now, those who would, I suppose, be in doubt of this whole global warming thing would probably say, you see, only the second warmest, not yet the warmest.
But I don't believe in those kinds of coincidences, not those types anyway.
Do you?
They would say, you see, it's cyclic.
No.
No, it's indeed not cyclic.
It's downright scary.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM raging through the night across most of the listening globe.
I'm Art Bell.
By the way, for the record, the ride to Hong Kong from here in Manila is about an hour and a half.
Same over to Bangkok and Vietnam.
I've been considering, and I've actually been considering for years and years now whether I want to visit Vietnam again or not.
I had one other opportunity some years ago, and I passed.
Even seeing it from the air, and we did cross the Mekong and it jetted about 45,000 feet.
And it was kind of unnerving.
Anyway, that's Inya in the background.
That's something Aaron turned me on to.
It's absolutely beautiful music.
And just about every cut on that, we'll try and get some other cuts during the show tonight of Inya on there.
In a moment, you're welcome, by the way, to pick up the phone.
If you have anything that you think the majority of the world would be interested in hearing, something of some magnitude, by all means, pick up the phone and join us because we're about to take calls.
In a moment, however, I will tell you something totally unnerving from Pravda, the Russian newspaper.
Let me tell you, here in the Philippines, the entire country is cell phone crazy.
They have a very modern, up-to-date cell phone infrastructure here, G3 everywhere, even out in the boonies.
And you can get internet everywhere on your cell phone, all that sort of thing.
Everybody here, instead of calling, they do call occasionally, but most of it is texting.
It's very, very inexpensive to send somebody a text.
I mean, something like one peso to send a text, which is not very much when you consider it's 50 pesos to the dollar.
Anyway, I'm going to, I sent this in to the CoastacosaM.com website, and they probably didn't get it quick enough to put it up for tonight, which is too bad because I want you to see it.
I'm sure it'll get up by tomorrow night.
It's from Pravda, and it's for you cell phone lovers.
Two Russian journalists cooked an egg with their mobile phones.
Now, this is replete with photographs, ladies and gentlemen.
It says greetings.
I can only presume the following is factual.
Whatever the case, it does make for an interesting read.
How two Russian journalists cooked an egg with their mobile phones.
And as I said, it's replete with photographs here, the eggs, the original eggs I used, and then the little lash-up.
Vladimir Logovsky and Andrei Mosinko.
Listen, I'm going to give you the address so you can go see this for yourself, just in case you don't believe me.
From Pravda newspaper.
So these guys actually worked for Pravda in Moscow, decided to learn firsthand just how harmful cell phones really are.
There's no magic in cooking with your cell phone.
The secret is in the radio waves that the cell phone radiates.
The journalists created a simple microwave structure shown in the photograph.
Now, what you're going to see when they finally get it up for you is a computer, and in the foreground, you're going to see what looks like a couple of empty packs of cigarettes holding two cell phones with an egg in the middle.
A little container with an egg in the middle.
That's it.
Two cell phones.
Now, listen.
They created a simple microwave structure as shown in the picture.
They called from one cell phone to the other and left both phones on talking mode.
They then placed a simple tape recorder next to the phones to imitate sounds of speaking so the phones would stay on.
After 15 minutes, the egg became slightly warm.
After 25 minutes, the egg became very warm.
After 40 minutes, the egg became very hot.
And in 65 minutes, the egg was cooked, as you can see.
And indeed, they show the peeling then of the egg and the fact that they now no longer have a regular egg, but they have a hard-boiled egg.
Conclusions.
One, cooking eggs with mobile phones is possible, but it's very expensive.
$4.55 or 123 rubles in their case.
Conclusion 2.
All of this talk of danger is exaggerated.
Even if your brain gets cooked, it would take a couple of hours of talking on a cell phone to do it.
And who does that?
Conclusion 3.
We don't recommend carrying cell phones in your pants.
It would take less time to cook two smaller eggs.
So there you have it.
The address to see this for yourself on the web is as follows.
Listen very carefully.
The normal HTTP: www.kp.
That's kilowattpapa.ru radio united forward slash daily D A I L Y forward slash two three six nine four uh decimal four forward slash five two two three three forward slash print P R I N T I'll do that one more time quickly so you can fill in the blanks HTTP
Frankly, I hope it's not true, but one never knows.
on the international line.
unidentified
are on the air hello hello thank you for taking my call I guess what's been weighing on my mind a little bit is in Canada here where we have our soldiers in Afghanistan presently and I'm just hoping that our mission statement will remain clear and focused as far as helping the Afghan people perhaps not return to a Taliban regime style of governing.
And I guess what's been weighing on my mind a little bit, Art, is this whole war itself and how wars are created to support an arms industry.
In other words, if there's no war, then how do they make money?
I just wish all of these millions and millions of dollars would go into something more constructive or positive.
We are a warrior, pretty much a warrior species, you know?
We have wars.
We've always had wars, and I think we always will have wars.
I would like to think that there will be this wonderful, unifying light that will descend on all of mankind and change his ways, but I wouldn't place bets on it.
unidentified
Well, I just hope that you continue to have many years to come of your show and bringing on such wonderful, interesting guests.
And sometimes it may spark some ideas or just a different way of viewing the world slowly as each day goes by.
So when I handed her the cigarette, her fingertip touched my fingertip, and it felt like a pinwheel going around in my belly when her fingertip touched mine.
And a week or two later, I was feeling kind of bad again, so I was calling on God again, and this time I was out sitting on a chair watching for Jesus.
Well, Brian, the Marine from Vietnam, had me doing that.
This was at night up there.
And a bunch of clouds and fog moved in real fast and mysteriously that night.
And this was a week or two later after the first encounter with Tomorrow.
And I wasn't looking up at the time, but something in me made me look up at the exact moment this perfectly round flying saucer came in.
It was low enough I could see it.
The lights were turned off.
When it went over my head, they turned the lights on.
And it pulsated white light, and it looked like a wheel going around it on the inside of it, around the edge of it.
Well, after they went over my head, they turned the lights off and I heard them land.
A little while later, this same woman, tomorrow, comes down the road again.
He gets another cigarette from me as she's leaving, turns and says, I'll see you tomorrow.
I just hope they're planning on abducting me and getting me off this blasted planet, sir.
Okay, well, just don't be afraid to say what you really mean.
unidentified
Well, to get to that point, now, like I said, the cat's away, and it might as well play.
Now, we have a complete Republicans running everything now, right?
So we have gas at $3 a gallon.
People go, ah, you're nuts.
It's just a market thing, right?
But as we have the November elections are coming up, now the Republicans are scared because now there's going to be a few seats in Democrat, and Democrats are going to take some seats, and they're dropping the oil prices, right?
Now the prices are dropping all the way down to $2.
Now, if gas was $3 a gallon and we had some Democrats in the White House, people are going to prison and we'd be talking impeachment.
Prior to every election, we all know gas prices fall.
Now, can there be a connection?
unidentified
There is directly a connection.
When gas is $2 a gallon in November, people are going to go, oh, my God, it's $3-2, and then they're going to bring up the lines, and everybody's going to be, oh, we've got more gas is flowing, gas is flowing, gas is flowing, oh, it's abundant.
It's everywhere.
It's everywhere.
