Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

Rand,
you are forgetting that the type of reporter that would write that article is much more threatened by a CAPITALIST like Branson, than he is by a COMMUNIST dictator like Kim "ILL" Jong.

The NK dictator would NEVER send ballistic missiles to America, but those rotten capitalists, you just can't trust them. They'd drop cheap air fares on us and how many people would hurt from that kind of abuse.

Don't even mention alternative power sources, the conservatives will just let Haliburton control, all the solar sights and we KNOW how they do business.

And now I have to go, its time to take my pet pigs out for a short flight. ZOOM!!! WHOOSH!!!!.

Posted by Steve at October 14, 2004 01:01 PM

A single microwave beam could not fry targets on the ground. However, if SPS is to satisfy any significant part of global energy demand, there will not be one satellite, but hundreds or thousands of them. It's not impossible in principle to aim many satellites' beams at the same target (and these beams do not have to be in phase with one another for the power to add linearly in the target zone.) This wouldn't be 'accidental', granted.

Posted by Paul Dietz at October 14, 2004 02:25 PM

Years ago (1990) as a college sophomore, I took a seminar on the history of global nuclear war policy -- great stuff and surprisingly well run, but as we moved away from Cold War historical stuff, to "modern" texts -- we got into that period of mid-1980s anti-Reagan nuclear paranoia, about SPS's "spot-welding" Toronto out of existence.

Better still was this section (I must find the book and scan it in) about how even if SDI worked, America might still use Jules Verne like devices to drill through the Earth and nuke people from below. The graphic was priceless.

Posted by Andrew at October 14, 2004 02:42 PM

Good lord, one does become weary at reading about this sort of thing, no?

Liberal democratic systems of government would seem, like bread, to provide the growth medium for a sort of "social mold", by virtue of providing enough prosperity and material comfort (a 'growth medium') to enable useless, clueless members of the academic and media Left elite to have the luxury of spouting whatever nonsense they want, cost-free, and naturally without a thought given to the possible effect upon continued success of the society which sustains them.

Bread is still palatable if the mold is sliced off at an early stage of growth, of course. I was taught that by a nice old gentleman who was a child in Texas during the 1930's.

Posted by Neuroto at October 14, 2004 02:56 PM

I sent the reporter a message, pointing out, (as he requests at the foot of his email) that he was being a space cadet; he has replied with some questions, we'll see what happens.

Posted by Ian Woollard at October 14, 2004 03:15 PM

"A single microwave beam could not fry targets on the ground. However, if SPS is to satisfy any significant part of global energy demand, there will not be one satellite, but hundreds or thousands of them. It's not impossible in principle to aim many satellites' beams at the same target"

Yeah, but the intensity of each one is *really* low. A 1GW beam through a 400 meter antenna only gives 7 W per meter on the ground c.f. 1kW of sunlight. And I've met atleast 1 radio ham who has been infront of a several kilowatt beam with no lasting harm.

And defense is easy- aluminum foil works great. It's a really useless weapon.

Posted by Ian Woollard at October 14, 2004 03:24 PM

I will leave it to others to pound the stuffings out of this clueless reporter. He deserves it.

But let me ask this question:

How would you defend these enormous arrays of LEO solar panels from a rogue nation with LEO capability and access to several hundred kilos of gravel? Or worse, cluster bombs filled with tiny shards of metal designed to create clouds of shrapnel that intersected the solar array fields every 90 minutes or so on intersecting orbits?

Posted by Bill White at October 14, 2004 04:05 PM

Aluminum foil--yesss, that would do the trick, just fine.

But tinfoil would be even better for this guy--he could make into a hat to protect his brain from the space rays.

Posted by Neuroto at October 14, 2004 04:11 PM

PS - - Or China.

If the United States became dependent on beamed solar power using LEO solar panel arrays, then any major spacefaring nation could hold a MAD card (Mutual Assured Destruction) over our heads.

