Giant Leaps Symposium (session 2), “The Next Giant Leaps in Energy, the Environment and Air Transportation” - MIT AeroAstro

WAITZ: Welcome back. We're now going to turn our attention to a look at some future challenges and opportunities. And what we sought to do with this discussion was to broaden it beyond just space exploration to look at some other challenges related to air transportation, energy, and environment. And the order of the sessions was chosen in a particular manner to sort of set a contrast. It's already been identified that some of those challenges are very different in character from the challenges of Apollo or, indeed, the challenges of the future of space exploration. And by putting these things next to each other in some contrast, we hope that it will draw some clear distinctions between them.

It's my great pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker for this session, the Honorable John Holdren. Dr. Holdren is Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology within the Executive Office of the President. Prior to joining the Obama administration, he was the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. He was also professor of environmental science and policy at Harvard's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and a Director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

He also co-chaired the independent bipartisan National Commission on energy policy. He holds a degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from our department and a degree in Theoretical Plasma Physics from Stanford so very broad background. He's the author of some 350 publications on global environmental change, energy technology and policy, nuclear arms control and non-proliferation, and science and technology policy. He's a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Academy of Arts and Sciences. And he's one of the first recipients of the MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship.

And thinking back on some of the comments that Ted Sorensen made this morning, related to the Pugwash Society, also note that 1995 he gave the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Pugwash is an international arms control and scientific cooperation organization in which he has held many leadership positions. Please join me in welcoming Dr. John Holdren.

[APPLAUSE]

HOLDREN: Well, thank you, Ian, and thank all of you. It's certainly a great pleasure for me to be back at MIT with so many old friends and, particularly, a pleasure to be back here on the occasion of this symposium on the next giant leaps, looking back on the achievements of the Apollo program and all that followed, and looking ahead to the new achievements in Aerospace, Science, and Technology that the great challenges before us are going to demand.

My own trajectory from undergraduate and master's degrees in core 16 more than 40 years ago to my current position advising President Obama on the full range of science and technology matters that are germane to the policy issues of the day I think illustrates, in a small way, both the wide ranging relevance of the disciplines that come together in the study of aerospace, science, and engineering. And it also illustrates I believe the enduring value of an MIT education. And because there are a lot of students I know in the audience, I'm going to dwell on that history for just a moment, how I came to make this transition.

My main focus is as an undergraduate here were on fluid mechanics, and rocket propulsion in the Aero and Astro Department and on electromagnetic theory and space physics in the Physics Department. I had the privilege of learning from some of the greats in all of those domains. And to my amazement, I had the privilege of talking with them one on one in their offices even as a freshman, which is one of the many things I loved about the Institute. We used to call it the glorious Institute in those days. I don't know if people still do.

In the Summers of my undergraduate years, I worked at Lockheed on reentry aerodynamics on the orbital mechanics of reconnaissance satellites, on a blade of rocket nozzles for the Poseidon submarine launch ballistic missiles. And then the collective senior project in the class of '65 in Core 16 turned out to be designing a manned Mars mission. I was the co leader of that effort with my classmate Jim Hester. We named that project Project Aries, interestingly enough.

I suspect the report is still on some shelf in the department library. As one of the highlights of that effort, Doc Draper, who was the chair of the Aero and Astro Department at that time, had the whole class flown on an Air Force C-54 to Cape Kennedy for spring break. And we got to see the main assembly building and the crawler and the whole works. It was just extremely exciting for a bunch of MIT seniors in Aero and Astro to have that experience, which Doc Draper was able to arrange because he held the honorary rank of Colonel in the Air Force among many other honors he had.

For my master's thesis here, I worked with Professor Jim McCune on a problem in theoretical plasma physics. And that domain had come to interest me both for its fascinating science, really, at the intersection of fluid dynamics and electromagnetic theory but also for its simultaneous relevance to astrophysics to defense science and technology and to the alluring challenge of harnessing fusion energy. In the course of that work, I was inspired by the great MIT fusion scientist and nuclear engineering Professor David Rose to think about how fusion might relate to the larger and wider challenges of energy supply and demand worldwide.

What then ensued, as Ian mentioned, was a PhD in plasma physics, which I completed jointly in the Aero and Astro department and the Institute for Plasma research at Stanford. That was followed by a job as a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, engaged in both energy and weapons applications of plasma science and technology. My experiences there helped turn me into an energy wonk. But they also help turn me into an arms controller, preoccupied more with how to reduce the dangers from nuclear weapons than with how to further improve their performance.

