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From Advice To Action On Space Nuclear Reactors
Fission Surface Power
A Lockheed Martin concept for a nuclear reactor on the Moon, a concept that has gained new life with an agency directive issued weeks after a recent report recommending rapid development of such systems. (credit: Lockheed Martin)
From advice to action on space nuclear power
by Jeff Foust
Monday, September 22, 2025
NASA gets no shortage of advice. These range from formal recommendations from advisory committees chartered by the agency to outside assessments tossed over the transom with little expectation of an acknowledgement, let alone a response.
But there are exceptions. This summer, a report commissioned by the Idaho National Lab (INL) recommended NASA take a new approach to developing space nuclear power systems. The US had not flown a space nuclear reactor in 60 years despite billions invested in various projects. The report offered two scenarios for developing nuclear power systems with the goal of an in-space demonstration by 2030 (see “Making a new case for space nuclear power”, The Space Review, July 21, 2025).
“It's almost like they read their report and decided to implement it,” said GIlbert.
That report was either extraordinarily influential or extraordinarily lucky in its timing. In late July, NASA’s acting administrator, Sean Duffy, signed a policy directive putting into motion a new space nuclear power program at the agency, calling for the development a 100-kilowatt nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030.
The new directive appeared to mirror many of the recommendations of that report, including not just the schedule but the use of public-private partnerships and the power level of the systems. The directive was more specific in some areas, setting an upper limit on the mass of the reactor at 15 tons and requiring the use of a power conversion technology called a closed Brayton cycle.
“It was very clearly informed by Bhavya Lal’s and Roger Myers’s report,” said Alex Gilbert, vice president of regulation at Zeno Power, a company developing commercial radioisotope power systems, referring to the authors of the report. “It's almost like they read their report and decided to implement it.”
Exactly what role the report played in the directive remains unclear, but Duffy has, since signing it, emphasized the importance of a fission surface power system for NASA’s Artemis program.
“We are in a race with China to the Moon, and to have a base on the moon we need energy,” he said at an event at the Department of Transportation in early August. “We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars studying if can we do it. We are now going to move beyond studying and we’ve given direction to start deploying our technology to actually make this a reality.”
Industry seems willing to give it a shot. “I think that at this point we can say it's technically achievable,” Gilbert said, citing progress made on past projects, like NASA’s Kilopower program to develop a smaller nuclear reactor on the Moon.
It is not without its challenges. Gilbert said there are questions on issues like the availability of high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU), the preferred fuel for a space nuclear reactor, although he was optimistic efforts by the Department of Energy would resolve that by the end of the decade.
Recent developments, like proposals by China and Russia for a nuclear reactor on the Moon, may be “driving some sense of urgency and desire to prove the American capabilities in this area,” said Timmons.
“I think we're at a point now where we've made a lot of advancements in material development, manufacturing maturity, understanding these higher temperature materials,” said Kerry Timmons, who leads strategy and business development at Lockheed Martin for its space nuclear programs. That included the company’s work on DRACO, a joint NASA-DARPA program to demonstrate nuclear thermal propulsion that ended earlier this year after DARPA withdrew.
The technical challenges of a nuclear reactor in space are potentially outweighed by those of policy and funding. She noted that such effort sin the past stretched out for years, making them vulnerable to shifting priorities, an issue raised in the INL report. Recent developments, like proposals by China and Russia for a nuclear reactor on the Moon, may be “driving some sense of urgency and desire to prove the American capabilities in this area.”
A rapid nuclear reactor development effort faces other obstacles. “I don't know that we have all of the people we need, but I think this is the time to start,” Timmons said, noting that Lockheed Martin has partnered with other companies with greater expertise in nuclear power systems to support past projects.
Gilbert said that the new effort should be able to leverage other advances in nuclear power technology, like work on small modular reactors for terrestrial applications. “Until about five years ago, the United States did not have a competitive nuclear industry,” he said. “We did not have a lot of innovation going on. That has changed decisively.”
The new project will also stress-test regulatory structures put in place several years ago intended to streamline the approval of space nuclear power systems. “From my perspective, it's understood, but not fully exercised yet,” Timmons said. “There is a process, and we just would look at that up front to make sure that it met the same timelines as the development of the spacecraft.”
In late August, NASA released a draft solicitation, formally known as an Announcement for Partnership Proposals (AFPP), outlining its plans for the Fission Surface Power program. It retained the key elements in the directive, including the goal of a 100-kilowatt reactor on the Moon by 2030.
NASA plans to use an AFPP rather than a traditional request for proposals since NASA plans to award funded Space Act Agreements for the program. Borrowing from other NASA services programs, like commercial crew and cargo, NASA would not purchase the nuclear reactor from a company. Instead, it would buy power from the reactor. That company would also be free to sell power to other customers.
“The market should include or leverage customers other than NASA,” NASA’s draft solicitation states.
Companies, besides explaining their technical approach to developing the reactor, would also have provide NASA with a business case. The agency requests in the draft AFPP that companies provide a financing plan explaining how “cash from operations, financing, and NASA covers the expenses of the total end-to-end deployment” of the system.
The agency also requested a “Commercial Lunar Power Business Plan” explaining how bidders would make money with the reactor beyond simply serving NASA. “The market should include or leverage customers other than NASA,” the document states.
NASA’s preference for fully commercial approaches extends to getting the reactor to the Moon. The draft AFPP said that companies could propose that NASA handle the delivery of the reactor on the lunar surface, but that those who instead propose “a wholly commercial approach to the end-to-end deployment, all other things being equal, will receive higher rated proposal evaluations than otherwise.”
The agency may have pushed too hard on that last point. Last Friday, NASA issued a request for information about a potential change to the FSP plan. “The cost of launch and lander services is likely to be substantial,” the agency stated, citing feedback on the draft AFPP and at an industry day earlier in the month. “A significant cost share between NASA and participants for those services will be difficult, if not impossible, to justify the business case for cost share investment.”
NASA said it is considering instead handling the delivery of the reactor to the Moon, using cargo versions of Human Landing System (HLS) reactors from Blue Origin and SpaceX. “Will removing the financial burden of acquiring launch and landing services be beneficial to your business case?” NASA asked industry.
The agency said it also wants feedback on any additional milestones it should include in the Space Act Agreement. Those milestones would cover “operational evaluation and service life verification” of the reactor after deployment, which NASA said could build confidence in the performance of the system to help companies win business from other customers.
NASA is moving quickly on this: the request for information asked for responses by this Wednesday, just five calendar days later. NASA stated in the draft AFPP that it expected to release the final version no later than October 3, with a goal of making awards—at least one, and potentially more—by next March.
A question mark, though, is funding. The draft AFPP did not include any estimated funding levels for the program, but noted those would be included in the final version. The two scenarios in the INL report have estimated costs $1 billion and $3 billion.
NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal would gut spending on nuclear power systems, particularly nuclear propulsion. “These efforts are costly investments, would take many years to develop, and have not been identified as the propulsion mode for deep space missions,” the agency’s detailed budget document stated.
The NASA directive suggests that the program could tap into a new “Mars Technology” budget line that the agency included in its fiscal year 2026 budget proposal requesting $350 million for it in 2026 and $500 million annually in 2027 and beyond. That proposal had provided, at the time of its release in May, no details on how the funding would be used.
Lal, one of the authors of the INL report, said in a webinar last month that NASA’s approach was risky, but benefits from the perceived “strategic urgency” for space nuclear power. “This urgency is what finally make space nuclear real because it turns what used to be a discretionary technology into a strategic imperative,” she said.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.
Hexagon Satellite Launch
Big Bird
Cover of Aviation Week & Space Technology for October 9, 1972 with a photo of a HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite launch, which the magazine referred to as the "Big Bird." Reporter Phillip Klass was apparently the first to use this term in print, although it probably originated with somebody working at Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1971. (credit: Aviation Week)
Shhhhhh!!! Pay no attention to the Big Bird…
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, September 22, 2025
In the first half of 1971, it was becoming clear that something big was about to happen at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Workers had prepared a launch pad for a new, larger rocket, the Titan IIID. This was to be the biggest, most powerful rocket ever launched from the West Coast, equipped with two solid rocket motors on its side. Previously, the Air Force had planned to launch the Titan IIIM with the Manned Orbiting Laboratory from Vandenberg. It would have been more powerful than the IIID, but it was canceled in 1969. There was no way to keep the large rocket secret—when it rose up over the low mountains, people in nearby Lompoc would see it, people to the south in Santa Barbara would see it, and people in much more populated Los Angeles would also probably see it.
In mid-June 1971, the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, John McLucas, wrote to the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, to inform him of what was about to happen:
“Previous experience with new space launchings indicates that we may expect some media coverage of the initial HEXAGON launch. This will be the first time that a booster as large as the Titan IIID has been launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base and will indicate a major new program. In this period of limited space activity any new program commands national interest.”
There was no way to keep the large rocket secret—when it rose up over the low mountains, people in nearby Lompoc would see it, people to the south in Santa Barbara would see it, and people in much more populated Los Angeles would also probably see it.
McLucas stated that the only official comment regarding the launch would be a post-launch announcement that a satellite employing the Titan IIID was launched from Vandenberg. No other questions would be answered and all the press would get was, “The payload is classified and no additional information can be provided.”
Queries related to the booster and safety aspects of the launch could be answered depending upon booster classification, but no dates or frequency of future launches would be discussed. The government and contractor personnel had been briefed about their own security obligations and the need for security.
McLucas ended his letter with “As you know there has been considerable speculation in trade journals that a ‘new super spy satellite’ will be launched in the near future. We have taken all possible precautions to insure that we in no way contribute to the existing press data base. While we cannot positively predict the extent or degree of news coverage, it is anticipated that it will be limited to the time frame immediately following the launch.”
Big Bird
Big Bird
Artist illustrations of the "Big Bird" satellite that appeared in David Hobbs' 1986 book Space Warfare from Salamander Books Ltd. Hobbs' book was a good general overview of military space programs at the time, although it was limited by continued classification. The HEXAGON satellite looked nothing like the "Big Bird" in the illustrations, although HEXAGON did have four film reentry vehicles. (credit: Salamander Books Ltd.)
