Powersat

Solar Power Satellite

It floats in silent emptiness twenty-two thousand three hundred miles above the equator, a mammoth flat square two and a half miles long on each side. At that precise altitude over the equator its orbit is exactly the same as Earth’s daily rotation: the power satellite remains over the same spot above the Earth’s surface always. From Texas it appears as a bright star in the south, almost halfway between the horizon and zenith. If you know precisely where to look, often you can see it in full daylight.

To the crews working on the powersat it looks like a big square island. The side facing the Sun glitters darkly, its panels of solar cells greedily drinking in the sunlight’s energy and silently converting it to electricity. The satellite’s underside, the side facing Earth, is studded with microwave antennas and pods that house power converters and magnetron tubes, as well as temporary shelters for the workers. Dwarfed by the sheer size of the powersat, the spacesuited workers buzz around the huge structure on broomsticklike flitters, little more than a small rocket motor and sets of stirrups to anchor their booted feet.

Far below, on empty desert land leased from the state of New Mexico, stands a five-mile-wide field of receiving antennas, looking like thousands of metal clothes poles set into the ground. The rectennas, as the engineers call them, wait for the microwave beam that the powersat will someday transmit.

In 1968 Dr. Peter S. Glaser, an engineer with Arthur D. Little, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, invented the Solar Power Satellite.

Glaser’s concept was simple. Solar cells convert sunlight into electricity; they had been used on spacecraft since the original Vanguard satellite of 1958. Why not build a satellite specifically to generate electricity from the uninterrupted sunlight in space and beam it to receiving stations on Earth? The basic technologies were already in existence: solar cells, such as those used to power pocket calculators, to generate the electricity; and microwave transmitters, which are the heart of microwave ovens, to transmit the energy to the ground. Receiving antennas on the ground would convert the microwave energy back into electricity.

The one technical drawback was that Solar Power Satellites would have to be big: several miles across. But they could generate thousands of megawatts of electrical power and beam it to Earth. With no pollution, because a power satellite burns no fuel. The system’s power plant is the Sun, some ninety-three million miles from Earth.

In the 1970s NASA and the Department of Energy conducted a joint study of the feasibility of Solar Power Satellites, and concluded that such an orbiting power plant would cost many billions of dollars. The SPS idea was quietly put aside by the American government.

Not so in Japan. In February 1993 Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science conducted the first experiment in space in which microwave power was beamed from one spacecraft to another. The power level was only 900 watts and the experiment took less than a minute. But that was the first step in Japan’s Sunsat program, aimed at building an experimental Solar Power Satellite capable of beaming ten megawatts of electrical power to the ground.

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the global electrical power market had grown to more than one trillion dollars per year. Most of that energy was supplied by fossil fuels: coal, natural gas, and oil that came principally from the Middle East. In Japan, where private corporations and the national government are intimately intertwined, the Sunsat program was quietly handed over to the newly formed Yamagata Industries Corporation, which constructed the demonstration solar power satellite in low Earth orbit. It delivered twelve megawatts to a receiving station built in the Gobi Desert. Yamagata’s program was international in scope; the corporation employed engineers and technicians from many nations, including Daniel Hamilton Randolph, a newly graduated electrical engineer from Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Despite the fact that a Solar Power Satellite uses neither fossil fuels nor radioactives such as uranium or plutonium, many environmentalists objected to transmitting a powerful beam of microwaves through the atmosphere. They drew pictures of birds being roasted alive as they flew through the beam and claimed there would be damaging effects on the long-term climate. Thus the original Japanese receiving station was placed in remote, sparsely settled Mongolia. And the microwave beam was kept so diffuse that horses could graze amid the receiving antennas without harmful effect.

Once the demonstration satellite was operating successfully, Dan Randolph flew back to his native United States and founded Astro Manufacturing Corporation. Pointing to the success of the Japanese, he convinced a consortium of American and Western European financiers to back his company’s effort to build a full-scale SPS, capable of delivering ten thousand megawatts to the ground. He hammered home to them that while the capital costs of building the orbital power station would be some four or five times the cost of a nuclear power plant, the operating costs would be so low that the power satellite would begin showing a profit within three years of its start-up. And once the first full-scale power satellite was operational, capital costs for the next ones would go down appreciably.

Saito Yamagata’s supporters in the Japanese government told him that the American’s betrayal was what he should have expected from a foreigner. Yamagata held his tongue and his patience. In silence he watched Randolph driving his fledgling corporation at a breakneck pace to produce a practical solar power satellite, while his own efforts proceeded much more slowly.

Carefully avoiding funding from any governmental entity and the crippling regulations that came with it, Randolph hired hundreds of workers. He rented time and expertise from NASA to train his team, and convinced aerospace giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin to mass-produce rocket boosters that lifted construction crews and equipment into orbit. Even with the benefits of mass production, the costs of the operation drove Astro Corporation to the edge of insolvency.

While the massive power satellite took shape several hundred miles above the Earth, and then was boosted to its final orbital position above the equator, Randolph pushed an elite team of engineers to perfect a spaceplane, a vehicle that lifted off on a rocket booster and then could land like an airplane at any major airport, capable of carrying a small payload or half a dozen workers into orbit. That was the key to operating the solar power satellite economically, profitably. Without it, servicing the huge powersat with human repair and maintenance teams would be too expensive to be practical.

Now Randolph had his solar power satellite. Its construction was almost complete. But the spaceplane project was in a shambles, and he had run out of sources for more funding.

Except for Yamagata’s offer.