And earlier, while still at Stanford, I had started to work on the side with Professor Paul Ehrlich, another biologist there, on the intersection of energy and resource technology with problems of population and environment and with the Caltech geochemist, Harrison brown, on issues of science and technology for economic development. All of those threads then came together in interdisciplinary research and faculty positions at Caltech Berkeley and, finally, again, as he mentioned at Harvard and the Woods Hole research center, where I focused in variable proportions on energy, on environment, on nuclear arms control, and non-proliferation. And on the theory and practice of Science and Technology Policy

And I think it was that collection of focuses more than any one of them that then President-elect Obama thought a sufficiently good fit with his needs in science and technology advisor to offer me, last December 15th, the immense privilege and opportunity of serving him in that capacity. For the students, the postdocs, and the young faculty members and researchers in this audience-- and I think you're my most important audience today with all respect to the senior statesman of space science and technology who are here-- the lesson in this lucky life I've lived at the intersection of science, engineering, and public policy is that you have more options than you may think you have.

Many of you will stay focused for all of your careers in or near the scientific and engineering specialties in which you've been mainly trained. I think it's important that many of you do that for we will continue to need specialists in these domains in abundance. But for those of you who feel as I did, the pull to cross the boundaries of disciplines, and not only within the natural sciences and engineering but across the larger divide to the social sciences and the domain of public policy, I'm here to tell you that the science and engineering training that you have gotten and are getting at MIT and even in lesser institutions with which I'm familiar, such as Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, and Harvard is--

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

--is a strong foundation, a strong foundation from which to do that, from which to cross those boundaries. Now, let me now turn to my main topic for these remarks, which is a little broader than the one advertised in the program, I want to talk about the intersection of aerospace, science, and technology with the great challenges that the United States faces as a nation and the ones that we all face as a globe. I will talk about the advertised topic of energy and environment and aerospace technology as well. But I'm going to talk more broadly as I expect many of you would want from someone in my current position. And excuse me? I thought I heard a comment from the floor.

But my closing introductory remark is that we do need, along with more specialists in individual disciplines or small subsets of them, we do need more specialists in wider interdisciplinary integration. And I hope some of you will take inspiration from the many successful examples in my generation and generations in between to follow that path. Let me then come to the main messages of my talk today.

First of all, science and technology and science and technology education are absolutely key to meeting the great challenges we face as a nation and a world in the 21st century. Aerospace, science, and technology have been and will remain a crucial contributor to and driver of many of the relevant capabilities. And a key point here is that President Obama not only understands these realities, he's putting them into practice in his priorities, his appointments, and his policies.

Even so, achievement of everything we need from aerospace, science, and technology is being impeded, both by longstanding inadequacies in federal budgets, coordination, and execution and on the space side and the aero sides alike. We have some big challenges here.

The solutions are very much a work in progress. We don't, by any means, have all the answers yet. Overall, budget stringency in and after the current economic crisis is going to remain a major challenge. And I'll come back to all of these points in a bit of detail. Let me start with what the challenges are that we face and that preoccupy the president.

Obviously, economic recovery and growth and, in my domain, the issue there is the role of science and technology as drivers of recovery and growth. Infotech, biotech, nanotech, green tech, and other kinds of tech that we haven't even thought of yet have roles to play there. Second big challenge and preoccupation is health care. We need to find ways to get better outcomes for all Americans and do it at lower cost. That is also an area in which science and technology have an important role to play.

In energy, we need to reduce our dependence on unstable parts of the world for oil supply. We need to reduce both conventional and heat trapping pollution from our energy sources. Other resource and environmental issues-- toxic substances, sustainable agriculture, water supply, adaptation to climate change, all big tough issues where science and technology are going to play a role.

National and Homeland Security, where scientific intelligence, cyber and power grids security, nuclear and biodefense are all important parts of the challenge. Global challenges-- deploying science and technology for poverty eradication, for development, for voluntary fertility limitation. Combating preventable and pandemic disease, transforming the whole global energy system-- we must do no less. And land use practices to avoid catastrophic levels of climate change-- we're already experiencing dangerous climate change. The question is, are we going to be smart enough and quick enough to avoid catastrophic climate change?

