Re: Juno yes, Moonrise no

Joe Strout <joe@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In article <1oDpe.9082$Cz3.1165164@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> raven@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> > > It's a LOT less waste heat than is generated by any other means of
> > > generating the same amount of electricity (including terrestrial solar).
> >
> > Yes, but dumping heat is far easier in a terrestrial situation. Heat
> > managment seems to me to be the big engineeering challenge to a large
> > scale SPS. I've never seen this issue adressed though.

> I assumed you were talking about the waste heat on the terrestrial side
> (basically, warming of the microwave rectennas), which is trivial.

> On the powersat end of things, it needs to be considered, but as I
> understand it, it's not much of an issue there either. These solar
> arrays are huge and their backsides always point away from the sun.
> They'll radiate their waste heat just like a, er, radiator.

Sure, there's no problem with the cells. But you're going to have gobs of
DC power available, tho it'll be spread out over a very large area.
Engineeering problems then come into play of how you're going to get this
DC energy from your SPS to the ground. If we posit a large scale maser
projector, we have to collect the energy from the array (which will be
large enough that using DC will be problematice) and transform it. Every
time we're transforming, we're going to have losses and with a GW maser,
you're going to have MW's of heat to disspate.

Q: would projecting from multiple antenaas be feasbale?



John
--
Remove the dead poet to e-mail, tho CC'd posts are unwelcome.
Mean People Suck - It takes two deviations to get cool.
Ask me about joining the NRA.
.