Strategy and tactics for enlisting the rest of the world in making access to space inexpensive.

1. Hello, my name is Brandon Sanders. Like many of the folks at this conference, I’m
passionate about making access to interplanetary space routine.
This effort is really a change effort. We are seeking to fundamentally change how the
human species relates to the cosmos.
This talk is about our strategy and tactics for enlisting the rest of the world, the
legions who aren’t at this conference, in making it happen.
Well I said it’s a change effort ...!

2. ... and a really great conceptual framework for instigating change that I’ve borrowed
pretty heavily from is the wonderful book “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath. The
entire book is an excellent exposition on effectiveness and I recommend it highly.
When starting a change effort, the Heath brothers advise us to look for bright spots
and determine why they exist. We need to identify some positive examples of the
phenomenon we’re looking to replicate and then learn from them.
So what is the phenomenon we’re looking to replicate? What are our examples?!

3. I’d argue that at their core, Space Elevator like projects are transportation
infrastructure projects. So our bright spots will be giant transportation infrastructure
projects. Some examples involving public/private partnerships include:
• The Erie Canal
• The Transcontinental Railroad
• The Panama canal
• The Interstate Highway System
All of these mega projects made a huge impact in their day ... and set the stage for
even more ambitious projects yet to come.
So which of these should we choose as our bright spot?!

4. Here are some numbers to help us decide. The dates are the start date for the
project and the numbers on the right are the percentage share of the GDP from the
start date projected forward to the year 2010 ... I used measuringworth.com to do
that projection.
A disclaimer: finding the exact costs and relating them across time for these projects
is difficult ... and small changes in our assumptions generate dramatically different
numbers in terms of 2010 share of GDP dollars. Case in point, the interstate highway
system took 36 years to complete with expenditures spread across that entire period
of time.
That said ... these are generally useful numbers as a starting point.

5. For the remainder of this talk, I’ve chosen the transcontinental railroad as the “bright
spot” to extract lessons from. I’ve chosen it for several reasons:
1) I find it to be intuitively accessible (I’ve ridden a train before)
2) Yet it isn’t a mundane story ... the story of it’s construction assumes heroic
proportions ... there have been fascinating books written about it (Stephen
Ambrose, etc)
3) It was finished quickly (6 years)
4) Next year will be the 150 year anniversary of the legislation that started it all ...
and since most humans are numerologists, such a round number anniversary has
significant emotional potency
So next year being the sesquicentennial of the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 ... is an
opportunity for us.
Now before we get into the lessons we can learn from our bright spot ...!

6. ... let me tell you an abbreviated version of the story of the building of the
transcontinental railroad.
The Pacific Railway Act was passed in 1862. It set up a race between the Central
Pacific in the West and the Union Pacific in the East. For every mile of track they laid,
they got a government loan. They got three times as much for a mile laid in the
mountains as for a mile laid on the plains. Also, for each mile they laid, they received a
grant of 10 square miles of land bordering one side of the tracks. Incidentally, the
total land granted to the the two railroads was larger than the size of Texas.
Lest you worry that the government got a bad deal ... the land across the tracks from
the railroad land was still owned by the government and with the completion of the
railroad came to be worth much more than double what it was worth before the
railroad.
The start of this epic contest was against the backdrop of the American Civil War.
The civil war started in 1861, and ended in 1865.
This brings us to our first lesson: political opportunism.!

7. Prior to the civil war, there were two main candidate routes for the railroad to
the pacific. In the context of the civil war, the significance of these two routes
cannot be overstated. The Northerners would block any bill proposing the
route through the slave states, and the Southerners likewise would block any
bill proposing the route through the free states.!
With the advent of the Civil War, the Southerners were no longer voting in
congress. This provided an opportunity to pass the legislation for the Northern
route. This legislation was further bolstered by the Unionʼs resolve not to lose
California. And the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 provided yet another tie to
bind California tightly to the Union.!

