Franklin Chang Brought Costa Rica into the Space Age with Ad Astra.

As the world’s energy crisis escalates, the Costa Rica government has ramped up its efforts to find alternative sources to fuel the country’s 4+ million residents. Franklin Chang, national hero and famous astronaut, and his company Ad Astra Rocket, in looking for such a solution, has developed a way to convert Costa Rica’s trash into valuable energy.

Though Ad Astra Rocket is generally focused on space, its Liberia location is in charge of researching applications for plasma on Earth as well as other developments. Its most recent achievement, the conversion of trash into energy, creates a stable form of plasma, which can replace traditional combustibles into more earth-friendly ones.

Ad Astra Rocket’s core idea is to create a series of tubes and chambers throughout Costa rica, which will dissolve and disintegrate industrial waste, starting with that from hospitals and housing projects. Epitomizing the phrase, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” this waste will be transformed into their fundamental elements, their gases later being converted into electricity.

This process will kill two birds with one stone, helping Costa Rica to generate clean, inexpensive energy, while disposing of unwanted trash. Eventually, Chang and Ad Astra Rocket plan to convert almost all of the country’s trash into usable energy, helping any waste management problem disappear completely.

Though this may sound like a fictional, futuristic novel, it’s not. Similar projects are already being researched in the United States, Japan, and Taiwan. Costa Rica will be the first Latin American country to take the plunge, paving the way for other nations in similar situations.

The project decided to start with hospital waste because, as Chang says, the Caja de Seguro Social (the public health system) provides plenty of trash. However, in conjunction with Carlos Alvarado, from the Instituto Tecnológico, Chang determined that the company’s next step will be to convert most residual solids, like commercial waste, into energy, as well. As the project develops, more and more waste will be used.

Initial projections show that 16 tons of trash will generate one megawatt of energy. This may not sound so impressive, but when you consider that Costa Rica produces about 11,000 tons of trash each day, maximum production will reach about 685.6 megawatts of energy daily. That’s more than the 622 daily megawatts promised by the Diques hydroelectric plant in Buenos Aires de Puntarenas.

At first, the newly-produced energy will be sold to ICE, but eventually, it will be used to fuel its own energy production centers. And in 100 years, Chang imagines that each home will be equipped with miniature energy-conversion centers, throwing in their daily waste to keep up with their energy needs.

Though this may be the most current project, it is not the only clean energy project in the works for Ad Astra Rocket - they are looking into using solar power, as well. These projects are not only revolutionary, but are an ideal example of Costa Rica’s reputation as a Latin American and world leader in environmental conservation, working to find clean solutions to today’s dirty problems.

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Filed under: Costa Rica News on July 2nd, 2008