0191-9067/83 $3.00 + .00 Copyright ’ 1983 SUNSAT Energy Council SOLAR POWER SATELLITES: THE INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE JOHN M. LOGSDON George Washington University Washington, DC 20052, USA Whatever approach might eventually be used to develop a solar power satellite (SPS) system, the tasks of designing, financing, developing, and operating such a system would be of immense scope and terrific complexity. These tasks are as much organizational and institutional in character as they are technical and economic. Even if a technically feasible, environmentally sound and economically promising plan for creating SPS were developed, it would still be necessary also to develop an organizational framework and set of operating principles and procedures for SPS which would both be workable and be acceptable to those deciding whether to support the enterprise. Indeed, the institutional character of a proposed SPS would be an issue of interest to almost all countries of the world, since the existence of a full-blown SPS supplying large quantities of baseload electricity would have global political and economic impact. Thus questions of organizational control and distribution of costs and benefits will be highly salient to political elites in many countries. This paper is intended to cast some light on the questions of how a SPS might be organized and managed. Given that any plausible scenario for bringing a solar power satellite system of significant scope into being is dealing with events 25-50 years in the future, and that talking about the political and economic conditions likely to exist at that point must be highly speculative, the paper tries only to make the point that similar (but far from identical) institutional challenges have been solved in the recent past. The reason for making such an argument is primarily to suggest that the task of creating a viable institutional framework for a multinational, expensive, innovative enterprise based on space technology, while extremely difficult, is not impossible. Given attractive technological and economic prospects, government and business have been able to accommodate their competing interests, in a cooperative framework which is both international and manageable. Based on the historical record, creating an institutional structure framework for SPS is not an impossible undertaking. INTELSAT AS AN EXAMPLE The most relevant example is the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (INTELSAT), which owns and operates the satellites used by most of the world for international communications. From its beginnings as an 11-member consortium in 1964, INTELSAT has grown to over 100 members and operates six satellites covering over two-thirds of the world’s transoceanic communications. The
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