Slashdot Log In
Public Discussion Opened on Space Solar Power
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jul 25, 2007 02:36 PM
from the armchair-influence dept.
from the armchair-influence dept.
eldavojohn writes "The National Security Space Office (NSSO), an office of the DoD, has taken a novel approach to a study they are doing on space based solar power. They've opened a public forum for it and are interested in anyone and everyone's expertise, experience and ideas on the best means to harvest energy in space. I suppose this is similar to the DoD's $1 million for an energy pack just without the award. Still, if you want to have an influence on the US's plans in space, this would be an easy armchair place to start. Space.com also has more on the details."
Related Stories
[+]
Hardware: DoD Offers $1 Million for Wearable Power Supply 167 comments
coondoggie writes with a link to a NetworkWorld article about an ongoing prize offered by the Department of Defense. The DoD is looking for very special battery, and they're willing to pay up to a million dollars for it. The battery in question is a 'wearable battery pack', one that will be powerful enough to fuel the soldier of the future but light enough not to burden him. "The DoD says typical soldier going out for a four-day mission carries as much as 40 pounds of batteries and rechargers in his pack and it wants to fix that. The goal is to reduce the weight for the power system that drives radios, night-vision devices, global positioning systems and other combat gear, including a recharging system, to about 2 pounds per day. The DoD is looking to mimic the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which has experienced successes using contests to attract competitors to develop innovative unmanned vehicles and other objects. Now the Defense Research and Engineering Office is hoping to tap into that same competitive spirit to develop longer-duration, lighter-weight power supplies. Three prizes will be awarded in November 2008: $1 million, $500,000 and $250,000."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Too late for nonterrestrial resources utilization? (Score:5, Interesting)
The proximate cause was that despite there being an obvious direction in place subsequent to the space race (remember the Apollo program?) that could have been followed through to space industrialization -- the launch service industry did not enjoy the same protection from government competition that the satellite industry enjoyed [presageinc.com]:
It wasn't until 1990, when a coalition of grassroots groups across the country lobbied hard for 3 years [geocities.com], that similar legislation got passed for launch services.
The fact that Malthusian paradigm didn't precisely follow the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" model [majorityrights.com] doesn't change the reality of the Malthusian paradigm given a fundamentally limited biosphere undergoing its largest extinction event in 60 million years. The Club of Rome merely added academic fashion to the urgency of the Malthusian situation still facing the biosphere. The 1970s was the right time to start the drive for space industrialization based on a private launch service industry. It didn't happen, the pioneering culture that founded the US is being replaced by government policy with less pioneering cultures and now we're all facing some increasingly obvious difficulties -- not just pioneer American stock -- and not just humans.
The cost of getting silicon into space from the lunar surface would be orders of magnitude less than launching from earth due not only to the much shallower gravity well but also due to the absence of atmosphere.
No beanstalk needed.
At worst a Dyneema Rotovator [slashdot.org] might be needed but probably not even that.
First, the bulk of the materials are manufactured in space from lunar raw material transported to orbital facilities so you don't need to land those facilities on the lunar surface, and you don't have to worry about g-loading the raw materials you are sending to the orbital facilities.
Second, you don't manufacture everything in space -- only bulky materials like solar cells, reflectors, structural members and perhaps klystrons. Only residual materials (raw and manufactured) are of terrestria
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-altcomments.cgi
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As we are all aware, the whole global warming problem presented by rising levels of CO2 is that more energy is trapped here on Earth. So how is trapping more energy from the sun and sending more energy to Earth going to help the problem? Maybe the solar collector will be directly between the Sun and Earth, thus removing as much incoming solar energy as it is beaming down to our power station. But
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea of blocking the sun to maintain the status quo on a climatic system we really don't understand yet, is stupid.
Wrong priorities? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheers!
Re:Wrong priorities? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkVlkSnoGNM [youtube.com]
-Brandon
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
- the radiation spreading over an area instead of hitting just the receiver
Place the receivers in, oh... North Dakota; RF spread control can already be feasibly done enough to keep spill-over to a dead-minimum (and the receivers should be large enough to catch that anyway). That, and IMHO, anybody who does air travel is likely already getting hammered with almost as much RF/cm2 thundering out of the ground and local ATC dishes than they'd likely get by standing betwixt power satellite and receiver panel... (that is, the panel is likely going to be rather big). Frequency diffs m
Not really (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I believe that was called the Star Wars Missile Defense System... but on the serious side, that's a pretty good idea, as long as you can solve some basic problems like accurate aiming, beam attenuation through an atmosphere, etc.
Different ways of thinking about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, this is going to sound crazy (but when has that ever stopped me?), but who needs to beam the energy anywhere? Introducing: space wires. Hey , if someone can come up with the seemingly hare-brained idea of the space elevator to haul things up out of the gravity well, then how about lines running down from space to transmission points on the ground? Yes, I know... feasibility is an issue, but hey that's part of the fun!
Uninformed: Microwaves (Score:4, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellit
Unlimited Solar Power, a burgeoning Space Program, and free cooked poultry falling from the sky! What more could you ask for?