8. So what do we learn from this?!
1) Tie your change effort into the current political Zeitgeist.!
2) Seize opportunities to pass your key legislation (perhaps a big sea change).!
So we need to maintain a good understanding of the political currents shaping our
country ... so that when opportunity arises ... we recognize it and we’re ready to
move on it.
So that’s lesson #1 to learn from our bright spot (the transcontinental railroad).!

9. These guys are the money for the transcontinental railroad.
The big four on the left were the ones behind the central pacific. We’ve got Leland
Stanford ... grocer and incidentally Governor of California. Next to him on the top
is Charles Crocker ... dry goods (he’s the guy who built the central pacific ... they
formed a subsidiary called charles crocker and co). Middle bottom Collis P.
Huntington ... a merchant selling miner’s supplies. Mark Hopkins ... wholesale grocer.
On the right here we have representative Oakes Ames and Charles Durant. Charles
Durant instigated the start of the Union Pacific portion and drummed up the
investors ... Oakes Ames was brought in by Lincoln to clean up the mess Durant had
created.
What these guys all had in common was lots of power and money and the desire to
get even more of both. They were sharp businessmen who spotted the potential for
the railroad.

10. Interestingly, Durant ... the guy on the right here and Ames, the guy whose lap he is
sitting on had a big fight about how to best make money off the railroad. Durant was
convinced that the building of the railroad was the best way to make money while
Ames thought the operation of the railroad once built was the true opportunity.
Regardless of which one was right, the important point is this: rich, well-connected
capitalists believed in the opportunity. But none of them would have invested without
the loans and the land grants provided by the government and all of them came very
near to ruin during the project. Without the government assistance it wouldn’t have
happened then.
So what do we learn?!

11. It’s got to make sense financially and interest the savvy capitalists. And for something
as risky as the transcontinental railroad ... it isn’t interesting without the backing of
the government.
All right, that’s lesson 2 dealing with the finances of the effort.
Next up, lesson three.

12. Lesson three is these guys.
What these two guys had in common was the desire to leave a legacy. They were also
huge proponents of the railroad.
So this third lesson is simple.!

13. Everyone wants to leave a legacy. Especially the sorts of folks who end up president.
So tap into that desire to leave a legacy.
So those are our three lessons from our bright spot ... the transcontinental railroad.

14. Fast forward to today. How do these lessons apply to our efforts to make access to
interplanetary space inexpensive and routine?
I’m going to apply the three lessons from the intercontinental railroad in the form of
a plan. The plan has three parts.
Well let’s start with the key driver: The key driver that unlocks interplanetary space
is space based solar power. Solar power satellites provide political relevance, financial
drivers, and an opportunity to leave a tremendous legacy.
So they cover every one of the key lessons ... but they have an achilles heel. Launch is
too expensive ... getting them up there costs too much ... it ruins the financial picture.
This brings us to the space elevator, it is the critical missing piece that makes
launching these things financially viable.
The third part of the plan is the orbital railway. And it’s a politically opportunistic
intermediate step. Since it’s probably the least familiar of the three items ... we’re
going to consider it in some detail later in the talk.
But first, let’s look at space solar.!

15. Space based Solar includes three space borne components. Mirror ... which large,
thin, and light. There are the photovoltaics that convert the sunlight into electrical
energy. And there is a transmission antenna that beams the energy down to earth at
a frequency that passes straight through the atmosphere. On the ground there is a
rectifier antenna that receives the energy. Because of the wavelengths chosen, these
things are big. 250 meters and larger.
That’s the gist of space based solar. Let’s look at it from the perspective of the
lessons we gleaned from the transcontinental railroad.!

16. How do our lessons apply?!
The first of these lessons is be politically relevant and politically opportunistic.
So what are the issues that are driving the most passion today?!
Everyone cares about jobs ... creates a new industry in the United states ...
someone has to build all those solar power satellites and staff the
infrastructure!
Everyone cares about energy independence ... the liberals for environmental
reasons, the conservatives for national security reasons!
• Can reduce greenhouse emissions ... could help us reach our climate goals
• Less dependent on foreign oil ... the arab states have less effect on our economies
Conservatives care about shrinking government and privatization ... let the
market work!