Posted by Bill White at October 14, 2004 04:13 PM

A possible answer to Bill White's "rogue nation" question would be fairly easy to implement. I doubt Fanatistan, or North Koercia, or wherever, would be easily able to launch against any asset we have in space without being simultaneously, or nearly so, detected, and their point of origin plotted.

Defense of the SPS's, in this case, would be justifiable retaliation by national strategic forces, I would think, although it wouldn't involve preventing damage to the powersat. In this scenario, we would have to rely on old-fashioned deterrence. Naturally that might not be the best option in our modern era of irrational actors.

Along those lines, why not incorporate something like the airborne laser system, which we are shortly going to deploy on 747's, into the design of the SPS?

Posted by Neuroto at October 14, 2004 04:21 PM

Neuroto, I agree. That is why I said MAD.

If a significant percentage of US energy needs (35% or 40% or more) came from LEO then a foreign space-faring nation could destroy our economy with our ability to nuke their cities in retaliation being the pay-back.

A return to Mutual Assured Destruction, since the fallout from nuking China will be carried by the jet stream to the US and world opinion may not equate blowing up things (LEO power sats) with killing hundreds of millions of people.

Bottom line?

Space based solar power as a solution to the world's energy needs is a fantasy, both for technical and political reasons.

Get over it and move on.

Posted by Bill White at October 14, 2004 05:30 PM

Oh well, in that case, we shouldn't go into space either- pretty much everything manmade in space for the foreseeable future can be destroyed with a bucket of gravel on the appropriate trajectory, so we shouldn't even go.

In fact, those guys that went up yesterday- they need to come right back down!

Posted by Ian Woollard at October 14, 2004 05:58 PM

As far as fallout Bill, a strike on China would have a miniscule affect on the CONUS. Groundbursat stuff would fall short and airburst residue would stay aloft too long and be too diffuse. If I was POTUS and facing a decision to go DEFCON 1 vis-a-vi China, fallout from the strike would be a non-consideration in regareds to the CONUS. It would cause a little problem in China.

We use much smaller bombs today. We could blow up every important target in China with less megatonnage than two Tsar Bombas.

Posted by Mike Puckett at October 14, 2004 06:10 PM

I disagree with this, strongly. ;-)

I simply do not buy the space solar power stuff.

There are new high temperature pebble bed reactor designs that are far safer than current fission reactors and will produce power quite cheaply. Though generally "liberal" I agree that the anti-nuke hysteria is just nutty.

Besides, space based solar arrays will be damn vulnerable to any spacefaring nation or terrorist interests that have access to tourist grade Earth to LEO lift.

Posted by Bill White at October 14, 2004 07:04 PM

The SPS arrays wouldn't be in LEO. Building a large, flat, lightweight structure in LEO wouldn't work because of atmospheric drag, and it would only be able to achieve lock on the ground station once every 90 minutes. Not ideal for a 24/7 power supply :-p

The logical place to build SPS's is GEO. Anything on a transfer trajectory to GEO takes several hours to get there, which is plenty of time to react to a potential strategic threat.

Posted by Stellvia at October 15, 2004 01:30 AM

It would be amazing if space-based power concepts would be anywhere on the radar of energy policy.
Good luck trying to find a single mention of SPS concept on www.energy.gov
BTW, http://www.wronkiewicz.net/ssp/ is a site well worth watching.

Posted by at October 15, 2004 02:55 AM

"Yes, Mr. bin Laden, your ticket for the next SpaceShip One flight is ready. Do you have any luggage? Just one suitcase? Good. Have a nice flight!"

Kidding! ;-P

OK, in theory, privace spaceflight gives every nutty suicide bomber in the world his own ballistic missile, and the ability to pilot it.

But...

Who could fly into space, see the world through the portholes, and not be psychologically affected by the experience?

