This morning the U.S. Department of the Interior released new draft regulations on oversight of natural gas drilling on public lands.  The rule specifically addresses  public disclosure of drilling chemicals, well-construction techniques, and “flowback” water that returns to the surface after drilling.

This rule will only apply to public lands, where about 3,400 wells per year are hydraulically fractured.  Public lands produce 20% of the nation’s natural gas.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued a press release today:

“…it is critical that the public have full confidence that the right safety and environmental protections are in place. The proposed rule will modernize our management of well stimulation activities – including hydraulic fracturing – to make sure that fracturing operations conducted on public and Indian lands follow common-sense industry best practices.”

The Interior Department should be commended for modernizing rules that were last updated in 1988 — in particularly for creating new provisions that strengthen the government’s ability to regulate the construction and oversight of wells.  However, the rule lacks a handful of basic public right-to-know measures.

It would require natural gas drillers to disclose the chemicals being used after the fracking has taken place, not beforehand.  This makes baseline testing of water quality nearly impossible, as local communities will be unable to know what exactly to test for.  As Center for American Progress Chairman and Counselor John Podesta put it:

“Disclosure after the fact not only jeopardizes public health but effectively cuts the public out of discussions that affect their communities.”

Additionally, the Interior Department is “working with” the Groundwater Protection Council to determine whether the actual public listing of chemicals can be done on its FracFocus.org website.  The Groundwater Protection Council is comprised of state oil and gas regulators, who often find themselves both promoting drilling and policing it.  A recent investigation by Greenwire found that 40% of state oil and gas regulators have financial ties to the industry.

Hydraulic fracturing is a natural gas drilling technique that involves pumping millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals underground in order to help stimulate wells. Whether or not chemicals used in the drilling process can contaminate water has been the subject of intense debate.  The Environmental Protection Agency recently found at least one instance where hydraulic fracturing was implicated in drinking water contamination. That report was backed up by an independent analysis.

The Interior Department should require companies to disclose the chemicals that they will use before hydraulic fracturing takes place, as well as make the lists available on a public website.

In addition to these standards, long term natural gas development could be made more safe if exemptions from various federal environmental laws are repealed, the National Academy of Sciences conducts a lifecycle study of natural gas’ greenhouse gas emissions relative to coal, and EPA’s voluntary Natural Gas Star program for methane is made mandatory.

Jessica Goad is Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress.

This article was originally posted on Climate Progress

by Anthony Swift, via NRDC’s Switchboard

The State Department announced that it has received an application from TransCanada for a Presidential Permit for the northern segment of its proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline that the President rejected back in January.

Keystone XL would carry 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands from Alberta, Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. Tar sands are the world’s dirtiest form of oil, require a devastating process that lays waste to forests to extract tar sands bitumen, a thick low grade fuel that has significantly higher emissions that conventional crude.

Tar sands pipelines also appear to pose higher risks – both in number and severity of pipeline spills. Keystone XL would grant tar sands a route through America’s heartland on its way to the international market. It would raise U.S. oil prices, put our waters and farms in jeopardy of hard to clean up tar sands oil spills, and would increase our dependence on oil – worsening climate change and undermining efforts to move to clean energy.

A new application means a new review process. The environmental review for the Keystone XL process must evaluate climate, water, land, and health impacts not only of the pipeline, but of the tar sands extraction, refining and end use. The national interest determination for this transboundary energy project has to assess whether the pipeline is really needed to meet U.S. security, economic, environmental or other goals. The world of oil and our understanding of the dangers of tar sands have changed since the first time TransCanada applied for a permit for Keystone XL back in 2008. The process for evaluating this permit request needs to be thorough, rigorous, transparent and free from conflicts of interest.

So once TransCanada reapplies, what can we expect?

The process for considering whether to permit an international energy project like the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is governed by Executive Order 13337. This order empowers the State Department to consider applications for Presidential Permits, in consultation with other federal agencies and the public. The Executive Order instructs the State Department to only grant Presidential Permits for projects that are in the U.S. national interest.

However, before the State Department can make a Presidential Permit decision, it must first conduct a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review of the impacts of the pipeline and assess reasonable alternatives. NEPA requires that Federal agencies prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) before making a decision that would trigger significant environmental impacts. Keystone XL would have tremendous environmental impacts – from the expansion of destructive tar sands extraction, the risk of tar sands spills across U.S. rivers and aquifers and increased refinery and greenhouse gas emissions.

The first step in the NEPA process will be to consult with government agencies, Indian tribes and the public to determine the scope and content of the environmental review for Keystone XL.  This is an opportunity to correct issues of objectivity, transparency and conflicts of interest which plagued the first environmental review prepared by Cardno-Entrix. The environmental review for TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline should have a broad scope – including a consideration of the need for the project given numerous recent infrastructure proposals, the impacts of increase tar sands extraction in Canada associated with Keystone XL, pipeline safety issues, increased refineries emissions, increased carbon emissions associated with replacing conventional crude with tar sands, and the economic costs of continued dependence on Canadian tar sands. The review should take a hard look at areas not considered in the narrow scope of the environmental review of the earlier Keystone XL application as well as consider information about pipeline safety, species, and other areas of impact that have come to light since the review was last done on the earlier application. The review should incorporate the results of other relevant assessments such as the upcoming National Academy of Sciences study of the impact of diluted bitumen or raw tar sands oil on pipeline safety.

