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Space: the power frontier
By Roy Bragg : April 25, 2013 : Updated: April 26, 2013 9:42am
Every bunker-building conspiracy theorist has, at one time, considered the possibility that government agencies were sending mind-controlling microwave beams from satellites in space.
This, they reckon, would explain everything: global unrest or lack thereof, spikes in crime or lack thereof, and unexplained possum migrations or lack thereof.
But then, at some point, they all told themselves, “Naw! Can't be!”
Then they carefully took off and neatly folded their tinfoil hat, put away their “Welcome to Earth” signs, and moved on to the Next Weird Thing.
There are no satellites up there beaming anything downtown to Earth other than television signals, GPS coordinates and Google Earth pictures.
But Hu Davis, a retired
NASA engineer who lives in San Antonio, is part of group of former space agency guys who think that a flotilla of satellites gathering solar power and beaming it to Earth as a focused, high intensity microwave beam might be a permanent solution for the planet's energy crisis.
He's not nuts, and he's not joking. He is, as an old engineer might say, as straight as Wernher von Braun's slide rule. He worked on the Apollo 11 moon mission and ran several top-level NASA departments before and after that.
And the plan being pitched by the Solar High Study Group makes a lot of sense.
A satellite in orbit would be exposed to 10 times more sunlight than the most sun-drenched Earth-based fixed solar panels.
A solar array floating in space wouldn't have downtime because of clouds. Nor would there be an atmosphere to filter it.
There would be no need for large batteries to store this power, since all the energy would be beamed home immediately.
Yes, there would be some loss of power in the process, but at least half of it would make it to the Earth-based receiver. This would be acceptable, Davis says, because the power itself is free and unlimited — i.e., we aren't running out of sunshine anytime soon.
After the original cash outlay, it would all be profit. That cash outlay would be billions and billions of dollars.
Imagine the possibilities.
If someone told me that satellites were beaming high-intensity microwaves from space to Earth near me, my first thought would be of popcorn.
I would buy every Jiffy Pop package off every grocery shelf in town. I'd throw 10 or 20 of them into the microwaved area. I'd nuke the heck out of them in two seconds, take them home, fire up Netflix and spend a weekend catching up on back seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants. And if I ran out of popcorn, I'd throw some more Jiffy Pops into the microwaves.
Davis was thinking about long-range power needs for the whole world, so he's thinking really, really big.
The group's plan calls for launching 150 huge solar arrays in geosynchronous orbit. This would take a lot of rocketry, averaging maybe four launches a day for 20 years. Heck, launching rockets would be a growth business.
The amount of power being generated would be mind-boggling.
Let's look at the science. In the film “Back To The Future,” Doc Brown figured it would take 1.2 gigawatts to juice up the flux capacitor and send Marty McFly back to the 1980s. To get that, Brown figured, they'd need a lightning bolt.
The Solar High Study Group's system would generate 300 gigawatts, or enough lightning to send Marty McFly back to the 1980s nearly 248 times.
The concept of mining space for solar power makes sense. Going to the 1980s more than once is the crazy part.
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