Hawaiian Solar System

Concerns and best wishes to friends in the Houston - Clear Lake area.

Mauna Kea's summit seen from my plane. The Islands often seem like little worlds, each with its own unique character. The Hawaiian solar system is central in the vast Space of the Pacific. Polynesian navigators settled the Pacific island by island in a process that took centuries. Future humans could settle the Galaxy in the same way.

Friday the national Space Society and John C. Mankins (expert on Space Solar Power) announced the first long-distance transmission of solar energy. The project transmitted power between antennas on two Hawaiian islands 148 km apart. This is similiar to the distance from low Earth orbit, though far from the 36,000 km geosynchronous orbit. Earlier this year we heard Colonel "Coyote" Smith announce a project to transmit power from orbit. The dream of limitless clean energy from Space may finally be moving forward.

Orbital Hub hosts the new Carnival of Space!

Light Shines Through

From the National Space Society: The team of Stanley Von Medvey, Mike Snead, and NSS Governor Howard Bloom produced this video as a message for the next US President. In late June Colonel "Coyote" Smith announced the first solar power demo from Space. Legally it will be a student project, which gets around a lot of regulations! Japan is also working seriously on SSP. The International Space Station has given humans experience building big things in Space. The dream of clean power from Space may finally be moving forward.

Another interesting comment from Canada has been found following Lawrence Krauss' December article at Physicsworld.

"Riofrio claims that the speed of light varies with time. Very simply – perhaps too simply – I understand that her reasoning goes something like this. In Plank units we can write (assuming a locally flat universe) the rest energy of a mass m as:

E = GmM/R…(1)

"But R the distance to a mass M having the equivalent mass of the universe and R=ct, where t is the age of the universe (t=time since the big bang), E = mc^2 so that:
mc^2 = GmM/(ct). Thus tc^3 = GM implying that c is a function of time.

"If Riofrio’s interpretation is correct, light is slowing down and thus the measured supernova redshift does not necessarily indicate an accelerating expansion of the universe; hence no Dark Energy is needed! I would appreciate your comment on this line of reasoning."

UPDATE: In case anyone wonders who came up with "GM=tc^3" theory, another short paper from 2005 is available for sale at the British Library website.

Solar Power Satellites Closer

2007 was a year when Solar Power Satellites came closer to reality. Because of the lack of atmosphere, sunlight is about eight times more intense in orbit than on Earth's surface. SPS in geosynchronous orbit has been studied at least since Dr. Peter Glaser in 1968. This year it has been subject of a serious study by the US National Security Space Office, and a blog by Air Force Colonel "Coyote" Smith.

In September at a conference in Hyderabad, businessman Peter Reed proposed a receiving antenna on an uninhabited island in the Palau chain. At December's UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Reed's partners described the idea further. Their plan would place an experimental satellite at 300-mile altitude, avoiding the difficulty of reaching geosynchronous orbit.

If scientists in 1907 had lectured about the future of energy it would have been about coal and oil, yet someone had already written E = mc^2. 40 years later we had atomic reactors and an atomic bomb. First we must go beyond dead ends like "dark energy." The power of free thinking will lead to technological surprises.

If tiny Black Holes can be contained in an orbiting laboratory, their energy could be tapped. Even nuclear fusion converts only 0.7% of fuel into energy. A Black Hole converts matter into radiation with 2 orders of magnitude greater efficiency, approaching total conversion. The food that a human eats in a year could provide all the electricity needs of the United States! Any sort of mass could be used for fuel, even old AOL disks and issues of National Geographic.

Solar Power satellites have not been deployed because of the immense construction costs. An SPS constellation powering the US would require 30-40 satellites, each with kilometers of solar arrays. Note how much trouble it has been constructing one space station in low Earth orbit. Black Hole energy would require just one satellite without all those solar panels! The power of thought is far greater than anything humans have imagined.