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."

Comments

How?

[Tubal-Cain]

And how exactly do they plan on getting the panels/mirrors/whatever up there?

Re:How?

[Samschnooks]

Outsource to the EU, Russians, or the Chinese?

Re:How?

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

Re:How?

[east coast]

I thought Obama's plan was to keep the jobs and technology home based. After all, outsourcing doesn't do much to create jobs.

he's either going to have to do this with NASA and keep their funding up or it's just more banter from a politician.

Re:How?

[peragrin]

Obama doesn't want to kill NASA, Obama wanted to streamline a few of NASA's pipe dreams Like returning to the moon or manned mars missions. Things that have little practical value in the next 5 years. a return trip to the moon would only be for historical reasons and maybe to bring back a few more moon rocks.

Re:How?

[Anonymous Coward]

Landing on the Moon is not a pipe dream, we've done it. Going to Mars is not a pipe dream, it's a plausable extension of the capabilities we have today. Both of these can be done for reasonable cost, and in the process spur innovation and boost our national prestige. Given the fact that we appear to be in a national malaise, the latter should not be considered trivial.

The pipe dream here is solar space power. It's an absurd concept that will never be profitable compared to Earth-based utilities. Even the supposed "military applications" like beaming power into remote battlefields is bogus.

Re:How?

[roguetrick]

If the permanent colony is as useful as the ISS, I'd sooner not have it.

Re:How?

[gwait]

It's far easier and cheaper to harvest that, and pretty much anything else right here on earth.

Same goes for the original post. Once we've covered all the usable solar cell friendly places on earth with panels, AND have run out of ways to improve their efficiency, AND have exhausted all other forms of energy here on Earth (like Geothermal - we live on a ball of molten rock with a thin skin for Pete's sake!), THEN it might make sense to look at placing solar panels in space.

to quote south park: Dumb Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb..

Re:How?

[Teancum]

Why does this have to involve NASA at all? Yes, NASA seems to be the agency with experience in dealing with spaceflight, but NASA certainly isn't the only (nor even the largest agency in the U.S. government) that is involved with spaceflight.

In terms of dollars actually spent on spaceflight, I don't know which is larger: The NSA (National Security Agency... who operate the spy satellites and hack into the internet) and the U.S. Air Force Space Directorate. Both are larger than NASA. The Air Force at one point even built their own private launch complex for the Shuttle... even though it was never actually used.

If NASA were completely eliminated as an agency, American activities in space certainly wouldn't end. It wouldn't even be the end of civilian space efforts that are done by agencies like NOAA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Also, I hardly consider the Ares I rocket to be an efficient use of limited funds to build power-sats, but that is fodder for a completely separate post.

Re:How? - I'll tell you how

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual, just throw money at NASA and ignore it when it doesn't work since it's really pork.

Pie in the sky

[yog]

I'm sorry to say, this SSP white paper is simply that--a piece of paper with a pie-in-the-sky proposal that is unlikely to get funded to the same extent as fusion energy by the DOE.

Since it's a space-based project, it should really be funded and organized by NASA, which after all knows something about orbital solar arrays, while the DOE is merely an umbrella bureaucracy without a clear mission. Jimmy Carter set it up, as I recall, and during the laissez-faire Republican administrations as well as the Clinton years, it has been primarily a custodian for regulating fission reactors and funding some research projects.

There is so much potential for reaping energy savings on land, without having to resort to dangerous space flights and risky, massive construction projects in orbit, that it's amazing that this proposal is even being looked at by the transition team. I suspect this is fake news.

Don't get me wrong--I'm a total space nut, and I want to see us spending a trillion a year on space, and spread our civilization out to the planets before we blow this one away.

But when we can reap significant energy savings merely by painting the rooftops white of most government buildings, when we drive cars that have half or one third the fuel efficiency they could have, when we live in uninsulated buildings--it's ridiculous to proclaim that an SSP would solve our energy problems.

We should definitely build orbital facilities that would include solar arrays, perhaps to house dangerous manufacturing operations and to do zero-grav research, but this is not the most persuasive white paper that they are going to look at, I suspect.