The impartiality of original EIS for Keystone XL prepared by Cardno-Entrix on TransCanada’s behalf has been too undermined by conflicts of interest to recycle. In the case of Keystone XL, the environmental review was done by a company that was both paid for and under contract to TransCanada to provide an EIS. It is true that federal agencies often hire third party contractors to conduct an environmental review and the costs are ultimately paid for by the project applicant. In this case, however, TransCanada appears to have largely cut the State Department out of the entire process, having selected, paid for and contracted to Cardno-Entrix to provide an environmental review for Keystone XL.

While an Inspector General (IG) investigation of conflicts of interest between the State Department and TransCanada didn’t find evidence of illegal activity, doing a job well enough to avoid going to jail is not always the same thing as doing a job well.  The IG found that the State Department’s “limited technical resources, expertise and experience impacted the implementation of the NEPA process,” forcing the Department to rely more on its third party contractor to address environmental issues. Given that its third party contractor was actually under contract to TransCanada, the problems with the EIS quickly become apparent. Ultimately, the IG concluded that EIS was not effective. Given the concerns with Keystone XL, the State Department should start from the drawing board and conduct a rigorous environmental review in which  the American public can have confidence.  This argues for a more major role being given to the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies with specialized experience in different aspects of the assessment process.

After the scope of the environmental review has been determined, the State Department will begin to prepare a draft EIS. This review should include a rigorous review of environmental and cultural impacts of the Keystone XL project. Throughout this process, the State Department must take diligent efforts to involve interested stakeholders – and that means public meetings along the pipeline route that allows affected communities to provide input during the scoping process and comment on the draft EIS.

After the environmental review process, the State Department will consider the whether the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is in the U.S. national interest. The National Interest Determination process is governed by Executive Order 13337 and should consider the significant environmental impacts of tar sands extraction, the risk of pipeline spills, higher refinery emissions, and the economic consequence of dependence on tar sands. The world of oil supply and transportation has changed rapidly in the United States even over the last year with additional U.S. oil reserves coming online and new pipelines being built within the United States. Both the environmental review and the national interest determination will need to consider new factors that go directly to the question of whether we need Keystone XL and whether it is actually in the U.S. national interest.

A rigorous review of Keystone XL will show that this tar sands pipeline is not in the U.S. national interest. It is not a pipeline to the United States but a pipeline through it, putting America’s heartland, rivers and aquifers at risk so tar sands producers can sell their product to international buyers at higher prices. While that may be in the interests of tar sands producers and their financial backers, it’s not in the interest of the American public.

Anthony Swift is an attorney with the international program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and was reprinted with permission.

This article was originally posted on Climate Progress

Having just re-read Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars for the first time in a couple of decades, I’ve been preoccupied by the idea of ‘deep time,’ and astronomical events that play out over billions of years. The fictional trick, of course, is to pair human observation with events that take aeons to unfold. In Clarke’s novel, the city of Diaspar is a place that is almost outside of time, a self-contained and beautiful place whose very inwardness ultimately becomes stultifying. But the vision of this glowing jewel of a city surviving amidst the dunes of an ancient Earth is one of those science fiction images that stick with you over a lifetime of reading.

New work out of Vanderbilt University now suggests other deep time images, but they’re likely to be more fantasy than science fiction. Imagine a star moving fast enough to escape the galaxy, living out its life on a long trajectory that will take it into intergalactic space. Kelly Holley-Bockelmann and Lauren Palladino think they can identify more than 675 stars moving out of the Milky Way that have been ejected from the galactic core, red giants with high metallicity — a large proportion of chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium — that are presumably the result of close encounters with the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Moving at something like 900 kilometers per second, a hypervelocity star of the kind catalogued by Holley-Bockelmann and Palladino takes roughly 10 million years to travel from the galactic hub to the outer edge of the spiral. Pushing out into the intergalactic dark, it would go through normal stellar evolution that takes it to the red giant stage, having begun as a small star relatively like our Sun. So could planets exist around such a star? If so, any civilization that might emerge on them would play out its lifetime well beyond the vast city of stars that is the Milky Way.

Image: A supermassive black hole at galactic center may be responsible for hypervelocity stars that are leaving the galaxy at high speeds. Credit: NASA/JPL.

That would make for some interesting tales, and science fiction stories like Poul Anderson’s World Without Stars (1966) explore the experience of extraterrestrials living in a system outside the galaxy. But planets would be seriously problematic among hypervelocity stars, given that the scenario under investigation involves a young binary system that wanders too close to the four-million solar mass black hole at the hub. While one star spirals in toward the black hole, the other would be flung outward, presumably disrupting any nascent planetary system around it.

Another mechanism involves a single star making too close a pass when the central black hole is ingesting a smaller black hole. Both situations produce the hypervelocity kick that propels a star out of its galaxy. That’s quite a lot to ask for the stability of any planetary system.

Working with Sloan Digital Sky Survey data, the Vanderbilt work probes these mechanisms, beginning with what has been called a ‘field of streams’ that extends out to about 100 kiloparsecs from the Milky Way. A similar stream extends outward from M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. Given that our two galaxies are not (yet) interacting, the black hole scenarios make a better explanation for these streams of stars than interactions between galaxies. To become intergalactic wanderers, stars must exceed the Milky Way’s escape velocity, now pegged at somewhere between 500 and 600 kilometers per second. So we have a mixture of bound stars on highly eccentric orbits and hypervelocity stars that are escaping from the galaxy altogether.

