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NASA Abandons SimCIty Microwave Power Concept
TexasDex writes "Wired reports: The NASA Space Solar Power project--a method of collecting solar energy efficiently from space and beaming it down to earth--was canceled in early 2001 after enjoying intermittent attention from scientists. NASA officials cited a policy shift toward the International Space Station and the space shuttle program. But there is still hope for it yet. A conference this month in spain hopes to advance the cause, dispite the fact that there is no public funding available in the US for this project. Some even claim that microwave power is essential for farther explanation. Accordong to the folks at Maxis, Microwave power should be available around 2020, depending on which version of SimCity you play."
Sorry I don't get my info about the future from video games. I get them from flash-forwards in the Simpsons and occasionally Futurama.
Now maybe a private company can develop it for 2% of the cost and we'll have cheap, environmentally benign power.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
That measurement as compared to the expected mean time between failure of the orbital system would be a very important number to the reliability of such a system. If the MTBF was 5X, then it's golden; 1.5X not so good.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
Apart from SF movies, books and tv shows, can anyone suggest other technology predicted by video/computer games that we might actually see in the near future?
I'm still waiting for my robot maid, holiday on the moon and flying car. how about you?
Some even claim that microwave power is essential for farther explanation. Accordong to the folks at Maxis
For a spelling and typo checker.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
So when can we expect the Nuclear Fusion power plant?
Well, just point out that a 9GW focussed beam can take care of any banana republic in the world without sending troops abroad. You have 3 settings on your "mertilizer":
- low power - sterilize males, give it a few years and the problem in more or less "gone". Add to this that the strike will not be much noticed until 9 months...
- medium power - blind people. The retina is very sensitive to heating induced by microwaves, almost as sensitive as your testicles (modulus gender of course)
- deep fry - do I need to expand on this?
So, just tell Pentagon and you will have a grillion dollar funding yesterday already.
This concept was floating around when I was in High School before you could even buy a personal computer.
...folks at Maxis, Microwave power should be available around 2020, depending on which version of SimCity you play.
And they really *should* know, right? If you're a scientist and you're reading this, you'd better get started on Arco technology now, so it can be ready in time to send us all to Alpha Centauri when Earth is too polluted and crime-infested to control. In other news, I saw a copy of Sim City 3000 bundled with a bunch of other great games like Alpha Centauri for $20 CAD, and I was tempted to pick it up. I might just do that, when I'm finished with TOEE, in all its bug-ridden glory. I've since lost most of the games in the package, so it would be great to play them this summer while I wait for Doom 3, and of course winning the lottery to fund a system that can handle it.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Everyone knows that microwave energy is a waste of money. You're better off waiting for fusion energy anyways. There's no chance that the microwave will miss and start a fire either. And one or two of the things can power an entire city for 50 years with no pollution or anything.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
If some company actually does this, it will be the frst step towards making our own Dyson sphere :)
instead of spain?
Don't build it near a hospital, because the beam might miss and BOOM! Ah, SimCity 2000, what fun.
Spain should be capitalized. Only france does not require capitalization.
This account has been seized by the GNAA. That is all.
"Death beams from space, that can microwave a city if terrorists got control of it". . .
Someone needs to figure out a way to put a canard on a solar power station, and then Burt Rutan will build one inside of 10 years.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
If I'm reading this right, the concept of power beamed down to Earth from satellites is credited to the SimCity crew.
However, at least one version of this idea has occurred before; namely in the comic Flash Gordon. The episode was called "The Observer" (translated to Finnish and now back again to English).
All rites reversed 2010
It's a musical penis piercing. Accordong players need real skill.
The difference is that the microwave solar power project has probably been technologically possible since before a single line of Sim City was ever written, and economically possible for at least 10 years. I remember my dad talking about how designs were making their way around the science magazines in the 70's. He said the everyone really expected a test project up by the 80's. It obviously never happened. It is really silly not to have an experimental platform in orbit, especially since there have been so many advance in solar power generation.
