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Japanese Firm Proposes Microwave-Linked Solar Plant On the Moon
littlesparkvt writes "Harnessing the sun's power is nothing new on Earth, but if a Japanese company has its way, it will build a solar strip across the 11,000 mile Lunar equator that could supply our world with clean and unlimited solar energy for generations." Some of the company's other projects look just as ambitious.
The Lunar equator is 11,000 Kilometers long.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Collect massive amounts of power, and beam it towards a planet. What could possibly go wrong?
In a surprise vote at the UN, the General Assembly accepted a proposal from Krasnovia to rename the planet. The new name is "Alderaan."
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
..They become Shimizu's Dream corporation staffers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
s/Timely/oldAsFuck/. Hilarious when Huffington Post beats Slashdot to a story by two and a half months.
I am Audience.
I remember in that game you could build a microwave power plant that got its power from something orbiting the planet or on the moon. Occasionally it would misalign and blow away a few city blocks of stuff.
Solar insolation on the moon is not dramatically higher than on Earth - around 1400 W/m^2 versus around 1000 W/m^2 on Earth. Granted, a Lunar solar station wouldn't be affected by weather, but Earth based receivers will suffer from efficiency loss during bad weather.
Could they achieve the same result by building a bit larger system on earth, but without the hundreds (or thousands?) of rocket launches it would take to get the materials to the moon to get the thing started?
Besides, who wants to see a big black ribbon around the moon?
So then this world will be like Transmetropolitan, only lamer, because it's on the Moon and not Mercury...
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
I remember having this conversation in Physics class many years ago, would be fantastic if it goes ahead but I honestly don't think that anyone would invest the huge amount of money needed to even attempt this, at least not until the oil has run out.
In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
Some of the company's other projects look just as luicrous.
A major issue is that the moon is fairly far up Earth's gravity well. It is easy to get things to low-Earth orbit and already tough to get things to even geo-stationary. The main saving of putting anything on the moon will come if you can do a large part of your construction on-site since otherwise moving that much material up is going to be tough. If you are doing automated construction on site you also are going to need to be able to make mainly a lot of solar cells. Solar cells are primarily silicon and there's already been prior research on refining the moon's regolith for silicon to manufacture electronic components and that looks possibly doable but one does need to get over some technical chemistry issues. See e.g. http://www.asi.org/adb/02/13/02/silicon-production.html.
The other issue is distance for power transmission: most designs for microwave power involve power transmission from at most a little over geo-stat at about 35,000 km. The distance to the moon is about 10 times that, so if you don't have a really tight beam, there are going to be issues. Also, since the moon change's position you are going to need a large number of sites on Earth that can receive the beam, and if you can't switch off smoothly between them always (which would itself require massive planet-wide infrastructure), you would still need power sources on Earth (possibly just massive storage facilities?) to deal with those times.
Overall, a really cool idea with a lot of technical hurdles. I hope they can make it work but I'm not optimistic.
Are these ideas realistic anytime soon? Not really. Are they possible with today's technology? Iffy, although some probably are. Would I like to see most of them actually in existence now, if it were possible? Most definitely!
Especially the space ones, and the pyramid city. I like those ideas!
Z
Actually the problem is that Earth-based solar collection is terribly inefficient. A solar cell (15 - 20% efficient to begin with), fixed to one spot on the Earth, is exposed to sunlight for a fraction of a day, sunlight which has been diffused by the Earth's atmosphere. Extraplanetary collection is actually a very good idea.
I am Audience.
And a solar cell fixed to one spot on the moon is exposed to sunlight for more than a fraction of a day?
We're not talking orbital solar panels here.
And the worms ate into his brain.
i feel that my proposal is just as likely to become a reality be it a good idea or not
Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The US contractors and gov spend time and treasure looking at different forms energy over distance in space.
Something very expected happens over distance to all that power, then add in the earths weather and you have non trivial issues.
Add ever more power or lasers or wavelengths... it all drops off fast but finding out just how and by how much can be a wonderful boondoggle.
