Volunteerism vs. Rewards for Space Settlement (Was R

respect to the sun, it doesn't receive 100% insolation the entire "day"...
most of the time, the sunlight is striking it at an angle and therefore is
less efficient. Hm... a little napkin calculation says that the efficiency of
a fixed lunar solar power station will be something like 30% of that of an
orbital SPS. Given that a SPS can track the sun with almost no moving parts,
whereas every collector element in an LPS will need some kind of motor to do
that, a movable lunar-surface solar power system would be a lot more
troublesome to operate. And in fact the Criswell design embraces the simplicity of fixed arrays flat to the surface, and simply eats the loss of efficiency. But as you correctly point out, an orbital array can have the best of both worlds.