Space Island Group & Solar Powered Satellites

[spacelifejunkie]

Check out the article below. This is a grand vision involving lots of money, unproven technology, an aggressive timescale and difficult political ties with other countries. Can there be any validity to this? I think we would all like to see it happen to at least some degree but my first reaction is that this group has their head in the stars but their feet aren't on planet earth either. To complicate the issue further, I heard last fall on The Space Show from the CEO Gene Meyers that they were on the verge of securing the first $2 billion for development this year. I love the candor on this board and I am dying to hear what all of you think.<br /><br />SLJ<br /><br />http://www.spaceislandgroup.com/press_10.html<br />

 

[chriscdc]

Well the idea works but most of us strongly doubt that SIG is in a position to pull it off.<br /><br />If they do however get 2billion then I reckon they will be taken more seriously on these boards.

 

[webtaz99]

I'm sure they lay awake at night sweating over how seriously they are taken on "boards". <img src="/images/icons/rolleyes.gif" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[tomnackid]

Well, maybe by the time they work out all of the bugs of launching and maintaining mega-structures in orbit and transmitting electricity via microwaves or laser on a large scale the price of oil will be high enough to make space-based solar power competitive. <br /><br />What is needed is a small scale "proof of concept" program. Maybe using a small solar sat to beam energy to a remote location where other methods of getting electricity are very expensive. Maybe send power to an antarctic base? How about powering a container ship or a supertanker? (How ironic would that be? A solar powered oil tanker!)

 

[spacelifejunkie]

"Everyone familiar with flight concepts agrees that SIG's plans are feasible," says Lynn Harper, head of integrative studies at NASA Ames Research Center. "It's one of the most exciting developments I've seen in my career."<br /><br />"As early as 2008, SIG claims, it will send up rockets with empty fuel tanks that can be refitted as commercial versions of Skylab. "These tanks cost about $50 million each, and right now they're thrown away," Meyers says. He believes that leasing the tanks to commercial interests will make his venture profitable by 2009--and lead to weekly launches by 2015."<br /><br />"Meyers is making presentations to the Chinese and Indian governments next month, offering 2 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity from 2012 to 2025 for $200 billion--a fixed price of 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable to the baseline U.S. average. An advance of 5 percent of that, he says, would cover all his development and launch costs."<br /><br /><br />Here are a few statements from the article. SpaceX, Scaled and others have been working feverishly on building their rather small rockets compared to what SIG is proposing for a number of years now and are still not completed with there initial plans for space exploration and tourism. How can SIG possibly promise India and China or anyone else who is supposedly giving them money that they are going to be successful? <br />They want to use STS based technology to make this happen. If NASA is using all the production facilities for Project Connie will they just build new ones to make room for there ambitious construction schedule? So many questions and yet they are claiming to be so close to multi billion dollar business deals. <br /><br />SLJ<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

 

[josh_simonson]

"Meyers is making presentations to the Chinese and Indian governments next month, offering 2 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity from 2012 to 2025 for $200 billion--a fixed price of 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable to the baseline U.S. average. An advance of 5 percent of that, he says, would cover all his development and launch costs." <br /><br />Uh-huh. I'd think it'd cost 200bln just to launch all the shuttles to get as many ETs as they show on their space station graphics. <br /><br />Who wants a hotel in space with no windows anyway?

 

[nexium]

Either country can use 2 trillion kilowattwatt hours during those 12 years, unless the world ecconomy or theirs goes bad. 4383 days = 105189 hours = almost 20 gigawatts average but it needs to be deliverd at multiple locations or close to their largest city. Multiple locations will be very costly for rectennas, even if the Chinese or Indians agree to more than one kilowatt per square meter in the beam = 16 square kilometers of rectenna @ 62.5% rectenna efficiency.<br />The 5% deposit is ten billion dollars. With that much seed money and a good business plan they can perhaps sell 100 million shares of stock at $10 = one billion dollars and barrow several billion additional dollars. The solar array at GEO altitude needs to produce at least 40 gigawatts = about 100 square kilometers, which is mind boggling, so they need to think perhaps 5 SPS each with a 8 gigawatt photo voltaic array of 20 square kilometers. I don't think they can pull this off even with launch costs to GEO at 1% of today's cost. Neil

 

[qso1]

Since the artist concepts illustrate what appear to be shuttle ET based orbital stations, the first thing SIG will need to do is get a contract arrangement with Lockmart to secure continued production of the ET line beyond shuttle's retirement. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[publiusr]

