

Japan building 1GW, $21bn solar power station in space - gjm11
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aJ529lsdk9HI

======
jacquesm
I seriously doubt this will ever be completed, but I'm pretty sure there will
be a lot of interesting technology developed and independently successful as
spin-offs of this project.

It is extremely ambitious, the article puts a possible date of operation
around 2030, which is about 5-7 years after ITER should come on line.

If you can make a 1GW (1000 MW) energy plant for about 1.5 billion
terristrially then to pay a 14 fold premium to put the same thing in space
(but renewable) as well as a whole bunch of very serious problems to overcome
(microwave radiation can be 'tight' beamed but that 'tight' is not as sharply
delineated as you'd want to for an application like this, there are serious
technical issues there) is a pretty brave thing to do.

I hope they will succeed with this, and that if they do not that we will gain
lots of useful knowledge.

~~~
tc
_If you can make a 1GW energy plant for about 1.5 billion terristrially then
to pay a 14 fold premium to put the same thing in space... is a pretty brave
thing to do._

If Richard Branson (to pick a random spacefaring billionaire) was fronting a
few billion dollars of his own money, that might be _brave_. Spending _other
people's_ money on boondoggles that are wildly unlikely to produce a positive
return is _not brave_.

~~~
jacquesm
If we'd follow that to its conclusion space shuttles wouldn't fly, the moon
visit would have never happened, the computer you are writing on would not be
connected to the internet, highways wouldn't exist and so on.

Plenty of infrastructure projects have started either as military or pure
research projects. Eventually we all benefit, even the countries where the
spending did not take place.

~~~
tc
_moon visit would have never happened_

This is my favorite example of this type of argument, because the moon visits
_should not_ have happened _when_ they did. A handful of government employees
spent a few days on the moon (at an enormous cost to other Americans) at least
40 years before there was any useful reason to get there. The evidence of this
is that we haven't gone back.

As for your other examples, your claim is as absurd as saying that if it
weren't for Edison we wouldn't have interior lighting or if it weren't for
Bell we wouldn't have telephones.

If in 1978, we had diverted 5% of GDP for 10 years to building something like
Google, we probably could have done it. But in 1988, it wouldn't have been
terribly useful, and by waiting 10 years we got Google anyway at a much lower
cost (and without coercively spending other people's money).

~~~
jacquesm
In 1978 google could not have been built simply because there was not yet a
need for a google to be built. The need for a google came in to being by the
combined existence of a large pool of accessible data called the world wide
web and the frustration with the search engines of the day, notably altavista
and inktomi.

Only when those conditions arose was a google possible, and in many ways
inevitable.

To compare the invention of electric light and the telephone with the moonshot
is to compare apples with oranges about as bad as I've ever seen it.

Compared to the amount of money wasted on various nonsense projects in their
time, SDI comes to mind but there are plenty of other examples the moon saga
was one of the high points in the history of humankind.

Sure the telephone and the electric light are great inventions, not a day goes
by without use of them for a large portion of the people on the planet.

But they did not inspire a generation of kids to follow the path of science
the way the moon episode did. We would most definitely be in a completely
different world technology wise had that not happened, it probably was one of
the best returns on investment in the history of man.

~~~
tc
As far as I can tell, your argument boils down to:

 _$125B+ (inflation adjusted) was worthwhile for inspiring people about what
was possible._

Listen, I don't disagree that there were some benefits of the space program.
But $125B+ is a lot of money for Velcro and inspiration. Let's keep a sense of
scale here: if you assume YC invests $25k per company, $125B is _5 million_
startups (and 15 million or so founders). [1]

Just remember that the resources have to come from somewhere, and that if
you're going to do it through government, you're spending other people's money
to get things that _you_ want. Someone else may not care about technology or
the moon, and may prefer to spend that money on social programs or farm
subsidies. Once you open the door that government takes the money and spends
it, how can you possibly determine whose value system is better?

Also, to tie this back around to where we started, whether you support the
idea of spending other people's money on projects that you like or not, my
initial point was simply that risking money that isn't yours is not _brave_ ,
whatever else you want to call it, because the politicians are not personally
at risk of any loss. Worthless boondoggles don't even seem to negatively
affect their reputation, and may even get them called _bold_.

[1] Note that I'm not proposing that the government should have invested in 5
million companies, but that an equivalent amount of resources was removed from
the economy -- resources that could have built other things that people want.

