This just in from the hydrocarbon desk at Astronomy.com: Titan’s surface lakes and methane-ice-laden dune seas collectively hold hundreds of times Earth’s bounty of hydrocarbons (oil and gas). It’s a Texas oilman’s dream: hydrocarbons rain from the sky on Titan. To my mind, this could solve a lot of problems.
Planetary scientists have been competing with NASA’s fantastically expensive manned space program for decades. Word on the aerospace street is that the critically important sample-return mission to Mars was snuffed by the need to divert billions to NASA’s Constellation program — the program to build a heavy cargo lifter (Ares V) and crew launcher (Ares I), and crew vehicle (Orion) to replace the space shuttle and return to the Moon by 2020.
An artist's imagination of hydrocarbon pools with icy and rocky terrain on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Steven Hobbs/ESA
Cassini radar team member Ralph Lorenz of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and 15 colleagues reported the new estimate of Titan’s oil wealth January 29 in Geophysical Research Letters.
"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals," press releases quoted Lorenz. “This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan.”
Yeah, yeah. It’s all for science. Yada, yada. I’m down with that, but let’s make some money, baby!
What would you say if I told you we could easily finance the entire planetary exploration program, plus Constellation, plus the much-neglected program to monitor Earth’s climate and biosphere with satellites? There would even be enough left to relocate Astronomy magazine to, say, Miami Beach, Austin, or Hawaii. (For clearer skies with which to more effectively test-drive new telescopes, of course.)
All it would take is a strategic partnership with the oil and gas industry and NASA. The oil industry, after all, is positively swimming in oil. A vast, amazingly valuable pool of oil that netted the industry record billions in profits last year.
Exxon-Mobil alone industry made $39 billion in 2007. That’s just $111 million per day, $4.4 million per hour, or $73,000 per second. That kind of money could buy a lot of space suits!
Now, consider the costs of a few choice space missions:
Bring back a sample of the martian surface: about $1 billion
Total cost of the Cassini-Huygens mission: about $3.26 billion, including $1.4 billion for pre-launch development and $704 million for mission operations.
Regain human launch capability via the Constellation program and return to the Moon: $230 billion over 20 years.
See where I’m going with this?
At a balmy –290 °F (–179 °C), Titan is a far cry from the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. And it’s no place for humans. But there’s more money on Titan than in the Swiss bank accounts of the roughly 30,000 members of the Saudi royal family.
So, dream big, America. All we need to do is:
Establish a base robotically on Titan
Send an army of robotic oil workers to run the operation
Harvest the methane lakes. Talk about a giant sucking sound!
Form the methane into frozen balls and shoot it back to Earth orbit using an electromagnetic mass driver
Go up in a shuttle-like orbiter and grab the methane balls, bring them back to Earth, thaw them out, and burn them. Or bring them down in a space-elevator tube.
NASA still has the greatest aerospace brains in the business. I suggest a summit between the oil industry and the space industry.
On Saturday night, the entertainment after the banquet could be a rollout of the new Hummer IV Titan model: It’s so hydrocarbon hungry, it gets zero gas mileage. You just park it in front of your McMansion and start it up once in a while to impress the neighbors and be confident in your enhanced ability to leave the world a lousier place for your kids.
Meanwhile, the space program could go humming along for centuries. And all that Titan hydrocarbon money could pay for orbital sun shields, underground carbon-sequestration, and all kinds of other proposed geoengineering schemes to suck the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere due to burning all those Titan-ic hydrocarbons.