0191-9O67/80/030247-05SO2.00/0 Copyright 0 1980 SUNSAT Energy Council A HISTORICAL ANALOGY: RAILROADS AND THE SPS* THAD M. PUGH Student Rice University The time is the middle 1800s; the country is the United States. Large amounts of resources, both for internal consumption and export, are available in an expanding frontier region. The natural wealth consists of fertile land for agriculture and grazing, mineral deposits, and forests for lumber. However, insufficient means of transporting goods and people across difficult terrain, especially under inclement weather conditions, makes the integration of this wealth into the national commerce unpredictable. Thus the economy is hindered by an uncertainty of supply (1). Enter the railroads and the steam locomotives, culminating a series of technological developments whose effects on American life were of much wider range than 19th century man could anticipate. The time is the late 20th century, the country is still the United States. International politics and the rapid depletion of fossil fuels are weakening a once-strong economy by robbing it of the certainty of abundant supply on which it was nurtured. Within the frontier of space are available many resources which could sustain the growth of the economy. Among these many resources is energy in the form of solar radiation; however, there is no way to transport this resource to earth in a useable form. Enter microwave and satellite technology in a new concept, the Solar Power Satellite (SPS). The purpose of the descriptions above is to establish grounds for an analogy between the SPS and railroads. Much of the material presented in this paper is adapted from a collection of essays edited by B. Mazlish and published in 1964, entitled The Railroad and The Space Program; An Exploration in Historical Analogy (2). The contributors to that volume treat in depth arguments which are only indicated here. Their purpose in constructing the analogy is, according to Mazlish, “to extract, if possible, generalizations that, in the form of hypotheses, can be applied to other cases” (2). Mazlish himself makes a convincing case for the validity of the analogy between the railroads and the space program. That validity is stronger in many respects when the SPS is substituted for the space program in the analogy. Both the SPS and the railroads may be considered what Mazlish calls “social inventions.” They are not isolated means of attaining goals, but instead are inseparable from secondary consequences which deserve consideration. Those consequences are technological, economic, sociological, political and intellectual. In these respects is found the commensurability of the two inventions. The problems which each invention is implemented to solve are of the same *This is a term paper written for a course: “Space Colonies” given at Rice University, Fall Semester 1979.
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