[ExI] Fwd: Help Us Reimagine Energy for the DoD!

[Keith Henson]

 On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 5:50 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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> Okay, so - I get it.  You think it is impossible that the military would ever want something less than 100% technically efficient,

Not at all.  The best power satellite designs lose 50% of the power
transmitting it to the ground (10 GW in space, 5 GW on the rectenna
output-.

> and that there is no possible way they could even conceive of bootstrapping the tech with something that costs mere millions of dollars and merely powers a few bases.

That seems impossible. But I am more than willing to listen to any
ideas that would get the cost down.

> You are dead wrong, but I get that that's what you believe.

It's based on ten years of studying engineering details.  Made a lot
of progress on such things as low mass heat sinks (down to a little
over a kg/kW at 20 deg C) and some on self-powered transport to GEO
and a lot of basic economics.  However, scaling them down runs up
against basic diffraction physics that is more than 200 years old.

Perhaps I should not be so pessimistic.  "deffraction limit microwave"
in Google News turns up a mess of papers.  Going through a sample of
them I find no obvious application to power satellites but there might
be.

Keith