Posted on 11/07/2022 8:59:59 AM PST by Eleutheria5
Technology capable of collecting solar power in space and beaming it to Earth to provide a global supply of clean and affordable energy was once considered science fiction. Now it is moving closer to reality. Through the Space-based Solar Power Project (SSPP), a team of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers is working to deploy a constellation of modular spacecraft that collect sunlight, transform it into electricity, then wirelessly transmit that electricity wherever it is needed. They could even send it to places that currently have no access to reliable power.
“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented project,” says Harry Atwater, an SSPP researcher and Otis Booth Leadership Chair of Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “It exemplifies the boldness and ambition needed to address one of the most significant challenges of our time, providing clean and affordable energy...
(Excerpt) Read more at scitechdaily.com ...
So let the PRC develop it instead?
From Minister Farrakhan’s space ship no doubt as source of energy.
I would believe we will have a space elevator before we have microwave power beaming back to earth.
And I don’t believe we will have a space elevator any time soon.
But it will probably involve carbon nano tubes. Self replicating possibly.Von Newman machines
SimCity 2000 had this as an option for one of your power plants after a certain year. Occasionally the beam goes awry and fries half your city though...
How about the effect on ballistic missiles?
I have been following this concept for decades, it isn’t anything new except for one thing: We may be able to get things into space much more inexpensively and at greater volume than we ever did before. I am all for having these arrays in space...if they can find a way.
No.
Still doesn’t answer my question.
Who gets to decide “where the power is needed.”
It might make more sense to concentrate the gathered energy into chemical storage, and then parachute it down.
I was born in 1950. Avid Sci-fi reader most of the time...
It seems today’s young ones have ‘rediscovered’ something new in the way of impossible, wasteful BS.
All I can say is that if you ‘f@ck with Mother nature, she’ll f@ck you back.’
It really is all only about the money they can get to ‘study’ the problem. Nothing ever comes from it.
LOL, emphasis on “If they can find a way”.
It does seem like “We can turn lead into gold...we just have to find a way...”
Not sure who started the idea but recall seeing it suggested here and there.
No need for microwaves.
Put it in geosynchronous orbit and just drop a power cord down to earth.
“How many cents per kw-hr?”
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
Sounds like this “unprecedented” project will require an endless supply of tax dollars for something that won’t work.
We don’t try this. The Chicoms do, and take over the world.
Or, you have defensive mechanisms in place to deal with something as clunky and unwieldy as an ICBM.
As for the danger to air traffic, that’s pretty simple. Keep the satellites in close geocentric orbit, so they transmit in a fixed location. Have high altitude receptors in place to take over from the microwave-transmitting satellite. Advise all air traffic of the location, just as they are advised of the military’s restricted zones.
As for birds, if you have only a few such transmission points, you will not be frying all the birds in the world, because they don’t all converge on one point, and they can be discouraged from flying into microwave beams the same way they are discouraged from hanging around airport runways and crashing planes.
No, the idea is not new. But concrete plans to implement it that are past the planning stage is a good thing. IF the idea becomes a real thing, it would be world-changing. Electric cars will then be closer to becoming universal. Fossil fuels, which do have a serious downside (aboriginal cultures and peoples keep getting wiped out for the promises of petrol wealth; Osage Indians, Darfur, Akhwazi, various tribes in Indonesia and Africa, etc., etc., etc., and evil people using it to finance terror, campaigns of imperial conquest, and leverage against the US and Europe, etc.), quite aside from the malarky of “global warming,” and therefore, it SHOULD be pursued, just as the steam engine was at one point unwieldy and scary, and computers used to be gigantic, expensive monsters that broke down all the time and were severely limited.
Like airplanes?
Who decides right now? And if it’s run by private companies, there’ll be competition. Would you rather PRC decide?
Birds, bats, insects, planes in the path of the bean will be fried and what is the dispersion on that beam - how much of the country side will be uninhabitable?
Back in 1976 Physicist Gerald O’Neil had the idea of using space colonies to manufacture these solar cells which would beam down the power with microwaves.
And the sun only puts out a certain amount of energy. Either collected in a parabola and in a concentrated beam or over a vast array of solar panels it doesn’t matter. One square meter of sun radiation will always produce the same amount of energy (give or take a joule or two...). Add to that the amount of energy to ‘move’ it to a useable collector of some sort and then storage through 50 miles of atmosphere.
OR... Could it just be a plan to ‘collect’ huge amounts of tax dollars and beam it in to the pockets of politically connected cronies???
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