Super spy satellite to HEXAGON to Big Bird
Concealed under the nose fairing of the Titan IIID was the first HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite, the most complex mechanical device ever flown in space. HEXAGON had two powerful cameras that rotated, sweeping the ground below, producing images that were long and thin and could cover vast amounts of territory at resolution good enough to determine tanks from trucks and transport planes from tankers. It was a marvel of modern engineering, and totally top secret.
Most of the NRO’s launches were from Vandenberg, which was a bit more isolated than Cape Kennedy. In another cable about a Cape launch, an NRO official noted that “we do have an enviable record for successfully launching from Kennedy under the worst of circumstances and getting away with it”—both CANYON and RHYOLITE signals intelligence satellites had been launched there with no apparent security leaks. But there were a lot more secret satellites launching from California.
Thereafter, when other Titan IIIDs launched from California, people referred to them as “Big Bird satellites,” a term that appeared in the trade press and stuck into the 1980s.
The day after McLucas wrote his letter, on June 15, 1971, the Titan IIID launched from Vandenberg. McLucas was right and the launch did get noticed, and some speculated that it was a reconnaissance satellite. However, there is no indication from contemporary sources that factual information about the payload—the large HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite—was leaked. Aviation Week & Space Technology reporter Phillip Klass wrote an article in August 1971 titled “Recon Satellite Assumes Dual Role,” claiming that the satellite had both film and readout capability, which was not correct. He apparently assumed the readout capability because he had recently learned of the development of a large diameter space-qualified satellite dish antenna. However, it was not associated with the HEXAGON satellite.
The secrecy surrounding the payload did have an interesting side effect, however. Lots of people at Vandenberg knew that the Titan IIID was being prepared for launch, but a much smaller number had knowledge of the payload. People at the base started to refer to the upcoming launch as “the big bird,” because it was the largest spacecraft to be launched from Vandenberg. This moniker stuck. Klass reported it in 1971. In September 1972, after the third launch, Phllip Klass wrote an article titled “Big Bird Nears Full Operational Status.” The rocket launch appeared on the cover of the magazine along with the words “Big Bird.”
Thereafter, when other Titan IIIDs launched from California, people referred to them as “Big Bird satellites,” a term that appeared in the trade press and stuck into the 1980s. Bill Yenne, in his 1985 book The Encyclopedia of American Satellites referred to the Big Bird. Curtis Peebles in his 1987 book Guardians had a chapter titled “Big Bird and KH-11”—the KH-11 was another satellite that used a similar rocket. David Hobbes’ nifty 1986 book Space Warfare had two artist illustrations of it, along with another artist depiction of the KH-11. None of them were accurate, although the Big Bird illustration included four film reentry vehicles, which was correct. The program was finally declassified in 2011, but even now new details about the program continue to be declassified by the government.
Despite the name appearing in many publications throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the HEXAGON was never officially referred to as the Big Bird, and many of those who worked on it avoided using the classified name entirely. Usually, they simply referred to it as “the item.” But there was no character named “The Item” on Sesame Street.
Dwayne Day can be reached at zirconic1@cox.net.
Astroelectricity: America's Energy Security Imperative.
SBSP
Space-based solar power, or “astroelectricity,” may be the only renewable power option to meet American energy needs in the coming decades. (credit: ESA/Andreas Treuer)
Astroelectricity: America’s national energy security imperative
by Mike Snead
Monday, September 22, 2025
The Conversation
In July, President Donald J. Trump announced a trade deal with the European Union (EU) in which they will purchase $750 billion of US energy resources over the next three years. At a price of $60 per barrel of oil, this would buy about 12.5 billion barrels of American oil. In terms of energy content, this would roughly equal one year’s worth of consumption of oil and natural gas used in America. With the presumption that this purchase will predominantly be oil and natural gas, it would substantially increase the demand on US oil and natural gas production—and this is without adding any other exports such as to Japan, South Korea, and China.
If oil and natural gas were renewable energy sources, this would be a tremendously beneficial trade deal. Recognizing that the geopolitics surrounding this trade deal is very complicated, it is important to recognize that exporting American oil and natural gas accelerates the depletion of affordable supplies of these non-sustainable fuels—the very fuels of which just a generation earlier, America was dangerously short of.
Periodically, the US Geological Survey publishes estimates of the amount of “technically recoverable” coal, oil, and natural gas remaining in the US. Technically recoverable means that portion of the remaining identified in situ resources that “can be produced using currently available technology and industry practices.” Importantly, market price is not a consideration in determining how much technically recoverable resources remain.
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Figure 1: US technically recoverable crude oil and dry natural gas resources as of 1 January 2020. The energy unit “BOE” is an abbreviation for barrels of oil equivalent. References: US Energy Information Administration National Energy Modeling System’s Oil and Gas Supply Module, Tables 1 and 2, dated March 2022.
Oil and natural gas now supply about 70% of the total energy used in America. Based on the pre-COVID-19 use of these two fuels—and prior to these recent trade deals—at the 2019 consumption rate of 12 billion BOE, the technically recoverable oil and natural gas resources would last about 75 years. Should US oil and natural gas exports be substantial and ongoing, then this lifetime estimate would obviously be shorter—perhaps, much shorter! Within the lifetime of today’s young children, these vital energy resources will likely be exhausted, leaving America dangerously energy insecure.
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Figure 2: The late-1973 oil embargo caused shortages of gasoline. To moderate demand, rationing was implemented in the form of odd and even number days, based on the number in the license plate, when gasoline could be bought.
America has been down that dangerous road before. In 1970, after 111 years of generally steadily growing production, conventional US oil production peaked, making America oil insecure. Within three years, America’s first oil supply crisis hit when some Middle East nations attempted to squeeze the US president to align with their foreign policy priorities. That crisis dramatically increased oil prices and caused a substantial US recession.
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Figure 3: History of US domestic oil production and imports from 1900-2023 with the author’s illustration of the likely decline of conventional oil production through 2100.
Within a decade, as America’s oil insecurity grew to the point that America was importing over half of the oil used, President Jimmy Carter declared protecting American access to foreign oil a national security priority. Within another decade, America was engaged in full-out conventional warfare in the Middle East to protect US access. It took nearly another 30 years for the US to finally be rescued —yes, rescued—from that quagmire by the practicable technological breakthrough of guided drilling and hydraulic fracturing known as “fracking.”
The US Department of Energy (DOE) was formed in 1977 by President Carter. He consolidated several existing federal agencies—many arising out of the Manhattan Project and civil nuclear power—into a department level organization focused on energy conservation and renewable energy sources, with a “side hustle” of managing much of the government’s nuclear weapon and nuclear power activities. (None of which have proven to reduce America’s persistent conventional oil insecurity.) Yet, buried deep in that organization when it was formed was federal research and development financial support for what became the fracking that rescued America three decades later and has now enabled the world to enter a period of energy insecurity dormancy led by the US.
The chart above shows the history of US domestic oil production. Specifically, the chart shows the sustained rise in production of conventional oil wells until the peak in 1970 followed by the decline that is still underway. This bell-shaped production curve is representative of all natural resources in demand. It was seen in the production of both wood fuel and coal in the US. Hence, we know that it will repeat with the production of fracked oil and natural gas.
As everyone should acknowledge, fracking is only a “band-aid” fix to America’s need to be permanently energy secure. Knowing this, it is only common sense that the US Department of Energy should have (by now) established a national energy security strategy to undertake America’s orderly transition to sustainable energy before, once again, America becomes energy insecure. However, this has not happened, even as the necessity for America undertaking this transition has been readily apparent for decades.
Responding to this need, I began to quantitatively model America’s energy use and evaluate its sustainable energy transition needs in 2008. Over the years, I have refined my analysis. In 2022, I summarized my findings in an article here in 2022. (See “Evaluating America’s green energy options including astroelectricity (part 1)”, The Space Review, November 14, 2022.) Recently, I updated and published my analytical assessment on ResearchGate. In this article, I summarize my updated results to reemphasize the point that pursuing the development of space solar power (SSP)-supplied astroelectricity should now be America’s (and DOE’s) national energy security imperative.
What will it take for America to “go clean”
The failed Green New Deal efforts make very clear that successfully transitioning to sustainable energy is not a trivial undertaking. Difficulties arise in two areas. First, the type of sustainable energy must be able to be scaled up sufficiently to make a difference. Second, the implementation of the solution must provide an orderly transition path while being practicable to be built. To better understand these two considerations, I will begin by explaining how much total energy America now needs and then show the equivalent amount of entirely sustainable energy needed for America to “go clean.”
America’s current energy use
The starting point is to refresh our understanding of pertinent energy units. For the use of primary combustible fuels in America —coal, oil, and natural gas—the primary energy unit is the British Thermal Unit (BTU). This unit originated two centuries ago to aid in designing steam engines. A BTU is the amount of thermal energy (heat) needed to raise one pound (16 fluid ounces) of water by one degree Fahrenheit. For perspective, when heating 16 fluid ounces of tap water to make tea, around 130 BTU of heat must be used. A BOE is defined as having 5.8 million BTUs of thermal energy.
For the following discussions, I use America’s energy use in 2019 as the baseline. That was the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic when the impact of the pandemic and later national energy policy changes suppressed energy use. Thus, in terms of per-person energy use, the 2019 value indicates what is needed during generally prosperous economic times.
Reflecting the fact that fossil carbon fuels still predominate US energy use, America’s national energy use is often reported using a unit called the “Quad”. This is an abbreviation for 1 quadrillion BTUs or 1 × 1015 BTUs. The chart below shows America’s sources of energy and how energy use “flows” through the US economy. In 2019, according to this chart, America used 100.2 Quads of energy from all sources. Coal, petroleum (oil), and natural gas provided about 80 Quads or 80% of the primary energy, with just oil and natural gas providing nearly 70 Quads. Further, electricity use consumed about 37 Quads or 37% of the primary energy.
figure
Figure 4: Diagram of how the sources of energy used in the US, shown on the left, “flow” through America’s economy to yield the goods and services consumed. Essentially, this entire energy flow needs to be made sustainable.
One Quad equals 172.4 million BOE. Thus, from the above chart, the 100.2 Quads used in 2019 equaled 17.3 billion BOE, with the petroleum and natural gas consumption supplying nearly 12 billion BOE—the value shown in the earlier Figure 1 table.
