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Sept. 16, 2006 - Art Bell

02:38:34

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - John C. Mankins - Space Solar Energy & Launch Systems

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	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.
	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 are 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.
	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 ten 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 1997 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 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.
	A 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, a 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 searched for an abductor who stabbed and seriously injured the infant's mother before fleeing with the child.
	The family is 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 stopped short of the apology demanded by Islamic leaders around the globe.
	They're angry, very angry.
	In fact, the anger is very intense.
	Pakistanis attacked 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.
	A 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 a hundred 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 A man named Vincent Flyyaw, I believe it is, and Kershaw County Sheriff Steve McCaskill.
	Mexico extradited accused drug kingpin Francisco Rafael Arreno 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.
	Just a quick note, many of you are 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...
	I would say I've cut my smoking down to a tenth of what it was, and that's a long way.
	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, well, 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 Calumet Air Force Station, 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 Lt.
	John Schmidt and Capt.
	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 Kincross 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 Sioux St.
	Marie.
	An F-89C operating from Kincross 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 second, 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.
	Air Force incident report reads actually as follows.
	Summary.
	Aircraft took off at 2322 Zebra, Zebra rather, 622 p.m.
	local time on 23rd November 53 on an active air defense mission to intercept an unknown aircraft approximately 160 miles Northwest of Kincross 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, F89C 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's 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, uh, two aboard vanishes over Lake Superior.
	The plane was followed by radar until it merged with an object 70 miles off, uh, I believe it's Quinoa 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 Monkla's memorial headstone at Sacred Heart Catholic Cemetery in Louisiana, Moorville, Louisiana.
	It reads, in loving memory of Gene Felix Monkla, 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.
	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, it 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 tube, 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.
	Well, 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, make that 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.
	Uh, but, uh, 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, 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.
	Maybe I'll... maybe... I still haven't made up my mind about that.
	I just don't know if I want to see it again.
	Even seeing it from the air.
	And we did cross the Mekong in a jet at about 40 or 45,000 feet.
	And it was kind of unnerving.
	Anyway, that's Enya 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 Enya 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.
	We'll be right back.
	Do you like cell phones?
	Are you a cell phone nut?
	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 and 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.
	I sent this in to the CostaCosam.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 they used.
	And then the little lash-up.
	Vladimir Lugoski and Andrei Moschenko.
	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 first hand 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 journalist 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?
	Ha ha ha ha!
	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 colon forward forward www dot That's kilowattpapa.ru, Radio United, forward slash daily,
	d-a-i-l-y, forward slash two-three-six-nine-four, 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.
	H-t-t-p colon forward forward, w-w-w dot k-p dot r-u, forward slash daily, d-a-i-l-y,
	forward slash two-three-six-nine-four, decimal four, forward slash five-two-two-three-three,
	forward slash print.
	You can see it for yourself.
	It's totally unnerving.
	Frankly, I hope it's not true, but one never knows.
	On the international line, you 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 already is this whole, is 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.
	What do you think?
	I think the same thing, but I also think that we're both dreaming.
	We are, and when I say we, I mean the West.
	No, I mean mankind.
	We are a warrior, pretty much a warrior species, you know?
	Yeah.
	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.
	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.
	Perhaps, Anne.
	I hope you're right.
	Thank you very much for the call.
	Take care.
	Yeah, I hope she's right, but I just wouldn't place any money on it.
	We really are a warrior species.
	Now, that may someday evolve.
	We may evolve.
	We may in some way evolve and evolve away from warfare and all the rest of it, but I frankly have my doubts.
	West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Is this art?
	It is indeed, sir.
	It's a pleasure to talk to you.
	I've heard you for years and years and years, even decades.
	Don't remind me.
	Everybody keeps saying that to me.
	Decades.
	When people start calling you an icon, sir, it means you're getting on up there.
	I remember you saying several months ago that you would be very interested in actually talking to somebody that's been touched by an alien.
	Oh, yes.
	I have been touched by an alien.
	You've been touched by an alien, all right.
	Well, let's expand on that.
	How, pray tell, did you get to the position where you were touched by an alien?
	Well, I lived in Idlewild, which is a mile high in the mountain above Palm Springs, for 19 years.
	for 19 years and in 2001 between April and May I was feeling very weak and I was out
	on my carport at night and I was calling on God really hard to help me.
	And a while later, I heard a shout up the road.
	It sounded like a woman shouting.
	And after a little bit longer, some footsteps, heard footsteps coming down the road.
	My friend Brian, who was in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, a Vietnam veteran, he was with me at the time.
	We was out enjoying the night out in front of the house when she came down the road.
	I shined my flashlight on her.
	It was a woman.
	And she said, when I shined my flashlight on her, who's there?
	And I turned it off and didn't say nothing.
	So she said, who's there again?
	And Brian, the Vietnam veteran, told her, well, we live here.
	And then I said, well, we live here.
	Yep.
	And she acted like she was going to go on.
	But she turned and said, could I get a cigarette?
	And I'm trying to...
	Cheap, giving out my cigarettes because it costs so much.
	But Brian says, go ahead, give her one.
	So I gave her one.
	You want to hear something really stupid?
	What's that?
	There's 50 pesos to the dollar.
	Cigarettes here are 38 pesos.
	Gee, I ought to move to the Philippines.
	Anyway, I'd also like to know, how did you know?
	I mean, an alien smoker, after all.
	How did you know she was an alien?
	I'm getting to that.
	Alrighty.
	So when I handed her the cigarette, her finger Her fingertip touched my fingertip and it felt like a pinwheel going around in my belly when her fingertip touched mine and the longer it spun the more energy I got.
	Wait a minute, her fingertip was spinning?
	No, no.
	It felt like a pinwheel spinning in my belly with her fingertip touching my fingertip.
	You just don't think it was her nicotine stained finger?
	No, this was, and a few days later a black movement came out of me and I felt energized.
	Wait a minute, a black movement came out of you?
	Yes.
	We're talking of the normal movements.
	No, this was completely black.
	And then you felt energized?
	Well yeah, the longer the pinwheel spun with her fingertip touching my fingertip, it was spinning in my belly, the more energy I got.
	I was about to die.
	Perhaps it sort of caused your body to reject all the poisons that were somehow within it.
	You never know, but I asked her what her name was and you're gonna love this.
