Power & Space
Power And The Pursuit Of Space
By Dave McDaniel, everyone’s sorta-smart space uncle.
Contents
I Have The Power!
Viva La Revolution
Pushing The Envelope
Fusion
Did You Know?
Power As A Yardstick
The Illusion Of Scarcity
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Everything begins with power.
From our own bodies to the civilizations that sustain us, the world turns on the generation and consumption of power.
Power is what defines us.
I Have The Power!
Throughout most of our existence here on Earth we’ve not been able to bring much more power to bear than a single human could generate.
More often than not that human was us.
Animals became an option somewhere along the way, manual tools and techniques added to our abilities, however humanity’s extreme tech curve didn’t begin until individuals were able to easily command energy well beyond their own two hands.
Once we moved past that barrier, everything took off.
Global power underpins our space program and all our space initiatives. Not just space-based and space-focused power, but power across the spectrum. Advances leading to the current space age have been built on an ever-increasing foundation of power.
This Golden Era of power began with the Industrial Revolution.
Viva La Revolution
When we think of the Industrial Revolution we tend to think of it as a single, long event, kicking off back in the 1800s.
Truth is there have been four Revolutions.
The one we most recognize is actually the second, the age of mass production and electricity.
The First Industrial Revolution fell between roughly 1760 and 1840, and saw the first mechanization, steam and water power.
Prior to that not much changed. Before the introduction of those basic, power-producing sources you would’ve been hard pressed to note any major technological difference between eras. Sure, in one century maybe the man in the street wore bloomers and a triangle hat, in another he dressed in leather armor, but neither century had much more to offer technology-wise than the other.
Energy, power, has been the key to our advancement.
Within the last two centuries we’ve advanced more rapidly than at any other time in human history. Not one, not two, but four stages of our “Industrial Revolution”.
1st Revolution (1780): Mechanization, steam.
2nd Revolution (1870): Mass production, electricity.
3rd Revolution (1969): Electronics, automation.
4th Revolution (Now): Cyber systems.
We sit at the cusp of the 4th, which is defined as the integration of cyber and physical systems. To that, we contend, should be added the field of cislunar space (the space between here and the moon) and lunar operations. Humanity’s current efforts in the pursuit of space make up a vital part of that 4th Revolution.
Perhaps our illustrious future experts will deem Mars and a far-system human presence the markers of the 5th Revolution.
We’ll see.
Whatever milestone gets set, one thing is certain:
It will depend on power.
Pushing The Envelope
Let’s pause for a fun diversion.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket wields the greatest thrust we’ve executed on yet. Seen it? Think it’s huge?
It is.
Frickin huge, and almost twice as powerful as the most recent big boy to crack concrete, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS).
SLS = 9 million pounds thrust (ulp)
Starship = 17 million pounds thrust (wha ...)
Prior to that, during our last moon program (Apollo), we used the hell out of a beauty called the Saturn V, which cranked out a candle-snuffing 8 million pounds.
Not too shabby.
So yeah, we’ve fielded some pretty big rockets.
But get this. Way back in 1962 American rocket scientists were working up serious plans for something even more audacious. A beast that would’ve blown all that away, quite literally.
The Sea Dragon.
How much power, you ask?
Try 80 million pounds of thrust.
Sweet mother of …
That’s like strapping together …
2 Starships
2 SLSs
2 Saturn Vs
… all in a single rocket. Oh, plus throw on a third Starship with 23 Raptor engines lit (vs the usual 33), just for good measure.
That’ll get you all the way to Sea Dragon power.
This thing could never have safely launched from land.
Which is where it got the name Sea Dragon. Designed to be floated in the ocean, then set upright using ballast tanks before launch, it was affectionately called a ‘big dumb booster’.
Woe be to the fish for miles in any direction around that.
But the scientists had it all figured out. The Sea Dragon was seriously considered but never implemented. The value of such a unit, able to launch 550 tons into space in one go, is not to be underestimated.
Crazy, absurd—if nothing else, it shows just what kinds of solutions we humans can come up with if challenged.
Fusion
Back to reality. Or kind of. The Holy Grail for us currently, when it comes to the generation of power, is nuclear fusion.
This is where atoms are fused rather than split, releasing much more of their potential energy.
Fusion, as you may imagine, takes a huge amount of heat.
In fact, so far it takes more energy to actually produce and control the fusion than we get out of it. More power is required to run the magnets, the lasers, etc. to start and sustain the reaction than is produced.
But we’ve done it.
We’ve created fusion reactors and fired off fusion reactions.
