Reply #20: On one point you are right, on one point you are totally wrong. [View All]

"1) Too expensive. It would probably be cheaper to go to the moon and extract helium3, which itself is very expensive."

Completely accurate.

"2) How do you store the energy and send it back? If it was easy to channel energy back to earth, again the moon would be the best bet. It would be cheaper to build nuke power plants in the moon and send the energy back. Meltdowns? Who cares, nobody lives on the moon."

You wirelessly transmit the energy to Earth. This is possible, you use radio which does it every day. Microchips for pets do it. A shitload of things do this. It's efficient in modern experiments, reaching 95% efficiency in some cases, which is on par with actual transmission lines.


That said, putting them in space is not an option, BUT what if I told you I figured out a poor man's version of this space-based power idea?

Oh, I have, and we can really do it on the cheap! Send the motherfuckers up on an airship designed for high altitude. Lockheed was designing a high altitude airship. You could use the same thing to put one of these solar plants in the sky.

But instead of using big ass and heavy solar panels, you can just use the gas envelope of the vehicle as the collector! It would have to be big anyway to support the weight of a power plant in the sky, so you'll get a lot of power out of it.

Doing this is ooodles cheaper than actually sending a satellite into space, and because it's high in the atmosphere you get a shitload of benefits from it. You get more direct sunlight because you're higher up and there is less atmosphere scattering the light being emitted from the sun!

You get more bang for your buck, and of course that actually works out, because it's not in space. You're still above the weather at extremely high altitude, so no worries about clouds fucking up your energy production!

It would be easier to launch, because it's not on a fucking rocket. Safer too.

And you can repair them, when you'd probably just have to write them off if they were in a geostationary orbit, because that's an extremely high orbit.

You would not get 24/7 illumination as you would with a geostationary plant, but you would probably be able to create network of transmission stations around the world to get power from the side that's in the sun to the side that isn't. But it must be said, because you're higher up, you would have a longer day, because the horizon is further away. The higher you go, the longer the day.

All of this we can actually do.

This kind of solar power makes terrestrial based solar look like a kiddie science experiment.

Now, eventually, space will be an option, because you can use experience from building these high altitude solar platforms, to build launch vehicles for rockets that will carry them to high altitude on board an airship, so that they can be lighter, because they wouldn't have to waste fuel fighting against drag in the lower atmosphere, and interestingly enough, they would have to carry fuel, just to carry more fuel. There are right now planes that launch actual rockets, but only for Low Earth Orbit, and they do this for that reason. Well, an airplane can't go as high as an airship.

It's like going up steps. First we did solar on Earth, but we saw the problems with it: scattering of light reducing power to terrestrial solar and clouds of course. Then we decided to jump a few steps, and we put solar panels in space to power spacecraft. And we now know the benefits of doing that.

What we need to do, is go down a step or two, and work to provide power at high altitude.

It sounds like science fiction, but all the technologies exist are used everyday. It's like cooking, you wouldn't have to grow a new species of spice, you'd just be coming up with a new recipe, by putting the technologies together in a way they have never been used.