We need to reconcile the competing human demands on land and water for food, fiber, biofuels, and ecosystem services. And we need, of course, to maintain the ecological integrity and productivity of the oceans. Again, these challenge challenges as well as the strictly national ones are going to be immensely demanding of science and technology going forward. Reducing the risks, finally, from nuclear and biological weapons, a tremendous challenge, still a tremendous set of dangers-- although many people think they went away at the end of the Cold War, they did not.

There are some cross cutting science and Technology Foundations of success in grappling with these challenges. I formulate them as follows-- one, of course, and very much at the top of the list is the capacities and the health of the institutions that do our fundamental research, our universities, our national and private laboratories. Another, again, very close to the top of the list is science, technology, engineering, and math education, pre-school to grad school and, indeed, life long. We need that not only to be sure we get the next generation of scientists and engineers we're going to need to address these challenges but we needed to get the informed citizenry who can be effective participants in a democracy where science and technology are more and more a part of almost every major policy issue.

The availability, capacity, and robustness of our infrastructures-- information, communications, transportation, and energy-- our capabilities in space, which I put in red to indicate I have not forgotten the topic that brings us together here today, international cooperation in science and technology, an immensely important cross cutting foundation certainly going forward, and what I call the supporting institutional processes and guidelines-- issues of intellectual property, transparency, scientific integrity, visas, export controls, all of those issues, essential to get right if we're to get all of the rest right.

Now, let me turn to the relevance of aerospace, science, and technology. Fundamental research and the quest for knowledge, of course, the Hubble the International Space Station's experiments, including the alpha magnetic spectrometer that's to fly on the last scheduled shuttle mentioned before the end of 2010, human and robotic exploration. STEM education-- space has played an enormously important role in this domain. And we already heard a lot about why this morning.

Sputnik and the Space Race of the late '50s and '60s inspired a generation of young people to study science and engineering, one of my inspirations to study science and engineering, certainly. And revitalizing space science and space exploration alongside new challenges for science and technology for clean energy, better health, and innovation for economic development and growth can do this for us again. We can inspire a new generation with these major issues to which science and technology have so much to contribute.

But it's not just about science, not just about exploration, not just about inspiration. It's about a lot of more nitty gritty things-- infrastructure, military and civil satellite communications, military and civil geopositioning, the efficiency, capacity, and safety of the air transport system, earth observation and national security, tracking capabilities and activities of potential adversaries, arms control and nonproliferation monitoring and verification, early warning, battle management. The other side of earth observation-- civil and multi-purpose uses of space for observing the earth, weather forecasting, storm tracking, monitoring the atmosphere, oceans, vegetation, and transitions in land use under climate change and other influences-- immensely important.

Spin-offs into other domains of the economy, health care, environment, and security-- and here I offer a quote from President Obama's speech to the National Academy of Sciences on April 27th where he talked about the spin-offs from the Apollo program. To those of you who have not read that speech by President Obama at the end of April at the Academy, I invite you to do so. It's on the White House website. It's on the National Academy website, really, an extraordinary speech talking about the importance and relevance of science and technology to the challenges we face today and emphasizing, among other things, the enormous importance of fundamental research even when nobody knows where it's going.

This brings me to President Obama's initial initiatives in the science and technology domain. I'll start with priorities reflected in his rhetoric since I've just shown you a quote from one of his speeches. He has put science and technology front and center in his campaign, in his inauguration speech, in his speech to the joint session of Congress, in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences, even in his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo, where he rolled out a number of initiatives for expanded science and technology cooperation with Muslim majority countries. His priorities have been reflected in his appointments. Seven members of the National Academy of Sciences are in top positions in his administration. I suspect that has never happened before.

A Nobel Laureate in physics leading the Department of Energy. One of the world's leading marine biologists leading NOAA. A CTO and CIO, chief technology officer and chief information officer, in the executive branch for the first time. His priorities have also been reflected in his budget.

Science got an enormous boost in the stimulus recovery package formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, ARRA, and in the FY2009 omnibus and the FY2010 budget, NIH, NIST, NOAA, DoD basic research, DOE science, all getting major boost. In some, 2009-2010 are the highest federal research spending in history. Tens of billions more were in the stimulus for information technology, transportation infrastructure, applied energy technology. The ARRA and the FY2010 budget added something over 2 billion dollars to NASA. I'll come back to that later.