An oil supertanker will carry two to three million barrels. Thus, in 2019, Americans used the equivalent of around 7,000 supertankers of oil—nearly one supertanker worth of energy every hour of every day. Of these, four of every five supertankers would be non-sustainable energy that must be replaced by new sustainable energy sources. Supplying 10–12 million BOE of new sustainable energy every day illustrates the challenge that America must solve to undertake an orderly transition to practicable sustainable energy. Clearly, this will require a well-developed “engineering” solution, not an impractical political solution as has been tried for the past several decades.
America’s possible sustainable energy source options
figure
Figure 5: The four possible sustainable energy sources that are sufficiently scalable to substantially replace fossil carbon fuels.
While there are many possible sources of terrestrial sustainable energy for America to use, biomass, hydroelectricity, geothermal electricity, and wave- and tidal-generated electrical power cannot be scaled up to become a primary source of sustainable energy to replace fossil carbon fuels. This leaves only wind power, ground solar power, and nuclear fission power as the remaining terrestrial options for America to possibly use to “go clean.” For this assessment, I added the option of SSP-supplied astroelectricity. Wind power and ground solar power are, obviously, intermittent power sources while nuclear fission power and astroelectricity are baseload power sources, meaning that they are assumed in this assessment to be able to operate continuously.
American current per person use of energy
The starting point to determine how much sustainable electrical energy America will need to go clean is to start with America’s current average energy use per person—specifically per resident. Using updated consumption and population values for 2019, the following chart shows how much energy per person was used on average and how this was consumed in the form of electrical energy and fuels.
In 2019, 12,545.8 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electrical energy and 31.1 BOE of fuels were used per person on average. In total, the equivalent of 50.584 BOE of energy was used per person. (By using the BOE unit, this provides an appreciation of how much energy is actually being used per person in America today.)
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Figure 6: US average total energy used per person in 2019 showing the breakdown into electrical energy and fuels use.
Introducing two new energy units
In America’s new sustainable energy infrastructure, electrical energy will be the primary type of sustainable energy used. The two electrical energy units used that will replace the BTU and BOE are the kilowatt-hour (kWh) and the gigawatt-hour (GWh). However, with kWh and GWh not having any real world physical meaning—as the BTU and BOE do—two new energy units are needed to help appreciate how much sustainable electrical energy will be needed per person and nationally.
From the above chart, 12,545.8 kWh of electrical energy was used on average per person in 2019. This was the electricity used directly (e.g., air conditioning) as well as that used to produce the goods and services consumed. There are 8,760 hours in a year. Thus, 12,545.8 kWh ÷ 8,760 hours = 1.43 kW of electrical power being used continuously throughout the year, on average. We can conveniently express 12,545.8 kWh as 1.43 kW-continuous or 1.43 kWc.
A typical microwave oven uses 1 kW of power when operating. Thus, in 2019, each American consumed enough electricity to operate 1.43 microwave ovens continuously. We can think of the per person electrical energy use in terms of microwave ovens just as we thought of the total energy use in terms of the barrel of oil equivalent.
In 2019, the US used 4,130,574 GWh of total electrical energy, or 472 GW continuous, GWc. The Hoover Dam can generate 2 GW when operating at full power. If the Hoover Dam could operate continuously, it would be rated at 2 GWc. We can use this to express the 472 GWc generated in 2019 as being equivalent to 236 Hoover Dams operating continuously.
When mentioning that the US was generating the equivalent of 472 GW of continuous power, most people would have little appreciation of how much energy that was. However, if this is stated as the US was producing the equivalent of 236 Hoover Dams operating continuously, this can readily be understood. Just as I will use the number of microwave ovens operating continuously to illustrate how much clean energy will be needed per person, the number of Hoover Dams operating continuously will be used to illustrate how much total sustainable energy for America will need to go clean.
figure
Figure 7: A microwave oven and the Hoover Dam are used to provide a perspective on how much sustainable energy America will need per person and nationally to “go clean”.
(Note: Before continuing, take a guess at how many Hoover Dams operating continuously would be needed for America to fully transition to sustainable energy.)
Modeling America’s needed new sustainable energy infrastructure
figure
Figure 8: Diagram of the model used to estimate the total primary sustainable electrical power (kWc) needed to go clean.
The sustainable energy transition model I used is shown in the diagram above. The complexity of energy use in America—as shown earlier in the energy flow diagram—and the need for carbon-based fuels and industrial feedstocks makes an all-electric or an electric-hydrogen energy infrastructure impracticable to use. Therefore, in this model, both clean hydrogen and CO₂-neutral (clean) carbon fuels are supplied to replace the use of fossil carbon fuels. By producing clean carbon fuels and industrial feedstocks, the transition from the use of fossil carbon fuels to an entirely sustainable energy infrastructure is seamless, making it generally transparent to the end-users. This is what I call an “orderly” transition.
(Note: All carbon used to produce synthetic carbon fuels and industrial feedstocks comes from the CO₂ either extracted from the atmosphere or captured in the exhaust of industrial plants, power plants, and waste disposal incinerators. In this manner, no net CO₂ is added to the atmosphere. This is necessary for undertaking an orderly transition to sustainable energy.)
I used this model to estimate the total primary sustainable electrical power (kWc) needed per person to supply 12,545.8 kWh of sustainable dispatched electrical power and 31.1 BOE of sustainable fuels. This model was run separately using only intermittent primary power and then using only baseload power.
(Note: For this top-level estimate of sustainable energy needs, only synthetic methane is assumed to be produced to supply the needed replacement fuels.)
America’s total kWc and GWc needed to have already “gone clean” in 2019
figure
Figure 9: Estimated total kWh of primary electrical energy and kWc of primary electrical power needed per person on average in the US in 2019 to have already transitioned to sustainable energy.
Recall that in 2019, the average end-user, directly and indirectly, used 1.43 kWc of utility-dispatched electrical power. This was generated using 38.5% of the total energy used. If all energy consumed had been used to generate electricity, then the total would have been 3.71 kWc.
From the above table, to transition fully to sustainable energy using the baseload-methane case, 16.47 kWc would be needed per person. Thus, for the baseload-methane case, America’s new sustainable energy infrastructure needs to supply roughly 4.4 times more energy per person. When using intermittent sources, this increases to 21.14 kWc, 5.7 times more energy. Using the microwave oven metaphor, the energy need increases from about 4 microwave ovens to about 16 for the baseload case and about 21 for the intermittent case. Hopefully, this is making clear the magnitude of the challenge of America successfully transitioning from fossil carbon fuels.
figure
Figure 10: Comparison of the total GWc of primary electrical power needed in 2019 along with the equivalent number of Hoover Dams operating continuously to supply that power.
The total GWc needed for America to have already transitioned to sustainable energy can easily be calculated by multiplying the above table’s kWc values by the US 2019 resident population. These results, along with the equivalent number of Hoover Dams operating continuously, are shown in the table above. When using baseload primary power, the equivalent of 2,476 two-gigawatt Hoover Dams operating continuously, supplying 5,424 GWc of electrical power, would have been needed. For the intermittent case, this increases to the equivalent of 3,481 Hoover Dams supplying 6,962 GWc.
Was your guess anywhere near this number?
(Note: The 2019 resident population used was about 329 million. Each additional million adds the need for 7.5 additional Hoover Dams operating continuously.)
Assessing America’s four possible scalable sustainable power options
As noted earlier, America has only four possible sufficiently scalable options to enable its transition to sustainable energy. The intermittent options are wind power and ground solar power, while the baseload options are nuclear fission power and space solar power-supplied astroelectricity. In my assessment, I examined each to determine if it was a practicable solution at the scale needed to fully meet the GWc need.
Wind power
figure
Figure 11: Possible wind farm locations in the contiguous US for wind turbines with a hub height of 110 meters.
The above map was created by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) as part of their assessment of the wind power potential in the contiguous US. The blue areas are where commercial wind farms could be built with the darker blue areas where the annual wind energy potential is greatest.
The NREL study found that about five million square kilometers (1.9 million square miles) of the contiguous United States could be used to build commercial wind farms. Building out this extent of wind power would require installing about 7.7 million wind turbines on nearly two-thirds of the contiguous US.
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Figure 12: This chart summarizes the author’s analysis of the NREL assessment of the wind power potential in the contiguous US. It shows how the total GWc available increases as more of the land area is used for wind farms, beginning with those areas with the greatest wind power potential.
From my assessment’s results—shown in the chart above—such extensive use of commercial wind farms could yield 4,756 GWc of intermittent primary electrical power in an average wind power year. Recall that 6,692 GWc of such intermittent primary power would have been needed in 2019. Thus, in an average year, the available wind power is only 68% of what the US would have needed to transition fully to sustainable energy. In a low wind power year, this drops to 3,805 GWc, or only 55% of what would have been needed. Obviously, wind power alone is not a practicable solution since the American public is unlikely to accept covering America with a forest of wind turbines, especially without yielding a full sustainable energy solution.
Ground solar power
While obviously there is sufficient land in the contiguous United States on which to build ground solar farms, how much land would be needed? By my estimate, to supply 6,692 GWc of intermittent primary power, about 14% of the contiguous United States would need to be converted into ground solar farms. In total, the required land area, within the perimeter fence, would be 1.1 million square kilometers (420,000 square miles). As shown in the map below, this is equivalent to a square of land 1,045 kilometers on each side.
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Figure 13: Representative total area of ground solar farms needed to meet the US 2019 GWc need overlaid on a terrain map of the contiguous US.
As the map above shows, a large percentage of the contiguous United States is unsuitable for ground solar farms due to terrain, especially in the sunny Southwest. Also, suitable locations for commercial solar farms require generally flat land and a location that has generally sunny skies—essentially the same requirements needed for large-scale agriculture. Thus, while needing only 14% of the total contiguous land area may not at first appear unreasonable, ground solar farms would need to be built across much of America’s breadbasket states. This is unlikely to be politically acceptable as well as being unacceptable from a food-security perspective.
Hence, as with wind power, ground solar power alone is NOT a practicable means of enabling America to transition to sustainable energy. In fact, a combination of wind power and ground solar power is also not a practicable solution as it still requires a coast-to-coast forest of turbines while only cutting the required land area for solar farms in half.
