The Focus Fusion Society Forums Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Experiment (LPPX) SPace Power to solve world's energy problems

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  • #615
    rashidas
    Participant

    No need to worry about global warming or peak oil. The Space Island Group is on the job and will have the worlds first solar power colectors in operation by next year. Their web site is:

    http://www.spaceislandgroup.com/home.html

    What do you all think of this development?

    Rashidas

    #4192
    Henning
    Participant

    More a dream than anything else. Deploying all this stuff in orbit is extremely expensive. The ISS costs almost as much as ITER, and it’s just a fraction of the size of the proposed space stations. The “Solar Power Array” needs to deployed in geostationary orbit (that’s 36000km away) for beaming down the energy to its base station (or maybe have several base stations and direct the beam to the closest one if you deploy in LEO).

    I think DESERTEC is much more plausible, which seems to be backed by Münchener Rück (world’s largest reinsurance company).

    #4193
    Aeronaut
    Participant

    Sounds like a job for the space elevator.

    #4195
    jowabea
    Participant

    I read a few sections of the site. It looks interesting, and they’re certainly optomistic that they can get costs way below NASA expenses. They are attempting to coordinate all the different uses that they possibly can into a single launch. They start with Space Tourism and Solar Satellite launch. Then they convert their external fuel tanks into orbiting lab space and lease that out to reasearch groups.

    They are super-optomistic that long term they can do everything with these satellites. They believe they can use Solar energy through either solar cells or solar reflectors to generate electricity, prevent or redirect hurricanes to prevent property damage, evaporate ocean water to create rain for agriculture and fire fighting, and warm entire cities to reduce heating and winter street plowing costs.

    They seem to be quite convinced that the science and technology for all of that is proven and available.

    Obviously initial financing is the elephant in the room, which they think they can conquer by first convincing the Insurance and Energy corporations to fund them, and then they believe they can get bank loans after they start getting leases for lab space signed.

    I’m not at all optomistic that they’re having any where near the level of success they were hoping for since I can’t find any evidence that their web site has been updated in the last 2.5 to 3 years.

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