The important thing is that Meyers is trying to work with Griffin and the HLLV he needs for VSE (CaLV). Thus far, the lousy alt.spacers like that fraud Tumlinson and Anderson have been attacking Griffin--like they know more about engineering than he does. Forrest Gump at t/Space is just mad because his contraption got no money from NASA, and he and the space libertarians want to pout.<br /><br />Gene Meyers is smart. He is looking for payloads to go atop the CaLV--instead of wasting time on the LV.<br /><br />The myth that NASA needs to "buy rides" and that private industry should provide the launchers needs to be busted, because such a scheme plays to the strength of neither party. NASA builds the big lv and it should be private industry that designs payloads like SPS or space pharmaceutical manufacture. If the goal is to make money--don't waste time re-inventing the rocket--make the payload.<br /><br />Therefore I consider Gene Meyers more legitimate than Rutan, or t?space or the useless XCOR/NASCAR idiots.<br /><br />Gene wants to work with Griffin--the others just want to tick him off.<br /><br />Not smart.

 

[chriscdc]

So he's good because he's concentrating on a hypothetical use for a hypothetical launch system?<br />The others are concentrating on new launch systems for experiments and exploration that are currently going on. At least these guys can actually get on with building something which at the least will allow orbital and lunar orbital tourism, even if they don't get money from Nasa.<br /><br />Saying that Meyers is more legit is like saying that star trek is more legit than Nasa as it's use of space is more forward looking and complex.<br /><br />Note that many of the hypothetical uses for space like pharmaceuticals have been massively weakened. Ooh you can make protein crystals, for X-ray analysis, easier in space but look you can achieve the same results on earth using more powerful X-ray guns.

 

[publiusr]

And you are a biochemist then and know that for sure? Or maybe the only alt.spacers you like are frauds like Tunlinson and Anderson who want to undermine Griffin, and our Launch capabilities?<br /><br />I find this man's research to be more valid than your rantings:<br /><br />http://main.uab.edu/show.asp?durki=38245

 

[chriscdc]

Now this is where my uni course gets interesting.<br /><br />I have taken biochemistry modules. I am well aware of the need to make crystals in order to generate diffraction patterns in order to determine structure.<br /><br />I am also in the middle of a tedious X-ray diffraction report, in this case for a materials module.<br /><br />The hardest part of determining the structure is not growing the crystal. The problem is growing the crystal in which the proteins fold to form the structure that you find in nature (and thus is useful). I see that your link said that the crystals were grown 14 years ago, well we have moved a long way since then. For example we have recently been working on membrane spanning proteins that you can't make 3d crystals from which would have been impossible to do 14 years ago.<br /><br />That's why I said that the biochemical reason has been strongly weakened in the last few decades. There was a good reason back then but not now.

 

[publiusr]

Space based solar powersats need not be stick built as they were proposed. With newer materials, inflatables rolled into heavy lifters could be self deploying--so the concept of them costing trillions is not credible. It would certainly give us solar sail tech--that no coal plant will give us.

 

[chriscdc]

Steve doesn't agree with that sort of argument. It's either been done down here or not at all and to be fair they haven't been demonstrated.<br /><br />Now I would argue that such solar cells will be likely to be developed (and any future looking plan without considering them is likely to become hamstrung).<br /><br />However SIG is a plan for the extremely near term where it would be unlikely to have been developed.

 

[SteveMick]

As has been mentioned on another thread, triple junction solar cells able to work efficiently in 150 suns or more while having a specific power approaching 1KW/kg have been developed by Spectrolab. Adding the mass of a solar concentrator such as L'Garde has developed and the specific power is still greater than .5KW/kg. This tech meets Steve's criteria in that it has been devloped already here on the ground. Deployment of the concentrator was demonstrated in the early nineties via the Shuttle although it was called an antenna. Even so, NEO derived materials would be needed to make SPS truly competitive IMO.<br />Steve

 

[craig42]