17. Lesson two. The financials have got to work and be attractive to capital markets.
Right now the world uses on the order of 17,000 TWh of electricity. If you sell that
electricity at industrial rates ... these are the rates that large factories and like get ...
residential rates are much higher. If we sell that much electricity at the lowest price
point ... that comes out to 1.0 trillion.
So far so good.

18. So what would take to launch enough solar power satellites to be doing $5 billion/
year? Well, the critical factor here is mass. The number that drives the mass is called
the Specific Power and it relates mass to the power that the system can produce.
State of the art as of 2009 is .5 kg/KW. These are research results from Applied
Physics Letters, not industrial results ... so let’s be conservative by a factor of 8 and
estimate that a realistic Specific Power for space based solar satellite systems is 4kg/
KW. At 4kg/KW we need 38 thousand metric tons ... that’s 38 million kg. To put that
into perspective ... if the space shuttle were still in use, we’d need 10,000 shuttles
launches to GTO to get our $5 billion/year or 2% of the global market share. At
current bulk costs ... note, this is not the shuttle, this is significantly cheaper ... at
current bulk costs it only costs us $762 billion to get a return of $5billion/year ...
This is a problem. Space based solar doesn’t work unless ... bulk launch is much
cheaper and has much higher volumes than we have today.
So ... what’s the missing piece? Many of the folks at this conference are optimistic that
a space elevator is the answer to our bulk launching needs.

19. Ultrathin film, high specific power InP
solar cells on flexible plastic substrates
Shiu, Kuen-Ting Zimmerman, Jeramy Wang, Hongyu Forrest, Stephen R.
Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
08544, USA
This paper appears in: Applied Physics Letters
Issue Date: Nov 2009
Volume: 95 Issue: 22
On page(s): 223503 - 223503-3
ISSN: 0003-6951
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1063/1.3268805
Date of Current Version: 08 December 2009

20. A space elevator would be perfect to launch them from.
Basically, once the space elevator is in place, the materials ride the elevator cars up to
Geosynchronous distance from the earth and just let go of the cable and drift into
location. Simple!
There is one hitch ... we need a fundamental basic material science breakthrough that
will allow us to build much stronger tethers ... and you can’t schedule fundamental
breakthroughs. The breakthrough could come next year ... or it could come in 50
years.
So once we’ve got that breakthrough ... the space elevator is by far the popular choice
for bulk launching of material.
So what do we do right now? Clearly we work on basic material science for the
space elevator and have tether contests like we’ve had this weekend. And ... I’d like to
sketch out another interim opportunity ... for the political and business folks to work
on while we wait for the scientists and engineers.
The solar satellites are ready now, and the space elevator is ready sometime ... but
not quite yet. So what does political opportunism suggest?!

21. 150 is a nice round number ... yes 2012-2019 is a window during which we can tap
into the sesquicentennial of the transcontinental railroad.
So our opportunity is to "Use a train to launch the solar power satellites.”
I’m calling the train that we can launch solar power satellites from the “orbital
railway”. Technical types would call the orbital railway a mass driver, but it's not
technical types that need the convincing. This decision of what to call it is important.
In Switch, the Heath brothers advise us to "shrink the change". For most people,
building a mass driver sounds like science fiction, it's a big change. On the other hand,
building a really fast train sounds like more of what we're already doing, it's a small
change. So let's call it an orbital railway instead of a mass driver.
Fortunately, one of the best contemporary designs of an "Orbital Railway" is in fact a
train. It's proponents call it the "StarTram". The StarTram isn't my idea, it was
developed by James Powell and George Maise. Since the StarTram concept is
probably the piece of this whole puzzle that is least familiar to this audience I'm going
to present a quick survey of it. If you would like more details, visit startram.com and
download one of their papers.

