This Satellite Could Be Beaming Solar Power Down From Space By 2025

Daniel_Stuckey writes "A NASA veteran, aerospace entrepreneur, and space-based solar power (SBSP) expert, [John] Mankins designed the world's first practical orbital solar plant. It's called the Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large PHased Array, or SPS-ALPHA for short. If all goes to plan, it could be launched as early as 2025, which is sooner than it sounds when it comes to space-based solar power timelines. Scientists have been aware of the edge the "space-down" approach holds over terrestrial panels for decades. An orbiting plant would be unaffected by weather, atmospheric filtering of light, and the sun's inconvenient habit of setting every evening. SBSP also has the potential to dramatically increase the availability of renewable energy."

Re:Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's some hard numbers on "traditional" approaches to solar ground vs space:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/ [ucsd.edu]
"You can even throw in batteries in the ground system without exceeding the space cost, and all the reasons for going to space have melted away."

It would be interesting if TFA had some hard numbers to compare against in terms of generation capacity vs launch costs vs upkeep/replacement schedule... Can't find anything myself though...

Re:My god, what has science wrought???

[HangingChad]

Ion Canon

I think you mean "ion cannon" unless you're talking about the definitive collection of published works on ions.

An ion cannon works by projecting a beam of charged particles, either atoms or molecules, not a beam of microwave energy.

And, no, it's not going to destroy the ground station.

Re:So why not...?

[Culture20]

Because solar orbit at 10% earth distance would make the magnifying glass zoom around the sun multiple times per earth year. There would be no way to get the rays from the glass to the collector. You'd be better off having the collector out there with an amiable maser.

Re:My god, what has science wrought???

[number6x]

The $600 Billion that you quote does not include all military spending. quite a bit of the $2.3T you list for social spending includes military pensions, the GI Bill, and the VA hospitals:

• Government Pensions (including Military pensions) $1.0 trillion
• Government Health Care (including VA Hospitals) + $1.2 trillion
• Government Education (including GI Bill) + $0.9 trillion
• National Defense + $0.9 trillion
• Government Welfare + $0.6 trillion
• All Other Spending + $1.6 trillion
• Total Government Spending $6.2 trillion

That is about $1.1 trillion more than we took in in taxes. The way our 'National Defense' spending is skewed towards big contractors and away from the soldiers, I would probably guess that there are quite a few veterans in the 'Government Welfare' figure as well.

The 'All Other Spending' includes foreign 'Military Aid'. The majority of which goes to Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Egypt to help pay for their military budgets. Total Foreign Aid comes to about less than 1% of budget. About $14 billion in foreign military aid, $23 billion in foreign humanitarian and developmental aid and $18 billion in 'other' foreign aid.

So there is military spending that is outside the pentagon's budget. A lot of it, for soldiers and veterans, gets included in the social spending.

Re:My god, what has science wrought???

[TapeCutter]

Learn English, what you are talking about is a particular type of investment, specifically private financial investments that have a monetary return. Governments do that all the time and have massive traditional investment portfolios, but they also make "investments" in infrastructure and such where the returns are meaused by how much they benifit society. For instance the government may choose to invest in a (say) new bridge, the ROI will be measured in reduced travel times and transport costs, the ROI cannot be measured in dollars because there is no such profit to be had. A private bridge would charge a toll to make money and therefore is of less benifit to the community since the toll redirects the bulk of the transport cost savings into the bridge owners pocket. You see the difference? - Government invests in society, private enterprise profits from society, both methods can be implemented with varying degrees of success depending on circumstance, neither group has a monopoly on inefficentcy.

IMHO, the single biggest problem in the US is that there are way too many people like you who reduce ALL government activity to a single simple minded complaint; "Waaaa.....they're spending my money...Waaaaa!"