Jon Goff has an absolutely fantastic post here at LH2: Love it or hate it?
LH2 seems most clearly stupid for a first stage fuel. Hydrogen engines have low thrust-to-weight, low thrust-to-cost, and big tanks which can cause a lot of atmospheric drag. Hydrogen first stages also see larger gravity losses than hydrocarbon first stages.
Both the Shuttle and the Delta IV use LH2/LOX engines off the pad. The Shuttle uses hydrogen because those engines are ground-ignited second stage engines, so it has at least some excuse. But the Delta IV is a simple two stage rocket with both stages being LH2/LOX. Why? Did they need to be different than the Atlas V?
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Opportunity
I just read a fantastic article in The New Republic. In it, Husain Haqqani & Daniel Kimmage comment on a series of 430 short biographies of Iraqi insurgents. At the end, they have a suggestion I really like:
Imagine how the biography of the "hero" Al Shammari would read if it were juxtaposed with the biographies of the people he killed? What might readers in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and elsewhere in the Arab world make of a companion volume to "The Martyrs" in which each suicide bomber faced his victims, not as statistics in a war against the infidels, but as individuals in their own right?
Friday, September 09, 2005
Falcon 9 Upper Stage Recovery
The SpaceX annoucement is fluffy. Their big engine is late, and they're going to try to push their Merlin 1 based product a bit past its economic sweet spot.
Significantly, SpaceX has not specified the upper stage. The upper stage for a plain Falcon 9 to LEO lift will require at least two and perhaps three Merlin engines. The upper stage for a Falcon 9-S9 to LEO lift (required to deliver a Space Shuttle cargo to the ISS) will require at least five Merlins, which means it will actually be a Falcon 5 first stage, but with large expansion ratio nozzles and some ability to do in-space restarts (propellant settling, multi-use igniters, RCS without gimballing the main engine). If they are going to recover that stage, though, they'll need more than just the F5's parachutes, they'll need some really wonderful ablatives, somehow spread under all the delicate engine bits.
If you ignore the upper stage reuseability, the business scheme seems wonderful. NASA needs 20+ heavy LEO launches to lift the rest of the ISS. SpaceX builds a fleet of identical airframes and engines. Four airframes and 32 engines go up, three and 27 come back. They build about 25 airframes and 140 engines over several years, and each airframe gets an average of three flights, and each engine gets four or five. They might charge NASA $1.5B for the whole launch set and make a ton of money, and save you and me (i.e. the average taxpayer) about 75 bucks apiece.
But what's this about Full reuseability? Full reuseability is not a press mistake. The SpaceX press release says explicitly that
Falcon 5 and Falcon 9 will be the world's first launch vehicles where all stages are designed for reuse.
(Except Kistler's design, of course.)
This is crazy. If they take over lifting the ISS segments, they'll have a nice steady stream of launches. Over time, they're going to learn how to manufacture their engines better (more thrust, better reliability, lower manufacturing costs), and the later engines will be better than the earlier ones. The steep learning curve makes the early hardware depreciate fast, which makes spending more money to recover it less attractive. Throwing away the upper stage is a great way to clear out the obsolete inventory.
Heck, at some point (2007?) they're going to deliver the Merlin 2. My guess is that this will be a 600,000-lbf-thrust engine. Their next-gen EELV-class launcher will lift 25,000 kg to the ISS without strapons, with four Merlin 2's as the bottom stage and four or five Merlin 1's as the top stage. Why use the Merlin 1's in the upper stage? Because their business plan requires each engine to get used a bunch of times. The last thing they want to do is introduce a new rocket which obsoletes $60 million dollars worth of engine inventory. Instead of recovering a brand-new engine from the upper stage, it will be cheaper for them to use and expend their Merlin 1 inventory in the upper stages of their launches.
I bet the upper stage reusability verbiage is just there to appease some group at NASA. SpaceX may actually attempt a controlled upper stage reentry with ablatives when launching some slightly more lightweight ISS segment. They may get some interesting data from such experiments. But I can't see them pushing upper stage reuseability very hard. They need to concentrate on the easier and more lucrative problem of recovering their lower stages first.
Significantly, SpaceX has not specified the upper stage. The upper stage for a plain Falcon 9 to LEO lift will require at least two and perhaps three Merlin engines. The upper stage for a Falcon 9-S9 to LEO lift (required to deliver a Space Shuttle cargo to the ISS) will require at least five Merlins, which means it will actually be a Falcon 5 first stage, but with large expansion ratio nozzles and some ability to do in-space restarts (propellant settling, multi-use igniters, RCS without gimballing the main engine). If they are going to recover that stage, though, they'll need more than just the F5's parachutes, they'll need some really wonderful ablatives, somehow spread under all the delicate engine bits.
If you ignore the upper stage reuseability, the business scheme seems wonderful. NASA needs 20+ heavy LEO launches to lift the rest of the ISS. SpaceX builds a fleet of identical airframes and engines. Four airframes and 32 engines go up, three and 27 come back. They build about 25 airframes and 140 engines over several years, and each airframe gets an average of three flights, and each engine gets four or five. They might charge NASA $1.5B for the whole launch set and make a ton of money, and save you and me (i.e. the average taxpayer) about 75 bucks apiece.
But what's this about Full reuseability? Full reuseability is not a press mistake. The SpaceX press release says explicitly that
(Except Kistler's design, of course.)
This is crazy. If they take over lifting the ISS segments, they'll have a nice steady stream of launches. Over time, they're going to learn how to manufacture their engines better (more thrust, better reliability, lower manufacturing costs), and the later engines will be better than the earlier ones. The steep learning curve makes the early hardware depreciate fast, which makes spending more money to recover it less attractive. Throwing away the upper stage is a great way to clear out the obsolete inventory.
Heck, at some point (2007?) they're going to deliver the Merlin 2. My guess is that this will be a 600,000-lbf-thrust engine. Their next-gen EELV-class launcher will lift 25,000 kg to the ISS without strapons, with four Merlin 2's as the bottom stage and four or five Merlin 1's as the top stage. Why use the Merlin 1's in the upper stage? Because their business plan requires each engine to get used a bunch of times. The last thing they want to do is introduce a new rocket which obsoletes $60 million dollars worth of engine inventory. Instead of recovering a brand-new engine from the upper stage, it will be cheaper for them to use and expend their Merlin 1 inventory in the upper stages of their launches.
I bet the upper stage reusability verbiage is just there to appease some group at NASA. SpaceX may actually attempt a controlled upper stage reentry with ablatives when launching some slightly more lightweight ISS segment. They may get some interesting data from such experiments. But I can't see them pushing upper stage reuseability very hard. They need to concentrate on the easier and more lucrative problem of recovering their lower stages first.
My Own Vision for Space Exploration
Since I think Bush's Vision for Space Exploration is screwed up, I thought I'd offer my own.
I would initiate a steady program of planetary probes, a common interplanetary communication system, and space-based observatories.
Budget: $4B/year for about 6 probes a year over 2006-2016
about 30 heavy and 30 medium launches
Budget: $8B for 3 observatories over 2009-2016.
about 10 heavy launches
Most probes are limited by their ability to transmit data back to Earth. That ability is limited by the power available to transmit. For the planets beyond Earth (or perhaps Mars), power is limited because solar cells do not have significant yield. I would fully fund the Prometheus project, which is developing a small nuclear reactor for use in space.
Beyond finishing the development of nuclear reactors in space, existing technology is already comfortably close to the limits of what can be transmitted for a given amount of power. It makes sense, then, to have multiple probes in close proximity use the same communication system. This is already done to some extent at Mars, with Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor relaying signals for ground rovers.
I would initiate a program to launch a nuclear-reactor-powered long-range communication satellites into orbit around each of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and (probably) one roving satellite in the asteroid belt. These satellites would primarily be responsible for relaying high data rate bit streams to earth from local probes. They would be built for a useful lifetime of 25 years. They would also carry a modest scientific payload.
Budget: Prometheus: $4B over 2006-2010
Budget: Comsats: $12B for 6 comsats over 2011-2016
about 20 heavy launches
Observatories and comsats, and to some extent probes, have one thing in common: very large communication dishes or imaging reflectors. Observatories and especially the extraterrestrial comsats will also be very heavy. All of these missions can benefit from orbital assembly. I do not forsee intricate assembly of the sort requiring people, nor do I see the ISS as a good place to do this assembly, as it will likely involve close proximity to very large amounts of propellant. I would fund one assembly robot in low earth orbit.
Budget: $2B for one assembly robot over 2006-2010.
2 heavy launches
The extraterrestrial comsats in particular and long-range probes in general have large propellant requirements. To avoid the need for seldom-used massive launchers and their infrastructure, these probes should be boosted to their destinations by the same stage that put them into low earth orbit, but refueled in orbit by other rockets, so that multiple launches can assemble the mass to be launched out of LEO.
To help the nascent boost industry, NASA would be required to fit all payloads into the standardized EELV payload masses and sizes. Payloads intended to fit in the Shuttle for ISS delivery will fit into Heavy EELV boosters.
The Shuttle program would be summarily dumped. If ATK thinks that solid rocket boosters are a good match to LEO delivery (as they may well be), they are welcome to collaborate on an EELV booster to compete with the existing 2 (Delta 4 and Atlas 5) and potential 1 other (Falcon 9).
NASA would develop a Crew Transfer Vehicle. This vehicle would be a capsule carrying about six that would ride as one of the smaller EELV payloads (perhaps the 9000 kg class). If t/Space thinks they can drop-kick people to the ISS for less money, I'd entertain a proposal.
Budget: $2B over 2006-2008 to develop the CXV.
The International Space Station would be completed with EELV Heavy launches over the next several years.
Budget: $4B over 2006-2010 (just for cargo launches)
about 20 heavy launches (ISS segments cargo only)
As well as assembling the station, crews would be sent up fairly often to perform science experiments.
Budget: $1B/year over 2006-2016 (just for the launches)
5 medium launches per year.
There isn't going to be any of this in the next 20 years. Instead, NASA would spend some portion of it's budget learning how to live, work and do science in space. In the meantime, all the probes launched would find out what we actually want people to look at.
Budget: $2B/year over 2006-2016
My total yearly budget ends up about 70% of what NASA spends today. Probably I have no idea how much things cost. In particular, I left out ISS operational and future segment build costs.
I don't see any massive increase in the launch rate. Over the next
11 years, I see about 160 launches with a total price tag of about
$12B. A billion dollars a year seems like enough money to keep
perhaps two players going -- with just 1000 employees each.
Heavy: 82 @ $100M/each
Medium: 80 @ $ 40M/each
Unmanned exploration
I would initiate a steady program of planetary probes, a common interplanetary communication system, and space-based observatories.
Budget: $4B/year for about 6 probes a year over 2006-2016
about 30 heavy and 30 medium launches
Budget: $8B for 3 observatories over 2009-2016.
about 10 heavy launches
Exploration infrastructure
Most probes are limited by their ability to transmit data back to Earth. That ability is limited by the power available to transmit. For the planets beyond Earth (or perhaps Mars), power is limited because solar cells do not have significant yield. I would fully fund the Prometheus project, which is developing a small nuclear reactor for use in space.
Beyond finishing the development of nuclear reactors in space, existing technology is already comfortably close to the limits of what can be transmitted for a given amount of power. It makes sense, then, to have multiple probes in close proximity use the same communication system. This is already done to some extent at Mars, with Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor relaying signals for ground rovers.