~~~
jacquesm
Space is really the next frontier, I see the moonshot as a taste of what is to
come, generations of people have seen what _can_ be done, now we need to find
a way to do it better and more cost effective. The rest is spin-offs, if you
think the only things that came out of the space program were velcro and some
inspiration then that is very sad indeed.

have a look here for some more perspective on this:

<http://www.spacecoalition.com/products.cfm>

~~~
tc
_very sad indeed_

Hyperbole is the pepper of interesting conversation, and I think the
randomness of mentioning Velcro made that intention pretty clear.

For what it's worth, I'm a proponent of space as well. I just think the Burt
Rutan / Richard Branson route is more likely to get people like you and I into
space in our lifetimes than a government program, which by its nature sucks
resources out of the economy that could be used by people like Rutan who have
an actual incentive to make it affordable. NASA has had over 50 years and
they've done little to nothing to bring the cost of space access down. The
Scaled Composites folks, as I understand it, were able to use very very little
of anything that came out of NASA (except Velcro [1]), as it was all geared
towards multi-billion dollar budgets.

Like you mentioned about Google being more or less inevitable, I believe Burt
Rutan and people like him are inevitable (in a free market) when the time is
right and the technical and capital foundation is in place.

(And I'll again point out that we're still missing the only point I really
wanted to make here, which is that risking other people's money, particularly
when they haven't freely given it to you, shouldn't be called _brave_ even if
you personally believe it's somehow worthwhile.)

[1] Velcro is actually a bad example anyway; it was invented long before the
space program.

~~~
jacquesm
Good points, and regarding velcro, nature had it long before we did :)

And I agree with you on the bravery when just looking at th e money side of
it.

I wasn't really thinking as much about the money alone though your cut & paste
made it look like that as on the combination of expense and technical
obstacles to overcome.

Especially the latter will have lots of challenges, a project like this will
require a fairly advanced degree of space assembly and/or manufacture.

~~~
teeja
I can't believe you left out Tang.

------
ggrot
For a moment, ignore the commercial viability of this. Of course, in a free
global market, this isn't viable. Think about this strategically.

Japan has roughly 40M barrels of proven oil reserved. They consume 5M barrels
of oil a DAY. Without imports, assuming they could even get at all of their
oil, they would run out in 8 days. They are the world's 3rd largest consumer
of oil, and the world's second largest importer.

Half of their energy consumption is oil, another 15% natural gas (which comes
from extracting oil). Coal and Nuclear make up the majority of the rest.
Japan's mining is well beyond peak-coal. The _vast_ majority of their oil
comes from the middle east. Japan is an island, they are entirely dependent on
energy imports. This means that if their trade routes were cut off they'd be
hosed. Since the US dominates the world's oceans, that means that Japan has to
keep the US happy. Sucks strategically and politically.

Space based power is useful strategically. You can beam it to an island. It is
very difficult to cut off, regardless of the size of your foes' navy. You can
beam it directly to a fleet in the middle of the pacific. You could use it as
a weapon.

~~~
Semiapies
"Since the US dominates the world's oceans, that means that Japan has to keep
the US happy. Sucks strategically and politically."

It just means Japan can't get saber-rattly in the US's direction. There isn't
a huge impetus for them to do so, so...

~~~
andreyf
Considering where our cars and gadgets come from, I don't think Japan or the
US would benefit much from cutting off oil shipments to Japan ;)

~~~
ggrot
Many of those japanese cars are physically built in the US.

------
pingswept
Residential solar has a total installed cost around $8/W in the US right now.
Prices are probably slightly higher in Japan, maybe $10/W. With the silicon
supply problems of the last two years easing and a glut of modules in the last
9 months, prices are dropping faster now than at any time since 2005.

This is proposing a $21/W solution-- not a good idea. By the time it's built,
terrestrial solar will likely be 5-10 times cheaper, i.e. around $2-4/W.

~~~
dagw
You're assuming that this is only about supplying electricity at as low a
price as possible, which is a very narrow way to look at it. Consider instead
the larger picture. This sort of project is going to require a lot of R&D
which will both create jobs and lead to additional discoveries. The experience
gained can used in future related projects and sold to other countries. If the
project is a success then Japan will be the world leader in this sort of
technology. So don't just look at the $/W look at the net effect of this
investment on Japan's GDP over the next 20 years. From that point of view this
is probably a lot better investment than simply buying third party solar
panels.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Providing jobs _as such_ isn't a benefit to society. Otherwise, we'd all be
better off if we stopped using computers and formed up an army of slide rule
calculators.

The benefit from additional discoveries is already factored into the cost of
conventional solar. The companies building it have business plans that
recognize the development work they're doing, and charge prices accordingly.
And that's part of why it's cheap (relative to this proposal) and getting
cheaper.

~~~
dagw
_Providing jobs as such isn't a benefit to society_

Indeed, but the type of jobs generated by these types of projects are hardly
pointless ditch digging.

