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Obama Transition Team Examining Space Solar Power
DynaSoar writes "President-elect Obama's transition team has published for public comment a white paper entitled Space Solar Power (SSP) — A Solution for Energy Independence & Climate Change. The paper was prepared and submitted by the Space Frontier Foundation and other citizen space advocates, and calls for the new Administration to make development of Space Solar Power a national priority. The SSP white paper was among the first ten released by the Obama transition team. It is the first and only space-related white paper released by the team to date. With 145 comments thus far, it is already among the top five most-discussed of the 20-some white papers on Change.gov."
there was an obvious direction in place subsequent to the space race (remember the Apollo program?) that would have been followed through to space industrialization had the launch service industry enjoyed the same protection from government competition that the satellite industry enjoyed:
http://www.presageinc.com/contents/experience/satellitereform/contents/briefingbook/technology/1962act.pdf
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.
http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/testimny.htm
The fact that Malthusian paradigm didn't follow the Club of Rome 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 would 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 terrestrial origin.
Third, the facility you do put on the lunar surface is there primarily to transport raw mater
Seastead this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_solar_power
Beam the energy in the form of microwaves to rectennas on the ground.
The concept has been kicking around for years. It generally calls for getting the power back down via microwaves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite/
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
The link is just a one page overview and doesn't really tell you much. The idea in a nutshell: "The basic idea is very straightforward: place very large solar arrays into continuously and intensely sunlit Earth orbit (1,366 watts/m2) , collect gigawatts of electrical energy, electromagnetically beam it to Earth, and receive it on the surface for use either as baseload power via direct connection to the existing electrical grid, conversion into manufactured synthetic hydrocarbon fuels, or as lowâintensity broadcast power beamed directly to consumers." That's from National Security Space Officeâ(TM)s Advanced Concepts Office's report you can read it here: http://www.acq.osd.mil/nsso/solar/SBSPInterimAssesment0.1.pdf
No cite needed. Fact: the 2000-era OSP/Orbital Space Plane project was going to provide a capsule or small spaceplane atop EELV.
the VSE said nothing about "Build a heavy lift rocket" - it did say to open the Solar System to human economic sphere. Mike Griffin took Bush's VSE and created ESAS plan from it - this became the Ares/Constellation projects. While Orion (the capsule) is an OK idea, the fact that NASA is trying to field yet another medium-lift rocket is a terrible idea. The obvious part of the problem - no payload should be designed to fly exclusively on one rocket. Even more short-sighted is fielding a giant new HLV that will also have exactly one customer - and it will still be mostly flying propellant - the actual hardware is light enough for ELVs. Instead of building the payloads and helping to build the existing market for medium-class launch while focusing on the mission (go to Moon, go to Mars, make conditions for homesteading/mining, etc) they have focused and stumbled on the first mile of the problem.
This goes back to Griffin's recent "Your not qualified" statements - he only sees the engineering aspect and is apparently blind to economic, historical and political forces. Apollo on Steroids is hide-bound not muscle-bound.
On SSP - SSP will require putting thousands of tons of hardware in orbit regardless of specific tech choices. Boeing proposed an "Ultra Heavy Lift" booster in the 1970s called LEO - 250tons to orbit. It can be done in arbitrarily large chunks but has also been proposed on the other end by Dr. Hoyt of Tethers Unlimited as a single payload of 25t flown on EELV. Beamed power can be demonstrated on an in-space scale first (w/ huge market potential) and later on Earth. The DoD has looked into an all-electric future with SSP, Gerard O'Neill proposed basing the entire space economy on beamed power as well. The basic tech has been demonstrated in the lab and recently between two Hawai'i islands.
Beamed power can be one of the most environmentally benign forms of energy production. It produces a microwave equivalent of 2X sunlight strength on the target rectennae and is tuned to be transparent to water, producing little to none atmospheric heating. Developed as GEO power plants they could provide baseline power to cities. Digital phase-array antennae may provide dynamic control and non-photovoltaics may be the better solution for generation (solar-dynamic/sterling). SSP is one technology that offers tremendous potential.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
If nothing else, the technical challenges of transferring that energy from space down through a thick atmosphere to the surface of the Earth should warrant a discussion of just moving us all closer to the source in the first place.
