Harvesting the Power of the Sun... from Space. Commentary by O. Glenn Smith, NYTimes, July 23, 2008. "There is... one potential future energy source that is environmentally friendly, has essentially unlimited potential and can be cost competitive with any renewable source: space solar power... A space solar power system would involve building large solar energy collectors in orbit around the Earth... [that] would collect far more energy than land-based units... Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near... places... [requiring] large amounts of power... [It] would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid... The two stumbling blocks... have been the expense of launching the collectors and the efficiency of their solar cells. Fortunately, the recent development of thinner, lighter and much higher efficiency solar cells promises to make sending them into space less expensive and return of energy much greater... Still, because [construction of the first] system will be very costly, a practical first step would be to conduct a test using the... space station... to house the astronauts and equipment... [helping to prove the concept]. Over the past 15 years, Americans have invested more than $100 billion, directly and indirectly, [in] the space station and supporting shuttle flights. With an energy crisis deepening, it's time to begin to develop a huge return on that investment." O. Glenn Smith is a former manager of science and applications experiments for the International Space Station at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
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