The New York Times caught up with the Solar Power Satellites / Space-Based Solar Power story a few days ago. We apologize for the wait but as you will see in the article there are a number of excellent links to external sources from our old friends including a Way Back Machine link to a 1978 report pdf and it got us into the SSI archives. And yeah, we don’t know why the Times linked to the Wayback Machine either, weird, that is right in the National Space Society pdf dump so they could have just gone direct.

That pdf has relatively good readability compared to most pdfs backed up from fast-scan government servers, but we thought that we would just give the physical copy a new scan. And then when we saw its companion volumes near it on the SSI racks and the Milestone One volume was so neat, we chose to do the work on that one instead. So you can heartily thank the good folks at the NSS and download the 62 page overview or read it in a mac/pc browser by using the link in the article, and if you want to see a bit more from that particular DOE/NASA SPS project you can use the viewer we made for you below; It of course has the helpful table of contents and we went the extra mile of creating a full digital TOC with all of the actual subsections in addition to the simple highest-level contents list that was originally printed. It’s over 300 pages so we think the table of contents is a real research boost and it’s what caused the slight wait.

We have not yet added this to the SSI SPS Research Releases database but, between us, there were already several other new SPS reports that were being cleaned and compiled for you and slated for release next week anyway, so this one will join the growing online reports collection with those others shortly.

Here’s the link to the Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/climate/space-solar-power-energy.html (if you don’t subscribe and hit a paywall, try another browser.)

Here’s the link to the report that they put in the article: https://web.archive.org/web/20170313135341/http:/www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/library/1978DOESPS-ProgramPlanJuly1977-August1980.pdf

And here is the Milestone One document:

Learn more, much more, about Space-Based Solar Power / Solar Power Satellites in the special SPS section of SSI.org.

Update! So sorry, we forgot to mention this days ago. This document is now part of the SSI SPS Research Library Collection. Also just added are: ESA Study On European Aspects Of Solar Power Satellites, JPL Preliminary Examination of SPS Occupational Health Impacts, The Lewis Center Statistics Of The Radiated Field Of A Space-To-Earth Mw Power Transfer System, Marshall Center Candidate Locations for SPS Rectifying Antennas, and the Boeing Systems Definition Space Based Power Conversion Systems Final Report (Detailed). 3 out of those 5 (so 4 out of six in this recent batch) are really good reads.