| Author | Message | ||
     Aesquire |
Mesh dish miles in diameter, part of the frame holding the solar collectors. Would the energy needed to launch it into orbit be more or less than it could generate over its operational life? Ah! That's a great question! That depends upon which technology is used to make the power. Pounds per watt & lifetime. I Suspect steam turbines will be the final configuration, not photovoltaic. I'll let you know after they actually build one. But it will probably be Chinese. So... | ||
| Gregtonn |
Steam turbine??? That is wrong in so many ways. Firstly launching water at eight pounds per gallon would be very expensive. Then there is the weight of the magnets and winding of the generator again very expensive in terms of launch energy. Next how would you condense the steam back into water? Space is "cold" but conducting heat into a vacuum is difficult. Once you figure that out we can talk about the other issues. G | ||
| Aesquire |
Oh, NASA went though a phase where the top idea was using Mercury or Sodium in the loop. The idea was because of basic thermodynamics, the metals transfer heat better per pound than water. Iirc, they still had a water loop for steam, since Mercury vapor turbines are a bit... Experimental. Bit of a hazard to crews and the environment, in case of accident. Would you rather have a cargo full of water, or Mercury, having a catastrophic failure in launch? Every real plan for space gear has radiators to dump heat, unlike Hollywood. ( Avatar was a rare exception ) Those go on the shadow side of your solar collectors, ( mostly mirrors if using heat engines ) since the only way to lose heat in space is radiation. It's possible the most efficient way is Sterling engines and Nitrogen gas, or even photovoltaic, but my money is on heat engines, phase change, and the least toxic working fluid. The ultimate satellites may use photovoltaic panels as mirrors for the boilers, and magnetohydrodynamic generators as well as turbines or Sterling or quadruple expansion steam engines like on the Titanic. I freely admit half my fondness for orbital solar is the infrastructure to build it also is quite useful for exploiting the other natural resources. ( "Oil found on Venus! China claims Goddess of Love as traditional Chinese territories.." ) Mostly metals and volatiles. Solar panel factory on Luna. Heck, in 20 years we'll want the He3 for the Fusion power that's been 20 years away since I was born.  | ||
| Aesquire |
And remember, you have to get all this past the protests we are causing global warming on Mars. ( great idea, but the atmosphere is already CO2, so we'll crash comets in it & be careful not to hit the Olympus Mons Tesla factory. ) Or polluting the heavens! ( which is a legit concern ) And death rays! Absolutely something that will be cried about by the detractors of orbital death beams, I mean cheap clean power.... | ||
| Gregtonn |
Oh, NASA went though a phase where the top idea was using Mercury or Sodium in the loop. I am well aware. I was designing ORUs (Orbital Replacement Units) for Space Station at the time. The purpose of this technology know as "Heat Pipes" is primarily to cool electronics. The heat is transfered to exterior wall panels with coatings of a specific emissivity factor and then radiated out into space. It works well at smaller scales but not at the scale needed for your Steampunk dream. G | ||
| Aesquire |
https://xkcd.com/2662/ Oh, Steampunk Dream is perfect! Nicely phrased! Steam engines obviously work on our planet. It's a pretty simple cycle. Heat water to a boil and move something with the steam. Cool the steam to condense it back to liquid, then feed it back into the boiler. It doesn't matter if you move pistons or turbines except for efficiency. Sterling engines, the neat toy Crookes radiometer, all use heat to move something. ( with widely different efficiencies ) Really easy on a ship floating in cold water to dump the heat into. Hard where you need to use radiation to dump the heat into space. Conveniently, you are making a shadow to stick the radiator behind the collector. You might be right that photovoltaic cells are more "practical" than mirrors, boilers, turbines and radiators. I Suspect a cogeneration system is best. But fewer moving parts certainly means fewer things to break. See also Ruzic Lunar Cryostat and Girl Genius comic book.  | ||
| Aesquire |
