Parts including the rectenna are figured at $1100/kW
Eventually SpaceX will get the cost of parts to GEO down by a full factor of ten from the current of $20,000/kg At 6.5 kg/kW and $2000 per kg, the lift cost would be about $13,000, total $14,100 per installed kW.
The formula to go from capital equipment to $/kWh is to divide by 80,000 or 17.6 cent per kWh. Sorry, no market at that price.
The project does depend on Skylon or something else that will get the cost down to $200/kg to GEO. That's hard, I agree.
PV (solar power) is about 20% efficient, so you get about 200 watts out of a square meter. But you only get it about 1/5th of the time due to day/night and low sun angles so the average over a year even in good places is 40-50 watts per square meter. The rectenna is typically 85%, 24 hours a day, about 250 watts per square meter or about 5 times as much.
Plus the rectennas are mostly open space. They don't block sunlight much so you can get duel use out of the land by putting the rectenna over farmland or pasture. They can be relatively flimsy structures since the wind force on them is small.
Even worse is when Bjarne Stroustrup changed the behavior of overriding equal. This comprehensively broke the last version of the Xanadu code I was involved with. After a couple of months of Roger Gregory--who is a very sharp programmer--failing to figure out what had happened, I had to single step the program (like debugging assembly code) to find what had gone wrong under the new compiler. Took most of a night.
Install 5 times as much name plate renewables and really cheap storage and it would solve the problem, which is that after you consider the cost of storage, renewables are way too expensive. Increasing renewables enough to seriously impact the carbon issue would jack up the price of energy and cause the economy (and government) to collapse.
There is a proposal that's been around a long time, power satellites. They do cope with intermittentcy, but to be economical, the cost of lifting parts to GEO must be reduced by 100 to one. The single stage to orbit rocketplane, Skylon and an old idea by microwave guru William Brown looks like it could get the cost down far enough for them to undercut coal. More here https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A few years ago there was a legal decision that you could not copyright a score that was the output of an algorithm. Pi is the output of an algorithm. If you code a song's score into a string of digits, and go searching for that sting in pi, you are sure to find it. Ergo, no song can be copyrighted.
Alas, you never have mod points when you need them.
I think I was the one who turned Steve on cryonics. Alcor was raided a few years before SJG and we sued the county under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act over email in the computers they took. Didn't go to a trial because Riverside county knew they would lose and just paid up. When Steve was raided I sent him the legal research and legal papers we had from that case. His lawyers used it, and Steve wanted to know what Alcor did.
My that was a long time ago.
I don't know if there is a game in this, but recently a new solution to energy, carbon and climate has developed. It's mainly based around the Skylon SSTO. Looks like that will get the cost down to where power satellites undercut coal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... I wonder if Steve or anyone could figure out how to make a game out of this solution?
Between the questions they ask on SF86 and the medical records that someone grabbed recently . . .
I don't see how anyone could fill out that form without missing something that could be exposed in medical records or a little PI work. Then they are threatened with exposing their error and 5 years in jail.http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/06/12/2210230/sf86-data-captured-in-opm-hack#
Judge Robert H. Wallerstein, an unknown number of prosecutors in the Riverside DA's office, the cult's lawyers and perhaps the Riverside Sheriff's Department were engaged in a criminal conspiracy to entrap. Seven years after it happened, it came to light that the judge had been in on an attempt to entrap me for "failure to appear" on an indictment they tried to keep secret by not sending a notice to appear to me or my lawyer. Wallerstein signed an arrest warrant for the "crime" of failure to appear prior to when I did in fact show up. The arrest warrant was never made part of the court record, but the Sheriff's office kept a copy of it which they filed in Arizona when I was arrested there.
The cult's lawyers went to a huge effort in an unrelated case to have me in a deposition later the same day as the notice to appear. I believe I would have been arrested on camera at the deposition if the cult's lawyers had not screwed up by assumed something I put in a filing in the bankruptcy case to mean I knew about the notice to appear when I didn't.
If you wonder why I say something that could be considered to slander the judge (if it were not true), he is long dead, and there are a ton of legal precedents that you can't slander the dead. My lawyer and I would have tried to recuse Wallerstein had we known he had been engaged in a criminal conspiracy against me 7 months before the trial.