I would initiate a program to launch a nuclear-reactor-powered long-range communication satellites into orbit around each of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and (probably) one roving satellite in the asteroid belt. These satellites would primarily be responsible for relaying high data rate bit streams to earth from local probes. They would be built for a useful lifetime of 25 years. They would also carry a modest scientific payload.
Budget: Prometheus: $4B over 2006-2010
Budget: Comsats: $12B for 6 comsats over 2011-2016
about 20 heavy launches
Orbital Assembly Development
Observatories and comsats, and to some extent probes, have one thing in common: very large communication dishes or imaging reflectors. Observatories and especially the extraterrestrial comsats will also be very heavy. All of these missions can benefit from orbital assembly. I do not forsee intricate assembly of the sort requiring people, nor do I see the ISS as a good place to do this assembly, as it will likely involve close proximity to very large amounts of propellant. I would fund one assembly robot in low earth orbit.
Budget: $2B for one assembly robot over 2006-2010.
2 heavy launches
Transportation development
The extraterrestrial comsats in particular and long-range probes in general have large propellant requirements. To avoid the need for seldom-used massive launchers and their infrastructure, these probes should be boosted to their destinations by the same stage that put them into low earth orbit, but refueled in orbit by other rockets, so that multiple launches can assemble the mass to be launched out of LEO.
To help the nascent boost industry, NASA would be required to fit all payloads into the standardized EELV payload masses and sizes. Payloads intended to fit in the Shuttle for ISS delivery will fit into Heavy EELV boosters.
The Shuttle program would be summarily dumped. If ATK thinks that solid rocket boosters are a good match to LEO delivery (as they may well be), they are welcome to collaborate on an EELV booster to compete with the existing 2 (Delta 4 and Atlas 5) and potential 1 other (Falcon 9).
NASA would develop a Crew Transfer Vehicle. This vehicle would be a capsule carrying about six that would ride as one of the smaller EELV payloads (perhaps the 9000 kg class). If t/Space thinks they can drop-kick people to the ISS for less money, I'd entertain a proposal.
Budget: $2B over 2006-2008 to develop the CXV.
Manned spaceflight
The International Space Station would be completed with EELV Heavy launches over the next several years.
Budget: $4B over 2006-2010 (just for cargo launches)
about 20 heavy launches (ISS segments cargo only)
As well as assembling the station, crews would be sent up fairly often to perform science experiments.
Budget: $1B/year over 2006-2016 (just for the launches)
5 medium launches per year.
Manned exploration
There isn't going to be any of this in the next 20 years. Instead, NASA would spend some portion of it's budget learning how to live, work and do science in space. In the meantime, all the probes launched would find out what we actually want people to look at.
Budget: $2B/year over 2006-2016
Budget
My total yearly budget ends up about 70% of what NASA spends today. Probably I have no idea how much things cost. In particular, I left out ISS operational and future segment build costs.
I don't see any massive increase in the launch rate. Over the next
11 years, I see about 160 launches with a total price tag of about
$12B. A billion dollars a year seems like enough money to keep
perhaps two players going -- with just 1000 employees each.
Heavy: 82 @ $100M/each
Medium: 80 @ $ 40M/each
Thursday, September 08, 2005
SpaceX choices
SpaceX has just announced a new, bigger launch vehicle. It has a number of configurations, some of which are roughly the size of some of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) sizes. The EELV program was a Defense Department-funded program to develop two launch vehicles independent of the Shuttle for military payloads, started after the Shuttle fleet was grounded after the Challenger accident.
Q: What is the Falcon 9 intended for?
A: The Falcon 9 is intended for three missions:
Steal payloads from the other two EELV boosters: Delta 4 and Atlas 5. These payloads are mostly military, and the Pentagon would very much like to have a reasonable fallback if they have to cut funding to one of the two subsidized EELV launchers. The Pentagon likes this idea so much they are spending real money on it: Falcon 9's first launch is a defense department satellite.
Replace NASA's "Stick" booster.
Lift the remaining ISS sections.
Q: Why has SpaceX announced Falcon 9 now?
A: SpaceX wants to stick a crowbar into the public debate over NASA's two new boost vehicles. I'm sure the competing camps at NASA have been fully aware of SpaceX's Falcon 9 plans for a while, and probably driving them to some extent. But NASA's decisionmaking is not entirely internal -- they have to convince policymakers to fund their plans, and quite a lot of that convincing is done by attempting to frame the public's perception of those plans.
The ATK/Morton Thiokol lobbyists, and their camp within NASA, have been pushing two new mostly expendable launch vehicles, one to launch a 21 - 26 metric ton crew capsule and resupply ship to the International Space Station, and one to launch Very Heavy Things (110 metric tons) needed for manned lunar or Mars expeditions. Both would use solid rockets derived from the Shuttle SRBs. The big launcher might throw away four reusable SSME engines per launch, which is expensive.
The push isn't going well right now. Developing two vehicles will cost more than NASA is spending now, and that looks very bad to legislators spending hard-won tax dollars on the non-pork-barrel Iraq war and the $700 million/day cleanup of Katrina.
Jumping into the fray now lets SpaceX grab some of the public's mindset before it gets solidified by the ATK camp. They have a launch coming up soon. If it succeeds, John Q Public is going to wonder why NASA can't use the reliable SpaceX booster instead of developing a nearly brand-new launcher.
NASA's designs for a Shuttle-derived Shuttle replacement center around the idea that the technology development, supply chains, and infrastructure it has developed for the Space Shuttle are valuable in their own right. Because the Shuttle is nearing retirement, all three of these things are in danger. For instance, if there is no future vehicle to use a Shuttle/SRB-like solid rocket booster, ATK will have to shutter its plant for assembling these monsters. NASA is absolutely right in realizing that a unique capability that only exists within the U.S. will vanish if that happens.
But the hard question is: are those capabilities actually useful? The ATK boosters, for instance, produce 3.3 million pounds of thrust each, and cost about $40 million per launch. A simplistic analysis of SpaceX's launch prices put an end-user cost of $2.25 million per launch on each Merlin engine, each of which produces 85,000 pounds of thrust. The solid rockets are a much better deal for straight liftoff thrust, at $12.12/pound rather than the $26.47/pound of the Merlins. (The price difference is mitigated significantly but not reversed by the better Isp of the Merlins.) The as-yet-unfulfilled promise of SpaceX is that they are going to recover their engines or even most of the vehicle after each launch, and then will reduce their prices. And, of course, prices in the launch market are flimsy: I read wildly different estimates for costs and have not done my own accounting of NASA's costs, which I assume are public record.
I think the SpaceX entry is great for SpaceX. I had lamented earlier that the Falcon V was just not big enough for ISS resupply. Falcon 9 solves that. This gives SpaceX an obvious and fairly large launch market (I'm guessing three-plus launches a year), which should give them an operating profit with which to fund future development. It should also give them a launch history. It's up to them, of course, to make that launch history one to be proud of.
One hopes that launch market is also an elastic market: since SpaceX's prices are quite low, NASA might get to eventually rotate more of its astronauts through the ISS and actually do some science up there.
I think the SpaceX entry is great for NASA. It gives them the excuse to retire the Shuttle early. It gives them a cost-effective way to assemble the ISS without the Shuttle. With some foresight, they may be able to focus on the in-space aspects of putting people on the Moon or Mars instead of spending all their money on ground handling of launchers.
Lingering problem #1: How does NASA kill off the Shuttle-derived Heavy Launcher? NASA's standing army can't be dismissed until that thing is dead, gone, and maybe replaced. Or perhaps, the folks at NASA will let go of the need for big heavy launchers. I can see this happening for missions with large fuel requirements (launch the fuel seperately).
Lingering problem #2: SpaceX needs to launch a bunch of Falcon 9s before anyone should be confident that they are safe enough for people. What are they going to launch? Possible answer: ISS cargo-only resupply missions. Stretch goal: launch astronauts on Soyuz, and launch ISS sections on big Falcons. It might take a lot longer to assemble the ISS with just 4 people on board, but it might still be doable.
Finally, SpaceX's F9-S9 launcher has no less than 27 2.25-million-dollar engines at the bottom, and their launch prices are about $3000/kg to LEO. Maybe those engines are going to get cheaper if they start cranking them off the production line. But it seems to me SpaceX needs a bigger engine (and a larger diameter standard fuselage), because the current scheme isn't going to scale up much larger. Elon Musk promised that such an engine is in development, but it must not be well enough developed to enter into the current debate, as SpaceX is going to have enough difficulty getting credibility for even the Falcon 9. SpaceX development is late, and they are starting to reap the costs of being late.
Q: What is the Falcon 9 intended for?
A: The Falcon 9 is intended for three missions:
Q: Why has SpaceX announced Falcon 9 now?
A: SpaceX wants to stick a crowbar into the public debate over NASA's two new boost vehicles. I'm sure the competing camps at NASA have been fully aware of SpaceX's Falcon 9 plans for a while, and probably driving them to some extent. But NASA's decisionmaking is not entirely internal -- they have to convince policymakers to fund their plans, and quite a lot of that convincing is done by attempting to frame the public's perception of those plans.
The ATK/Morton Thiokol lobbyists, and their camp within NASA, have been pushing two new mostly expendable launch vehicles, one to launch a 21 - 26 metric ton crew capsule and resupply ship to the International Space Station, and one to launch Very Heavy Things (110 metric tons) needed for manned lunar or Mars expeditions. Both would use solid rockets derived from the Shuttle SRBs. The big launcher might throw away four reusable SSME engines per launch, which is expensive.
The push isn't going well right now. Developing two vehicles will cost more than NASA is spending now, and that looks very bad to legislators spending hard-won tax dollars on the non-pork-barrel Iraq war and the $700 million/day cleanup of Katrina.
Jumping into the fray now lets SpaceX grab some of the public's mindset before it gets solidified by the ATK camp. They have a launch coming up soon. If it succeeds, John Q Public is going to wonder why NASA can't use the reliable SpaceX booster instead of developing a nearly brand-new launcher.
NASA's designs for a Shuttle-derived Shuttle replacement center around the idea that the technology development, supply chains, and infrastructure it has developed for the Space Shuttle are valuable in their own right. Because the Shuttle is nearing retirement, all three of these things are in danger. For instance, if there is no future vehicle to use a Shuttle/SRB-like solid rocket booster, ATK will have to shutter its plant for assembling these monsters. NASA is absolutely right in realizing that a unique capability that only exists within the U.S. will vanish if that happens.
But the hard question is: are those capabilities actually useful? The ATK boosters, for instance, produce 3.3 million pounds of thrust each, and cost about $40 million per launch. A simplistic analysis of SpaceX's launch prices put an end-user cost of $2.25 million per launch on each Merlin engine, each of which produces 85,000 pounds of thrust. The solid rockets are a much better deal for straight liftoff thrust, at $12.12/pound rather than the $26.47/pound of the Merlins. (The price difference is mitigated significantly but not reversed by the better Isp of the Merlins.) The as-yet-unfulfilled promise of SpaceX is that they are going to recover their engines or even most of the vehicle after each launch, and then will reduce their prices. And, of course, prices in the launch market are flimsy: I read wildly different estimates for costs and have not done my own accounting of NASA's costs, which I assume are public record.
