15 Responses

1. Re-usable launchers are cost prohibitive. The shuttle well demonstrated this. When the vehicle is required to be reusable the engineering constraints cause maintenance and safety to be sacrificed. Any talk of these old buzzwords should be shunned. Even if it is somebody famous talking about it.

   ha that was a great pun!@Palmstream

2. you know how lucky we are to even have a sun that is a giant freaking planet on freaking fire in the middle of the universe that is probably older than our earth. Do you know how lucky we are even to exist near this ball that has been burning for this long?

   I don’t think anyone see’s this. Your all concerned about trivial media concerns. I’m done here.

3. And that glider craft could be ” towed ” to a very high altitude perhaps by two or three , otherwize empty (except for extra fuel), C-5 Galaxy cargo planes utilizing a common hawser to tow the spaceplane behind at a safe distance relative to the initiation of transmission of satellite based microwaves to the port and starboard sides of ” faired in ” reception dishes in the port and starboard sides of the space plane . Two transmission satellites same exact longitude different lattitudes.

4. werner von braun discussed this concept in a television interview in the mid? sixties . It has occured to me that this concept might be applied directly to launching spacecraft in that the powdered aluminum propellent , which is the main constituent of solid rocket boosters could be ‘maximized” via a continuous stream of electrical power from above therby allowing SRB’s underslung a gliding type re-entry vehichle to achieve a much higher apogee ?

5. Cheaper rockets are already in development at Nasa – including going back to something like the more efficient rocket design of the sixties.

6. ooh, multidimensional graphs.

   Anyway, the idea would only be practical if launch costs were massively reduced first.

   As well as all the ideas that are already floating around (space elevator, spaceplane, railgun, etc.) i’ve got my own (patent pending) idea –
   have a solar-powered balloon collect water vapour from the atmosphere and electrolyse it into hydrogen+oxygen rocket fuel, then climb to a high altitude and launch a reusable rocket.

7. PG&E is looking to buy 200MW of space based solar power from Solaren Corp. in Manhattan Beach, CA starting in 2016. The rectenna will be in Fresno. Solaren says they will get their powersat to geo using an existing lifter. They hope to get approvals from CA by this fall.

8. I totally agree with you. Humans are so dependant on energy that we have to do this.

9. solar sterling is ready right now, it’s affordable and way more efficient than PV-

   it can be manufactured with current technology, it’s cheap and produces AC power…

10. Good points. I just hope with the cost of oil going down, we don’t do what we did in the past and stop developing other forms or energy.

11. Currently it is not effiecent and too costly! there cheaper ways for free energy. Wind, Geothermal…

12. We should throw a lot of money at this, like the arms race of the 60s. The sun is always shinning in space.

13. Obama’s National Space Council should review SSP in short order, so that an announcement can be made by spring 2009. An announcement by the American President is the mother duck behind which all others align. More tests? Sure. Do all the tests and demos you want. I suggest that we need to fire up a helluva lot more than a light bulb from space to demo SSP’s onions.

14. Actually, Peter Glaser proposed it in 1968. O’Neill saw it as the major industrial reason to settle high orbit, and, therefore, a reason to build his 1-g rotating habitats. SSP has been favorably reviewed by NASA, DOE, and now DOD, and it is rapidly approaching a business case. A little nugget: Buzz Aldrin is talking with T. Boone Pickens about SSP, and he is working on large reusable launchers to start the job.

15. It is about time. This idea has been kicking around since Gerard K O’Neill proposed it back in 1970.