A solution by 2100 is about what I expect from the political world, i.e., put it off far beyond their term in office. Good reason actually. The existing renewable "solutions" are so expensive that coming down hard on carbon (that's coal for electrical generation and oil for transport) would kill the economy, the government that tried it would be replaced and the new government would repudiate the policies.
What's needed is a renewable energy source that's cheaper than coal. Then carbon emissions would fall fast and the economy would boom.
I can't say we have a solution yet, but we might have one. Here is a proposal to build solar power plants where the Sun shines close to 99% of the time. This video of transporting parts to GEO and building a thermal power satellite was recently made public. It was in a contest, but a team supported by the Chinese government won.
3000 of these could entirely replace the three cubic miles of oil (equivalent) of fossil fuel the human race uses each year. By the early 2030s if we got on it soon.
Cheaper than coal or oil too. Because Skylon is a UK project, the UK has the lead in fixing energy, carbon, climate and the difficult economic times due to expensive energy. Japan is paying close attention and actually spending serious money on power satellite development.
The most serious current problem is the NOx generated by vehicle reentry. Some atmospheric chemists are looking into the problem to see how much damage the traffic would cause to ozone.
There is a simple and relatively cheap way to stop the ice from sliding off into the ocean. It's well understood and has been used in large numbers for 40 years.
I refer to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline supports. There is a picture here of one of the thermal diodes that keep the permafrost frozen under the line. They are dirt simple, a pipe with a few gallons of ammonia or propane.
No space station? Well that's because people wrote those books, and books on moon colonies or terraforming Mars when they weren't really aware of how much effort it took just to get rockets off the ground. People thought going to Mars would be as easy as driving your car to Vegas, and over time people slowly became aware that it wasn't, and science wouldn't create any magical thing that would make it so.
I think you may be confusing science and engineering/economics. "Rocket science" has been around 202 years according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It's not as expensive to get into orbit as you think. If you just consider the energy it's around $2 a kg to GEO.
By combining Reaction Engines' Skylon and a method the microwave guru Bill Brown proposed, I think it is possible to get the cost down to less than $200/kg to GEO at a flight rate commensurate with the cargo requirements of a power satellite project. At that transport cost, energy from space can undercut electrical energy from coal--if you can get the mass of a 5 GW power satellite under 32,500 tons. Preprint here https://drive.google.com/file/... The one on getting the mass of a thermal power satellite down to where the project makes sense will be out in a few weeks.
But mostly you are right. I remember one place where Heinlein mentioned that "he and Ginny spent three solid days calculating on big sheets of butcher paper some of the Hohmann transfer orbits he was writing about . .." Nowadays, you can run this off in half an hour with Excel (half hour to write, less than a ms to run) but how many of the current crop of writers would do even that?
Maury, if you want to attack a kind of renewable energy, you should pick a better way. It's cost rather than any other factor that makes the difference.
If you use levelized cost of electric power for electrical from space it turns out that the cost depends entirely on the capital investment since there is no fuel.
Capital investment depends on the cost to buy the parts and the shipping to get them to GEO. Cost of parts, including the rectenna is about $1100 per kW. This is based on steam turbines, which are about three times as efficient as current low cost PV. Analysis of the mass indicates they will mass about 6.5 kg/kW. That includes the concentrators, boilers, turbines, condenser/radiators, the transmitter and a frame to hold it all together.
This paper (preprint, but it's been published) https://drive.google.com/file/... shows how a substantial parts flow to GEO would cost less than $200/kg. That makes the whole thing come in at less than $2400/kW or 3 cents per kWh.
Coal costs 4 cents per kWh, so power from space (if this analysis is correct) would undercut coal.
Fastest this could happen is 2023 assuming Reaction Engines delivers as promised in 2021. On the kind of fast growth you would expect from something making a very high level of profit, power from space would completely displace more expensive fossil fuels by the early 2030s.
If you think that's a good idea, you might want to analyze power satellites from the end point of producing power for less than electricity from coal.
I know it is off topic for your request, but if you have money well beyond what your wife and daughter need, you might consider cryonics. There are two companies out there, Alcor and CI. CI is lower cost, Alcor froze Hal Finney last year.
It may be a long shot, but in your condition, there are not many options--especially if you want a chance to see how your daughter does.
The last person I helped process for Alcor, Dr. Jim Stevenson, died of pancreatic cancer.
