Give NASA a Real Mission We’re throwing money at the wrong stuff. by Gregg Easterbrook Time frame: open-ended | Degree of difficulty: surprisingly hard |Barrier: NASA itself The National Aeronautics and Space Administration needs a new mission. The space shuttle program has ended. The space station seems to be history’s most expensive white elephant. Even NASA’s naming conventions lack vision: “International Space Station” was the best the agency could think of. Its troubled advanced space-telescope project, whose costs have increased sevenfold, is named not for a great astronaut, scientist, or explorer but for former NASA administrator James Webb. He did a solid job, but an organization that names a project after a bureaucrat is an organization without imagination. HBR List of Audacious Ideas Tackling the World Economy Give People Shares of GDP Double Down on Start-ups Partner with China in Afghanistan Enroll the World in For-Profit Universities Tackling Science Challenges Give NASA a Real Mission Declare 20% of the Ocean Off-Limits Electrify the Bottom of the Pyramid Tackling Social Problems Die the Way You Want To Pay Businesses to Keep People Out of Prison Grow More Apples and Less Corn Tackling Business Problems Stop Tying Pay to Performance Crowdsource Management Reviews Stop Collecting Customer Data Couldn’t President Obama give NASA an inspirational new mission of sending people to Mars? Though technically possible, travel to Mars would be insanely expensive right now. If there were an affordable way to reach orbit, it might open countless business opportunities in space. At the moment those opportunities are few. SpaceX, a start-up run by PayPal founder Elon Musk, is working on fully private rockets, but so far the sole customer is the government—which needs cargo delivery to the space station. Someday resources such as helium-3 may be mined on the moon, but that day is many decades distant. Space tourism has gotten a lot of attention, but to date all the projects in that realm seek to build flying machines that do no more than sail briefly through the upper atmosphere. Essentially, they’re developing very high altitude aircraft. The reason Mars and the space business are out of reach is that no one has yet solved a fundamental problem: the cost of propelling weight into orbit. Engineers like to say that low Earth orbit is “halfway to any destination in the solar system.” The energy required to overcome Earth’s gravity and place an object 200 miles above sea level is roughly the same as that required to send it from there to any of the planets. But the cost of getting into orbit is extreme. We need a lower-cost form of propulsion to make dreams like Mars travel a reality. Rocket motors have changed surprisingly little since the 1960s. All current designs for space-bound craft employ propulsion methods much the same as those used during the moon race. And the least-expensive existing rockets cost about $10,000 per payload pound delivered into orbit. Consider that the three astronauts now aboard the space station each get two liters of fresh water a day. So it costs about $125,000 to put the six liters of water the astronauts drink daily into orbit. Cheers! And that’s just to move bottled water 200 miles. A manned Mars mission could be a trillion-dollar proposition. (See “Space: The Expensive Frontier.”) All presidents since Ronald Reagan have seen the numbers. It’s why not one has endorsed anything more than the study of Mars travel. One caveat: It’s not clear that a fundamentally new form of space propulsion can be invented. Many ideas haven’t panned out, including “densified” fuel and an “aerospike” engine that changes technical properties at different altitudes. Attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to build “single stage to orbit” vehicles that could fly into space like aircraft yielded no fruit. Nuclear propulsion could work—but only once in space. Getting objects up the first 200 miles is still the issue. “Solar sails” suffer from the same problem. Eccentric ideas have also been batted around. One is to use lasers to beam energy to an ascending rocket. The favorite of science fiction is the “skyhook”—a counterweight in high orbit, connected to a cable that would pull objects into space. You don’t happen to know what materials could be used to manufacture a 23,000-mile-long weight-bearing cable, do you? Still, just because propulsion’s a difficult scientific and engineering challenge does not mean NASA shouldn’t try. Since the shuttle program began, too much of the agency’s emphasis has been on maintaining subsidies to current contractors and congressional districts. Too little emphasis has been placed on seeking new ideas. In the 1960s, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama developed the revolutionary engines and structure of the Saturn V moon rocket. In recent decades, Marshall has mainly tinkered with existing designs. NASA hasn’t made the search for propulsion breakthroughs a priority. Right now the astronaut corps has little to do. Why not divert $1 billion or $2 billion a year from funding for manned space travel to propulsion research—say, half the money to NASA engineering centers and half to private contractors? Astronaut training could be put on hold or reduced to some minimal level to free up the money needed. Any grand future in space will require a more economical way to get there. Finding fundamentally new ways to reach orbit would put NASA on track toward a useful tomorrow. When the propulsion breakthrough comes, the cosmos will still be there. Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor to the Atlantic and the New Republic . His most recent book is Sonic Boom (Random House, 2009). Declare 20% of the Ocean Off-Limits Here’s one great way to save fish—and the fishing industry. by Enric Sala Time frame: before cod disappear | Degree of difficulty: surprisingly easy | Barrier: national and international bureaucracy We are consuming fish faster than they can reproduce, denuding the ocean. Conventional solutions, such as forcing reductions in fishing capacity, lowering industry subsidies, and imposing sustainable quotas on catches, have proved difficult to implement globally. Creating fish banks—marine reserves where no fishing can ever take place—covering at least 20% of the ocean is a bold way to tackle the problem. When areas of the ocean are left to recover from overfishing, the results are impressive. The number of marine species in fish banks increases by 21%, on average, and the fish grow to be 28% bigger, according to data on 124 reserves in 29 countries. The amount of fish per hectare increases 166%, on average, and fish biomass, or total