	She said her name is Tomorrow.
	Tomorrow?
	That's what she said, Tomorrow.
	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, uh, this is a week or two later after the first encounter with Tomorrow.
	And, uh, 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.
	It had the lights were turned off.
	When I 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, the same woman tomorrow comes down the road again.
	She 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.
	All right, well, that's all very interesting, particularly since you were calling upon God in both cases.
	There are a number of people who feel that the aliens are our progenitors, and I wonder if that's some sort of proof.
	Hmm.
	Strange story.
	But then again, this is the home of strange stories.
	Wildcard Line, you are upon the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	I went to your website, Coast to Coast, and I saw your picture there.
	I just see you standing there.
	I've never seen you so happier.
	You've been happy for a while now.
	I'm glad for you.
	It'll keep you living a long time.
	Well, I think that is absolutely correct, yes.
	Yeah, good for you.
	Well, I called, basically, a follow-up.
	I talked to you many months ago, and you know how they say, like, if a lie is told long enough, people start to believe it?
	Well, we've heard this many, many, many times.
	That there's a shortage of oil.
	There's a shortage of oil.
	We've all heard that saying that when the cat's away, the mice will play.
	Now we have... See, I'm not one of those guys who are like liberal or whatever.
	You know, I don't support both.
	You know, Democrats I think are stupid and Republicans I think are thieves.
	So I'm not one of those Democrats.
	I'm sorry, Democrats are stupid and Republicans are what?
	Thieves.
	Thieves?
	Yes.
	Okay, well just don't be afraid to say what you really mean.
	Well, to get to that point, now like I said, the cat's away and the mice will play.
	Now we have a complete, we have Republicans running everything now, right?
	So we have gas at $3 a gallon.
	People go, ah, you're nuts.
	It's just, it's a market thing, right?
	But, 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 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, there'd be people going to prison and we'd be talking impeachment.
	It is magic, sir, I must admit.
	It is magic.
	Prior to every election, we all know gas prices fall.
	Now, can there be a connection?
	There's directly a connection.
	When gas is $2 a gallon in November, people are going to go, oh my god, it's $3 and $2, and then they're going to bring up the lies, 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 that it's been ripped off billions of dollars.
	And as soon as we get the 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 $0.99 because of the lawsuits, and you go, oh, you're delusional.
	I said, well, you see, watch what 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 it 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. We've got
	guys retiring with 800 million dollar retirements and there's a shortage going
	on. Art, have you heard?
	Yes, yes I know. It's ridiculous and what we're taking is each American is being stolen an
	average of five thousand dollars 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 to 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 shortages and the cost of everything we purchase.
	Our food products are going up as well.
	And then we had an 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.
	A People's Party, where we could actually, when all these corporations are funding presidents with millions and millions of dollars to do them favors to become president, we need a party, an American party, where the citizens of this country could fund a leader for themselves.
	You know, 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.
	In 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, 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, you know?
	All right, sir.
	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?
	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.
	Now isn't that interesting?
	Nicorette, 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.
	John, welcome to the program.
	Good evening.
	I was setting you up there, buddy.
	I know you're not here to do that.
	But do you know anything that you can talk about?
	I mean, there's just zillions of stories going around, John, honestly, about what astronauts have seen and that sort of thing.
	Astronauts are making statements and then sometimes sort of retracting them.
	I don't know.
	We're all curious.
	You probably don't know a thing, but I'm forced to ask.
	Well, certainly I appreciate the curiosity.
	And I have to say, I am a tremendous pack rat, and something of a historian, so I've constantly looked at anything I could lay my hands on in terms of files and documents and reports and studies and so on.
	And I gotta say, I've never seen anything that even looked like it was a legitimate report.
	Not a thing.
	Not a thing.
	And I'm a terrible pack rat.
	Okay.
	Well, you're here pretty much to talk about solar energy, actually, aren't you?
	Yes.
	All right.
	Can you take just one moment while I read a story that seems to me to be relevant before we begin?
	Sure.
	Okay.
	Here it comes, John.
	This is by Carl Grossman.
	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.
	So, I'm real curious, John, what happened?
	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 on the outer planets, 10% of the sunlight that you get at Earth, so that 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.
	I'll be darned.
	And so it's a difference in how you collect the sunlight before you try to convert it into useful energy.
	I see.
	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.
	Why is this such a outlandishly wild idea?
	In other words, it seems, I don't know, it seems so reasonable to do that and not exactly so hard to think up.
	Yeah, 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 The plutonium reactors, they're not reactors, they're radiothermal isotope generators, RTGs.
	The concepts for those all came about years and years before these large concentrators were matured or were valid for space use.
	Well, do you agree that we have an energy problem?
	Well, I've bought gas this week, so yes.
	Although certainly it's cheaper today than it was last week or two weeks ago.
	Well it's interesting 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 the election seems to come, the more the price of oil seems to drop.
	I must confess, I was listening in during the first hour, and I found that observation to be quite reasonable.
	Yes, I've seen that in the past.
	Although it is also the end of the summer driving season, and that's typically a time when the prices come down, because the demand goes down.
	Well, a little bit, but perhaps not this much.
	Not 50 cents in 10 days.
	No.
	That's a little striking.
	Well, I certainly have enjoyed it.
	Well, absolutely.
	And they have a way of, you know, they run it up to $3 and then it comes down to $2.50 or $2.40 and you go, oh, thank the Lord.
	But $2.40, you know, a few years ago, you'd have gone, you know, the country's going to crash.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Anyway, I'm a big fan of solar power and wind power, as a matter of fact.
	At my homes in Nevada, I have a completely independent... I'm powered by solar and wind, so I've been a fan for a long time, but I spent much more money on it than I should have.
	And perhaps you can sketch out for us whether it's becoming economically feasible now.
	I mean at the time I did it, it wasn't.
	I just happened to have the money and I wanted to do it.
	I wanted to see if I could do it and indeed I could, but you know it was about 70 grand.
	Yeah, there has been just enormous progress for all sorts of renewable energy available today than where it was even 10 years ago.
	It's true for solar, it's true for wind, The big challenge, or the dilemma, in those Earth-based renewable energy technologies is that they're intermittent.
	They don't produce power constantly.
	And so we've had about five days worth of cloudy weather here in Northern Virginia, where I am, and during those five days, if I had rooftop solar, which I don't happen to, I would have gotten no power.