Interaction of multiple lasers, different rays, microwaves all have their power, distance issues and are known to science.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Microwave power plant on the moon?
What's next, giant energy beam cannon powered by said power plant?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I would say that only the Japanese would think surface area here on Earth to be at such a premium that it would be worth it versus panels here on Earth.
I would, except for the slew of other people who have proposed lifting them into orbit.
I view all such proposals as a distraction from the real logistics issues involved in installing more of the renewables we can build now and connect to the power grid by more conventional means, with the added whimsical notion that what they really want is a death ray.
Someone had to do it.
We get plenty of sunlight, but 70% of that is over ocean. Even over land, there's a lot of places that don't get good sun coverage but still get to see the moon every day/night (e.g. higher latitudes)
Perhaps they should focus on one incredibly ambitions plan instead of eight separate ones. I'm also a bit curious how big the receivers would have to be earthside to collect the beamed energy. I don't know if they've invented the microwave equivalent of a laser which is probably what would be needed to to keep the receivers less than 20 miles wide.
Do you know about moon phases?
After the oil runs out, there won't be any money. Details here. Warning -- it's a harrowing read.
Whether it's specifically THIS project, or another.
Whether it's The Japanese or someone else.
The incentive to achieve this is too unavoidable.
Why? (I hear you ask)
Because the distinction between a targetable multi-terawatt laser and an eco-friendly solar-power downlink is mythical (legal, at best).
So Japan can bypass (simultaneously, no less) their own constitutional ban on militarisation AND the internal treaty against "space weapons".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I'm sure they will do this as soon as a space elevator becomes available. I probably wouldn't hold my breath.
William Atherton better have his home insurance paid up.
Yes, but it's not always the same half. :-P
The moon is tide-locked to the Earth, not to the sun. The so-called "dark side of the moon" gets just as much sunlight, but it never faces us. Moon based solar collection will have most of the problems that Earth based collection has... and a whole host of new problems.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
On the contrary, pumping extra energy in in a way that allows the energy to escape again is orders of magnitude better than pumping out gasses that prevent the energy from escaping.
But with them off nukes cost less and give off more power.
Guess they never played SimCity...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Shimizu Corporation intersects with Dr. Criswell in another way that I just discovered today after searching for his more recent patents.
We've got to attract technological civilization's population away from natural ecosystems into idealized artificial environments such as Shimizu Corporation's design for what it calls the "Green Float". You can house the entire population of civilization in beach-front property on the boundary of a tropical rain forest where people can swim, fish, hunt and gather recreationally, as well as access the height of urban lifestyle. From there space habitats are likely to emerge so that the natural propensity of these "cells" to replicate endlessly needn't destroy Earth's biosphere. Interestingly, I came up with a geometry that looks very similar to that years ago, with the Solar Updraft Tower Algae Biosphere proforma and, over the subsequent years, I found a floating photobioreactor technology that requires little more than 2 layers of polyfilm that has demonstrated production per cost figures far in excess of what I projected in that proforma. Before I ran across Shimizu Corp's Green Float I had further refined the idea based on the Atmospheric Vortex Engine, which, like Shimizu's "Green Float", is ideally sited in the equatorial doldrums and could make use of the central tower of the Green Float. I posted some preliminary thoughts over at the Seastead Institute's blog.
A key problem I attempted to address in my preliminary thoughts was the early market for energy from the Atmospheric Vortex Engines that would form the nuclei for Shimizu's Green Floats. A big problem was the fact that the electric power markets are thousands of miles away from the floating AVEs even if you could build on the order of a terawatt of oceanic power transmission lines thousands of miles long. Early markets are critical for attracting capital -- the lack of which renders such grandiose ideas "non-starters".
I had thought it would be very nice to have a microwave transmission technology that could dynamically switch the power distribution to achieve the holy grail of "dispatchable" power generation for peak loads, but wasn't aware, until just now, that Dr. Criswell's recent revision of his patent serves precisely that purpose.
Seastead this.
Did you know that it's possible to have multiple solar panels at various places on the Earth?