I think the SpaceX entry is great for SpaceX. I had lamented earlier that the Falcon V was just not big enough for ISS resupply. Falcon 9 solves that. This gives SpaceX an obvious and fairly large launch market (I'm guessing three-plus launches a year), which should give them an operating profit with which to fund future development. It should also give them a launch history. It's up to them, of course, to make that launch history one to be proud of.
One hopes that launch market is also an elastic market: since SpaceX's prices are quite low, NASA might get to eventually rotate more of its astronauts through the ISS and actually do some science up there.
I think the SpaceX entry is great for NASA. It gives them the excuse to retire the Shuttle early. It gives them a cost-effective way to assemble the ISS without the Shuttle. With some foresight, they may be able to focus on the in-space aspects of putting people on the Moon or Mars instead of spending all their money on ground handling of launchers.
Lingering problem #1: How does NASA kill off the Shuttle-derived Heavy Launcher? NASA's standing army can't be dismissed until that thing is dead, gone, and maybe replaced. Or perhaps, the folks at NASA will let go of the need for big heavy launchers. I can see this happening for missions with large fuel requirements (launch the fuel seperately).
Lingering problem #2: SpaceX needs to launch a bunch of Falcon 9s before anyone should be confident that they are safe enough for people. What are they going to launch? Possible answer: ISS cargo-only resupply missions. Stretch goal: launch astronauts on Soyuz, and launch ISS sections on big Falcons. It might take a lot longer to assemble the ISS with just 4 people on board, but it might still be doable.
Finally, SpaceX's F9-S9 launcher has no less than 27 2.25-million-dollar engines at the bottom, and their launch prices are about $3000/kg to LEO. Maybe those engines are going to get cheaper if they start cranking them off the production line. But it seems to me SpaceX needs a bigger engine (and a larger diameter standard fuselage), because the current scheme isn't going to scale up much larger. Elon Musk promised that such an engine is in development, but it must not be well enough developed to enter into the current debate, as SpaceX is going to have enough difficulty getting credibility for even the Falcon 9. SpaceX development is late, and they are starting to reap the costs of being late.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Graffiti
Yesterday on KQED's Forum program Michael Krasny hosted a panel talking about Graffiti in San Francisco. I thought a lot of these folks were talking around the right idea without nailing it.
One panelist had previously been a graffiti artist and was now a professor of Chicano studies. He thought we needed to engage the kids more (I thought, yep), give them avenues to express themselves (uh oh). Then he got off on a diatribe about how our culture oppresses these kids, is private property really moral, that sort of thing. Michael cut him off and he didn't go there again. It's a shame. I think the issue of private property is the right one. Kids join gangs to get power. Gangs are tribes. We want to belong to tribes.
Most of us, especially teenage boys, want to find our place in the world. We want to assert control. We want to find out who we boss around, and who we are going to have to obey.
Prehistorically, we joined tribes to gain power. A small tribe can have a readily understood structure, so you can figure out how to improve your position in the tribe. Then you can improve the tribe's wealth by asserting ownership of the environment. If that stuff is currently owned by someone else, you steal it. Sometimes this involves tribal warfare, like going to a nearby tribe and killing all the men and boys there (drive-by shootings). This take-and-take-back is what establishes tribal boundaries. It appears to have worked well enough in the past with Amazon-jungle-like population densities.
Here we are in the modern world, where this kind of behavior involves unsustainable mass slaughter (e.g. Iraq). Nowadays, there is an awfully big mega-tribe with an unfathomable structure. I'm trying hard to find my place within this mega-tribe. It's not fair, the power structure excludes lots of people who aren't born into the right families.
Lots of those people are trying to find a way around the mega-tribe. The tribe will tolerate some of this behavior. It will absorb some of it, changing the tribe itself, changing the identities of the winners and losers within the tribe. Heck, Open Source is like that, a subversion of the intellectual property regime that has served so many others so well.
But the tribe can't change too fast, or too many tribe members lose out. That's not in our interests. If you want to change the rules on private property, if you want to be a squatter, or a graffiti artist, or (for that matter) a Chinese businessman who sells unlicensed copies of designs originated elsewhere, you'll affect too many comfortable tribe members and we will come down on you, hard.
It seems petty to arrest and jail a ten-year-old tagging the side of a Safeway in San Francisco. One panelist talked about councelling for these kids. Sounds good, but any councelling is going to have to involve waking them up to a set of unpleasant realities, so they can get on with working within the structure of the mega-tribe:
They really are oppressed. This condition will not change in their lifetimes.
We really will keep sticking them in jail if they try to assert their rights over the ones we unjustly inherited.
The system for remedying their situation ("democracy") is malfunctioning badly, and there is very little they can do about it without a lot of thought and selfless action. The latter is not going to improve their personal situation.
There is no obvious legal route for them to get rich. If they work hard within the existing system, they can join the middle class, get a mortgage, and become indentured to the international capital system like the rest of us. And they'll be discriminated against the whole way.
For those of us born to better circumstances, we need a clear-eyed understanding that we can't afford to discriminate against very many other people for very long. Eventually they'll figure out how to organize against the existing structure. We need more of the people of the world, especially those who live closer to me, to have a clearer path to at least some measure of personal fulfillment. Since there isn't enough material wealth to go around, and our media spends at minimum 20 minutes of every hour hammering home the message that unlimited material wealth is a baseline requirement for happiness, it seems to me that the message that our media is sending is opposed to my interests, and those of most owners of private property.
I doubt I'm the first one to figure this out. Maybe this is why the sons and daughters of the rich have a greater tendency towards philanthropy: it's better to give some of it away than have all of it taken from you.
And of course, it sure isn't all the media's fault. I just can't think of anything else right now.
Mood: grumpy.
Side note: remember to pray for those folks in Louisiana tonight. Maybe when they rebuild New Orleans they can put the whole city on piers, like Venice. Seems more reliable than pumps, and as Venice shows it's quite romantic.
One panelist had previously been a graffiti artist and was now a professor of Chicano studies. He thought we needed to engage the kids more (I thought, yep), give them avenues to express themselves (uh oh). Then he got off on a diatribe about how our culture oppresses these kids, is private property really moral, that sort of thing. Michael cut him off and he didn't go there again. It's a shame. I think the issue of private property is the right one. Kids join gangs to get power. Gangs are tribes. We want to belong to tribes.
Most of us, especially teenage boys, want to find our place in the world. We want to assert control. We want to find out who we boss around, and who we are going to have to obey.
Prehistorically, we joined tribes to gain power. A small tribe can have a readily understood structure, so you can figure out how to improve your position in the tribe. Then you can improve the tribe's wealth by asserting ownership of the environment. If that stuff is currently owned by someone else, you steal it. Sometimes this involves tribal warfare, like going to a nearby tribe and killing all the men and boys there (drive-by shootings). This take-and-take-back is what establishes tribal boundaries. It appears to have worked well enough in the past with Amazon-jungle-like population densities.
Here we are in the modern world, where this kind of behavior involves unsustainable mass slaughter (e.g. Iraq). Nowadays, there is an awfully big mega-tribe with an unfathomable structure. I'm trying hard to find my place within this mega-tribe. It's not fair, the power structure excludes lots of people who aren't born into the right families.
Lots of those people are trying to find a way around the mega-tribe. The tribe will tolerate some of this behavior. It will absorb some of it, changing the tribe itself, changing the identities of the winners and losers within the tribe. Heck, Open Source is like that, a subversion of the intellectual property regime that has served so many others so well.
But the tribe can't change too fast, or too many tribe members lose out. That's not in our interests. If you want to change the rules on private property, if you want to be a squatter, or a graffiti artist, or (for that matter) a Chinese businessman who sells unlicensed copies of designs originated elsewhere, you'll affect too many comfortable tribe members and we will come down on you, hard.
It seems petty to arrest and jail a ten-year-old tagging the side of a Safeway in San Francisco. One panelist talked about councelling for these kids. Sounds good, but any councelling is going to have to involve waking them up to a set of unpleasant realities, so they can get on with working within the structure of the mega-tribe:
For those of us born to better circumstances, we need a clear-eyed understanding that we can't afford to discriminate against very many other people for very long. Eventually they'll figure out how to organize against the existing structure. We need more of the people of the world, especially those who live closer to me, to have a clearer path to at least some measure of personal fulfillment. Since there isn't enough material wealth to go around, and our media spends at minimum 20 minutes of every hour hammering home the message that unlimited material wealth is a baseline requirement for happiness, it seems to me that the message that our media is sending is opposed to my interests, and those of most owners of private property.
I doubt I'm the first one to figure this out. Maybe this is why the sons and daughters of the rich have a greater tendency towards philanthropy: it's better to give some of it away than have all of it taken from you.
And of course, it sure isn't all the media's fault. I just can't think of anything else right now.
Mood: grumpy.
Side note: remember to pray for those folks in Louisiana tonight. Maybe when they rebuild New Orleans they can put the whole city on piers, like Venice. Seems more reliable than pumps, and as Venice shows it's quite romantic.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Hydrogen from nuclear reactors
I used to think this was part of the Hydrogen Economy scam. Now I think it might be a good idea, but it appears to be justified to the public as part of the Hydrogen Economy scam.
Here's the idea: electrolysis of water to make hydrogen is expensive (about $2.46/kg at $.05/kW-hr), because electricity is expensive. But electrolysis at very high temperatures takes much less electricity, since the heat supplies much of the energy. Nuclear reactors can supply that heat cheaply. New gas-cooled high-temperature reactors can supply heat at 850 C. General Atomics has published a report that claims hydrogen could be produced from high-temp reactor steam for $1.53/kg.
Yawn. In 2003, hydrogen from natural gas cost $1.40/kg. Sounds like a boondoggle for the nuclear industry, combined with some Hydrogen Economy crap that generally makes my skin crawl. Buuut...
At May 2005 natural gas prices, hydrogen costs $2.70/kg.
The domestic U.S. consumption of hydrogen is huge: about 11 million metric tons per year. Half gets used to make ammonia (fertilizer), the other half is used to hydrocrack heavy hydrocarbons into lighter, fuel-grade stuff. World production of hydrogen is growing at 10% per year. Growth is probably faster in the U.S.
Bottom line: The U.S. spends $30 billion per year to make hydrogen, most of that is the cost of imported natural gas. The dollar volume is going up very fast as consumption increases and gas prices rise. Billions of dollars a year can be saved by making the stuff at nuclear reactors, and that is billions of dollars directly diverted from importing natural gas.
Near term future: We're going to need a lot more hydrogen as the hydrocarbon stocks we process for fuel get heavier, for instance, if we start using oil from Canada's Athabasca tar sands. Note that hydrocracking is not a clever way to get ordinary cars to run on hydrogen: Refineries will use the minimum amount of $1.60/kg hydrogen necessary to convert and sell their $0.30/kg crude as gasoline for $1.50/kg.
I'd think these reactors would be more appealing for their operator than the current offerings. Instead of being stuck with base load electricity prices, they can make electricity during the day, when prices are higher, and make hydrogen at night, when prices fall. It's expensive to store hydrogen, but you can probably store a few day's worth before you pipe it to the refinery down the street. And as long as these reactors are just down the street from oil refineries, there's a good chance the refinery can use some process heat from the reactor, too.
Finally, there is an international market for any such nuclear reactors, as well as the ammonia that we can produce from them.
The market seems big enough: hydrogen consumption is growing fast enough that you could build 5 new one-gigawatt reactors each year just to keep up with the growth, assuming each makes hydrogen 24x7.
So why should the U.S. government subsidize these reactor designs?