	I'd have been shut down.
	Well, that of course, in my case for example, I had large banks of telephone company type sealed gel cell batteries for that kind of thing.
	And those haven't gotten a lot cheaper yet.
	That's right.
	But here's a good question for you.
	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.
	What exactly is space solar power?
	Well, the concept is that here on the ground you're subject to day and night, 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.
	By microwave, I would guess, right?
	Microwave is one approach.
	You could also look at using low-intensity lasers.
	Okay.
	I recall reading a book some years ago called Sunstroke.
	You ever have the opportunity to read that?
	I have not seen that book.
	No kidding.
	Well, it was really cool.
	It was about a space-based setup that was working in the manner you just described, using, in their case, a 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.
	That could not happen, right?
	Well, there's a very nice gentleman who's a professor at Kobe University by the name of Nobuyuki Kaya, a very good friend.
	And he and several others invented what's called a retro-directive phased array, something like 15 years ago.
	And it's a very elegant sort of fail-safe approach in which you have to have an uplink radio signal.
	You have to have a pilot signal from the ground receiver where you want to send the energy.
	And without that pilot signal, none of the millions of individual RF transmitters that are up in space can focus.
	And they just can't do it.
	And so they go out of focus and the energy is just smeared across space at very, very low intensity.
	And that solution, which they invented, pretty much makes it Impossible to accidentally shine an energy beam on something.
	What if you were a nasty, well suppose you were a nasty terrorist and you managed to hack into the system?
	You'd have to have some way of persuading it that you were a legitimate customer.
	So you'd have to find some way, and you'd have to be able to hack in, you'd have to have all the right encryption and all that, and you'd have to have a A legitimate transmitter.
	But, of course, if you did that, then everybody would know where you were because you'd be transmitting.
	Good point.
	All right.
	What are the economics of it?
	In other words, for example, how much would it cost to put up?
	How much power do you speculate or do you know that it could deliver to Earth on a regular basis?
	What's the deal?
	So, the answer is kind of a moving target.
	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 three cents per kilowatt hour or something like that.
	It's a little higher.
	Is it?
	Wind's a little higher but again that's wind for when the wind is blowing.
	Well, that's true.
	Yeah.
	But space solar power is still some years away from getting to very low cost.
	All right.
	How much power might we imagine that a full lash-up would be delivering?
	And would it do so for a long time?
	I mean, once you make the investment, are you going to have to remake the investment as the satellite ages, or what's the deal?
	Yeah.
	The nice thing about space is it's actually fairly benign.
	So once you have a system which is up in space, like a communications 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 once you, 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 communications 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.
	Okay, how about this?
	With communication satellites, you can do spot beams.
	In other words, you can service a fairly specific area of the country from geosynchronous orbit.
	Now, one of the problems I guess you'd have with solar power would be you get it to a place, but then you've got to get it to the grid, right?
	Could you service, with the equivalent of spot beams, several earthly locations with, for example, one or two different satellites doing this work?
	In fact, that's a very elegant solution and it's one that has been looked at in recent years.
	Solid-state electronics makes that possible.
	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 US, Canada, and do it simultaneously.
	That's such a good idea.
	How did you get involved with all this?
	I mean, somewhere along the line, your history with NASA and so forth, it wouldn't seem to lend itself to such a passion.
	How did this happen?
	Well, 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.
	I wonder how that was received.
	I mean, there was obviously at that point, there were contracts let out, there was a lot of money involved in the nuclear solution for all of this, and so you would have been, it seems to me, knocking heads with those people and their money.
	Yeah.
	It's a long-standing area of tension.
	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.
	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 Mankins, who was with NASA for 25 years, 10 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 sky-falling scenario, of 28 US 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.
	I'm Art Bell and we'll be right back.
	So John, if we'd had a Plutonian oops with Cassini, is that probably an accurate assessment
	of what might have occurred and what was your attitude toward that stuff in space?
	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 and 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.
	We're reasonable as, you know, the same kinds of costs and the same kinds of science to within some multiple.
	Obviously, in places like Earth orbit, there's, there's, 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, you know, the 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.
	Go back to the first part of the question.
	Is the risk 20 to 40 million people potentially dead?
	I have to think that that's probably A 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.
	But if it did fail as a can? Oh, you'd have to somehow grind the stuff up and
	and spread it over a large area.
	Bye.
	Because it's a metal.
	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 why, you know, after re-entry you're in the atmosphere more or less, right?
	Oh, it's true.
	It's true.
	But it would almost take some kind 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 vaporize it.
	Because otherwise it's just going to stay in that can.
	So did you argue, even all that just said, you were basically arguing against it, but perhaps not for that reason.
	But 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 really good other options, especially options that could be cheaper,
	like solar arrays 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, certainly I agree with that, and I think most people do.
	Are these deep space examinations of places where we've only got 10% of the light, let's say, so important as to even take that small risk?
	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, you know, fish down or living things down under that ice, you probably need to use some kind of radioisotope source for the energy.
	I thought everything else was ours, but we weren't supposed to go to Europe.
	Oh no wait, that's a movie.
	Yeah, exactly.
	What do you think the odds are that there might be life on Europa?
	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.
	Anyplace there's liquid water and there are sources of energy, you've got the potential for complicated chemistry, and the potential for life.
	Well, we've certainly, I think, proven that with the, what do you call them, the smokers down there at the bottom of the ocean?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And these places where you've got these volcanic vents along the ridge lines where the crust is thin, you get these extremophiles that live in these really harsh and bizarre chemistry.
	Well, you know, it's very interesting, John, but suppose we did manage to get to Europa, and brought back a sample of whatever the life forms are there.
	Would that be safe?
	Or would that be as dangerous as bringing back plutonium?
	Yeah, that's a whole field in itself.
	There's an entire discipline that's quite mature, in which JPL is one of the leaders, called Planetary Protection.
	And the topic has a strong technical interest on both sides.
	One, to avoid taking bugs from Earth out to other planets, so you don't contaminate these scientific areas.
	And by the way, haven't we already done that, John?
	Well, there's some things that are probably, or 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 planet.
	There's this whole process.
	And this was done even with the early Mars probes?
	Absolutely.
	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.
	Right, sure.