And people just aren't smart enough to realize it has been ripped off billions of dollars.
And as soon as we get somebody a Democrat in there, there's going to be lawsuits filed, and they're going to offset the price.
Like I told you months ago, I said gas will go down to under $2 a gallon, and it'll work its way down to 99 cents because of the lawsuits.
And you go, oh, you're delusional.
I said, well, you see, watch when it happens when we get the Democrats back, and there's going to be lawsuits filed.
It'll be secret.
And the only way we'll see is that the pumps will start going down and going down and going down.
And people are going to yell and go, God, is this possible that somebody could actually allow people, corporations, steal countless billions of dollars?
And we've got guys retiring with $800 million retirements.
And what we're taking is each American is being stolen an average of $5,000 from each American home because of this shortage.
And no one's doing anything.
There's people that need this money.
That $300 kickback that we got, oh, that's so nice.
But $5,000, it costs so much money to drive the work.
There's hundreds of dollars.
If you add it up every year, each American is being stolen at least $5,000 per year in artificial energy shortage and the cost of everything we purchase.
Our food products are going up as well.
And then we had even more ridiculous thing.
Greenspan is forced to drop interest rates down so the housing market goes up.
And how do people can afford a house when a housing price goes up to a $200,000 house goes up to a $600,000 house?
How does that help the economy of this country?
I know, it's their point to destroy the middle class and the poor, and they've said that many times.
But that's what goes on.
But we have to have a party in this country, not Democrat, not Republican, but a people's party where we could actually, when all these corporations are funding presidents millions and millions of dollars to do them favors to become president, we need a party, American party, where the citizens of this country could fund a leader for themselves.
Donate X amount of dollars.
Hell, I'd give $100.
Each American give $50, $30 to a certain party.
We could get people that give everybody a nice clean run.
Corporate America, I understand they're taxed sometimes too high.
There's always a war against Democrats and Republicans.
The Republicans, you know, give us a hard time with playing with the economy.
And then the Democrats tax the living hell out of the corporations, as you know.
They hated Clinton.
So, you know, instead of having a war against each other, we should break even, have a flat tax, you know, take care of each other and make this economy a happy place because there actually could be a revolution in this country, you know, over something like this stupid energy shortage scam.
Listen, you have been very clear in what you said.
I've got to run.
We're just about out of time here.
I do agree that there is a connection between the falling gas prices and the approaching election.
I think there's absolutely no question about it.
Now, what does that tell us?
Does it really tell us all of that?
Hmm, I'm not sure.
Is there a real oil shortage?
I tend to think there is, but I'm not sure.
I am, however, Art Bell, I'm sure of that.
It is indeed.
Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, whatever it is, wherever you are, coming up in a moment.
John Mankins.
Now, John was with NASA for 25 years.
That includes 10 years with JPL in Pasadena, so he knows all the secrets.
And 15 years at NASA headquarters in Washington.
So you know he knows all the secrets.
He oversaw NASA's exploration technology investments and managed the agency's advanced concept studies for a decade.
Now, John's president of a not-for-profit, the Sunset Energy Council, and a champion of developing abundant and affordable power from solar, energy, and space.
But I mean, here we got a guy who worked for NASA for 25 years, including 10 years with JPL in a management position.
So surely in a moment, we will force him to open the secret NASA UFO files.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology Now, isn't that interesting?
Nicoret, the gum to help quit smoking, is a sponsor of the program.
Now, how convenient is that?
That was run during the break.
Gee whiz.
Perhaps Nicorette, as a sign of their kindness and understanding, will send some samples over to the Philippines here.
John Mankins worked for NASA, worked for JPL, and now tonight he's with us to disclose everything NASA has ever found out about UFOs.
For years, NASA insisted it could not be done beyond the orbit of Mars.
Said NASA, solar energy could just not be used to generate electricity for onboard power on space devices.
So the agency used the extremely dangerous nuclear substance plutonium as fuel in electric generating systems, and people on Earth were put at great risk in the event of an accident.
I'm sure you'll object to that.
For instance, the 97 NASA launched in 97 its Cassini plutonium-fueled space probe, and in 99 had Cassini hurtled back to Earth in a slingshot maneuver to increase its velocity.
Well, they say an awful lot of people could have died, millions and millions of people.
And now, for some reason, it seems that NASA has changed their mind.
And NASA now says that even as far out as a spacecraft would be looking, for example, at Jupiter, we can now use solar panels all of a sudden.
Yeah, probably the biggest change in the technology has been in large, usually what's called thin-film structures.
If you take a typical solar array, like the ones that were unfurled on the space station here this week, they're flat-plate solar arrays just like you put up on your roof, and they take the sunlight directly.
A lot of the new concepts, when you go out to Jupiter, you're out in the outer planets, it's about 10% of the sunlight that you get at Earth.
So the intensity of the sunlight is much, much less.
However, if you use a large reflector, basically like a large mirror, you can concentrate the sunlight and still get useful energy out of it.
So then one would have to imagine if you only have, say, 10% of the light that you had when you were closer to the sun, that the solar panels that we would use for such a trip would have to be 90% more efficient than they were.
Or you use this large reflector, and you simply use regular old solar panels, but you concentrate the sunlight up to normal strength before You illuminate those solar panels.
Yeah, it's well, there have been advanced studies on lots of things for years and years, and this one has been studied in the past.
But you have to remember it takes a long time for an idea to go from the drawing board to deep space.
I can remember back in the mid-80s, so 20 years ago when the technologies were being set for the Cassini mission, which is out at Saturn, not at Jupiter, but it was 20 years ago those were being set.
The real innovations in these large lightweight concentrators was only in the mid-90s.
And so these missions, the outer planet missions that use the plutonium reactors, not reactors, they're radiothermalisotope generators, RTGs, the concepts for those all came about years and years before these large concentrators were matured or were valid for space use.
You should note that, and perhaps you would like to tackle this question.
I had a caller in the first hour of the program who said that he was just absolutely amazed that the closer that the election seems to come, the more the price of oil seems to drop.
This technology that you were just talking about that would work way out past where we normally put spacecraft close in with only perhaps 10% of the energy, can that particular technology be applied here on Earth effectively with existing systems?
Not the same kind of reflectors, but the same concept.
The reflectors out in space, it's weightless, and there's no air, there's no weather, so you can use very large, thin films like mylar balloons.
Down on the Earth, you use more conventional structures like aluminum and steel structures.
You use more conventional mirrors.
But if you look on the web, you can Google and find a number of different projects that use concentrators to collect the sunlight and then convert it into electricity.
Well, so the concept is that here on the ground, you're subject to day and night, and you're subject to the weather and changes in the season, and all of these things make ground-based solar very difficult, very expensive to use for constant power.
The idea with space solar power is that you go up into space where the sun is brighter, because it doesn't have to go through the air, and it shines almost constantly, except when you occasionally pass through the Earth's shadow.
You collect the energy there, and then you convert it into a beam and send it down to the Earth.
It was about a space-based setup that was working in the manner you just described, using, in their case, microwave with a nothing can go wrong type backup system.
And, of course, obviously, for the drama of the book, something did go wrong.
And the satellite began to drift, and, of course, the microwaves didn't turn off, and it promptly began cooking people on the ground as it went.
