SYNERGY WITH SPACE TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENTS The goal of the SPS is to provide an economically viable and environmentally and socially acceptable option for power generation on a scale substantial enough to meet a significant portion of future world energy demands. The concept is based on the extension of known technologies and could stimulate extensive space activities. A significant impetus to space activities is the demonstrated success of the space shuttle. The shuttle is making commercial activities in space possible, and is setting the stage for permanently manned space stations with expanding operational capabilities during the next 20 years. The projected growth of the industrial infrastructure to support growing space activities will make it possible to undertake projects of increasing magnitude and complexity, for example, a space platform that will lay the foundation for the construction of an SPS system beginning in the 21st century. Satellites to be built during the next decade will require more electric power than current satellites and could well get their power from a space-based power plant. Such a power plant could be modified by the addition of a microwave antenna to transmit power to other satellites. Advances in orbital assembly will increase the feasibility of constructing large structures in space. Development of thin film solar cells has the potential to reduce mass and cost and to achieve the production goals of solar cell arrays for an SPS. Orbital transfer vehicles using chemical propellants, solar electric or microwave electric propulsion are being studied. Only after such generic technologies have been developed and demonstrated would a prototype SPS be designed, constructed, and tested. Advances in space technology may also open such other possibilities as the use of extraterrestrial construction materials to reduce the cost of transporting material to an SPS construction site in orbit. The SPS represents a fertile field for innovations. Few of the potentially interesting alternative technologies have been analyzed in detail. It would be premature to choose among them because the consequences of these technologies cannot be evaluated without a vigorous system study of the impact of advanced technologies on SPS designs at the system and subsystem levels. The SPS design objectives based on the use of several alternative technologies include the following: • The lowest feasible cost per unit power output; • Reduction of environmental and other external effects; • Cost-optimum power otuputs for specific designs, ranging from 500 MW to 5 GW; and • Demonstration of performance of preferred system designs at costs low enough to reduce investments needed before returns will be available. The development of the most effective SPS designs for intended uses represents significant challenges, and these challenges must be met realistically. But it is as inappropriate now to discount the SPS as a major option for the 21st century as it was for Simon Newcomb, American astronomer, to state in 1906 that “the demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.”
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