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Rebel Blob posted:If you can keep the costs under $20 billion, it would still be less than what the US military spent annually on air conditioning during the Iraq & Afghanistan wars. That gives you about one year of Operating budget for NASA.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:19
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Rebel Blob posted:If you can keep the costs under $20 billion, it would still be less than what the US military spent annually on air conditioning during the Iraq & Afghanistan wars. This is all just to build one solar power satellite with a hypothetical 1GW capacity, and assumes that it would not run into massive cost overruns due to unforeseen difficulties (and also that there would be minimal transmission losses, and that it would be roughly as simple as throwing up a half metric kiloton of solar panels, plugging them into a big microwave transmitter, and aiming it at a rectenna on the ground). We also haven't discussed what happens if a huge solar flare hits the solar power satellites. I like the idea of a constellation of solar power satellites, and maybe eventually the engineering would get worked out, but even as a huge space nut I firmly believe we'd be better off spending that money on building fleets of nuclear reactors on the ground.
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May 5, 2015 19:56
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