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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."
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?
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.
...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.
Actually, this (steering) IS one of the problems with any space-based microwave power project.
Don't build it near a hospital, because the beam might miss and BOOM! Ah, SimCity 2000, what fun.
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
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
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!"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.
I'm sorry but this post deserves a medal. I know I'm tooting my own horn but after starting at +1 (karma) this post dropped to -1 troll. Now, through years of fighting adversity it has risen to the rank of +4.
For some more on topic info I'd like to suggest this microwave power plant of sorts could be made with a lot less danger simply by putting more of it in orbit. I would like to ask what the point is of collecting a lot of solar energy is, if you're simply turning it into another kind of solar energy, and then capturing that and turning into more useable electricity. If a space elevator is to have a cable going from Earth to orbit, surely the same could be done for a geosynchronous power plant device? That is, capture the sun's energy and send it to Earth as electricity. The downside would be the amount of equipment that would be on the ground that is now in space (therefore more expensive and oh such much harder to fix), but we're looking at a futuristic power plant anyway. I couldn't say what to make the power cords out of, if there'd be multiple ones or perhaps just two really big ones (well I assume now). I don't know what kind of side effects the magnetic field created by such a device could do. It just seems to completely bypass the safety issue which I feel is the most pressing.
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.
Well, that is just the US. In Japan electric power is very, very expensive (I lived there) and there is a big interest there in spolar power sattelites. A quick tour on Google will show that.
With Japanese energy rates they could afford a costly space project. Moreover they also have a great interest in reducing their dependency on foreign energy. During the power crisis in the 70's they were forced to make deals they did not like.
Oh, please!
Electrical power isn't even remotely a threat to the petroleum industry. Sure, it's all "energy", but even completely free electricity has so many drawbacks in vehicles that it wouldn't put a dent in petroleum use; batteries just don't have competitive energy density when put up against a tank of hydrocarbons.
You know what Bush would do if he really wanted to help the oil industry? Push the ratification of the Kyoto treaty.
Why? Because natural gas is a byproduct of petroleum extraction, coal is cheaper than natural gas for electricity production, and natural gas produces far less C02 per kilowatt-hour than coal does. The easiest, least expensive way to reduce U.S. CO2 production would be to shutter coal plants in favor of natural gas -- which would shift the profits from coal companies to oil companies.
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
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".