> I view all such proposals as a distraction...
So do I for the most part - but maybe not for Japan. After all they don't really have the land area to do much in the way of renewables themselves, are subject to tropical storms which make offshore source problematic, and they aren't exactly on the best terms with their neighbors.
Plus there's the fact that such a system could very easily be modified into a terrifying weapon, which could do a great deal for the national security of a tiny island nation off the shore of a hostile up-and-coming superpower. I doubt they want to be the US's political lapdogs forever.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's not the energy we use that does the warming - the CO2 released from burning fossil fuels captures about a million times as much solar energy per year as there was energy in the fuel, and it does so for many decades before leaving the atmosphere.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This proposal would only make sense if you planned on using the first few missions to establish the ability to turn local Lunar resources into solar panels
On the other hand, an orbital system would have to lift well... how much?
current solar panels weigh 15.8 kg/m^2, lets make life simple and imagine that they can make solar panels that are 1kg/m^2
and the moons equator is 11,000 Km (I can;t believe that the story said that it was miles...) and lets say they decide to make it a Km wide that is
11 billion kg of mass you are putting into orbit to match the generating ability of the lunar system
Ouch, that is a big win for a Lunar system right there... Even if you could get a solar film in space that was down to a gram per square meter, that is still 11 million kg... or 460 shuttle launches ouch!
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Why on the surface of the Moon? That's nonsense. In case they hadn't thought about that, the nights on the Moon are 14 days long; why go into space to achieve the same problems we have right here on Earth?
Build them in orbit. First of all, they won't need to be sturdy enough to hold up under their own weight, and can be in the sun 99% of the time. Second, beaming power back from 22,000 miles up will be easier than beaming it back from 250,000 miles.
They don't have to worry about beta software. Besides, it takes about this long to allow for our in depth analysis and witty repartes.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yes, I don't however see any data on their website about how wide they are planning to build the ring out. If their graphical renderings are accurate, they display a 195 pixel moon with a 22 pixel ring. Given that google tells me the moon's radius is 1737 km, that means the ring should be about 200 km wide.
So considering that we have a 11,000 km ring that is 200 km width, the power generation for the light-facing half should be what you'd expect from 5500km x 200km or 1,100,000 square kilometers. I've seen estimates of 1.2 mw per square km for solar. Using that as a basis we'd expect 1,320,000 mw of constant power generation. Wikipedia says to take off 10% due to conversion inefficiencies of microwave transmission of electricity and we probably should take off another 5% or so for weather and atmospheric disruptions or inefficiencies. That leaves us with 1,122,000 mw of constant power.
As a point of comparison, all the wind power in the entire world added up to 238,351 megawatts in 2011, so it is roughly five times the capacity of that. However, in 2008 the world had an average power consumption rate of 15 terawatts . 1,122,000 mw is 1.12 terawatts, so this project could supply roughly 7% of the worlds electricity if it was operational today.
The moon has an area of 37,932,000 square km though, so if we coated the entire moon and got energy from the sunny side and do the same math we get 19.34 terrawats. So, at our current state of energy usage it could power the world if we coated the moon in solar panels.
I'm not sure about the aesthetics of it though, a racing stripe on the moon.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Oh, yeah? Well...
rewriting history since 2109
this is misdirecting effort. smart people solving a problem that doesn't exist. we use energy we get better we don't need to pump more from the moon.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Counter-intuitive I know, but reality is often like that: improvements to energy efficiency paradoxically tend to stimulate further consumption.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Has everybody forgotten what the lifespan of your average photovoltaic cell is? They'll burn out faster than we can replace them - I mean, that's a lot of solar cells, guys. I seriously doubt that Alpha can keep up with just the replacements, let alone completing the original design.
Yup. I even know what causes them. You're aware that the "dark side" of the Moon isn't dark all the time?
The point being, if we get the same amount of energy from lunar solar as from fossil fuels, we'll cut our influence on warming a million-fold, at which point it becomes a non-issue. And we'd be doing so without even any of the environmental impacts of terrestrial renewables.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Some of the company's other projects look just as unrealistic.
