Lifeboat Foundation EnergyPreserver
By the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board. This is an ongoing program so you may submit suggestions to [email protected].
Overview
If our civilization ran out of energy, it would grind to a halt, so Lifeboat Foundation is looking for solutions.
Imagine providing the Earth or a moon base with harnessed solar power, or ravelling in space without returning to Earth for fuel. That’s the idea behind space-based solar power generators such as this SunTower. Courtesy, NASA.
Solar Power from Space
“We need new sources of electrical power”, said John Mankins, Manager of Advanced Concepts Studies at NASA Headquarters Office of Space Flight, “and we have been studying a variety of space solar power concepts. Tremendous advances have been made in many relevant technologies in the last fifteen years.”NASA’s involvement in space solar power, or SSP for short, began after the oil embargo of the mid-1970’s when the space agency (working under the leadership of the US Department of Energy) began to study alternative energy sources that might result in less dependence on foreign oil.
Proposed space solar power systems utilize well-known physical principles — namely, the conversion of sunlight to electricity by means of photovoltaic cells. Giant structures consisting of row after row of photovoltaic (PV) arrays could be placed either in a geostationary Earth orbit or on the Moon. A complete system would collect solar energy in space, convert it to microwaves, and transmit the microwave radiation to Earth where it would be captured by a ground antenna and transformed to usable electricity.