Priorities are also reflected in budget goals. Clean energy and energy efficiency are targeted to get $150 billion over 10 years, $15 billion a year, an enormous boost in that domain. And in the National Academy speech, the President announced the goal for national investment in R&D, public and private combined, to reach and exceed 3% of GDP, a level it has never achieved. At the height of the Space Race, it got to 2.9% of GDP.

Priorities have also been reflected in Presidential events. This is the President hooked up by video link to the astronauts on the International Space Station. The kids in the background are middle school science students from around the DC area. Next to me is Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican from Texas, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Transportation, and Science.

And you can see by the smile on the President's face that he's enjoying this. This is in the Roosevelt Room in the White House, the Discovery astronauts with their colleagues on the International Space Station. He has talked also to the Atlantis astronauts while they were still in orbit. He welcomed the Discovery astronauts after they got back for an animated and energetic conversation in the Oval Office. He is immensely interested in and excited about space. And he is immensely excited by getting kids interested in space, again, as you can see in that last picture.

But the administration has done more still in science and technology. Very early in his term, instructed my office to prepare new guidelines for across the executive branch on scientific integrity. There will be no more altering of scientists' conclusions by political minders, either at NASA or anywhere else in the executive branch. The Visa MANTIS procedures have been substantially revised. This was effective a week ago, Friday.

There was an article in the New York Times about it. But it considerably understated what has actually been done. There's been a substantial modification of procedures, which is going to drastically reduce both the backlog and the wait time for visas for graduate students, postdocs, and research scientists and professors in science and technology.

STEM education-- significant amounts of the recovery package money for education is going to go to science lab, science teacher training. We're going to restore space, science, and technology and establish clean energy as sources of inspiration and sources of learning. There is a new effort already named Re-energized, into which the Department of Energy and NSF are putting substantial funds to get that done.

Let me turn to some of the issues that the space program faces. And you all in this audience, most of you at least know already what these issues are without my listing them. There is a disparity between vision and budget and an associated gap in the capacity of the United States to put US astronauts into space on US launchers. The last President articulated a grand vision for returning Americans to the Moon and going to Mars but without providing budgets to match. The president never requested and the Congress never provided the budgets that would enable serious pursuit of that vision.

The attempt to deal with the mismatch stretched stressed budgets all across NASA but still without finding enough money to implement the vision. And now we face a gap of five years or more between the end of shuttle operations scheduled at the end of 2010 and the availability of a successor capability in the Constellation program to put US astronauts in space with US launchers.

We have both fragility and gaps in the earth observation satellite fleet. The national polar orbiting Earth observation satellite series in post, which is a joint venture of NASA, NOAA, and the Department of Defense, is far behind schedule and over budget due in part to poor coordination and cooperation among those agencies. This problem threatens the quality of our long range weather forecasts and our hurricane tracking, among other things. The Landsat earth observation satellite series is in fragile condition with failed instruments, the remaining satellites operating beyond their intended life and gaps impending. This threatens the continuity of climate and vegetation monitoring data sets that are extremely important for understanding what's happening on planet Earth.

And there are issues for the aeronautics program. Aeronautics research has long suffered in NASA from inadequate budgets, above all recently. And that has had impacts on the pace of advances needed to modernize our antiquated air traffic control system, said impacts on research to further improve fuel efficiency and reduce the noise of Civil Aviation aircraft, impacts on understanding the intersection and envelopes of fuel burn, air pollution, and noise taken together. Look for a moment at the air traffic control issue.

The costs of congestion and delays in the US Civil aviation system currently have been estimated at figures ranging from $10 to $40 billion a year. The $10 billion figure is from the Department of Transportation. The $40 billion figure is from the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress.

The use of non-state of the art tracking and communication technologies is contributing to congestion as well as to fuel inefficient routing and fuel waste in holding and taxiing. It's also a safety issue, of course. And in the face of all of this, US Civil Air traffic is forecasted to increase as much as two-fold by 2025.

If you look at the energy environment issue-- my advertised topic for today, I finally get to it for a moment-- this is a diagram. A little hard to read, I'm sure in most of the room. We call this in the energy business a spaghetti diagram. It tells you what the flow from sources to end uses is in the petroleum liquids sector of the US energy economy for 2007. The width of the arrows represents the magnitude of the flow.

