SPS Hearings, 94th Congress January 1976

Senator Ford. You are talking about 20,000 acres in the four units. How does that compare to your receiver? Mr. Taylor. The receiver is about twice the size as the size of the antenna. Senator Ford. 40,000 acres? Mr. Taylor. It is about 5 miles on the ground here, the receiving antenna. And, of course, the elements would be directed directly at the satellite—they would be tilted, the elements would be. And this direct current, then, that would be transmitted over the microwave beam would be then converted to AC and then connected to the Nation's power grids at the site. Now, an essential element of the Powersat, or any other concept for power generated in space, of course, is an economical space transportation system. And I have over here this set of models which puts in perspective the size of these units. Now, over here on my left is a Saturn I-B—it is not the Saturn V which was used on the moon rocket, but similar in size—to give you some perspective now. This is our low Earth-orbit freighter; the space freighter. This is a reusable launch vehicle to low orbit. And this vehicle carries the parts and the assemblies for the space station, for the satellite, into low Earth orbit. It then returns to Earth and it lands, similar to the Apollo module, using the same technology, with this exception—it uses rockets to decelerate into a pond of water rather than the parachutes as they drop into the ocean. This unit, then, would be reused, the new parts and assemblies would be loaded, and we envision that this, with the concept that we have laid out down at the Cape—and we have some pictures of it if you would like to see it later—would be used in about a daily cycle to provide all of that equipment in space. Then the satellite would be assembled by one or two hundred workers in lower Earth orbit. And the satellite, after being completed, can generate electricity, and we would use the solar electric tug here, shown here, attached to one corner of the satellite and transport it out to geosynchronous orbit, where it would then be on station. Now, we would use the Space Shuttle, which is shown here, as a personnel carrier to take the people to low Earth orbit and to return them. And then we would use a vehicle like this orbital transfer vehicle to transfer people and critical supplies from the low Earth orbit out to the geosynchronous orbit where the satellite would then be on station. We can envision a Powersat with a mass of about 100,000 tons, stretching about 9 miles across space. It would pour enough energy to Earth to produce about 10,000 megawatts of net useful output from the ground receiver, enough to power about a million households. It is immense and mind-boggling, but possible, according to our preliminary studies. The cost? My apologies, because I cannot entirely be responsive to your request for the economic viability of Powersat as compared to likely alternatives. Projecting cost is uncertain at best and tends to develop, at these early stages, into a numbers game. The truth is that we do not know at this time what these costs will be. We have, however, done enough homework to believe that Powersat

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