If you tried to do it 30 years ago when these ideas were first looked at, the answer would have been hundreds of billions of dollars to get to the first watt, which would be just outrageously expensive.
These days, it's not nearly so much.
It's going to depend on production and things like that.
But it's probably, I would say within 10 or 20 years, it could be cost competitive with energy that's, say, on the high end of the current market.
High end is like 10 to 20 cents a kilowatt hour.
Right.
And I think it could be in that range in terms of the power delivered.
So we're still a decade or two away from anything being, or even getting close to being practical, because I understand wind power now is around 3 cents per kilowatt hour, something like that.
The nice thing about space is it's actually fairly benign.
So once you have a system which is up in space, like a communication satellite, it tends to run for a very long time with only a few things that occasionally need to be fixed.
The amount of power that's available in space near the Earth is almost, this is literally true, almost limitless.
You could provide enough energy one way or the other, oh, probably to provide some significant fraction of all of the Earth's needs, many hundreds of gigawatts, many hundreds of millions of megawatts of electrical power.
And we've looked at it, once you deploy these studies, these satellites, as in all things with economics, the question is how long does it last before you have to start repairing it and replacing it and so on, but certainly for decades.
A communication satellite will last 10, 15 years, and then the thing that tends to fail first is that it runs out of fuel, so it has difficulty maintaining its position.
The satellite pieces themselves last for a very, very long time.
In fact, that's a very elegant solution, and it's one that has been looked at in recent years.
The solid-state electronics makes that possible.
And if, say, for example, you had a single large satellite that was capable of delivering power to the Earth, you could set it up so that it could deliver power into several markets down on the ground, East Coast, West Coast, in the U.S., Canada, and do it simultaneously.
Well, I spent, as you mentioned in your introduction, I spent my first decade at JPL working advanced studies and spacecraft systems projects.
And I really had no particular interest in space solar power.
I'd always regarded it as rather an odd topic.
But when I came back to NASA in the late 80s, I got involved in managing a number of advanced technology programs.
And in the mid-90s, I became the manager at NASA headquarters for advanced studies, advanced concept studies.
And one of my first assignments was to take a fresh look at space solar power.
The concept, as I mentioned, had been looked at earlier, had largely faded away because of the high cost.
My own interest sort of came at it from the standpoint of doing a fair and independent look to see whether or not new technologies might make solar power satellites more feasible than they had been in the 70s.
And after two, three years of looking at it, I decided that that was in fact the case.
Solar energy has always been relatively low budget and has had its own advocates.
Nuclear has a whole different set of technologies and different interests in terms of organizations and champions.
No, your point is well taken.
It's always been hard to argue for advanced energy in which solar and nuclear sort of looked at on an equal basis as opposed to having champions for one or the other.
Okay, well, there was a big debate, of course, about the use of nuclear anything in space.
So when we get back from the break, which appears to be approaching very rapidly, I'd like to get your take on the advisability of putting anything like plutonium in space at all.
From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
With John Menckens, who was with NASA for 25 years, ten of those at JPL, the death toll, had Cassini gone wrong, was put by Dr. Ernest Sternglass, a professor emeritus of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine at 20 to 40 million people, and that was not a skyfalling scenario.
Of 28 U.S. space missions using plutonium, there have been, to date, three accidents.
The worst was in 1964.
I wonder if you remember that, in which a plutonium-powered satellite fell back to Earth.
I think it was up in Canada, breaking up, spreading the toxic radioactive substance rather widely.
It was kept fairly secret.
I mean, they really downplayed the whole thing when that happened.
But I remember there were guys in radiological protection suits all across the northern lands gathering this stuff up.
To take the second one first, the attitude question, essentially, the way the rules are supposed to work, that you look to the potential use of nuclear materials for energy in space in cases where the sun doesn't shine or doesn't shine very much where you want to operate,
where the science you're trying to accomplish is really important and where a fair and independent evaluation of the engineering options leads you to the RTGs, the radioisotope systems, as the only reasonable solution, where reasonable is the same kinds of costs and the same kinds of science to within some multiple.
Obviously, in places like Earth orbit, it's very, very hard to imagine a case that would justify the use of radioisotope systems or reactors for any kind of civilian purposes, because the sun shines there.
If you look at the moon or Mars, there are day nights on Mars just like there are on Earth, but you look at how the rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have done, how Sojourner did a decade ago, they did fine with solar power.
On the Moon, there are places where the sun never shines at the north and south pole, but right nearby, you've got permanently illuminated peaks where you could set up power stations and get power down into the dark craters.
Out in the outer planets, places like Pluto, although it's not a planet anymore, evidently, places like Pluto, the sun is so dim because it's billions of miles away, it's hard to imagine how you'd ever do in the foreseeable future any kind of significant science out there without some kind of nuclear power source.
Yeah, I have to think that that's probably not a plausible scenario.
Like, it's probably a I can't imagine how you would get to that kind of dispersion of the material.
It's packed into a really hard container.
By that, I mean a container that's designed to endure the rocket blowing up right on the pad.
And it's just hard to imagine.
If you look, for example, at the pieces that ended up surviving coming down when there was the terrible accident several years ago with Columbia, the shuttle Columbia, and you look at this weird array of things that just drifted down from 10 times the speed of sound and 200,000 feet, and they landed safely in Texas.
It's hard to imagine how this canister that's got the radioactive material in it would not successfully survive any kind of an accident.
It's just very, very likely that it would survive.
That doesn't mean you should take the chance needlessly, but it's very, very, very unlikely that it would ever fail to sort of do its job and hold.
It might fail from the standpoint of being a good nuclear battery, but it's hard to imagine how it could fail as a can.
Yeah, but if something came and re-entered, for example, and didn't survive the re-entry properly, then I suppose there is a scenario where, well, you know, after re-entry you're in the atmosphere more or less, right?
It's true, but it would it would almost take some kind of a of a you know one in a trillion incident where this object moving at a high speed hit another object moving at a high speed in the other direction to to vaporize it.
Because otherwise it's just going to stay in that can.
But you should you should well, just because even if it's an infinitesimal risk, that doesn't mean you should take it needlessly.
And if you've got if you've got really good other options, especially options that could be cheaper, like solar rays have become much, much cheaper in recent years, then you should use those other options.
If they're safer and they're viable and they're also cheaper, then you should use them.
Well, and I think that's one of the reasons why for a number of the missions, at least to the outer planets or perhaps to objects that are closer to the sun, they're looking more and more at solar power just to avoid even the tiny possibility of an accident.
Now, whether or not the science is really worth it, that's always a cultural issue.
I mean, that's something that you've just got to sort of decide on.
If you really thought that there was life down in those oceans under the ice at Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, when you're down, you're not in space, you're down on the surface of Europa, you're down sort of inside Jupiter's radiation field where it's really intense.
A person would be killed in a matter of minutes if they were in that kind of radiation.
Solar arrays are going to get cooked.
They'll just get destroyed by the radiation.
So if you really wanted to find out whether or not there was fish down or living things down under that ice, you probably need to use some kind of radioisotope source for the energy.
There is a marvelous book called Rare Earth that was published some years ago that looked at all of the different factors that make the Earth special and that make it such a marvelously unique place or perhaps almost unique for us.
And it also talks to how easy it might be to end up with very simple life forms, how hard it is to get really complicated organisms like us, and how easy it likely is that you can get simple organisms like microbes or bacteria.