https://nypost.com/2022/08/25/20-million-us-homes- cant-pay-utility-bills-as-shutoffs-loom/ Billions spent on expensive power that's only on part time is one reason for the price hikes. The big community solar system down the road from me, which might have literally been across the street, ( and might still be ) won't send a watt to my very eco-friendly heat pump on cold winter nights. Zip. The massive wind farms a bit south might help, if the electric heaters for the gear oil work ok, and it's blowing in the sweet spot that evening. ( But In winter it's either calm or blowing hard, at night ) Good luck for me there's a nuclear reactor not far away. Hope the grid holds up. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/suez-canal-halte d-again-after-oil-tanker-runs-aground Technically this may be a Russia vs. Ukraine thread item, since it's Russian fuel being resold by China to make big bucks and bypass sanctions. Ditto, it may belong in the Patriotic American thread that now covers general threats of war and acts of war along with general politics. I stuck it here because it shows the fragility of world commerce and the insane effects of Greenie Authoritarian regimes on their oppressed servants. Like Germany running out of wood stoves in summer as intelligent people try to prepare for the blackouts and cut off of heating fuel this winter, a combination of Green Government Policy and Putin's War. And you KNOW that wood stoves will in turn be banned and made into propaganda against the Despoilers of Gaia or whatever new, catchy insult is invented to use against people trying not to freeze to death in a Greenie Paradise. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/08/texas-applie s-to-build-molten-salt-nuclear-by-2025.html | ||
| Aesquire |
Speaking of fragility of modern civilization... https://abcnews.go.com/US/jackson-mississippi-wate r-shortage-crisis-cost-billions-dollars/story?id=8 9061056 Not going to comment on political aspects here. "Understaffed" may have many causes, from " politicians stole the money", to "Mandating everyone take an experimental drug to stay at work", to "sucks to work there because..." . As near as I can tell from Lamestream Media, ignorant "reporters" reading political CYA handouts, etc. ... They had a system that needed maintenance. And didn't get it. They had a flood, and golly gee, no one thought that might happen! ( again ) And there are no/few spare parts that survived locally either flooding or neglect. And the kicker, in a Covid Shutdown world with supply chain breakdowns and let's not forget the War in Europe and the imminent War in the Pacific, they can't get equipment overnight by Amazon Prime. Thus, a major city is without potable water unless brought in by truck. Diesel trucks. And Diesel trains, maybe. & fuel costs have Tripled. ( political rant not needed ) Every city has been an artificial island that can't exist without a constant stream of supplies from the countryside, since the buildings were mud and sticks and the city walls were thorn bushes to keep out the tigers. That's why a siege has been SOP in war since a rock tied to a stick was state of the art, through Today in Ukraine and Russia. You surround the village/city/economy and cut off outside supplies. In Modern Western Cities, shut down power, you've probably shut down water and lost all refrigerated food and medicine, in less than a week. I've repeatedly read 3 days to run out of food. So all it takes to cause a mass casualty event of Biblical proportions, is a Solar Storm, a Chinese hacker farm, or Really bad ESG policies. And I'm serious about Biblical. Today, one city may have a larger population than entire Empires in ancient times. So, a typical local power failure apocalypse shuts off heat, light, gas station pumps, and OMG! internet! And escape is high impossible. ( one nightmare of City Disaster planners is that the roads will be jammed with abandoned cars trying to escape. And worse, cars with dying families in the Snow Storm or Heat Wave.) And people who starts War/coups/revolution typically don't care about how many peasants die. In fact, a religious cult may Desire that many of the Other Side die, because Gaia Wills It! Or brutal practicality, not wanting to have to feed the conquered. Both apply to some of the antagonists in Today's world. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/08/the -wests-energy-disaster-worsens.php Siege. Not new. Nor is the fall of rich, complacent societies that insist "it couldn't happen here!" And ignore reality and live in self absorbed bubbles. | ||
| Gregtonn |
You might be right that photovoltaic cells are more "practical" than mirrors, boilers, turbines and radiators. I never said that. Not for your proposed purpose. I did however state, some time ago, the many reasons why your "energy ray" idea is impractical with current technology. G | ||
| Hootowl |
Almost no new idea is brought to fruition with current technology. It will take advances in material science, etc. | ||
