6. Economics ECON, Incorporated, under contract to the Marshall Space Flight Center, and with the assistance of Arthur D. Little, Grumman and Raytheon, has recently completed a rather comprehensive economic evaluation of an SPS based on the photovoltaic concept and a power relay satellite (Ref. All). JPL (Refs. A7, A8, A15) is also conducting comparative assessments of orbital and terrestrial center power systems. All investigators acknowledge that the economic question is the pivotal one in determining SPS feasibility. It is reasonably clear that the technological problems can be solved, given enough money; it is not so clear that these problems can be solved economically. Section V discusses the key economic issues and contains a comprehensive economic analysis. 7. Environmental Impact The primary environmental impacts associated with the SPS that have been addressed thus far can be grouped into the three areas of social impact, environmental pollution, and microwave transmission. The social impacts include such things as radio frequency interference with communication systems, land use for microwave receiving and launch facility, and the general issues of public safety associated with the SPS, particularly if nuclear power generation is used. Environmental pollution stems from the massive manufacturing processes and extremely large number of launch vehicles required. The microwave transmission issue revolves primarily about the acceptable levels of such radiation that can be permitted for humans and other animal life although there may be some secondary climatological effects, such as inosphereic heating. Most concept studies deal with the environmental issue to one extent or another and the microwave transmission has been investigated in some detail. A detailed treatment of SPS environmental effects is presented in Section VII.
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