Parent
Re:Wrong priorities? (Score:5, Funny)
It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes, silly. In all seriousness, yes, you can build hydrogen all the way up to Uranium. Happens all the time in supernovae. Well . . . some of the time. But that generates an awful lot of "waste heat" you aren't capturing, you have to ship the mass of the uranium out of the gravity well of a star, slow it down to catch it when it gets here (which will take tens or tens of thousands of years depending on how fast you throw it and which star you're using). I figure, if you can build a dyson sphere around a distant star, you can probably build a tightly focused high energy and high efficiency laser emitter and receiver/collector that'll recover a useful amount of power to make the whole ordeal worthwhile. Tho if you're that advanced, you might as well just go to that star and live there.
Parent
This Is Beautiful! (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re: (Score:2)
Average people might make suggestions, but too often, won't understand why it's not feasible.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? You must never have gone to a (public) university library. Plenty of science there for one to scrutinize. One just has to get off one
Dear Slashdot, (Score:5, Funny)
please do our homework for us.
Sincerely,
The National Security Space Office (NSSO), an office of the DoD
P.S. we won't use your ideas to kill or oppress people*
*actually, we will.
Re: (Score:2)
Another idea (Score:2)
I would imagine it would be cheaper than trying to hoist an entire solar power station into space, easier to upgrade as more efficient solar power methodology is developed and not suffer from trying to find the RF bandwidth to beam the energy back.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
One word... ants.
Re: (Score:2)
Light beams (Score:2)
Double normal intensity or less would still produce significantly more power, and not instantly fry an inadvertent target.
P.S. -- Ironically, the captcha word for this post is "disaster"
Re: (Score:2)
For some reason this reminds me of an old two-dimensional simulation package from high school called Interactive Physics:
Warning - Forces are large! [Stop] [Continue]
Continue!
Warning - Accelerations are large! [Stop] [Continue].
Continue!
*Stuff flies every-which-way*
Beam focus and receiver size (Score:2)
If you need a lower-powered beam, spread out the antenna farm into so
Re: (Score:2)
Fascinating subject (Score:5, Interesting)
Three basic problematic areas:
1. Return Delivery for energy. A beam would be the most obvious approach, as no conventional matter would be easilly sustained without something like a space elevator bringing enriched material up and down constantly. An exception would be antimatter, though that would be horribly dangerous on a scale that would make any concentrated beam mishap look like nothing.
2. Energy effects on the earth. Increased energy use, in any form, is going to have various effects on our ecosystem. We'll have to devote a percentage of our global energy use to offset this in some way, hopefully without a tragedy of the commons effect leftover.
3. Upkeep: Materials break down when they transfer the kinds of energy under consideration here. This won't just be a simple solar-panel install job in space. The materials involved will have to be self-repairing in some way if they're going to get closer and closer to the sun. Perhaps they'll function by 'flowing' with the solar winds, then reforming at the front. This promises to be a fascinating task for engineers and scientists looking to harvest such enormous resources safely and (relatively) efficiently.
Every aspect of this subject bristles with the various concerns of humanity - it'll be interesting to say the least what this group can go over.
Ryan Fenton
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This would help to solve the scare of a huge beam missing and the worry of maintaining equipment that focuses excessive amounts of power through one p
random idea #2453 (Score:3, Funny)
Impossible? (Score:3, Interesting)
If these figures are accurate, then this is a pointless endeavor.
To replace, yes (Score:2)
silly idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Critical reactors just don't do it for me. They are hard to turn off. But sub critical reactors sound like the ticket. Need to do some R&D to get the accelerators up to spec. But then they can even burn nuclear waste.
"Novel approach" (Score:2)
Dear Mr. Chairman: (Score:5, Funny)
ps: I suggest building these microwave power stations far away from cities, as they occasionally explode. They're also frequent targets of large, mechanical alien spider robots.
Re:Dear Mr. Chairman: (Score:4, Funny)
What about using them against shadowy quasi-nationstates led by men with mullets? That's really the more immediate need for me right now.
Parent
Cart before the horse??? (Score:2)
The Space Frontier Foundation believes there are energy and environmental benefits that could come from space-based solar power - collecting solar power in space and transmitting it back to Earth
Oh, yeah, that minor detail of "transmitting it back to Earth" might be a bit of a hitch. Given that we have yet to find a way to reliably, efficiently, and safely "transmit" energy (particularly in these magnitudes) over any significant distance, I'd say this discussion is a little premature at best.
Still has bad environmental effects (Score:3, Insightful)
Power needs to go somewhere as some form of energy. It might do some work, but usually ends up mostly lost as heat. All lights, stoves, heaters, etc would essentially mean nearly all of the solar energy collected was as if the sun were simply shining brighter on the earth. Imagine if they were researching how to make more sunlight hit the planet just to harness it with solar cells -- this is almost exactly the same thing.
Space energy is energy being brought into the system that wouldn't have normally entered. I don't see this as a viable form of energy. It will potentially lower greenhouse gasses, but will still screw up the ecosystem.