The key point is that jet fuel in 2007, the fuel for the civil aviation industry as well for the military, about 1.6 million barrels a day. Of that, 1.2, 1.3 is civil aviation. The rest is military. That compares to a considerably larger number in motor gasoline, over 9 million barrels a day. Total US imports for comparison-- about 12 million barrels a day.

The oil consumption then is not a large fraction of the total. But it's not insignificant either. US oil consumption going into jet fuel is in the range of Prudhoe Bay and its peak production just as a comparison for you. And of course, it's already suggested the growth potential in aviation is large. In the United States and worldwide, aviation's contributions to total greenhouse gas emissions measured in terms of global warming potential is in the range of 5% the total. Again, not dominant, but not insignificant either, and it is forecasted to grow substantially.

If you look at the opportunities for dealing both with the energy use, oil dependence, and environmental impact dimension of this, obviously, one leverage point is the fuel economy of the aircraft, how well do they do in terms of energy use per revenue passenger mile. That's the units in this diagram. Again, a little hard to read, but it starts at 1965 on the left and goes to 2025 on the right. And the dotted line up the middle is the year 2000, which was when this study was done with the end of the historical data and the beginning of the forecasts.

The upper dark line on the left is the US fleet average at actual load factor the line at the bottom is the US fleet average at the 2000 load factor of 0.72. And the individual dots are different aircraft that came into use in the years indicating. Crucial thing here is summarized at the bottom.

In the late 1960s, the typical fuel economy for civil jet aircraft was three to four megajoules per revenue passenger kilometer. By 2025, we expected to be a fourth to a third of that, 1 megajoule per revenue passenger kilometer. This is immense progress in increasing the efficiency of jet aircraft.

And somewhat comparable progress has been made in reducing the noise from civil aircraft, which has been very important. Further reductions in specific fuel burn are desirable and expected. They should be accelerated.

But interestingly, the cost of emissions permits under a cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gases is going to add only modestly to the incentives for doing that. It is quite likely that when a cap-and-trade system goes into effect, probably in 2012 if we manage to pass out of the Congress this year, the cap-and-trade legislation currently embodied in the Waxman Markey bill, it's unlikely for some years to come that the permit price will go over about $30 per ton of carbon dioxide. That's $110 per ton of contained carbon.

And that only translates to about a $0.30 gallon. Again, that's not negligible. But it's probably not as important to the airlines as the bigger fluctuations that occur in the price of fuel in the global oil market.

Coal to liquids, tar sands, oil shale could all help with our oil import dependence. But without carbon dioxide capture and sequestration, those options for alternative fuels for jet aircraft actually make climate change worse. They increase by a substantial margin the total greenhouse gas emissions per liter of fuel in the airplane.

And of course, the motor vehicle solutions for reducing mobile greenhouse gas emissions-- plug-in hybrids, pure electric cars, hydrogen vehicles-- either don't work at all for aircraft or they require radical aircraft redesign as in the case, say, of a hydrogen fueled aircraft. This means that the main short and mid-term focus for reducing aircraft greenhouse gas emissions beyond what improved fuel economy can achieve has to be converting sustainably grown biomass to something that's, essentially, the equivalent of kerosene.

The currently most promising way to do this is Fischer-Tropsch liquids produced from cellulosic biomass. This is a technology that basically works. We know how to do it. It's been done for years on a small scale. But we need substantially more research and development on the compatibility of these fuels mixed with conventional jet fuel on their emissions characteristics, engine performance, and so on.

Let me turn, now, to what's being done on these problems in the aerospace domain. On the aeronautics side, NextGen, the Next Generation Air Transportation System, a public private partnership to transform US civil aviation by 2025. It was initiated by Congress in 2003, in the last administration, through an act of Congress called VISION 100, the Century of Aviation Reauthorization Act.

It's led by the Department of Transportation and the FAA, with participation by NASA, DoD, Department of Homeland Security, NOAA, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which I direct. It's managed by a Joint Planning and Development Office and the NextGen Senior Policy Committee, on which I sit.

It has a number of interesting features in the air traffic control domain, Automatic Dependent Surveillance and Broadcast-- which is going to enable both pilots and controllers to see the same real time displays of air traffic, which should substantially improve safety while increasing system capacity-- System Wide Information Management-- has the wonderful acronym SWIM-- to reduce redundancy and facilitate information sharing, and NextGen Data Communications Technologies that are going to allow for a much better exchange of all kinds of information between pilots and controllers, and as a result, undoubtedly, increase the productivity, capacity, and safety of our Civil Air system.

