without destroying the Earth's environment!!]. This idea is still valuable and should be realized before the world economy collapses due to the crisis of oil which will become shortly unavailable by the middle of the next century. However the SPS is only a milestone of the space civilization program. Not only the demand of power on the Earth but that in space will have to be satisfied by Space Power Facilities. The SPS, which is planned to be placed on the Geostationary Orbit, is not always suitable for power transmission to fast-orbiting space vehicles. A different design for such need must be studied other than those having been made for the SPS. The present paper presents a feasibility study of a Power Supplying Satellite (PSS) and proposes some new concept of design of the PSS. Concept of the PSS The PSS is an orbiting power satellite with a capability of feeding a maximum power of 100 kW to orbiting customer satellites or stations. A schematic illustration of the PSS is given in Figure 1. It uses a 24 GHz microwave as an energy carrier in contrast to 2.45 GHz proposed for the SPS. The reason for this is that the higher frequency reduces the size of the transmitting antennas and hence the volume and weight of the PSS. Regardless of this merit of using higher frequency of 24 GHz, the SPS is supposed to use 2.45 GHz microwave to avoid a strong absorption and damping by the Earth's atmosphere. However, in case of the PSS, the power transmission is limited only in space and thus is free from the problem of power absorption by the water molecules. The advantages of the establishment of the PSS as one of the space infrastructures are as follows. (1)A High Power Availability in Space Power in space is normally generated by deployed paddles of solar-cell array. However, a high power supply by the huge solar battery system requires a more complicated control system and enhances the weight and volume of the necessary solar paddles. Therefore, the attitude control of the heavy solar paddles produces the perturbation of an artificial gravity in the spacecraft, which destroys the ideal zerogravity environment for some material science and processing in space. Such bulky and complicated onboard power systems of the spacecraft could well be avoided by replacing the solar cell paddles with a much lighter and simpler microwave rectenna system. The PSS is capable of feeding power up to 100 kW to such rectenna-equipped customer satellites or stations. (2) Establishment of Key Technology of Microwave Energy Transmission Though the frequency of the microwave used for the SPS is an order of magnitude lower than the PSS microwave, most of the technologies developed for the PSS are transferable to the future SPS. One of the new technological aspects of the PSS
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