The big obstacles I see are safety, environmental, economics, and military. Obviously, the satellite is transmitting a lot of power, and so a large buffer area will be needed to prevent casualty. Such an area will be a site of environmental damage, so we will have to study that. I doubt that the power generation will yet be profitable, but that does not preclude launching a test vehicle and building a test site. Finally, the satellite will be hard to defend and would be a target for those who with to disable a country, but unlikely more so than the GPS vehicles.
Most of these are equally true of fission power, which has received tons of money for little results. I wonder if the Big Problem is that many researchers are not comfortable with the cost and complexity of space research, and may therefore shy away from it. The ones who are confortable with space are tend to be more focused on military needs.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
What would happen, if the microwave beam moved slightly out of alignment? From such a high altitude, even a fraction of a degree could move the endpoint of the beam a few tens of metres...
Even if the reciever could detect this, it would be a few seconds before the satellite could recieve the command and turn off the beam...
And what if, something flies into the path of the beam, whether or not it is misaligned? Birds, planes, lower orbit satellites...
The question is not just what would happen, but also how to prevent it.
-- someone who hopes for safe, clean, efficient power, be it microwave or fission or fusion
Let's concentrate on a nice safe space elevator first!
What's with the multiple typos?
n/t
I was under the impression that to send that much power down, you would need wither very thin, high energy beams which are dangerous, or a dish a kilometer across. No technology can lower the amount of power sent down to the earth while still dramatically increasing the power output. The beam can be wither wider or more dangerous.
In Shadowrun, Japan first deploys solar-powered collector satellites in 2006.
Despite Spain's recent cowardice in withdrawing troops from Iraq, the country name should still be granted a capital S. Editors, please proofread the articles in future.
Is it because they tend to be too socialist to be capitalized?
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
How can tech savy nerds be so stubbornly simplistic when it comes to economics? The internet certainly wasn't a private venture for many years (not profitable). The technology behind all computers was developed and heavily subsidized by the government. There is next to know chance that any private company is going to develop this technology. Even if it were possible I think the powers that control expensive, polluting power would ever let it happen.
I worked with a Prof from California who had worked on this and other projects. The technology to aim the beam is there. If they can hit an ICBM travelling at Mach 25, they can keep a beam pointed directly at a stationary target.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm still waiting for my robot maid, holiday on the moon and flying car.
Flying cars are already here, you can't spend a holiday on the moon (yet), but this guy got the next best thing, and there aren't any fully fledged robotic maids out there yet, so you'll have to do with this sucker.
The 21st century has only just begun.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
It will never happen because Big Oil and he fossil fuel industry won't let it happen. Follow the Money! You'll find that "saftey nazi's" have very little money or power. ON the other hand- an effective sattelite-to-ground weapon would find funding immediately. In fact, the Pentagon may be secretly working on it already.
Hi there,
So many geeks and nobody read "Reason" (Supossedly 2015 AD. I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions) ??? In that story eveything happens in a satellite around the sun that collects the energy to beam it down to Earth.
Shame on you guys... but the point is that its an OLD idea.
Read Asimov, its great!
How do you know this isn't already in place? I sometimes wonder where the millions for Reagan's (then Bush's) "Star Wars" went...
"NASA officials cited a policy shift toward the International Space Station and the space shuttle program"
An organization that's "vowed to change for the better" doing more of the same.
I'd really like to see solar powered satellites happen - not taking advantage of all the power coming from the Sun seems downright stupid, when we have all the technology to do it. And, as others have said, it gives us the power we need to become truly spacefaring.
However, what I've wondered is why we don't start by using a subset of the technology and have satellites that relay power from ground based power generators to parts of the planet that need it. If this is feasible, it seems to me that it's a logical starting point. The initial business model would be to buy energy from the energy-rich cities and nations and sell it to the energy poor. Hoping that's profitable, you could then start adding space-based solar power satellites to the system and become a power generator as well as a reseller.