Re:Pie in the sky

[DynaSoar]

I'm sorry to say, this SSP white paper is simply that--a piece of paper with a pie-in-the-sky proposal that is unlikely to get funded to the same extent as fusion energy by the DOE.

I almost added some similar editorializing to the submission, but opted to leave it as it was. I'm also very skeptical of the proposal itself. However, I find the interest in it as compared to the other proposals on change.gov to be encouraging. This is especially so since Obama was at first hardly pro-space. Their interest in this proposal is another step away from that stance. And I believe Obama's team still to be capable of being influenced and directed to better things. This proposal is too far off, but it makes a good focus point for choosing a more positive direction. O'Neill's ideas were similarly distant, but they persist as well developed starting points.

Space solar but not sustainable colonization?

[macraig]

Perversely, my articulate question submitted to change.gov, asking when and whether we could expect to see sustainable off-planet colonization receive some significant priority, was virtually ignored. It was even "modded down" by some people.

If we're gonna talk about exploiting solar energy in space, we should be talking about colonizing space in the same breath. 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.

Who needs exploration, anyway?

[hax0r_this]

Yeah, and a trip to the west coast after the Lewis and Clark expedition would only have been for historical reasons and maybe bring back a few more notes.

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[Eskarel]

Exploration most certainly does have value.

That said, expensive exploration, without the means to capitalize on it, when the economy is in trouble and we're trying to cut our energy use probably doesn't have a whole lot.

Nothing wrong with sending more landers, probes, etc to mars, the moon, wherever else we can get em. It's expensive, but it's potentially valuable. Sending a person somewhere just to say you've sent them somewhere is really rather silly.

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[couchslug]

"Yeah, and a trip to the west coast after the Lewis and Clark expedition would only have been for historical reasons and maybe bring back a few more notes."

We can send robots instead of meat puppets at less cost and no risk to personnel, whose loss would endanger programs that are much more valuable to mankind than a few dead astronauts. We need to develop machines to do our exploration and our work because humans are delicate, weak, and high-maintenance, so send unmanned missions for a few decades and get good at it.

I'm fine with lunar missions, but not with expensive tourists when sending robots is a more worthy goal. Exploiting space should be done using unmanned systems while humans do the design and enjoy the benefits without personal risk. Catering to meat tourists SLOWS development life cycles (Space Shuttle, anyone?) and is a drag on science.

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[Your.Master]

Why is this inherently a problem?

Look, I think manned space exploration is cool and all too. But if there's a reason to send humans into space, then we will have a desire. And if they don't, then this society we breed is immensely practical and correct, which is an improvement over today's society :).

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[roguetrick]

Very silly logical fallacy called the slippery slope. You ignore that if there became a viable reason to send humans up there, we still would. Sending them up there to try and force us to continue sending them up there is silly.

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[aliquis]

If nothing else the better we get at leaving this rock in space the higher probability of us surviving the time we fail as species on earth.

Also if we would happen to be the only life in space it makes a hell of a difference =P (but only for us :D)

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[Waffle Iron]

Yeah, and a trip to the west coast after the Lewis and Clark expedition would only have been for historical reasons and maybe bring back a few more notes.

If Lewis and Clark had come back reporting that there was nothing on the west coast but dust, no economically extractable minerals, and that had zero atmosphere and only trace amounts of water, and that another trip would cost multiple billions of 2008 dollars, and a colony would cost hundreds of billions, then there would indeed have been no reason to go back.

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[nine-times]

Nothing wrong with sending more landers, probes, etc to mars, the moon, wherever else we can get em.

Especially if you suspect that these places might have resources that we can figure out a way to use. Exploration for the sake of exploration is fine and dandy, but that's not generally why human exploration has happened. The reason people sailed across dangerous uncharted areas has usually been because they expected to find something of practical/financial value on the other side.

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[Teancum]

As if NASA has done much original exploration lately. How long has it been since anybody has been to the Moon?