Stars on their way out of the Milky Way should show a definite signature. From the paper:

It is useful to compare this to theoretical predictions of stellar ejections from the Milky Way (Kollmeier et al. 2009). Stars ejected from the galaxy center through three-body interactions with a SMBH [supermassive black hole] will typically have much higher metallicity than stars that were stripped from satellite galaxies originating in the outskirts of a galaxy halo…

Or as Holley-Bockelmann puts it in this Vanderbilt news release:

“These stars really stand out. They are red giant stars with high metallicity which gives them an unusual color.”

Usefully, stars between galaxies may offer up insights into the history and evolution of galaxy clusters, but followup observations are needed to weed out any candidates that are actually much closer brown dwarfs rather than hypervelocity red giants. As to my musings about planetary systems around hypervelocity stars, they’re likely to be little more than that, because how a planetary system could stay gravitationally bound to a star that has had a violent encounter with a black hole remains a mystery — most likely any previously existing planets would be torn away to become lone wanderers themselves. But if anyone has seen any work on planetary survival in these scenarios, please let me know. It seems a wild stretch.

The paper is Palladino et al., “Identifying High Metallicity M Giants at Intragroup Distances with SDSS,” accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal Vol. 143, No. 6 (May, 2012), p. 128 (abstract / preprint). Another science fictional treatment of stars outside galaxies is Iain Banks’ Against a Dark Background (1993), which is finally nearing the top of my reading stack.

This article was originally posted on Centauri Dreams

Felipe Calderón stands in front of a wind farm in Mexico.

by Jeffrey Cavanagh

Since Mexico’s legislative body passed sweeping climate change legislation on April 19, Mexico joins the UK as the only two countries in the world with legally binding emissions goals to combat climate change.

The new law will reduce the country’s carbon emissions, end fossil fuel subsidies, and establish a voluntary carbon trading market. This law builds on Mexico’s previous commitments to action on climate change, and reflects on the country’s green leadership on the international stage it prepares to host the upcoming G20 leaders’ summit in June.

Adrián Fernández, a consultant for the Latin American Initiative and former President of the National Ecology Institute, recently discussed the importance of Mexico’s new climate change law during a briefing 2012 by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington DC:

[Mexico] now has a framework that allows governments at national and local levels to set aside budgets with clear earmarks towards climate change, and to create new investments for climate mitigation and adaptation … pushing [Mexico] into the spotlight and, under international scrutiny, [Mexico] will be held accountable to its people and the international community.

After several years of debate and revision, the bill passed Mexico’s lower house on April 12, with a vote of 128 for and 10 against. Mexico’s Senate unanimously passed the legislation on April 19, and President Felipe Calderon, who has championed immediate action to stop global warming, is expected to sign the bill into law soon.

As President Calderon prepares to host the next G20 summit in June, his administration will make climate change and sustainable development “priorities” during the meeting under a broad Green Growth theme. With 75 percent of the world’s GDP, the G20 is responsible for 75 percent of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Bringing together finance ministers from these countries is essential for putting sustainability at the core of economic recovery and for figuring out how to mobilize significant resources for international climate finance.

Today, Mexico is the only developing country in the world to have passed binding climate change legislation.

While the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) designates Mexico a “non-Annex I country,” or a developing country — thus not requiring it to make greenhouse gas reduction targets — Mexico’s non-Annex I status is not reflective of its economic size (11th) or contribution to global greenhouse gasses (also 11th).

Given its size and commitment to sustainable growth, Mexico is well positioned to facilitate cooperation among major developing countries such as China and industrialized countries like the United States as they seek consensus on international climate finance during the upcoming summit.

UNFCCC talks have previously stalled with industrialized and developing countries “locked into definitions” that hinder global cooperation. Mexico can use the G20 Summit to build on its previous success from the 2010 UN talks in Mexico that resulted in the Cancun Agreements.  By passing climate law legislation, Mexico is acting demonstrating continuing leadership on sustainable development on the international stage.

According to Rodrigo Gallegos, the Director of Climate and Technology at the Mexico Institute for Competitiveness, and representative for the business community who also participated in the briefing, the climate legislation will simplify emissions regulations throughout the country and set a new institutional and regulatory framework that will create more certainty for Mexico’s business environment. As a result, Mr. Gallegos notes, Mexico’s business sector is supporting the climate change law:

Most of the private sector and chamber are in favor of the law and have changed positions over the last two years. So, having said that, there is a very positive sense of perception of the law among businesses.

Mr. Gallegos believes that with reduced long-term investment uncertainty, Mexico can become a destination for green technology and innovation.

As a backdrop to Mexico’s G20 summit and climate change legislation, the country is concurrently dealing with one of the worst droughts on record for several areas of the country. More than half of Mexico’s territory is experiencing drought, and over 3.7 million acres of farmland have been lost. The federal government has spent billions of dollars on food, water, and other aid relief in some of the most afflicted areas in 19 of Mexico’s 31 states. Severe drought is one of the most pressing problems caused by climate change — likely severely hindering global food production over the coming decades.

Mexico’s climate legislation may not bring sorely needed rain in the immediate future. But it is a great step in the right direction for international climate sustainability.

Jeffrey Cavanagh is an intern with the international climate team at the Center for American Progress. Policy analyst Rebecca Lefton contributed to this report.