I say take terrorists on spaceflights. Show them the "big" view of the Earth. It might make reconsider their ways. (And if they don't... there's the airlock, goodbye, WHOOSHH!)

A.R.Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com

Posted by A.R.Yngve at October 15, 2004 05:31 AM

Quote: "these long-range goals would help explain some of the Bush administration’s seemingly irrational actions, such as withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty."

Yes cause we know that all Bush's space agenda is in reality, ALL ABOUT THE oi.errr..SOLAR POWER!!

I would say though that the granola and yoga crowd would raise a big tissy about how power sats would cause brain cancer, skin cancer, and contribute to global warming by redirecting more of the sun's radiation to the surface of the earth.

I too think that our future power needs can be meet here on the ground. If anything as our technology to peer ever deeper and drill deeper in the surface we will continue to find large sustainable reservoirs of oil and gas. Hell I've read some articles where oil fields that had once been tapped dry and started to fill back up with oil from an unknown source. Lots of Geologists suspect that there are pockets of energy that lie much deeper in the Earth's crust. If anything we may one day be able to drill deep enough into the upper mantle that we can just pump water down one hole and tap the steam through a turbine generator as it comes back up the other.

I think this reporter though must have just watched the old James Bond Moonraker movie to many times

Posted by Hefty' at October 15, 2004 06:14 AM

What if the gravel the NORKs sent to destroy our SPSs came from pebble-bed fission reactors, then our goose would really be cooked! ; )

Stop anti-satellite atomic pebbles now!

Posted by Andrew at October 15, 2004 06:37 AM

Quote: "Stop anti-satellite atomic pebbles now!"

LoL!

I think I'm gonna make a button with that slogan.

Posted by Hefty at October 15, 2004 06:44 AM

The New Wold is inebitable.

Posted by Kim Jong-Il at October 15, 2004 07:02 AM

Ian:

The intensity at ground level of the center of an SPS beam is quite a bit more than 7 watts/m^2. It's more like 400 W/m^2 in the baseline designs from a couple of decades ago, IIRC. Realize that the intensity drops off dramatically away from the center of a gaussian beam, so that by the time you get to the edge of the rectenna the intensity is much less than the peak.

Posted by Paul Dietz at October 15, 2004 07:08 AM

I must disagree with you. When you said:

This piece is an incoherent mess, in which he takes several facts, completely unrelated except that they all have to do with space, and foolishly and illogically attempts to weave some kind of weird conspiracy theory about the Pentagon's space program. It doesn't work.

It's the last line I have issue with, the rest is self-evident to anyone who knows a bit about the subject.

The article is not, however, aimed at people who know the first thing about space travel. It's aimed fair-and-square at Rabid Capitalists, AmeriKKKa and Bush=Hitler. In that, it works well. Just enough Science to be plausible to the ignorant.

Posted by Alan E Brain at October 15, 2004 09:02 AM

If the SPS is mostly mylar mirrors reflecting on a focus, the effect of a cloud of gravel intersecting it might be as minor as lost efficiency and a disturbed orbit. Depending on the size, dispersion and relative velocity of the gravel.

A missile attack on Manhattan with conventional high-explosive warheads would almost certainly do far more damage for less effort.

Posted by Jon Acheson at October 15, 2004 11:20 AM

What about the microwave beam emitters? A solar farm is worthless if we cannot get the power to Earth.

What about the collectors deployed at the focal point? That is what you target. And unlike Manhattan, no people get killed. Bloodless terrorism.

Posted by Bill White at October 15, 2004 12:49 PM

You can't just aim a beam, or multiple beams, anywhere you want, Paul. It has to get the reflected pilot beam back from the rectenna or it dephases.

Bill, ability to get into LEO is no threat to SPSs in GEO.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 16, 2004 10:53 AM

Rand, there's a whole bunch of similar systems with varying degrees of safety, from so safe you couldn't kill anyone if tried, to deliberate death ray.