FTFY.
The moon isn't smooth for a reason. Do you want stuff smashing into your solar panels? better off in space where you don't attract much of anything.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Just to be clear, they're proposing building a facility on the moon to shoot lasers and/or microwaves at the earth. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG. :)
Since you're actually looking at the projected surface area, and beyond a critical angle the panels will be reflective, the effective surface area is really more like 25% of the total surface area of the array.
As people have pointed out, the surface of the moon isn't always lit. They should put the solar panels on the surface of the sun instead.
Let's go one better and cover the sun with solar panels.
This space intentionally left blank
That'd be the most unstoppable, powerful, unlimited energy weapon ever made. So no, nobody is making one of those...ever.
Any energy added to the earth contributes to global warming.
All electrical energy, when used, eventually winds up as heat. Adding energy to the earth from space (be it orbital power plants, or this scheme on the moon), or even by fusion power, will result in warming the planet.
Earth-based solar power installations use energy that is already heating the earth, so they don't contribute to the problem in the way orbital or lunar power installations would.
Anonymous has pointed out that such solar panels would only provide 7% of power required by our civilization. Then what advantage could we get by constructing lots of nuclear power plants on the Moon?
Why would you link a solar strip to a microwave on the moon? Never mind there is currently nobody living on the moon, the second you open the door on the microwave all the air - and the hotpocket - would get sucked out into space, and I'm pretty sure you can't eat a hot pocket once it has moon dust on it.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Giant laser or maser (assuming someone manages to develop one) on the moon beaming gigawatts of power at us what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Anyone read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress lately? Just substitute massively powerful energy weapons for a mass driver.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Consider that a typical top-end solar panel can get 255 Wp (Wp = Watts at Peak) for a panel. The referenced panel holds 60 156x156mm monocrystalline polysilicon cells, totaling about 1.4602m^2 , or roughly 174.6Wp/m^2
1,100,000 km^2 (from above) comes to 192 terawatts of electricity under ideal lab conditions.
All is good and all that, except for the energy input required to produce the solar cells.
Assuming we produce the solar cells here, at the bottom of the gravity well, and transport them to the moon - even if we do not include the energy required to transport that much solar cells to the moon - the energy requirement in the production of the solar cells itself would further deplete the fosiil fuels that are left on Planet Earth.
GGP talked about the possibility of coating the entire surface of the moon
... The moon has an area of 37,932,000 square km ...
, would there be sufficient power left on planet Earth to produce that many solar cells ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I remember seeing this five years ago in the New Scientist
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
On ISS, they get about 0.1 mw from an acre, that is 24.7 mw from km2.
Pedantic remark: There is a slight difference between a mW (milliwatt) and a MW (megawatt), a factor of about a short billion, or 9 (decimal) orders of magnitude.
Even more pedantic: W is upper case (as it's named after James Watt). I'm not aware of any unit using a lower case "w" as the abbreviation. But in general, capitalisation is significant for units.
Stephan
You got your units wrong here, I'm afraid. The source you are referring to is not speaking about 1.2 MW per square km. It is speaking about 1.2 MW per km of road. Roads are pretty thin, so installing solar panels along them does not result in many square kilometers per km.
This mistake leads to your result being off by a huge amount. The solar constant is 1.361 GW per square km. Normally this is reduced by 30% by the atmosphere, but that does not apply in space. Neither are there clouds to worry about, so we can pretty much use this number directly, after dividing by pi to account for the lunar day/night cycle, giving us about 0.45 GW per square km. High-end satellite solar cells get up to 29% efficiency. Using that, we get 0.13 GW per square km. With an area of 11,000 km by 200 km = 2.2 million square km (we have already taken the night into account in our numbers), that results in a total production of 286 TW, which is 19 times the world's current total energy use. Of course, one has to get this energy down to earth somehow too. This seems to have an efficiency of about 85% (possibly squared - unclear). That partially negates the advantage of being outside the atmosphere, but we still end up receiving 206-243 TW.
