Solar Energy in Space is not Necessarily Easy to Harvest (Video)

The ARTEMIS Innovation web site says, "John C. Mankins, President of Artemis Innovation Management Solutions LLC, is an internationally recognized leader in space systems and technology innovation...." And one of John's biggest recent projects is coming up with a practical way to collect solar energy beyond our atmosphere and use it not only in space, but how to beam it down to the Earth's surface where we can use it to power our plug-in cars, household appliances, and other electrical devices.

Comments

This has all been hashed out on /. before...

[rgbatduke]

... and there is simply no sane way that paying a MINIMUM 32 MJ/kg to move a kg from the earth's surface to low earth orbit -- that's the minimum that assumes perfect efficiency, which is all by itself pretty funny, multiply it by maybe 100 or 1000 to get an actual estimate -- is ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to give you a ROI compared to installing solar cells on earth at an identical cost. And then you have to extra problem of getting the energy you harvest in orbit to the ground, which either involves putting a huge receiver somewhere to pick up relatively low intensity downbeamed microwaves (at some major hit in waste heat an inefficiency) OR using less ground area but building a super-maser in orbit that can cook an entire city to extra crispy in a few minutes.

What could go wrong?

Once again, when confronted with an idea that is so very, very, very far away from economically feasible or sane, the right thing to do is club the person suggesting that they will implement it all, with our money (natch!), while keeping ownership and control of the death ray -- I mean "orbital power station" -- is to knock them down and club them with a heavy blunt instrument until they stop twitching.

The guy in the movie about actually pretty much said just that. The only thing it might make sense to lift into orbit for power is solar cells for powering SPACE devices, vehicles, living quarters, or fusion plants once we manage to build one, assuming we can make one small enough and light enough and capable of rejecting heat in a vacuum enough to be able to operate for decades on a small fuel load.

rgb