Perspectives on SPS FRANK P. DAVIDSON Summary The Solar Power Satellite (SPS) poses both technical and organizational challenges. Thanks to recent improvements in subsystems and their components it is becoming realistic to think in terms of a pilot project. Such a project could be designed by an international study group. In this manner, official and private agencies can cooperate with a minimum of formality, somewhat along the lines of the original, highly efficacious Channel Tunnel Study Group. Macro-engineering, generally defined as the study, preparation and management of the very largest technical enterprises that can be built at any given stage of history, may offer a perspective of some relevance to the launching of a Solar Power Satellite programme. In the very country where the concept of ‘Les Grands Travaux' first took root, it could appear that to encourage such an approach is tantamount to ‘gilding the lily'. But our problem, very precisely, is to accommodate diverse procedures and even diverse cultures of organization so that a combined effort will be able to offer, at minimum risk, the human and environmental benefits of what could be a virtually limitless and - hopefully - a benign source of power. History is replete with examples of great conceptions which took many decades, or even many centuries, to accomplish. According to Herodotus, the Pharaoh Necho, who ruled over Egypt from about 609 BC to perhaps 593 BC began to build a canal between the Nile Delta and the Isthmus of Suez. The modern Suez Canal was completed in 1869. The Panama Canal was first proposed by Alvarado, a cousin of Cortez, in the early years of the 16th century. It was nearly four centuries later, in 1913, that the canal was finally opened to traffic. Important ideas are not self-executing. If competent opinion decides that there is more than a reasonable hope that the SPS will be of substantial benefit to humanity, then the stewards of the technology and of the ‘caisses des depots' capable of underwriting it, must take the organizational problem seriously: just as there is a mingling of doctrine and experience in matters of engineering, there can be useful recourse to precedents and guidelines when new institutional agencies are to be devised and sustained. If the SPS is to be launched as a purely national undertaking, then the modalities will follow the institutional habits and procedures of the sponsoring state or its component entities. For our purposes here, I assume that there will be strong elements of international teamwork in a foreseeable SPS initiative. Surely there will be little Frank P. Davidson, Lecturer and Program Coordinator, Macro-Engineering Research Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==