This article was originally posted on Climate Progress

One of the topics receiving fairly little coverage in the excitement of the Planetary Resources announcement is asteroid deflection. It seems clear that learning how to reach an asteroid and extract everything from water to platinum-group metals from it will also teach us strategies for changing an asteroid’s trajectory, in the event we find one likely to hit the Earth. The recent report from the Keck Institute of Space Studies makes this point clearly in the context of its own mission study, a plan to retrieve a small (7 m) asteroid and park it in lunar orbit.

What Asteroid Operations Can Teach Us

Although Planetary Resources estimates there are more than 1500 asteroids that are as easy to get to as the Moon, we still have a long way to go in understanding basic facts about these objects and their composition. Take dust, which will probably vary from object to object, but which could cause problems for ‘gravity tractor’ concepts where a spacecraft is used to deflect an asteroid without physically contacting it. If the rendezvous with the asteroid can be managed far enough from Earth, the gravitational field of a nearby orbiting body as tiny as a spacecraft can, over a period of years or even decades, bring about the needed course change.

But assuming your vehicle works with the kind of solar electric propulsion envisioned by the Keck study, dust could be a factor if the engine exhaust reaches the asteroid as part of needed station-keeping (this is perhaps an argument for solar sail technologies in these scenarios). What seems to be a small issue becomes a big unknown when you think about the multi-year presence of a gravity tractor spacecraft around such an asteroid. Direct study, as via Planetary Resources robotic technologies or manned crews examining a captured asteroid in lunar orbit, should help us learn more about how dust is moved and settles on an asteroid surface.

Other factors listed by the Keck report:

Anchoring: We need to acquire the ability to land a robotic spacecraft on an asteroid and anchor it there, a challenge any mining venture will have to resolve.

Structural characterization: This is a big one. We need to understand an asteroid from the inside out, since a prime deflection method is to hit the asteroid with enough of a blow to change its course. But we know little about what happens to an asteroid when this occurs because ejecta from the impact could multiply the momentum given to the NEA by the impactor.

Proximity operations: How do we dock with the asteroid and navigate near it? We’ll learn many of these things through actual robotic asteroid operations, and as we saw last time, having a small asteroid available for examination in lunar orbit would far surpass the 60 grams of surface material we’re going to have returned from the upcoming OSIRIS-REx mission.

These are all technical matters, but it goes without saying that a successful asteroid retrieval of the kind Keck envisions would also draw public attention to the asteroid defense element of all our studies of near-Earth objects. And in addition to its uses in providing unique, space-based resources for radiation shielding and propellant extraction, an asteroid retrieval would offer up some of the options we may someday want to use in space elevators. Says the report:

One day, in the more distant future, it is possible that a small NEA (~10 m) returned to E-M L2/L1 could act as an orbiting platform/counter weight for a lunar space elevator to allow routine access to and from the lunar surface and also function as a space resource processing facility for mining significant quantities of materials for future human space exploration and settlement and possible return and inclusion in terrestrial markets.

Eye on an Exoplanet

The asteroid mining and retrieval idea seems so loaded with possibilities that the Keck Institute’s 51 page report can barely contain them all, but I want to close with the idea NextBigFuture has been discussing recently. Planetary Resources makes a point about the Arkyd Series 100 space telescopes it intends to begin launching as soon as 24 months from now. These are intended to begin with studies in low Earth orbit but the Arkyd Series 200 that follows would contain a propulsion system so that missions directly to new asteroid targets will become possible.

We get the same kind of look at an asteroid, says Planetary Resources, as we got when exploring the Moon with the Ranger missions (1961-65) or the Deep Impact mission at Comet 9P/Tempel in 2005. The name of the game is data acquisition as we try to decide which near-Earth asteroids are the best candidates for future operations. NextBigFuture took a look at all those telescopes — Planetary Resources describes them as “the first private space telescope… simple enough to be designed, manufactured, tested and integrated by a small team, yet robust enough to get the job done.” Could they be massed for deep space studies?

The principle is interferometry, which would allow the creation of huge telescopes, mixing signals from a cluster of small instruments to achieve high-resolutions unavailable from a single, monolithic lens. The idea has been thoroughly vetted, and with great success, with Earth-bound instruments, but French astronomer Antoine Émile Henry Labeyrie (Collège de France) has been studying what he calls a ‘hypertelescope,’ which would involve huge numbers of free-flying spacecraft combining their data to produce images that could show surface detail on exoplanets.

Labeyrie’s presentation on the topic at a European Space Agency meeting in 2009 describes a “laser-driven hypertelescope flotilla at L2” that could image continents and oceans on a world 10 light years away. These would be telescopes whose mirrors were placed kilometers apart, each of them small instruments but forming what he has called a ‘sparse giant mirror.’ Here’s the image from Labeyrie’s talk that NextBigFuture also ran. Note the resolution shown for Earth at the 10 light year distance, and the swarm of spacecraft that have been used to produce it.

In a 1996 paper, Labeyrie had this to say about interferometry and exoplanets:

As the technical difficulties will become mastered, a continuous evolution towards larger sizes is to be expected. Jupiter-like planets at 5 pc can be imaged from Earth with 10 km arrays, while Earth-like planets at 5 pc require 100 km arrays, preferably installed in space. Because such images can also yield spectra for each of their resolved elements, they should provide a better diagnostic for the presence of life, and possibly civilisation, than would spectra of unresolved planets. Other objects such as pulsars, galactic nuclei and QSOs [quasi-stellar objects] are also candidates for high resolution imaging.

