Legal perspectives regarding SPS Prevailing international regulations, especially the 1979 Moon Treaty, should be reviewed, in order to establish a clearly defined legal regime conducive to the implementation of power-from-space concepts. The overriding purpose must be to meet the needs of all nations and to preserve the Earth’s ecology. But to attract the requisite investment from both the public sector and from the world’s capital markets, it will be indispensable to provide reasonable assurances that there will be recognition of defined rights to approved leases of lunar land, perhaps on the precedent of the 99-year leases so commonplace in the Australian outback. Towards a Progressive International Strategy The world community is beginning to accept the need for a concerted effort to reduce the greenhouse effect. SPS and its subsystems can act as a unifying force between North and South. And a series of specific experiments are being considered: the Space Shuttle Experiment (U.S. Center for Space Power, Texas), European Multispectra Energy Transmission Experiment - EMETRE - (EUROSPACE), and Microwave Energy Transmission in Space (Japan). Moreover, two terrestrial demonstrations are now being considered: the provision of commercial power across a body of water to an isolated settlement in Alaska, and the supply of electrical energy across a valley on Reunion Island, off the coast of Africa. The latter two uses offer near-term benefits for the commercialization of wireless power transmission, especially in view of the heightened interest in an intertie between Siberia and Alaska across the Bering Strait. This summary underlines the appropriatenessof the suggestion, endorsed by Dr. Arismunandar at "SPS 91", that a committee of leading public utilities be established within the next two or three years, to seek realistic offers to supply power from space on terms competitive with existing and prospective conventional long-term supply contracts. The mere existence of such a utility committee will act as an incentive to the aerospace industry to come up with designs and plans leading to an offer, by reputable suppliers, to finance and build the systems that can provide, through wireless power transmission at first from the Earth and at a future time from space, a reliable power supply compatible with world environmental policy and the needs of the developing as well as developed world. I salute all who have labored to bring SPS development to this significant point of partial - but decisive - application. The transmission of power through space, undertaken prudently and progressively, will be a major contribution of the international scientific technical community to reintroducing both orderliness and solidly based expectations into a world social environment perplexed by a confusion of signals and seeming dearth of tangible accomplishments. Space power can be an environmental and an economic boon. For this reason, it is attracting increasing interest on the part of industry, governments and the world’s capital markets.
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