	So there is that possibility that whatever we might bring back, if we find life forms, whether it be Mars or Europa, could be dangerous to Earth?
	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 strain 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.
	Going back for a moment to the concept of solar power coming to Earth.
	Okay, let's assume for a second that the beam is safe.
	In other words, if the satellite begins to move or something untoward occurs, it virtually goes off or is spread out in a very Not dangerous way.
	Does that include, for example, an aircraft crossing the path of the beam or a bird flying through the path of the beam?
	Right.
	And I think it's probably a three-tiered answer.
	On the one hand, you'd probably design the system so that the normal beam at full strength was too weak to directly harm an aircraft.
	So you'd design it to be weak enough so that it wouldn't harm an aircraft.
	Secondly, you'd design the system so that if there was a problem, it would shut off, which we talked about before.
	And lastly, you'd probably have an exclusion zone above it, so you just wouldn't normally allow aircraft to ever fly through the beam.
	And so you'd go belt and suspenders and several buttons as well, just to try to assure that there wouldn't be any hazard.
	And the poor little winged things?
	The studies are pretty good.
	Again, the intensity is fairly low.
	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.
	But you are cooking.
	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.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	That's what microwaves do.
	They get absorbed by water.
	Yes, well that's actually the beginning of cooking you, more or less.
	And so the kind of, you know, 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, is sort of what we evolve to be able to withstand.
	Delivers about 1000 watts, one kilowatt of energy per square yard or per square meter.
	That's about the normal intensity that we evolved to stand in terms of heat.
	So we can stand in that and we get warm, but our bodies deal with it.
	The intensity, and we don't normally have that kind of heat, normally it's less than that because cloud cover, haze or something, or the sun is low in the sky.
	Sure.
	The intensity of the beam that's been looked at would be normally about 10% of that.
	Really?
	And only in the very center.
	And so during a normal day, you know, let's suppose it was Four 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 of 300 watts.
	You'd get an extra 100 watts from the power beam.
	Boy, that's not much.
	I would have imagined much more.
	I mean, with the amount of power you're talking about transferring.
	Yeah.
	But if you think about it, a square A kilometer on a side, a thousand meters on a 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 a thousand watts per square meter and you had a million square meters, that's a gigawatt.
	That's true.
	That's very true.
	A little bit of energy spread out over a large area is a whole lot of power.
	This is a very ambitious project, of course, and going to the larger picture for just a moment, maybe you'd like to comment on this.
	I mean, after all, we went to the Moon all those years ago, and boy, the space program just seems like it's in dire straits right now.
	We're on the last legs of the shuttle's capability.
	You know, you can see the end of that pretty quickly and I don't know that the replacement anybody's all that hot about that.
	It just seems like the space program has sort of fizzled away.
	How do you feel about it?
	Yeah, I have to confess, I felt, I personally felt like there were a number of missed opportunities during the 90s.
	We had some fairly ambitious goals like very low-cost space launch and new space industries that were talked about.
	And there's a lot of very ambitious vision in the vision for space exploration that the Bush administration released several years ago.
	Right now it seems like the program is a very tactical one.
	So they're working on a new capsule and they're working on a new booster and they're working through the ongoing programs.
	But it's challenging right now in terms of sort of looking at it and saying where Are we really going?
	And what are the reasons?
	What are the purposes that we're trying to achieve?
	And so I think it's going to be a tough few years, I think, in terms of all the other competing interests to maintain a strong civilian space program.
	Like war?
	Well, like war or like, let's suppose there was, God forbid, a pandemic, or let's suppose there was just any, any number of issues.
	All right, so NASA's kind of in limbo at the moment.
	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 Bigelow's out there?
	Yeah.
	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's 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.
	The 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.
	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 break point 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.
	Alright, 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?
	Could it be done?
	The simple answer is yes.
	The longer answer is take the moment.
	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 a Uh, 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 communication satellites and new kinds of power systems for NASA or for others.
	And you can use those technologies here on the ground.
	New types of, you know, rooftop solar and so on.
	You know, it's very difficult to put that in a business proposal, though.
	It really is.
	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, you know, that's... 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?
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	But your point is very well taken.
	It's very hard to raise money on the basis of trust me, as opposed to let me show you the patent number.
	Yes.
	All right, 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?
	Yeah.
	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.
	That's right.
	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, certainly in Japan, certainly in Europe, and in other countries, in new energy supplies and in space solar power systems.
	All right, so it should be an international effort, I know, that's an absolute yes.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	If we don't... But just forgive me one thing, 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 communication satellites in the 60s, those are pretty good international
	business models.
	Would you say the International Space Station is a good model?
	It's a, like I said, it's a stupendous engineering project.
	Yes.
	But it has taken such a long time, and it was so hard to put the international agreements into place.
	It's been very, very hard because of a lot of the political factors.
	All the major countries all built their own habitat module, their pressurized module.
	In a business case, like for example the Boeing 777, you end up with one company making the tail section.
	You don't end up with five companies making tail sections.
	And you get better economies of scale.
	You get cheaper jet planes that way.
	It's harder when it's government to government and there are a lot of conflicting policy interests to get to good economics.
	Was the space station a good idea, period?
	Certainly the idea is a really good one.
	I think there's a lot to be done.
	In space with research and technology development, 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 environments that you can do things with.
	It's unfortunate that 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-eighties.
	What is the current, do you have any idea what the current projected cost when we're done will be?
	It's in the many tens of billions ultimately.
	I don't remember precisely whether or not it's 35 or 45 billion dollars, but it's some very, very large number.
	The reason it's such a very, very, very large number is because it costs so very much to put a pound into space, right?
	Well, actually, the number I just cited, I think, doesn't include the launch costs.
	Oh.
	That's just the hardware.
	Oh.
	If you add in the launch costs, then that number goes up.
	But your point is well taken.
	It costs a lot right now using existing launchers to launch things into space.
	Right.
	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?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	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 of It's so high and it doesn't get down to a few hundreds of dollars per pound or per kilogram.
	Okay, so we don't have anything that currently defies gravity that I'm really aware of and I'm sure you're not aware of it.
	Short of that, we have to use all this power to get into space.
	But the only thing I've heard of that might be actually possible is this space elevator concept.
	Do you know about that?
	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, it leads to deterioration in the nanotubes, and that's hard.
	Oh, that's the first time I've heard that, John.