Macroeconomy: Because a billion dollar subsidy can reduce our balance of trade by $30 billion.
National Security: Because it can reduce our dependence on oil (in two ways) by a useful amount, and this is a noticeable step towards energy independence.
P.S. But none of this means that running cars directly on hydrogen is anything but stupid. It's just too expensive for that. If Governor Schwartzenegger gets a clue maybe he can dump the hydrogen-fueled Hummer and help secure licenses for 6 more 1100 MW units at Diablo Canyon.
Here's the idea: electrolysis of water to make hydrogen is expensive (about $2.46/kg at $.05/kW-hr), because electricity is expensive. But electrolysis at very high temperatures takes much less electricity, since the heat supplies much of the energy. Nuclear reactors can supply that heat cheaply. New gas-cooled high-temperature reactors can supply heat at 850 C. General Atomics has published a report that claims hydrogen could be produced from high-temp reactor steam for $1.53/kg.
Yawn. In 2003, hydrogen from natural gas cost $1.40/kg. Sounds like a boondoggle for the nuclear industry, combined with some Hydrogen Economy crap that generally makes my skin crawl. Buuut...
Bottom line: The U.S. spends $30 billion per year to make hydrogen, most of that is the cost of imported natural gas. The dollar volume is going up very fast as consumption increases and gas prices rise. Billions of dollars a year can be saved by making the stuff at nuclear reactors, and that is billions of dollars directly diverted from importing natural gas.
Near term future: We're going to need a lot more hydrogen as the hydrocarbon stocks we process for fuel get heavier, for instance, if we start using oil from Canada's Athabasca tar sands. Note that hydrocracking is not a clever way to get ordinary cars to run on hydrogen: Refineries will use the minimum amount of $1.60/kg hydrogen necessary to convert and sell their $0.30/kg crude as gasoline for $1.50/kg.
I'd think these reactors would be more appealing for their operator than the current offerings. Instead of being stuck with base load electricity prices, they can make electricity during the day, when prices are higher, and make hydrogen at night, when prices fall. It's expensive to store hydrogen, but you can probably store a few day's worth before you pipe it to the refinery down the street. And as long as these reactors are just down the street from oil refineries, there's a good chance the refinery can use some process heat from the reactor, too.
Finally, there is an international market for any such nuclear reactors, as well as the ammonia that we can produce from them.
The market seems big enough: hydrogen consumption is growing fast enough that you could build 5 new one-gigawatt reactors each year just to keep up with the growth, assuming each makes hydrogen 24x7.
So why should the U.S. government subsidize these reactor designs?
P.S. But none of this means that running cars directly on hydrogen is anything but stupid. It's just too expensive for that. If Governor Schwartzenegger gets a clue maybe he can dump the hydrogen-fueled Hummer and help secure licenses for 6 more 1100 MW units at Diablo Canyon.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
USEC
Nuclear disarmament is a good thing. Reducing the weapons stockpiles in the U.S. and Russia has left both countries with large stockpiles of highly-enriched bomb-grade uranium and plutonium. Every terrorist in the world wants to get some, some terrorists are rich, and some 40-year-old nuclear workers in Russia are living hand-to-mouth. It's a dangerous situation.
In 1991, Senators Nunn and Lugar had a good idea. The government-owned U.S. Enrichment Corporation (USEC), which operates enrichment facilities in the U.S. to provide fuel for commercial reactors, would buy a portion of Russia's nuclear stockpile so that it could be burned in U.S. commercial reactors. This is a great idea, and a pretty good summary can be found here. There is a snag, however:
Russia wasn't going to send bomb grade material directly to the U.S., because that would be like actually selling us nuclear weapons. Instead, they mixed the bomb grade stuff with Russian natural uranium, so that the result was 4.4% U-235 -- just right for a commercial reactor. The overall flow of reactor-grade material would have replaced a good chunk of domestic U.S. uranium demand.
Domestic U.S. uranium suppliers didn't like that. Together, the U.S. and Russia have about 2000 metric tons of bomb-grade material, equivalent to 12 times annual world mine production. By the time the U.S. civilian reactors had burned through Russia's half of this stockpile, the domestic U.S. uranium suppliers would be out of business and Russia would end up being the majority uranium supplier to the U.S.
So the deal was that Russia would buy the American natural uranium from the miners that was displaced by the Russian imports. This uranium would be stockpiled in the U.S. in USEC's custody. The U.S. goverment got two commercial reactor operators to promise to buy the Russian uranium eventually. Russia would sell the rest off over sufficient time.
Realistically, it's going to take many decades to work through that stockpile. Now that they've been paid off, the domestic U.S. miners have mostly stopped digging, which will help. Getting this stockpile is yet another good reason to build more nuclear powerplants (though not the strongest, of course).
The notion of U.S. mining interests delaying such an incredibly important piece of national security work so that they could protect their bottom lines still strikes me as... treasonous. But it appears that negotiators at our government have managed to pay off these people, so that we can get on with the business of paying off Russia for the knives held to our throats.
In 1991, Senators Nunn and Lugar had a good idea. The government-owned U.S. Enrichment Corporation (USEC), which operates enrichment facilities in the U.S. to provide fuel for commercial reactors, would buy a portion of Russia's nuclear stockpile so that it could be burned in U.S. commercial reactors. This is a great idea, and a pretty good summary can be found here. There is a snag, however:
Russia wasn't going to send bomb grade material directly to the U.S., because that would be like actually selling us nuclear weapons. Instead, they mixed the bomb grade stuff with Russian natural uranium, so that the result was 4.4% U-235 -- just right for a commercial reactor. The overall flow of reactor-grade material would have replaced a good chunk of domestic U.S. uranium demand.
Domestic U.S. uranium suppliers didn't like that. Together, the U.S. and Russia have about 2000 metric tons of bomb-grade material, equivalent to 12 times annual world mine production. By the time the U.S. civilian reactors had burned through Russia's half of this stockpile, the domestic U.S. uranium suppliers would be out of business and Russia would end up being the majority uranium supplier to the U.S.
So the deal was that Russia would buy the American natural uranium from the miners that was displaced by the Russian imports. This uranium would be stockpiled in the U.S. in USEC's custody. The U.S. goverment got two commercial reactor operators to promise to buy the Russian uranium eventually. Russia would sell the rest off over sufficient time.
Realistically, it's going to take many decades to work through that stockpile. Now that they've been paid off, the domestic U.S. miners have mostly stopped digging, which will help. Getting this stockpile is yet another good reason to build more nuclear powerplants (though not the strongest, of course).
The notion of U.S. mining interests delaying such an incredibly important piece of national security work so that they could protect their bottom lines still strikes me as... treasonous. But it appears that negotiators at our government have managed to pay off these people, so that we can get on with the business of paying off Russia for the knives held to our throats.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Escape rockets for unmanned satellites
Re: Is an EELV safe enough to launch people without "man-rating" it first?
In a May 2003 hearing (before he was head of NASA), Griffin commented “What, precisely, are the precautions that we would take to safeguard a human crew that we would deliberately omit when launching, say, a billion-dollar Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission? The answer is, of course, ‘none’. While we appropriately value human life very highly, the investment we make in most unmanned missions is quite sufficient to capture our full attention.”
Since then, he's had a change of heart. NASA's line right now is that man-rating an EELV booster is more expensive than designing a new shuttle-derived vehicle.
I agree with the change of heart, at least. Unmanned satellites generally don't have reentry and landing systems packaged with them, as manned vehicles must. If a satellite did have a reentry and landing system, for the expensive portion of the satellite, seperately engineered to be fail-safe for other reasons, I suspect the insurance companies would be quite interested in adding escape rockets to the launcher, to recover the billion-dollar-satellite in the case that the $100-million-dollar launcher blows up or simply fails to get it into a reasonable orbit.
So escape rockets are a good example of something we would deliberately omit from the Mars Exploration Rover. Ironically, the MER does have a reentry and landing system, but one designed to work in the thin atmosphere of Mars. It would have been much different, e.g. heavier and more expensive, if it were also required to get the rover down, safely, into the mid-Atlantic after a failed booster shot.
In a May 2003 hearing (before he was head of NASA), Griffin commented “What, precisely, are the precautions that we would take to safeguard a human crew that we would deliberately omit when launching, say, a billion-dollar Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission? The answer is, of course, ‘none’. While we appropriately value human life very highly, the investment we make in most unmanned missions is quite sufficient to capture our full attention.”
Since then, he's had a change of heart. NASA's line right now is that man-rating an EELV booster is more expensive than designing a new shuttle-derived vehicle.
I agree with the change of heart, at least. Unmanned satellites generally don't have reentry and landing systems packaged with them, as manned vehicles must. If a satellite did have a reentry and landing system, for the expensive portion of the satellite, seperately engineered to be fail-safe for other reasons, I suspect the insurance companies would be quite interested in adding escape rockets to the launcher, to recover the billion-dollar-satellite in the case that the $100-million-dollar launcher blows up or simply fails to get it into a reasonable orbit.
So escape rockets are a good example of something we would deliberately omit from the Mars Exploration Rover. Ironically, the MER does have a reentry and landing system, but one designed to work in the thin atmosphere of Mars. It would have been much different, e.g. heavier and more expensive, if it were also required to get the rover down, safely, into the mid-Atlantic after a failed booster shot.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Slime Farms
The Set America Free folks have the right idea. Their proposal is a series of legislative steps that we can take now that will have the effect of reducing our oil imports through a combination of better fuel efficiency and generation of oil substitutes.
I'm not 100% in agreement with these folks. They'd still fund hydrogen fuel cell research to the tune of $2 billion over the next 4 years, and they pay lip service to biodiesel research. I'd whack that fuel cell research completely, and put steady money into biodiesel for at least two decades -- $300M/year into biodiesel from crops (this will help work out the bugs in delivering biodiesel through our supply chain and any vehicle use issues), $100M/year into biodiesel from existing microalgae (to develop and debug the infrastructure for growing and processing for millions of tons of algae), and maybe $100M/year to $200M/year into engineered microalgae.
The oil business is so huge, and leverages such a massive prehistoric biological mechanism, that replacing our oil imports will eventually involve re-engineering our environment in the same way that we have done with building big dams, draining big swamps, and farming the prairie. We are never going to produce meaningful amounts of fuel from farm crops, because there is not enough land, not enough fresh water, and land plants produce too much non-fuel mass to sort through. When Big Oil gets into biodiesel, we'll end up extending Louisiana, Texas, and Florida with dikes extending into the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico. Within those dikes will be massive brackish algae ponds pumped to saturation with the CO2 from coal-fired powerplants. Millions of gallons of oil every day will be extracted from algae separated from those ponds. Environmentalists will be outraged at the devastation wrought on the delicate marine environment. Folks living on those coastlines will protest the change in their views (but will probably welcome the new jobs).
And negotiations with fundamentalist regimes in the mideast who wish to have nuclear weapons will have a decidedly different tone. Without the U.S. dependent on Iranian and Saudi oil, without their ability to tweak our economy with simple price changes, without the constant flow of Westerners who must tend to their oil fields, without the massive influx of cash that keeps their corrupt governments in power and able to support expensive research into WMDs... things will be vastly different. Conditions will be more like Afghanistan and less like Saudi Arabia. More like Afghanistan but without the subsidized madrasas. But that is their problem, not ours.
