for weapon use in the US SDI program by the late 1990s, will still require development and qualification of receiver and power reconversion hardware, which is as yet not even under serious consideration and has not progressed beyond the conceptual stage. Should a commitment for its use in central-station development be made by, say, 1992, however, it is reasonable to expect that at least the high-intensity photovoltaic reconversion concept could be reduced to practice and qualified by 2000, if not the more efficient (but much more technically sophisticated) wave energy exchanger and Brayton power system. Costs. Development and deployment costs of power generation systems, power transmission systems, and receiving/conditioning subsystems have been estimated in a number of the references cited herein, but little or no specific central-station power system cost data are available. Hence the cost estimates in this paper are based on data compiled for other types of power systems. Costs are estimated (in 1988 US dollars) for a nominal 400 kWe system, but are scalable from 100 kWe to 1 MWe by the following relationship: where C(p) = cost of system or subsystem of power ‘p' C(400) = cost of 400 kWe system or subsystem appearing in the tables Table I shows the estimated costs for development of the various elements of a space-based central power system, including the portions of the system that are based on the customers' spacecraft. Unit costs for the various system options of interest appear in Table III. Note that much of the development effort in some elements of the central-station system is being conducted elsewhere, so only that portion of the development effort which is unique to the central-station concept is recognized in the unit-cost estimates of Table III. Table II lists the estimated costs of deploying the space-based central power
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