Nuclear fission power
With wind and ground solar power not enabling America to undertake a practicable transition to sustainable energy, the only remaining terrestrial option is nuclear fission power. As noted previously, the baseload-methane case would require 5,424 GWc of primary electrical power. This equates to 5,641 GW of nameplate power with the assumption that each plant would not be generating power for two weeks each year to undertake maintenance, inspection, and refueling. For perspective, the US currently has around 100 GW of nuclear power generation capacity. To fully meet the baseload sustainable energy need using only nuclear fission power, about 56 times more nuclear generation capacity would be needed.
As has been recognized since the 1950s, with natural uranium only having 0.72% of the U-235 fissile fuel needed by the reactors, breeding is needed to undertake a substantial expansion of nuclear fission power. It is estimated that about 1.2 metric tonnes of fissile fuel are needed per GW-year of generation. Thus, to fully meet the US sustainable energy need, 6,509 metric tonnes of either Pu-239 or U-233 would need to be bred each year. For perspective, from 1945 until it ended breeding in 1987, the government’s Hanford plant only produced a total of 67.4 metric tonnes of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons and to power naval reactors.
While nuclear breeding reactors were pursued in the 1960s and early 1970s, by the end of the 1970s, these were abandoned due to worries about nuclear weapon proliferation as both Pu-239 and U-233 can be used to produce nuclear weapons. Further, no enrichment is needed as with U-235. Thus, nuclear breeder reactors could covertly—or defiantly, by a rogue nation—be used to produce fissile materials to make nuclear weapons. Should the United States establish a precedent for using nuclear breeder reactors to transition to sustainable energy, this will most certainly open the door for uncontrollable nuclear weapon proliferation worldwide.
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Figure 14: An already built naval reactor was used to speed up the construction of the Shippingport Atomic Power Plant.
In the 1950s, the US advocated for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The first civilian nuclear power plant was built at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. An unneeded US Navy 60-megawatt (MW) reactor, developed for an aircraft carrier, was installed in 1956 as shown in the photograph above. The plant began to generate electrical power the next year.
This particular reactor bred fuel while producing power. During its 25 years of operation, it first bred Pu-239 and, later, was modified to breed U-233. However, doing this required a special core of weapons-grade U-235 to breed Pu-239 with a similar approach used to breed U-233. This effort spurred interest in the 1960s and early 1970s in developing more advanced breeding power reactors—efforts that were abandoned by the end of the 1970s.
The Shippingport Atomic Power Plant illustrates why there is current interest in building new nuclear fission power plants using smaller “modular” reactors. The intent is to reduce the construction cost and shorten the plant’s construction time by powering it with one or more smaller reactors that can be built on an assembly line and then installed in the plant as was done with the naval reactor. To achieve the US total GWc need, the chart below shows how many of such small modular reactors in the range of 100–500 megawatts would be needed.
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Figure 15: Number of small modular reactors needed to meet the US 2019 GWc need as a function of the reactor nameplate power generation rating.
Naval reactors typically have an operating life of about 30 years. Thus, the small modular reactors will have a finite life perhaps in the range of 30 to 60 years. At the end of their life—when the reactor would likely be highly radioactive—each would need to be decommissioned, removed from the power plant, and transported to where they would be finally (somehow) rendered no longer a radioactive hazard to humanity.
While this sounds straightforward, when the Shippingport reactor was decommissioned and removed in the late 1980s, to render it safe for transport, the reactor pressure vessel and its steel and concrete filled surrounding radiation shield weighed 870 metric tonnes. It required a 320-wheel trailer to transport it the short distance to the Ohio River to be loaded aboard a special oceangoing barge for transport down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and then by sea to Washington state where it was entombed—meaning it is probably still there. This is what may need to be done to remove and replace the modular reactors—perhaps several hundred each year—at the end of their rated life to keep the nuclear power plants operating.
In addition to the nuclear weapon proliferation issues and the likely need for the transport and entombment of highly radioactive decommissioned reactors, many other serious concerns exist. Among these are the threat of natural disaster (such as the tsunamis that destroyed several Japanese nuclear power plants in 2011), a continuously expanding need for nuclear waste disposal (with no current politically acceptable solution), the growing threat of terrorist attacks (perhaps using drone-deployed weapons), and the threat of a space-based electromagnetic pulse attack (potentially rendering the reactors’ safety systems inoperative). As with wind power and ground solar power, nuclear fission power will not enable America to undertake an orderly transition to sustainable energy.
Astroelectricity
As the 1960s came to an end, American oil insecurity was emerging as a major political, economic, and national security issue. One proposed solution—far ahead of its time—was to collect sunlight in Earth orbit, convert this into electrical power, transmit this power via radio waves to special receiving antenna (rectenna) farms on the ground, and supply this power—what I call “astroelectricity”—to the power grid as baseload power. This is called space solar power (SSP). It was invented by Peter Glaser in 1968, perhaps building on the idea of beaming power to planets in a 1941 story by science fiction author Isaac Asimov. Glaser received a US patent for this in 1973.
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Figure 16: Illustration of space solar power from Peter Glaser’s space solar power patent.
As America’s energy insecurity grew in the 1970s—and after breeder reactors were abandoned—space solar power was investigated from 1978 to 1980 by NASA and the recently formed DOE. From these efforts, a baseline five-gigawatt space solar power system was defined. This concept is shown in the following illustration. It involves using Manhattan Island-size space solar power platforms located in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) to collect sunlight, convert this into electrical power, and transmit the power using radio waves to the ground receiving antennas (rectenna farm).
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Figure 17: Illustration of the ground rectenna site that would receive the power transmitted from the space solar power platform. The transmitted power will be converted into “astroelectricity” and fed into the regional power grid just as is done with baseload powerplants today.
I refer to the ground rectenna farm as an astroelectric plant. For the baseline 5-GWc design, the ground area used by the astroelectric plant is shown in the following illustration. For a typical plant located in the contiguous US, the plant’s rectangular area would be 12.6 km 16.6 km = 209 square kilometers (81 square miles). This equates to 42 square kilometers (16 square miles) needed per 1 GWc of baseload power supplied.
(Note: The GEO SSP platforms will enter the Earth’s shadow at local midnight for about an hour each day for about a week before and after the spring and fall equinoxes. This would be at a time of minimal power demand—seasonally as well as daily. With the annual loss of energy being less than 1%, for this top-level assessment, the SSP platforms are considered to be operating continuously.)
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Figure 18: Diagram of the dimensions of a typical astroelectric plant located in the mid-latitudes of the contiguous US.
I assumed that astroelectricity would supply 80% of the primary baseload power America would need. This equates to 4,339 GWc of astroelectricity needed. This would require about 182,000 square kilometers (70,000 square miles) of land in the contiguous United States for the astroelectric plants. This is less than 3% of the contiguous US. For perspective, this is comparable to the total land used for cities in the contiguous US.
For the remaining 20% of the total GWc needed, ground photovoltaic solar farms would be used. Using special rectenna panels collecting both sunlight and the transmitted power, these solar farms would be built as part of the overall astroelectric plants.
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Figure 19: Representative total area of astroelectric plants needed to meet the US 2019 GWc need overlaid on a terrain map of the contiguous US.
The approximate total land area needed for this astroelectric option is shown on the map above. The 180,000 square kilometers needed for the astroelectricity option compares very favorably to the more than one million square kilometers needed for an all-ground solar power solution or with the coast-to-coast forest of wind turbines and a half-million square kilometers of ground solar farms needed for a combined solution. The space solar power option will provide America with the best form of sustainable primary power—baseload—while minimizing the land area needed to meet America’s total sustainable energy need. Also, it is the only one of the four options that provides a practicable solution for undertaking an orderly transition to sustainable energy.
Conclusion
The primary conclusions drawn from the assessment are:
At least for America, only SSP-supplied astroelectricity can provide an orderly transition to sustainable energy at the scale needed to replace fossil carbon fuels.
The magnitude of America’s transition to sustainable energy is immense requiring concerted leadership and effort by the Government to ensure that it is effectively undertaken.
To avoid a return to the geopolitical plague of energy insecurity, America must complete the transition to SSP-supplied astroelectricity before the end of this century while being ready to begin its orderly deployment by the time fracked oil and natural gas production peaks and begin their inevitable decline.
Acknowledging today’s moral obligation that we owe to future generations to ensure that their America will still be free, prosperous, energy secure, and at peace, undertaking SSP must now become America’s national energy security imperative.
James Michael (Mike) Snead is an aerospace Professional Engineer (PE) in the United States, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and a past chairman of the AIAA’s Space Logistics Technical Committee. He is the founder and president of the Spacefaring Institute LLC, which is focused on space solar power-generated astroelectricity and the astrologistics infrastructure necessary to enable the spacefaring industrial revolution that will build space solar power energy systems. Mike Snead has been involved in space development since the mid-1980s when he supported the US Air Force Transatmospheric Vehicle (TAV) studies, the National Aerospace Plane program, and the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) project. In 2007, after retiring from civilian employment with the Air Force, he focused on the need for (and politics associated with) undertaking space solar power. Beginning in the late 1980s, he has published numerous papers and articles on various aspects of manned spaceflight, astrologistics, and America’s and the world’s needed transition to sustainable energy. His technical papers are located at ResearchGate and https://mikesnead.com. His blog is at: https://spacefaringamerica.com. His eBook, Astroelectricity, can be downloaded for free here. He can be contacted through LinkedIn or at spacefaringinstitute@gmail.com.
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For Too Log, Colonial Language Has Dominated Space Exploration
Lunar base
Is a “race” to go to the Moon and beyond the best perspective for space exploration? (credit: ESA/P. Carril)
For too long, colonial language has dominated space exploration. There is a better way.
by Art Cotterell and William Grant
Monday, September 22, 2025
The Conversation
At an internal staff briefing earlier this month, acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy declared the United States has a “manifest destiny to the stars”, linking this to the need to win the “space race.”
An Indigenous-inspired lens can help us envision and build a future with stewardship and shared responsibility, not competition and conquest.
This rhetoric is not new: it directly echoes US President Donald Trump’s inaugural address from earlier this year. The phrasing invokes US nationalism that’s historically been used to justify colonial expansion and empire-building.
Language matters. How we talk about space exploration shapes the futures we imagine and build. As two space governance specialists working together—one non-Indigenous, one Indigenous—we see an urgent need for a different way to view space.