 _The benefit from additional discoveries is already factored into the cost of
conventional solar._

But only if the companies are Japanese. Otherwise Japan is not only helping
grow another countries GDP they're also helping them gain a further technology
lead. Doing everything 'in house' is probably more inefficient in the short
term, but might offer more long term benefits.

~~~
CWuestefeld
You seem to believe that the world economy is a zero-sum game. This is
emphatically false.

In this case, certainly the whole world would benefit even if a better solar
energy technology (conventional or outer space) were invented. The polio
vaccine helped the whole world; the reason that most of the revenue from it
came to the USA is that the rest of the world thought that having those shots
was more important than giving up their money.

And in economic terms, if tilting the economies of scale makes Japan a better
manufacturer of solar power tech, then the law of comparative advantage allows
other countries to benefit from supplying the goods that Japan will shift away
from as it moves resources to the solar tech.

------
btn
Was SimCity 2000 never translated into Japanese or something?

~~~
andreyf
Refernce to:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_2000#Scenarios_Vol._I:_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_2000#Scenarios_Vol._I:_Great_Disasters)

 _Silicon Valley: The high-tech society of the 2010 Silicon valley is hit hard
when its futuristic power source goes awry - microwave beams transferring
solar energy from an orbital satellite miss their intended receiver and
instead incinerate many businesses and people in the area._

------
ankeshk
This seems like a cool hi-tech venture. But the opportunity cost is way too
high.

For Japan, I think $21 billion investment in windmills in the ocean would lead
to more energy than creating a solar power station in space that sends back
electricity in the form of microwaves.

~~~
drats
Yes, but the windmills don't get you a 1GW energy weapon in space.

~~~
jacquesm
I'm assuming it is geosynchronous, you could only blast down to your own
country with it, any place else the angle to the atmosphere would be too
oblique to have any chance of reaching the ground.

It's an ideal country sized energy suicide weapon though.

Sort of a satellite born seppuku.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Well, you could also target your immediate neighbors. I bet most of the
richest and most industrialized eastern china would be right inside the viable
target area.

Also, think anti-ballistic missile defences -- no need for adaptive optics and
all that jazz when you can swat the missiles with lasers from their most
vulnerable position, right at the top of their trajectory.

~~~
jacquesm
One gigawatt is a tremendous amount of energy, but what microwave radiation
would do against an incoming ICBM is an open question. It's all about how
concentrated the beam will be and how fast you can direct it (ICBMs move
pretty fast and even at the top of their trajectory they are hard to pinpoint
because they do not exactly carry homing beacons).

Also, in all of the following keep in mind that we're talking about a re-entry
vehicle here which has extensive heat shielding anyway just to survive its
inevitable contact with the atmosphere.

It is more about energy density if this could be used as a weapon against an
ICBM or not, the receiver of the energy would presumably be a fairly large
patch of ground with a 'safe zone' around it in case of minor misalignment.

If you'd want your gigawatt to be concentrated in an area of 100x100 m under
'normal 'conditions you will not be able to quickly reconfigure to something
on the order of a hotspot as produced by a battle laser (this is _not_ a
laser!).

In normal operating conditions and assuming they can beam as tight as
1,000,000,000 Watts per 100x100m patch (which remains to be seen) you'd have
about 100KW / square meter, or about 10 W / square centimeter assuming
absolutely perfect (so lossless) transmission and 0 reflection.

Microwave absorption of the ICBM would then be the deciding factor if anything
happened to it or not, 10W / square centimeter seems a lot but it really
isn't, the question is how long the beam could be focused on the incoming ICBM
and how steady it could be held.

With lasers this appears to be possible, see this
[http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817](http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817)
but it was an aircraft at subsonic speeds vs a stationary ground target.

Shooting stuff down that moves very fast is not that easy, especially not if
your normal mode of operation is for energy transmission instead of
destruction.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Who was talking about shooting icbm's with microwaves? If you have a gigawatt
power generation platform in space, putting a couple of free-electron lasers
up there is hardly more than an afterthought. With a big enough laser, you can
stop having to worry about the heat shielding/reflectivity of the target, and
just trust that the second you hit something, it's surface is going to ionize
(= blow up). And as for hitting the targets up there, at the apex of their
trajectory ICBM's are 1) ballistic 2) slow compared to the other parts of
their flight. While hitting is still not exactly easy, other than hitting them
on the launch pads it's the easiest way to do the (hard) task.

~~~
ars
Why would it blow up? Nuclear bombs don't blow up when they get hot.

All that would happen is you would make a hole in it, but since it's on a
ballistic it would keep on going. (Ballistic means gravity is controlling it,
it's not powered.)

Even if you blew it up, at best you would spread nuclear material all over the
target area.

You need to hit these things during the boost phase, where a: you can stop it
from going ballistic and make it fall back into the launching country, and b:
you have something volatile to blow up (the fuel).