But none of this is possible now because nobody really knows how to grow a lot of algae cheaply, just like nobody knew how to use steam and CO2 injection to profitably leach oil out of a recalcitrant well 100 years ago. It is a U.S. national security priority to develop extensive domestic energy supplies, and that is why the U.S. government should fund biodiesel research. We had a decent program going for about a dozen years, called the "Aquatic Species Program", started during Reagan's tenure, which was canned by the Clinton administration. Here's their report. (300+ pages, check the table of contents and the last couple of sections for the good stuff.)
So there is a lot of research and development to do.
I should say that by engineered microalgae, I mean crop development the way it's been traditionally done for thousands of years: grow a lot of algae, select the stuff that produces the most oil, propagate that strain and wipe out the rest. Iterate hundreds or thousands of times. Set up multiple centers across the U.S., so that various strains can be developed independently, optimized for the local environment, adapted to the highly acidic environment we want to grow this stuff in, with different approaches to optimization by different teams. Given the rate at which microalgae grow, I think we should be able to get the iteration time down to a week at maximum. One iteration a day would be significantly better. I'd expect some decent results within a decade. If illiterate people can take wild maize and transform it into corn in a millenium with just one or two crops a year, we can turn wild microalgae into a serious oil producer in a decade.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for actual genetic engineering of the microalgae. Genetic engineering is good at turning off particular pathways inside cells. It might be useful for adding pathways that wouldn't exist otherwise, say, if you want to produce a particular drug in carefully sterilized bacterial fermenters. But the problem is that any tinkering we do is going to make the resulting species less well adapted to its environment. Algae in the wild live in a very competitive environment. Algae farms are going to be cheap places, not well-controlled places -- we probably can't afford to even put thin plastic film over the ponds to cut down on evaporation and CO2 loss. So we can't protect specially engineered algae from competitors.
I think there is a lot we can do in the next decade to turn around our crummy national security situation and maybe improve our economy as well. We need to get Congress on board, define the problem, and eliminate distractions.
I'm not 100% in agreement with these folks. They'd still fund hydrogen fuel cell research to the tune of $2 billion over the next 4 years, and they pay lip service to biodiesel research. I'd whack that fuel cell research completely, and put steady money into biodiesel for at least two decades -- $300M/year into biodiesel from crops (this will help work out the bugs in delivering biodiesel through our supply chain and any vehicle use issues), $100M/year into biodiesel from existing microalgae (to develop and debug the infrastructure for growing and processing for millions of tons of algae), and maybe $100M/year to $200M/year into engineered microalgae.
The oil business is so huge, and leverages such a massive prehistoric biological mechanism, that replacing our oil imports will eventually involve re-engineering our environment in the same way that we have done with building big dams, draining big swamps, and farming the prairie. We are never going to produce meaningful amounts of fuel from farm crops, because there is not enough land, not enough fresh water, and land plants produce too much non-fuel mass to sort through. When Big Oil gets into biodiesel, we'll end up extending Louisiana, Texas, and Florida with dikes extending into the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico. Within those dikes will be massive brackish algae ponds pumped to saturation with the CO2 from coal-fired powerplants. Millions of gallons of oil every day will be extracted from algae separated from those ponds. Environmentalists will be outraged at the devastation wrought on the delicate marine environment. Folks living on those coastlines will protest the change in their views (but will probably welcome the new jobs).
And negotiations with fundamentalist regimes in the mideast who wish to have nuclear weapons will have a decidedly different tone. Without the U.S. dependent on Iranian and Saudi oil, without their ability to tweak our economy with simple price changes, without the constant flow of Westerners who must tend to their oil fields, without the massive influx of cash that keeps their corrupt governments in power and able to support expensive research into WMDs... things will be vastly different. Conditions will be more like Afghanistan and less like Saudi Arabia. More like Afghanistan but without the subsidized madrasas. But that is their problem, not ours.
But none of this is possible now because nobody really knows how to grow a lot of algae cheaply, just like nobody knew how to use steam and CO2 injection to profitably leach oil out of a recalcitrant well 100 years ago. It is a U.S. national security priority to develop extensive domestic energy supplies, and that is why the U.S. government should fund biodiesel research. We had a decent program going for about a dozen years, called the "Aquatic Species Program", started during Reagan's tenure, which was canned by the Clinton administration. Here's their report. (300+ pages, check the table of contents and the last couple of sections for the good stuff.)
So there is a lot of research and development to do.
I should say that by engineered microalgae, I mean crop development the way it's been traditionally done for thousands of years: grow a lot of algae, select the stuff that produces the most oil, propagate that strain and wipe out the rest. Iterate hundreds or thousands of times. Set up multiple centers across the U.S., so that various strains can be developed independently, optimized for the local environment, adapted to the highly acidic environment we want to grow this stuff in, with different approaches to optimization by different teams. Given the rate at which microalgae grow, I think we should be able to get the iteration time down to a week at maximum. One iteration a day would be significantly better. I'd expect some decent results within a decade. If illiterate people can take wild maize and transform it into corn in a millenium with just one or two crops a year, we can turn wild microalgae into a serious oil producer in a decade.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for actual genetic engineering of the microalgae. Genetic engineering is good at turning off particular pathways inside cells. It might be useful for adding pathways that wouldn't exist otherwise, say, if you want to produce a particular drug in carefully sterilized bacterial fermenters. But the problem is that any tinkering we do is going to make the resulting species less well adapted to its environment. Algae in the wild live in a very competitive environment. Algae farms are going to be cheap places, not well-controlled places -- we probably can't afford to even put thin plastic film over the ponds to cut down on evaporation and CO2 loss. So we can't protect specially engineered algae from competitors.
I think there is a lot we can do in the next decade to turn around our crummy national security situation and maybe improve our economy as well. We need to get Congress on board, define the problem, and eliminate distractions.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Shuttle replacements
NASA is mulling two vehicles to replace the Shuttle. Both are based on Shuttle components. This post is really about three things: one, why the proposed NASA designs are about as good as they can do; two, how the proposed designs are worse than the alternatives, and three, what would have to happen for the U.S. to use a better alternative.
The claimed reason for basing on Shuttle components is reduction of development cost, infrastructure build cost, and time-to-reliability. This last issue is not to be taken lightly -- the flight histories of much of the Shuttle hardware, along with the years of tweaking of that hardware, are irreplaceable. If we're going to launch people on a new rocket, we want to be in a position to say with familiarity that the rocket is safe, and we can only say that about a rocket with a long flight history. Nothing else is going to have a long flight history by 2010. Well, almost nothing, and I'll get to that near my conclusion.
The other reason for basing the new vehicles on Shuttle components is jobs. The Shuttle program currently employs many tens of thousands of people at NASA and its subcontractors. Those people and their employers want to stay in business, and they have gained quite a bit of leverage on their representatives in Washington.
Considerations like this are what make NASA's proposed vehicles so sad in comparison to a clean-sheet design. It's not so much that the NASA vehicles are more dangerous or less capable than the alternatives, but that that NASA will do so much less with them than they could do with the alternatives, for the same amount of money. My current favorite clean-sheet design is the one being pursued by SpaceX, and I think it's interesting to compare the two.
Before I go any further, I should note that unlike NASA and its prime contractors Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, SpaceX hasn't launched any hardware yet (first launch is scheduled for the end of September, 2 months from now). What they do have is 100 or so employees almost all of whom have experience putting stuff in orbit. Assuming SpaceX gets the contract to haul supplies to the International Space Station via their as-yet-unbuilt Falcon V, and assuming they establish regular flights by 2008, they still won't have a long flight history by 2010.
But back to the comparison. Both NASA and SpaceX are pursuing a two stage to LEO design. Both first stages are reusable (they parachute back into the ocean), both upper stages are expendable, both use capsules to recover the crew and have little ability to return large masses from orbit. All of these are good choices.
The limitations of the comparison are that the NASA "Stick" design is supposed to lift 20000 kg to the ISS, and the SpaceX Falcon V lifts 5450 kg. So if NASA were to use SpaceX to send people to the ISS, it would have to be three people at a time instead of six, and the capsule would have to be simpler than the full-blown Crew Expeditionary Vehicle they envisage today. Also, SpaceX hasn't yet announced a crew capsule development for the Falcon V. They are going to man-rate the booster, and I think they intend to use it for people after developing a good flight history with cargo.
Both the SpaceX stages burn liquid oxygen and kerosene. Such engines are well understood, and give predictable, respectable but not spectacular performance. Because the engines are liquid fuelled, they can be throttled and shut down at will. And crucially, kerosene is benign (basically like the gasoline you put in your car) and liquid oxygen is not terribly difficult or expensive to handle. SpaceX uses recently developed materials, manufacturing techniques, and avionics to achieve larger payload per dollar than has historically been possible with this propellant combination. As a result, the SpaceX rocket can be handled by a small team of people and manufactured for small amounts of money.
NASA's first stage is a stretched version of the solid rocket booster currently used by the Shuttle. That SRB costs about as much to recover, refurbish, and refuel as it does to build a new one, so the reusability is cosmetic. The proposed first stage cannot be shut down early (for instance, if the cabin loses pressure). It cannot be throttled, and the thrust is somewhat unpredictable (which means the whole rocket structure has to be built with more margin to sustain higher peak G and aerodynamic loads, and the upper stage needs more delta-V margin to recover when there is less delivered velocity).
The SRB is a low performance first stage. It is heavier than the SpaceX hardware: The aluminum-lithium SpaceX booster has a mass fraction of 94%, where the steel SRB has a mass fraction of 85%, and the SpaceX booster has a higher exhaust velocity, 2980 m/s versus the SRB's 2636 m/s (measured at sea level air pressure). The result is that the SRB has to be much bigger per kg of payload as the SpaceX design.
There is a school of thought in the rocket design community that espouses the Big Dumb Booster. Their point is that a larger rocket is just fine, so long as it costs less. Cost is mostly related to things other than size, like the number of people necessary to build, transport, and launch the rocket. But the Shuttle SRB is so big that its size implies complexity. Pouring single grains of propellant that large requires enormous facilities to mix and cure the components. The entire SRB is too large to pour or transport as a single piece, so it is poured as four pieces, seperately transported to Cape Canaveral, then assembled there. And while the clevis and tang joints between the sections have now been sufficiently engineered to be safe, they impose handling restrictions (NASA cannot leave the Shuttle out in the cold), and cost more money.
As a result of all this complexity, each Shuttle SRB costs $40M per flight (that's half of the first stage, with no guidance or communication system). A two-stage SpaceX Falcon V sells for $15.9M (that's everything but the capsule on top) [number has been updated - thanks, Jon]. For a sense of how cost scales with size, note that the Falcon V lifts almost ten times the payload of the Falcon I, but costs a little more than three times as much. Each SRB has a bit more than 7 times the thrust of the Falcon V first stage.
NASA faces a difficult choice for the upper stage. There is only one man-rated engine suitable for upper-stage use in production in the U.S., and that is the Shuttle's SSME. That engine is complete overkill for an upper stage engine, because it's designed to work in the lower atmosphere too, which makes everything more complicated. Throwing it away each flight will cost a lot. Any other engine (i.e. the in-development Cobra or the in-production RS-68) will require at least some development money and time to certify as man-rated, but will cost less per launch.
All the engines NASA is considering for the second stage burn both liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. This decision alone pushes the cost of the NASA solution far away from nearly anything else. LH2 will give better performance than kerosene (4300 m/s exhaust velocity versus 3330 m/s, measured in a vacuum), and thus a smaller rocket, but the relevant difference is cost. NASA can't go with a lower cost propellant combination because there are no US-manufactured man-rated engines which burn anything less costly.