Does anyone have any idea if this would be feasible? At a glance it strikes me as a better business model, since it's got a few stages to it, as opposed to doing everything at once - but it's entirely possible you could never make enough money from the first stage to pay for the second stage. And there might be technical issues making the relaying of power from space difficult (IANAEE). Still, it sounds better to me than just building everything and then turning on the power switch and hoping to make some money.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
Economic energy intensity numbers mean you're using about 10 MJ for every dollar. Typical ground-side power plants cost on the order of $1000 - $3000/kW (nuclear on the high end of that, coal on the low end) which translates to 10-30 GJ/kW, or 10 - 30 million seconds - i.e. the energy payback is a few months to a year.
For a space power plant to be economically competitive, it's numbers had better be pretty close. Unfortunately right now space launch is about a factor of 10 too expensive, which puts the energy payback into the few to 10-year timeframe.
By the way, I'm the one quoted in the Wired article as saying $10 billion RD&D over 10 years would do the trick - but I don't remember saying it had to go through NASA! And yes, I will be in Spain at the meeting next week.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Ready : -5 Troll
/.ers here (like me who'd think it's not for grown ups like us. *ducks*)
Start
The relation between SimCity and Microwave would definitely not be obvious, atleast for most
and having the title of the article linking NASA and Simcity would just be confusing to say the least. Had the article been without any references to simcity, some AC who would have posted a comment citing simcity would definitely have got modded troll. (People who actually know about it might consider it funny but not the majority)
Why is it that trolls are not always trolls but funny and insightful in some cases?!
(Karma be damned!! I am no better than an AC anyway)
A.
Those people go ape about ANYTHING. Suggest the use of wind power, one group will cheer and the other group will start bitching claiming seagulls might get whacked by the rotorblades. Suggest hydropower, one group will cheer and another group will bitch about the safety of the backward-swimming Russian troutski. Suggest solar power, one group will cheer and another will bitch about "landscape polution".
Enviromentalist extremists are best left unheard and/or shot at.
Hate me!
High Frontier: Human Colonies In Space
A.
The problem is that in order to beam the microwaves down from geosynchronous orbit a huge antenna is needed to focus it down to even cell phone power density.
There's only two ways to up the power intensity in the beam:
a) build a bigger antenna in space (people would notice)
b) increase the power in the antenna (needs much bigger solar panels- people would notice)
Basically either way involves incredibly large amounts of money, and the weapon can't move so is easy to shoot at, easy to defend against (silver foil) and obvious.
It's really a non starter as far as weapons go.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I wonder how much microwave popcorn that could have made
Webmaster of Infoweb
The earliest I've seen this power source suggested was in Asimov's I, Robot. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy on me to check the dates ;)
Do you see what I did there?
NASDA, NAtional Space Development Agency of Japan too had plans for harnessing energy through satellites.
Just hope that the NASA effect doesn't reflect upon NASDA
Story of my life.
Nuclear power is the way to go, its the cheapest and safest means of providing electricity. People have been misguided about supposedly how dangerous it is. Anyone who thinks nuclear power shouldn't be used should read "Trashing The Planet" by Dixy Lee Ray.
Considering the response being received for the X-Prize, it wouldn't be a bad idea for some wealthy guy to sponsor some Y-Prize for an extremely efficient, eco-friendly setup for generating power.
Am damn sure the current hydel, thermal, fission, solar, wind sources can be made use of in other better ways than the current ones
The idea of giant solar satellites beaming power down to earth as microwaves goes back to Gerard K. O'Neill's book _The High Frontier_ about building colonies in space... and he got the the idea from a report written in the 60's.
The creators of SimCity had nothing to do with inventing or developing the idea.
What Space Shuttle program might NASA focus on? Are they building more?
Though not for getting power, in 1999 NASA seems to have left in space a disco ball with the discovery.
