Energy Generation in Space

these 2 major problems can be solved by the following, use a lubrating working fluid. like refrigators use freon. recently mini-gas turbine have been built with air bearing. the good thing about the heat sink you can sent heat out to the cold of space which is about 4 K

GARY ANSORGE wrote: There are two MAJOR problems that attend the use of
turbines in hard vacuum and orbit.
1) They are machines with moving parts that must be
lubricated and replaced on a regular basis. The
failure rate of mechanical devices, regardless of
environment, is easily 10,000 times more likely than
the failure rate of solid state devices.
2)For a turbine to function, it must have a heat sink
somewhere, which necessitates the building of a LARGE
radiative surface to dump the residual heat of
operation. No such requirement for the solor cells
themselves, though the conversion to micro waves would
have some residual waste heat, I doubt it would be as
significant as that from a heat engine such as
turbines.

Gary 7