PREFACE This section was prepared by Grumman Aerospace Corporation for Raytheon as the final report on the Mechanical System and Flight Operations tasks of Preliminary Analysis and Concept Definition. The baseline MPTS assumed for these tasks was derived from the prior feasibility study (Reference 4). The principal difference between this baseline and the system description that evolved during the Conceptual Design Phase was the increase in weight of the MPTS waveguide to reflect an increase in wall thickness to 0.5 mm. This increase does not materially effect the study results since the structure design driver is the thermal environment, and the orbital transportation- assembly costs are normalized to cost per unit weight. A similar evolution to higher weight took place in the estimate for the solar photovoltaic power source used as an example for the complete SPS. The preliminary and final estimates are as follows for an aluminum-amplitron configuration and 5 GW ground output power:
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==