Why in space? (Score:3)
If anyone can generate their own electricity, it makes for a system which is much more robust from infrastructure failure. People can be independent and recover better from disasters, becoming more
Furthermore, they foster dependency among energy consumers, making them vulnerable to abuse by monopolies in the energy industry. Enron, Dick Cheney, California... you get the idea. Of course, if you happen to BE one of these industrial monopolists, the idea of centralized production is exactly what you want - a "good thing" - for
Let's get solar (and perhaps wind, which shares these properties) working on Earth first.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
U-S-A #1! U-S-A #1! U-S-A #1!
Actually, the US would probably be pretty isolationist now if energy wasn't a concern.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
if the rest of the world wants to shut us up and keep them out of their hair they should just give us plans for an easy never ending supply of renewable energy.
Re: (Score:2)
Here you go. [wikipedia.org] Of course, that's not exactly "renewable" or "never ending" but it'll do for the next several hundred million years (depending on which fuel you pick). Billions if you can figure out commercially viable fusion.
This whole "energy crisis" nonsense isn't actually an energy problem, it's an infrastructure problem. What I really want are some more breakthroughs in energy storage. Batteries suck. I want somet
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We will put every one of our troops on our border and shoot anyone trying to get in. Anyone that want's out is free to leave. Once you leave, you cannot come back in.
We will give ZERO food and money to ANY nation. We will simply take c
Re:I've got great ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
The average American voter, when asked, guesses that about 15% of our budget goes to non-military foreign aid, and thinks it should be closer to 5%. In reality, it's 0.01% percent. Just, y'know, to put things in perspective.
Parent
Re:I've got great ideas (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. The US has historically done and presently does great and positive things for the rest of the world. That's what is so disappointing about the choices made in the last few years.
It's nice to think that the US would help because it "wants to", out of its generosity, but the reality is that much of the food supplied to the rest of the world is dumped there to keep prices up domestically and to justify massive farm subsidies. It feeds the poor, but dumping that much food at low prices can undercut a country's attempts to build agriculture and an export trade in food (subsidies depress global prices, though many other countries are just as bad), and that can keep people poor. Anyway, to change this the US agricultural business and government policy would have to change drastically. They currently *need* to send grain and other foods elsewhere. So, is this generosity or merely necessity?
It would also be quite difficult for the US to survive without energy and mineral resources drawn from the rest of the world, especially oil, what with >50% of oil imported. Historically, the US had a strong isolationist attitude, but that's long over, because the US simply could not survive for 6 months without the rest of the world's resources. At least, not with its current industrial structure. It's obvious that many military and economic choices have been made not out of some enlightened vision of helping the rest of the world, but primarily out of economic self-interest to keep the oil or (insert commodity here) flowing.
A fairly clear example is Iraq. It's hard to explain the choice to go in there as anything other than getting access to oil. Iraq has about 25% of the known conventional oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia. All the original reasons for going in there have evaporated (and they were flimsy beforehand). WMDs? Ha. And everybody now knows the only terrorists in Iraq are the ones that moved in or people who decided to change professions AFTER Saddam was gone. Afganistan made sense at the initiation of the "war on terror", but it's only major resource is opium. It was an expensive operation on solid and globally-supported principles, but taking over that country doesn't pay the bills or feed the resource demands like taking over a country like Iraq. It's obvious the "war on terror" was an excuse in Iraq, and it was hoped it would be easy (decapitation strike indeed!). But if Iraq didn't have oil or threaten other country's oil, I doubt the US would care much.
Yes, the US has and continues to do great and positive things, but you are fooling yourself if you think it is mainly out of generosity or even democratic principles. If it was, then the US would not have such a long and colorful history of propping up dictators and monarchs (e.g., in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Chile, etc.). It has shown that it is quite willing to make shady deals with countries that just happen to have major natural resources needing development. And, look, here's a number of US-headquartered multinational corporations only too willing to lend a generous, helping hand!
I'm sorry to be skeptical. I have great respect for the United States and its principles. Unfortunately I don't see much correlation between where and how the "help" is distributed in the rest of the world and those principles.
The one exception is indeed during natural disasters, where the US has a good and fairly consistent record of offering and effecting aid regardless of who needs it. For that, the generosity of the US is immense and truly genuine. Thanks. The rest of the "help" you can keep. Unfortunately, I doubt the US could survive for long if it did what you suggest.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Did I or did I not say we have done and do some fucked up things? I'm fairly certain I did. I admit that we do wrong things sometimes...but you cannot sit there and say that America doesn't support millions of people with food, clothing, and water.
You know what? I could be wrong in
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is actually the exact opposite of what you say. By designing something in an open, public forum, where all can see the process, we ensure that it CAN'T be patent hi-jacked...or at least, if a patent is granted, it can very easily be contested.
The whole intent of patents was to reduce the amount of secrecy out there to allow ideas to grow into new and better ideas instead of being locked away in some back room.
Re: (Score:2)
You're thinking of a "first-to-invent" system. Here's the difference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_fir st_to_invent [wikipedia.org]