"But putting the collectors in space will be stupid and uneconomic for the foreseeable future."
Maybe and then again, maybe not.
I don't think there is any point in making the investment for power satellites unless the cost of power produced from them is less than that from coal.
If you can get the cost of power down to $2400/kW, then the cost of power gets down to 3 cents, undercutting coal at 4 cents per kWh.
The cost of the parts and the rectenna is expected to be around $1100/kW. That leaves $1300/kW for transport. I *think* the mass of a kW reference to the ground will stay under 6.5 kg/kW (a thermal, not a PV design). That means the cost to lift large amounts of cargo to GEO can't exceed $200/kg.
Reaction Engines thinks Skylon will put cargo in LEO for $120/kg, leaving $80/kg for the cost of the LEO to GEO leg. That can't be done with chemical propulsion, but it looks like a ground powered arcjet tug that moves about 15,000 tons at a time could get the cost down to perhaps $65/kg. The arcjets exhaust velocity for this cost is around 25 km/s.
"End-to-end encryption is easy - you just need to send a courier with a one time pad."
Key management is a PITA. Still, making pairs of DVDs filled with random noise isn't that hard. If you seal them with glitter nail polish and send a picture of the sealing back, then you and the recipient can be fairly sure it wasn't intercepted and copied.
USB sticks are larger, but you need to completely erase the USB or DVD after copying to disk. Then the program needs to enforce that used blocks on the disk are erased.
Phil Z and one other name in the crypto biz thinks this is unneeded.
It doesn't work well for encrypting pirated movies, but for most stuff it's really secure.
A simple thought experiment will tell you that if this thing works as stated, it's a source of free energy. I was amused by a post from a power satellite fan saying that the thing could be used to get parts from LEO to GEO to make power satellites economical.
It might make stuff cheaper to move in space, but the near free energy these things can generate eliminates the market for energy from space.
I was in my last year of college when they landed. It's still one of my most intense memories.
It's worth keeping in mind that NASA is not the only game in town. The most interesting work right now is Skylon by Reaction Engines in the UK. Japan has the most interest in a commercial product, power satellites. Between them with China or Norway picking up much of the tab, we could see the first power satellite by 2023.
Artwork of a microwave ground station and and a vehicle to take 1000 15 ton Skylon payloads from LEO out to GEO to build power satellites.
In the long, long ago when telemarketers were humans and more often known as telephone solictors, I listed my phone number under a high school nickname, Heimdallr the Watcher., or Watcher, H.T.
That made it easy to sort out the telemarketers, it was a legit call if they asked from "the Watcher," but a dead giveaway if they asked for Mrs. Watcher.
So the standard rap would be, "Sorry, Mrs. Watcher is here but she can't speak to you."
Sometimes they would bite and ask "Why?"
"Well, you see, Mrs. Watcher used to be a telephone solicitor." [Dramatic pause]
I knew the people who worked on Xanadu though not quite back to the earliest days.
The design was largely completed by the time Autodesk got out of funding it. For a while the project continued under Memex (later Filoli over trademark issues). Memex had funding problems, the core group quit, and when Memex was funded again Roger Gregory (one of the original team members) and I were brought in to try to make sense of what they had. My experience was long out of date FORTRAN and more recent assembly. The majority of the code had been written in Smalltalk and auto translated to C++ as part of the compiling process. Memory was (by current standards) insanely limited. The clever part of the code was to pack and unpack a multi dimensional tree off disk. Fan out ran to around a thousand link pointers per 8k disk block meaning three disk reads could take you to a billion unique objects. The famous log N property.
The performance critically depended on a high performance system to reclaim abandoned parts of the tree in memory and that part was not finished. (It had been designed as an Ungar-Sather moving type garbage collector and partly written but not tested.) We got it going and it ran the regression test suite. One of the last tasks was to upgrade it from the Sun compiler. The most critical inner parts of the code depended on switching tree elements around to keep the tree balanced. It used the classic c=a, a =b and a=c where a and b were links. Bjarne Stroustrup had changed the definition of overriding equal between the two compilers making this a hard bug to find. I finally found it single stepping through the assembly language representation of the code. The tools are much better now, nobody would think of writing a garbage collector from scratch. It was only 20 years ago, but it feels like a lifetime.
Let's take a crack at putting numbers on your assumptions.