So no, the main objection to this plan isn't that there wouldn't be enough energy available. It is how much resources would be spent making it. I think one will need some sort of self-replicating solar-cell-producing robot on the moon to avoid this requiring too many launches. But I have not read the tehcnical details of their plan.
As I pointed out previously, the number isn't 1.2 MW per square km. The article that number is from talks about building solar cells along roads, and the number is 1.2 MW per km of road. A more realistic number is 130 MW per square km, and that already takes the day/night cycle into account, so you can use the whole area. Also, milli (m) and mega (M) are very different, so don't be sloppy with the case in units. In my reply to your previous, anonymous post, I arrived at 200+ TW of average power after beaming to Earth. That is different from your number by a factor of 200!
Pie in the sky and tall tales, why don't you try and build a moonbase with 50 people - or even 5, before trying to cover half the moon with solar panels? Just building them would require the moon to be already colonized, with millions of people living there, which is not happening any time soon.
that results in a total production of 286 TW, which is 19 times the world's current total energy use
compared to
so this project could supply roughly 7% of the worlds electricity
A pretty significant difference.
It's a good idea, except:
- the cost of getting the original materials to the moon is ... astronomic.
- the cost of getting the dependencies for building on the moon is astronomic as well (workers or enough robots to build a 11000 km solar panel strip), unless we send a Von Neumann machine; if we do, I propose we make it out of Unobtanium so it'll last.
- the system would provide good clean energy for the whole planet, except when something goes horribly wrong; Then, the cost of the project would increase by the cost of getting a crew to fix the problem all the way up there (high risk, large cost, polluting rocket and so on), and human lives (as in "the microwave beam unfortunately hit near the receiving station; cancer risk in the area increased to 90% in 10 minutes").
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
An interesting point. Supporting math in ``Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist'':
https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-th...
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
By the power vested in me by the Holy Helix, I hereby revoke your pedant card. M and above are capitalized and everything else is in lower case.
Equally pedantic: The K in km should also be upper case, so:
On ISS, they get about 0.1 MW from an acre, that is 24.7 mw from Km2.
No it shouldn't. The SI prefix for 10^3 is a lower case k.
You also forgot to log in.
There is no such mistake. It reads correctly "its way".
Yes, I don't however see any data on their website about how wide they are planning to build the ring out.
Maybe because they aren't actually planning anything. This is science fiction, not a serious endeavor. People propose all kinds of things that can't reasonably be done but sounds pretty cool. Spend about 30 seconds thinking about the economics, technical problems, logistics problems and our current level of technology and you'll appreciate how absurd this "proposal" is. This is the sort of thing people do when they want a grant to "study" some far out idea that they know damn well cannot be done.
If the microwave laser ever gets knocked out of alignment, you'll never ever have to worry about popcorn shortages.
Or anything else, I guess.
but we wouldn't get a viable space-faring capability as a side-effect if we built it on Earth.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The lunar surface is covered in silicon, and has plenty of iron, aluminum, and magnesium.
Great! What about oxygen? Carbon? Water? The thousands of other chemicals, materials and tools that we take for granted here on Earth which are required for production?
Ship a refinery and fab up to the Moon, and whatever trace dopants and alloys you need.
Oh is that all there is to it? We just have to ship a hypothetical refinery which can somehow process all the different materials without any supply chain of any kind. Where pray tell can we find this magic piece of technology? [/joking sarcasm]
Seriously, have you given this a moment's actual serious thought? You seem to seriously think that we can send a few rocket loads of equipment and somehow manufacturing will magically take place. It doesn't work like that. You are talking about a level of manufacturing technology that is probably two to three centuries away at minimum. We don't have ANY equipment that resembles what would be needed here on Earth much less something ready to go into space. I have been in manufacturing for the better part of three decades and I'm both an engineer and an accountant. Proposals like this are absurd on the economics alone. There is FAR more to manufacturing than just a refinery and a few robots.