Now that we know why NASA is mulling an expensive crew vehicle, and what a less expensive vehicle looks like, and interesting question is, how could we end up with the cheaper alternative? I assume, in particular, that the SpaceX honchos think about this problem relatively often. I also think that Michael Griffin, the NASA chief administrator, thinks about this fairly often as well.
It's a political problem. NASA has to get crews to the international space station after the Shuttle is retired. The Russians have complained about being solely responsible for launching crews for the last few years, but that is because we weren't paying enough for the launches. If we were willing to pay, the Russians would be happy to provide launch services (they recently asked for $63M per launch). They have a very dependable launcher, which costs a fraction of a Shuttle launch. Buying time to design and build a better, cheaper U.S. launcher would be cheaper than building the stopgap crew launcher currently envisaged.
We would then be faced with the smaller problem of launching the ISS portions originally intended to go up on the Shuttle. Both EELV boosters have the mass capability to launch these cargoes (though NASA would have to rework each piece to sit in the EELV payload fairing rather than in the Shuttle payload bay). EELV launches are expensive (around $254M), but they're half of a Shuttle launch, and don't endanger crews.
Michael Griffin is going to take the expensive but politically necessary route. He'll pay the big NASA prime contractors many billions of dollars to develop a stopgap launcher, while ensuring that SpaceX and perhaps t/Space and Kistler get sufficient funding to get launch histories. Eventually, perhaps after his tenure, it will become clear that the startup U.S. launch companies are safe enough and obviously cheaper enough to mothball those horribly expensive launchers. This comparison will have to be painfully real, immediately obvious, and undeniable. Only then can the NASA prime contractors be fired and the money formerly used for their support used instead for space exploration.
The claimed reason for basing on Shuttle components is reduction of development cost, infrastructure build cost, and time-to-reliability. This last issue is not to be taken lightly -- the flight histories of much of the Shuttle hardware, along with the years of tweaking of that hardware, are irreplaceable. If we're going to launch people on a new rocket, we want to be in a position to say with familiarity that the rocket is safe, and we can only say that about a rocket with a long flight history. Nothing else is going to have a long flight history by 2010. Well, almost nothing, and I'll get to that near my conclusion.
The other reason for basing the new vehicles on Shuttle components is jobs. The Shuttle program currently employs many tens of thousands of people at NASA and its subcontractors. Those people and their employers want to stay in business, and they have gained quite a bit of leverage on their representatives in Washington.
Considerations like this are what make NASA's proposed vehicles so sad in comparison to a clean-sheet design. It's not so much that the NASA vehicles are more dangerous or less capable than the alternatives, but that that NASA will do so much less with them than they could do with the alternatives, for the same amount of money. My current favorite clean-sheet design is the one being pursued by SpaceX, and I think it's interesting to compare the two.
Before I go any further, I should note that unlike NASA and its prime contractors Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, SpaceX hasn't launched any hardware yet (first launch is scheduled for the end of September, 2 months from now). What they do have is 100 or so employees almost all of whom have experience putting stuff in orbit. Assuming SpaceX gets the contract to haul supplies to the International Space Station via their as-yet-unbuilt Falcon V, and assuming they establish regular flights by 2008, they still won't have a long flight history by 2010.
But back to the comparison. Both NASA and SpaceX are pursuing a two stage to LEO design. Both first stages are reusable (they parachute back into the ocean), both upper stages are expendable, both use capsules to recover the crew and have little ability to return large masses from orbit. All of these are good choices.
The limitations of the comparison are that the NASA "Stick" design is supposed to lift 20000 kg to the ISS, and the SpaceX Falcon V lifts 5450 kg. So if NASA were to use SpaceX to send people to the ISS, it would have to be three people at a time instead of six, and the capsule would have to be simpler than the full-blown Crew Expeditionary Vehicle they envisage today. Also, SpaceX hasn't yet announced a crew capsule development for the Falcon V. They are going to man-rate the booster, and I think they intend to use it for people after developing a good flight history with cargo.
Both the SpaceX stages burn liquid oxygen and kerosene. Such engines are well understood, and give predictable, respectable but not spectacular performance. Because the engines are liquid fuelled, they can be throttled and shut down at will. And crucially, kerosene is benign (basically like the gasoline you put in your car) and liquid oxygen is not terribly difficult or expensive to handle. SpaceX uses recently developed materials, manufacturing techniques, and avionics to achieve larger payload per dollar than has historically been possible with this propellant combination. As a result, the SpaceX rocket can be handled by a small team of people and manufactured for small amounts of money.
NASA's first stage is a stretched version of the solid rocket booster currently used by the Shuttle. That SRB costs about as much to recover, refurbish, and refuel as it does to build a new one, so the reusability is cosmetic. The proposed first stage cannot be shut down early (for instance, if the cabin loses pressure). It cannot be throttled, and the thrust is somewhat unpredictable (which means the whole rocket structure has to be built with more margin to sustain higher peak G and aerodynamic loads, and the upper stage needs more delta-V margin to recover when there is less delivered velocity).
The SRB is a low performance first stage. It is heavier than the SpaceX hardware: The aluminum-lithium SpaceX booster has a mass fraction of 94%, where the steel SRB has a mass fraction of 85%, and the SpaceX booster has a higher exhaust velocity, 2980 m/s versus the SRB's 2636 m/s (measured at sea level air pressure). The result is that the SRB has to be much bigger per kg of payload as the SpaceX design.
There is a school of thought in the rocket design community that espouses the Big Dumb Booster. Their point is that a larger rocket is just fine, so long as it costs less. Cost is mostly related to things other than size, like the number of people necessary to build, transport, and launch the rocket. But the Shuttle SRB is so big that its size implies complexity. Pouring single grains of propellant that large requires enormous facilities to mix and cure the components. The entire SRB is too large to pour or transport as a single piece, so it is poured as four pieces, seperately transported to Cape Canaveral, then assembled there. And while the clevis and tang joints between the sections have now been sufficiently engineered to be safe, they impose handling restrictions (NASA cannot leave the Shuttle out in the cold), and cost more money.
As a result of all this complexity, each Shuttle SRB costs $40M per flight (that's half of the first stage, with no guidance or communication system). A two-stage SpaceX Falcon V sells for $15.9M (that's everything but the capsule on top) [number has been updated - thanks, Jon]. For a sense of how cost scales with size, note that the Falcon V lifts almost ten times the payload of the Falcon I, but costs a little more than three times as much. Each SRB has a bit more than 7 times the thrust of the Falcon V first stage.
NASA faces a difficult choice for the upper stage. There is only one man-rated engine suitable for upper-stage use in production in the U.S., and that is the Shuttle's SSME. That engine is complete overkill for an upper stage engine, because it's designed to work in the lower atmosphere too, which makes everything more complicated. Throwing it away each flight will cost a lot. Any other engine (i.e. the in-development Cobra or the in-production RS-68) will require at least some development money and time to certify as man-rated, but will cost less per launch.
All the engines NASA is considering for the second stage burn both liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. This decision alone pushes the cost of the NASA solution far away from nearly anything else. LH2 will give better performance than kerosene (4300 m/s exhaust velocity versus 3330 m/s, measured in a vacuum), and thus a smaller rocket, but the relevant difference is cost. NASA can't go with a lower cost propellant combination because there are no US-manufactured man-rated engines which burn anything less costly.
Now that we know why NASA is mulling an expensive crew vehicle, and what a less expensive vehicle looks like, and interesting question is, how could we end up with the cheaper alternative? I assume, in particular, that the SpaceX honchos think about this problem relatively often. I also think that Michael Griffin, the NASA chief administrator, thinks about this fairly often as well.
It's a political problem. NASA has to get crews to the international space station after the Shuttle is retired. The Russians have complained about being solely responsible for launching crews for the last few years, but that is because we weren't paying enough for the launches. If we were willing to pay, the Russians would be happy to provide launch services (they recently asked for $63M per launch). They have a very dependable launcher, which costs a fraction of a Shuttle launch. Buying time to design and build a better, cheaper U.S. launcher would be cheaper than building the stopgap crew launcher currently envisaged.
We would then be faced with the smaller problem of launching the ISS portions originally intended to go up on the Shuttle. Both EELV boosters have the mass capability to launch these cargoes (though NASA would have to rework each piece to sit in the EELV payload fairing rather than in the Shuttle payload bay). EELV launches are expensive (around $254M), but they're half of a Shuttle launch, and don't endanger crews.
Michael Griffin is going to take the expensive but politically necessary route. He'll pay the big NASA prime contractors many billions of dollars to develop a stopgap launcher, while ensuring that SpaceX and perhaps t/Space and Kistler get sufficient funding to get launch histories. Eventually, perhaps after his tenure, it will become clear that the startup U.S. launch companies are safe enough and obviously cheaper enough to mothball those horribly expensive launchers. This comparison will have to be painfully real, immediately obvious, and undeniable. Only then can the NASA prime contractors be fired and the money formerly used for their support used instead for space exploration.
Friday, October 22, 2004
Energy independence
James Zogby is talking on the commonwealth club right now on KQED.
He made two claims:
One, that although alternate supplies of energy are good, we aren't going to achieve energy independence. This is probably true. But I think that replacing any substantial amount of our current imported energy with new domestic sources can help our national security and economic situation.
Two, that even if the U.S. imported no energy that we still would not be independent of Middle East oil, because other countries, on which we depend, depend on Mideast oil. Like Japan, China, Taiwan, etc. This may be true. But it's also true that if the U.S. develops a domestic energy production capacity, other nations will follow to the extent that it makes economic sense for them to do so. The U.S. isn't going to have a broadscale switch to domestic energy supplies unless those supplies are cheaper than the alternative. Oil was one of the first big Globalized products, so if it's cheaper for us it'll be cheaper for them.
He made two claims:
One, that although alternate supplies of energy are good, we aren't going to achieve energy independence. This is probably true. But I think that replacing any substantial amount of our current imported energy with new domestic sources can help our national security and economic situation.
Two, that even if the U.S. imported no energy that we still would not be independent of Middle East oil, because other countries, on which we depend, depend on Mideast oil. Like Japan, China, Taiwan, etc. This may be true. But it's also true that if the U.S. develops a domestic energy production capacity, other nations will follow to the extent that it makes economic sense for them to do so. The U.S. isn't going to have a broadscale switch to domestic energy supplies unless those supplies are cheaper than the alternative. Oil was one of the first big Globalized products, so if it's cheaper for us it'll be cheaper for them.
Google at $400, part II
Is the Yellow Pages really a profitable opportunity for Google?
Google would be competing with a solution that really works already.
Local businesses are not going to abandon the Yellow Pages, so a Google sale requires them to purchase two listings -- more money in a down economy.
Where is Google going to list these ads? Am I going to use Google's website to search through JUST ADS? (That is what I do with the Yellow Pages right now, after all.) What criterion would Google use to rank the ads presented to me? If it's not money, why would the advertiser pay more?
Google at $400?
Google, Yahoo, and Ebay are trading at P/Es of 207, 92, and 90.8. As the companies get bigger earnings growth will slow. Eventually the P/Es will come down.
But let's think short-term: how about next March?
The companies aren't going to grow enough in that time to saturate any market. No need for P/E to change because of that.
