[ExI] Power satellites

[John K Clark]

Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> All the numbers on their cost and efficiency are based on speculation.
"Keith Henson" <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>

> No, they are based on utterly sound physics. [...]
> Capital cost (which I didn't mention)

That is the problem. You keep going on and on about the energy required to
put a power satellite into geosynchronous orbit but I don't give a hoot in
hell about that; I'm interested in the dollars required to put it into
orbit. Not to mention the dollars required to build it.

 > isn't entirely speculation either.

Of course it is! By honest, if you were a prudent banker would you invest
hundreds of billions of dollars of your bank's money into Power Satellites
on the basis of these cost estimates? I wouldn't and I'd take my savings out
of any bank that did. And you thought investing in sub prime mortgages was
risky!

The number of large projects that have come in at or under budget could be
counted on the fingers of one hand, and this thing is larger than any of
them, and we have no experience to help us because nobody has ever done
anything even remotely like it before. I'd be very surprise if these cost
"estimates" (optimistic guesses would be a better word) were accurate within
1000%, probably not accurate to 10,000%.

  John K Clark