I think there's a fairly decent chance.
Any place there's liquid water and there are sources of energy, and you've got the potential for complicated chemistry and the potential for life.
And these places where you've got these volcanic vents along the ridge lines where the crust is thin, and you get these extremophiles that live in these really harsh and bizarre chemistry.
Well, there's some things that were probably taken originally to the moon by the Apollo program.
But for all of the robotic probes, they go through this really strenuous process of decontamination to try to make sure that nothing living could get from Earth to Mars or get from Earth to the outer planets.
They do this heat soak to basically cook anything so hot that nothing living could survive, or they do chemical baths or both.
They're very serious about it to try to make sure we don't inadvertently introduce organisms that we later go back and look at and say, oh, look, we found life.
It's more a question of just not taking the chance.
It's fairly unlikely, as I understand it.
My field is physics.
But it's fairly unlikely, as I understand, the biochemistry, that an organism could actually be sort of like an Andromeda-destrained situation, referring to the Michael Crichton novel.
The chemistry of living things on the Earth is so likely to be different than the chemistry of things that are elsewhere that it would be hard for them to, in fact, infect us.
But non-zero.
It's not zero.
So you just want to make sure you take every possible precaution.
In fact, a really fine gentleman who's no longer with us by the name of Bill Brown, who was one of the inventors of a lot of the key technologies back in the 60s, one time at a conference, he set up a little experiment in my backyard, and I stood in front of a microwave beaming transmitter.
And what I felt was I felt a little warm.
And that's what you feel.
It's like an extremely faint microwave oven.
And as long as you're running it fairly cool, then the bird flying through it is going to feel warm, but otherwise is not going to be appreciably harmed.
There have been some studies.
All of them so far show that plants and animals, they get a little warm, a little bit warmer than the normal temperature, but they don't have any kind of no direct ill effects.
Not like going out in sunlight and getting melanoma or skin cancer from the UV in the sunlight.
I mean, I used to be in cable television, and I recall working on a tower one time, and I didn't notice that I was standing directly in front of a microwave dish, and indeed my leg began to warm up a little bit.
Well, that's actually the beginning of cooking you warm up.
That's true.
And so the kind of power you're talking about, it seems to me, would be I'm trying to envision how it gets delivered safely without that beam cooking every living thing crossing its path.
Well, if you think in terms of the intensity, normal sunlight, say midday, this is sort of what we evolve to be able to withstand, delivers about 1,000 watts, one kilowatt of energy per square yard or per square meter.
That's about the normal intensity that we evolve to stand in terms of heat.
So we can stand in that and we get warm, but our bodies deal with it.
The intensity of, and we don't normally have that kind of heat.
Normally it's less than that because cloud cover or haze or something or the sun is low in the sky.
The intensity of the beams that's been looked at would be normally about 10% of that.
And only in the very center.
And so during a normal day, you know, let's suppose it was 4 o'clock in the afternoon, the sun's a little low in the sky, you're not getting a kilowatt per square meter, you're getting a couple to 300 watts, you'd get an extra 100 watts from the power beam.
But if you think about it, a square, a kilometer on a side, 1,000 meters on the side.
I worked hard, by the way, to go metric years ago.
So I use metric units rather than English units.
But about a half a mile on the side or about a kilometer on a side, that's a million square meters.
And so that area, which is just a half a mile on the side, if you had 1,000 watts per square meter and you had a million square meters, that's a gigawatt.
There are, however, these what I think you call space cowboys Out there.
Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic, a very good friend of mine, Bob Bigelow, he is a good friend of mine, has just launched and has another launch coming up shortly, and he wants to put a hotel up in space.
Now, if you want to develop your idea, are you better off going to the U.S. government or are you better off going to the Bob Bigelows out there?
One of the challenges in trying to work with any major new concept with governments is that you find it's really nobody's job.
So NASA is working on science and exploration, human spaceflight and aeronautics.
And in the U.S., the Department of Energy is working on ground-based energy, not space-based energy.
It's hard to find anybody whose job it is to think about something that's not currently on the agenda.
Now, there's people out in industry, entrepreneurs, who are constantly looking for something which is really new, especially if they can make some money.
And the newer it is, the better, because that means nobody else has cornered that market yet.
The challenge for them is to somehow make a connection to the business case, because they've got to raise their money privately.
Nice thing about public money is it can be fairly patient.
But capital that you raise from a venture capitalist or from a major firm, even from an entrepreneur with deep pockets like Bob Bigelow, he doesn't want to make an investment indefinitely before he starts to see some return on that.
Well, no, actually, Bob said to me that the best way to take a billionaire and turn him into a millionaire is aerospace.
And I'm sure that's correct.
Yeah, I mean, they're looking for a return for their money.
So, I mean, you know, saying this is a decade or two and a half decades away probably would keep them from entering the game at this point.
Listen, we're at a breakpoint at the top of the hour.
So, John, hold on a moment.
We'll be right back.
I'm Mark Bell from Manila in the Philippines.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
People like Branson and Bigelow, they didn't get to be billionaires by, well, donating money to things.
They're interested in making money.
So I wonder if you took a scaled-down, faster, cheaper-type version of what we've been talking about tonight, solar power from space, and gave it a shot, I wonder if it could be done in the faster, cheaper mode.
Well, that's John Mankins, 25 years with NASA, about exactly that in a moment.
All right, once again, John Mankins.
John, suppose somebody like Bob Bigelow came to you and said, look, you've been studying this for a long time.
What if we took sort of a faster, cheaper approach to this?
Give me your best.
Could we put something together that would be marginally profitable and would demonstrate at the same time to the world that this could be done?
One of the biggest things that has changed in the last 30 years since space solar power satellites were looked at seriously back in the 70s is the information revolution.
Same technologies that make possible the internet and cell phones and personal digital assistants and these ubiquitous networks of computing machines that are all so much more powerful than anything that existed decades ago.
Those same technologies make it possible to think about putting very, very big systems up in space out of lots and lots and lots of little pieces.
And so these modular concepts, you can easily envision how you might put together a demo where the pieces are full scale, but you don't put together as many of them as you would for a large solar power satellite.
And this kind of scenario, you could probably do certainly the ground R ⁇ D for a lot less money, for tens of millions, not tens of billions.
And the nice thing about it is that the problem is sufficiently hard.
It's a little bit like an Apollo-type situation where the goal is sufficiently hard that you're going to get a lot of very high-value new technologies out of solving this problem.
And I think that's part of a viable business case.
You can start smaller, you can put together a demo, and by solving the problem, you end up with a lot of technologies which have value both in space for new kinds of communications satellites and new kinds of power systems for NASA or for others.
And you can use those technologies here on the ground, or new types of rooftop solar and so on.
You know, it's very difficult to put that in a business proposal, though, to essentially say, look, we're going to find all kinds of new things by solving this problem or these problems to do this.
And nobody ever seems to buy that, even though it's absolutely true.
I mean, the space program has given us a lot, hasn't it?
Let's go back to the bigger project, assuming that we would do something gigantic.
It's not just the United States that needs energy.
I just came back from China two days ago.
And let me tell you, China, that's one of the reasons, one of the reasons that our gas prices are going up the way they are, because China is competing for the oil that we use.
