Dr. Heiss. And it is the photovoltaic version that we studied. And please excuse the alphabet salad. Senator Ford. We get alphabet soup. Once it is identified in the hearing, we can go on to A B C's. Dr. Heiss. Well, I think there is a lot of alphabet still left on solar power stations with regard to alternative concepts—and I think it has to be sorted out. That is one conclusion I came to. The effort studied one concept—I believe that on the basis of this 10-month effort very firm insights can be arrived at, which are more detailed than, you know, just one question—is this concept economically useful? I think the questions that can now be answered are more detailed—some things make sense, other things do not make sense. And I would like Dr. Greenblat to report on the effort that he directed over the past 10 months. Members of the support team are with us. I would be very happy after this testimony by Dr. Greenblat to enter into any policy questions or other more broader questions, if you have such questions. Senator Ford. Fine. Dr. Greenblat? Dr. Greenblat. Mr. Chairman, let me introduce first some of the other people who are with me. Mr. Fawkes is not here. To my right is Mr. Thomas Kelly, who is a vice president of the Grumman Aerospace Corp. There is Mr. Nathan who is the Grumman Aerospace Corp, study manager of our subcontract to them. Dr. Peter Glaser, whom you know, from Arthur D. Little. And, finally, Mr. Owen Mavnard, who is the space systems manager for the Raytheon Co. They are here to give me whatever technical backup is required to answer your questions. Now, on to our study. The principal objectives of our 10-month study have been to achieve increased understanding of the economic and technical aspects of space-based power generation and transmission systems. In addition to the satellite solar power station, we were asked to study what is called the power relay satellite. The study's objective was to determine whether they might make significant contributions to meeting future energy demands. The principal study emphasis was to identify key problem areas of operational power systems and the developments required to resolve them, to come up with—and I will give another one to you—what we call ROM costs. It is, in the engineering parlance, “rough order of magnitude.” It is not very well defined. It means within a factor of two to three in terms of the accuracy of the cost. That is, you may not want to go out and bid on these cost estimates, yet they are better than back-of-the-envelope; they are as good as we could do at this time. Another major emphasis to the study was the identification of the social and environmental impacts arising from the operations of these systems, which we believe may be as important as the economics of these systems. Now, I will proceed to, really, the bottom line, the results of the study and then tell you how we arrived at them and give you our recommendations.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==