----- Original Message ----- From: "Kevin Street" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 2:49 AM Subject: SCOUTED: A New Reason To Go Back To The Moon
> I really like this one. Dr. David Criswell has come up with a good reason to > start up the space race again. If the Chinese claim the moon first, they > might become the new power barons of the 21st century. > > Dr. Criswell has a plan to plate the moon with solar cells and beam the > collected energy to earth. According to him, it would take about fifteen > billion dollars to get started, and another hundred and thirty five billion > dollars to break even, but after that all those sunbeams would be money in > the bank. Forget about oil and nuclear energy, the real future could be > solar powered! > > http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/lunarpower020422.html > > http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0204/29moonpower/ > > The next link is a download of Criswell's original article in "The > Industrial Physicist." But you need Adobe Acrobat to read it: > > http://www.aip.org/web2/aiphome/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-2/p12.pdf > > What do y'all think? Is there potential here? > Maybe in 500 years. If you notice, he snuck in some doozies. For example, capturing 1% of the total power hitting the moon is a tremendous amount. Present systems discuss 11% efficiency with pride. This means that the panels would have to cover 9% of the moons surface. Further, he talks about 100,000 square km of receivers on the earth. My guess is that he is underestimating costs by around a factor of 100. IMHO, he is doing wishful thinking engineering at best. I would place the likelihood of this prediction coming true in this century in the general range of the other Criswell's predictions coming true. Dan M.