May be that ball's already reflecting back enough light that this microwave power seemed to be an overkill and they scrapped this project.
Here's the link - yeah it's closer to a blog than slashdot, but it's community edited!
Energy: time to change the picture.
A tip for NASA:
Shift-F-U-N-D
Well, here's a critique of the idea from someone who can't in any way be fitted into those categories: USS Clueless
Indeed! Many of them had a case of 'holy shit, we have to outlaw this stuff' about this:
Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division
After all, its corrosive properties with respect to metal, inhalation danger, and the fact that it's a component of acid rain should tell you something.
I saw an article in an IEEE magazine a few years ago about a French project to trial wireless power transmission for a remote village on a mountainous island - It may be small scale, but it does seem to be a real working system, which is a step towards what would be required for whats being discussed here
A little googling for it eventually turns up this English language page : Grand Bassin (Réunion Island) Wireless Power Transmission , but I couldn't find very much technical information on it.
The Oil companies get their man in power and we cancel the space solar energy program.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Suggest any of the three (or more) to a Republican body and you'll catch flak for not lining their pockets. (Power sans oil)
Slashdot:
...
... Distract with talks of "Hydrogen", instead of promoting SSP and/or (even!) "Energy Efficiency" == Eminence Front ... it's a put on! ... Or, as was said in a lie, so so long ago, "THERE IS NO (ENERGY) SANCTUARY" so don't try to find it... And its DEFINATELY NOT IN FREE ENERGY FROM SPACE ;^)
... It is the 21st century you know!!
:^)
Consider how much oil energy would be needed if even 1/10000000000000000000th of the solar energy accessible from orbit were harnessed
There is no Space Solar Power BECAUSE there is OIL money to be made
Now, what was that about CROP CIRCLES? "Boo hoo hoo, we can't aim our SSP without it going astray and killing everything, boo hoo hoo"? Ever notice how Crop Circles look like TEST PATTERNS? Maybe if I shot a cool laser/particlebeam weapon from orbit, it'd be great fun checking its accuracy by carving a nice moire pattern in the crops, so my telescope can see and verify the quality of the art, er fear-mongering, er, um, well, it just helps me be a better space-laser-shooter!!
Given the TWO DECADES (plus the previous TWO DECADES) of Raygun's "SDI" (before Jar Jar Binks joined the cast, young paddywin-learners) it would seem that SPACE-BASED GROUND TARGETING (and of course space-based targeting of in-flight icbms) would as pretty refined
SSP will happen -- have hope!
TAR
Alpha Centauri has tons of them (artificial spider silk, monopole magnets etc.).
Most of the futuristic tech in sci-fi media is either taken from actual research or is complete baloney. Deus Ex and System Shock 2 had nanotech augmentations, Quake 2 had the railgun, Half-Life etc. had the Gauss gun... It's a bit far-fetched to think that the game designers were pre-empting engineers decades in advance.
Enviromentalist extremists are best left unheard and/or shot at.
I want to place my vote for the latter, as from my POV these people will not be happy until humanity dies off as a race, and I would like to volunteer them to be first in line.
Misalignment is really a problem, when the energy density increases. Even if the satellites remain perfectly stable, the beam would "dance" around its intended target due to atmospheric turbulances. You would actually need a large area [51] just as security perimeter, for every collector on the surface.
Regular maintenance work within that area is impossible with the beam turned on. You have to defocus the beam or better yet, turn it off completely, every time you need to repair something. That's not so big a problem, but it is inconvenient.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
These people have allready thought of that.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Now maybe a private company can develop it for 2% of the cost and we'll have cheap, environmentally benign power.
Is that extra power really environmentally benign? IIRC, intercepting solar energy that would have missed the Earth means directing more energy towards our planet. This excess energy would contribute to increase the global temperature. Nobody know exactly by how many 1/10th of degrees, but it will definitely have some kind of impact.
Even if we only diverted solar energy from A to B (with A and B both on the surface), it would have some kind of effect (perhaps more winds from B towards A to compensate for the differential?).