An Indigenous-inspired lens can help us envision and build a future with stewardship and shared responsibility, not competition and conquest.
We’re still talking about the “space race”
That space is a “race” has become a common, and sometimes contested, refrain. The US and China are leading missions to the Moon’s south pole, each looking to land on prime sites where they could establish bases and access scarce resources such as water ice and light, essential for staying on the lunar surface for longer periods of time.
The first arrival could influence space governance and a future lunar economy for private companies. This has prompted talk of an “infrastructure arms race” or “trade war.”
This “race” isn’t only about nations. Interlune, a US-based startup, is “racing to be the first to mine helium on the Moon” for potential uses in everything from quantum computing to nuclear fusion. Helium-3 is a rare non-radioactive isotope on Earth but more common on the lunar surface, valued at US$19 million per kilogram.
Other commercial entrants are looking to asteroid mining, with hyped claims that the “first trillionaire” will be whoever returns with rare minerals. We also see talk that this is a “billionaires’ space race”.
The expressions used to understand, engage with, and think about space aren’t neutral. They still carry the ideas of coloniality: the power structures and attitudes that persist as a legacy of colonization.
“Colonization” is not an empty metaphor
When space is described in terms of “colonization,” “conquest,” “manifest destiny,” or the prize in a “race,” these words are not empty metaphors.
They echo imperialist ideals. Such mindsets push for taking more power and extending dominance into new “frontiers” of control, racism, and erasure of other forms of knowledge. They also simultaneously exclude voices that don’t align with them, preserving the dominant narrative.
The idea of a “manifest destiny” is driven by a human-centric approach to the environment. The Moon or other celestial bodies are seen as resources to be conquered by first arrivals. Phrases such as “final frontier” and “wild west” have similarly colonial origins.
Historically, “manifest destiny” was used to legitimize US nationalism and the violent expansion that dispossessed Indigenous peoples from tribal lands and territories as the so-called American frontier expanded westward.
The same logic first infused US space policy during the Cold War, as the US and Soviet Union vied to take that first “one small step” on the Moon and assert leadership as the preeminent global superpower.
How we talk about space affects the futures we create off-Earth, and a better framing already exists in Indigenous perspectives.
Such perspectives of dominance have not gone uncontested. During Cold War era negotiations for the United Nations’ international space law treaties that still stand today, Global South nations—many of which had endured painful experiences of colonial rule—advocated for a more equitable approach.
Foundational principles in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 seek to safeguard outer space as the province of all humankind and for the benefit of all nations, not only the powerful and privileged few.
Yet a gap between principles and practice remains. How we talk about space affects the futures we create off-Earth, and a better framing already exists in Indigenous perspectives.
An alternative, inclusive future
The Māori ethic of kaitiakitanga, which broadly encompasses the concept of stewardship, envisions a future grounded in reciprocity and shared responsibility. It extends beyond the human to embrace the more-than-human world.
Rather than treating space as an empty “frontier” to conquer and exploit, kaitiakitanga recognizes that celestial bodies, Earth, and humankind are not separate domains, but part of an interconnected system.
This perspective challenges the assumptions that only people hold moral standing. Instead, the night sky and celestial bodies have value in and of themselves.
Kaitiakitanga also maintains intergenerational responsibilities: ensuring that decisions made today honor past, present, and future relationships. Such obligations also support nascent calls for an Indigenous right to space.
Likewise, collaborative research by Bawaka Country under the guidance of the Yolŋu songspiral Guwak “refuses the idea of space, portrayed by would-be space colonizers as a dead, empty stock of resources awaiting exploitation”.
Instead, it recognizes space as an ancestral domain for Indigenous and some non-Indigenous peoples globally. It explains how “space colonization” risks disrupting and harming enduring, millennia-old connections and ethical obligations of care to the sky and beyond.
These and other Indigenous perspectives offer lessons that benefit everyone.
Reclaiming the narrative
When we shift the conversation away from the human-centric logic of exploitation and empire-building, we also expand who has a relationship with and a responsibility to space.
We all do. In effect, we are all “space citizens.” That means space must not be left to dominant nations and tech titans alone.
To realize this future, we must reclaim the narrative around outer space from powerful actors who use exclusionary language grounded in coloniality. Instead, we should move towards a more inclusive, relational and sustainable ethic of stewardship.
Otherwise, we risk repeating history and launching injustices into the cosmos, one rocket at a time.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Art Cotterell is a Research Associate at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University (ANU), focusing on the governance of emerging technologies. His particular expertise is the power, politics and policies that shape the regulation of space and nuclear technologies.
William Grant is Lecturer in law at the University of Canterbury, with a focus on international law, in particular Indigenous rights, human rights, and the law of outer space.
Book Review-"Rocket Dreams"
book cover
Review: Rocket Dreams
by Jeff Foust
Monday, September 22, 2025
Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race
by Christian Davenport
Crowm Currency, 2025
hardcover, 384 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-0-593-59411-7
US$32.00
Last Friday, NASA announced a surprise: the VIPER lunar rover mission was being revived. More than a year ago, NASA said it had to cancel the mission because of cost and schedule overruns, even though the rover itself was nearly complete. That led to various efforts to explore commercial partnerships to take over the mission, but on Friday NASA was going back to its original approach to get VIPER to the Moon. This time, it awarded a task order through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program to Blue Origin to take VIPER to the south polar region of the Moon in late 2027 on the company’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander.
“What can you do relative to the Moon by 2020?” one of transition team members asked. One company executive noted the progress on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle: “We can land something like it on the Moon.”
The announcement took many by surprise, since NASA already has a CLPS task order awarded to Astrobotic for VIPER that it retained when it canceled VIPER last year. It is also contingent on Blue Origin demonstrating that Blue Moon can land on the Moon: while the full award is worth $190 million, the company is guaranteed only a fraction of that amount to do design work to accommodate VIPER on the lander, as well as demonstrate that Blue Moon can land safely on a demonstration mission planned for as soon as late this year.
It is, though, a victory for the company, and something of a vindication as well for a program that started almost as an accident. As Christian Davenport recounts early in his new book, Rocket Dreams, Blue Origin officials were meeting with members of the NASA transition team for the first Trump administration after the 2016 election. “What can you do relative to the Moon by 2020?” one of team members asked. One company executive noted the progress on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle: “We can land something like it on the Moon.”
It was, as Davenport notes, a “completely off-script” response since Blue Origin did not, at the time, have a lunar lander in development based on New Shepard. But it set gears in motion to develop one, which became Blue Moon.
Blue Moon is part of the larger competition between Blue Origin and SpaceX, and between their billionaire founders Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, that is the theme of the book. It is a sequel to The Space Barons (see “Reviews: Rocket Billionaires and The Space Barons”, The Space Review, March 26, 2018), his earlier account of commercial space competition that included Bezos and Musk, among others.
Rocket Dreams is devoted principally to the competition between the two billionaires in space, and how that interacts with a NASA refocused on a human return to the Moon starting in the first Trump administration. Artemis would rely on commercial capabilities, notably landers, to get NASA astronauts back on the Moon, an effort that takes on increasing urgency as China ramps up its efforts to land its own astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade.
SpaceX is as hard-charging as ever, even as the focus shifted from Falcon and Dragon to Starship. It’s Blue Origin that has seen a new urgency.
This is a familiar story for readers of this publication as the book recounts the development of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to restore NASA’s ability to get astronauts to the ISS, as well as work on Starship, as well as Blue Origin’s efforts to get into the game with its New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon. However, the book is filled with details behind the scenes at the two companies, and NASA, as they work on their various programs and grapple with political and personal drama. That makes the book enlightening even to those who have been following these events closely.
The book makes clear that, of the two companies, Blue Origin has changed more over the last decade. SpaceX is as hard-charging as ever, even as the focus shifted during that time from Falcon and Dragon to Starship. It’s Blue Origin that has seen a new urgency as Bezos, no longer the CEO of Amazon, devotes more time to the company; the hiring of Dave Limp as Blue Origin CEO in late 2023 also changed the culture. (Limp notably asked Bezos when being courted to take the job, “Is this a hobby or a business?”) Blue Origin is at least running faster now, even if the gap with SpaceX is as wide as ever.
The Moon gives Blue Origin an opportunity to take the lead on SpaceX in one area. If the first Blue Moon makes it to the lunar surface late this year or even next year, it will get there ahead of SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander for Artemis, as many warn the program may be years behind schedule (see “Go faster, somehow,” The Space Review, September 8, 2025.) Blue Origin has rarely achieved a spaceflight milestone ahead of SpaceX, so this is an opportunity that would literally be once in a Blue Moon.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.
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Former Astronaut Garrett Reisman Talks About Astronaut Safety
Reisman
Former astornaut Garrett Reisman at the Johnson Space Center (credit: the author)
I’m a former astronaut: NASA workers are afraid, and safety is at risk
by Garrett Reisman
Monday, September 15, 2025
Every year, former astronauts like me are invited back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, to get a flight physical. NASA is still collecting data from us to better understand the long-term effects of human spaceflight. I look forward to this trip every year as an opportunity to enjoy the comradery of my former NASA colleagues and our shared optimism about our future in space.
But this year I found an environment of fear and uncertainty that struck me as a serious safety concern.
This year I found an environment of fear and uncertainty that struck me as a serious safety concern.
When I made my annual trip last March, the Trump Administration was in the process of vilifying federal workers and pursuing an anti-diversity, equity and inclusion strategy across the federal workforce, which was resulting in plain old discrimination. I asked to meet with NASA employees who were members of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) such as the “Out and Allied”, African American, Hispanic, Women Excelling in Life and Leadership, and Parenting ERGs. I was trying to send a message that there were still many of us in the space community who, to paraphrase, hold these truths to be self-evident, that we are all created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. However, my primary intent was just to listen and learn.
These civil servants told me that before the 2024 election of Donald Trump they felt welcomed at NASA. They felt like they belonged, and their contributions were valued. In fact, in 2020, the NASA administrator appointed by Trump, Jim Bridenstine, added inclusion to the agency’s list of core values, joining safety, integrity, teamwork and excellence. But this time around, things are obviously different. All of the ERGs listed above had been banned as part of the anti-DEI crusade. Pride flags were being taken down, websites celebrating the accomplishments of women and people of color were disappearing, and email signatures stating a person’s preferred pronouns were prohibited.