Assuming power satellite people want a large market share, they will have to set the cost lower than other sources. Say 2 cents per kWh. Hydro is lower, but there isn't enough of it.
If you go into the models for calculating levelized power, then to get 2 cents per kWh, the cost of the source can't be higher than $1600/kW (6.8% discount and 20 years). Even in China nuclear reactors are about $5000/kW. Ground PV can't get close, it might hit 8-10 cents per kWh, but at that cost the concrete and steel become bigger factors than the silicon.
The rectenna, the part on earth, will cost around a billion dollars for 5 GW. That's $200/kW. I have published the details on how I estimated the cost, can quote them if you want.
I favor thermal designs as they are a lot smaller, but even with PV, it should be possible to get the cost of panels and transmitter plus labor down around $900/kW referenced to the output of the rectenna. That's assuming microwave amplifier tubes cost about the same per kW as they do in microwave ovens.
So a reasonable cost for power satellites $200 plus $900 plus $500 for the transport to GEO.
I think it's reasonable to expect power satellites to mass around 5 kg/kW.
Thus the allowed transport cost to GEO is $100/kg, or $45/lb. But that's to GEO, not LEO.
"The problem with space elevators (and other sky-hooks) is that if the tonnage down doesn't, over time, match the tonnage up, the orbit decays."
That's not true. Long as the cable is tight, you can lift stuff forever without anything coming down. The cable does lean a little to the east, and it saps the earth's rotation to provide the velocity at GEO. Remember there is a rigid arm from the center of the earth to the base of the elevator. If the traffic tonnage is matched, the elevator will be straight, if more is coming down, it will lean to the east.
Slashdot Mirror
Parts including the rectenna are figured at $1100/kW
Eventually SpaceX will get the cost of parts to GEO down by a full factor of ten from the current of $20,000/kg At 6.5 kg/kW and $2000 per kg, the lift cost would be about $13,000, total $14,100 per installed kW.
The formula to go from capital equipment to $/kWh is to divide by 80,000 or 17.6 cent per kWh. Sorry, no market at that price.
The project does depend on Skylon or something else that will get the cost down to $200/kg to GEO. That's hard, I agree.
I am sorry you missed it, but launch cost are over half the capital cost even when you get the cost down to $200/kg.
PV (solar power) is about 20% efficient, so you get about 200 watts out of a square meter. But you only get it about 1/5th of the time due to day/night and low sun angles so the average over a year even in good places is 40-50 watts per square meter. The rectenna is typically 85%, 24 hours a day, about 250 watts per square meter or about 5 times as much.
Plus the rectennas are mostly open space. They don't block sunlight much so you can get duel use out of the land by putting the rectenna over farmland or pasture. They can be relatively flimsy structures since the wind force on them is small.
Even worse is when Bjarne Stroustrup changed the behavior of overriding equal. This comprehensively broke the last version of the Xanadu code I was involved with. After a couple of months of Roger Gregory--who is a very sharp programmer--failing to figure out what had happened, I had to single step the program (like debugging assembly code) to find what had gone wrong under the new compiler. Took most of a night.
Clearly stated and dead on correct.
Install 5 times as much name plate renewables and really cheap storage and it would solve the problem, which is that after you consider the cost of storage, renewables are way too expensive. Increasing renewables enough to seriously impact the carbon issue would jack up the price of energy and cause the economy (and government) to collapse.
There is a proposal that's been around a long time, power satellites. They do cope with intermittentcy, but to be economical, the cost of lifting parts to GEO must be reduced by 100 to one. The single stage to orbit rocketplane, Skylon and an old idea by microwave guru William Brown looks like it could get the cost down far enough for them to undercut coal. More here https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A few years ago there was a legal decision that you could not copyright a score that was the output of an algorithm. Pi is the output of an algorithm. If you code a song's score into a string of digits, and go searching for that sting in pi, you are sure to find it. Ergo, no song can be copyrighted.
Alas, you never have mod points when you need them.
I think I was the one who turned Steve on cryonics. Alcor was raided a few years before SJG and we sued the county under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act over email in the computers they took. Didn't go to a trial because Riverside county knew they would lose and just paid up. When Steve was raided I sent him the legal research and legal papers we had from that case. His lawyers used it, and Steve wanted to know what Alcor did.
My that was a long time ago.
