Solar Power Satellites

Hello again,

Aside from the cost problem, which I'm sure will come
way down, either through new technologies or the
learning curve of building 100s of 1000s of GWs of
SSPSs, I have one more small idea to propose.

At GEO the SSPS would be located at a fixed point in
the sky all day and all night, all year long for many
dozens of years (with only minor station keeping).
This is nice for a satellite dish reciever. Now what
if instead of a circular 24 hour Geosynchronous orbit,
we put some of the SSPSs in 24 hr elliptical orbits
with a perigee of say 15,000 mile (since "a" needs to
be 22,300 miles for maintain the orbital period)
apogee would be up at 29,600 miles. The perigee could
be placed over say Arizona, where the rectennae farm
is located. Now perigee could be arranged to occur at
say 2PM, so that load leveling or power storage or
booster power stations, would not be needed.

I may have perigee a little to off, but I'm sure an
orbit could be found where the SSPS matches the power
requirements pretty closely.

Other alternatives include using the night time excess
power to make H2, or to relay the excess power to
another SSPS in GEO, but in a different time zone that
could use more power.

I like the eccentric orbit idea better because it is
far more efficient. My one big reservation would be
space debris? I understand there is a donut of space
debris all around GEO, so could this eccentric orbit
pass around this donut? Remember a typical SSPS will
be huge compared to anything currently in space, 1000s
of times the linear dimensions of the ISS. Being so
large will make debris mitigation a very important
issue.

Now when we do start putting up SSPSs, we will
seriously need to address this problem. Now suppose
some bright mind came up with an idea to remove all
the space debris. Problem is that it would also
remove any working satellites too, unless they were
able to maneuver into a new orbit. So I guess the
real problem would be to capture all the good working
satellites, space stations, space telescopes, whatever
(with the owners permission of coarse), get rid of the
space debris, then put them back where they were
without hurting them. This would also have to be done
for all the comm Sat's in GEO. The CIA, DoD, USAF, and
the Russians and Chinese might have some concerns, as
would the world's phone and data companies, but
something will need to be done. Any Ideas?

regards,

Dave Handwerk

--- "Combs, Mike" wrote: