Solar-pumped laser power transmission, a way to dramatically decrease launch costs?

Jonathan wrote:

It's within the realm of possibility for NASA to 'Save the Future'.
With an agressive forward looking energy project.

It would be a mistake to look to NASA for a solution. They're really
into providing jobs for the aerospace industry, by spending money.
Achievement is very much a secondary goal. Give the job to them, and I
guarantee it won't get done.

Launch costs are going down,
Are they? Significantly? I wonder what the marginal cost of launching using
today's heavy-lift launchers is.


If SSP would become practical, and start-ups and nations to boot would
suddenly produce a dramatic increase in the need for heavy lift, shouldn't
better prices and better launchers follow in a much larger market?

You might see some improvement, and a large number of launchers better
distribute the development cost (though not if you keep changing them).
But at the end of the day, existing launchers get built once, hurl
themselves and their payloads into space, and are then destroyed. Since
the process of building them, and fuelling them, is expensive, there's a
limit to how much the price can come down.

On a smaller scale, a nice example is the lead-acid battery. The number
made is huge. But they're still damned expensive for what they do.


It's communication that's the death of dictatorships.
The US has been flooding various dictatorships with
laptops, smart and satellite phones for several years
now with great success. (SEE IRAN)

http://www.dipity.com/timeline/Rahesabz

Well, that's communication. Power is something else.

Sylvia.