| Hootowl |
Until someone decides to do it, it will not happen. | ||
| Aesquire |
It may turn out that the inefficiency of beamed power makes the costs impractical. Much as the Hydrogen Economy ideas, to use a compressed, leak prone, gas, to move power from a huge fixed electric power plant to a filling station to power a fuel cell electric car probably requires a mass build of nuclear power plants to be practical. Nicola Tesla might have been unrealistic when he browned out Colorado Springs beaming power from mountain to mountain. But the lights did light up, so it worked, for values of work. It's not yet proven technology, as far as cost per watt hour goes. And cost is a variable metric. In WW2, German engineers built coal to gasoline plants to fuel the War effort. Too little, and too late? Decades later, the Carter administration spent a bundle on developing that same proven chemistry process, in a world of artificial oil shortages. The pilot plant worked, and iirc, the system needed oil at $55 a barrel to be profitable. So, then OPEC, specifically Saudi Arabia, opened the taps they'd closed in protest to the 1973 War with Israel, and dropped the price to make the project impractical, and preserve their monopoly. You might have noticed, it would be profitable Now. And there's no one who CAN open the taps to foil it, except us. And the current Occupation of the White House would refuse to. Unfortunately they would also refuse to allow coal to gasoline plants to be built. Either would ruin their announced plans to Transition to an energy scarce, power monopoly, Liberal World Order. That's not speculation or paranoid conspiracy theory, it's the publicly announced Dogma. So it's possible that orbital solar is more expensive than, say, today's costs in the U.S. but cheaper than, Germany, today. I suspect that a multiple treadmill powered by illegal immigrants built on our southern border, or Canada's! Might be a short term practical solution too. ( joke? ) But it depends on circumstances of the moment, not a universal physics based solution. We'll see how the | ||
| Hootowl |
Re Hydrogen, the idea is to turn it to ammonia, then use the ammonia directly in a fuel cell. I have a friend with a major chemical/air services company who is neck deep in such a project. | ||
| Ducbsa |
When I worked for Kaiser Engineers, they were building a big coal gasification plant in Beulah, ND that ran for a few years. Ironic that ND is a major fracking gas field now, making such a thing ludicrous. At the same time, we had a German joint venture partner and the engineers from them in our office had just come from the very large Sasol coal-to-liquids plant https://www.sasol.com/media-centre/media-releases/ sasol-produces-15-billion-barrels-synthetic-fuel-c oal-fifty-years | ||
| Aesquire |
Almost no new idea is brought to fruition with current technology. It will take advances in material science, etc In general I agree, but if the issue is beamed power, as Gregtonn says, ( and he may be correct, please reference earlier remarks, please. ) then it's 19th century tech. Tesla tech, mind you, so stuff so advanced it was argued insane or genius for a century. And it's certainly going to be the Propaganda Point, for detractors. You can count on extreme agitprop about building death rays from space, especially if it defeats the Watermelon Cult plan to ration energy, movement, food, and housing. And the receiving antennas should be simple wires on insulators. Batteries may indeed benefit from 3d printing or meta material advances. Probably mostly from polymer layers with microstructure design, like the plastic used in time release capsules, with micro holes, or monomolecular layers of metals plated on micro level 3d polymers to get enormous surface area from minimum metal mass. Or more efficient per pound solar panels. And orbital solar has the same problem as on your roof. As you assemble it, in the sunlight, the potential charges go up, and wiring it all together is working on live wires. It raises costs and difficulty if you need to build a ring solar sail station to finish assemble giant solar collectors in permanent shadow. Then move them into their parking orbit. ( although building them simply facing away from the Sun may be the technique used. ) After all, if it was easy, everyone would do it! | ||
| Gregtonn |
Then move them into their parking orbit. Once again, you need to do some basic research. What is a "Parking Orbit" and how is it achieved? How many "Parking" spaces are available? Do you have a direct line of sight from this "Parking Orbit" to your ground receiver? G | ||
