Re: Solar Power Satellites

From: OrionCA (OrionCA_at_earthlink.net)
Date: 11/18/04 

Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 05:57:39 -0800

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 00:26:01 -0500, "Scott M. Kozel"
<kozelsm@attbi.com> wrote:

>Joe Strout <joe@strout.net> wrote:
>>
>> "Scott M. Kozel" <kozelsm@attbi.com> wrote:
>>
>> > The costs of boosting the materials to build an SPS system, is pretty
>> > much a killer issue to the whole scheme.
>>
>> Nonsense. You don't boost the materials to build an SPS system from
>> Earth; most of them would come from the Moon. Thus the reason why lunar
>> development is an important investment.
>
>Utilizing the Moon would mean that enough launch capability would need
>to be built there, to lift the weight of an Iowa-class battleship into a
>geostationary orbit to construct one SPS.
>
>Exactly how many rockets have been fired from the Moon's surface?
>That's right, 6 LEM ascent stages that were built and fueled on the
>Earth.
>
>Sounds pretty far-fetched given the technology.

It's called a "Mass Driver" and it fires projectiles into space using
electromagnetic energy. Inefficient on Earth due to high gravity,
power requirements, and atmospheric drag on the projectile, it's been
around as a concept for lunar launches since the 1960s in one form or
another. The O'Neill people built a small, 6' prototype for testing
but got bored digging the projectile buckets out of the wall.

You would make it from locally obtained materials and power it with
undiluted sunlight. There are two versions: One lobs bulk materials
from the Moon toward a space station and the other vaporizes the
material first and fires these in a columnar, charged plasma stream
toward an oppositely-charged target plate in space, where they are
refined in zero-g into building materials for the space station.

The science works. You only need a small starter factory to build
solar panels from silicates found abundantly in the regolith and
connect those in any size array you like. With free,
damned-near-unlimited power you build factories on site to process the
regolith into building materials.and loft those into space. If we
WANTED to we could build the seed factory in 5 years, ship it up to
space on the Shuttle in modules and send these to the Moon on a
low-energy orbit using ion propulsion. Then you'd drop a 5-10 man
team on the Moon to assemble the factory and begin processing
materials.

Beyond the seed factory there's very little you'd need to lift from
Earth. We can mine oxygen and hydrogen from the regolith (finding
water on the Moon would be a bonus) and periodic REMOs would provide
food and supplies for the station until they can build the
infrastructure to grow their own. The construction crews would rotate
every 2-3 years and eventually grow into a sustainable colony on their
own.

On a sidenote (but related) the major cost of a space mission is NOT
the launch vehicle and fuel but the infrastructure. With few missions
the cost-per-launch grows exponentially;, with more launches it
shrinks because the infrastructure of engineers, technicians, and
scientists at Cape Canaveral remain largely fixed. The mission cost
goes down further as space vehicles start being produced on the Moon
and they COME DOWN to ferry people and equipment back up.

Within 15 years we could have the first L5 station in space and from
there on it's just a matter of *how fast* we wanted to expand out into
the solar system, using the same basic technique. 

--
Some factoids:
		2000		2004		% Increase
Bush		50,456,169	59,459,765	17.8%
Democrat	50,996,116	55,949,407	9.7%
Population	281,421,906	294,719,604	4.7%
Much of the Democrat gain is explained by simple
population growth.  Bush's gain isn't.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Solar Power Satellites
    ... You don't boost the materials to build an SPS system from ... >Utilizing the Moon would mean that enough launch capability would need ... refined in zero-g into building materials for the space station. ... WANTED to we could build the seed factory in 5 years, ...
    (sci.space.policy)
  • Re: Summer Study and colony location
    ... At a later point, the reactor was gone, and the mass-driver was powered ... of getting a nuke to the moon. ... I'd consider it a truism that manufacturing on the lunar surface makes more ... fact that mass-driver launch of raw materials from the moon should be much ...
    (sci.space.policy)
  • Re: Fusion Rocket to the Moon
    ... But the amount of nuclear materials disposed of in the atmosphere ... Small detonatoin events amounting ot 60 tons of TNT are totally ... and 1/3rd gee at landing on the moon. ... vehicle masses 400 tons empty and carries 20 tons of pulse units. ...
    (sci.space.policy)
  • Fusion Rocket to the Moon
    ... But the amount of nuclear materials disposed of in the atmosphere ... Small detonatoin events amounting ot 60 tons of TNT are totally ... and 1/3rd gee at landing on the moon. ... vehicle masses 400 tons empty and carries 20 tons of pulse units. ...
    (sci.space.policy)
  • Re: Anyone translate this for me please?
    ... by letting you try. ... No materials? ... No workers? ... No factory? ...
    (rec.travel.europe)