0191-9067/83 $3.00 + .00 Copyright 1 1983 SUNSAT Energy Council SPACE SOLAR POWER IN PERSPECTIVE GORDON R. WOODCOCK Boeing Aerospace Company Seattle, Washington 98124, USA Abstract — Solar electric power, collected in space and transmitted to Earth as a coherent electromagnetic beam for reconversion to electricity, was conceptually proposed by Dr. Peter Glaser almost fifteen years ago. In the early 1970s, the concept, now called solar power satellite, or SPS, was explored by low-level NASA studies. From 1977 to 1981, about $20 million was spent on studies and research, sponsored jointly by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy. Much was learned by the research carried out in the past few years. This paper, after a summary review of what took place, addresses several broad questions: 11] What are the greatest technical challenges to a successful SPS system, and the prospects for their resolution? [2] How did the environmental issues evolve, and what are the prospects for their resolution? |31 What was wrong with the “Reference System (and program)” and what was right with it? |4] How substantive are the issues of SPS costs? [5] What do we know today that might alter the views of two years ago? [6] What are the potential consequences of doing nothing? What should we be doing? INTRODUCTION The solar power satellite concept was introduced to the world by Dr. Peter Glaser in 1968. It quickly became regarded as a fanciful idea that would not work; even if it would, one that was hopelessly uneconomic and, at any rate, one that surely was not needed. Denigration of new ideas by the technical and professional establishment is so common that Arthur C. Clarke wrote an entire book on the subject (1), mostly devoted to notorious historical examples. Almost every true innovator of new concepts has been, at one time or another, declared a crackpot by established scientific opinion. Dr. Glaser was no exception. The early critics of SPS raised four issues: [ 1 ] Microwave power transmission would be so inefficient as to be entirely useless; [2] Such large space structures could never be built, or controlled if they were built; |3| Delivery of SPSs to orbit would consume more energy than the satellites could ever deliver; and [4] The space transportation cost would be so astronomical that no society could ever afford even one SPS, let alone the number needed to make a real contribution to the world’s energy needs. It was “common knowledge” that RF amplifiers are at best about 35% efficient, and, further, some experts had predicted that the microwave receivers would reflect at least half the incident energy. However, at the time these criticisms were being leveled, the pioneering experimental work of Brown at Raytheon, showing that
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==