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June 15, 2007
Satellite mini sun hoarders
Last month, a man at a bar introduced himself as "Coyote," and told me he was working on the Pentagon's plans to build a string of satellites that beamed solar rays down to Earth.
Solar_sat My first thought was to call my wife, the psychiatrist.
I resisted, however. And I was glad I did. Turned out the guy was an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, "Coyote" was his call sign, and he was very serious and (mostly) sane.
The government -- especially NASA -- has, for decades, toyed with the idea of collecting sunshine, and shooting it to power everything from lunar bases to the terrestrial grid. The space agency just backed a conference at MIT last month on this very subject. But two problems always arose: the collecting "rectennas" would have to be massive (10 square kilometers, in one estimate), and the costs could soar even higher.
Now, the Defense Department is going to see if it can come up with ways to overcome these not-inconsiderable obstacles. Pentagon "officials have decided to examine this concept now because the military is growing increasingly dependent on fossil fuels -- a dependency that is causing the United States to rely on unreliable sources of energy, pay higher prices and face operational insecurities linked to the logistical burden of delivering oil on the battlefield," Inside Defense says.
Posted by Sun at June 15, 2007 03:36 PM