Space may power Earth’s future

A business entrepreneur based in Texas, Anousheh Ansari was born in Iran, and spent her childhood watching Star Trek and longing to become an astronaut. Eric Anderson grew up in Colorado with the same dream, but bad eyesight prevented him from fulfilling it. Instead, he became a rocket scientist and later on founded the world’s premier private space exploration company.

The two met, and on September 18, 2006, Anousheh boarded a Soyuz flight operated by Anderson’s Space Adventures, thus becoming the first-ever female private space explorer. And then, Ansari was writing the first-ever space-based blog. Its popularity spread like fire and people’s reactions were overwhelming. She realised that it was much larger than her personal excitement. Since then, she has been touring the world encouraging people to follow their dreams, especially women in the Middle East, while working on furthering private space exploration.

Anderson believes we will soon become a multi-planet species. Population on earth is growing and energy is needed to fuel growth, but fossil-energy reserves are declining, while alternative energy methods have numerous shortcomings. Space, on the other hand, has limitless energy.

Pentagon-commissioned studies have proved that space-based solar power (SBSP) can be up to 16 times more efficient as on earth. Sunlight can be collected 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and beamed back on earth. A km-wide space solar panel could collect as much energy in one year as the amount contained in all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth. By 2050, SBSP could provide half of the planet’s energy needs.

Our solar system is home to millions of asteroids. Often seen as a threat to life on Earth, they can be an opportunity too, as they are rich in minerals. A typical 30-40m-wide heavy metal asteroid has metal worth $10 billion on it. An average platinum asteroid presents a concentration 50,000 times higher than the highest concentration on earth. Learning to mine asteroids may be a solution to our energy problems.

Of course there are tremendous technological challenges in achieving these visions. One of the first priorities is to lower the cost of space flight. Developing private exploration is one solution. Anderson is forecasting a million space tourists within three decades. Google founder Sergey Brin is on the shortlist as one of his next customers.

Tremendous advances in micro and nano-electronics, lightweight inflatable composite structures, ultra-small power management devices and others may gradually help SBSP become a reality.