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Solar Power Satellite: Green Energy or Ultimate Mass Destruction Weapon?

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Based in the 1960s, the idea of sending a solar powered satellite into outer space to provide electricity to ground stations has been brought up over the years several times by the Department of Energy (DOE) and The Department of Defense (DOD) of the United States. It is about a satellite floating at 22,000 feet above the Earth, equipped with powerful and large solar panels, that transmit the captured energy from the Sun (remember, in you don’t have any obstructive elements in space, such as air, water, or other gases) through microwaves down to Earth.

In 2007, the Pentagon encouraged the initiative of building such satellite systems, but NASA specialists say that it won’t be available until 10 years from now, if we start developing it… now!

The green implications of this energy super-generator would be enormous: only one of these satellites could provide enough electricity to power an entire town such as New York. The project costs a lot. In the 1970s, NASA estimated infrastructure for a complete system could top $1 trillion. The latest report suggests sharing the costs of a prototype with other space-faring nations. Of course, nowadays the cost would be much smaller.

Everybody is excited by the idea of having free energy from space… But… something sounds weird here… What does Green Energy have to do with Pentagon and DOE? We all know military applications never take into account the material and environmental costs of a war and the investments in the art of destruction seem endless. Part of them are paid through the work of regular citizens, like you and I.

My father worked in the military. He once told be they had a radar that was used to scan the planes’ lift-offs and landings from several hundreds of miles away. The radar had a “magnetron” (radar emissive subdevice – it’s really called that way) that, if open to full throttle could emmit several MegaWatts of energy. For those who don’t know, the electromagnetic field from the microwave range can be directed to a certain target, otherwise it wouldn’t be used to detect particular objects. Microwave devices can focus their energy to a limited area, working like a lens in the Sun.

My father told me that if a bird happened to pass through the electromagnetic field of that radar, it would instantly die and fall to the ground.

If you’re not drunk or if you haven’t taken any drugs lately, you may have already reached a conclusion: what if these satellites, having huge power (in the order of GigaWatts – and even more, I don’t know any numbers), would be pointed at some point on earth, instead of their ground stations? What if their emitting frequency would be modified to that of a microwave oven (2450 MHz)?

Wouldn’t that be the beginning of another “cold” (or better said “hot”) war? The energy would be sufficient, the speed would be instant, and, as history proved, civil energy producing principles (such as nuclear) will be used by the military, first of all.

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7 COMMENTS

  1. Take a look at this new group dedicated
    to possibly the cleanest form of energy. They are looking for
    volunteers to help crowd-fund research and development of aneutronic
    fusion. If its successful it will replace nuclear fission and fossil
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  2. if its in geosynchronous orbit it can hit a huge part of the earth not just aimed straight down at your own country.

  3. then add rockets to change orbit

    build the satellite with thermal

    the emitter can be enhanced to concentrate the beam, maybe with parabolics

    well, i think this would be better than nukes anyway

  4. Okay, first a solar power satellite wouldn’t make a good weapon.

    They have to be in geosync orbit to beam their power down to the collection station. So you could only use them against your OWN people.

    Second, they would probably be using a microwave beam. It’s lower maintenance than an optical laser. And it’s hard to focus a microwave beam to a pinpoint, so the most you could do is make the fillings in people’s mouths get hot by peppering them with microwaves from 26,000 miles away.

    Third, there’s no REASON to go to the expense of building such a system and boosting it into space.

    We already have Concentrating Solar Power plants here on Earth: look up Kramer Junction on google.

    Solar Thermal is about six times more efficient than photoelectric panels, and all you need are:

    a) polished aluminum reflector troughs
    b) vacuum-insulated collector pipes filled with oil
    c) a commercial steam turbine
    d) sunlight
    e) water.

    Now, conveniently we have a giant desert in the American Southwest where nobody can raise crops.

    If we used even a 90 mile square of that Nevada desert to build these Solar Power plants, we’d make ALL the electricity we need in America.

    Now imagine that we don’t stop at 90 square miles, but keep going.

    We store that solar thermal energy overnight either by using large insulated tanks to keep the turbines running, in molten salt, or split water into hydrogen and store it in pressure tanks.

    So we end up not needing to burn coal or build nuclear plants.

    And once we have a surplus of energy we can store it by smelting aluminum with it, or in a variety of forms we can use to power a car.

    One tip? Aluminum takes a lot of power to smelt. But you can get that energy back later if you alloy the aluminum with a little gallium metal.

    So you have a stable metal powder, until you add it to ordinary water. Then the AlGa strips the oxygen off the water molecules, releasing hydrogen for use.

    Afterward you just re-smelt the aluminum gallium oxide and store more energy in it.

  5. Hi there, I have read this info, and realized though it’s a good idea, the number of rough objects ” space junk ” keeps growing at an alarming rate.
    just thinking out loud here, but if one of those objects were to impact such a satellite, and the navigational computer couldn’t fire the stabilizer rockets in time, then wouldn’t the guy who invented the damn thing, feel like a kid with a magnifying glass? ” even unwillingly ”

    our need for an abundant energy source is no secret, that’s why I say we need to investigate zero point energy, “Vacuum energy” this would be found in one of those black holes you inferior apes are creating in CERN.
    one must be created within our solar system and sustained, energy can be collected by dropping matter into it, and collecting induction from the atom’s electron field, stored in a buffer.
    after the buffer becomes fully charged a continuous loop of capacitors { sent to this black hole empty and depleted } to merge with and dispense from the induction station, and the return of charged ones to for example, the space elevator, to distribute this energy to the grid or any other application.

    it pains me to even think that nobody else has the imagination to accomplish this in theory, and I never even graduated high school.
    I am disgusted beyond belief that humanity has no will to better our situation as a whole, it’s all about obsolete commerce.

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