	I raised this a number of years ago, and it's like embrittlement in the metal containers around nuclear reactors.
	Over time, the radiation just causes dislocations in the crystalline structure.
	And with these carbon nanotubes, you've got an object that's 50, 60, 70,000 kilometers long, And it's all in the radiation environment in space, and it's all under enormous strain because of the tension.
	There are some other approaches, which are all on the ground, that involve actually catapults, maglev catapults, that are much more interesting.
	Tell me about that.
	Mag-lift catapults.
	Speak.
	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 just rose slowly with the engines going at full throttle off the launch pad.
	It turns out that you burn about 10 times more fuel to get the first 1,000 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 of 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.
	So, you would, I'm trying to imagine what something like this would look like.
	Oh, it would look a lot like a very large version of some of these 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.
	That's absolutely fascinating.
	So how far would this thing move such a vehicle before the vehicle had to start its own propulsion?
	Well, maybe 5 miles, maybe 10 miles.
	It kind of depends on how many G's you can stand while you're accelerating and how much power you want to put into it.
	But that would get you just the start.
	That's sort of a starter kit.
	There are other concepts where you'd have much larger systems Once you had the market to support that kind of investment.
	That's incredible.
	I'm just now sort of considering this.
	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.
	to orbit.
	Well, the way you would, the trick here is that gets you that start and that buys you
	pounds and you don't actually put the pounds into cutting the fuel.
	What you do is you put those extra pounds into increasing the engineering margin, the robustness in all your vehicle systems.
	So, for example, the Space Shuttle main engines, they operate at 100 or 105% of rated thrust every time the Space Shuttle takes off.
	They have no operational margin.
	Jet aircraft engines operate with the operational margin of a factor of two or three.
	So they never, it's like if you drive your automobile in first gear at 100 miles an hour, you redline it and you burn up the engine.
	That's right.
	You can drive at 2000 RPM virtually forever.
	Well, similarly with rockets, 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.
	Alright, 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?
	Yeah, 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 margin 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.
	Wow.
	It's very disproportionate.
	Why hasn't anybody actually moved on something like this?
	Is it practical in every way?
	Well, it doesn't require any magic.
	It doesn't require Buckminster Fullerene.
	It doesn't require fundamental new chemistry or physics.
	It was looked at in the mid-90s.
	The maglifter is the specific concept.
	That was actually an invention of mine in the early 90s.
	There are some other concepts which are very promising, which are more ambitious.
	One called Star Tram that would take you all the way to escape velocity.
	These things were kicked around in the late 90s with a concept called Space Liner 100.
	It was programmatically part of the reusable launch vehicle program at the early part of this decade.
	Can I back you up for a second?
	Star Tram, that sounds fascinating.
	What was that?
	Star Tram is really cool.
	That was invented or co-invented by a good friend.
	His name is Jim Powell.
	He was for many years at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
	He was one of the co-inventors of superconducting maglev trains with a gentleman by the name of Gordon Danby back in the 1960s.
	And with Star Tram, you would actually go all the way to space electromagnetically.
	So you wouldn't have the second stage be a rocket.
	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 have been 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.
	Yes.
	And so you have a magnetic coil on the ground, and it holds this tube up in the air, and the vehicle, which is accelerated on the ground, just like in a roller coaster, coasts up through this tube, and when it comes out, it's in space.
	Holy smokes!
	I have never heard of this concept.
	I've never heard of this concept.
	How do you, I can't, I mean, like with the space elevator, how do you hold this thing Well, in this case you actually have to hold it down, because it wants to go up because of the magnetic field.
	So you hold it down, like holding down one of these balloons on New Year's Day in New York.
	Oh, I'm trying to get a picture of this in my mind and I'm not having success.
	You create a magnetic field, an electromagnetic field, yes?
	And this magnetic field is located where?
	On the ground or in space?
	The coils are on the ground and it creates a large magnetic field which is in the air, not in space.
	And there's another coil, another magnetic coil up that's accompanying, going with this tube.
	Okay.
	And so the tube is basically suspended by the two magnetic coils wanting to move away from each other.
	And so it floats up there.
	That's going to take a tremendous amount of energy, yes?
	Only to get it started.
	Only to get it started.
	Once it's up there, the concept would be to use superconducting coils.
	Okay.
	With superconducting coils, once you have the current started, then keeping it flowing is fairly easy.
	Doesn't take a lot of additional power.
	Absolutely fascinating.
	Star Tram, we're going to talk more about this.
	Hold tight, John.
	We're near a break point 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 Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	It 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, that's 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.
	You'd have the, in principle, you'd have them in In large loops.
	It would look a little bit perhaps like the superconducting supercollider.
	There's a large evacuated tunnel and you have these superconducting coils buried under there.
	Right.
	And so these things would all be in large pipes and the pipes would be cooled to super cold temperatures to make the cables superconducting.
	Real progress in this in the last decade for power transmission.
	You can actually buy superconducting power cables these days.
	So we've made good progress in this area.
	I know they're trying to get superconducting at room temperature.
	Are we moving in that direction?
	Room temperature is still very, very hard, but I think a big step in the right direction would be if you had Uh, large power cables that were just at the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
	So there's a lot of difference between one, uh, liquefied gas temperature and another.
	The supercooled helium is so incredibly cold, that's what normal superconductors require.
	Liquid nitrogen, which is what you see out on the highways going around in trucks, uh, occasionally, that stuff is much, much warmer.
	That's only, uh, uh, Minus 70 or 100 degrees.
	So it's much easier to make and to keep cold.
	This is probably a silly question, but maybe not.
	Jeff in Asheville, North Carolina asks, coronal mass ejection danger?
	Wouldn't that tube funnel the particles from the CME right down to ground level?
	The tube itself is basically just a vacuum.
	It's a hole in the air.
	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.
	So 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 be, they wouldn't make it, they wouldn't be, you'd have to work very very hard to get them to go down the evacuated tube.
	Got it.
	Why are we not proceeding with this, if it's possible and practical?
	To pursue it is 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.
	Star tram because you'd want to take things not just to a thousand feet per second
	But all the way to orbital velocities would have to be much much longer
	so so it would be have to be a hundred or hundred and fifty miles long and
	So it would cost billions of dollars to build But basically you could get something to orbital velocity.
