SSI Senior Adviser John C. Mankins has launched a KickStarter fund-raising campaign to fund a new high-quality, non-fiction book on space solar power. Mankins, an internationally recognized expert on the subject who is president of Artemis Innovation Management Solutions LLC, is attempting to raise $25,000 by Wednesday, June 27.
Please give what you can to help John reach his goal. Click here to donate.
Hi,
solar power satellites ( SPS’s ),very exciting ! Low
cost solar energy from space,free of greenhouse gases,to
heat our homes and businesses in the winter,run air conditioning in the summer,charge up electric vehicles,and
provide power to desalination plants to make fresh water
from ocean water,then to run large electric pumps to pipe
that water to farms,towns,cities and countries that need
more fresh water.No more need of oil,coal,natural gas,
hydro or nuclear generated electricity.We will have to go
to the Moon to get most of the material to build these
solar power satellites in geosynchronous orbit.Laurentian
University in Sudbury,Ontario has made a lunar excavator
called the Lunabot.The Google contest has produced a lunar lander.An electromagnetic catapult will launch lunar
ore into orbit,a catcher ship will collect the ore and
transport it to a space foundry at Lagrange Point One and
extract the silicon and titanium to be made into photo
voltaic cells,then transported to geo orbit where
operators on Earth will remotely control hundreds of
Robonauts and assemble the SPS’s in geo orbit.Have read
that 60 SPS’s would supply the entire energy needs of every country on Earth. For an earth-moon shuttle,attach
an Ad Astra plasma rocket to a nautilus module,to protect
astronauts from cosmic rays,Dr.Ruth Bamford’s force field
generator could be used.
When we have enough SPS’s to supply energy needs,we will have the infrastructure in
place to start building Gerard O’Neill’s space colonies
and bring an end to poverty for many thousands of years.
Building space habitats will make
unlimited good jobs and nice homes for every person born
for many thousands of years to come.Then,if a large
asteroid destroys the Earth,we will not have all of our
eggs in one basket,there will space colonies to carry on.
A bigger risk than asteroids is war , should
a Third World War occur , again,we have all our eggs in one basket ,today there are so many weapons of mass destruction ,there might not be many survivors, those that
do survive might wish they were dead and the capacity to
build space SPS’s or space habitats will be severely
diminished.
Look at it as a war on poverty, instead of
buying War Bonds,call them Space Bonds .Long term investments to provide money to build SPS’s and Space Habitats, bonds that will always be honored and can always
be turned back into cash whenever the owner wants to ,
in order to generate public interest in Space Bonds as
a long term investment opportunity.
Am sure,Gerard K.O’Neill
would have wanted his book,The High Frontier to always
be in print in as many languages as possible including Esperanto,really,nobody gets to choose what country they
are born in.
Cordially , John Hadden ; jhadden@hotmail.ca
The use of Solar Power Satellites (SPSs) is long overdue and badly-needed.
But solar shields at L1 are needed too — they may well be the only way to stop the acceleration of global warming before it leads to an unstoppable runaway chain of events. That in turn would lead to the exponential acceleration of the mass extinction already in progress (e.g., our coral reefs are dying), and would almost certainly lead to our own eventual demise.
So while the first SPSs will be deployed in synchronous orbit, we also need to put SPSs in orbit around L1 instead of Earth, to double as solar shields to keep 1% to 3% of sunlight from reaching Earth. That’s a far more ambitious project, but it gives us a shot at saving our planet, and the benefits, some of which John Hadden describes in his 2012 post, are too many to list here. Besides, I don’t see that we have a choice.