Posted on 04/24/2005 5:36:53 PM PDT by CHARLITE
I hope that I live to see the day when all of the oil rich America-hating Wahhabi-spewing camel herders are reduced to sitting on oceans of useless oil covered with the same sand which has been there for millions of years........I want to see them back inside their tents, bereft of a single petro dollar with which to threaten America's safety and well being, ever again.
It is not only that, but it would be an ideal weapon.
Oh for crying out loud!
Forget this stuff and let's just ramp up the pebble bed nuclear reactors, make some hydrogen and be done with the middle east in 50 years.
PIE IN THE SKY... at the moment.
Solor Panel technology is NO-WHERE near efficnet enough to be viable to constitute a sattelite that would send ANY energy back to Earth, much less a sattelite that is cabable to suplimenting national energey requirements.
Sounds like a good energy policy for 2040 than is is for 2004.
The Greens will preclude anything other than a retreat to the 8th century.
Well said my friend.
True, if you could really 'beam' enough energy down to the ground to be useful as a power source, it would be 'a shame' if that beam accidentally fell on someplace we don't like.
Not to mention what would happen if the beam strayed a few seconds in angle and fried a nearby city.
Think intelligently outside the box. Or go with what we know we already have; billions and billions of cubit feet of natural gas we're sitting on, same with oil offshore, and mountains of coal that can be cleaned up for burning.
You forget that the "greenies" won't permit any nuclear reactor activity beyond what we already have, just as they oppose any drilling in ANWR. I wonder what their objection to solar power satellites might be?...."pollution of the moon and 'space' itself?"
"Extreme vitriol and rancorous replies served daily."!!!
Jerry Pournelle advocates the prize approach to this sort of thing. NASA has become welfare for middle class engineers, or really just bureaucrats; I think they went less than 1:1 on the engineers: managers ratio some time ago.
Something like:
"Be it resolved by Congress, that the first U.S. corporation to provide 100kW of power from a satellite in Earth orbit, to the power grid in the United States, for no less than 8000 hours in a single calendar year, shall be awarded a prize of $500,000,000 tax-free."
Even if we quadruple the solar collector efficiency we now have, each sat would be gigantic in area. Add in groundside collection inefficiencies, and the area goes up.
Among other groups, astronomers and the light pollution people would go nuts.
As is, it's hard to take any astrophoto without catching a sat trail in it.
As for use as a weapon, you'd defocus the send beam and use a quite large area on the groundside to rectify the beam- quite large, to get the beam density as low as possible, which in turn lowers collection efficiency.
ADL did a study of mice and rats in a low density microwave environment and found some problems long term, if I remember the details- it was a while ago that I read it.
Why not lets develop a big space power capability and use it in space to refine asteroid metals? More efficient overall and much less polluting to have the power source, mine, and refinery way offshore. Astronomically offshore!
I seem to recall that an article posted last week stated they had gotten past 55% efficiency in solar panels. If that is the case, this idea might have some merit.
At $3/gal gas, the people will tell the Greens to go sit on a spotted owl.
Power source would render "black gold" obsolete.
In a word: horseshiite!
We still 'need' awl as a feedstock for plactics and chemical manufacturing, as well as lubricants...
It's Deja Vu all over again.
Back in the early 80's, the MIT Aero & Astro department was pushing this idea down in Congress. They were using our Systems Engineering class to flesh out the details of this concept. Our department head would come back and give us the details of how it went in DC. But Congress shot down the space-based power station due to environmental issues (Microwaving power back to the Earth), so he dropped back and tried for a field goal.
Instead we were to build solar power panels in space - for use back on Earth! (Hey, when you have a concept-baby, it's hard to give it up). So we reshifted our focus to design lunar mining stations to mass-drive basic material mass from the moon directly into LLO, then vehicles for slow orbital transfer of the stuff back to GEO, where huge factories would use a technique called Direct Vapor Deposition to coat the lunar material substrate with photoelectric converter material (which requires a vacuum), and voila! - ship it back to Earth.
All this, of course, would require as a minimum, $300 per pound into LEO, so even before Shuttle flew, with its $10,000 per pound payload delivery cost, it was well known that a follow-on vehicle would be required. So we designed that too - a scramjet/rocket hybrid SSTO vehicle that could achieve routine access to space from any standard runway.
The investment for all this would be staggering. And step 1.a is the development of a Shuttle follow-on. When that happens, I'll lose my smirk.
This "new concept" is all a buncha hand-waving - to use a phrase some of our professors used to describe a skimpy project submittal, that's designed to give us the illusion that we have these wonderful new industries to leapfrog into, as third-world competitors take away our existing industries.
There are microwave towers all over the country transmitting high energy beams. I haven't heard of birds being fryed by them.
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