An interesting response

[hkhenson]

I have recently been discussing the scope of a space based power 
satellite project with a bunch of high powered space engineers.

They are all accomplished, one of them was the project engineer for 
the first moon lander.

This started when I scaled a moving cable space elevator large enough 
(2000 tons a day) to put a real dent in the carbon/energy problems 
(300 GW/year production rate, displacing all the coal fired plants in 
the US in one year).

So when one of them posted a study of a rocket with about twice the 
payload of a Saturn V, I extrapolated how many of them and what rate 
of launches it would take to ferry 2000 tons per day to GEO using 
rockets instead of a much more questionable space elevator.

To my surprise, the energy payback went from under a day for the 
elevator to 15 days for rockets.  You would have to dedicate the 
first 3 power satellites (15 GW) to making rocket 
propellants.  Hardly a deal breaker.  Takes 10 200 ton payload 
rockets each flying once a day to do it and with a blank check 
perhaps under 5 years to work up to this production rate and 6-7 
years from start to get to a $50 billion a year revenue stream 
increasing at $25 billion a year.

I didn't expect a response other than something like "that's 
interesting" but they reacted almost with horror, saying the best 
they could hope for is an almost useless 1 GW demonstration power sat 
in the next 10 or 15 years and that the only choice we have is to 
build lots of nuclear power plants.

Now countries and companies in the world for the most part realize 
that there is a serious problem with energy, and that it isn't going 
to get better as we slide down the far side of oil production.  It 
seems to me that a project that really could displace all fossil 
sources of energy with renewable solar energy and (using penny a kWh 
electricity) reduce the price of synthetic gasoline to a dollar a 
gallon would get a lot more support than a tiny demonstration project 
no matter how few in billions it cost.

There is no doubt it's a big project, on a par with what we have 
spent on the Iraq war.  But the market for energy is massive, oil 
alone is $3,000 billion a year.  And there is no lack of money to 
fund it, Exxon can't figure out what to do with their profits so they 
are buying back $30 billion of their stock a year.  The Chinese have 
a few thousand billions in US notes they would spend on a secure 
energy source large enough to meet their growing needs.

So my question to you, is which be an easier project to sell, a 
demonstration project for a small number of billions over 10 or 15 
years, or a really huge project in the high hundreds of billions to 
massively displace coal and oil with solar energy from space in under 
ten years?

Keith Henson