Dr. David Criswell at the University
of Houston at Clear
Lake thinks he has a better idea.
Why mess around with developing the technology to build fusion power plants,
when there is already a fusion power plant readily available? That fusion power
plant is called the Sun. The problem is how to tap into the energy it produces.
Space solar power is an old concept, first developed by
Peter Glasser at Arthur Little in the late 1960s. The idea is that huge solar
collectors, located in orbit around the Earth or on the lunar surface, would
collect the flood of energy flowing from the Sun and beam it to the Earth via
microwaves. On Earth, the microwaves would be converted to electricity and fed
into the power grid. Space based solar
energy is also seen as a means of powering space based industries and mining
operations.
In the early seventies, Dr. Gerard O’Neill of Princeton
suggested that the cost of building these “powersats” could be decreased by
using off world resources, from the Moon or from Earth approaching asteroids,
to build them. A more recent study, conducted by the National Research Council,
suggest that advances in solar cell efficiency, robotics, composite materials,
and digital control systems, as well as successful tests of wireless
transmission technologies make space solar power even more feasible.
Dr. Criswell believes that he has a more elegant idea.
Instead of building huge powersats in high Earth orbit at great expense, why
not build solar collectors on the lunar surface? Criswell envisioned robot
miners/factories traveling the lunar surface, mining it for silicon, and
creating solar cells and laying them out on the Moon for a fraction of the cost
of building space based powersats. Power would be beamed to Earth, via small,
relay stations in orbit.
The advantage over Helium 3 fusion is that the technology to
build this greatest of all power grids exists today. Criswell estimates that
the lunar surface captures 13 trillion terawatts of energy from the sun.
Capturing even one percent of this energy would provide prosperity for ten
billion people on the Earth.