Also, it's easier. When it's at the apex it's moving horizontally very
quickly, and it's at it's closest to you. Which is the most difficulty when it
comes to aiming (since the angle of the shot is moving the fastest at that
point).

When it's moving vertically toward you is much easier to aim, since you barely
have to move the laser.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
I'm not saying the bomb will go nuclear when heated.

A high-powered laser won't just heat stuff up. If you can pump enough energy
to small enough surface area in small enough time, the outer layer of the
object being hit will be ionized. The laser will pump even more energy to this
cloud of electrons and ions. For all intents and purposes, this cloud can be
called an explosion.

Yes, I'm saying that when you hit a piece of garden-variety steel with a
strong-enough laser, it will blow up and disintegrate into small pieces.

And even if the missile is moving very fast horizontally at the apex _the
movement is entirely predictable, even minutes into the future._ All you need
is two rangings, then you can just point the laser at where the missile is
going to pass trough.

~~~
ars
My point about the apex is not prediction, but dwell time. You have to move
the laser very fast, and very accurately to match the motion of the missile.

And anyway, you can predict the motion as soon as the motor is finished, you
don't have to wait for the apex.

It's very difficult to aim the laser that well - even if you know exactly
where it's going to be. Even if you were perfect in location and control,
random atmospheric effects would mess it up.

The only practical way is via feedback loop, and when the angle is changing so
fast it's very very hard to do.

You want a place where the angle doesn't change much, and all you need to do
is adjust it based on feedback.

As far as destroying the missile - you need to pump enough energy into it to
vaporise the entire thing. Normally an explosion will fracture the object near
it. That cloud won't. You are moving very fast in air (even at the apex), and
any ions will be blown away, plus they are only moving away from the missile,
and not toward it, so they will not damage it. (They are moving away because
they came from it, when they vaporized they bounced off the surface and away
from the missile.)

You have to vaporise the entire thing layer by layer. And the energy in the
cloud will not help you - since it's moving away from the missile it won't
heat it, in fact it will insulate it (until it's blown away by the air)
because all the energy of the laser will heat the cloud, and do nothing to the
missile.

It's too easy to defend against a laser anyway. A small amount of water in the
nose, released when it detects a laser will produce a cloud of water that will
absorb all the laser's energy.

~~~
jacquesm
> random atmospheric effects would mess it up.

Not in a space based laser aiming at an ICBM at it's apex, it would be about
500 to 700 km depending on the trajectory, and doing about 14,000 km / h.

------
barredo
Nobody would say nothing about the Dyson Sphere?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere>

It's like the first step. Right?

------
rhysho
For powering up an army of Evangelions in defense of Tokyo-3 against the
attack of Angels? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelion_(mecha)>

------
tlrobinson
Wouldn't any gained efficiency be wiped out by having to transmit the power
via microwaves? And couldn't you build a vastly larger solar panel array on
earth for the same price?

What happens when a plane flies underneath the beam?

~~~
jacquesm
The plane would be in the beam path for only a short time: 900 Km/hour is 250
meters / second, if the beam were to be sent down very tightly the effect
would be stronger but the duration would be correspondingly shorter.

A 100 meter diameter beam would take 0.4 seconds to cross, the energy density
would be 12.75 W / square centimeter.

The kind of effect would also be quite dependant on the wavelength used,
longer wavelengths would be harder to 'tight beam' than shorter ones.

A typical microwave oven 'beams' 1KW or so across an area about 15 cm radius,
that's roughly 1.3 W / square centimeter.

How tight the beam is really is the crucial question to answer here, 35000 km
up the beam will be very tight right under the point of emission, near the
surface of the planet (an airliner flying 10 Km up) it would be much more
dispersed.

------
miracle
Bad luck for the guy having his house under the solar panels. He will have no
sunlight even if there are no clouds on the sky ;)

~~~
mseebach
4 sq km 36.000 km out in space is a very very tiny shadow.

~~~
metaguri
or for all intents and purposes none at all. i could be wrong but given the
relative sizes of the sun, the solar array, and the distances involved, the
amount of sunlight that is blocked by the array from any observer's point of
view on earth would be negligible.

for example planes flying at 35k feet don't cast visible shadows.

~~~
jules
I don't think the distance really matters in the amount of blocked sunlight.
The sun is very far away compared to the satellite. The atmosphere scatters
the light so it would cast a more diffuse shadow than if it was closer to
earth.

------
Tarks
Am I the only one that immediately thought "This is what happens when a
nation's raised watching gundam ^_^ " when I read this?

------
natch
"beaming the electricity from space through the ionosphere"

What could possibly go wrong?

------
teeja
I hope they remember what (almost) happened to the Ringworld.

------
electronslave
I'd like to chip in my own "this is silly" perspective. You see, Japan has a
history with futuristic flops:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer>