Labeyrie went on to develop the concept he calls Exo-Earth Imager, one that made an appearance in New Scientist in 2006 in an article by Govert Schilling:

Labeyrie’s design for a hypertelescope takes dilute optics to the extreme. Ultimately his Exo-Earth Imager will consist of at least 150 mirror elements, each measuring 3 metres across, and spread out over an area of about 8000 square kilometres. Together, they would fly in formation around the sun to make a hypertelescope with a diameter of 100 kilometres – large enough to pick out clouds and continents on a distant relative of our home planet.

Whether or not Planetary Resources would eventually wind up creating a hypertelescope flotilla anything like this as an offshoot of its asteroid mining effort remains to be seen, but what is exciting here is the prospect of lower-cost space telescopes whose very presence may spur refinements in interferometric techniques. The same network could boost the effort to exploit sunshade concepts, in which the light of the central star is effectively nulled and the faint light of exoplanets made visible. All in all, an effort to reach and take advantage of asteroid resources could have large ramifications indeed, not all of them confined to our own Solar System.

Two papers by Antoine Labeyrie are relevant here. They are “Resolved imaging of extra-solar planets with future 10-100km optical interferometric arrays,” Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement, v.118 (1996) p.517-524 (abstract) and “Snapshots of Alien Worlds: The Future of Interferometry,” Science 285 (1999), pp. 1864-65 (abstract). The Schilling article is “The hypertelescope: a zoom with a view,” New Scientist 23 February 2006.

This article was originally posted on Centauri Dreams

A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post extra links below.

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted. [ProPublica]

Scientific models are failing to accurately predict the impact of global warming on plants, says a new report. [BBC]

Tariffs enforce WTO rules and protect U.S. solar manufacturers, but could also drive up solar costs or touch off a U.S.-China trade war. Center for American Progress China energy and policy analyst Melanie Hart and Grape Solar founder Ocean Yuan debated the wisdom of tariffs at the GTM solar summit. [Greentech Media]

If the mainstream media won’t connect the dots, then it’s up to the rest of us to try. This Saturday, 350.org’s global network of volunteers, activists, and organizations are hosting over 1,000 events in more than 100 countries to “connect the dots” between extreme weather and climate change. [Huffington Post]

South Korea’s Parliament approved Wednesday a long-delayed bill to start trading carbon-dioxide emissions in 2015, paving the way for Korea to become one of the first Asian countries to implement a nationwide cap-and-trade system. [Wall Street Journal]

A new paper in the prestigious science journal Nature assesses one of the big questions in ecology today: How do species extinctions rack up compared to other global change issues like global warming, ozone holes, acid rain, and nutrient pollution (overfertilization)? [Mother Jones]

Another long, stupefyingly hot summer is looming for Japan just as it shuts down its last operating nuclear power reactor, worsening a squeeze on electricity and adding urgency to calls for a green energy revolution. [Washington Post]

This article was originally posted on Climate Progress

On the Trail of the Space Pirates was a 1953 adventure written by Carey Rockwell, a house pseudonym used by a Grosset & Dunlop writer who may or may not have been one Joseph Greene, an editor for the firm in that era. We don’t know for sure who ‘Carey Rockwell’ was and no one has come forward to claim the title, but see the Tom Corbett Space Cadet website for another possible clue to authorship. In any case, On the Trail of the Space Pirates took readers such as my grade school self out into the asteroid belt, where all manner of adventures occur and uranium prospectors ply their trade harassed by evil doers. The asteroids became a lively analogue to the American wild west.

Asteroid mining and the culture it spawns has a robust history in science fiction, but I couldn’t help recalling this particular book when I read about Planetary Resources and its ambitious plan to mine asteroids. The company’s intentions don’t extend all the way to the main belt, but focus on asteroids much closer to home, of which there are plenty, and out of which some 1500 may prove to be of high interest if mining is the intention. What caught me up in the spirit of the science fictional ‘belters’ was this pitch on the Planetary Resources website encouraging people to work for the company. It’s titled ‘We’re looking for a few good asteroid miners’:

1. We are finding a new way to explore space beyond Earth orbit.
2. We are a growing business with incredible people who are dedicated to Planetary Resources’ long-term objectives.
3. Like all small businesses, we are a family. We love our team and what we do.
4. You will get your hands dirty. If you prefer your hands clean, go somewhere else.
5. We have a grill. We are not afraid to use it.
6. Seattle, Washington. Ok, so it rains. It’s gorgeous, and anyone who says otherwise is from California.
7. Bottom line – we build spaceships and explore asteroids. If you need any other motivation to apply, don’t bother.

The brash spirit of those comments is a nice tonic in an era when government space programs seem rudderless and strapped for cash. Whether Planetary Resources can deliver on its promise to study and then mine iron, nickel, gold, platinum and water resources on nearby chunks of rock remains to be seen, though the list of backers — Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page of Google, movie mogul James Cameron, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis — offers hope and plenty of cash. And let’s not forget Eric Anderson (Space Adventures) and the well-traveled Charles Simonyi, who is unusual among space tourists in having made not one but two flights to the International Space Station.

This is a genuinely exciting startup that is going to teach us a lot about how fast and how soon we can develop resources in nearby space that can help us go much further afield. In Centauri Dreams terms, I always think about building the needed infrastructure in the Solar System that can one day support an interstellar effort. Extracting water that does not need to be boosted into Earth orbit and creating rocket fuel from space resources to supply future missions fits that bill, as does the hope that enough money can be turned from the extraction of precious metals to make the venture self-sustaining and prosperous. Good fortune to Planetary Resources!

