CONCLUSION This paper has used the analogy of the INTELSAT negotiations to suggest some relatively unexplored aspects of the overall challenge of bringing SPS into being. Whether or not a single country takes the lead in creating solar power satellites, as happened with communication satellites, the process of bringing a system into operation will be inherently international. Even in the relatively naive period of INTELSAT'S creation, many countries recognized the important stakes involved; in the much more pluralistic world of the coming decades, international involvement in SPS is inescapable. There are treaty obligations to be met, international organizations to involve, and, most fundamentally, the interests of many nations and transnational institutions to be considered. As a source of the most basic need of an industrial society, affordable and available energy, a SPS system would be debated at the center, not the periphery, of the global political process. Establishing a viable international framework for an expensive and technologically complex undertaking through such a political debate would be an extremely challenging task of institution-building for the world’s leaders. The INTELSAT example suggests that such leaders can sublimate their parochial concerns in order to cooperate in their mutual interest; it provides no assurance that they will do so. In order to create a permanent institutional structure for INTELSAT, almost a decade of discussion was required. Developing agreed-upon international frameworks for other uses of space technology, such as remote sensing and direct broadcast satellites, is not yet a completed task, and discussions on those frameworks have been going on for over a decade. What this suggests is that, even though a decision to develop SPS may be some time in the future, it is useful to consider now not only the technical, financial, and environmental facets of such an enterprise, but also its political and institutional dimensions. Hopefully, this paper is a contribution in this direction.
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