I don't know if there is a game in this, but recently a new solution to energy, carbon and climate has developed. It's mainly based around the Skylon SSTO. Looks like that will get the cost down to where power satellites undercut coal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... I wonder if Steve or anyone could figure out how to make a game out of this solution?
Between the questions they ask on SF86 and the medical records that someone grabbed recently . . .
I don't see how anyone could fill out that form without missing something that could be exposed in medical records or a little PI work. Then they are threatened with exposing their error and 5 years in jail.http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/06/12/2210230/sf86-data-captured-in-opm-hack#
Judge Robert H. Wallerstein, an unknown number of prosecutors in the Riverside DA's office, the cult's lawyers and perhaps the Riverside Sheriff's Department were engaged in a criminal conspiracy to entrap. Seven years after it happened, it came to light that the judge had been in on an attempt to entrap me for "failure to appear" on an indictment they tried to keep secret by not sending a notice to appear to me or my lawyer. Wallerstein signed an arrest warrant for the "crime" of failure to appear prior to when I did in fact show up. The arrest warrant was never made part of the court record, but the Sheriff's office kept a copy of it which they filed in Arizona when I was arrested there.
Copy here: http://www.operatingthetan.com...
The cult's lawyers went to a huge effort in an unrelated case to have me in a deposition later the same day as the notice to appear. I believe I would have been arrested on camera at the deposition if the cult's lawyers had not screwed up by assumed something I put in a filing in the bankruptcy case to mean I knew about the notice to appear when I didn't.
If you wonder why I say something that could be considered to slander the judge (if it were not true), he is long dead, and there are a ton of legal precedents that you can't slander the dead. My lawyer and I would have tried to recuse Wallerstein had we known he had been engaged in a criminal conspiracy against me 7 months before the trial.
A solution by 2100 is about what I expect from the political world, i.e., put it off far beyond their term in office. Good reason actually. The existing renewable "solutions" are so expensive that coming down hard on carbon (that's coal for electrical generation and oil for transport) would kill the economy, the government that tried it would be replaced and the new government would repudiate the policies.
What's needed is a renewable energy source that's cheaper than coal. Then carbon emissions would fall fast and the economy would boom.
I can't say we have a solution yet, but we might have one. Here is a proposal to build solar power plants where the Sun shines close to 99% of the time. This video of transporting parts to GEO and building a thermal power satellite was recently made public. It was in a contest, but a team supported by the Chinese government won.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
3000 of these could entirely replace the three cubic miles of oil (equivalent) of fossil fuel the human race uses each year. By the early 2030s if we got on it soon.
Cheaper than coal or oil too. Because Skylon is a UK project, the UK has the lead in fixing energy, carbon, climate and the difficult economic times due to expensive energy. Japan is paying close attention and actually spending serious money on power satellite development.
The most serious current problem is the NOx generated by vehicle reentry. Some atmospheric chemists are looking into the problem to see how much damage the traffic would cause to ozone.
There is a simple and relatively cheap way to stop the ice from sliding off into the ocean. It's well understood and has been used in large numbers for 40 years.
I refer to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline supports. There is a picture here of one of the thermal diodes that keep the permafrost frozen under the line. They are dirt simple, a pipe with a few gallons of ammonia or propane.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Far as I know, nobody has yet studied what it would cost or how to pay for it, but enough of them would freeze the glaciers to bedrock.
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
I know the people involved. Been signed up myself since 1985.
The problem is science.
No space station? Well that's because people wrote those books, and books on moon colonies or terraforming Mars when they weren't really aware of how much effort it took just to get rockets off the ground. People thought going to Mars would be as easy as driving your car to Vegas, and over time people slowly became aware that it wasn't, and science wouldn't create any magical thing that would make it so.
I think you may be confusing science and engineering/economics. "Rocket science" has been around 202 years according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It's not as expensive to get into orbit as you think. If you just consider the energy it's around $2 a kg to GEO.
By combining Reaction Engines' Skylon and a method the microwave guru Bill Brown proposed, I think it is possible to get the cost down to less than $200/kg to GEO at a flight rate commensurate with the cargo requirements of a power satellite project. At that transport cost, energy from space can undercut electrical energy from coal--if you can get the mass of a 5 GW power satellite under 32,500 tons. Preprint here https://drive.google.com/file/... The one on getting the mass of a thermal power satellite down to where the project makes sense will be out in a few weeks.
