On May 7, 5:25*am, (Rand Simberg) wrote:
On Tue, 6 May 2008 22:52:11 -0700 (PDT), in a place far, far away,
Totorkon made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

A 5Gw SPS would have a mass close to 100X the ISS. *If its cost were
scaled by the same measure, the price tag would exceed twelve trillion
dollars.

It would be absurd to assume that it would scale that way.

But it will serve as a handy baseline for any critic of such a
project. At 12 cents/Kwh it would have to cost no more than 1% of
that figure, $120B, just to pay for itself, without a profit. A
structure of more than nine square miles, in GEO, for less than the
cost of the ISS.

I don't think this is absurd, but it does have the smell of political
suicide.