We have a National Aeronautics R&D Policy, since 2006, that was produced by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science and Technology Council, which is an inter-agency body which OSTP organizes with the deputy heads of the various relevant cabinet agencies and other executive branch agencies. That R&D policy enunciates overall goals, including increased efficiency, fuel availability, and environmental protection. And it was made official policy by an executive order in the last administration as a guide to aero R&D efforts through 2020.

Going with it, and materializing in the next year, in 2007, a national plan for Aeronautics R&D and related infrastructure. That included specific goals, mostly numerical, versus time for engine efficiency improvements, alternative fuels, emissions, and noise.

The FAA has an Aviation Climate Change Research Initiative organized under NextGen to advance, mostly, these same goals-- cleaner, quieter, more efficient aircraft technologies, and the development and demonstration of alternative fuels for aviation.

It is being supported by something called the Continuous Lower Energy Emissions and Noise. Again, another wonderful acronym, CLEEN-- misspelled, but "clean," nonetheless. It's a partnership of FAA with industry. Another initiative in there is the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative, which is public, private, and indeed international in the partnerships involved.

NASA has got something called the Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project, authorized in the 2010 budget, a new effort focused on both aircraft technologies and on aviation operations to get at some of these issues.

What's being done in space? I mentioned before that to begin addressing NASA's budget problems, $2 plus billion got added to the FY09 and FY10 budgets in the Recovery Act and the FY2010 request. The trick is how to finish addressing the budget problems.

A little over a week ago-- a couple of weeks ago, now, retired general and former astronaut, Charlie Bolden, was nominated by the president as the new head of NASA. There was a lot of complaining out there that there wasn't a new NASA head.

This was taken by some to be an indication that the administration wasn't really interested in space. Not true. For a whole variety of reasons, the process of selecting a new NASA administrator proved to be more time consuming than expected. But we were working at it all along.

I spent a lot of time with Charlie Bolden in the initial interviews, and then in meetings with him and the president. And I would say that he clearly understands the challenges of budget and rebalancing that NASA faces, including balancing space versus aeronautics, balancing human versus robotic exploration, balancing exploration versus science, and balancing looking up versus looking down.

He's got a big challenge ahead of him. He knows it. But he has a deep understanding of the program, deep experience with the program. And I think he's going to make an excellent NASA administrator.

There is-- this has already been mentioned-- a new blue ribbon panel, chaired by Norm Augustine, that will report to me, the NASA administrator, and the president, by August, on the options for the human spaceflight program going forward.

Questions that that panel will be addressing is, can we figure out any way to reduce the gap in the capacity of the United States to put astronauts in space on our own launchers? It will look at what the options might be for extending the life of the International Space Station beyond 2016.

It seems a terrible waste for everybody to have put the immense amount of money that's gone into that space station and then not get the full scientific value out of it. The Panel will look at how we think about the timetable for missions beyond low Earth orbit, given the likely budget constraints going forward, and some more.

The Earth-observing satellite issues are also starting to get addressed. My office is convening the principals from NASA, NOAA, and indeed the Commerce Secretary, as well, and the Department of Defense, to address the cooperation and coordination problems that have plagued that program. And I'm optimistic that we're going to turn that around.

We're undertaking reviews of LandSat and the other Earth-observing satellite systems across a wide variety of agencies, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Science and Technology Council, NASA, NOAA, and the National Academies all looking at that.

But here's where we end up. We end up with a continuing federal budget challenge that is going to be extraordinarily difficult. What you're looking at here is FY2008 through FY2014. The big budget categories, many of them are nondiscretionary. Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and of course, a big chunk of Department of Defense.

The amount leftover for other discretionary, out of which the space program and aeronautics have to come, is not very big and looking pretty flat. So it is really going to be a huge challenge to get everything done we need to get done and want to get done in this domain in this budget situation.

My closing observation is that President Obama has been very clear that, in order to succeed in this challenging environment, we're going to need all hands on deck. What that means is that the science and technology community and its aerospace component are going to have to come together.

They're going to have to come together across government, industry, universities, the academies of science and engineering, other professional societies, and NGOs, and across countries in new levels of commitment, communication, and cooperation. I would say that giant leaps are going to require giant partnerships. Thank you, very much.

[APPLAUSE]

WAITZ: Thank you, John. We're going to take just three questions from the floor for Dr. Holdren. And then I will invite our panelists up for a broader discussion. Please come to the mics, if you can.