And when you see China these days, you understand exactly why.
My God, they're going nuts over there.
And So shouldn't this be more of an international project than just national?
Just to follow on what you said for a moment, another area where you don't see it so obviously, even in an area like wind power, I was part of a review of the U.S. wind program some months ago, and one of the issues that came up in that meeting was that even for wind power,
the cost of a kilowatt of wind had gone up 15 or 20 percent in the last year and a half because the commodities, the raw materials, the steel out of which you make the wind generators is under terrible pressure from the Chinese market.
They're just buying up a lot of these raw materials.
And so it's in very pervasive ways that the growth in the global economy is putting pressure on U.S. energy.
But I think the answer has to be absolutely yes.
And there has been ongoing interest in certainly in Japan, certainly in Europe, and in other countries in new energy supplies and in space solar power systems.
But probably it's problematic to think about it being an international sort of super-scale government project like the International Space Station, which has been a stupendous engineering accomplishment.
If you look at some of the more successful international business ventures like Airbus or Boeing jets or the communications satellites in the 60s, those are pretty good international business models.
I think there's a lot to be done in space with research and technology development that there's just no way to duplicate those environments down on the ground.
You can get microgravity for a few seconds in a tower.
You can get low gravity but not microgravity in an airplane for a couple of minutes.
Very, very hard to get the kinds of environment that you can do things with.
it's unfortunate that the just the way things have turned out that it has taken such a lot longer and cost such a lot more than anybody had hoped it would back in the mid-80s um yeah it's it what is the current do you do you have any idea what the uh the current projected cost when we're done will be it's in the it's in the the um the many tens of billions ultimately i don't i don't remember precisely what
whether or not it's $35 or $45 billion, but it's some very, very large number.
Isn't that kind of the key to almost everything we want to do, not just the space station, but whether we want to put solar power in space or whatever else we want to do, we've got to be able to find a way to get per pound down to something reasonable, don't we?
Although I will say I'm a little bit of an iconoclast on this in that I think that the cost of the hardware is as important as the cost of launch.
A lot of people believe the cost of launch is the only thing that matters.
But if the hardware is costing you $20,000 or $30,000 a kilogram and the launch is costing you $10,000 or $20,000 a kilogram, they're both really important.
But all of the ambitious visionary things are hard to imagine as long as the cost is so high and it doesn't get down to a few hundreds of dollars per pound or per kilogram.
I am familiar with the space elevator, although there are actually also some other concepts that are pretty good.
The space elevator is interesting.
I think it has some difficulties technically.
Probably the hardest one is that it's an extraordinarily large fiber that's under great tension, and you're stringing it out in space where it's in the radiation environment in space, and it's going to damage the molecular structure of these nanotubes.
And I think over time, that's just, it leads to deterioration in the nanotubes.
Well, for example, if you look at how a rocket goes into space, the first, and you think about things like the Saturn V, where it sort of just rose slowly with engines going at full throttle off the launch pad.
It turns out that you burn about 10 times more fuel to get the first thousand feet per second than you do to get the last 1,000 feet per second.
You just have this terrible amount of energy to get going at all, and all that is fuel, and the fuel has to lift the fuel that lifts the fuel.
This is the rocket equation.
Well, if you can do something about the front end of that, just give it a little push.
This is like a catapult on an aircraft carrier.
It makes a very disproportionate difference in the overall economics of the launch system.
It's a virtual first stage, an electric first stage.
It would look a lot like a very large version of some of these new, new linear motor roller coaster rides, where you'd have a long stretch and you'd have a track, a carriage that would run on a very large stretch of electromagnetic track, maglev track, like a maglev train, and on it you would have the rocket.
I've never heard anybody mention it before, a catapult that would virtually be your first stage, which would mean, if you could do it, it would mean how much difference in fuel costs and per pound to orbit.
As long as you're burning up the engine, then you're going to have lots of wear and tear and high operations costs.
So what you do with this catapult concept is you'd fold the benefit, the mass that you're saving back into making everything more robust, more reliable, more spare, more redundancy.
Well, is there a way of converting that economically to understand how much difference it would make if you had a large model of what you're talking about?
There were some nice studies done a number of years ago with existing rocket engines.
Just to give you a feeling, if you can improve the operational margins by, say, 10%, so let's suppose you had a margin of 5%.
So you're operating at 95% of your red line.
If you can improve that from 95% down to 85%, so you increase your margin from 5% to 15%, that can improve your mean time between failures by a factor of 10.
Well, you have a dilemma, of course, in that if you're down at sea level, you've got the thick atmosphere.
And if you try to get to orbital velocity, which is many miles per second, you hit the air like running into a brick wall, and you get terrible heating and shocks and all of those things.
Jim, and there are big concepts for how to solve this problem.
Jim and his co-inventor, whose name I cannot remember at the moment, they came up with this clever idea to accelerate all the way to orbital velocity on the ground and then to run up through a hollow tube in which you would have a vacuum to very high altitudes.
And when you come out of the tube, you'd be in space.
And you keep the tube up in space by suspending it on a very large magnetic field.
So you make a magnetic field, just like magnets repel one another.
We're near a breakpoint here at the bottom of the hour.
What a fascinating concept.
A star tram, something that would be held a tube, essentially, by electromagnetic fields in place, and then the craft that you want to put in space would travel through this tube, and at the other end would simply be in space.
If that's possible, then I wonder why we're not working on it, don't you?
I'm Mark Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Certainly is.
Good morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you may be in the world.
My guest, John Mankins, has 25 years with NASA and JPL.
He's a guy.
We're talking ostensibly about solar power in space, but we're kind of moving all over the place.
The latest entry was Star Tram, and that one is fascinating stuff.
Absolutely fascinating.
More about the Star Tram in a moment.
So a gigantic electromagnetic field generated by superconducting technology, which requires right now, unless there's been a very recent change, very cold temperatures, right, John?
Absolutely.
So you would have those cold temperatures in space, but you said the superconducting apparatus would be on the ground.
So the tube per se would not be, the particles coming from space would basically just intersect with its surface and be absorbed, just like they would with any other material.
And if it came in through the mouth of the tube, then they would be absorbed by the walls of the tube.
So they wouldn't make it.
You'd have to work very, very hard to get them to go down the evacuated tube.
To pursue it, it's probably, again, it's a little expensive and you've got to have the right business model.
The mag lifter that I mentioned before is kind of a starter kit.
That would be like five or ten kilometers long, five, ten miles.
StarTram, because we'd want to take things not just to 1,000 feet per second, but all the way to orbital velocities, would have to be much, much longer.
So it would have to be 100 or 150 miles long.
And so it would cost billions of dollars to build.
Almost entirely the work these days, not quite, but almost entirely the work these days is focused on playing out the current set of programs in science and aeronautics and space flight and working on the replacements, the near-term replacements for the shuttle.
Well, I have to confess, since I was in the new stuff business, both managing technology programs and doing advanced studies, I think there has to be a somewhat more balanced portfolio.
So if I were running the circus, then I would have a different set of acts, probably.
I would almost certainly be pursuing these novel, low-cost launch concepts that don't require a whole bunch of technical breakthroughs, things like Maglifter and Star Tram.
I would certainly think that a lot of very novel things could be done in space systems.