Personally, I'd say: go for it! have a try! but some people and scientists would most likely object.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
If energy were more expensive than it is today, you betcha some entrepreneur would start collecting solar power in space and beam it down. And, yes, it will probably be much less expensive than if NASA did it.
Unfortunately, who ever wants to start this project, will have to convice a lot of governments to get a license. Directing a high energy beam towards the ground is risky, and it puts a lot of power in the hands of the corps steering the beam.
A high energy beam can be used as a WMD, and governments hate competition on this sector! Just look how tightly the nuclear energy sector is regulated. A space energy sector would be even more closely supervised!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I remember reading about this EXACT technology in the early nineties. And that was in an archive of science magazines (the french Science & Vie). So the idea isn't new, and it certainly didn't originate from the game makers. What the game makers do, though, is help popularize such under-the-radar ideas that people would've otherwise ignored.
;)
On a side note, I can't wait to see pre-cooked birds falling from the sky
It's called controversial discussion. I prefer people who go ape about everything to people who don't go ape about anything. All of the things you mentioned do have their drawbacks, and those drawbacks need to be pointed out, discussed and weighed against each other. They are in fact practising their democratic right and duty to actively support what they think is right - something that many people on Slashdot seem to think is below them. Cheering and bitching is the essence of a democratic society.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Bender: "What should we point it at first?"
Fry: "I dunno. Try it on me!" *zap* "Ow! My sperm!"
Bender: "Wow! Neat! Mind if I try that again?" *zap*
Fry: "Huh, didn't hurt that time."
How about mixing the two? Solar panels at the end of a Space Elevator. Send the power down via a very high voltage line instead of microwaves... Removes the "microwaves are bad" issue.
So one budget gets two projects going.... And once the project is built, it is self-sustainable (i.e. money from the electricity goes to operating and maintaining the whole rig). And well. Once the elevator is built, it's a LOT less expensive to send more panels up.
We can get really high Isp's with electric propulsion, but a lot of the advantage is lost when the mass of the power source is figured in (solar cells or nuclear). With microwave power, it is easy to make a low-mass, very efficient power collector.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
"a method of collecting solar energy efficiently from space and beaming it down to earth..."
Why do I get a visual of a kid standing beside an ant hill with a magnifying glass? Ouch...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
A critique of the critique:
1. He never outlines the numbers he uses to reach that "I would be surprised if the system had a yield as high as 5%" conclusion. Hey, I think there's a 0.367539 probability that USS Clueless is a actually a front organization for al-Qaeda! No, you can't see my numbers, they're classified.
2. 5% of efficiency on (to make some numbers up) an initial power intake of 1 GW beats 50% efficiency on 10 MW every time. He conveniently ignores the fact that we have to expend resources to get the energy for an earth-based coal (or oil, or nuclear) plant; powersats would take advantage of energy that's already there, currently wasted streaming out into space.
3. Beware anyone, anywhere, who leads his argument with the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Thanks to its frequent misuse by creationists, it's become the Godwin's Law of scientific arguments online. The 2nd l.o.t. is much more subtle, and its implications much more complex, than most people who invoke it seem to think.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So, will all Microwave plants explode for no reason around 2070?
SAILING MISHAP
The moment we build a Microwave plant, we'll have UFO's all over blowing stuff up.
He also mispelled further. Farther refers to actual distance (I ran farther), further refers to a more metaphysical sense of distance (The poster needs to be educated further).
Though I kind of doubt these satellites are feasable, arguing about their efficiency is ridiculous.
If they lose 99% of the energy hitting them, just build them 100 times larger. The only selling point of them is that, if it is possible to build them at all, there is probably no size limit, and the costs are likely to drop considerably per area as the size goes up.
He might as well argue that their efficency is really really terrible because the sun puts out a hundred billion billion times as much energy as a solar power sattelite would collect.