About the only genuinely ground breaking missions currently on tap are the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Dawn mission to the asteroids. I am excited about both, but they certainly don't need an agency the current size of NASA to support either or both missions.

The spirit to boldly go where nobody has been before seems to be lost right now with NASA. No astronauts are setting altitude (aka distance) records to explore the depths of the Solar System. Heck, it was Apollo 13... a "failed" mission... that set the all-time distance record for anybody away from the Earth. There just doesn't seem to be any fire in the policy makers to have a difference here. This isn't even a Democrat or Republican issue, as both political parties are to blame.

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[Teancum]

You are talking about a planet-sized object that doesn't have to be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well.... and the ability to do metal fabrication on an industrial scale using techniques that can only be dreamed about on the Earth.

The Moon has the surface area of North America and has mineral deposits at least equal to anything found on the Earth. Wouldn't it be better to stip mine the Moon to extract resources there rather than to destroy major eco-systems here on the Earth for the same resources?

And don't even get started with some of the high-metal astroids, that even a small asteroid has more precious metals than everything that has ever been mined in the history of all mankind to date. Of course the problem would be on how to mine it and send that to the Earth economically, but that is a problem I'm sure somebody will eventually figure out.

Space gives us two things we seem to be hurting on here on the Earth: raw natural resources and energy. This is energy by far and away more abundant in multiple forms than all of the petroleum reserves, nuclear fuel reserves, and "alternative energy" sources combined that can be exploited over the rest of the history of this planet here on the Earth.

This is also dismissing the fact that even going somewhere else and having to apply human ingenuity to new environments almost always produces side benefits that ultimately help all of the rest of mankind as well. Explicitly because of the development of space sciences to date, mankind as a whole is better fed, lives longer, safer, and much more comfortable.... on a planet-wide basis.... than our species has ever been before.

Every single problem you think may be plaguing mankind... from war, famine, disease, and natural disasters... has been made more comfortable and less damaging due to advances in space science. Name a problem you think should be fixed, and I'll tell you explicit space projects and missions that have made life much easier.

If you want to live like people did in the 1930's before any of this happened... go ahead. Just make sure you know what life was like back then before you push the rest of us back to that sort of lifestyle. I really don't think you want to go back to living under those conditions... even if you lived in a place like the USA or Europe of the 1930's.

Re:Who needs exploration, anyway?

[sumdumass]

The problem with Helium 3 is that the fusion device to be able to practically use it has yet to be invented.

I don't think this is so much a problem seeing how out capabilities to safely return to the moon still haven't been reinvented yet. I mean it isn't like we are going tomorrow and at least an abundant supply of the stuff could make the research more availible.

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.

We are looking to the future right? I mean If the tesh to use it is as safe and productive as the claims say, then a future mission to the moon compiled with future uses would basically make it worth it. No one is going to ramp up a need for something we can't get. That would be like purposely forcing a shortage in a market just so it costs more. With it here and the ability to get it, then usage would increase to make it viable and probably self supporting.

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.

I think we are at a Chicken and the egg type impasse here. Which comes first, the need for a supply of Helium3 to feed the otherwise limited reactors or feed supply to produce the capabilities of them resulting in the creation and dependency on it. Right now, we have to rely on a government to go to the moon and pick the stuff up or have it created as well as captured in rather expensive ways. One of those ways require extracting fossil fuels from the ground and isn't very productive.

Even if we had one condenses load of it, and a means to get more with the expectations of it being availible, I'm willing to bet that the need will be there.

rube would be proud.

[Anonymous Coward]

this wacky idea of harnessing solar energy seem rather rube goldberg-ish. if you read the original concept paper you would know there are flywheels and giant vacuum tubes on this thing. aside from that, the ultraprecision for positioning this monstrosity is beyond anything humans have ever done. no worries though, when a giant beam of radiation accidentally hits the wrong place, im sure the people wont mind being irradiated.

in short, this idea is insane.

Yeah, the economic math doesn't work

[IdahoEv]

There is so much potential for reaping energy savings on land, without having to resort to dangerous space flights and risky, massive construction projects in orbit, that it's amazing that this proposal is even being looked at by the transition team.