The resulting plasma is hotter than the core of the sun, is turbulent and hard to manage, releases high-energy neutrons during the process that bombard the metal walls of the reactor, can produce beams of high-energy electrons that bore holes in the reaction-chamber cladding (yikes), along with other challenges that crop up when you try to ignite, create and control a star on land, but we’re doing it.
Fusion, once mastered, will likely become the backbone of all our power needs, at least for the foreseeable future.
As with all technologies, it’s only a matter of time.
Did You Know?
A project called ITER, Latin for “the way” and an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is one promising gambit. Not only for the technology it will pilot, but for the players involved.
ITER represents a veritable who’s-who of global participants.
Parties involved include:
The European Union
The UK
China
India
Japan
South Korea
Russia
The United States
This is the biggest, and most expensive, such undertaking, requiring the sorts of resources only a consortium of national players like this can bring to bear.
But talk about important.
Expense, of course, being relative. For perspective, take a look at this short comparison of Cost vs Result:
Cost of ITER = $12B
Result = clean, pure energy to run the entire world
Cost of Vietnam War = $120B (10x as much as ITER)
Result = … ?
(Yes, it’s okay to pause for a moment. The comparison is as insane as it seems.)
The difference in value proposition is clear.
And did you notice the who’s-who involved in this little fusion project? Aren’t some of them competitors in other arenas?
Indeed they are.
Another joint project, between the European Union and Japan, the JT-60SA reactor, has recently gone live. A collaborative precursor to ITER, the six-story-high machine in Naka north of Tokyo uses a donut-shaped “tokamak” vessel to contain the plasma.
The beauty of these sorts of grand, collectively-beneficial efforts is that not only do they have the potential to advance humanity, they have the potential to become Great Unifiers.
Space Age 2.0 is just such common ground.
Power As A Yardstick
When it comes to power there’s a scale, called the Kardashev scale, scientists use to classify the advancement of civilizations.
Everything begins and ends with power, therefore any civilization can be rated according to how much power it commands.
The Kardashev scale is broken into three very broad Types that span a wide range. A Type I civilization, for example, is able to use the energy available on its entire planet. A Type II that of its entire star.
Here are the three basic Civilization Types, ranked according to the scale:
Type I = a civilization that can harness all the energy that reaches its home planet from its parent star.
Type II = a civilization capable of harnessing and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. This is the entire star, not just the portion of energy reaching the planet.
Type III = a civilization having access to power comparable to the luminosity of the entire galaxy. Heady stuff.
Earth is not yet a Type I. Physicist and futurist Michio Kaku suggests that, if humans increase their energy consumption at an average rate of 3 percent each year, they may attain Type I status in 100–200 years, Type II status in a few thousand, and Type III status in 100,000 to a million years.
We believe a concerted focus on the exploration and colonization of space will drive that rise faster.
Humanity has certainly exceeded expectations before.
No matter our rate of expansion, Power will be the yardstick by which that advancement is measured.
The Illusion Of Scarcity
Which brings up a reality that must be both understood and widely accepted:
When it comes to power “more” is the goal.
Our future demands it. Humanity’s power needs will continue to increase and that’s a good thing. Increasing demand for power means we’re doing more, which means we’re growing as a civilization. We’ll find more and better ways to make it and, as we do, advancing up the Kardashev scale mentioned above, we humans will eventually get on the map as an actual spacefaring civilization.
That won’t happen if we focus on ways to conserve.
Our goal is an abundance of power.
Not less.
Clean, reliable, sustainable, yes. Of course.
But gobs and gobs of it.
An extraplanetary existence depends on it.
Sam Altman, visionary behind much of the recent AI hullabaloo, is backing a parallel push on both AI and better sources of energy.
He had this to say:
“The alternative to not having enough energy is that crazy degrowth stuff people talk about. We really don’t want that. I think it’s insane and pretty immoral when people start calling for that.”
He was referring to a philosophy of restricting production, consumption and energy use as a way to conserve natural resources.
A flawed way of thinking.
Certainly no way to build a huge, expanding, ambitious future.
There is no scarcity except that which we impose on ourselves, or agree to settle for. It helps none of us to think in terms of less. The idea of a “lack” of things is a short-term illusion—apparently real in a very limited sense, but not actually true.
We sit at the doorstep of a vast, vast universe, with unlimited everything. One we’ll never reach if we throttle back.
So let’s not go down that road of thinking small.
Let’s think big instead.
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Whatever humanity’s power needs, for whatever purpose we apply that power, humanity’s goal should be toward how that power can best be directed toward one end:
Space.
Dave
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