| Gregtonn |
Interesting that I should be watching the "Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon" documentary while typing about this subject. G | ||
| Aesquire |
Let's see, geosynchronous orbit, figure the circumference, divide by length of array, carry the 2.... That's the number of parking spaces, one good sized ring out there. Parking orbit is either geosynchronous or lower, there's arguments either way, and did you really want me to diagram a Hohmann Transfer? Wikipedia has a picture. Direct line of sight is needed, unless we add the inefficiency of relay satellites, so they probably won't install receivers much further north than Nova Scotia. At some angle there's both too thick an atmosphere path, & the ground array gets impractical. And sure, there even may be insurmountable issues besides politics & NIH to be practical. Gotta build a prototype. Or let the Chinese. Rather not have a "Blowups Happen" mega scale nuclear plant instead of solar panels. But I'm guessing the beamed power part is your prime objection? You might be right. I don't know, a lot of high power research got classified early in the SDI program, and I'm behind on my reading. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://xkcd.com/1053/ | ||
| Aesquire |
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/09/colorado-res idents-locked-out-of-their-thermostats-on-a-hot-da y/ My elderly Mother has this setup. Saved a few dollars! I do worry a little that her heat will be turned off this winter so the rich guy a few miles away can charge his 4 Teslas. ( she lives in a nice 'hood next to a Very Nice 'hood where home prices are quoted in millions ) If the power company choses to turn off her heat remotely, I'd need to load up my minivan with firewood and huddle with her around the fireplace. Again. ( after the last time she spent a fortune on a backup Generator. ) Although in the event her gas line is still pumping I would simply come over and bypass her thermostat. ( I keep an old manual one for a spare ... And None of my 3 are internet capable ) | ||
| Gregtonn |
But I'm guessing the beamed power part is your prime objection? Not at all. In fact I would like to see some experimentation if it could incorporated with a more useful geosync satellite. Geosync orbit spaces are limited and too precious to become part of the "Orbital Junkyard". Just FYI I was also part of the team that designed the first generation of GOES (Geosynchronous Orbit Environmental Satellite) satellites. I even have the coffee mug to prove it along with my Space Station Freedom mug. In case you don't know, that was the original name for the Space Station before the international partners joined the party. G | ||
| Aesquire |
Freedom? Cool! Missed or forgot that. You're crazy if you don't sell frame space on orbital collectors. You want a communication satellite? or a com Station module? Why not just rent space and buy power on a big, mostly open frame, station? No need for attitude jets or station keeping fuel. Solar panels? Nope, a cord they plug in to the main power supply for the planet. I Suspect that lower, inclined orbits, and timed passing of beam from ground station to station like a com Sat is the best choice. Multiple rings at different inclinations perhaps. Do want to avoid a Kessler Cascade, but that's going to take active cleaning of the orbitals. Apparently nobody wants anyone else taking their dead satellites away, proprietary information and national security. So that's a political problem that I cynically expect not to be solved until there's a world government, and it needs to be a smart responsible benevolent one. Good luck and not this year. Or next... Maybe in 2024, but if it's the WEF guys ruling I doubt Cleaning the orbitals will be a priority unless they build an exclusive resort/enclave space station to rule us from. So... ( forgot the Matt Damon movie name ) Cool projects! Bless Arthur C Clarke! Btw. I'd love to see Clarke's other space concept, the elevator, built. We're almost there on materials. The biggest challenge now is terrorism. | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11173211/ Life-Blackout-Britain-Experts-warn-energy-rationin g-winter.html Don't forget this source is famous for hype and alarmism! So I predict even worse! | ||
| Ebutch |
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| Aesquire |
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-re al-reason-they-blame-heat-deaths | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/the -green-revolution-is-impossible.php | ||
| Aesquire |
https://billwhittle.com/take-that-the-crippling-fa ilure-of-nasa-lunacy-and-how-to-fix-it-with-a-dart / |
