Landis & Heiss Shimizu wants to cover Moon with solar panels

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The paper attached shows on page 17 how the 1.2MW ZIA Array can provide power to lunar activity, including mining Atkin's Bassin water ice. See also page 12 for COTS (commercial off the shelf components). Owning two 1MW, 50 cm DS4G Ion Thrusters ZIA can go to the moon at near 250k m/sec on xenon ion fuel. All parts are already space qualified so as excluded from ITAR already. A large lunar solar field is not needed for years ... 50 or more. The money ball is Atkin's Bassin at the lunar south pole and water ice. Nearby are titanium, ytrium and many other useful minerals in great abundance. A polar (molnaya type orbit) of the moon needs only four satellites to cover the entire lunar surface. Beam microwave or laser where you will. Power mining, transportation and life systems. Best is of course fuel for Mars or other projects related to beaming Space Based Solar Power to earth. Best papers to check areLunar Production of Solar Cells, Geoffrey A. Landis and Klaus Hiess "6 Pack Experiment". Much of Geoffrey's lunar fuel production ideas work with Klaus's experiment. These solve many problems rather than one. Get it all done instead of selected parts that do not even work so feasibly on there own. Please check JPL's work with lunar station. It is much closer the the mark using a ZIA Array. As wrote in page 17 poster a 1.2MW ZIA Array can beam microwave optimally to the lunar surface. Remember no water vapour and very short distance. Fiendly Greetings Kevin Welsom Space Power,"The Race is On!"
Mike, power generated from the moon has the additional disadvantage that the moon is moving with respect to the earths surface, so the power transmitted must be constantly refocused to different earth based receivers, plus only half the earth will be able to receive power at any one time. GEO synchronous power sats always stay focused on their dedicated receivers and coverage is global in extent.
On the other hand, it would be an incentive to Lunar resource development. Still, mining of lunar materials and shipment via mass drivers to L5 does the same thing(driver of lunar development) , so I still expect the GEO power sats to be more cost effective than this solar/lunar belt.
GAry 7

Good: Gets us to a non-carbon producing power source which would be more broadly and consistently available than Earth-bound solar or wind. And it gets us to use of lunar resources. Bad: We're building solar power plants in a place which is dark for half the time. Yes, I'm aware the proposal is for a continuous belt completely encircling the moon. But each square meter of solar array (and we have to pay for each square meter) is in darkness for half the time. So you might think we have to build 2x the array area for the same power delivered, butin fact, it's even worse than that, because this array is flat to the ground which means less power available whenever the sun is not at its zenith. The best solution is an orbitalsolar array built outside the shadow of any celestial body, and continuously oriented face-on to the sun. Yes, there are raw material lift-costs involved, but they're a one-time cost. The day/night and sun angle problems are operational disadvantages which last for the lifetime of the array. But I did hear from someone at SSI that even though the moon is ~10x the distance of a GEO SPS, microwave power beaming from that distance ought to not be a problem. I discuss some of these issues in an article I wrote on planetary chauvinism in general: Somewhere Else Entirely - http://writings. mike-combs. com/somewhere_ else.htm Additional discussion of lunar vs. GEO solar arrays here - http://writings. mike-combs. com/LSP_vs_ L-SPS.htm
Regards, Mike Combs

What is good and what is bad about this idea?
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