NASA completed another study in 2012, with a vastly cheaper and more practical design enabled by new technologies. Here's a description: <a href="https://space.nss.org/sps-alpha-a-novel-approach-to-space-solar-power/" rel="nofollow">https://space.nss.org/sps-alpha-a-novel-approach-to-space-so...</a><p>and the study itself: <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2011_Practical_Solar_Power_Satellite/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2011_Practi...</a><p>A book-length treatment of modern SPS designs is <i>The Case for Space Solar Power</i>. It has detailed cost figures but was written before SpaceX had accomplished much, estimating a cost at gigawatt scale of 15 cents/kWh. I plugged in Starship launch costs and it came to 4 cents/kWh, which is not bad for 24/7 clean power without storage.
Even things like electricity and water, which move pretty well, have "place value" -- people commonly move water from place to place by growing grain with the water and then moving the grain (not the water) to places that don't have enough water to grow the grain conveniently / economically. The same goes for electricity -- Iceland exports refined metals which require huge amounts of electricity to melt, effectively exporting the electricity entombed in the refined aluminum.<p>What can be made in space that can allow moving this abundant energy? Obviously you can't haul ore up into space then refine it with a big magnifying glass and drop it back onto the earth. People talk about asteroids but they seem like they're a big delta-V away from where they'd be useful to put into Kia bumpers.
One problem with this that wasn't as much of a problem in the 1970s is RF interference. The 1970s designs and many other designs use 2.45 GHz, so it will interfere with wifi and bluetooth, with bluetooth being more sensitive to interference.<p>How far does this interference extend? Thousands of kilometers from the receiver[0, see page 250]. Because the transmitter is far, the beam spreads out quite a bit due to diffraction and because the transmit power is gigawatts there's hundreds of megawatts of stray power. Making bluetooth headphones and bluetooth low energy tags work worse will probably make people angry.<p>Different frequencies could be used, but that requires allocating spectrum, which is a pretty difficult task politically. In the US, there are a couple bands in the sub-10 GHz range where power beaming works best that have few users. So it's not impossible, but still politically difficult.<p>[0]<a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9318744" rel="nofollow">https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9318744</a>
I loved <i>concept art</i> (like the NASA/Boeing illustrations that accompany this article) until the artists started to go digital/CG in the 80's or whenever it was.<p>I'm not a huge fan of the artist(s) depicting space concepts in this particular article though (still better than most rendered art). I tried to do a bit of googling to find something better but in 10 minutes the best I could come up with was this site: <a href="https://www.kuriositas.com/2013/08/space-shuttle-concept-art-of-1960s-and.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.kuriositas.com/2013/08/space-shuttle-concept-art...</a><p>I think there was more dynamism in the pre-CG concept art, often a bold use of color, sometimes an exaggerated use of shadow/light.
This idea never made any sense to me. Why the heck would you spend billions of dollars to launch solar panels into space to gather sunlight then beam it to earth when you could just wait for the sunlight to get to earth naturally for free...
This was an energy generation option in Sim City 2000 with the caveat that occasionally the ray of microwave energy would "miss" and cook some of your city.
Has anyone updated the economic feasibility studies based on using SpaceX's Starship as the heavy-lift reusable launcher? At first glance, it seems like this, combined with today's greatly improved robotics and ion thrusters to move components from LEO to GEO, may be the key enablers.
The article mentions that limited agriculture could be conducted at the rectenna sites. I wonder if it could have actually been beneficial. A lot of middle America (where most of the sites would have been located) gets VERY cold in the winter. Would microwave warming of the rectenna sites allow growing more crops there for more of the year?
For those in the Cambridge area (or who have Zoom!), there will be a CSAR talk on Monday evening about the CASSIOPeiA Solar Power Satellite:<p><a href="https://www.csar.org.uk/lectures/2022-2023/20230501/" rel="nofollow">https://www.csar.org.uk/lectures/2022-2023/20230501/</a>
I just got done reading Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez. The technology described and used in near future story of the book is based around this concept. Except in the book, they use it to power mass drivers to shoot cylinders of lunar regolith to a Lissajous orbit where it can be processed into raw materials.
I think it's neat that they did all these studies on feasibility and projected a start date into the 2000s.<p>Also neat that we ended up with complimentary energy generation and storage technologies to fix the "it gets dark at night" problem of solar electricity generation!
Any discussion on how much shooting giant microwave beams through the atmosphere would warm the atmosphere locally or globally? Clearly the beam won't be 100% efficient and that power loss is going to partly be absorbed by the atmosphere, causing it to warm.
".. President James Carter .."<p>Weird, that's the first time in my life I've ever heard him referred to as 'James' rather than 'Jimmy'.