Public Discussion Opened on Space Solar Power

eldavojohn writes "The National Security Space Office (NSSO), an office of the DoD, has taken a novel approach to a study they are doing on space based solar power. They've opened a public forum for it and are interested in anyone and everyone's expertise, experience and ideas on the best means to harvest energy in space. I suppose this is similar to the DoD's $1 million for an energy pack just without the award. Still, if you want to have an influence on the US's plans in space, this would be an easy armchair place to start. Space.com also has more on the details."

Comments

Too late for nonterrestrial resources utilization?

[Baldrson]

Interestingly it was Gerard O'Neill who argued in the 1970's for solar power satellites constructed from lunar material and, as part of that argument predicted the industrialization of China would lead to increased CO2 emissions from coal burning that would mandate radical restructuring of global energy technology. It may be too late now to pursue nonterrestrial material SPS since the baby boomer generation, raised and educated to pioneer space from childhood, was denied that opportunity by --- well that is the question of the millennium if not the epoch isn't it? There are almost as many answers to that question as there are religions.

The proximate cause was that despite there being an obvious direction in place subsequent to the space race (remember the Apollo program?) that could have been followed through to space industrialization -- the launch service industry did not enjoy the same protection from government competition that the satellite industry enjoyed:

* (c) Private enterprise; access; competition

In order to facilitate this development and to provide for the widest possible participation by private enterprise, United States participation in the global system shall be in the form of a private corporation, subject to appropriate governmental regulation. It is the intent of Congress that all authorized users shall have nondiscriminatory access to the system; that maximum competition be maintained in the provision of equipment and services utilized by the system; that the corporation created under this chapter be so organized and operated as to maintain and strengthen competition in the provision of communications services to the public; and that the activities of the corporation created under this chapter and of the persons or companies participating in the ownership of the corporation shall be consistent with the Federal antitrust laws.

It wasn't until 1990, when a coalition of grassroots groups across the country lobbied hard for 3 years, that similar legislation got passed for launch services.

The fact that Malthusian paradigm didn't precisely follow the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" model doesn't change the reality of the Malthusian paradigm given a fundamentally limited biosphere undergoing its largest extinction event in 60 million years. The Club of Rome merely added academic fashion to the urgency of the Malthusian situation still facing the biosphere. The 1970s was the right time to start the drive for space industrialization based on a private launch service industry. It didn't happen, the pioneering culture that founded the US is being replaced by government policy with less pioneering cultures and now we're all facing some increasingly obvious difficulties -- not just pioneer American stock -- and not just humans.

The cost of getting silicon into space from the lunar surface would be orders of magnitude less than launching from earth due not only to the much shallower gravity well but also due to the absence of atmosphere.

No beanstalk needed.

At worst a Dyneema Rotovator might be needed but probably not even that.

First, the bulk of the materials are manufactured in space from lunar raw material transported to orbital facilities so you don't need to land those facilities on the lunar surface, and you don't have to worry about g-loading the raw materials you are sending to the orbital facilities.

Second, you don't manufacture everything in space -- only bulky materials like solar cells, reflectors, structural members and perhaps klystrons. Only residual materials (raw and manufactured) are of terrestria

Wrong priorities?

[vigmeister]

best means to harvest energy in space First figure out if there is an efficient way to bring this energy back to earth...

Cheers!

Re:Wrong priorities?

[Brandon30X]

How about this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkVlkSnoGNM

-Brandon

Re:Wrong priorities?

[Orange Crush]

That is, move lots of energy, a long distance, on a "truck". Theoretically, since you can draw nuclear energy from uranium, you should be able to convert lower-numbered elements into uranium to store energy.

It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes, silly. In all seriousness, yes, you can build hydrogen all the way up to Uranium. Happens all the time in supernovae. Well . . . some of the time. But that generates an awful lot of "waste heat" you aren't capturing, you have to ship the mass of the uranium out of the gravity well of a star, slow it down to catch it when it gets here (which will take tens or tens of thousands of years depending on how fast you throw it and which star you're using). I figure, if you can build a dyson sphere around a distant star, you can probably build a tightly focused high energy and high efficiency laser emitter and receiver/collector that'll recover a useful amount of power to make the whole ordeal worthwhile. Tho if you're that advanced, you might as well just go to that star and live there.

Dear Slashdot,

[KillerCow]

Dear Slashdot,
    please do our homework for us.

Sincerely,
  The National Security Space Office (NSSO), an office of the DoD

P.S. we won't use your ideas to kill or oppress people*

*actually, we will.