They plan to use lunar materials, so no hundresds of rocket launches to get started
Right, because entire supply chains can magically materialize out of the vacuum of space. Look, even here on Earth just because there is a pile of iron ore sitting around doesn't mean you have everything you need to refine, process, form, machine, deliver and install the products you need. I think there is a general lack of appreciation here of how complicated it is to make a lot of the products we take for granted. You don't just have to deliver a few robots to the moon and let the magic happen. You have to deliver an entire supply chain. That is VERY hard to do and extremely expensive. You are BADLY underestimating the amount of equipment and manpower and technology that would be needed to make this happen.
For any technology that is likely within the next 100 years, there would be hundreds (probably thousands) of rocket launches. The parent post is quite correct on this point.
I guess the point is kind of that real estate and raw materials are "free", if you get the proper manufacturing equipment up there.
Nothing is free. The people that make that hypothetical manufacturing equipment are going to want a return on their investment. Just because the costs are not direct doesn't mean they don't exist.
Since you're talking about decades of effort to build this thing, it doesn't really matter how long it takes to get there.
Yes it does because you have to fund the project. Even ignoring the technical problems (which are legion), anyone funding this is going to want a return on their investment that is not measured in decades if not centuries. Even governments aren't usually willing to put up with that long of a payback, particularly for something as absurdly hypothetical and risky as this.
Certainly they can raise the complexity and sharply increase installation and maintenance costs - but that won't buy much effective area. The ones closer to the subsolar point will increasingly shadow those further away, By the time you reach the edge, they'll effectively be in full shadow.
It is how much resources would be spent making it.
The answer is none because this will never happen. It's just science fiction that people write when they are looking for a grant to "study" something that isn't actually feasible. I'm amazed that anyone is actually bothering to worry about the physics of the power generation. That is FAR less of an issue than how to actually build the thing.
think one will need some sort of self-replicating solar-cell-producing robot on the moon to avoid this requiring too many launches.
You'd need a LOT more than a robot. Manufacturing on this sort of scale is hugely resource intensive and requires an entire supply chain. You have to have mining equipment, refineries, production equipment, assembly equipment, fabricating equipment, chemicals, additives, etc, etc. All of this has to work in space, with minimal human intervention, somehow be repaired, have replacement parts, etc. We do NOT have the technology to do this even here on Earth in a similar manner much less millions of miles away in a harsh vacuum. And I'm not even worrying about the economics of all this which are even more absurd.
Frankly even if the physics of the power generation made sense,
Some of us have been screaming solar power satellites in geosync for decades. It's a *lot* less expensive to fly to geosync, and the environmental impact studies (US) were *done* by 1980....
mark
Can you say 'Microwave Death Ray"? I know you can...
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Here's the math:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/the-maury-equation/
and:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-maury-equation-redux/
The long and short of it is that any soft of SBSP loses about 1/2 of the power during transmission and grid conversion. There's no way around this, it's basic radio physics.
So to make it work in your favour, you need to generation at *least* twice as much energy. And that's assuming your shipping costs are zero.
An SPS in GEO *might* be able to do that. That's because they get about five times as much light as a panel on the earth - day/night, clouds, cosine angles, etc.
But on the moon you have the same sorts of effects as the earth, with the exception of weather. The panels will cycle under the sun as the moon rotates, and spend half their time on the night side.
There is absolutely no way such a system can make up for the losses in transmission. Period. Do the math yourself if you don't believe me.
M and above are capitalized and everything else is in lower case.
oH, I THInK I GET IT now.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
With a Japanese power company managing the project, what could possibly go wrong?
Beam divergence is a function of wavelength. There are no efficient generator of microwaves at a high enough frequency to be received by a field of synchronously rectifying 'rectennas.
Bear in mind, and over-spray would warm water, or burn houses and people.
http://www.ehow.com/how_584952...
O...M...G...thank you! Hilarious and true!
Just a note - last time I checked, circling the equator on any (roughly) spherical object in space will put half your path in sunlight and half in the dark (assuming there's a sun close enough to light yon globe). Spinning or not (which our moon definitely does) makes no difference, except for how long and how often a specified piece of the construct is in sunlight.