Solar Power Satellites by 2020?

soulfuct writes: "Finally, a national space agency has budgeted funds for a test project to convert solar energy in space to microwaves and beam them down to Earth. They plan to deploy this for use by 2020. Kudos go to the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) and Kyoto University for being the first to realistically act on the idea of solar power satellites promoted decades ago by Gerard K O'Neill in his book The High Frontier. With all of Bush's rhetoric about an energy crisis, why doesn't NASA latch onto this idea to secure more funding?"

Comments

Re:damn and i voted Gore

[Brento]

Surely the oil companies and their presidential puppet will not stand for this blasphemy.

I know I'm going to get marked as a troll or flamebait for this, but here it comes anyway: Clinton had two terms in office, and Mr. "I Invented The Internet" Gore did what for the California energy crisis? The power problems in California didn't suddenly begin in January when Bush took office - they've been brewing for years. Never heard of Gore doing anything about it, did you? Hmm, don't hear Gore speaking up too much about that energy crisis, do you? Wonder why that is? I don't.

Re:Ehh.. Am I the only one who remembers SimCity2k

[soulfuct]

(1)By the time it's "mostly harmless," won't it be sufficiently low-energy to be completely useless?

The atomspheric energy absorption is not high enough to make this inefficient and does not really contribute to making this *mostly harmless*. The reason it becomes *mostly harmless* is due to dispersion of the beam over a large area. So, a larger antenna is used to pick it up.

People need to check out the solar power satellites link cited in the post. The safety details have been addressed long ago.

Frying cities..

[nightfire-unique]

Ok everyone, relax. :)

There is no possibility a city will get fried by microwave energy. First of all, any system beaming energy from orbit would use a laser based targetting system. There would be an electrical cutoff if the laser failed to reach the satellite along the return path (which would presumably not be software controllable). So, if the microwave emitter lost the laser "signal" from earth (which would presumably only be receivable on a perpendicular to the ground) by drifting off course or because of a mechanical failure, the microwave emitter would shut down.

Second of all - the microwave beam would not be wide enough to cause mass destruction anyway. The waves would be directed so that it bathes a small target on the ground (less than 10 feet in diameter). So even if the guidance cutoff failed and the satellite were to hit a city with microwaves, the damage would be fairly localized (imagine a disaster the scale of a 747 crashing into a neighborhood - not a nuclear or biological weapon event).

All in all I think this will be an interesting project. Best of luck to them.

--
All men are great
before declaring war

Slashed research

[dachshund]

With all of Bush's rhetoric about an energy crisis, why doesn't NASA latch onto this idea to secure more funding?"

For all of Bush's rhetoric, his budget has already slashed funding for alternative energy research. I think this particular idea would fall under the same axe. I'm not going to draw the obvious conclusion as to what his priorities really are.

Now, if we could bill these solar satellites as some sort of missile-defense...

Of course it's dangerous!

[WoefullyFat]

But then again, so are oil, coal, and nuclear power. Everytime there's a new tech advance posted here on Slashdot, 50 people reply to the story pointing out how deadly the new tech is. Imagine the replies to the post about Ford releasing the Model T: "So we're just going to let anyone that has $500 drive around some thousand pound chunk of metal powered by EXPLODING GASOLINE! No thanks, I'm sticking to horses!" All technology is dangerous. If you discount a new idea because it's possible to accidentally kill people with it, well, enjoy your cave.

Forget about this Star Trek solution...

[Waffle Iron]

Why spend billions on an expensive, fragile space-based solution? The billions would be better spent on a crash program to develop solar cells embedded in cheap plastic tarp. Use some ideas similar to those being developed for plastic display technology.

It wouldn't have to be especially efficient, just cheap. Unroll acres of the stuff directly onto the desert floor, or float it on the ocean. Maybe put it in the diamond-shape gaps between those circular irrigated crop fields out west.

My math estimates a few thousand square miles of 5% efficient (at 1% overall system efficiency) collectors would satisfy all our energy needs. (If you think that's too much area, imagine explaining how much area would be paved over in 2001 to a guy from the 19th century. It can be done.)

If this was treated like the Manhatten project, I'd bet they could get production started in 7 years or so. By contrast, in 7 years, NASA would still only be doing feasiblity studies on a space-based solution.