Things like these modular solar power satellites, a whole set of things we didn't talk about in terms of modular robotic systems.
Yeah, there's been so much progress in the last 20 years in computing and in mechanisms and motors and so on.
Basically anything you can conceive of by way of a robot, you can turn it into the mechanics of that robot.
There's still limits in getting to robots that are really intelligent.
There's no sudden breakthrough there.
But robots that have intelligence similar to that of insects, that's very, very feasible now.
And if you think of doing things in space, not with a conventional spacecraft, but with groups of or collections of robots with insect class intelligence, think about what an ant colony can accomplish.
An individual ant is very little, but a colony of ants can do amazing things.
Well, similarly, collections of very intelligent, sorry, not insect-class intelligence, but very capable modular robots could do amazing things in space.
No, no, because I think the same techniques work really well to make the cost of human spaceflight really low and the reliability of human spaceflight really good.
I'm very even-handed on that subject.
I think there are lots of things that only people can do, like science, like discovery, like research.
And there are lots of other things that machines do very, very well.
Well, explain to me how this concept of insect, intelligent, smaller, robotic things would – Well, as a good example, let's come back to the idea of a solar power satellite.
In the 70s, the concepts that were looked at were like stick-built homes or stick-built skyscrapers.
You had pieces that were dumb, and you had workers, and you had factories, and the pieces got put together either in the factory or out in the field With people doing welding and turning wrenches and so on, quite similar to the way that the space station operations were done earlier this week.
And it takes a lot of effort to put together systems in that way.
If you instead think of a collection of spacecraft elements that they look like, say, a set of plates, like tiles in a tile floor.
But instead of being dumb, let's suppose each of the tiles in your tile floor was smart.
So they could position themselves and sort of take their place in the mosaic without needing any kind of assistance from a factory or from a construction crew.
You can envision remarkably large space solar power systems sort of assembling themselves out of a kit once they get into space and get to the right location.
Yeah, but most of what they have to go through to get be trained is they have to be trained not to use their intelligence, but instead to do just what they're supposed to do and nothing more.
So they have to dumb down to do these these remarkable formations.
But I don't know if you've ever seen synchronized skating or synchronized swimming.
Well, as we mentioned before, if you looked at it as sort of an investment within any major organization, you tend to see any large, sort of future-looking organization spending 5, 10, or 15 percent of its total resources each year on its farther term future.
And that's just sort of a healthy kind of level, depending on the business.
Well, it's just a question of having a lot of obligations for current programs, things like finishing station assembly and a lot of ongoing science programs, and at the same time wanting to accelerate the development of the shuttle replacement and to move forward on the new launcher.
Yes, but the fact that we're not spending that money, or at least 10% in the direction you talked about, isn't that, I mean, failure or waste almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah, the dilemma is all the statistics going back, both on the NASA side and in defense and in industry, suggest that if you're not spending that kind of money, your future programs are going to be in some difficulty.
You end up with a lesser understanding of the technical issues that you face, not today, but tomorrow, and that leads to cost problems in the future.
Or if you continue with the mindset of assembling the International Space Station, for example, with continued nothing but continued, I don't know, shuttle launches and whoever all is helping out, the Russians still are.
If you continue only in that direction and you don't consider some of these other options, then you're almost doomed, aren't you?
Certainly, it becomes very hard to see how you ever break through some of these fundamental barriers in terms of cost or performance to do really new things.
That's true.
It's always going to cost billions of dollars to do anything, then it's very hard to imagine how you do anything new.
And furthermore, since the monies aren't available for developing these other ideas, nobody bothers.
I mean, if they come up with a really good idea, whether it's a Star Tram or anything else, they're not going to pursue it because there's not going to be any money available for it.
There's still some very novel things that are being done, for example, at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts and by a number of the NASA centers.
Well, also, Will, another aspect of the first decade of the agency, since almost everything that was going to be accomplished was new and was really, really hard, of necessity, accomplishing those objectives led to a tremendous amount of innovation.
It's, um, I don't, I, I, I actually, I, I, Having gone through those years, my feeling was that it wasn't so much the shake-up from Challenger.
I mean, people were trying hard and people made mistakes.
People are people.
But if you go from the latter 90s, yeah, the latter 80s after Challenger, and you look at the rather tectonic shifts in the White House going from George Bush Sr. to Bill Clinton, and then almost immediately after that, from the Democratic Congress to the Republican Congress.
And there were such broad shifts.
And to some extent, the space exploration initiative that was part of the original Bush administration's legacy came out in 1989.
That became a political football.
Those sort of getting kicked back and forth that way led to a certain amount of paralysis in terms of thinking about the farther term future that really didn't get resolved until the later 90s.
When we come back, I'd like to begin to answer some phone calls and see what the public has to say, and I'm sure it'll be quite a bit.
So hold tight, John, from Manila in the Philippines, Southeast Asia, where the sun is high in the sky, and it's, I don't know, around 4 in the afternoon or so.
I'm Mark Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
By the way, everybody, I think I've been enlisted to do a little extra duty toward the end of the year.
George is going to have a much-earned vacation toward the end of the year, you know, Christmas to New Year, that sort of area.
And, of course, Ghost to Ghost AM, the traditional, and then the predictions for the new year, all that sort of thing.
And by the way, I'm going to have to have the network collect those predictions because I'm afraid they remain locked in the Bell Family Vault.
So are you listening, network?
I'm going to need a list of last year's predictions.
I'm sure you have that on record.
Sorry to put somebody through going through all that, but it's just one of those things that got left out as I headed for the other side of the world.
John Mankins is here.
He's got 25 years collectively with NASA and JPL, and it's not very frequently, it's not very frequent that you ever get an opportunity to ask somebody of this caliber question.
So that comes next.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Coast to Coast AM John, I certainly cannot guarantee what awaits you, but I can tell you that every single line is blinking, so a lot of people want to talk to you, that's for sure.
It's basically a very large solar, either photovoltaic or solar dynamic farm where you have a very large number of solar arrays deployed someplace where the sun shines a great deal, either in, for example, in Arizona for North America, and then you ship the power around wherever you need it.
Yeah, the central challenge, there are a couple of central challenges with that particular architecture.
One, obviously it's going to work when the sun is shining, but you do have challenges with regard to when the sun is not shining, meaning you need a considerable amount of energy storage.
The other challenge is that it won't necessarily work for all locations in the world.
And there are some technical risks with regard to taking large amounts of power, gigawatts, hundreds of gigawatts of power across some International boundaries, some geopolitical issues.
So the fundamental trade, there's always going to be an increasing demand, I mean, I think for the rest of the century for more and more solar power on the ground.
The more fundamental competition is between the energy storage systems that you need for ground solar power and other competing technologies, whether it's carbon sequestration or solar-powered satellites.
And you think solar-powered satellites will, for example, John, in Nevada, where I'm from, or in Arizona, as you point out, or that part of the country generally, you have in excess of 300 days of sunshine usually.
And when you don't have sun, you usually have wind.
You also have a great deal, about 90% in the case of Nevada, of government land.
That's an awful lot of area where you could put an awful lot of solar and wind power.
The best recent study was actually done by the European Space Agency.
They looked at a very similar scenario where they would, and they didn't take into account any kind of geopolitical issues.