	It's technically possible It is perfectly technically possible. No again as I said
	before no new physics That's just incredible.
	That's just incredible.
	Is there anybody in NASA actively working on these concepts or have we turned all our energy toward, you know, what comes after the space shuttle only?
	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.
	Are you saddened by that?
	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.
	Okay, let's say you were running the circus and you had all the money and power that comes along with that, what would you be doing?
	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 be doing, I would certainly I 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.
	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?
	Yes.
	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, insect class intelligent, but very capable modular robots could do amazing things in space.
	So then in the bigger picture you're more of a fan of not necessarily the manned program, is that correct?
	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, how would that work?
	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 We're 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.
	Think of a bunch of skydivers.
	We have the technology to do this now?
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	Think of a bunch of skydivers.
	They all jump out of a plane.
	They're falling through the air at increasing sets of speeds.
	And they assemble themselves into these remarkable arrays, these networks, these beautiful patterns, and they do it in a matter of moments under quite stringent conditions before they separate and then open their parachute.
	That's humans, huh?
	Yeah, but most of what they have to go through to 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.
	Uh-huh.
	So they have to dumb down to do these remarkable formations, but I don't know if you've ever seen synchronized skating or synchronized swimming.
	I have.
	Yes, I have.
	It's just sad to me that we're not... I mean, you've already mentioned so much that we could be doing, but we're not doing.
	Now, is it politics within NASA that is propelling us in this single-minded, not necessarily efficient direction?
	Well, it's just a question of tactical priorities.
	I don't think it's at all politics.
	I don't think it's in any way related to one party or another or one vision or another per se.
	It's just a question of tactical emphasis.
	Oh yes, but that tactical emphasis is decided by those in high management positions or even national.
	It's certainly a judgment question, but I just wouldn't characterize it as a political question.
	It's a question of judgment.
	Well, then, is our judgment flawed?
	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% 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.
	And the percentage that NASA is spending now?
	No, no, no.
	But I'm just saying that would make a... I understand.
	So I'm following up and asking, what is NASA spending in that department?
	These days, it's substantially less.
	I don't know the precise number, but it's substantially less.
	In the Apollo era, NASA spent about 10% of its budget on the farther term future.
	So what happened?
	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, the capsule and the booster.
	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?
	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, if 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.
	But that does seem political, John.
	At the end of the day, it does seem political.
	In other words, they're given direction and everything else is out the window.
	Well, or at least ultimately it comes down to what is it that the body politic wants from its space program.
	What do you think right now, if that question were asked and answered honestly, that the answer would be with respect to our current program?
	Well, I think at the moment everybody knows and everybody's in agreement that they're There has to be a replacement for the shuttle.
	I think there's pretty good consensus on the major elements of the vision for space exploration.
	So I think at the higher policy levels, there's, as far as I can tell, there's pretty good agreement on some of the core things that need to happen.
	And the rest is tactics.
	It's a judgment call on the part of management.
	I don't think that there's a lot of attention paid at that level By the overall system.
	The overall system has a lot of things to worry about.
	Well, NASA used to be, it seems to me, much more of a forward-looking organization than it is presently.
	Is that fair?
	I don't want to get you in trouble here.
	No, I understand.
	And I appreciate that.
	I think that NASA is as forward-looking as it ever was.
	The question is, how far is its reach?
	In thinking about the farther-term future, you can think about your retirement, and you can put away 1% of your income towards your retirement, or you can put away 10% of your income towards your retirement.
	It's not that you're not thinking about your future 20 years from now.
	The question is, how much are you investing in 20 years from now?
	Versus how much you're investing in for today.
	And the difference is not so much one of the longer term perspective, but rather what's the investment portfolio?
	What's the balance in the investments between the near term and the farther term?
	Well, the difference is that if it's 1% along with inflation, you're probably going to starve to death when you get to be 65.
	I understand the logical implications of the metaphor.
	And I'm concerned that that's exactly what we're doing, and apparently you have the same concern.
	Yeah, certainly from my perspective, I think that the investment portfolio has to have a somewhat different balance, somewhat farther term balance.
	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.
	And so that they just kind of languish.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Although there's still small amounts of money.
	There's still some very novel things that are being done, for example, NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts and by a number of the NASA centers.
	And there are a lot of very, very smart people.
	Well, I'm sure there are.
	It's just that, as I mentioned, they're really almost prohibited from pursuing these things.
	Everything takes money.
	It's true.
	And you're wise to pay attention to what it is that the organization wants to accomplish.
	And unwise to behave as though you're somehow an independent Yes, yes.
	And I guess that's why NASA at its very beginning was, I don't know, electrically propelled forward.
	I mean, just so forward-looking.
	And everything could be solved and everything could be done, and I just don't know if that's the mindset there anymore.
	Well, also, 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.
	Remember after Challenger, John, they talked a lot about the culture at NASA, and they shook up the culture at NASA.
	Did they shake it so hard, John, that they shocked it into inaction?
	Well, it's um...
	I don't...
	I actually, 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 80s after Challenger, and you look at the rather tectonic shifts in the White House, going from George Bush Senior 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.
	Paralysis is a good word.
	All right, John, hold tight.
	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 will 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, oh, I don't know, around 4 in the afternoon or so, I'm Art 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 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 a question.
	So, that comes next.
	This is 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.
	If you're ready.
	Okay.
	Okay, here it comes.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with John Mankins.
	Hi.
	Hello?
	Hello.
	Yes, hey, how you doing?
	My name is Jim.
	I'm calling from New York.
	And I just wanted to talk about solar fusion.
	I wonder if you guys are familiar with that.
	Um, if I could resource an article from, uh, Inc.
	Magazine, July of 05.
	Uh, the gentleman's name is, uh, David Slauson.
	And to sum it all up, he more or less said that if you canvas 1% of the world's, uh, deserts, you could, uh, supply 100% of the world's needs.
	And in order to displace, uh, the usage of the fossil fuels in the U.S., you'd need a solar fusion farm of 100 miles by 100 miles.
	Right.
	So I'm familiar with the concept.
	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.
	Correct.
	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.
	Namely, 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 power satellites.
	Mm-hmm.
	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.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, how does that add up compared to doing it from space?
	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.
	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, it turned out the costs were about equal.
	Okay.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with John Mankins.
	Hi.
	Yes, sir.