I'm also a space nut, and I agree with you completely. A simple look at cost/benefit, even back-of-the envelope, makes it entirely clear how silly orbital solar is.

1) Benefits - how much energy can an orbital solar array produce, relative to the same size solar array on Earth? About twice as much - it's lit for 24 instead of 12 hours. (plus benefit of always-perpendicular incident radiation, but minus losses in conversion & transmission.) Ultimately, ~2x power from the same array.

2) Costs - how much does it cost to put that solar array in orbit, and build the microwave transmission system, relative to the same size solar array on Earth? Answer: an awful lot more than 2x. More like 100x.

Paying 100x cost for 2x the power generation is not anyone's idea of good economics. End of story.

It's just so much cheaper to simply build twice the arrays on the ground, even if you have to build huge power storage facilities or around-the-world ultra-high-voltage power lines to funnel energy to the night side of the planet.

Maybe in 100 years we'll have a developed space industry that can build them, up there, on the cheap. But certainly not any time soon.

 

Why bother with space solar power?

[Khyber]

We haven't even come close to getting terra-based solar power up and going as a mainstream energy alternative. Let's work on the ground before we put things in the air, gentlemen.

Re:Why bother with space solar power?

[mikelieman]

WHY?

The sun NEVER SETS in GEO.

and once you build the infrastructure to build/service the constellation of satellites, you have the infrastructure to go to the Moon, Mars, Titan and anywhere else you care to go.

This technology simply is the killer-application which will drive American domination of the Universe.

And if it ain't us, it'll be the Chinese. Your choice.

Re:Why bother with space solar power?

[lotho brandybuck]

The sun never sets on earth, either.

It would seem much more effective to find 3 deserts, spaced approximately 120 degrees around the globe, then run and HVDC power transmission link connecting everything.

Or, you could combine solar power plants (either solar thermal or direct PV) with pumped storage systems. All realizable with present technology. There are many reasons we need to be in space. Solar power is not one of them. The sun shines all the way down here with only a 30% reduction in power.

Re:Two clear choices

[The Living Fractal]

That you received +5 Insightful for your post is staggering.

My favority scenario (although rather unrealistic) is people marching into gas chambers while watched over by the Eco-Troops.

This is your favorite? Seriously? How very insightful that you are able to pick your favorite way for billions of people to die!

I find it intriguing that you think these potential futures are 'choices'. As if the collective of Humanity is actually going to do anything without being forced to do it! Name one thing Humanity has done as a whole that was a 'choice'.

It's as if you think that we had a choice going from your purported 200million limit to where the population is today. What, was everyone going to just up and stop fucking? I don't think so.

BTW, you are dangerously out of touch if you think the world cannot support more than 200 million people.

Who do you trust with a death ray?

[victim]

Whenever you read "spaced based solar power", just replace that with "municipal scale death ray". Now decide who should be in control of it.

Re:Who do you trust with a death ray?

[JoeMerchant]

The power density would probably never be high enough to turn it into a death ray.

A 1" magnifying glass can make solar death rays for ants... any multi giga watt system capable of transmitting that power to the ground in a useful form is going to be capable of frying stuff. It may be "completely harmless by design" - but with what this system is going to cost to build, I can't imagine it getting funded without a military application onboard.

Re:Numbers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that about 1GW of solar energy reaches a square kilometer on Earth. That's during the daytime, on a sunny day, sun overhead, so let's say we only really get a quarter of that on average. 50% efficiency solar cells get us 1/8 GWh per square kilometer. 3000 square kilometers is an area of just 55 by 55 kilometers. There is no shortage of room on earth in suitable areas. So why would anyone put solar cells in space? The first thing that comes to mind is "dual use technology"...

someone's penny wise, pound foolish

[leftie]

NASA's total budget request for FY 2009 was $17.6 billion...

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/210020main_NASA_FY09_Budget_Estimates_Summary.pdf

Wanna bitch about wasting money, go yell at a banker or a broker.