This problem is the most straightforward one. There are two holes in the spectrum normally blocked by the Earth's atmosphere, one in the microwave range and the other in light (infared, I think). Both are easy to transmit and convert back into electricity.
The problem that isn't so straightforward is getting launch costs cheap enough to make it competitive with other solutions. Which ends up being exactly the same problem that colonization needs to solve, so there's no reason why research into one won't help the other.
Not a typewriter
Well, I can't find any really great numbers, but heres what I have:
According to the article from the Economist linked below 1.3 GW of solar energy pass through every square kilometer of space (presumably this is near Earth).
According to Wikipedia, nuclear power plants on earth had a total capacity of 366 GW in late 2005.
So by some rough calculations, assuming 100% efficient panels we would need ~280 square kilometers of solar panels in space just to gather as much energy as we can currently produce with nuclear power.
Today, even highly experimental solar cells don't reach 50% efficiency. So 2 * 280 = 560.
Now I can't find any good numbers on the efficiency of this "beaming" energy back to earth, but I'm going to throw out that 10% would be generous, its probably way less. But assuming 10%, 10 * 560 = 5600 square kilometers of solar cells in space just to get as much useful power as we get from our dismal nuclear setup today.
And thats not to mention the size of antennas you would need on either end to beam that power, or the safety issues involved (you think windmills or low frequency submarine radios kill a lot of birds, how about a 3.6 TW microwave beam?)
I am a retired physicist/space scientist who researched this subject in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. While it is true that a huge amount of energy passes by and intercepts this planet, it was and remains too dangerous to try to get it down here for us to use.
The idea was shelved back then for the simple reason that the number of launches needed to build the orbital facilities would completely destroy the ozone layer. (EVERY launch does damage to the upper atmosphere.) Funny, but the textbook of reference material about that is "missing from shelves" as of the 1st Bush administration.
Yet another analysis showed that the reflectance of that much material up there would make the darkest night roughly equal to the full moon at mid-twilight.
Better to solve our problems right here.
Get caught up on the technology. They fixed that one a long time ago. Simply put, the ground station emits a pilot beam. Go study the topic, and you'll see that it's 1970's technology.
If Reagan had started the ball rolling, we'd have stations online now.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Actually, the sun does set in GEO. Just not for very long, and only at certain times of the year. Eclipse seasons for a geostationary satellite occur around the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The seasons last around 40-50 days, with maximum sun-occultation duration of about 72 minutes. A discussion of the relevant orbit geometry can be found here.
0.) You fill out the environmental impact statement (because this is not Soviet Russia!).
1.) Do we want to get a lot of power from something so vulnerable to easily-deniable sabotage?
2.) Any such device could also pass muster as a death-ray; this might raise objections from a Major Creditor Nation.
But OF COURSE outsourcing creates jobs! It just creates them "over there."
Tag lost or not installed.
The atmosphere absorbs around 25% of sunlight on a sunny day, and you have nighttime and clouds. So a solar collector in space produces around 5 times as much raw power as one on the ground. Space solar power makes sense if *ALL THE OTHER COSTS OF GETTING THE POWER DOWN TO THE UTILITY GRID* are less than 5 times as high. Otherwise ground based solar power is cheaper.
Right now, the cost equation says it does not make sense. Some combination of cheaper launch methods, robotic construction, and supply of 99% of the power satellite parts from space-based sources *MIGHT* change that answer.
(I am a rocket scientist, in fact I got paid to help figure out that 99% number in considerable detail. Most of a solar power satellite can be sourced from space. A small part it makes more sense to get from earth, computer parts for example)
The problem with Helium 3 is that the fusion device to be able to practically use it has yet to be invented.
This particular isotope of Helium is found in the outer-atmosphere of the Sun and has been blowing onto the surface of the Moon for billions of years. As such, it permeates the top layers of the Moon and can be extracted economically to be able to... by itself... pay for manned trips to the Moon.
The problem is that the world-wide demand for Helium-3 right now is so minuscule that a single trip to the Moon would satisfy world-wide demand for the substance over the rest of this century.
Assuming that some fusion reactors actually get built and can produce practical energy supplies, there would certainly be demand for this on an industrial scale to justify permanent mining operations on the Moon. But that is assuming technological break-throughs are going to happen here... which has at least so far proven to be quite difficult to achieve for fusion devices.