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."

Comments

Break-even point?

[gevmage]

It would be interesting to find out what the break-even point is. If you did deploy such a system, how long would it take until the energy savings recouped the cost of putting the thing into orbit.

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.

Other tech predicted in games?

[xirtam_work]

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?

Weapon Capability

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Maxis

[mfh]

...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.

Re:Excellent...

[tomhudson]

Now maybe a private company can develop it for 2% of the cost and we'll have cheap, environmentally benign power.

No ... they've figured out it makes a great space-based weapon (ever watch your sims melt down when the beamer mis-aligns?)

Actually, this (steering) IS one of the problems with any space-based microwave power project.

should have happened already

[fermion]

This type of solar power is like the space elevator. It has been around forever, the technological needs are well known, but no one can seem to get it done.

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.

No weapon Re:Weapon Capability

[WolfWithoutAClause]

The beam power might be 9 GW, but the energy density would be about the same as a cell phone gives out. The idea is that you create a big aerial called a rectenna that covers whole square kilometers and collect the dilute energy.

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.