Summary of 2008 Technology / Public Policy Project Courses

With the rising concerns of climate change and other environmental problems, campus sustainability has become an important issue for most U.S. universities, namely in what concerns greenhouse gas direct and indirect emissions. This concern is justified, since education related buildings alone accounts for 12% of the electricity consumption from the U.S. Commercial sector.

Several universities have already pledges and specific goals for emissions reductions or more broad sustainability targets, but much of those lack coherent analysis to show which strategies are more effective at reducing emissions and/or making campus more sustainable. There is also a lack of knowledge on which strategies might be more cost-effective to achieve those specific goals.

The broad goals of the "Sustainable Campuses" project are the following:

• to develop a streamlined and transparent method for assessing the carbon footprint of colleges and universities by using publicly available data;
• to develop fair metrics for campus carbon footprint comparisons, accounting for structural differences between universities (as climate, campus size, type of university, etc);
• to assess which other environmental impacts from campuses should deserve some attention while defining sustainability goals;
• to provide a generalized framework for evaluating mitigation strategies for campuses;
• to understand student perceptions on different mitigation strategies and policy designs to move towards more sustainable campuses.

We further assess the set of mitigation strategies what would make sense for CMU depending on the target reductions chosen and the size of investment and provide specific recommendation for that case.

If you have any questions, please contact Scott at hsm@cmu.edu. If you schedule permits, please plan to attend the presentations.

The commercial spaceflight industry has long consisted of large aerospace firms funded primarily by government contracts. In recent years, however, a new set of small private firms, funded in large part by venture capital, has entered the commercial space flight market. These entrepreneurs, typified by Elon Musk's SpaceX and Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, are building radically innovative craft for a variety of orbital and sub-orbital missions. Their goal is to make access to space cheap and reliable enough to attract a variety of new users, and turn a profit in the process. Services envisioned by these ventures include suborbital manned flights (adventure travel, space diving), platforms for research requiring microgravity or high speed conditions, microsatellite orbit insertion, express package delivery, remote sensing, military missions, supplying the International Space Station and other orbiting modules, and advertising. The Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST) is charged with both promoting the development of these "new space" activities and regulating their safety.

The project will address the technological, economic, safety, legal, international dimensions of the New Space phenomenon. Specific questions that the project could explore include:

• Technologies. What types of New Space technologies exist today and are likely to be available in the coming decade? What new space services will be enabled by these emerging technologies?
• Economics. What is the demand for each of the new space services enabled by New Space technologies? What are the costs of these technologies? Can new space firms turn a profit? What role can/does insurance play in spreading risk for new space systems?
• Safety. What are the risks of New Space activities to workers, flyers, and the public? How should safety be regulated?
• Spaceport siting. What are fair public processes for siting new space ports, given the risks that such facilities would impose on surrounding populations.
• Informed consent. For adventure travel, what constitutes informed consent for passengers? Should children be permitted to fly?
• Space debris. How might New Space activities affect risks from orbital debris? Are existing standards for managing orbital debris adequate to handle greatly increased traffic to orbit?
• Technology policy. What policies, if any, should the federal government pursue to promote development of New Space technologies? Examples of possible policies include direct funding of technology development, insurance subsidies, and partnerships with government space programs.

If you have any questions on the additional information, please contact Keith at florig@cmu.edu.