	How's it going?
	Proceed.
	Yes, hello.
	This is Bob in Mansfield, Ohio.
	Yes, Bob.
	I wonder if we could convert the liquid storage tanks on the shuttle-type mechanisms to Dewar 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 or the like, you just tow this thing that you keep raising to a higher and higher altitude as you use the garbage as your shielding.
	All right.
	What about that, John?
	I've heard that proposal made by many.
	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 The trouble, 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 problematic.
	That would have been a viable idea though years ago.
	If it had been designed in, 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.
	Got it.
	Okay.
	First time caller on the line, your turn with John Mankins.
	Hello?
	Hello?
	First time caller line, yes.
	Yes, hi.
	I was listening about that design where the tube and the 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 cloverleaf.
	Uh, 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.
	So how would you solve a problem like that?
	I just, uh, was wondering.
	Yeah, it's a, um, the, uh, um, 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 Star Tram.
	But the simple answer is that the electromagnetic system is actively controlled.
	So, I mean, 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 field, as it tries to slip, you can adjust it so that it'll stay floating.
	That's sort of the basis of how the maglev trains that Jim Powell and Gordon Damme originally invented in the 60s works.
	And it's been tested very successfully in Japan, for example.
	So it definitely works.
	It sure does.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with John Mankins.
	Hi.
	Wildcard?
	Yes.
	Oh, hi Art.
	This is Steve in Los Angeles.
	How you doing?
	Fine, Steve.
	Great.
	Listen, I've got a question for John Mankins.
	It starts at the top of the hour, the thing you asked him about the UFOs.
	John?
	Okay.
	Yes.
	What is your question?
	Hi John.
	Hi there.
	Okay.
	John, hi.
	Are you aware that NASA produced a TV show and in that show they showed an Told that every flight to and from the moon was accompanied by a physical or nebulous object and they showed all the pictures.
	What program was that?
	I'm curious.
	That's a Los Angeles TV show in the late 70s.
	It might have been on Channel 11.
	They showed everyone.
	I'd just like to point out real quickly one that really caught my attention because I saw James McDivitt 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 had 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, 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.
	Where has that information gone?
	I can't be the only one that saw the show.
	That information needs to be brought back to the public.
	Sir, are you sure that was a NASA production?
	Absolutely NASA produced show.
	John, are you at all familiar with that?
	No, I've never heard of such a thing.
	But I have to say, I wasn't with NASA in the late 60s.
	I was still in college.
	Or late 70s.
	I was still in college.
	But I have to say, it doesn't sound like NASA media policy.
	No.
	NASA wouldn't ordinarily do a program like that.
	It's not like NASA.
	NASA would support other media activities.
	I would have to agree with you.
	It doesn't sound like it would be NASA.
	Wells for the Rockies.
	You're on the air with John Mankins.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	My name is Abraham.
	I've just got this really weird question.
	I was watching something on the Discovery Channel a few days ago, and it was about a laser-propelled craft, basically, that they're working on, and they actually showed this thing, and it was operable, but I only caught a few minutes of it.
	I was wondering if Mr. John there happened to know anything more about it.
	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 Rensselaer 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 Meriboh.
	That is fascinating though.
	And conceivably you could take smaller objects, John, with that technology and get them to orbit?
	Absolutely.
	And it looked interesting enough for us to invest in at the time.
	Well, the reason I ask 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?
	It would depend on whether or not you could get enough power to get a meaningful payload up there.
	It's a challenge.
	It's a challenge.
	These modular robots that we were talking about earlier, they tend to sort of be really successful if it's sort of human size and larger.
	So like 100 kilograms, 100 pounds to 1,000 pounds.
	The kinds of light craft that Lake was looking at are much, much smaller.
	They're like mylar balloons.
	They're a little bit like mylar balloons that are pushed or accelerated by a beam of light, a laser beam.
	Got it.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
	Yes, this is Donald from Kingston, Tennessee.
	I wanted to ask Mr. Mankins how he felt about the astronauts dropping the bolts in the spacewalks.
	I think they dropped one bolt.
	Isn't that so, John?
	I think when it was at the end of the week, I think they'd lost a couple of bolts.
	I only followed it in the media, but that was my understanding.
	It is just so hard for the astronauts to maintain their dexterity over a very long extravehicular activity in EVA.
	Yes.
	Because their suit is under pressure, and the outside is a vacuum, and so they're constantly fighting with their hand strength.
	The astronauts have really strong hands, but they're just constantly fighting it.
	I mean, I can just easily see whereby late in the EVA, It's just going to be hard to hold on to a small object like that.
	Sure.
	Now, I guess the danger of a loose bolt is that even though it's simply harmlessly floated away from the space station, it's still going at, well, what, 18,000 miles an hour?
	Right.
	But that's no danger to the station because they're moving in the same orbit.
	Right.
	And in due course, the bolt will slowly decelerate and move away from the station and reenter the atmosphere, become a little meteorite.
	The challenge is when you've got an object that size and it's coming at you in a different orbit.
	But I mean there are a number of other low-Earth orbiting satellites, are there not?
	Not that many.
	Not that many.
	There are a few, but a decade ago there were lots of plans for large constellations of low-Earth orbit satellites.
	But the way things turned out, there aren't all that many in the same kind of orbit as the station.
	All right.
	Easter Crockies, you're on the air with John Mankins.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Vinnie from Avon Lake.
	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 sail laid up with a balloon.
	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.
	Actually, it's a very good question.
	If you could get out of the majority of the atmosphere, I imagine you've got quite a boost.
	It's kind of what you've been talking about, right, John?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	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 the 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 sea-going 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.
	How much advantage do you have by launching closer to the equator, as a matter of interest?
	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.
	I think it's 1,000 feet a second.
	That's amazing.
	Yeah, as compared to, say, the poles.
	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 Kourou in South America to be very near to the equator.
	Actually, I'm fairly close to the equator right now, so I'm spinning a little faster.
	Yes.
	I thought about it.
	All right, John, thank you very much.
	Hold tight.
	We've got one more segment to go.
	John Mankins is my guest.
	From Manila, the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	Good morning, or whatever it is where you are.
	John Mankins with 25 years at NASA and JPL.
	Is my guest.
	Not too frequently do we get an opportunity to ask somebody of this caliber questions.