None of the NASA employees I spoke with felt secure in their jobs or safe from persecution. It is true that many members of the NASA workforce who are not members of historically marginalized groups are also concerned about losing their jobs. However, members of these vulnerable communities inside the NASA family have no confidence that management will downsize according to objective merit-based criteria. Instead, they expect to be the first to be fired regardless of their job performance and capabilities.
A Hispanic female engineer told me of being harassed by co-workers who taunted her with claims that she would soon be deported. In the current environment it is not clear if there is any recourse to combat this type of harassment. No one wants to have the reputation of being a “complainer” and it’s not clear if reporting incidents of racial or sexual harassment would achieve results that would outweigh the backlash.
Not only does this discrimination have a profound effect on individuals, but it can also have a devastating effect on the safety of flight. Even on a typical day, it is often difficult to get engineers to speak up with dissenting views, and technical experts holding back their opinions can lead to disastrous consequences. The tragic loss of the Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia, which resulted in the deaths of 14 astronauts, both occurred after management silenced dissenting views. There were engineers who knew that Challenger’s O-rings would not work properly at low temperatures, and there were engineers who knew that the foam that hit Columbia’s wing during launch could cause catastrophic damage. In both cases their safety concerns were dismissed by higher-ups, but at least they were voiced.
In the current environment of fear and uncertainty at NASA, it will be more challenging than ever to elicit dissenting views, making it more difficult than ever to prevent the next human spaceflight tragedy.
Reisman
Former astornaut Garrett Reisman at the Johnson Space Center (credit: the author)
Let me be clear, NASA is a large bureaucratic agency that can be inefficient and resistant to change. In fact, my frustration regarding obstacles to innovation at NASA was the reason I left the agency in 2011 and joined SpaceX. A more agile and innovative workforce at NASA would indeed be a good thing, and I understand that enacting large-scale change in an organization with considerable institutional inertia is very difficult. However, there is potential for great harm to NASA even if the streamlining is executed by leadership with the best of intentions.
The initial downsizing has occurred via a voluntary workforce reduction. The Trump Administration’s deferred resignation program resulted in nearly 4,000 NASA employees opting to leave, or about 20% of NASA’s workforce. Some of these employees were about to retire anyway and perhaps some of them were not making critical contributions to NASA’s mission, but the problem with this approach is that often the people who choose to go are the ones whom NASA needs to stay. Indeed, the loss of critical expertise and experience when a contractor relocated their workforce was an important contributing factor to bad decision making during the Columbia space shuttle tragedy.
The next phase of downsizing will not be voluntary; it will consist of layoffs. While this phase can be tailored and targeted by leadership to increase NASA’s agility, in the wrong hands it can be an excuse to discriminate.
Based on my experience at SpaceX, I assert that safety and progress are not mutually exclusive, and I challenge NASA to accomplish both without compromising either.
Meanwhile, the safety of flight risk is increasing. The three biggest tragedies in NASA history are each spaced about 20 years apart. While this could be purely coincidental, human organizations tend to get complacent over time, and 20 years just might be the half-life of NASA’s vigilance. In the nearly 23 years since the Columbia tragedy, we have managed to sustain an admirable safety record in human spaceflight. But new safety challenges are arising with riskier missions as we prepare to send astronauts back to the Moon under the Artemis program and as the International Space Station, already cracked and leaking, continues to show its age.
I call upon NASA’s interim administrator, Sean Duffy; the new associate administrator, Amit Kshatriya; and the rest of NASA leadership to proceed with caution. Administrator Duffy said just this past week that “sometimes we can let safety be the enemy of making progress.” Based on my experience at SpaceX, I assert that safety and progress are not mutually exclusive, and I challenge NASA to accomplish both without compromising either.
Finally, let me remind you that it will be much harder to achieve our national ambitions in space without the contributions of everyone who has the talent and interest to help. So, as you reduce NASA’s workforce and work to reshape its culture it is imperative that you ensure that personnel decisions are made based only on performance and merit and not based on a person’s gender, race or sexual orientation. That is not only the right thing to do for NASA; it is the right thing to do period.
Garrett Reisman was selected by NASA as a mission specialist astronaut in 1998. His first mission in 2008 was aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which dropped him off for a 95-day stay aboard the International Space Station, after which he returned to Earth aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. His second mission in 2010 was aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. During these missions, he performed three spacewalks, operated the station’s robotic arm, and was a flight engineer aboard the Space Shuttle. After leaving NASA in early 2011, he joined SpaceX, where he served in multiple capacities, most recently as the Director of Space Operations. He stepped down from his full-time position at SpaceX in May of 2018 and in June 2018 he became a Professor of Astronautical Engineering in the Viterbi School at USC.
Gemini's A Wing And A Prayer Part 2
paraglider
A March 1962 tow test of a wing configuration. Note that the struts along the side are inflated. (credit: NASA)
Gemini’s wing and a prayer (part 2): Parachutes, paragliders, and more crashes in the desert
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, September 15, 2025
In the early 1960s, NASA was undertaking an extensive series of tests in the Mojave Desert to develop the capability to bring its new Gemini spacecraft to a gentle landing on the ground rather than at sea. In 1961 and 1962, test pilots and at least one astronaut began flying a flimsy-looking craft called the Paresev to evaluate a new type of wing—called a Rogallo Wing, or paraglider—that could be folded up inside a compartment on Gemini. It would then be deployed at high altitude to unfold and provide lift and controllability to enable Gemini to land on a dry lake bed. After the Paresev I was destroyed in a crash, NASA developed the Paresev I-A, which also occasionally crashed. At this time, NASA fully intended to land Gemini using the paraglider technology—if it could be made to work (see “Gemini’s wing and a prayer (part 1): Rogallo Wings, the Paresev, and crashes in the desert,” The Space Review, September 8, 2025.)
paraglider
Francis Rogallo conceived of his wing design in the late 1950s. Here he is with a wind tunnel model in 1959. The advantage of the soft wing was that it was lightweight and could be folded up. NASA conducted many tests of several wing designs in the early 1960s. (credit: NASA)
The desert tests of the Paresev were not the only activities conducted in what became an extensive development program. In March 1962, test pilot Milt Thompson went to North American Aviation in Downey, California, and flew a Gemini parawing simulator. He maintained close ties with the other aspects of the research project.[1]
MSC engineers realized that an accident that destroyed one of the boilerplates could have a significant impact on the test program.
NASA also started a new series of wind tunnel tests. On May 23, 1962, the Ames Research Center tested a half-scale paraglider wing in one of the center’s wind tunnels. Further wind tunnel tests demonstrated all phases of paraglider operation, from deployment all the way down to landing. During some later tests the wing ripped. But the tests were finished by July 25. [2] At the same time, North American built two boilerplate capsules for paraglider drop tests from aircraft. One was a scale mock-up known as a Half Scale Test Vehicle, or HSTV, and the other was known as the Full Scale Test Vehicle, or FSTV. The boilerplates did not have any of the internal systems of an actual spacecraft and were primarily intended to simulate the shape and weight of Gemini and nothing more.
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Half Scale Test Vehicles were developed for testing the wings. Two of the HSTVs were destroyed in crashes. (credit: NASA)
Parachute tests
The boilerplates were far simpler than an actual spacecraft but were expensive for test vehicles. MSC engineers realized that an accident that destroyed one of the boilerplates could have a significant impact on the test program. They ordered North American to develop an emergency parachute system that would deploy if the paraglider failed. This decision had a significant impact on the testing schedule, because now North American had to test and prove the emergency parachute system before starting paraglider tests. North American subcontracted the emergency parachute system to Northrop Corporation’s Radioplane Division. [3]
On May 24, 1962, North American dropped the Half Scale Test Vehicle from an aircraft in the first test of the emergency parachute system. It was equipped with a single parachute and the test was successful. Another test on June 20 also succeeded. On June 26, the parachute failed and the boilerplate was damaged and had to be returned to North American’s factory in California for repairs.
paraglider
NASA required that the boilerplate test vehicles be equipped with emergency parachutes in event that the paraglider wing did not deploy. Here the parachute is being tested in 1963. The parachute system had to be tested for both half-scale and full-scale vehicles, and suffered some problems. (credit: NASA)
On July 10, North American conducted another test and the parachute failed again. This forced another delay in the testing until the flaws were corrected and the test vehicle repaired. On September 4, the Half Scale Test Vehicle was dropped again and the parachute system operated successfully. NASA declared the parachute system qualified. [4]
As the tests with the Half Scale Test Vehicle progressed, North American began testing the Full Scale Test Vehicle, which was equipped with three emergency parachutes instead of one. On August 2, they successfully conducted the first drop test. On August 21, they conducted the second, but lost a parachute after deployment. During the next test on September 7, two of the three parachutes were lost and the test model hit the ground hard and was slightly damaged. The next test was delayed until November 15, and ended badly when all three parachutes failed and the vehicle crashed. NASA ordered McDonnell, which was building the Gemini, to supply North American with a spare boilerplate capsule to resume testing.
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NASA used many methods to test various wing configurations, including towing it behind a truck in the desert. (credit: NASA)
Paraglider failures, parachute failure
Meanwhile, North American was having other problems. The contractor began tow tests with the Half Scale Test Vehicle at the Flight Research Center. The paraglider was deployed and inflated on the ground and then the capsule was towed into the air by an Army helicopter. Once it reached the right altitude, the cable would be released and the capsule would make a radio-controlled descent. [5]
On August 14, 1962, North American engineers conducted the first test. The wing was folded during the tow to altitude but refused to unfold in flight. Three days later they tried again, but the wing released too soon. On August 23, they tried yet again, but the vehicle descended too fast and was slightly damaged on landing. The next test took place on September 17, but the tow-line failed to release and the helicopter had to return to base.