One can create many coal fired plants and nuclear plants very cheaply for that, and give immediate energy supplies. <br /><br />Until the fuel runs out.<br /><br /><br />The problem with solar is that it's very low energy density. That requires huge collection surfaces, & thus for at least $1500/kg. it's billions initial costs alone.<br /><br />Big problem only if your lifting materials from Earth. Plenty of room in space for large facilites<br /><br /><br />There is a very serious shortage of specifics and as the devil is in the details here, one can seriously doubt this is as good as surface based energy production. The inefficiencies of converting the solar energy to microwaves, then losses beaming to the earth's surface, then losses in coversion of the MW's into usable eletricity, then transmission losses are far too high to be credible. <br /><br />What about the loss of converting heat into kinetic energy into electricity? Or Nuclear enery into heat into kinetec energy into electricty? Are you factoring those in? <br /><br />You say transmisson costs are to high to be credible. Is 70% efficency credible? 60%? 50%? 40%?<br /><br /><br />And until we have a large lunar habitat sending in magnetic cannon (railgun, or mass driver) loads of lunar masses into NEO, or from a metals rich asteroid at the L-5 point, then it's going to be 'solar pie in the sky'. <br /><br />Sure but why a large facilty? Why not a small unmanned one?<br /><br />Intrestingly Japn plans to launch one in 2040 <br /><br />The dream <br />it does not have 0% waste energy however all its waste energy is in the form of heat. Which is more enviromently friendly than non-renewables.

 

[publiusr]

Enough with the railguns. Large rockets are the way to go. CaLV demonstrator powersats (that can also be used for solar electric missions with slight modifications. Then Sea Dragon.<br /><br />I like Gene Meyers in that he doesn't bash Griffin the way Tumlinson and the other frauds do.

 

[nexium]

We can build a demonstration SPS now, for a few million dollars. The rectenna to receve one milliwatt may cost a million dollars. Why bother when a million times scale up will only run one window air conditioner? Neil

 

[spacelifejunkie]

Here is the latest off the SIG website. The part that interests me is that SIG expects to strike a deal with the governments of India and China to provide solar powered satellites to kickstart this whole process. Space Island Group speaks so confidently yet has nothing to show. How are they getting so much press? They want to use space shuttles for God's sake despite the fact that the shuttles will be retired right around the time they claim to have 10,000 jobs in space by 2010! I love ambitious dreams but I need some hard evidence on these guys, especially in terms of financing this project.<br /><br /><br />http://www.longislandpress.com/?cp=162&show=article&a_id=8249<br /><br /><br />SLJ

 

[kmarinas86]

It was ok until Columbia happened.

 

[kmarinas86]

www.oceanpowertechnologies.com<br /><br />Much better than SPS (it recovers waste energy from Global Warming).

 

[publiusr]

No it isn't better--for SPS systems can also give us the technology needed for solar sails and missions to deflect asteroids with something other than nukes.<br /><br />I will say this--a lot of ocean tech CAN be used for spaceflight. I was watching National Geographic Explorer the other day when they were doing a show on the Neptune spar. So help me--this thing IS Sea Dragon. If anything, Truax's monster rocket is smaller and simpler.<br /><br />Some links:<br />http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/megastructures/episodes.html<br /><br />http://www.anvilpub.com/epn_december.htm<br /><br />http://www.kerr-mcgee.com/operations/innovation/spartech/index.htm<br /><br />http://www.jraymcdermott.com/spartec/spartec_history.htm<br />http://www.rigzone.com/data/projects/project_detail.asp?project_id=32<br />http://www.corrpro.com/solutions16.htm<br />http://www.offshore-technology.com/projects/neptune/<br /><br />http://www.tamu.edu/univrel/aggiedaily/news/stories/archive/102896-2.html<br />http://www.jraymcdermott.com/projects/Neptune__27.asp

 

[pmn1]

The size of some of the cargoes being moved around by Dockwise and other HL ship companies is getting quite extreme especially the open decked vessels.<br /><br />http://www.dockwise.nl/index.php?sid=3 <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[nyarlathotep]

<font color="yellow">One can create many coal fired plants and nuclear plants very cheaply for that, and give immediate energy supplies.<br /><br />Until the fuel runs out. </font><br /><br />I don't think we're going to run out of Uranium and Thorium any time soon. Not for atleast a million years. Then we can start smashing protons.

 

[nyarlathotep]

<font color="yellow">Enough with the railguns. Large rockets are the way to go. CaLV demonstrator powersats (that can also be used for solar electric missions with slight modifications. Then Sea Dragon. </font><br /><br />Why the hell would we build a CaLV if we were then going to go out and build a Sea Dragon? It makes absolutely no sense, why not just develop and build the much cheaper and more capable Sea Dragon? Churn them out in bulk from ukranian and russian shipyards. They're desperate for work. <br /><br />Oh wait, that's right, that would put tens of thousands of middle-upper class workers in key congressional districts out of work. No, never mind, Griffin's plan sounds much more workable.