Using a pilot-wave phased array rectenna is ok, but in principle, you can always introduce a deliberate relative phasing of the array, and then it can point literally wherever you want. If the total power on orbit reaches lethal or 'useful' levels; you have a potential weapon.

It's probably better all-round to make the transmitter small enough that it physically can't fry people due to Bragg diffraction, given the solar panel power available. That means you need relatviely big receivers on the ground, but smaller antennas on orbit. The rectenna are mostly just dirt-cheap wire, diodes and capacitors; square kilometers of receivers aren't a problem; and it can be done on farmland- the wires block very little of the sunlight.

As to Bill's suggestion about SPS's supposed susceptibility to attack by 'rogue states'. There's only a few nations with access to geo transfer orbits at all, and it's trivial to track the stuff back to the source. It's very unlikely that all of the powerstations are going to be in one place, so there is redundancy available, and that kind of attack would be essentially declaring direct war on a nation with nuclear capability. You can never stop people declaring war on you- and if they do, blowing up your powerstations is to be expected wherever they happen to be. GEO is actually *harder* to attack.

It's also fantastically unlikely that a terrorist would be able to do this kind of attack for the foreseeable future; launch vehicles are going to be locked up tighter than a drum due to their potential for use as ICBMs.

Suborbital vehicles simply don't have the altitude- you need geosynchronous transfer orbit (faster than mere orbital), and most of the way to *escape* orbit in fact.

Oh, yeah, Paul Dietz said that the power on the ground was 400 W/m^2. The power is actually a design choice, you can set it to whatever you want it to be.

Posted by Ian Woollard at October 16, 2004 03:42 PM

Rand: A pilot beam is certainly one *way* of aiming an SPS beam, but it's by no means the only way. Phased array radars can aim their beams in real time by computer control of the phase of individual emitters. Real SPS would likely do the same, for example to enable power to be split to alternate receivers for purposes of robustness and load following.

Ian: yes, power is a design choice, and if you make the power density of the beam at ground level low the system becomes uneconomical. The cost of the rectenna will be proportional to its area, so too low a power density makes the cost/watt prohibitive.

Posted by Paul Dietz at October 16, 2004 05:13 PM

A pilot beam is certainly one *way* of aiming an SPS beam, but it's by no means the only way.

It's the way that's been predominately proposed for SPS, for exactly the reasons stated--to eliminate the possibility of hostile use, or accidental misaiming of the beam, even if it loses the advantages you state.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 16, 2004 06:29 PM

I don't know if SPS is actually feasible. It takes a LOT of energy to get those suckers up there. Would they be able to pay it back? Ten years ago Zubrin said they wouldn't. Maybe things have changed.

While I suppose that you COULD use an SPS as a weapon, if you can launch things that reliably into GEO, then why dick around with beaming power down when you can simply drop metal rods down on them? Proposed (and cancelled) project Thor had something like that.

But actual science means nothing to a moonbat. Just like the Star Trek Voyager scriptwriters, scientific terms are simply Words of Power to be sprinkled in your narrative.

Posted by Gary and the Samoyeds at October 18, 2004 10:44 AM

The energy to get them up there is not the problem. A 2.5 GW SPS will produce electricity equivalent to the energy of a 500 megaton nuclear bomb over its lifespan (assuming it works for at least three decades.) There's at least one SPS design of this capacity with a launch mass of less than 3300 metric tons (and no extraterrestrial materials used):

http://www.powersat.com/PSU-1%20Physical.pdf

Posted by Paul Dietz at October 18, 2004 02:24 PM

Please give me feedback on this proposal: a massive program for the distribution of aluminum-foil strips in orbit to deflect sunrays. It would not be hard to calculate the amount needed to produce significant reduction in global warming.
Let's face it- we do not have thepolitcal will to stop the emission of greenhouse gases- but we may have the money, the technology and the will to implement this kind of international project.

Posted by Ross at May 6, 2005 06:47 AM

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