Posted on 04/11/2005 12:33:13 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
http://www.isso.uh.edu/
Okay, you and all the rest of you crazies can go put mirrors on the moon. In the meantime, I'll be perfecting the nuclear fusion reactor in my garage.
An investment in Lunar industry can produce cell after cell that will have a very long life in the optimal conditions for electronics on the Moon. By producing vast farms of solar cells, power can be gathered without any clouds or atmosphere to get in the way. If the solar photovoltaic power cells are built out of Lunar materials, a small industrial base on the Moon can lead to enough power to export by radar beam back to the Earth. Lunar solar power (LSP) is a low pollution, low operating cost, high capacity power generation technology...............*** Rectifying the case for beaming Lunar solar power
Some info at LINK in Post #3.
Exactly!!
They all seem to gloss over the fact that 100 gigawatts electricity delivered via any technology know would totally fry any and all life at the receiver locations.
Any one who has ever worked around powerful radar stations (Like the NORAD or DEW installations) knows there is the morning bird patrol, sent out to pick up the dead birds fried by the operations of the last 24 hours.
Yet all these reports talk about how easy it is to beam power. Well maybe in the lab, with a safe backdrop.
I don't see any of these folks lining up to have their house and children microwaved 23/7/365 by enough power to run even your household fan.
Some way of sending power around the moon itself would have to be constructed for new moon periods, as the half of the moon receiving sunlight would be facing away from the earth, where the transmiters would have to be located.
Also, some way of transmitting these huge amounts of power between continents on earth would have to be developed and constructed for the 12 hours per day when any particular point on the earth faces away from the moon.
Translation: It ain't ever going to happen!
Areas around the polls are in almost total sunlight.
If you don't like that plan. How about launching regolith (lunar dirt) into space and building solar arrays there? It would solve property dispute problems.
Why use the Moon when we could simply put SPS's in Earth orbit? The Moon would be a better place as a platform for interplanetary launches, manufacturing rocket fuel from hydrogen, or for observatories.
It's good for many things and we better get our buns their first.
Actually, due to various irregularities in lunar orbital movement, the polar areas nod in and out of sight of the earth, so building right at the polar areas would not be sufficient.
If this concept has any prospect of working, putting the collectors and transmitters in synchronous orbit makes a lot more sense.
The info in post three shows 10,000 watts being transmitted and 500 watts recovered, or 5% of what was sent. That's a serious no go. I don't believe there are any known technologies to provide the capabilities required. Microwave energy that can be reasonably converted back to electrical power is relatively low in frequency with today's technology. Those low frequencies aren’t collimated well. The beam would be huge by the time it made it to earth. And if it could be collimated well the power densities would fry anything that passed through it. Airplanes, birds, people, whatever. Aiming the beam at anything other than the intended receiver could be considered a large-scale weapon of mass destruction. It would destroy pretty much whatever it hit. Getting international approval for such a device would be virtually impossible because of its alternate uses. There would be no prior warning of any attack made by it. A military dream weapon…
Yes a "wobble" is there but it's not much.
Solar panels in space - made from the Moon. Now there's a project worth pursuing.
I don't know if your post is accurate.
They believe their studies will yield a viable product.
I'd like to hear more about this.
Yes, we do need to get our buns on the moon and make something of it.
I think a space elevator is more practical than this power generation idea.
100 gigawatts. Isn't that the amount of power to send the DeLorean on it's way in Back to the Future?
I think a space elevator is good too.
There can be two (and many more) good ideas.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just extremely unlikely.
It will require a technology still undiscovered.
OK, this is what I am unsure of.
When I drive around, I cross bridges. They all have spaces at the beginning and end, some even in the middle.
These spaces are built in because the bridge expands from heat. It would buckle and disintegrate if there were no spaces.
So what happens if you made a solid piece of steel, filled it with holes so you could run water through it and cool it down, painted it black, and attached one end to a gearbox that was connected to a generator?
We're talking hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of pounds of pressure per square inch as this thing heats up and expands. And you would get energy from the cooling cycle as well as the heating cycle.
It might even be efficient enough to obsolete my perpetual motion machine.
Being an engineer, one's view is based on what one can do with today's technology, not tomorrow's.
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