HOLDREN: We have mics in the two center aisles.

AUDIENCE: Einstein sent Roosevelt a letter in the late '30s. And by the early '30s and with war threatening, we were able to go ahead on fishing and produce a whole city in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which I happened to be in on that, and other facilities in Columbia, and later for the bomb.

And why is it-- why don't we have the leadership now to do something like this? Because a case can be, I think, made that the threat that the United States now in the energy crisis is comparable, or somewhat comparable, or maybe even worse, than it was in World War II.

And yet, that's not happening. I know in Livermore, they they were supposed to fire off the 192 lasers last week? I haven't seen anything of that. But why don't we have that pressure?

HOLDREN: Well the first thing I would say is I would agree with your tentative proposition that the energy challenge is more difficult than the challenge of building the first atomic bomb. It's more difficult than the challenge of going to the moon. And the frequently heard remark that if we could build the atomic bomb, if we could go to the moon, we can certainly solve the energy challenge, in a way, might be right. But it understates the magnitude of the energy challenge.

The president, in proposing $150 billion over 10 years to start to address the energy challenge in the science and technology domain in a more responsible way is a recognition of the magnitude of the problem. I should tell you, by comparison, that what the United States has been spending on Federal Energy R&D-- the total fission, fusion, fossil, renewables, transmission, and distribution, the whole works, and fundamental energy science-- has been about $3 billion a year.

So by proposing an additional $15 billion a year, he's proposing to increase the US investment in Federal Energy research development and demonstration by a factor of 6. I mean, this is a gigantic increase, and a response that most folks think is in the ballpark of what we would need to increase the pace of innovation in energy technology to the place it would have to be to give us the options we're going to need to address this array of challenges in a cost effective way. So I think this president does understand how big this challenge is. And the question is, will the Congress let us have the money? Yes.

AUDIENCE: I'm Allan Klumpp, MIT of '59 and contributor to the Apollo program and other space programs, but working recently on energy and the environment problems. Have you considered the possibility of hydrogen powered airplanes that follow, essentially, a recent Boeing design that have a fuel tank in the front and rear of the passenger compartment because of the much greater volume needed to power airplanes by hydrogen. And the hydrogen could be transported from solar or wind farms to the airports using the star super cables, which conduct electricity superconductivity, on the outside, where the cables are cooled by transporting liquid hydrogen at near 0 temperatures on the inside.

HOLDREN: The short answer is Yes. We're looking at everything, believe me. And I get about six interesting proposals a day across the transom in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. We look at them all.

What I meant by saying that powering aircraft with hydrogen requires radical redesign applies to that case.

AUDIENCE: Yes, it does.

HOLDREN: That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. But it means it's likely to take longer. And we need to do a good many other things in the meantime. But I think the possibilities, ultimately, of hydrogen powered aircraft are very interesting.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. I figure that my grandchildren's grandchildren will be able to fly on those airplanes without emissions anywhere in the world.

HOLDREN: Third one. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, hi. My name is Peter [INAUDIBLE]. I'm with the Smithsonian. This may go against the general way that space is done, or just the plans, that the way people think. But I have always thought to improve the innovation, we need to shrink the of the projects, make many, many, many more for the same amount of money.

But we also need to reduce the emphasis on success. Obviously, I'm not talking about dealing with human involved flight. But space, robotic kinds of things, there's always this emphasis on near 100%.

So that drives the price up. It also drives the time out. And I was kind of shocked to see that the Gemini program put up so many flights in two years.

Yesterday, I was asked how quickly I could do anything in space. And I said, well, minimum, maybe three years. I was kind of chuckling to myself that we had, I don't know, 10 Gemini flights in 2 years. I don't think I could do that now, especially with the rules.

So I was thinking that something along the lines of the nascent CubeSat program, which is much, much, too small, but aims as working on things that are, maybe three or four times that size, but in the range of the $4 to $6 million, and maybe have 10 or 15 of those a year. And you'd really see an explosion in the innovation out of science and engineering.

Obviously, that's not going to be the up lookers that you're talking about. Because those have to be extraordinarily large. But down lookers and in situ, and space weather, and things like that, all could be done in that kind of range.

HOLDREN: Yeah, I am aware of thinking of this sort that is going on in looking at the options for getting better at looking down in more cost effective ways. Certainly, that is something that is under consideration. I think there's some interesting ideas in there.

