Dr O'Neil wrote a book at NASA's urging. It was titled "The High Frontier" and proposed the development of lunar mining colonies and satellite factories where orbital satellies would be constructed. These power satellites would collect solar energy, convert it to low intensity microwaves and transmit it to the earth where it would be converted into electricity.
large antenna farms would collect the low intensity microwaves and there would be little to no environmental impact. One of the pictures in the book show an antenna field in west Texas that is almost a sqaure mile in size. Below the antenna cattle graze and birds fly through the beam iwth NO adverse effect. In the late 80s NASA tested this by transmitting microwaves between two mountain at White Sands. the technique was proved and we need to return to the moon to and do this stuff.
Of course if you want to encourage students to study math and science, develop alternative energy sources which are GREEN and improve our economy we need to increase Space funding.
PS read the High Frontier and google O'Neil!
I read the late Dr O’Neill’s book, well, a while back, I think right after there was a magazine article about him, possibly in “Final Frontier” magazine. He was smart, but he was also dead wrong about shooting that much energy through the atmosphere. It would be marginally better to have a single large downlink, but that might take some doing to get that to work.
And that’s right, the generating source he suggested was photovoltaic arrays, miles in size, manufactured and deployed in orbit. He suggested building large, half-glass cylindrical settlements, which would turn on the long axis fast enough to simulate gravity for the inhabitants. Those would also run off photovoltaics.
To get a series of downlink stations to be workable, a series of them (each group in an isolated area) would have to be constructed, as well as a series of large photovoltaic arrays that take turns passing over the illuminated side and can hit the downlink stations. It would be an impressive feat of engineering to accomplish this, and maybe even more impressive to maintain many square miles of cells exposed to micrometeoroid damage.
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