WELCOMING STATEMENT FOR SPACE SOLAR POWER REVIEW ROBERT O. FROSCH Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Washington, D.C. It is a pleasure to welcome the first issue of Space Solar Power Review, a journal dedicated to innovative research in the physical and social sciences related to energy retrieval and transmission systems deployed in space. For everyone in our Nation and, indeed, throughout the world, the supply of energy looms as a major concern today and for the future. One day, perhaps, the systems and concepts for supplying energy from space, which are the major focus of this new journal, may help to meet this essential need of society. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the organization I am privileged to lead, has many cooperative programs with the Department of Energy involving approximately 1000 NASA personnel. Our goal in these cooperative ventures has been to assure the effective use of NASA technologies and experience arising from our programs in aeronautics and space in support of national research and development needs in energy. We have been working toward this goal by two primary thrusts: terrestrial energy technology, which is the larger portion of the effort, and energy from space. The energy from space includes the Satellite Power System (SPS) as the dominant effort. It is being pursued under a joint DOE/NASA Concept Development and Evaluation Program. Should the SPS become a part of our national energy program it would involve virtually all technologies and scientific disciplines. You have recognized this in selecting the areas relevant to the journal and by the inclusion of topics related to societal acceptability and economic feasibility in the deployment of space energy systems. A journal devoted to space-based sources of energy should serve a useful function by providing a focus for collecting and disseminating relevant technical information which would otherwise be available only from a large number of publications. Any major, future SPS effort will involve practically every scientific and engineering discipline; therefore, it is critical that there be a place where all contributions of interest to SPS can be presented in a refereed format in keeping with the high standards of professional quality journals. By giving these papers a high degree of visibility to engineers, scientists and technicians directly and indirectly involved with space power systems, the Space Solar Power Review will assure itself a continued audience of interested and concerned people.
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