They looked at the engineering of putting a very, very large solar array in North Africa, large enough, 100 gigawatts, so that it would provide a substantial fraction of the energy for Europe.
And then bringing that energy around, say, through the Middle East or up through Spain through large cables, power cables, high voltage cables, compared that to the space solar power case, and they ended up with about a wash.
I.e., the cost of the two approaches, if you included the energy storage, because it's such a stupendous amount of power that you've got to store, that it turned out the costs were about equal.
I wonder if we could convert the liquid storage tanks on the shuttle-type mechanisms to doer flasks so we could reduce the foam problem and then take them up into space for your hotels or to continue to increase the size of the space platform and eventually use that for ablation and thermal shielding.
And when you want to go to Mars, there's a light you just tow this thing that you keep raising to a higher and higher altitude as you use the garbage as your shielding.
Yeah, and there's a very nice website which has been up for a long time.
The Space Island Group has been looking at the potential use of the Space Shuttle's external tank for other purposes in space for a number of years.
And I guess the difficulty, of course, for the shuttle is that the rest of that infrastructure is already coming up on 30 years old and is at the end of its useful engineering life.
And so replacing a particular element like the external tank when there's only three, four years left in the overall system is kind of problematic.
If it had been designed in, you know, if you go back to the decisions that were made during the Nixon administration in the face of strong budget cuts from the White House at that time, if you could go back then and somehow get a little extra money, another billion dollars, and design that in, then you could have done it.
But putting it in after the fact is just very, very hard.
I was listening about that design where the tube into space and everything using electromagnetics, one based on the Earth and the other one based in space.
I wanted to know, basically, lines of flux that propagate don't propagate straight.
They're more of a clover leaf when they come off going from north to south or from south to north, whichever.
So how would you solve the problem of that tube wanting to roll off to the edges?
If you hold two magnets together, they hold together fine as long as you've got a hold of them.
But the second you let go, they move off to one side or the other.
Yeah, it's a the guy, the guy in question here, his name is Jim Powell, and I would actually, for details, I would refer you to his patent because he does have a patent on the StarTram.
But the simple answer is that the electromagnetic system is actively controlled.
So you're absolutely right.
If you take two permanent magnets that are not in some way controlled and you try to get them to sort of float on top of each other, it won't work.
It's like an egg standing on the pointing end.
It wants to slip off one way or the other.
That's right.
But if you dynamically control the fields, as it tries to slip, you can adjust it so that it'll stay floating.
That's sort of the basis of how the magleft trains that Jim Powell and Gordon Daniel originally invented in the 60s works.
And it's been tested very successfully in Japan, for example.
Are you aware that NASA produced a TV show, and in that show, they showed and told that every flight to and from the moon was accompanied by a physical or nebulous object, and they showed all the pictures.
I'd just like to point out, real quickly, one that really caught my attention because I saw James McDiviott on a TV interview previous to this show in which he said he took a picture of a cylindrical object with an appendage coming out the side, like a Coke can with a straw coming out the side.
And when he got back to Houston, they said, no, we don't have anything like that.
And then NASA's show, you know, produced at the top of the show, they have a disclaimer that said, you know, this may alarm some people.
And they went one by one through all the flights.
And they said, and here are James McDivitt.
And boy, I said, oh, boy.
And there it was, just like you said, a cylindrical object with an appendage.
And every flight to and from the moon, they showed all the objects.
So where has that information gone?
I can't be the only one that saw the show.
I mean, that information needs to be brought back to the public.
Yeah, I think most likely what you saw was a thing called the Lightcraft.
And one of the strong champions for this concept is a gentleman by the name of Lake Mirabeau, M-Y-R-A-B-O-W, as I recall.
His first name is Lake.
I think it's L-E-I-K.
He was for many years a professor at Rensseler Polytechnic.
I don't know where he is now.
And his work on the lightcraft, I actually sponsored, I funded that when I was back in the mid-90s when I was in charge of advanced concept studies.
The idea is a very interesting one where you power, basically keep your power generation on the ground and you beam power to a vehicle as it's going up.
There are a couple of dilemmas with the concept that you might want to look at.
Probably the biggest one is that it's hard for it to carry any payload.
You can get enough power to it without breaking down the air.
It's a question of energy density.
You can get enough power to it without breaking down the air for the vehicle to sort of stay aloft, but it's hard for it to carry any payload.
So it's hard to see how it becomes an economically cheap way to get things to orbit.
But you might Google it, Lightcraft and Lake Maribo.
Well, the reason I asked that is you were talking earlier about smaller objects with the intelligence of an insect being able to, once they were up there, essentially assemble themselves into something.
And if this was a way to get smaller objects into orbit and you mated those two, wouldn't you have something?
Now, I guess the danger of a loose bolt is that even though it simply harmlessly floated away from the space station, it's still going at, well, what, 18,000 miles an hour?
You pretty much answered my launching laser question, so I have an alternative question.
A caller called in, I don't know, a couple years ago about raising a small satellite up with the balloon to the, it floated to the top of the atmosphere, he claimed, and then he kicked it out with a small explosive.
I was wondering if anything to do with a balloon would be feasible.
There's a whole family of concepts that we described in our studies in the 90s as launch assists, things that help you get started in your launch.
And launching from underside the wing of an aircraft like the Pegasus launcher does from Orbital Sciences, that's a company that makes it.
That's one approach.
Going up on a balloon and launching, that's another approach.
Going from a catapult, but one that's on the ground, the mag lifter, that's another approach.
All of them have some advantages.
The balloon one has actually been looked at in the past, and it does give you some advantages because of the altitude.
It doesn't give you as much as, say, the sea launch concept, where you take the rocket and you take it on a seagoing platform down closer to the equator where you get some of the advantage of the Earth's spin on its axis.
But the balloon launch is a perfectly viable strategy.
If you're right on the equator, the spinning of the Earth, and you launch in the direction of the spin, the spin of the Earth gives you an advantage of about 1,000 feet a second.
That's one of the reasons why the same rocket delivers so much less payload if it's going into a polar orbit against the spin of the Earth or independent of the spin of the Earth versus launching due east.
That's why all the launches that go up into as much as they can, you want to go due east.
The European Space Agency built their launch facility at Karou in South America to be very near to the equator.
Well, nominally, if you want to run your home, you need something like, depending on the size of the home, something from like three to five kilowatts, depending on what you do at night.
There's a great many websites these days that offer insight or information into what you can do with home solar photovoltaic systems.
The production is so high in the market.
It's just grown so much in the last five, ten years.
In general, the efficiencies are going to be something like 10 to 20 percent, which means something like 10 to 20 percent of the sunlight which falls on that part of your roof is going to be turned into voltage.
And so if it's the middle of the day, so it's not in the afternoon, if it's the middle of the day, you might get 100 or 200 watts per square yard of solar array.
And so it would depend on how much power that you want to have come from solar versus from the grid.
And for her question, there are all kinds of spiffy new Products on the market today that run, for example, small fountains and lights that will stay on all night and that sort of thing.
There are all kinds of things like that out there right now.
But when you're talking about powering a whole house, it takes actually a lot more than people imagine.
You use more power than you imagine that way.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with John Mackins.