22. The StarTram story goes like this:
Start with a superconducting magnetic levitation train almost exactly like this one in
Japan. Put it into a long tunnel and suck all the air out of the tunnel so that we don't
have to deal with air resistance. Accelerate the train at 30 gees for 30 seconds (30
for 30). At the end of those 30 seconds the train will have achieved orbital velocity ...
that's right, it's going more than 8km/sec.
Now just let the train out of the tunnel and it will fly off the surface of the earth into
space. One final detail, since it's current orbit intersects the earth's surface, fire a
small rocket and circularize its orbit.
Presto, we've launched our train into low earth orbit (LEO) and we can now at our
leisure deploy our solar power satellite.
Probably for most of you here, you'd like a few more practical details including how
mature the technology is and how much this thing costs.

23. Well the first thing we need is the tunnel.!
We need two 110km acceleration tunnels and 60 power storage tunnels (more
on those later). So the total tunnel length is 260km. The tunnels are all 3m in
diameter.!
This is existing technology whose use is almost routine.!

24. What's the next thing we need?!
Since drag goes up with the square of the velocity, and we're planning to go
really really fast ... we've got to get rid of the air from the tunnels. No air, no
drag.!
The vacuum and monitoring equipment cost $1 billion.!
The one interesting element of keeping the tube evacuated is the opening
from the tube into the atmosphere. How do we keep all the air in the
atmosphere from rushing back into our tunnel?!
The opening of the evacuated tube uses 1960s magnetohydrodynamics
technology to pump ionized air out of the opening. The outgoing air keeps the
outside air from rushing in and destroying the vacuum.!

25. A fully loaded cargo craft weighing 40 metric tons moving at 8km/sec has a
kinetic energy of 1280 gigajoules. This is equivalent to 1 hr of output from a
360 MW power plant.!
Storing and delivering the energy in less than 30 seconds is the big challenge.
The peak power output required to accelerate the craft is 94 gigawatts.!
We need a power plant to charge up the Superconducting Magnetic Energy
Storage (SMES) loops (of which there are 60). Almost 60 kilometers of our
tunnels are used to hold the SMES loops. !
$1 billion for the plant!
$1 billion for the superconducting material!
$1 billion more to build and install the loops and the cryopipes!
300 million for the refrigeration systems!
The plant is 1/3 of the $2.8 billion, the superconductor materials are another
1/3, and the actual manufacture and installation of the superconductor and the
cryopipe used to keep it cool is another 1/3.!

26. This is the staggering item. Converting the DC current in the SMES loops into
the AC wave that the craft surfs in the big Linear Motor. The frequency of the
wave goes from DC up to 1 kHz ... and it takes a lot of power conditioning
hardware to do it.!
This is big engineering, but it's routine big engineering using the same
technology the power industry uses to convert from high voltage DC
transmission lines to ordinary power grid AC. !

27. So what do we get for our $20 billion? A railway line that can launch 35 metric
tons of cargo into low earth orbit for less than $1 million. Compare that to the
space shuttle that can launch 24.4 metric tons into low earth orbit for $450
million. And if we amortize the $20 billion over 10 years of 10 launches per
day the total cost per kilogram to ride the StarTram into orbit is just $43.!
This doesnʼt launch people. The versions that do are just as far out as the
space elevator. Besides, for comfortable metaphors that “shrink the
change” ... even a train doesnʼt beat an elevator!!

28. Master plan:!
Create the corporation.!
Negotiate contracts with the business folks who are interested in solar power
satellites. Folks like Solaren …!
Write the plan, including sample legislation.!
Recruit someone who is good at overseeing large infrastructure projects.
Their projects come in under budget and ahead of time. Get a conditional
agreement that they will join the project.!
Take the skeleton team and plan to investors and get seed funding.!
Create a petition and tap scientists, engineers, and others who are both
trusted and enthusiastic.!
Create a packet with the plan, the sample legislation, and the signatures on
the petition. Send the packet to every congressman and to the whitehouse.
Find sponsors who are looking to leave a legacy.!
Contact me at brandon@orbitalrailway.com if youʼd like to help!!