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A Rogallo Wing struts inflated with nitrogen is being connected to the Paresev vehicle in 1963. Note the lifting body aircraft in the background. The 1960s was a period of intensive aeronautics testing by NASA. (credit: NASA)
Several more delays occurred, at which point MSC halted the testing until the problems were fixed. Tests resumed on October 23, and this time the paraglider successfully lowered the vehicle to the ground. [6] But a major milestone remained: deploying the wing in flight. Still more problems delayed the test until December 10. An HSTV was carried up to altitude by a helicopter and dropped. The paraglider was folded inside its storage can. But the drogue parachute did not operate properly and the paraglider did not properly deploy. The test controllers jettisoned the paraglider and deployed the emergency parachute, which operated properly. [7]
Another attempt was made on January 8, 1963. But the wing deployed too late and tore. Ground controllers commanded the emergency parachute to deploy, but it did not and the HSTV crashed. [8]
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The Half Scale Test Vehicle was carried aloft underneath a heavy-lift CH-37 Mojave helicopter.(credit: NASA)
Put up, or shut up
Gemini was scheduled to begin uncrewed orbital flights in 1964. By this time the Gemini program was experiencing cost overruns that forced the program managers to make some hard choices. The Office of Manned Spaceflight at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, wanted a successful deployment of the paraglider before it would approve more money for the program. But the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston wanted to award a contract for Phase III of the program. Washington won the argument.
In retrospect, North American’s problems with the emergency parachute system should have been a clear warning sign that the company was experiencing quality control and workmanship problems.
On March 11, 1963, a helicopter took the second HSTV aloft and dropped it. But once again the storage can did not separate, the paraglider could not be deployed or even jettisoned. The radio command for the emergency parachute was also ineffective and the capsule fell to the ground. Now North American had destroyed both Half Scale Test Vehicles.
In retrospect, North American’s problems with the emergency parachute system should have been a clear warning sign that the company was experiencing quality control and workmanship problems. Parachutes are admittedly more complex than they seem, and their performance is hard to model or predict mathematically. However, they are still relatively simple devices and North American’s problems with getting the parachutes to deploy indicated not so much design problems as a failure to perform the kinds of checks and oversight required to make sure that even simple operations happen the way that they are supposed to happen.
The progression of the paraglider research also was a bad sign as well. All new technologies experience difficulties in development. But a well-run development program will not repeat the same mistakes and the same failures as engineers systematically solve the problems. The persistence of even simple failures with the paraglider development indicated that there were bigger problems as well.
The paraglider testing continued, but the pressure was mounting to make it work, or it would be removed from the Gemini program.
Next: Boilerplates and Kabongs.
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paraglider
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A 1963 test of a Half Scale Test Vehicle under an inflated paraglider wing resulted in some damage.(credit: NASA)
M.O. Thompson and Curtis Peebles, Flying Without Wings, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999, p.19.
Ibid., p.47.
On the Shoulders of Titans, p.92; Project Gemini: A Chronology, p.30.
On the Shoulders of Titans, pp.98-99.
Ibid., p.99; Project Gemini: A Chronology, p.56.
On the Shoulders of Titans, p.123.
Ibid.
Ibid.; Project Gemini: A Chronology, p.66.
Dwayne Day can be reached at zirconic1@cox.net.
The Greatest Story On Mars-A Sequel
ALH84001
News that scientists claimed to find evidence of past Martian life in a meteorite leaked out before NASA’s planned formal announcement. (credit: NASA)
The greatest story on planet Mars: the sequel
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, September 15, 2025
On Wednesday, September 10, NASA held a press conference to announce that scientists had found evidence consistent with past life on Mars. If you’re old enough, you might have experienced a bit of déjà vu. In August 1996, President Bill Clinton held a press conference at the White House to announce that scientists had found evidence in a Mars meteorite consistent with past life on Mars. That suspected discovery had a profound impact on American space science policy. But the story had leaked to the press even before the White House announcement. Later that year, I published an article in the journal Quest about how the Mars news had become public. Thanks to former Quest editor Glen Swanson, I am republishing that 1996 article here. The story involves an intrepid reporter, a sleazy White House advisor, and a high-paid prostitute.
And it’s all true.
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The greatest story on planet Mars
The story had all the lurid qualities of a dime-store political thriller: top presidential advisor tells secret information to a high-priced prostitute who promptly sells the story to a reporter. As the disgraced advisor resigns in an embarrassing scandal, the story has earth-shattering consequences. Such was the rumor that circulated after the possibility of past life on Mars leaked to the press a week before the official announcement. It was a great story with only one minor flaw: it wasn’t true.
The reporter who broke the news was Leonard David, and if anyone was going to break the story of life on Mars, it was going to be him.
The word that a group of NASA and university scientists had found evidence of possible past life on Mars created a short-lived media frenzy within the United States as well as around the world. On Tuesday, August 6, 1996, two of the three major news networks in the United States led their broadcasts with stories on the Mars rock, despite the fact that they had no firm infor¬mation on which to base their reports and no visuals which are so central to modern television reporting. That same day, in Washington and all over the United States, journalists struggled to get more information. Calling it a media feeding frenzy would be an understatement. Everyone wanted the story, and all they knew was that they had all been beaten to the punch by another reporter.
In the wake of the story, rumors circulated through space and media circles that the leak—coming two weeks before the officially planned announcement of the research team’s findings—was the result of some Washington, DC pillow-talk associated with a recent White House scandal. The lurid story, apparently even promoted by one of NASA’s scientists, couldn’t have been farther from the truth.
The reporter
The reporter who broke the news was Leonard David, and if anyone was going to break the story of life on Mars, it was going to be him. David is a veteran space reporter who has written for scores of magazines and trade journals and also served as editor for several space publications. He is probably the best-connected space reporter in the business, especially when it comes to Mars. David considers himself one of the original members of the “Mars Underground,” a group primarily centered in Boulder. Colorado, which has been dedicated to the exploration of the Red Planet for nearly two decades. David knows virtually everyone associated with Mars research.
Leonard David got the story from a reliable source at least a week before he wrote it. He submitted it to Pat Seitz, his editor at Space News, a weekly trade publication, on Friday afternoon, August 1. [1] He was a little unsure whether it would actually run in the paper, since he had already submitted two other articles that week, one on space tourism and the other on NASA research into wormholes. By the time he submitted a “life on Mars” story he figured his editor would have concluded that David had gone crazy. Thus, he wasn’t even sure the news-paper had decided to run the story until the following Monday, when he looked at a copy in the NASA library. It was carried on page two of the paper, in a section labeled “This Week” and usually reserved for late-breaking stories of no more than 150 words.[2] It was also carried on the newspaper’s website. A day later the story spread throughout the country and the world.
Only three weeks after that, however, rumors began to circulate through space activist and other circles that the story had leaked to the press through another way. The rumor was that Presidential advisor Richard “Dick” Morris had told a high-priced call girl, Sherry Rowlands, about the Mars news and that she in turn had sold the story to the press.
Dick Morris was President Clinton’s chief campaign strategist and perhaps the man more responsible than any other for saving the Clinton campaign from President Clinton himself. Morris was the architect of the strategy of “triangulation”—setting the Democratic president apart both from the Republicans and the Democrats in his own party. The strategy had worked brilliantly, but it had earned Morris the enmity of Democrats as well as Republicans. When news of his relationship with Rowlands leaked to a tabloid on the eve of Clinton’s address to the Democratic National Convention, it was a major scandal. Morris resigned on August 28. He had no real friends in Washington, and virtually no one in either party was sorry to see him go.
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Rowlands sold her story to the American tabloid newspaper the Star for “less than $50,000,” in the words of the editor who broke the story. Over the next several weeks, she chronicled her encounters with Mr. Morris, which ranged from the sleazily bizarre (Mr. Morris was a foot fetishist) to the ultimate in Washington government weirdness (Morris had read her Hillary Clinton’s speeches and bragged of his importance to the White House). One of her revelations that emerged even before the full story was published was that Morris had told her about the NASA findings.
Rowlands wrote in her diary entry for August 2: “...Then he [Morris] said, ‘I have something very top secret to tell you... This is top military stuff... Only seven people in the entire world know of it.’ He said they found proof of life on Pluto! (SR note: He said Mars, but I was so tired the next morning I wrote Pluto.) It proves there is life out there, so we’ll be sending up more probes and a full-scale discovery program...” [3]
Apparently even before Rowlands’ account was printed in the Star the rumors began circulating, through e-mail messages and over the Internet, that Rowlands and Morris were the source of the leak about the Mars information. But the story does not hold up to scrutiny. There is a clear chain of events leading from the leak of the information to its publication in Space News and the resulting media firestorm.
Rowlands wrote the information in her diary on Sunday, August 3. by which time Space News had already gone to press. She learned of the information the previous evening, while Space News was editorially “closed” and awaiting publication. There was simply no way that the information could have leaked via her.
The rumors about Morris and Rowlands being the source of the leak persisted, however, and eventually made it into the mainstream media.
Morris’ bragging that only seven people knew the story was also false. In addition to the nine members of the science team, five senior editors at the journal Science, which was planning on publishing the findings, also knew the story. NASA Administrator Dan Goldin also knew, as did NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Science, Wes Huntress. Other persons who knew of the findings included the members of the peer review panel, plus a number of people in the NASA Public Affairs Office, and President Clinton and Vice President Gore. These were only those who officially knew, since Leonard David and the editors at Space News also had the story before Morris had told Rowlands about it, although they were not supposed to know about it.
The rumors about Morris and Rowlands being the source of the leak persisted, however, and eventually made it into the mainstream media. In a September 12, 1996, story in the Boston Globe, a reporter wrote, “U.S. scientists openly blamed the White House for a leak of a long-held secret of the discovery of signs of life on Mars... NASA scientist Everett Gibson, an author of the now-famous Mars paper, said he had briefed NASA. ‘We managed to keep it quiet for two years,’ Gibson said in an interview yesterday, ‘Through certain indiscretions, that was leaked.’”
Gibson’s comment that the NASA team had managed to keep the story quiet for two years was not borne out by the facts—or Gibson’s own words. Gibson himself had been talking openly about the team’s work on the meteorite, ALH 84001, as early as spring of 1995. The team had even given a presentation on their early work on the meteorite at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in March 1995. At the time, the team reported that, using a sophisticated laser analysis technique developed by Dr. Richard Zare at Stanford University. they had detected complex organic molecules, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), inside the meteorite.
All the essentials of the story were present at the March 1995 meeting. including the names of the team members, the name and history of the meteorite in question, and the type of research that the team was conducting. The story was widely reported in the press. particularly in the American Southwest, and Gibson was quoted in many of the articles. Newspapers which carried the story included the Houston Chronicle, the Fresno Bee, the London Times, and the San Francisco Examiner. [4] Science News also ran the story. The articles all noted that the scientists were not claiming to have found evidence of life, but that the findings were consistent with the discovery of life.