I was just going to ask the Honorable John, what about gravitationally assisted spaceflight along magnetic lines or grids that exist in the universe, but not just shooting yourself around the moon or something, but maybe 100 years from now, maybe propel yourself from one star to the next,
creating more and more velocity in your spacecraft, possibly even reaching a percentage of the speed of light by actually tuning into the frequency of 1,000 points of light at one time and propelling yourself across these magnetic lines or grids in the universe using gravitationally assisted flight.
Gravity assist per se is a technique that was invented back, I think, in the 60s.
The way gravity assist is used typically is for a spacecraft to come in and sort of slingshot off of a larger, more massive object like a planet and pick up energy from the planet that it goes swimming by, or swinging by rather.
There's another approach for using sort of the complex gravitational fields in our solar system, which is called the gravitational superhighway, or terms to that effect.
So a gentleman that you might look for on the internet, his papers, his name, as I recall, was Martin Lowe.
Another lady who was a university professor, as I recall, her name was Kathleen Howe, is basically using the complicated gravitational fields of the sun and the moon and other planets to follow very low energy paths through space.
You can go from point A to point B without using a lot of rocket fuel.
The dilemma with those, which is really cool and they're very efficient, the dilemma with those is that they tend to be very slow.
You sort of follow the path of least resistance and you slowly glide from point to point.
And so you don't get anywhere very quickly, but you get places very, very efficiently.
One other comment with regard to interstellar flight.
There actually was a concept that was looked at.
It came up with some years ago by Freeman Dyson, a truly brilliant man, to use a very supermassive object like a neutron star to get up to relativistic speeds.
The big dilemma, of course, is that there aren't any of those in our immediate neighborhood, which is a good thing, actually.
And so they're not very useful in trying to get to starflight anytime soon.
My question to you is actually a couple of questions.
One, what do you think will be the best use of the International Space Station?
My guess would be like protein crystal growth.
And my second question related to that is there's some concern about taking research funds and utilization funds from the ISS to pay for the next space vehicle.
And don't you think that sets a bad precedent by taking away utilization and research funds?
So what do you think the best product is, and what do you think about taking away research funds for the ISS?
Yeah, clearly, just going to the latter one, since the U.S. has invested tens of billions of dollars in this orbiting research laboratory, it seems somewhat penny-wise and pound-foolish not to make the modest additional investments that are needed to use the space station to do the kind of research that it's capable of doing.
So obviously, I think that there needs to be an adequate investment in space station-based research.
In terms of which kind that I think is going to be most profitable, I think I have to admit that I'm biased.
As I said, I'm a physicist.
My background is largely in the engineering sciences, not in biomedical sciences.
So my own tendency is to look for the biggest value to come from the use of the space station as an engineering test facility, as a place where we can go and try out really exciting new technologies with the opportunity to tinker with them and with a relatively low marginal cost and to do so very quickly and to do it in space.
The biomedical research, I think, is going to be good.
It's going to be useful and interesting.
I don't know whether or not protein crystal growth per se will be that profound on the latter.
Let's assume that we did not have the International Space Station where it is now, that there was nothing there, and that you, for example, were going in front of a congressional committee, and you were asked to provide good, solid reasoning why we should Begin to build the space station at perhaps $100 billion or more cost.
If you were starting from scratch, I would argue for a space station.
But I personally would probably argue for a space station along more modular lines.
So one in which you would build multiple copies of similar modules rather than the current architecture from the early 80s.
So I would make the argument for a space station.
So I don't think the cost would need to be as high as it in fact has turned out to be.
The line of arguments I would probably make would involve all of the new technologies that I need to demonstrate and to do so cost-effectively, things like electric propulsion and advanced robotics and in-space power systems, and the fact that I can use the space station as an engineering research laboratory and as a testbed for all of these individual experiments.
And when I put them all together, the net cost, the total cost of the collection of experiments is going to be much, much cheaper than if I had to fly each one individually.
You're doing such a tremendous service for us all.
And I especially want to thank you, of course, for mentioning my book tonight.
You bet.
Oh, gosh.
This is an incredible accomplishment, sir, which you have achieved at the Philippines.
And I do have a question for your very distinguished guest, John Menckens.
John, it's a genuine privilege to speak with you.
And I would like to ask you, sir, if you have read the U.S. Office of Technology's Assessment's Evaluation of Solar Power Satellites, this was published in the early 80s by the U.S. Congress.
Okay, do you remember that on page 180 that it clearly states that ionospheric heating could disrupt telecommunications, including AM radio broadcasts?
There has been some excellent work that was done by the Japanese.
This gentleman I mentioned early in the show, Professor Kaya, who was one of the co-inventors of the retrodirective phased array, he did a sounding rocket experiment in which he took a small spacecraft.
We talked about it in the program back a few years ago.
The only thing, only tests that were done on the U.S. side that I'm familiar with were done at much lower altitudes.
Like, for example, the very high power test that was done out at Goldstone.
unidentified
Exactly.
Yes, I'm familiar with that.
And John, I do have another question, if I may, Mr. Bell, ask this other question.
Are you familiar at all with also the OTA's assessment of tropospheric heating?
Now, they do state in the same page, 180 head document, that tropospheric heating could result in weather modification.
Have you conducted any other further research into the possibility that a solar-powered satellite employing microwaves could possibly modify the Earth's environment?
I'm not familiar with any specific report by OTA on that subject.
I am familiar with the general theme, though, and there have been some published papers, I believe, at the International Astronautical Congress on this recently.
The general line is that you have to choose the frequency at which you would do the power beaming specifically to modify the weather.
Otherwise, if you go with a normal kind of frequency, the kind that you would use in a solar power satellite, you get very, very poor coupling with the troposphere, and you don't get good coupling to the climate, to storms or weather or that kind of thing.
And if you wanted to affect them, this is the basis of these papers, then you'd have to choose a frequency that would be absorbed deliberately in things like weather patterns in order to get those effects, in order to modify the weather.
But you couldn't do it with a normal solar power satellite.
You'd have to build a system specifically for that purpose.
International Line, you're on the air with John Mankins.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi, George.
Hi, John.
Hi.
I have a point to make.
It's kind of a question and a comment.
I guess it comes down to, I guess effectively, being able to do some of the research or put funds into not so much the institutional level or government level, but even sort of free enterprise Inventors or guys out of their shops that have these sort of good ideas.
Has NASA ever looked at using an approach similar to what the Defense Department does for autonomous vehicles and such?
Have you ever thought about putting money into, say, competition-based public input?
Well, I have to say, you know, it's just to be not the right personal pronoun since I'm no longer with NASA, but there is a thing called the Centennial Challenges, which is a current program out of NASA headquarters.
And they have what are really relatively minor prizes being offered in a variety of different areas, like a half a dozen different areas.
One of them does involve power beaming.
And it's related to the idea of space elevators, where you would beam power.
The competition is to beam power to a machine that would ascend a cable like a space elevator going up the strands of the Buckminster Fullerene tube.
So there is a small competition in that area at this time.
I don't know of any others, though, that are related to space solar power.
And in fact, I had an update to the one that's listed on your website?
The one that you had listed on your website is a link actually to my consulting site, which is a different one.
If you go to another website, which is the www.spacepowerassociation.org, that's a new website that we're building for the Sunset Energy Council and provides information on the space solar power and on the council.
And there's the old website, which is also still current, which is I think it's sunsetenergycouncil.org or sunset.org.