Maybe oil prices, the crashing economy, and a new president will make the market more reasonable. Or maybe enough people will sell their falling retail stocks and head for the only bright stars on the horizon -- our three horsemen. Note that all three are already diversified out of the U.S. economy.
So a P/E of, say, 80 is possible next March.
Text ads are a better business than graphical ads. Nevermind that web surfers prefer text ads. They are better from the ad buyer's point of view, too.
graphical ads take a lot of manpower and often external contractors to lay out, which takes time and money.
that initial investment in layout is not closely predictable.
graphical ads, especially the animated kind with Flash, take more IT work to get onto a website.
So essentially, there is a bigger hurdle to cross if you want to use graphical ads. From google's point of view, the nice thing about text ads is that basically the purchaser's entire ad budget goes to google. It's also nice that an explosion of ads does not require an explosion
of media contractors creating those ads.
Right now, most businesses don't know much about how their online ads are working. Google's term sheet specifically prohibits advertisers from discussing with one another how well the ad campaigns are going. What buyers do know is that online ads have buzz, and Christmas is upon us.
After the Christmas rush (and Google's year-end earnings release, which is going to be wonderful again), ad buyers are going to analyze what just happened. My guess is that three things are going to happen at this point:
online ads will turn out to be not as good as hoped.
Yahoo will be selling context sensitive text ads.
Major media companies who publish online content will also be selling context sensitive text ads directly, licensing the context bit from someone else (like Yahoo).
At this point, Google will be competing by saying: we can get more clickthroughs. They may also say they can get higher quality leads or broader coverage, but the measurable bit will be clickthroughs. This number gets put in the face of the guy who signs the check, it doesn't take any IT work to get it.
So I see four downsides to the E part of P/E:
Google will face competition.
Major media companies will negotiate better terms to keep more of the advertising revenue already going through their web pages.
Buyers will be willing to pay less for a clickthrough.
The world economy will be in the toilet next year.
And one more thing: after Christmas there is a lot less advertising for a while. Ebay looks great as people shuffle presents to those who want them more, but retailers don't spend as much on ads.
I suspect that momentum buyers, used to seeing 18% per quarter growth rates, are going to balk when they see a flat quarter. They're going to balk even more when all those unlocked shares start to sell. The fund managers who feel so left out right now will keep the bottom from falling out.
But let's think short-term: how about next March?
So a P/E of, say, 80 is possible next March.
But what about E?
Text ads are a better business than graphical ads. Nevermind that web surfers prefer text ads. They are better from the ad buyer's point of view, too.
So essentially, there is a bigger hurdle to cross if you want to use graphical ads. From google's point of view, the nice thing about text ads is that basically the purchaser's entire ad budget goes to google. It's also nice that an explosion of ads does not require an explosion
of media contractors creating those ads.
Right now, most businesses don't know much about how their online ads are working. Google's term sheet specifically prohibits advertisers from discussing with one another how well the ad campaigns are going. What buyers do know is that online ads have buzz, and Christmas is upon us.
After the Christmas rush (and Google's year-end earnings release, which is going to be wonderful again), ad buyers are going to analyze what just happened. My guess is that three things are going to happen at this point:
At this point, Google will be competing by saying: we can get more clickthroughs. They may also say they can get higher quality leads or broader coverage, but the measurable bit will be clickthroughs. This number gets put in the face of the guy who signs the check, it doesn't take any IT work to get it.
So I see four downsides to the E part of P/E:
And one more thing: after Christmas there is a lot less advertising for a while. Ebay looks great as people shuffle presents to those who want them more, but retailers don't spend as much on ads.
I suspect that momentum buyers, used to seeing 18% per quarter growth rates, are going to balk when they see a flat quarter. They're going to balk even more when all those unlocked shares start to sell. The fund managers who feel so left out right now will keep the bottom from falling out.
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Definition of Insanity?
I've heard two different commentators on the radio recently state that a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different things to happen.
When I hand-saw through a piece of wood, I perform the same action over and over. For a while, it doesn't look like much is happening. Eventually, I cut through the piece.
I shorted a stock. It kept rising, I kept shorting. Was this insane? Eventually it went down like I thought it should.
The underlying problem here is that the things we act on in the real world often have state that isn't immediately apparent. We know it's there, we know we're acting on it, and we have to gauge the effects of our actions on that unknown state. Working with the unseen is common.
When I hand-saw through a piece of wood, I perform the same action over and over. For a while, it doesn't look like much is happening. Eventually, I cut through the piece.
I shorted a stock. It kept rising, I kept shorting. Was this insane? Eventually it went down like I thought it should.
The underlying problem here is that the things we act on in the real world often have state that isn't immediately apparent. We know it's there, we know we're acting on it, and we have to gauge the effects of our actions on that unknown state. Working with the unseen is common.
Monday, March 22, 2004
Nuclear Power
I think we need a massive increase in the domestic production of nuclear power.
Oil and natural gas and coal and electricity are, to some extent, fungible. If we produce more electricity with domestic nuclear, we can import less oil. There is a short-term limit, of course, because there are only so many oil-burning powerplants that can be supplanted by nuclear plants. But if new supplies of electricity make electricity cheaper relative to oil, people will switch other things from oil to electricity -- things like cars (plug-in hybrids) and home heating (heat pumps instead of furnaces and oil burners).
Think of the advantages:
Oil is a major portion of our balance of trade deficit, so reducing our oil imports will improve our overall trade deficit. Our trade deficit is scary, because we pay for all these foreign consumables with domestic hard assets -- we are trading our land and buildings away for things that are thrown away in 15 years.
Numbers: 9,140,000 barrels a day at $22/barrel (the bottom of OPEC price range) is $73 billion a year. The real number is likely a fair bit higher than that. The entire 2003 trade deficit was $374 billion, so oil imports were at least 20% of that.
The money we pay for oil goes largely to corrupt governments in unstable parts of the world (and Norway and the UK :). If we buy less oil, less money will go to these governments. Other nations will certainly step in and buy more barrels of oil, of course, but if total demand is reduced then the total revenue will go down with it. As the U.S. is the world's largest consumer of oil, by far, a significant drop in U.S. oil imports will have a very real effect on world oil prices and revenue.
Those governments spend their massive oil wealth in ways that are not aligned with U.S. interests. Saudi Arabia funds schools which teach millions of children religious intolerance and the glory of death in battle. Iraq was funding a militaristic dictatorship. Reducing the money they have to spend is in our interests.
External oil supplies are a national security problem. Right now, the world's producers are pumping at close to capacity. There is not a great deal of slack in the system. That means that a single large country, like Saudi Arabia, halting exports of oil would make for a massive disruption of the world economy. This gives the oil-producing countries a large amount of negotiating power. That their own economies would be wrecked by such a move tempers that power.
But consider what would happen if the guy on the Saudi side of the table didn't care about the local Saudi economy. What if his priorities were religious and/or political?
Not just the rate but the total amount of oil is a long-term national security problem. The U.S. will use up its domestic reserves before foreign reserves are depleted. As U.S. domestic reserves are depleted, our reliance on and transfer of money to foreign sources will increase, and our independence of action in the world will decrease.
Shifting $73 billion a year into jobs which are almost entirely all in the U.S. directly employs about 730,000 U.S. residents, permanently. These people then consume services from others, and so there is some multiplier for the total number of jobs added to the U.S. economy. Though this is not going to solve our economic problems, it is enough to make a noticeable change in the unemployment rate.
There is some possibility the jobs could be moved to Canada or Mexico. Either one of those two countries could invest in large nuclear programs and become a major exporter of electricity to the U.S. Canada is already a major exporter of hydroelectricity.
The U.S. accounts for a healthy chunk of the world's CO2 output. A significant cut in our CO2 production would help towards reducing the rate of CO2 rise in the atmosphere. The science on global warming is still out, but I think it's clear that humans are responsible for most of the rise in atmospheric CO2 in the last century, and I find it reasonable to imagine that that rise is changing something.
But of course the problem with nuclear power is the waste and the security issues. These issues look unacceptable if you think that the alternative is to simply reject nuclear power. But that's not the alternative. The alternative is invading nasty foreign dictatorships because we can't afford oil supply instability. But worse, we have to keep those foreign nations stabilized over dozens of years to ensure oil stability. That effort claims the lives of our soldiers who will perish trying to suppress rebellions overseas against what those rebels (correctly) see as U.S. interference in their domestic politics.
So, I think we need to examine two propositions: Do we keep garrisons overseas in unstable nations for the next 100 years, and lose many soldiers every year to insurrection, in order to secure our overseas oil supply, or do we replace that oil supply with a domestic nuclear infrastructure that generates, uses, and discards enormously dangerous substances as part of its basic operation?
And my answer is, better the devil you know that the one you don't. Nuclear is an entirely domestic industry. Our government has the ability to regulate this industry. The regulation may not be perfect, but at least everyone involved is inside our borders. Nobody questions that the U.S. military and police forces have the right to secure nuclear facilities. There are no protests in the street from those willing to die to prevent the NRC from specifying standards to which the nuclear industry is accountable.
Of course, I would like to see some changes in the nuclear industry. Reactors are still built as if a major goal was the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The only way to reduce the amount of nuclear waste that must be separated from the environment forever is to reduce the interaction of radioactive stuff with the environment. This means that reactor cores should be sealed objects, built in the very crypts they will stay in for hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that ever comes out is heat. When the fuel in the core is "burned up", the core is irreversibly shut down and left to cool, essentially forever. New cores, with their own independent containment vessels, are built next to the old ones, and the power generation infrastructure is switched to these new cores as the old ones die.
Oil and natural gas and coal and electricity are, to some extent, fungible. If we produce more electricity with domestic nuclear, we can import less oil. There is a short-term limit, of course, because there are only so many oil-burning powerplants that can be supplanted by nuclear plants. But if new supplies of electricity make electricity cheaper relative to oil, people will switch other things from oil to electricity -- things like cars (plug-in hybrids) and home heating (heat pumps instead of furnaces and oil burners).
Think of the advantages:
Numbers: 9,140,000 barrels a day at $22/barrel (the bottom of OPEC price range) is $73 billion a year. The real number is likely a fair bit higher than that. The entire 2003 trade deficit was $374 billion, so oil imports were at least 20% of that.
But consider what would happen if the guy on the Saudi side of the table didn't care about the local Saudi economy. What if his priorities were religious and/or political?
There is some possibility the jobs could be moved to Canada or Mexico. Either one of those two countries could invest in large nuclear programs and become a major exporter of electricity to the U.S. Canada is already a major exporter of hydroelectricity.
But of course the problem with nuclear power is the waste and the security issues. These issues look unacceptable if you think that the alternative is to simply reject nuclear power. But that's not the alternative. The alternative is invading nasty foreign dictatorships because we can't afford oil supply instability. But worse, we have to keep those foreign nations stabilized over dozens of years to ensure oil stability. That effort claims the lives of our soldiers who will perish trying to suppress rebellions overseas against what those rebels (correctly) see as U.S. interference in their domestic politics.
So, I think we need to examine two propositions: Do we keep garrisons overseas in unstable nations for the next 100 years, and lose many soldiers every year to insurrection, in order to secure our overseas oil supply, or do we replace that oil supply with a domestic nuclear infrastructure that generates, uses, and discards enormously dangerous substances as part of its basic operation?
And my answer is, better the devil you know that the one you don't. Nuclear is an entirely domestic industry. Our government has the ability to regulate this industry. The regulation may not be perfect, but at least everyone involved is inside our borders. Nobody questions that the U.S. military and police forces have the right to secure nuclear facilities. There are no protests in the street from those willing to die to prevent the NRC from specifying standards to which the nuclear industry is accountable.
