Awe believers?

240,000 miles away can compete with the beam spread
from a location 24,000 miles away. Are we so good
these days we would lose an insignificant amount of
energy from that lunar transmission site? It's a solvable problem, but it requires a much bigger transmitting antenna. For phased array power-beaming systems, as the area of the transmitting antenna grows, the beam becomes more parallel. Between the beam spread problem, and the more complicated pointing issues, I'd consider the latter to be the more significant disadvantage for power beaming from aLPS. The idea of working in free fall may be
so counter intuitive to most people that they
instinctively grab on to the idea of having land to
stand upon. About a month ago I was having a debate with someone on sci.space.policy who was arguing forcefully that in the near-term we had to talk about industrialization of moon rather than HEO (or even an asteroid) because all of our current industrial processes assume presence of gravity, and it would be too expensive to come up with alternative methods of doing everything. I pointed out that a portion of an orbital facility could be set rotating. After over a week of discussion of rotating systems, he was right back to his original assertion: Industry had to start on the moon because there's no gravity in orbit.