Fig. 3. The moon's environment and the properties of the Regolith make its surface a natural candidate for a semiconductor. Machines have been conceived that would convert the soil into football field size solar cell arrays. One such concept is shown in the opposing drawing. An astronaut is watching a semiautomatic tractor smoothing the lunar soil, extracting lunar iron (magnetic separation) for processing elsewhere, laying iron wires to connect solar cells together (cutaway in the lower middle), and forming solar converters directly on freshly made mounds of lunar soil. Each plot of solar cells feeds power to a conversion station where the energy can be used to supply the lunar base. On a much larger scale, such lunar activities have been proposed that will microwave the energy to the Earth as an alternative to geosynchronous solar power satellites (20).
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