The context in which this new company moves is suggested by a recent report from Caltech’s Keck Institute for Space Studies which was released in early April, and which was invariably mentioned in news reports in tandem with the Space Resources news conference on the 24th. I want to start digging into this report in the next day or two because although it focuses specifically on retrieving an asteroid, it has obvious implications not only in terms of how we might exploit its resources but learn to manipulate its trajectory. All that, of course, takes us into the realm of asteroid threat mitigation. If we one day find an asteroid that is moving on a dangerous trajectory, will we have the time and the know-how to actually do something about it?

Here it’s worth noting that the Apollo missions were able to return 382 kilograms of lunar materials over the course of their six lander missions, while NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is slated to retrieve about 60 grams from the asteroid known as 1999 RQ36, which orbits the Sun every 1.2 years and crosses the Earth’s orbit every September. 60 grams isn’t much, but neither is the Apollo sample return when compared to the ~500,000 kilograms of asteroid material the Keck Institute study talks about, an entire asteroid delivered to high lunar orbit by around 2025.

Can it be done? Even more significantly, can it be done without endangering the home planet? I’ll be looking further into the report tomorrow. Meanwhile, have a look at Alan Boyle’s excellent discussion of Planetary Resources’ prospects and the problems they’ll encounter along the way. And check NextBigFuture’s challenging look at a different way to use those small, inexpensive telescopes Planetary Resources intends to put into space as part of the infrastructure for studying asteroid targets. They could conceivably be used as the basis for a ‘hypertelescope,’ an interferometer with a 16,000 kilometer baseline. The possibilities for a close-up look at an exoplanet are intriguing, to say the least, and we’ll discuss them further in coming days.

I’ve believed for a long time that planetary defense demanded we develop the technologies that would get us into the outer Solar System, and we may be seeing the first steps in that process now. The painstaking study of nearby asteroids that the Planetary Resources concept will demand should pay dividends if we ever have to move one not just for resources but for safety.

This article was originally posted on Centauri Dreams

Long before Planetary Resources was a gleam in the eye of its founders, John Lewis (University of Arizona) wrote a book that put asteroid mining into the public consciousness. Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets and Planets (Perseus Books, 1996) contains no shortage of wonders, as in the well publicized idea that a single one-kilometer asteroid could produce enough gold and silver to equal world production for a century. David Brin writes about this on George Dvorsky’s Sentient Developments site, noting that while that would produce a collapse in gold and silver prices, it would also produce incalculable benefits in terms of raw materials production that could change the economic paradigm entirely.

Lewis is a natural fit with Planetary Resources, the highly buzzed-about startup that plans to make asteroid mining a reality, and it’s no surprise to see that he serves as one of its advisors. But remembering Mining the Sky, I was startled to discover that the idea of using asteroid resources goes all the way back to Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, who wrote about it in The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Motors in 1903 — it was in this same work that the Russian rocket scientist and visionary first proposed multistage rockets using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for space exploration. It seems fitting that there is an asteroid with a Tsiolkovskii connection, the object 1590 Tsiolkovskaja being named for his wife.

Image: An artist’s concept of a fragmented asteroid laden with resources. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout , Reuters files.

A New Study on Asteroid Retrieval

Caltech’s Keck Institute for Space Studies has examined asteroid possibilities in the just released Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study, whose April 12 appearance was timed to perfection by the powers behind Planetary Resources. What the Keck study is interested in is returning an object not to low-Earth orbit but a high lunar orbit, allowing the project to be conducted with far more relaxed propulsion constraints than would be applied deep in Earth’s gravity well. A corollary to this is the fact that larger asteroids can be captured. The study authors settled on an asteroid 7 meters in diameter with a mass on the order of 500,000 kg. This was a 6-month study enlisting a wide range of space-minded talent (see the contributor list on p. 6 of the report).

The Keck report meshes with NASA’s current goals of sending a manned expedition to a near-Earth asteroid halfway into the next decade, though given the mutable nature of NASA’s funding, that’s the least of the reasons to make this happen. Even so, an asteroid retrieval has definite consequences for manned flight. What Keck has in mind is robotic, unmanned missions that culminate in a scout mission, also robotic, to enable detailed mission planning. The full retrieval mission is seen as a precursor to subsequent human missions to this and other NEAs. An NEA in high-lunar orbit then becomes an obvious and accessible target for astronaut visitation.

Again, no astronauts on the retrieval mission, which is robotic. But:

Taken together, these attributes of an ACR [Asteroid Capture and Return] mission would endow NASA (and its partners) with a new demonstrated capability in deep space that hasn’t been seen since Apollo. Once astronaut visits to the captured object begin, NASA would be putting human explorers in contact with an ancient, scientifically intriguing, and economically valuable body beyond the Moon, an achievement that would compare very favorably to any attempts to repeat the Apollo lunar landings.

Reasons for Snatching an Asteroid

Why retrieve an asteroid in the first place? Here’s a distilled rational from the executive summary, one that begins with a focus on the effect of spurring manned spaceflight:

It would provide a high-value target in cislunar space that would require a human presence to take full advantage of this new resource. It would offer an affordable path to providing operational experience with astronauts working around and with a NEA that could feed forward to much longer duration human missions to larger NEAs in deep space. It would provide an affordable path to meeting the nation’s goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth object by 2025. It represents a new synergy between robotic and human missions in which robotic spacecraft retrieve significant quantities of valuable resources for exploitation by astronaut crews to enable human exploration farther out into the solar system.