On the subject of the language, I misspelled misspell. Two S's in there.
2020 too late: As Microprose has shown us, we need to be on our way to Alpha Centauri before 2025. I mean, if SimCity can be right, why can't Civilization?
Great. First the Hubble, and now this. The ISS drains billions of dollars from NASA, leaving them little time to do real, affordable R&D into space. But look! We have people in space!!1
3. Beware anyone, anywhere, who leads his argument with the 2nd law of thermodynamic /.)
Well in this case it used right: energy conversion has to be wasteful (i.e. create entropy). However as you point out, the amount of power wasted when the initial power is "free" is not really relevant (especially if the power is wasted into space).
But his point that the amount of resources to build the plant could be higher than what it produces is appealing (though of course it would be interesting to have some numbers), I read for instance that solar panels cost more energy to create than they produced during their lifetime (to be verified, I think I read it here on
is pretty well established now.
You're thinking of fusion power.
I was under the impression that the cable line for the space elevators were to be made of carbon nanotubes. AFAIK, these are excellent conductors.
Sorry, just watched conspiricy theroy the other night.
Exciting research into superconductivity using carbon nanotubes coupled with the space elevator using carbon nanotube based cable would lead one to the conclusion that they should use a set of parallel cables/conductors, abondon the whole laser lights the elevator to get it power concept and just pas the power through the elevator cables, with the excess delivered to the ground.
... IMO.
Don't these scientists talk to each other or leverage each others work? This is why we are not getting to space at an acceptable pace while solving rather than causing problems on the Earth as a result
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
- spain: Spain is a proper noun, to be capitalized.
- dispite: This word has an E: "despite"
- farther explanation: What? Is this "further exploration" or is the answer just really far away?
- Accordong: Huhuh Beavis he said "dong"
- Microwave: This is not a proper noun and is properly uncapitalized in the prior sentence.
I'll let "canceled" slide because one-L or two-Ls is a style issue.Now, back to the sunshine.
Oh yes, this is a logical conclusion. It's obvious just exactly what a great idea building a bunch of coal-fired power plants is.
Do yourself a favor, and next time you paste that article somewhere, chop off that last paragraph.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People who truly KNOW what they are talking about to comment. Please remove your comment quick or you shall me modded a troll-for-life. We here at /. have standards and they will be enforced.
So, does that mean (referring to your response elsewhere) that to recover the energy cost takes about 10 years now and to recover the construction cost at the 100 year mark?
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
But anyway, if the guy can make such a huge error at the beginning of his argument, his entire credibility is shot completely to hell anyway!
*look here, at the first bullet under "Technical Approach"
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
We're all missing it. Luanch a bird with a nuclear reactor in it and when the sludge builds up or the core is depleted, send it on a trajectory for the sun. Keep the platform small so that it won't have a large impact at the sun. References include:
The other point mentioned briefly in the Japan article is that even if high-energy beams were used, they could be pointed out to sea. Put it out far enough and bouys would be easy to post or, better yet, a small unmanned receiving platform with a cable to the land.
While certain economists have a religious belief that governments are inefficient and private companies are not, there is no evidence of that.
That belief comes from anti-communist hysteria. Communist governments were enormously inefficient and needed to be abolished. But communist governments were also corrupt, run by bad administrators, and unaccountable.
Experience shows that, despite the whining of right wingers, the US government manages to do a lot of things very efficiently compared to private companies. And customer service may not be great, but it seems better than many private companies.
None of that should really surprise anyone: anyone who thinks that big private companies operate according to free market principles is naive.
The efficiencies of every step have to be multiplied together to calculate the overall system efficiency.
True, sort of, but drawing unwarranted and false conclusions from it.
Apply the same argument to low-grade ore being turned into gold. You care a lot more about the efficiencies of the final product than those of the raw materials.
One thing about space and sunlight in space, there's a lot of both. Converting sunlight into useable energy in space doesn't need to be particularly efficient. If nothing else, just put up reflectors and beam the concentrated sunlight to an earth-based facility.