But mostly you are right. I remember one place where Heinlein mentioned that "he and Ginny spent three solid days calculating on big sheets of butcher paper some of the Hohmann transfer orbits he was writing about . . ." Nowadays, you can run this off in half an hour with Excel (half hour to write, less than a ms to run) but how many of the current crop of writers would do even that?
I wonder what would happen if one of the candidates in the next Presidential election pledged to pardon Snowden?
Is there enough of a majority for them to win on this issue?
Maury, if you want to attack a kind of renewable energy, you should pick a better way. It's cost rather than any other factor that makes the difference.
If you use levelized cost of electric power for electrical from space it turns out that the cost depends entirely on the capital investment since there is no fuel.
Capital investment depends on the cost to buy the parts and the shipping to get them to GEO. Cost of parts, including the rectenna is about $1100 per kW. This is based on steam turbines, which are about three times as efficient as current low cost PV. Analysis of the mass indicates they will mass about 6.5 kg/kW. That includes the concentrators, boilers, turbines, condenser/radiators, the transmitter and a frame to hold it all together.
This paper (preprint, but it's been published) https://drive.google.com/file/... shows how a substantial parts flow to GEO would cost less than $200/kg. That makes the whole thing come in at less than $2400/kW or 3 cents per kWh.
Coal costs 4 cents per kWh, so power from space (if this analysis is correct) would undercut coal.
Fastest this could happen is 2023 assuming Reaction Engines delivers as promised in 2021. On the kind of fast growth you would expect from something making a very high level of profit, power from space would completely displace more expensive fossil fuels by the early 2030s.
If you think that's a good idea, you might want to analyze power satellites from the end point of producing power for less than electricity from coal.
I know it is off topic for your request, but if you have money well beyond what your wife and daughter need, you might consider cryonics. There are two companies out there, Alcor and CI. CI is lower cost, Alcor froze Hal Finney last year.
It may be a long shot, but in your condition, there are not many options--especially if you want a chance to see how your daughter does.
The last person I helped process for Alcor, Dr. Jim Stevenson, died of pancreatic cancer.
"But putting the collectors in space will be stupid and uneconomic for the foreseeable future."
Maybe and then again, maybe not.
I don't think there is any point in making the investment for power satellites unless the cost of power produced from them is less than that from coal.
If you can get the cost of power down to $2400/kW, then the cost of power gets down to 3 cents, undercutting coal at 4 cents per kWh.
The cost of the parts and the rectenna is expected to be around $1100/kW. That leaves $1300/kW for transport. I *think* the mass of a kW reference to the ground will stay under 6.5 kg/kW (a thermal, not a PV design). That means the cost to lift large amounts of cargo to GEO can't exceed $200/kg.
Reaction Engines thinks Skylon will put cargo in LEO for $120/kg, leaving $80/kg for the cost of the LEO to GEO leg. That can't be done with chemical propulsion, but it looks like a ground powered arcjet tug that moves about 15,000 tons at a time could get the cost down to perhaps $65/kg. The arcjets exhaust velocity for this cost is around 25 km/s.
There is an IEEE paper that goes into the details here https://drive.google.com/file/...
"End-to-end encryption is easy - you just need to send a courier with a one time pad."
Key management is a PITA. Still, making pairs of DVDs filled with random noise isn't that hard. If you seal them with glitter nail polish and send a picture of the sealing back, then you and the recipient can be fairly sure it wasn't intercepted and copied.
USB sticks are larger, but you need to completely erase the USB or DVD after copying to disk. Then the program needs to enforce that used blocks on the disk are erased.
Phil Z and one other name in the crypto biz thinks this is unneeded.
It doesn't work well for encrypting pirated movies, but for most stuff it's really secure.
Ello could just charge people. I don't mind paying for an ad free experience. Slashdot used to have that option but no longer.
I do pay for LinkedIn, but they are serving up ads today in spite of the $20/month.
A simple thought experiment will tell you that if this thing works as stated, it's a source of free energy. I was amused by a post from a power satellite fan saying that the thing could be used to get parts from LEO to GEO to make power satellites economical.
It might make stuff cheaper to move in space, but the near free energy these things can generate eliminates the market for energy from space.
I was in my last year of college when they landed. It's still one of my most intense memories.
