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Old October 2nd 07, 03:29 PM posted to rec.arts.sf.science,sci.space.history
John Schilling
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Default Questions about "The High Frontier"

On Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:45:19 -0000, Damien Valentine
wrote:

So I just got through O'Neill's "The High Frontier". There seem to be
some philosophical inconsistencies -- O'Neill claims to be promoting
individual freedoms and small-scale economies by building monolithic
power satellites and kilometer-scale orbiting cities, for instance --
but that's neither here nor there.


What really bothers me is that the entire scheme seems too much like
something out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon. "We'll build a base on the
Moon to deliver material to Earth orbit -- and we'll need at least
some mining ships scouting the asteroids for water and organics too --
which will be used to build a 3-million ton, 10,000-man space station
the size of Manhattan; then that will build 80,000-ton satellites, and
those will transmit solar power back to Earth." (He offers other
justifications for his "Islands" -- building space telescopes, for
example -- but it seems that we've achieved most of those goals
already without them.)


I suppose I want to start off by asking, "Would a Solar Power
Satellite work in the first place?" I know that the idea has gotten
a lot of flak recently; is it still viable or just hopeless?



That's almost entirely a question of scale. Solar Power Satellites
can be built and will work as advertised, it's just that if you read
the fine print in the advertisements, the things only work well at
power levels of several gigawatts or so. Anything less, and you run
into problems with the relative size of the antennas for power beaming
from desirable orbits. Or, alternately, the seriously inconvenient
duty cycle and load sharing problems associated with the crappy orbits
you're limited to with small antennas.

Multiple-gigawatt power satellites are huge enough that we'd need a
whole lot of new infrastructure to even start building them, and new
productive infrastructure is rarely worthwhile unless you're going to
produce at least a dozen or two of the whachamacallits in question.


So, given someone who says, "I've got half a trillion dollars here,
I desperately want/need a hundred gigawatts of electric power, and
I can't find a cheaper terrestrial solution", yes, something like
O'Neill's architecture follows pretty naturally. And it's probably
even profitable in competition with terrestrial power generation.

But if all you've got is half a billion dollars and you just want
to prove the concept and/or get yourself a hundred megawatts of
juice, it doesn't work.


Oh, and multiply that half-trillion dollars by a factor of ten or
so, ruling out any hope of profitability, if you put a government
agency in charge of the program.


Mind you, some of the same problems apply to nuclear power, and we
do have that. But much of the necessary infrastructure there is
common to existing coal-fired powerplants, and much of the rest is
shared with the nuclear-weapons people. And governments have a
well-established track record of pumping huge ammounts of money
into unprofitable weapons programs.


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