Already claimed, some guy named Nikoli Tesla, he just left the small detail of implementing it as notes for his other notebook, as the margins in this one were not quite large enough...
(and besides, it should be an exercise for the reader anyway)
It's not perfect, but it's also not a shroud of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reflecting heat back onto the surface.
Plus, it's much better than the nuclear fission that nearsighted environmentalists ranted against for years and have recently discovered as a viable option...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Dude, 'boilers + mirrors' beats and rapes 'photovoltaics' no matter how you look at it: energy-wise, price-wise, and efficiency-wise. Don't hold it against him that he supposed in *favor* of this project succeeding.
Did you not read the complete linked article?
I'm not claiming he's right. But his arguments deserve proper consideration.
Why don't they build the space elevator, and embed conductors into the structure linked to a collector at the counterweight ? Then there would be no need for a beam at all. Depending on the length, anchoring position of the elevator, it should be able to capture the suns energy constantly.
In space?! I can just imagine how efficient it is to lift all that water into orbit...
Besides, photovoltaics in space are more efficient than photovoltaics on the ground.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It makes absolutely no sense on so many levels to try to launch and construct a space-to-earth power generation system. In this circumstance, putting the receiving station "out of harm's way" will dilute the return on the investment due to the same losses that the traditional power generation industries see from transport of electricity while hyper-centralizing our electric generation infrastructure. This is completely opposite from the way we need to go for decentralization of the power grid. Most homes and businesses, with the exception of heavy manufacturing, have enough roof space to allow photovoltaics to completely power their entire energy needs. If this isn't enough, you could fill a 1 mile square section of any piece of land with current technology solar panels for about 1-1.5 billion and come up with a 200MW generation facility - boring but it works. At what point is the "oh cool" factor just going to get us all killed.
Stanislav Lem kicks I.Asimov's ass anytime, dude! ;)
That story was great, especially when the robots got religous about their mission/purpose.
I also would like to protest the 'dumbization' of great SF literature for the sake of making it accessible to wider audiences.
"I,Robot/WillSmith", "Solaris" , to name two relevant examples. Does anybody want to complete the list ?
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
A cheaper alternative not only to rocket boosters, but to the obsolete Space Elevator concept is under development. For more about blimps to space, go to this slashdot article and follow the links.
Remember the art deco artist's conceptions done in the 1930s of skycars we'd all be driving in 2000? Shove the Space Elevator into those pictures and let's start actually putting stuff into space instead.
Unlike the space elevator, the blimp doesn't require solving some rather fundamental materials problems involving taking a lab process and scaling up fibers a few inches long into linear structures thousands of miles long, or building a giant ribbon which in and of itself is a safety hazard (YOU want to be aroud one that breaks? Or on your way up/down?), the blimp-to-space project is simply a logical extension of technologies we already know.
The NASA 20TW configuration orginally discussed would probably be a lot cheaper to build using the new space transportation methods even including building the transportation than the original would have been. At $250/ton, we can simply buy the solar cells, build modular structures to put them in, and assemble them around L5.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Are you sure?
Time to dust off the old VE novels, perhaps -- substitute "Power" for "Communications" and they will probably read just as well...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Sure, but why play solar power generation at all ? We've got a big honking static electricity generator going here. Lift up/ drop down a cable. (insulated exterior, waveguide, whatever you need). Inflate a few nice biiiig silvery baloon thingies. Let it run through the atmosphere. ZZZap!. Sure- you can post a few tables with nice sewn together corpses at the bottom (yes, master). Downside ? Might reduce lightning storms on the planet, which may affect plant and animal life, etc. Big downside ? Remember Odyssey 3010's quote: "Supernovae are Industrial Accidents".
This would be a perfect solution to provide power to places we want to go, Mars, the moon, Eos...
You can send these in advance, and the would not have to carry power with them, which would lighten the load or provide room for other things.