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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
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.
If some company actually does this, it will be the frst step towards making our own Dyson sphere :)
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". . .
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
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
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.
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.
> Is it because they tend to be too socialist to be capitalized?
Nope, this is simply capitalized punishment.
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
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!
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.
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
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
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
The Oil companies get their man in power and we cancel the space solar energy program.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Alpha Centauri has tons of them (artificial spider silk, monopole magnets etc.).
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.
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.
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.
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.
You know, I'm generally in favor of nuclear power, because I believe the benefits outweigh the risks -- but citing Trashing the Planet as an argument in favor of it is roughly equivalent to citing The Coming Global Superstorm (the Art Bell and Whitley Strieber book which inspired The Day After Tomorrow) in an argument over global warming.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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".