The Bush Administration signed an agreement with Brazil (which also signed an agreement with Japan last week) on standardizing ethanol definitions and pledging an alliance on technological developments related to ethanol production. Combined, the U.S. and Brazil produce 70% of the world’s ethanol, with the U.S. producing about 18 billion liters per year and Brazil 17 billion. Brazil gets its ethanol from sugar cane and is able to do it cheaper than the U.S. To protect corn farmers, Brazilian ethanol has a 54 cent/gallon U.S. tariff at least through 2009. If the United States is to decrease gasoline consumption by 20% in ten years, a goal put forth by Bush earlier this year, that would require 132 billion liters of ethanol if there are not simultaneous savings through efficiency or using Hydrogen, for example. Even with Brazil’s current rate of expanding ethanol production of a new plant every month for the next six years, that only increases their number of plants by about 25%.

My favorite story on the signing of the cooperation agreement between Brazil and the U.S. is this one from ABC News Online, where, quoting Bush, they couldn’t resist the temptation to point out his misuse of English with the editorial “sic”:

“We all feel incumbent (sic) to be good stewards of the environment – and it just so happens that ethanol and biodiesel will help improve the quality of the environment in our respective companies and so I’m very much in favour of promoting the technologies that will allow ethanol an biodiesel to remain competitive,” he said.

I also liked Bush’s incisive grasp of the fundamentals of the problem exemplified in this statement: “As we diversify away from the use of gasolene by using ethanol we’re really diversifying away from oil.” Really! Gasoline comes from oil?

The spelling of gasoline above is the Australian spelling since this was quoted on the Australian ABC News Online web site.

It was more than 23 years ago that U.S. President Ronald Reagan directed NASA to build a space station within a decade. It will take another three or four years before NASA pronounces the space station complete. Today John Glenn lamented that we will be losing a major investment in the space station.

I have mixed feelings about the space station. In 1992, when its future was in doubt (and no hardware had been launched, 8 years after the initial directive to NASA), I wrote Congress against the space station arguing that a return to the Moon would be a more sensible effort for the manned space program. The Moon has some major advantages over the space station as a permanent manned outpost, the most obvious one being that it is permanent itself. Low-Earth-orbit, which is only marginally easier to access than the Moon, has the disadvantage of the Earth’s upper atmosphere which causes orbits to decay. Furthermore, the infrastructure of an orbiting space station is not exactly rock solid, while the Moon is exactly rock solid.

At any rate, the congressional debate on space station funding in Congress in 1992 was cast in terms of support for the space program as a whole, rather than the space station versus some other ambitious manned space program. Such initiatives obviously require presidential backing. Although Bush the 41st had proposed human exploration of Mars, it did not have the specificity or urgency of Bush the 43rd’s exploration initiative of January 2004. So the space station got the go-ahead, and now there actually is something up there. Along the way, however, plans for a permanent crew of six were dumped when no one felt like paying for a new lifeboat vehicle that would guarantee a safe return to Earth for six residents of the station. The lifeboat for the space station is therefore a Soyuz capsule with a capacity of three. One problem with this is that it takes almost all the manpower of three astronauts just to take care of space station housekeeping and maintenance, leaving virtually no astronaut time available for scientific research, ostensibly the reason for building the thing in the first place.

A second problem is that once the station started to take form and Bush 43 stated that we would instead go to the Moon, all money for research on the space station was redirected to the new exploration initiative. Here is where my mixed feelings enter the picture. Once it was clear that we were going to build a space station I decided I might as well take advantage of it. I received significant funding for two microgravity research projects, one on the origin of planets and one on the behavior of dust in the solar system, which seemed to be heading toward experiments on the space station. However, the lack of funding, access to the station (virtually every pound of payload going to the space station is allocated to hardware to build the thing), and crew time resulted in cancellation of those projects and indeed the entire microgravity research program.

So, in the end, as Senator Glenn points out, we will have invested some tens of billions of dollars in a giant orbiting infrastructure and then direct our attention to a new giant piece of infrastructure, namely the Orion/Ares system for going back to the Moon. What to do with the Space Station? It basically looks like ESA and the other international partners are going to inherit it, so the scientific utilization of the facility, as well as the continued maintenance, may well become primarily a European and Russian operation. Europe has recently expressed renewed interest in developing the capability to launch astronauts, and the space station may be an attractive orbiting asset for them. I have European colleagues still working on experiments that they hope to fly to the station in the not-too-distant future. Here’s hoping they get the chance.

There is an idea in the community of space scientists that the manned space program is a budgetary adversary to less-costly and more scientifically productive unmanned missions. I’ve supported the manned space program, and my colleague Carolyn Porco, head of the Cassini imaging team, has an Op-Ed in the New York Times that captures a lot of the reasons I do support it.

For the latest sign of the apocalypse, a consortium of power companies is actually calling for curbs on carbon emission absent any federal regulatory requirement to do so. Can our government really be that so retarded in addressing CO2 emissions that even the power companies think it’s gone too far? Not entirely. As reported in this article in the New York Times, the likely explanation is that they are trying to head off even more stringent requirements that might be in the offing after the 2008 elections. Said Peter Darbee, Chief Executive and PG&E in California, “a future political climate, after 2008, might produce solutions less sensitive to the needs of business.” The proposed carbon emission limit would see emissions drop below current levels in ten years. It’s a start. Let’s see if the government has the ability to act on this issue in a timely way.

One of the consequences of the last congress’s inability to do anything is that NASA is operating in fiscal year 2007 under a continuing resolution. This means that it is able to spend on each program the lesser of what it spent last year or what it proposed to spend this year. With costs ramping up to develop the Orion vehicle and the Ares launch vehicles, and with the so-called Vision for Space Exploration the top priority of the agency, money for those programs will now have to come from other programs. NASA’s earth science programs, already hurting, may well get additional cuts. NASA was looking at increase of more than half a billion dollars, so that’s how much has to be recouped from other programs to cover the Vision developments. I don’t know if this will have any ramifications for the approval of Cassini’s extended mission or not, but I’ve already heard rumors about cancellations of atmospheric science programs.