Volunteerism vs. Rewards for Space Settlement (Was R

points of view.
Glaser SPS as an example will require miles long
satellites and miles wide rectennas on Erath
for what?
after the space station experience you would endorse a
miles long space assembled satellite as reasonable
feasible? You're making a common error: Assuming that the ISS went phenomenally over budget because it was built in space. The real reason is because of the way NASA chose to build it, and because the government entered into the decision-making process and dictated on the basis of politics, rather than on technical issues or economics. If private industry builds a SPS, they most assuredly will not build it the way NASA built the ISS. to centralize power from a space source and then
distribute it in the traditional way
where is the improvement? The improvement is that we get off our reliance on polluting fossil fuels with a power source which is just as constant and accessible as the energy sources it's replacing. Ground based solar, wind, tides, or any of the others can't touch either SPS or present fossil fuel plants on the issues of constancy or accessibility. It only fails to be an improvement if you accept as an axiom that the goal is to stamp out centralized power, rather than the less-ideologically-driven goal of providing clean, broadly accessibleenergy. We could harness the wind, tides, solar and devise
many other alternatives to produce small amounts of
energy locally where it is needed.
That's the way of the future not my conviction but by
a consensus of foremost energy researchers worldwide Are we talking about energy researchers who are ivory tower academics, or ones who are charged with giving information to energy utilities that won't result in their bankruptcy? Because it would seem the latter are telling them to do what they're doing now.
It's always struck me that this entire controversy is driven not by technical issues, or economics, or science. It's driven by a philosophy and that philosophyseems to be, "Centralized power is evil and immoral, decentralized power is good and moral." These decision will be made not on the basis of idealism, but on economics. And right now the economics of decentralized power can't touch the efficiencies of scale of centralized power. We've been doing it the way we've been doing it for decades not because evil men are in charge, or because the ignorant masses have yet to be persuaded of thebountiful advantagesof decentralization. We've been doing it this way because it's what works economically.