electricity from the SPS? If the answer is “we are!”, we’ve got a special set of matters to resolve. For instance, the SPS is intended to operate at 2450 megaherz, so the U.S. has requested the International Telecommunications Union to designate this frequency for use by the SPS. The ITU, however, has declined this request, calling for an extensive study of the entire subject and a future report to the United Nations. ITU acceptance is not a diplomatic necessity, but it is substantively important to the United States. Proceeding without ITU acceptance would require serious consideration by the U.S. Government. Closely related to use of the scarce frequency spectrum is the use of the valuable slots in geostationary orbit. A unilateral U.S. plan to put 60 SPS’s in the 90° equatorial zone over South America, would undoubtedly result in accusations that the U.S. is appropriating for its own use an invaluable natural resource in limited supply which belongs to all mankind. We’ll need a very persuasive U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. in the year 2000. You can imagine many other international disputes — for example, what if the secondary effects of the microwave beam of a U.S. SPS degrades the operation of another country’s satellites to an unacceptable level? What do we do if the other system effectively degrades the SPS microwave beam or the two-way radio communications necessary to control the SPS from earth? On the purely technical level, the volume of space traffic for an SPS program is tremendous—eight Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle flights to orbit per week. Articles associated with the LEO staging base are subject to orbital decay. These circumstances lead to a potential for accidents. If a U.S. HLLV or a crane from LEO drops on Calcutta, Foggy Bottoms will face new diplomatic challenges. Could these problems be solved by organizing at the outset as an international program, with international ownership, management, financing and control? INTELSAT works quite well, but could we get international agreement today for another INTELSAT? Widespread international participation may be called for, but if so it would probably involve initially the two strongest, wealthiest, and most technically advanced partners — the European Common Market and Japan. The technical and economic questions are challenging enough, though, without the added complications of international management — at least in the beginning. In general, about half the cost of delivering power to the bus bar in today’s fossil fuel generating plants are attributable to fuel costs, but environmental protection and added safety requirements are escalating costs rapidly. We can’t estimate the future costs of resolving the technical and environmental issues of nuclear, coal and SPS power, but our experience should allow us to bracket them. Similarly, we cannot confidently estimate the future price of nuclear and fossil fuels, or the environmental costs associated with their greatly increased use. At best, the economic input to a 1981 decision on whether to proceed with exploratory development of SPS can provide only comparative ranges of cost between SPS and its alternatives. So, where do we stand now on SPS and, given the litany of open questions and the absence of definitive answers, how do we decide what to do next? Perhaps the absence of definitive answers may be a fortunate circumstance. Lacking the refuge of specific technical or numerical certainty, we may be forced into broadening our evaluation horizons. Looking back, we can recall the controversy during the 1960s over the utility (or futility) of economical communication satellites for world and national communications systems. Today, no one questions the benefits of satellite communications or the great reduction in the cost of communications made possible by comsats. Now all analogies are slippery, so the comsat revolution doesn’t necessarily presage an SPS
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