0191-9067/83 $3.00 + .00 Copyright ® 1984 SUNSAT Energy Council SOFT AND HARD TECHNOLOGY IN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT: COEXISTENCE OR DIVERGENCE? T. STEPHEN CHESTON Geostar Corporation 101 Carnegie Center Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA and PETER E. GLASER Arthur D. Little, Inc. Acorn Park Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140, USA FORWARD The birth of this volume is a statement of sorts of the divergent forces at play in U.S. public opinion in the 1970s. The story actually begins in the latter 1960s during the halcyon efforts of the Apollo program to land a man on the moon. The mesmerizing drama of the space program caused a number of scientists and engineers to adopt a the-sky-is-the-limit attitude to their thinking. There was a vigor and robustness in their mental processes that transformed science fiction-like ideas into feasible realities, at least on paper. The first such idea was Solar Power Satellites (SPS) which was designed to produce massive amounts of electricity from sunlight by collecting solar energy in space 24 hours a day and transmitting it to the Earth's electrical power grid. The concept called for building huge solar collectors (kilometers in diameter) in orbit, this being permitted by the near zero gravity in the space environment. The collectors required advanced technology and substantial capital to construct. However, once on line they would be a passive, totally renewable and very low maintenance source of energy (1). In the early 1970s the SPS concept was absorbed into a portfolio of ideas to utilize space for economic purposes known collectively as Space Industrialization (SI). Besides SPS, SI included proposals for factories to process pharmaceuticals, electronic crystals, alloy metals and other highly specialized products that would have substantial value added by utilizing space's near zero gravity and natural hard vacuum and cryogenic temperatures. SI also involved super-sized communications satellites that would miniaturize the size and cost of ground receiving and transmission stations to put them within economic grasp of the average citizen. The crescendo of this highly creative period of space engineering ideas occurred in 1974 and
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