1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 THE CONTEXT OF THE PRESENT STUDY The Satellite Power System (SPS) implies a very large space construction project, involving the annual construction in orbit over a 30-year period of two arrays of solar cells, each roughly 5 x 10 km in dimension and weighing 35,000-50,000 metric tons. Each array would provide 5 GW of baseload electric power, which would be beamed to the ground, using 2.45 GHz microwaves. Over a 30-year construction period this effort would provide 60 such satellites, supplying some 20-25% of U.S. anticipated electric power needs by the year 2030. The total propulsion effluents injected into the upper atmosphere per year would include 140,000 metric tons of hydrogen, 800,000 of oxygen and 25,000 of argon, and 6 x 101 joules of energy. In the context of reviewing environmental impacts on the upper atmosphere, the present study is designed to identify research needs, in particular for atmospheric experiments as a part of currently ongoing research, and to follow up on workshops held at Argonne National Laboratory in August and September, 1978 (Rote, 1978, and Brubaker, 1979). Effects of microwaves, effects due to launch and construction operations on the surface, and effects on communication systems are not addressed here. It became apparent during the workshop that under the constraints of present understanding and the time requirements for the current SPS assessment program, certain critical questions in phenomenology must be analyzed in more detail, which will require a lot of time and funds, before one can design and execute useful atmospheric experiments. Thus the orientation of the study changed to emphasize these analytical requirements. 1.2 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DIFFERENT INJECTIONS The atmospheric disturbances considered cover a wide range of materials and of altitudes; see Table 1* for the injection due to each element of the system and Appendix B for more details of the scenario; also RSR, 1978. The principal material injectants in the upper atmosphere are H2O and H2 from chemical rocket exhausts, NO due to reentry heating of air, and argon ions in the keV energy range with their neutralizing electrons from electrical propulsion. Material injections, but not necessarily their atmospheric effects, occur in three general atmospheric domains that are described in Table 2. Domain A, 70-120 km, corresponds to the main burn of the Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle (HLLV) second stage, and to reentry heating. Domain B corresponds to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), approximately 500 km, the circularization and deorbit burns of the HLLV, while Domain C corresponds to transport from LEO to Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), at approximately 36,000 *Tables appear consecutively at the end of this section.
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