Lunar Solar Power Stations vs. The O'Neill Proposal

The problem with Criswell's idea isn't that it doesn't work; it's the
startup costs to get it to work.

Startup costs for Earth launched SPS is about $3-10 billion, and from
what I've seen payback is about 3 years or so.

Startup costs for lunar power is about $100+ billion.

If you were a politician would you sign off on a highly risky lunar
power system for $100 billion? I wouldn't. You might be about to swing
$3-10 billion.

$3-10 billion might be fundable, particularly if it secured supplies
of energy and reduced dependence on politically unstable regions.

Indeed, $3-10 billion might be raisable from private sources.

On 02/06/06, Combs, Mike wrote:
> For those of you who may have read my article about planetary chauvinism
> "Somewhere Else Entirely" at
> http://members.aol.com/howiecombs/somewhere_else.htm, I just wanted to
> let you know that I did have to back away from one of my assertions, and
> I wrote a bit more to clarify some issues. Dr. David Criswell noted
> some critical things I'd said about his LSP proposal, and we resumed our
> previous debate on the merits of LSP vs. lunar-resources-derived SPS in
> GEO. In my article I had asserted Criswell had not made sufficient
> comparisons between his proposal and the O'Neill one. After some
> discussion, I followed that paragraph with a parenthetical "(But I may
> now need to retract at least this point. )" which was
> a hyperlink to the following:
>
> Lunar Solar Power Stations vs. The O'Neill Proposal
>
> In May of 2006, Dr. David Criswell became aware of this article
> and contacted me to resume our debate about the relative merits of Lunar
> Solar Power (LSP) stations vs. lunar-resources-derived GEO SPS.
> Dr. Criswell said that all of his comparisons were toward the
> GD-Convair study, which included SPS where 90% of the construction
> materials were lunar-derived (SSI later calculated this number could be
> boosted to 99% for SPS designs optimized for use of lunar materials).
> I'm sure my previous comment in this article would have been based on me
> going through the Criswell papers looking specifically for references to
> O'Neill or to manufacturing in HEO. Dr. Criswell went on to say he had
> calculated LSP could provide power at a cost 1/50 that of power
> delivered from SPS built as O'Neill had recommended.
> Interestingly, Criswell said the GD-Convair study judged the
> lunar-material-derived SPS option less risky than the Earth-launched one
> for several issues, among them the environmental damage which would
> doubtless be done to the upper atmosphere of Earth by all of those
> thousands of mega-rockets thundering upward.
> One very good point Dr. Criswell raised was that GEO SPS might
> suffer from an orbital debris problem absent from the lunar surface. My
> take on this is that hopefully a significant manned operational
> capability in GEO might mean a better ability to manage and combat the
> debris problem. But Criswell relates the severity of this hazard with
> the surface area of the satellites in GEO. To say that SPS would lead to
> a significant increase in this area is putting it mildly, to say the
> least.
> He says that my emphasis on the day/night cycle of the moon and
> my assumption of a 2-to-1 advantage for GEO is wrong, making the point
> that GEO SPS, being a baseload (flat) source of power, must be similarly
> oversized around 2x in order to meet peak power demands. But I'm not
> convinced this is the best argument, since an oversized GEO SPS can
> obviously be selling excess power to secondary markets during off-peak
> hours.
> Despite the fact Dr. Criswell brought up much new and helpful
> information and helped me appreciate certain aspects of LSP a bit
> better, I still can't entirely rid myself of the conviction a planetary
> bias may be involved here. When he says, "The Moon exists. You do not
> have to build it, and you can use its materials," I think we're veering
> from the point. The O'Neill proposal agrees the moon is the right source
> for the materials, and I don't think our choice is between building an
> orbital ore refinery or not, it's between building a refinery in orbit
> or on the lunar surface. Ditto manufacturing facilities.
> It can't be denied lunar materials take a much longer path in
> the O'Neill scenario vs. LSP, and Criswell rightly points out that the
> more steps, the greater the expense. But lunar lift costs are a one-time
> expense. The 50% duty cycle resulting from the moon's day/night cycle is
> an operational disadvantage which lasts the lifetime of the power plant.
>
> On the other hand, there are some at SSI who tell me there are
> too many unknowns to conclude that Criswell isn't right, and that power
> beaming from the moon should not present major problems.
> I'll say that if Dr. David Criswell has come up with an
> alternative to SPS which can undersell it by a factor of 50, then he's
> done more to advance us toward space settlement in recent decades than
> anyone. There could be no doubt his LSP scenario would lead to the High
> Frontier. For example, any universe in which many thousands of square
> kilometers of the moon's surface is being coated in photovoltaic arrays,
> the manufacture of a lunar mass driver (the most massive part of which
> would be its PV array) would certainly be done on the lunar surface from
> local materials instead of it being sent up as a kit from Earth. Thus,
> in a future Criswell presents us, an important component of the O'Neill
> vision becomes trivially easy to manufacture.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mike Combs
>

--
-Ian Woollard

"Gravity is just a theory. We shouldn't be teaching it to children as
if were fact."
"The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this
Sunday. They need to calibrate their system."