Of course, I would like to see some changes in the nuclear industry. Reactors are still built as if a major goal was the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The only way to reduce the amount of nuclear waste that must be separated from the environment forever is to reduce the interaction of radioactive stuff with the environment. This means that reactor cores should be sealed objects, built in the very crypts they will stay in for hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that ever comes out is heat. When the fuel in the core is "burned up", the core is irreversibly shut down and left to cool, essentially forever. New cores, with their own independent containment vessels, are built next to the old ones, and the power generation infrastructure is switched to these new cores as the old ones die.
Thursday, December 05, 2002
NPRM 02-230
Hollywood is in the process of buying congress and the FCC (as well as other bits of the government). They want rules and laws passed which will give the small existing content cartel control over what people see, so that they can tax and shape the flow of information in our society. Here's the EE Times article. And here's my letter to the FCC:
I oppose NPRM 02-230.
It is unreasonable for the FCC to put restrictions on signals that I can receive. It is unreasonable for the FCC to put restrictions on how I may process a signal.
If content providers wish to deny me the ability to process their signal in any manner I please, they can choose not to transmit, or they can only transmit once we have entered a mutually beneficial contract. If this choice obliterates their business model, that is their problem, not mine, and especially not the FCC's.
The FCC does not have a mandate to sustain the existing business of existing transmitters. The FCC does have a mandate to encourage the development of new technology. Placing broad restrictions on entire classes of processing technology is a subversion of the FCC's reason for existence.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
Hi Def isn't trying hard enough
George Lucas apparently shot most of Star Wars II on a 1920 x 1080 x 3 CCDs x 24 frames/sec. He's been arguing that Hi Def is just as good as film. If you look at 35mm DSLR vs 35mm SLR comparisons, it seems that Hi Def is almost as good as 35mm movie film. But I don't think that's the right thing to compare against.
The DSLR folks like to compare their digital pictures to 35mm film. The consensus: 6 megapixels is close to the resolution achievable with 35mm film, 11 megapixels is maybe a little better. Film has somewhat better dynamic range than the best CCDs.
The Sony F900 (that's George's $80,000 camcorder) has 3 CCDs, so it takes 3 color samples at each pixel location. So does the Foveon sensor in the Sigma SD9 digital SLR, except the Foveon sensor has 3 megapixels. DPreview says the Foveon 3 megapixel is about as high resolution as Canon's 6 megapizel D60. Apply the same scale factor to the F900 and you get a sensor equivalent to 4 megapixels -- about what you have in $700 prosumer digicams today..
35mm SLR film has images which are about 36mm x 24mm, with the short axis aligned to the width of the film strip. 35mm movie film has images which are about 24mm x 16mm, with the longer axis aligned to the width of the film strip. So 35mm movie film has about half the resolution of 35mm SLR film.
Put the two bits together, and the Sony F900 should capture about as much detail as 35mm movie film. But the best movies are shot and printed on 70mm film, with four times that much resolution. Digital sensors with that resolution exist -- the Canon 1Ds has 11 megapixels. The trick, of course, is to get the high-speed readout necessary to take 24 (or more) pictures every second. That requires a differently designed imaging chip.
I think the right spec for Hi Def should be 3840 x 2400 resolution, at 36 frames per second. This will look like 70mm film, and the higher frame rate will eliminate the irritating artifacts that make pans almost unwatchable in American movies. It will downsample to HDTV nicely, but the really interesting display is the PC monitor. 1920 x 1200 resolution 23" CRTs are available today for the price of a modest TV. 3840 x 2400 resolution 24" LCDs are available today for the price of a large HDTV. 36 frames/sec will look good on an LCD, and you can double it to match a CRT's refresh rate.
Curiously, the distribution format for such movies already exists. The pixel stream is about 40 times as fast as broadcast American TV, which MPEG-4 can currently compress into about 1 mb/s. Assuming no improvement in compression, 15 minutes of 3840x2400x36/s would fit on a DVD, and would be playable with an 8x DVD player.
But larger pictures generally compress better, even with no improvement in compression technology. If we suppose that for every factor of 4 pixels we increase the information by 3, then this big stream is about 20 times broadcast American TV, and a standard 4x DVD will supply 30 minutes of it.
The DSLR folks like to compare their digital pictures to 35mm film. The consensus: 6 megapixels is close to the resolution achievable with 35mm film, 11 megapixels is maybe a little better. Film has somewhat better dynamic range than the best CCDs.
The Sony F900 (that's George's $80,000 camcorder) has 3 CCDs, so it takes 3 color samples at each pixel location. So does the Foveon sensor in the Sigma SD9 digital SLR, except the Foveon sensor has 3 megapixels. DPreview says the Foveon 3 megapixel is about as high resolution as Canon's 6 megapizel D60. Apply the same scale factor to the F900 and you get a sensor equivalent to 4 megapixels -- about what you have in $700 prosumer digicams today..
35mm SLR film has images which are about 36mm x 24mm, with the short axis aligned to the width of the film strip. 35mm movie film has images which are about 24mm x 16mm, with the longer axis aligned to the width of the film strip. So 35mm movie film has about half the resolution of 35mm SLR film.
Put the two bits together, and the Sony F900 should capture about as much detail as 35mm movie film. But the best movies are shot and printed on 70mm film, with four times that much resolution. Digital sensors with that resolution exist -- the Canon 1Ds has 11 megapixels. The trick, of course, is to get the high-speed readout necessary to take 24 (or more) pictures every second. That requires a differently designed imaging chip.
I think the right spec for Hi Def should be 3840 x 2400 resolution, at 36 frames per second. This will look like 70mm film, and the higher frame rate will eliminate the irritating artifacts that make pans almost unwatchable in American movies. It will downsample to HDTV nicely, but the really interesting display is the PC monitor. 1920 x 1200 resolution 23" CRTs are available today for the price of a modest TV. 3840 x 2400 resolution 24" LCDs are available today for the price of a large HDTV. 36 frames/sec will look good on an LCD, and you can double it to match a CRT's refresh rate.
Curiously, the distribution format for such movies already exists. The pixel stream is about 40 times as fast as broadcast American TV, which MPEG-4 can currently compress into about 1 mb/s. Assuming no improvement in compression, 15 minutes of 3840x2400x36/s would fit on a DVD, and would be playable with an 8x DVD player.
But larger pictures generally compress better, even with no improvement in compression technology. If we suppose that for every factor of 4 pixels we increase the information by 3, then this big stream is about 20 times broadcast American TV, and a standard 4x DVD will supply 30 minutes of it.
Saturday, November 02, 2002
Rockets
Remember model rockets when you were in middle school? The biggest engines I ever launched were Es. These guys started with Is and ended up using Os.
What strikes me as odd about this stuff, though, is why all these rockets are mainly subsonic. They go transonic or slightly supersonic at the end of the boost stage, but they really aren't getting into the many thousands of feet per second that even suborbital stuff would. And why not? These engines deliver around 200 seconds of impulse, which is a pretty serious amount of bang. If they could get their rockets down to less than the weight of the engine, they should be good for 4500 ft/sec in a vacuum. Surely a few seconds of air drag wouldn't wipe out 70% of this delta V?
What I'd really like to build would be a solid fuel ignited propane ramjet. The idea is to use Kelly Johnson's design for the back end of the Blackbird engine, but with gas pressurized propane for the afterburner and a solid rocket motor instead of the turbojet as an ignitor. Getting proper mixing of the exhaust, air, and fuel might be tough... I think it's significant that those SR-71 motors are so long.
...and you gotta love the web. Georgia Tech has a web-based design tool for just this kind of thing. They call what I want to do a Supercharged Ejector Ramjet. Can't handle a solid-fuel core, but what the hell, let's try a O2-JP5 engine instead.
Work the specs:
Defaults after this...
What strikes me as odd about this stuff, though, is why all these rockets are mainly subsonic. They go transonic or slightly supersonic at the end of the boost stage, but they really aren't getting into the many thousands of feet per second that even suborbital stuff would. And why not? These engines deliver around 200 seconds of impulse, which is a pretty serious amount of bang. If they could get their rockets down to less than the weight of the engine, they should be good for 4500 ft/sec in a vacuum. Surely a few seconds of air drag wouldn't wipe out 70% of this delta V?
What I'd really like to build would be a solid fuel ignited propane ramjet. The idea is to use Kelly Johnson's design for the back end of the Blackbird engine, but with gas pressurized propane for the afterburner and a solid rocket motor instead of the turbojet as an ignitor. Getting proper mixing of the exhaust, air, and fuel might be tough... I think it's significant that those SR-71 motors are so long.
...and you gotta love the web. Georgia Tech has a web-based design tool for just this kind of thing. They call what I want to do a Supercharged Ejector Ramjet. Can't handle a solid-fuel core, but what the hell, let's try a O2-JP5 engine instead.
Work the specs:
C3H8 tank: 5cm dia 100cm long - 1900cc
Energy: 48 MJ
Fuel Mass: 1.1 kg
Solids: 200 seconds impulse, 2 kg fuel
Burn time: 10 sec
Thrust: 392 N (4 G acceleration off the pad)
Delta-V: 294 m/s
Rocket: 6.9 kg mass
Required thrust? 1000 N (about 10 G acceleration)
Inlet area? 45 cm^2
Cowl height? 3 cm
Nose to cowl? 100 cm
Compression angle? 10 degrees
Forebody friction? 0 (uh oh)
Primary Area ratio? 15
Chamber pressure? 6000 KPa (Can't be as high as the swoopy stuff)
Fan pres ratio? 1 (no fan)
Defaults after this...
Thursday, October 24, 2002
ALIVH
One of things that makes HPC (High Performance Computing, i.e. weather, aerodynamic, vehicle crash and nuclear bomb simulation) so expensive is the huge memory systems on these machines. There is an old saying in the field that latency is hard, bandwidth you just pay for. Anyway, the cost of a memory system isn't the memory itself -- Pricewatch puts a stick of 512MB of 200 MHz DDR memory at $137, or $274K for a terabyte. The cost has generally been in the plumbing necessary to connect that memory to the CPU(s)*. You need lots of very fast wires, which has historically required exotic packaging.
Things change. I just read that half of all cellphones are made on circuit boards with enough density to make an HPC architect drool. Chuck the unobtainium and use ALIVH -- this stuff is cheap! It makes me want to design a hobby HPC.
* Well, actually, the prices mostly come from market dynamics. You have consumers (big companies and government labs) with deep pockets and little ability or incentive to ensure they get real value for their money, and producers who try hard to lock their consumers into proprietary hardware and software to avoid real competition. The HPC money well is drying up as (a) defense budgets have been slashed and (b) many customers have realized that racks of commodity PCs will do the job just as well.
Things change. I just read that half of all cellphones are made on circuit boards with enough density to make an HPC architect drool. Chuck the unobtainium and use ALIVH -- this stuff is cheap! It makes me want to design a hobby HPC.
* Well, actually, the prices mostly come from market dynamics. You have consumers (big companies and government labs) with deep pockets and little ability or incentive to ensure they get real value for their money, and producers who try hard to lock their consumers into proprietary hardware and software to avoid real competition. The HPC money well is drying up as (a) defense budgets have been slashed and (b) many customers have realized that racks of commodity PCs will do the job just as well.
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