Word: glasers
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...report, says SPS Pioneer Peter Glaser, "is a landmark study that should go a long way to dispel the apprehensions and just plain misunderstandings about solar power satellites...
...Glaser, 57, a vice president at Arthur D. Little, Inc., the Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm, is a Czech-born engineer who first proposed solar satellites twelve years ago. Foreseeing a day when oil would run out and other fossil fuels would become scarce, he suggested placing two giant arrays of solar cells, each about half the size of Manhattan, 22,300 miles above the earth in geosynchronous orbit; there the structures' orbital speed would match the planet's rotation, thus holding the solar powerhouses over the same spot on the ground. Bathed in almost perpetual sunshine, the cells...
...microwaves would come flooding down from space. In the scheme studied by the Energy Department, these beams would be focused on six-mile by nine-mile oval-shaped receiving antennas called rectennas. The rectennas would turn the microwaves back into electricity and funnel it into utility power grids. By Glaser's calculation, one satellite could supply as much electricity as five nuclear plants. The Energy Department envisioned 60 such arrays, built over 30 years, to supply 300 million kW., which is about half the U.S.'s current electrical generating capacity...
...long time, Glaser recalls, even some of his scientific colleagues "thought T was writing science fiction." Many critics, recoiling at the potential cost of $100 billion or so for the first satellite, called his idea a pie-in-the-sky space boondoggle. Others worried about the effects of microwave radiation, fretting that passengers in passing airplanes might be flash-cooked like roasts in a microwave oven...
...press briefing heralding the Energy Department study, Glaser replied to all these objections. He pointed out that solar satellites, unlike power plants that would use nuclear fusion, need no major technological breakthroughs; the space program has already shown that the required scientific know-how exists. What of the staggering costs? Glaser argued that after the turn of the century, when such satellites could be in operation, their electricity probably would be no costlier, and perhaps a lot cheaper, than power from oil, coal and nuclear plants. As for the danger from microwaves, Glaser conceded that this needs further study...