All true, of course, but it’s only after this spadework has been done that the report turns to what has electrified the space community about Planetary Resources and its own asteroid plans, and it’s nothing like an Apollo-style effort to get people to particular destinations. The goal is broader and much longer-lasting. Once we have an asteroid, either by traveling to it or by inducing it into a lunar orbit for further exploitation, we have the ability to extract materials from it. All this gets into the real infrastructure-building components of asteroid mining:

…water or other material extracted from a returned, volatile-rich NEA could be used to provide affordable shielding against galactic cosmic rays. The extracted water could also be used for propellant to transport the shielded habitat. These activities could jump-start an entire in situ resource utilization (ISRU) industry. The availability of a multi-hundred-ton asteroid in lunar orbit could also stimulate the expansion of international cooperation in space as agencies work together to determine how to sample and process this raw material. The capture, transportation, examination, and dissection of an entire NEA would provide valuable information for planetary defense activities that may someday have to deflect a much larger near-Earth object. Finally, placing a NEA in lunar orbit would provide a new capability for human exploration not seen since Apollo.

Aspects of the Retrieval Mission

Two aspects of the asteroid retrieval campaign are immediately obvious. Before retrieving anything, we need an extended effort to identify objects that fit the bill physically and offer up orbital parameters that would make them good candidates for the return mission. We also need a transportation method, and here what the Keck study advocates is a ~40-kW solar electric propulsion system with a specific impulse of 3,000 seconds. It’s interesting to see by the report’s figures that, given a single launch to low-Earth orbit aboard an Atlas V-class vehicle, the ultimate plan would be to retrieve 28 times the mass launched to LEO and bring it into high lunar orbit.

The mission plan is fascinating and fodder for science fiction writers. The solar electric propulsion system would be used to spiral the vehicle into high-Earth orbit and a lunar gravity assist would then put the vehicle on a trajectory to the NEA. The report allocates 90 days for studying the NEA and capturing and ‘de-tumbling’ the asteroid, transporting it back to the Earth-Moon system for a second lunar gravity assist that would be used to capture it. Transfer to a stable high lunar orbit would take place about 4.5 months after the first gravity assist.

All of this presupposes mechanisms for stabilizing and moving the asteroid, which the report says could be done with a high-strength bag assembly, deployable and inflatable arms and cinching cables, the bag being 10 meters by 15-meters in diameter looking like this:

Image: The capture mechanism deployed and in operation. Credit: Rick Sternbach/KISS.

But before any such mission can be flown, we also need improved ways of studying potential targets. Planetary Resources has the idea of launching inexpensive telescopes that could sample a wide variety of NEAs, while the Keck report notes the value of the solar electric propulsion system for sending multiple-target robotic precursors that would precede any human missions. As opposed to the upcoming (2016) OSIRIS REx mission, which will return 60 grams of surface material, a robotic precursor like this would be used to bring back large boulders and regolith samples from any human targets prior to sending manned crews there.

The report’s focus on resource acquisition in space is heartening. Check this:

The asteroidal material delivered to cislunar space could be used to provide radiation shielding for future deep space missions and also validate in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) processes (water extraction, propellant production, etc.) that could significantly reduce the mass and propulsion requirements for a human mission. The introduction of ISRU into human mission designs could be extremely beneficial, but until the processing and storage techniques have been sufficiently tested in a relevant environment it is difficult to baseline the use of ISRU into the human mission architecture. Bringing back large quantities of asteroid materials to an advantageous location would make validation of an ISRU system significantly easier.

Well said — the whole notion of in situ acquisition and utilization is critical as we look toward building a true human future in space. Part of the Planetary Resources plan is to extract water from asteroids not only for human needs (much better than launching from deep within the gravity well) but also for the creation of rocket fuel. The report’s emphasis on the need to bring back asteroid materials to study the prospects in detail is wise, because we need to learn how effectively we can go about extracting these materials and turning them around for space use.

But there are other areas where moving into the asteroids, first with robots and then human crews, makes abundant sense. Tomorrow I want to examine asteroid deflection as one major area that will benefit from these activities, and we’ll also look at the ramifications of all those telescopes Planetary Resources plans to put into space. We may only be scratching the surface of how useful our future ability to move tools and crews to asteroids — or to move asteroids themselves — may turn out to be in building the next phase of human civilization.

This article was originally posted on Centauri Dreams

Headlines are important because research shows that most newspaper readers don’t get much beyond them. And NY Times headlines sweep across the internet through twitter, facebook, news aggregators and search engines.  Probably 10 to 50 times as many people see the headlines as read any substantial portion of the story.

So when the New York Times publishes a front-page piece eviscerating Dr. Richard Lindzen and his “discredited” theory — the NYT’s word — that the cloud feedback could somehow save us from catastrophic global warming, it ought to have a better headline than “Clouds’ Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters.”

Even worse, the heavily-trafficked front page of the NY Times website has this teaser for the piece:

Again, far more people are going to read this teaser — written by the editors, not the reporter — than actually read the story. What they are going to come away with is the notion that climate skeptics aka deniers aka disinformers have legitimate arguments that might “save us.”