It's worth keeping in mind that NASA is not the only game in town. The most interesting work right now is Skylon by Reaction Engines in the UK. Japan has the most interest in a commercial product, power satellites. Between them with China or Norway picking up much of the tab, we could see the first power satellite by 2023.
Artwork of a microwave ground station and and a vehicle to take 1000 15 ton Skylon payloads from LEO out to GEO to build power satellites.
Ground transmitter size
https://drive.google.com/file/...
Microwave rockets 3 pixs
https://drive.google.com/file/...
https://drive.google.com/file/...
https://drive.google.com/file/...
In the long, long ago when telemarketers were humans and more often known as telephone solictors, I listed my phone number under a high school nickname, Heimdallr the Watcher., or Watcher, H.T.
That made it easy to sort out the telemarketers, it was a legit call if they asked from "the Watcher," but a dead giveaway if they asked for Mrs. Watcher.
So the standard rap would be, "Sorry, Mrs. Watcher is here but she can't speak to you."
Sometimes they would bite and ask "Why?"
"Well, you see, Mrs. Watcher used to be a telephone solicitor." [Dramatic pause]
"Until someone caught her." [Another dramatic pause]
"AND CUT HER TONGUE OUT!"
Usually this got a laugh, but at least once the telemarketer said she was calling the cops.
I knew the people who worked on Xanadu though not quite back to the earliest days.
The design was largely completed by the time Autodesk got out of funding it. For a while the project continued under Memex (later Filoli over trademark issues). Memex had funding problems, the core group quit, and when Memex was funded again Roger Gregory (one of the original team members) and I were brought in to try to make sense of what they had. My experience was long out of date FORTRAN and more recent assembly. The majority of the code had been written in Smalltalk and auto translated to C++ as part of the compiling process. Memory was (by current standards) insanely limited. The clever part of the code was to pack and unpack a multi dimensional tree off disk. Fan out ran to around a thousand link pointers per 8k disk block meaning three disk reads could take you to a billion unique objects. The famous log N property.
The performance critically depended on a high performance system to reclaim abandoned parts of the tree in memory and that part was not finished. (It had been designed as an Ungar-Sather moving type garbage collector and partly written but not tested.) We got it going and it ran the regression test suite. One of the last tasks was to upgrade it from the Sun compiler. The most critical inner parts of the code depended on switching tree elements around to keep the tree balanced. It used the classic c=a, a =b and a=c where a and b were links. Bjarne Stroustrup had changed the definition of overriding equal between the two compilers making this a hard bug to find. I finally found it single stepping through the assembly language representation of the code. The tools are much better now, nobody would think of writing a garbage collector from scratch. It was only 20 years ago, but it feels like a lifetime.
Let's take a crack at putting numbers on your assumptions.
Assuming power satellite people want a large market share, they will have to set the cost lower than other sources. Say 2 cents per kWh. Hydro is lower, but there isn't enough of it.
If you go into the models for calculating levelized power, then to get 2 cents per kWh, the cost of the source can't be higher than $1600/kW (6.8% discount and 20 years). Even in China nuclear reactors are about $5000/kW. Ground PV can't get close, it might hit 8-10 cents per kWh, but at that cost the concrete and steel become bigger factors than the silicon.
The rectenna, the part on earth, will cost around a billion dollars for 5 GW. That's $200/kW. I have published the details on how I estimated the cost, can quote them if you want.
I favor thermal designs as they are a lot smaller, but even with PV, it should be possible to get the cost of panels and transmitter plus labor down around $900/kW referenced to the output of the rectenna. That's assuming microwave amplifier tubes cost about the same per kW as they do in microwave ovens.
So a reasonable cost for power satellites $200 plus $900 plus $500 for the transport to GEO.
I think it's reasonable to expect power satellites to mass around 5 kg/kW.
Thus the allowed transport cost to GEO is $100/kg, or $45/lb. But that's to GEO, not LEO.
"The problem with space elevators (and other sky-hooks) is that if the tonnage down doesn't, over time, match the tonnage up, the orbit decays."
That's not true. Long as the cable is tight, you can lift stuff forever without anything coming down. The cable does lean a little to the east, and it saps the earth's rotation to provide the velocity at GEO. Remember there is a rigid arm from the center of the earth to the base of the elevator. If the traffic tonnage is matched, the elevator will be straight, if more is coming down, it will lean to the east.