Leonard David had not attended the conference, but he too heard about the new evidence and wrote a story on March 21, 1995, which cited Gibson as a source for information on a new SNC meteorite 4.5 billion years old containing the hydrocarbon. At the time there was no clear evidence of signs of life, but David wrote, “The finding is suggestive that, perhaps, Mars was once a more user-friendly niche for life.” The story even included an anonymous scientist stating, “It opens the door slightly for life on Mars, particularly in the suspected early wet phase of Mars.” [5] David ran the story in the May-June 1995 issue of the space magazine Final Frontier, which he was then editing. The overall issue was devoted to the subject of Mars, but the small story, titled “Time Capsules From Mars,” was tucked away in a sidebar article. [6]
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Hushing up
According to an interview with members of the research team after the news broke, they had collectively decided to cease speaking to the press late in 1995 when they prepared to submit their paper to peer review. But as late as September 1995, Gibson was still talking to the press about their findings. Another space writer, James Oberg, who also worked at Johnson Space Center, did a television interview with Gibson on KDFW-TV in Dallas that month. The TV spot even included a photo of the limestone circles from the team’s ongoing research. After that, however, press reports on ALH 84001 were virtually nonexistent. When the research team submitted their paper for the journal Science in March 1996, they signed an agreement that they would not divulge any information on their research prior to the publication of the paper, a date which depended entirely on the length of the peer review process.
After already pitching stories on space tourism and faster-than-light travel earlier in the week. David expected Seitz to say "What’s next, David, a story about Roswell?!"
The research team’s paper in Science was finally accepted for publication in late July. By this time, the NASA Public Affairs Office at Headquarters in Washington. DC was preparing a press conference to coincide with the release of the article on August 16. They carefully selected speakers for the conference. In addition to all the members of the science team, NASA also chose to include a non-member of the team to serve as a skeptic and counterweight and to add credibility to the proceedings. NASA had done this on a number of previous occasions in order to avoid charges of staging publicity stunts. [7]
The skeptic in this case was Dr. William Schopf. professor of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles. When the Public Affairs Office began asking experts about who would be the most authoritative paleobiologist they could consult, Schopf’s name came up repeatedly. He is considered the foremost expert on the subject.
The story breaks
Leonard David knew that something odd was happening regarding the subject of life on Mars when he attended the Case for Mars VI conference in Boulder, Colorado, in mid-July. Several speakers at the conference jokingly made comments hinting at some discovery pertaining to fossilized life being found on Mars. Clearly a number of people within the Mars scientific community knew about the research. But David did not get the story at that time. He apparently got most of the story soon after Science accepted the paper for publication. However, before he published it, he needed to do some basic fact-checking. One thing he wanted to confirm was that he had the right name of the meteorite. He called another source and asked that person to confirm that ALH 84001 was indeed an SNC meteorite (i.e. one of the dozen that is confirmed to have come from Mars). He did this carefully so as not to indicate to this other source that he was particularly interested in this meteorite. With the information in hand, he sat down to write his brief story that NASA scientists had discovered something interesting. [8]
David had most of the facts, but decided not to reveal all of them out of a concern with protecting his source, so he left some information out of the story. He sent the story to his editor electronically and then talked to him on the phone to convince him to run it. David, who is a correspondent for the paper, as opposed to a staff writer, usually worked with Lon Rains, the paper’s edi¬tor. Rains was on travel and David wasn’t used to dealing with Pat Seitz, Space News’ business editor, and was a little concerned that his article would not be taken seriously. After already pitching stories on space tourism and faster-than-light travel earlier in the week. David expected Seitz to say "What’s next, David, a story about Roswell?!" (As it was, David was working on a story on Roswell—a light-hearted piece for another publication about Roswell. New Mexico, where many UFO-buffs believe a flying sau¬cer crashed in 1947.) Space News is aimed at industry and government circles. not science fiction buffs, and Seitz was concerned that it not be considered to be anything other than a serious publication. [9] Seitz did not reject the story, but wanted to make sure that it was credible and did not damage the reputation of the paper.
After David submitted his article, he went on to other writing assignments. However, the one piece of information that David did not have was the name of the journal where the paper was to be published. He suspected it was probably going to be Science, but was not sure. He did not think that this one piece of information was essential to the story and it was too late to include anyways, but he was still curious.
Space News stopped accepting stories on Friday evenings, “closing” for the week. The paper went to press beginning Saturday afternoon on the 2nd (before Rowlands and Morris had yet to make their regular business transaction). That evening, while attending a party in Washington, David ran into his colleague, Andrew Lawler. Lawler used to be a reporter for Space News and now worked on the editorial board of Science. Although the paper was already being printed, David was still curious about the story and decided to have a little fun. He went up to Lawler during the party when the two were alone in the kitchen and said, “So, what’s the deal with this life on Mars story?” Lawler blanched, telling David that he wasn’t supposed to know about that and thus confirming that the paper was indeed going to run in Science. David then chose to tease him, saying, “Yeah, Andy, Nature has been calling me all day about it...” (Nature is Science’s British-based rival journal.) [10]
Space News is distributed to some important subscribers in Washington as early as late Sunday, with most “hand-deliveries” of the paper not taking place until the early hours of Monday morning. Most other subscribers are at the will of the erratic US Postal Service, although subscribers can also log into a sparse online edition. The first outsiders could read the story over their Monday morning coffee. All day Monday, the 5th of August, the story circulated. NASA Headquarters’ Public Affairs Office took notice of it, but received no calls from enquiring reporters. [11]
By Tuesday morning NASA started getting calls, apparently first from another space reporter by the name of William Harwood. Harwood writes for the New York Times and the Washington Post and also serves as a space consultant for CBS News. Somewhat ironically, Harwood also writes for Space News. He called his editors at CBS and put them onto the story. By Tuesday afternoon the story spread like wildfire through media circles and the phones at NASA Public Affairs were ringing off the hook. Still, no one had anything more than what David had written. Even that had been edited down. The print version of his story was shorter than the on-line version, as a cautious editor had removed all reference to the word “fossils” on Mars.
The overwhelming consensus was that it did not contain signs of past life on Mars. However, the announcement had a profound impact on space science.
By Tuesday afternoon, NASA’s Public Affairs Office decided to move up their press conference—originally planned for the middle of August—over a week. Their best laid plans were not all for naught, since they already had all of the preliminary details worked out and their speakers chosen. All they needed to do was to contact them and get them to Washington, DC. They notified the speakers and had them take late night flights from San Francisco and Dallas, both several thousand miles from Washington. Team leader David McKay was on vacation when the story broke. He had a remote telephone pager for just such a contingency, but it did not work and he only learned of the impending press conference when he called his office to see what was happening. He then interrupted his vacation in order to make the sudden trip to NASA Headquarters and the media frenzy that was brewing there.
The news conference itself was a madhouse, with reporters and photographers jostling for position in front of the team members as well as a sample of the Martian meteorite itself, on loan from the Smithsonian Institution. After some initial problems with the audio, however, the conference settled down as the research team carefully made their case and William Schopf expressed his skepticism. Despite the frenetic atmosphere, it managed to be a highly informative session.
Conclusion
Certainly, a majority of the Mars meteorite story was already public long before Leonard David broke the story and it became a media frenzy. Various newspaper and television reporters had gathered most of the facts that were reported later about the perplexing find. They had the name of the meteorite, the names of the research team members, the types of research they were conducting, and the preliminary results of that research. It was not until the research was subjected to the formal peer review process and accepted at a prestigious scientific journal that it finally became “major news.” And it did not leak to the press through the actions of a disgraced toe-sucking presidential advisor.
David himself still finds it surprising that the story garnered the attention that it did. How did obscure and inconclusive research translate into intense attention from around the globe? Was it only because August is traditionally a slow news month? No matter how it happened. the story still has tremendous appeal and has captured the imaginations of many in the world community.
Postscript 2025
The ALH 84001 Martian meteorite data was examined by many other scientists after the publication of the paper in Science. The overwhelming consensus was that it did not contain signs of past life on Mars. However, the announcement had a profound impact on space science. It energized the study of astrobiology, the search for life on other planets and the conditions that make it possible. NASA’s Mars budget increased substantially and the agency began a series of Mars missions with the goal of better characterizing the planet, including the “follow the water” strategy to identify locations on Mars that could have once supported life. That eventually led to the Perseverance Mars rover, which recently found the possible evidence that has current Mars scientists excited. There was also a cultural legacy as well. The announcement led to renewed interest in Mars, and may have contributed to the eventual production of a couple of Mars movies several years later. Bill Clinton’s introduction to the science discovery was re-edited and appeared in the 1997 movie Contact. And the White House advisor with his call-girl became a minor plot point in the 1999 premier episode of the TV series The West Wing. Today’s politics are much more sedate.
Notes
Interview with Leonard David, Washington, DC, September 1996.
”Meteorite Find Incites Speculation on Mars Life,” Space News, 5-11 August, 1996, p. 2.
Richard Gooding, “My Last Nights With Dick Morris,” Star, September 24, 1996, p. 32.
Carlos Byars, “Mars Meteorite Contains Carbon Compounds,” Houston Chronicle, 18 March. 1995, p. 34; Keay Davidson, “Forget the Little Green Men, But Life May Have Once Existed On Mars,” San Francisco Examiner, 16 March, 1995, p. A-4; Nick Nuttall, “Martian Meteorite Shows Glimmer of Life On Red Planet,” London Times, 21 March, 1995. Several of the stories were also carried by other newspapers as well. The San Francisco Examiner story, for instance, appeared in both the Fresno Bee and The Plain Dealer.
Memo, Leonard David to Geoff Briggs, “Mars Research,” 21 March, 1995, provided by David to author.
”Time Capsules From Mars,” Final Frontier, May-June 1995, p.
Telephone interview with Don Savage, NASA Public Affairs, September 1996.
Interview with Leonard David.
Telephone interview with Patrick Seitz, Space News, September 1996.
Interview with Leonard David.
Telephone interview with Don Savage.
Dwayne Day can be reached at zirconic1@cox.net.
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