weight, shoots up 446% over the next 10 years. In most cases, the fish biomass keeps rising for more than 25 years. There are spillover effects, too. Because of the higher biomass and higher reproduction rates inside a fish bank, adjacent areas often get rejuvenated. The creation of the Columbretes Islands Marine Reserve in Spain, for instance, increased catches in surrounding fisheries by about 10% a year. In the same way, after five small fish banks were established in St. Lucia, catches in adjacent areas grew by 46% to 90%, depending on the gear used, over a five-year period. These spillover effects more than offset the financial losses to fishermen caused by the creation of no-fishing zones. In Kenya and the Solomon Islands, the incomes of people living near marine reserves doubled within a decade. Reserves attract more tourists, too. The 345,400-square-kilometer Great Barrier Reef Marine Park—of which 33% is a marine reserve—generates around AU$5.5 billion a year in net economic benefits and has created more than 50,000 full-time jobs. Fish banks also help preserve ocean ecosystem benefits such as carbon sequestration. In fact, “blue carbon” projects could generate additional revenues for local communities through global carbon markets. Fish banks aren’t the only answer, of course, but they must be a key component of the portfolio of solutions needed to tackle the current crisis. Finally, fish banks are an inexpensive solution. The cost of creating and managing marine reserves that would close off 20% of the ocean is estimated to be as low as $5 billion a year—just a small fraction of the subsidies that governments offer the fishing industry, which were upwards of $25 billion in 2003. Moreover, the additional revenues the fish banks generate should cover the cost of managing them, making fish banks self-sustaining business opportunities—not resource sinks, as people typically perceive conservation projects to be. Marine reserves could be easy to create if instead of relying on governments and global negotiations, we empowered local communities to develop and manage them. Policy makers would need only to facilitate the process; they should be happy to do so. Public-private partnerships would be an effective way of getting this idea to scale quickly. Companies might be willing to invest in fish banks, covering short-term losses with long-term profits from larger catches, more tourism, and “blue carbon” projects. Creating fish banks would thus turn fishing populations from hunters into shepherds of the sea, who help protect Earth’s biggest asset, the ocean. Enric Sala is an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, based in Washington, DC. He is a coeditor of Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries (Island Press, 2011). Electrify the Bottom of the Pyramid A little energy will spark a lot of growth. by Arun Majumdar Time frame: 20 years | Degree of difficulty: significant | Barrier: scientific know-how Staggeringly, about 1.5 billion people live without electricity. They’re off the grid literally and figuratively, lacking a basic resource that’s so vital to economic development and well-being. But extending the grid isn’t always practical—in many cases logistical issues and high costs make it all but impossible. The solution: creating local, self-contained, affordable power generation and storage systems that can provide electricity wherever it’s needed. The chart at right helps explain why it’s so important for businesses and government to invest in this goal. It correlates per capita electricity consumption with the human development index, a broad measure of well-being as gauged by life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living. The greater a country’s electricity consumption, the greater the well-being of its people. Electricity doesn’t cause well-being, of course. But it is a powerful enabler. When people have lights that allow them to study and work after dark, refrigeration to keep foods and medicine fresh, pumps and purifiers to irrigate farmland and produce safe drinking water, and cell phones and computers to connect them with commercial, educational, and health care resources, they can more fully participate in the social and economic activities that drive human development. A little electricity goes a long way. Note that when annual consumption rises from 0 to just a few thousand kilowatt hours per capita, countries move near the top of the HDI scale. Argentina, with per capita consumption of about 2,500 kWh, has an HDI score approaching that of Canada, whose consumption is seven times higher. Emerging economies like India, China, and Brazil have aggressive rural electrification programs. They’ve discovered, though, that laying thousands of miles of wire or burning expensive diesel fuel to run inefficient generators isn’t necessarily the best way to bring electricity to remote communities. Stand-alone power generation systems using local resources—particularly renewables such as solar, wind, biomass, and hydroelectric—increasingly look more attractive in these circumstances. But with renewables, there’s a catch. When the sun sets or is hidden by clouds, or when the wind stops blowing, the lights wink out. And when these systems produce more electricity than is being used at a given moment, the surplus is lost. The solution is storage. Just as cellular technology leapfrogged landlines to bring telecommunications to millions in remote areas, battery-assisted stand-alone systems could leapfrog hardwired electrification. Imagine a photovoltaic panel and a high-capacity, low-cost battery in every home in every remote village. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA-E, is making major investments in next-generation battery research—targeting higher-efficiency batteries at significantly lower costs. Though this research is driven by developed economies’ concerns—chief among them, extending the range of electric vehicles and grid-level storage—better and cheaper batteries will help open up vast new markets at the bottom of the pyramid. The challenge is more complicated, of course, than just getting the science of storing power right. There are huge economic and technological hurdles to clear. But who would have imagined 20 years ago that billions of people in developing economies would join the global conversation on their cell phones? There’s a good chance that 20 years from now, hundreds of millions of people living off the grid will depend on local electricity generation with storage to reliably power lights, refrigerators, and phones—wirelessly joining the electrified world. Arun Majumdar is the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E).