WAITZ: Good. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you, very much. I'd like to introduce our panelists who all work in this domain of air transportation, and environment, and energy. First, Mike Bair is Vice President of Business Strategy and Marketing for Boeing commercial airplanes. He leads their strategic business planning and marketing activities. He was also the lead for the team that developed the new 787 Dreamliner and was responsible for all aspects of that airplane program. Among his several degrees, one of them is an MBA from our Sloan School of Management.

Seated next to him is Dave Danielson. Dave started, I think, just two months ago-- is that right? Two months ago as one of the founding program managers within the US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Project Agency dash Energy-- ARPA-E, a new agency designed to accelerate the development of transformational high-risk, high-reward new energy technologies.

Prior to that he was in the business of being a venture capitalist working on clean energy. And prior to that, he's, I think, best known here at MIT as the founder of our MIT Energy Club, which was something that started from an idea and very rapidly grew to include about 1,000 people involved in that. So it's sort of a dramatic level of interest.

Seated next to Dave is Alan Epstein Alan is currently Vice President of Technology and Environment for Pratt and Whitney. He's responsible for their long-term technology and environmental strategy. He's also the RC Maclaurin Professor in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. He has a long history of working on problems of aerospace propulsion, power, and energy. He also, as a student, worked on the Apollo 11 landing at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory as an electronics technician. So he was in very early in that program.

Seated next to Alan is Dr. Lourdes Maurice. Lourdes is the Chief Scientific and Technical Advisor for Environment within the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Environment and Energy. She's their primary technical lead for all basic and exploratory research, advanced technology development that focuses on environmental impacts, as well as alternative fuels. She also manages a program that I lead, so I've had the benefit of having a very close collaboration with her for seven years.

So this is a very talented set of panelists. And I'm going to ask them each a question, just to get things started. And then we'll open it up for all of the panelists for questions from the floor.

So first, Mike, if I may start with you-- given what you've heard today about Apollo and air transportation, energy, environment, and some of the challenges that John listed here, what do you take as the important lessons? And what role can big commercial aerospace play in providing some solutions?

BAIR: Very good. Actually, I get to reinforce some of the comments that John made, which is always great, as opposed to arguing with people. First, just a couple of quick facts.

8% of the world's GDP, 30 million jobs, 40% by value of all the exports depend upon commercial air transportation. So you throw those numbers in and all the intangible things that air transportation brings to the world. So the fact that we get to choose in the winter something other than oranges for fruit and cabbage for vegetables, the fact that we can gather people like this together from around the world, around the country, to have these sort of conferences, the fact that people can travel to different countries and realize that we're more alike than different, all dependent upon air transportation. So clearly a huge and very important industry to the United States and to the world in general. So it's obviously to our best interests to do everything we can to further the development of this industry.

The industry has had a wonderful history. It grows faster than GDP. That's a journey that we are really, really interested in continuing. But we have two really major challenges that we face in this industry. One is economics.

As a capital goods provider to the airlines, it's not lost on us that they have failed to return their cost to capital over their entire history. Not a good thing. So that needs to be addressed. It's an awful business model.

Second one is obviously our carbon footprint. And as was indicated, we're small single digits of the problem. I think if you were to ask us probably as an industry and certainly my company maybe three or four years ago what we should do, our response would have been, leave us alone. And go pick on the people that really matter.

Clearly, that's not a constructive approach. And we've decided over the last few years that we need to be far more responsible in what we do in terms of addressing our contribution to global climate change, especially given the fact that we are going to continue to grow faster than GDP. So we are not going to be a smaller part of the problem, but a bigger part of the problem, unless we do something.

So those are two big problems. The good news for us is that, unlike most of the issues that we all work at, the answers to these two problems are not compromises between them, because the answers for one tend to support the other. So we've got things that we can do to affect change in both of this regard. And what we do in one will help the other side.

And we're really focused on three major thrusts. And they were mentioned by John. First is fuel efficiency. We've had a great ride. Since the start of the jet age, we've improved the fuel efficiency of the airplanes some 70%. Pretty remarkable.

But with jet airplanes, that's 50 years worth of technology. With aluminum airplanes, that's 70 years worth of technology. We're kind of running out ideas. And that's really what the 787 is all about. It's a step function change. 20% improvement over what we can do today is what the 787 represents.