Space Technology for Developing Nations

In case you didn’t know, this is World Space Week, celebrating the anniversary of Sputnik (it’s a bigger event outside the U.S…) and this is the second time this conference has been held – last year’s meeting received a bit of press coverage. Taylor Dinerman and Christophe Bosquillon of SpaceEquity.com were the organizers for this year’s meeting.

First up on the agenda was the Global Positioning System – a free service from the United States to the world. At least that’s the spin from Nate Johnson, of the US State Department, who spoke briefly on how they are working with various countries on finding ways to make use of it. Andy Wulfestieg of the US Air Force Space Command provided a summary of how GPS works – basically each satellite transmits a time and location signal, time being maintained by an atomic clock on board, and both time and position updated from ground stations on a regular basis. So GPS provides both positioning and time information – the time signals from the 24 GPS satellites in fact are now the primary broadcast mechanism for the US Naval Observatory time standard.

Wulfestieg talked about planned upgrades to GPS – current accuracy is 5-10 meters; new satellites are going up in 2004 to 2006, and then a completely new GPS-III system is planned for launch in 2012 or so. Pradipta Shome of the US Federal Aviation Administration also discussed GPS accuracy and availability – currently GPS does not meet FAA requirements for “integrity” – at least for landing and takeoff control. For navigation in civil aviation they need an assurance of error rates less than 1 in a billion, and response to, notification, and correction of error in seconds, not tens of minutes as it is now. Shome argued for augmenting GPS with local and regional ground stations and geo-synchronous monitoring satellites in addition to the current system of ground stations.

The aviation application is one area developing nations could benefit – generally GPS allows mapping out geographic areas with high precision for much less expense than traditional surveying. In aviation, use of GPS in navigation could greatly reduce the capital requirements for an airport – assuming traffic control was handled at the regional level, with GPS all you really need is a paved runway entered in the geographic database, and some assurance that it is being maintained…

GPS is being used extensively in agriculture in the US – “precision agriculture” is the buzzword. It’s not clear whether this will be easy to deploy for developing nations; it does cut down on the need for pesticide and fertilizer use, but it’s also an information-intensive application (soil sampling entered into a geographic database). Richard Jordan, a UN staffer involved in the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society pointed out the link between these (and most other) space applications and the need for information technology. But the developing world is making progress by leaps and bounds in info-tech – for example, cell phone usage has basically leapfrogged land-line telephones in many areas.

Eric Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society spoke on how remote sensing satellites (the venerable Landsat in particular) are a huge help in monitoring and tracking down problems in critical wildlife habitats around the world. In particular he showed some of the work he has done with the huge Bukit Barisan Saletan park in Sumatra, Indonesia. It doesn’t look good for the elephants and tigers there, unfortunately…

Tele-medicine and other tele-services were discussed briefly. India is apparently a leader in this, and has been offering tele-medecine services via its satellite systems for use by the US and UN in places like Afghanistan.

Marty Hoffert, a physics professor at NYU, then spoke about the potential of space solar power, one of my favorite topics… His background was in climate science, but when the evidence for climate change from CO2 became overwhelming, he felt compelled to work on ways to solve the problem. There’s a fundamental link to the needs of developing nations here – the original Rio summit and subsequent Kyoto protocol were prompted by the huge number of countries, both developing and developed, that are concerned about the impact of climate change on their nations. Perhaps as important, the US’s refusal to go along with Kyoto (which isn’t just a decision of the Bush administration – the entire US Senate voted against a Kyoto-style accord) is based on a feeling that up to now, these agreements have forced almost all the sacrifice and cuts on the currently developed world. If the agreement doesn’t involve requirements on developing countries, the US doesn’t want to go along with it. To Hoffert, space power provides a solution for both developed and developing world – in fact it works better for countries near the equator, where receiving antenna sizes can be smaller.

Unfortunately, Hoffert and colleagues have had a terrible time getting funding. The US Department of Energy is very risk averse, and doesn’t want anything to do with this (yet). NASA doesn’t see energy as being their bailiwick, unless it’s something joint with DOE. Right now the only real source for funds is the National Science Foundation – but there’s no line-item dedicated to space power there.

What is needed, what many people have called for, is an “Apollo”-scale project in alternative energy. There seems to be some hope for a consensus on this now; the energy department has actually put together some proposals for demonstrations of new “clean” power plants – a coal-fired plant with sequestering of CO2, a new nuclear fission plant design. Hoffert would like a demonstration solar power satellite to be one of these clean power projects – we’ll see if that can happen!

The final major topic was access to space. Jeff Foust of Futron Corp. and The Space Review gave an excellent summary of the current market situation for large, medium, and small launch vehicles, and the new suborbital group spurred by the X Prize. As far as large vehicles are concerned, such as the Boeing, Lockheed, and Ariane offerings, there seems to be a real over-capacity, and these vehicles are being sustained only through “national need” justifications, rather than any significant commercial market. For small launches there is a bit of a worldwide market, but it still hasn’t been growing as much as people had hoped a few years ago. The most active market area is suborbital, where tourism, high-altitude photography and sensing, and zero-gravity sounding-rocket type applications all seem to be markets with a lot of potential. Foust didn’t see much progress in launch cost reduction in the orbital market over the next few years – even a reusable vehicle (such as Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies is trying to develop) doesn’t seem to have much hope of cutting costs significantly right now. The best hope seems to be a continued development of the sub-orbital market, where increasing cross-range capabilities may eventually lead to markets with enough revenue to sustain a low-priced reusable orbital vehicle. That’s probably a long way off though.