1. Standard Benefit Cost Analyses: Even with long-time horizons, projects exist which through the best knowledge of today, with expected future cost uncertainties allowed for as well as ranges of benefits, and with the application of a rigorous social rate of interest, lead to clear positive expected net present values. Such projects also exist among R&D ventures and if they can be shown to be clearly and uncontestably of merit, the government of the business community should, and usually does, pursue them. Whether SPS, to the best of our current knowledge, falls within this category is questionable. Very substantial progress in SPS must still be made in a variety of technological and cost areas before such a firm conviction can withstand such an evaluation. These areas would include space transportation costs; the structure, size scale, and location of SPS; the efficiency of energy conversion and transmission; the mass of the needed satellite system; and a variety of environmental and regulatory concerns. Since these questions cannot now be answered from tested, reliable knowledge in any one of the categories mentioned, standard benefit cost evaluations can, at best, show the range within which technical and economic parameters have to lie to make potential economic sense of SPS. In fact, the issue with SPS is that such knowledge first has to be created through further R&D. 2. R&D to Buy Information: The most pertinent context within which R&D projects have to be evaluated is that of ‘‘buying information” with R&D funds. While for benefit cost analyses the net present value of the project always has to be positive Fig. I. Context of economic analysis and concerns.
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