	This indeed is your opportunity.
	More of it in a moment.
	It doesn't necessarily directly relate, but I love this fast blast from Gary in Long Island,
	He says, Hey Art, any new exploratory projects on the horizon soon from NASA?
	Well, that relates, I guess.
	He says, Gary, down the street from Brookhaven Labs, no black holes yet, house still here.
	John, anything on the horizon exciting?
	In terms of sort of exploratory R&D, a good place to look is to check out the website for the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts.
	The NIAC, a gentleman named Robert Casanova, is the director of that center, and they do a lot of innovative work.
	Seems to me they just recently selected a bunch of new projects that may be going forward.
	Gotcha.
	All right, let's go west of the Rockies.
	You're on the air with John Mankins.
	Hi.
	West of the Rockies.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	Hi John.
	Hi.
	I had a question.
	It's a little on the smaller scale about solar energy and like about how much it would take to run like your shop tool, like a water feature in your yard.
	Okay, well, let's try and answer that, and then, I don't know, even expand it to a home, for example.
	I could actually answer that.
	Well, no, I can't.
	I don't know what it takes today.
	John?
	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 lot of, 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 and the market has just grown so much in the last 5-10 years.
	In general, the efficiencies are going to be something like 10-20%.
	Which means something like 10 to 20% 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 Mankins.
	Hi.
	All right, John, it's a pleasure.
	Been listening to you since the early 90s.
	Yes, sir.
	Yeah, calling from the Gulf Coast here.
	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 a hundred years from now, maybe.
	Propel yourself from one star to the next, creating more and more velocity in your spacecraft, possibly even Uh, reaching a percentage of the speed of light by actually tuning into the frequency of a thousand points of light at one time and propelling yourself across these magnetic lines or grids in the universe using gravitationally assisted flight.
	Um, gravity assist per se is a, is a technique that was, uh, was, uh, invented back, I think, in the, um, in the 60s.
	Uh, the, the way gravity assist is used is 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.
	The 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.
	You do gain acceleration, but very slowly, right?
	Exactly.
	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, came up with some years ago by Freeman Dyson, a truly brilliant man, to use a 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.
	Okay.
	East of the Rockies, your turn with John Mankins.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Yes.
	There you are.
	I wanted to inquire about Bill Nelson, who was with NASA probably about 20 years ago, and he came up with the machine for alternative healing, and it was used for when astronauts had headaches or had physical problems.
	All right.
	Are you familiar with that, John?
	I'm sorry.
	I don't know the gentleman.
	So I can't comment on it.
	I'll look it up, but I don't know him.
	The machine has now been updated and it's called the Scio.
	S-C-I-O.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Well, I guess we don't know, but we'll certainly look into it.
	I hope so.
	Thank you.
	Okay.
	You're very welcome.
	Take care.
	Let's go here.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, Art.
	Hi, John.
	This is Jeff calling from North Carolina.
	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 Clearly, just going to the latter one, since the U.S.
	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 US has invested tens of billions
	of dollars in this orbiting research laboratory, it seems somewhat pennywise and pound foolish
	not to make the modest additional investments that are needed to use the space station to
	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 The biggest value to come from the use of the space station as an engineering test facility.
	It's 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.
	Let me ask you a very, I'm sorry, a very loaded question, John.
	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 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.
	Would you justify it, or would you argue against it?
	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,
	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.
	But 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.
	Okay.
	Well, Carline, you're on the air with John Mankins.
	Thank you, Mr. Bell.
	This is an incredibly sensational show.
	My name is David.
	I'm a past guest and the author of a book titled Sunstroke.
	Oh, hey, buddy.
	Hey, Mr. Bell.
	My gosh.
	Congratulations on your phenomenal achievement in broadcasting directly around the world from your Manila, Philippines, tropical paradise.
	My gosh.
	Thank you so much.
	You're very welcome.
	Oh my gosh, 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 Mankins.
	Far away?
	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 Assessments Evaluation of Solar Power Satellites.
	This was published in the early 80s by the U.S.
	Congress.
	Have you read that document, sir?
	You bet.
	The OTA Report 1980 or 81.
	I have a copy.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Do you remember that on page 180, That it clearly states that ionospheric heating could disrupt telecommunications, including AM radio broadcasts.
	I don't remember each page, I'm sorry.
	Of course you don't.
	Let's talk about ionospheric heating, John.
	How much ionospheric heating concerns would there be with something like that?
	It was a legitimate concern at the time.
	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 retro directive phased array, He did a sounding rocket experiment, in which he took a small spacecraft... It was called the MIMIX project.
	The MIMIX experiment, and he ran a test, beaming power through the upper atmosphere to look for those effects.
	Right.
	He succeeded in generating 300 watts of power, very briefly, just for a few minutes, on a ground-based receiving station.
	Really sensational test of the system.
	Now, John, to your knowledge, has the U.S.
	ever duplicated that We talked about it in the program back a few years ago.
	The 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.
	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 of the 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?
	A reasonable question, I think.
	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.
	Well, both of those are intriguing.
	International Line, you're on the air with John Mankins.
	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, you know, put funds into Not so much the institutional level or government level, but even, you know, sort of free enterprise inventors or, you know, guys out of their shops that have these sort of good ideas.
	Has NASA ever looked at using a approach that's similar to what the Defense Department does for, you know, autonomous vehicles and such?
	Have you ever thought about putting money into, say, you know, competition-based, you know, public input?
	Kind of like, I think he means kind of like a DARPA thing.
	No, no, I understood.
	Well, I have to say, you know, just to be, it's 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.
	Okay.
	You have a website, right?
	I do.
	And what is on that website?
	Uh, there's a, um, uh, and in fact, I had an update to the one that's listed on your, um, uh, what the hell did I do?
	Our website?
	The one that you had listed on your website, uh, is a, um, is a link actually to my consulting site.
	Ah.
	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 SunSat 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.
	All right.
	Well, it has been an absolute pleasure having you here, John.
	We will do it again for sure.
	So thank you for staying up late and thank you for informing us, my friend.
	It's my pleasure.
	Take care.
	That's John Mankins, 25 years with NASA and JPL.
	It has been a wonderful night and I will look forward to seeing all of you tomorrow night.
	Same time, same station is the way I think the expression goes.
	So even from the other side of the world, that's the way it works.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.

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