Obviously nothing could be further from the truth, especially when it comes to the discredited Dr. Lindzen. As the article notes:

When Dr. Lindzen first published this theory, in 2001, he said it was supported by satellite records over the Pacific Ocean. But other researchers quickly published work saying that the methods he had used to analyze the data were flawed and that his theory made assumptions that were inconsistent with known facts. Using what they considered more realistic assumptions, they said they could not verify his claims.

Today, most mainstream researchers consider Dr. Lindzen’s theory discredited. He does not agree, but he has had difficulty establishing his case in the scientific literature. Dr. Lindzen published a paper in 2009 offering more support for his case that the earth’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is low, but once again scientists identified errors, including a failure to account for known inaccuracies in satellite measurements.

Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper contained “some stupid mistakes” in his handling of the satellite data. “It was just embarrassing,” he said in an interview. “The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque.”

Last year, he tried offering more evidence for his case, but after reviewers for a prestigious American journal criticized the paper, Dr. Lindzen published it in a little-known Korean journal.

The reporter, Justin Gillis, has done a fine job here. What could be clearer than “most mainstream researchers consider Dr. Lindzen’s theory discredited”?

But why should a reader have to wade through many, many paragraphs to learn that this “last bastion” is nothing more than a “Potemkin village”? Again, “bastion” is a very strong image that should not be applied to something as flimsy as the house of cards that is Lindzen’s discredited theory.

Indeed, the recent scientific literature includes multiple studies that conclude clouds are likely to be an amplifying feedback, not one that reduces impacts:

• Science: “Clouds Appear to Be Big, Bad Player in Global Warming” — an amplifying feedback (sorry Lindzen and fellow disinformers)
• Major Science study: Observations confirm “the short-term cloud feedback is likely positive”
• Journal of Climate: New cloud feedback results “provide support for the high end of current estimates of global climate sensitivity

Lindzen himself has been debunked by some of the leading climate scientists in the country (see Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error”). Climatologist Kevin Trenberth said in 2010 of one paper co-authored by Lindzen that the flaws “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got.”

This is hardly the first time the NY Times has ruined a good climate story with a lousy headline — see “Crappy Headline” Ruins New York Times Story on Link Between Climate Change and Extreme Weather. In that case, the headline was “Scientists See More Deadly Weather, but Dispute the Cause.” The author of that piece, John Broder called it a “crappy headline.”  He said of the two scientists he spoke to and quoted — NOAA’s Thomas R. Karl and NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth — “they don’t dispute the cause.” Doh!

I get that even the NY Times is under pressure to write headlines that will appeal to the most people, headlines that suggest controversy and dispute. But such headlines are inappropriate for articles whose actual content does not reflect controversy and dispute. It is time for the paper to review its headline policy, at least on climate, and, I think, give reporters some sort of a veto power.

We’ve seen the lousy headlines. What headline would you suggest?

One final point. The other reason that only slashing greenhouse gas emissions — not having your head in the clouds — can “save us” is that there are many, many more documented amplifying feedbacks poised to kick in if we keep taking no action:

• NSIDC bombshell: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100
• Stunning Peatlands Amplifying Feedback: Drying Wetlands and Intensifying Wildfires Boost Carbon Release Ninefold
• The destruction of the tropical wetlands
• Decelerating growth in tropical forest trees — thanks to accelerating carbon dioxide
• Wildfires and Climate-Driven forest destruction by pests
• The desertification-global warming feedback

This article was originally posted on Climate Progress

by Brad Johnson

When the Discovery Channel aired “On Thin Ice,” its Frozen Planet episode documenting changes in the Arctic, it conveniently left out human causes. The show’s producer told the New York Times she didn’t want people saying “don’t watch this show because it has a slant on climate change” – illustrating everything wrong with the conversation around climate change in America. This afternoon, I and other members of Forecast the Facts delivered a petition to the Discovery offices with 10,000 signatures demanding the organization correct this unscientific self-censorship:

We are deeply disappointed by your decision not to explain the science, and human causes, of global warming in the “On Thin Ice” episode of the Frozen Planet series. As the world’s leader in environmental programming, your decision sends a dangerous message to media companies around the world — that it is better to censor yourself than risk criticism by global warming deniers. We call on you to immediately acknowledge this error and to conduct a review of all Discovery programming decisions to ensure no such self-censorship happens again.

As I and other members of Forecast the Facts, scientists Steve Scolnick and Clarence Maloney, entered the Discovery headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, we were greeted by a security officer in the vestibule. Corporate Security Manager David Sterner told us that no-one in communications, production, or viewer relations was or would be available to accept the petition, nor were we welcome even into the main lobby. However, he did personally guarantee that the 10,000 signatures and the letter addressed to Discovery chairman John Hendricks would be delivered on our behalf.

It is an essential fact that burning fossil fuels is the cause of the melting poles. As Bill McKibben noted, “On Thin Ice” is no different than a documentary on the ravages of lung cancer that censored mention of cigarettes. The pursuit of profit is not a valid excuse for the censorship of science. Neither is the fear of reprisal from well funded polluters.

Faced with a gross failure of leadership on climate pollution by those in power, average citizens are mobilizing to demand honesty and action. But they’re not the only ones. Today also marks the start of the inaugural science policy conference of the American Geophysical Union, a response by the leading organization of earth scientists to the increasing disconnect between the facts of science and the decisions made by politicians and corporations. The central topic of today’s sessions? The rapidly changing Arctic.

Brad Johnson is campaign manager for Forecast the Facts.

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

This article was originally posted on Climate Progress