[Graeme]

How to harvest solar power? Beam it down from space!

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Y')et Mehta has another solution for India's chronic electricity shortage, one that does not involve power plants on the ground but instead massive sun-gathering satellites in geosynchronous orbits 22,000 miles in the sky.

The satellites would electromagnetically beam gigawatts of solar energy back to ground-based receivers, where it would then be converted to electricity and transferred to power grids. And because in high Earth orbit, satellites are unaffected by the earth's shadow virtually 365 days a year, the floating power plants could provide round-the-clock clean, renewable electricity.

"This will be kind of a leap frog action instead of just crawling," said Mehta, who is the director of India operations for Space Island Group, a California-based company working to develop solar satellites. "It is a win-win situation."


Russia, China, the European Union and India, according to the Pentagon report, are interested in the concept. And Japan, which has been pouring millions of dollars into space power studies for decades, is working toward testing a small-scale demonstration in the near future.

But a number of obstacles still remain before solar satellites actually get off the ground, said Jeff Keuter, president of the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington-based research organization. "Like any activity in space, there are enormous engineering challenges," he said.

One major barrier is a lack of cheap and reliable access to space, a necessity for launching hundreds of components to build what will be miles-long platforms. Developing robotic technology to piece the structures together high above Earth will also be a challenge. Then there is the issue of finding someone to foot what will be at least a billion-dollar bill.

[Denny]

This technology lost me when it mentioned the need for a massive array of klystron tubes and the 10 km diamter earth receiving antenna.

It still seems very Buck Rogers to me.

And, as other have noted, why is the military even involved, it should all be NASA, if there is some possible viability there. If this thing was tainted by the military, its scary, at worst. Or a boondoggle at least. Remember the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers? Yes, those guys responsible for the levees around New Orleans.

[Cashmere]

LINKY
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hile women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, 46 percent of those discharged under the policy last year were women. And while 20 percent of Air Force personnel are women, 49 percent of its discharges under the policy last year were women. . . . Pentagon officials could not explain why the numbers for women increased last year.

[shakespear1]

Perhaps they see what is going on and saying "No" to it this way.

[mattduke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')The Pentagon's inspector general said yesterday that the Defense Department's public affairs office may have "inappropriately" merged public affairs and propaganda operations in 2007 and 2008 when it contracted out $1 million in work for a strategic communications plan for use by the military in collaboration with the State Department.

[mattduke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')ollywood action director Michael Bay enlisted the U.S. military to provide realistic props for his 2007 giant-robot epic Transformers. After the Pentagon helped rewrite the script, Bay got access to helicopters, warships and -- for just $25,000 an hour -- F-22 stealth fighters.

[wisconsin_cur]

washingtonpost.com

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')or the Defense Department, the largest consumer of energy in the United States, addiction to fuel has greater costs than the roughly $18 billion the agency spent on it last year.

By some estimates, about half of the U.S. military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are related to attacks with improvised explosive devices on convoys, many of which are carrying fuel. As of March 20, 3,426 service members had been killed by hostile fire in Iraq, 1,823 of them victims of IEDs.

"Every time you bring a gallon of fuel forward, you have to send a convoy," said Alan R. Shaffer, director of defense research and engineering at the Pentagon. "That puts people's lives at risk."

Spurred by this grim reality, the Pentagon, which traditionally has not made saving energy much of a priority, has launched initiatives to find alternative fuel sources. The goals include saving money, preserving dwindling natural resources and lessening U.S. dependence on foreign sources.

[Plantagenet]

The military has been a pioneer in using alternative fuels since the 1950s. For instance, they were the first to use nukes to power submarines and other ships.

[davep]

Those Swedish subs using Stirling engines could feasibly run on almost any energy source.

[DrBang]

If this tin foil stuff was not true, then how is it that the US military is able to ask and get large sums of money at this time of economic crisis? The US govt can't even fund its emergency services and core services.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagons-black-budget-grows-to-more-than-50-billion/

Pentagon’s Black Budget Grows to More Than $50 Billion (Updated)
* By Noah Shachtman Email Author. May 7, 2009 |
* Categories: Paper Pushers, Beltway Bandits, Politicians, Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance

top-secret-movie-poster The Pentagon wants to spend just over $50 billion on classified programs next year, newly-released Defense Department budget documents reveal. “That’s the largest-ever sum,” according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer — a three percent increase over last year’s total.

It makes the Pentagon’s secret operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside, “roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan,” Sweetman adds. All in all, about seven and a half percent of the Defense Department’s total spending is now classified.

Black-world weapons-buying “remains dominated by the single line item,” according to Sweetman. (You can find it under the Air Force’s “other procurement” section, on page F-21 here.) “This year’s number stands just above $16 billion. In inflation-adjusted terms, that’s 240 per cent more than it was ten years ago.”

Many of the secret budgets still remain clandestine, however. In the research budget, the line item for a “Special Program”of the super-secret National Security Agency is a string of zeros. Same goes for an NSA “Cyber Security Initiative” kitty. And don’t even ask about NSA’s “Intelligence Support to Information Operations” account. That’s a blank slate, too.

Some other fun facts, buried in the Pentagon’s just-released budget docs:
* Money for “Directed Energy Technology” — real-life ray gun research — jumps from $62.7 million last year to $105.7 million in 2010.
* Cash for “Prompt Global Strike Capability Development” — weapons that can hit anywhere on the planet, in just a few hours — jumps from $74.1 million to $166.9 million.
* The high-flying Global Hawk drones get an an extra $486.8 million.
* The Office of the Secretary of Defense is pushing $75 million in new alt-fuel and alt-power projects — from “Landfill Gas Energy Capture” to a “Tactical, Deployable Micro-Grid.”
* The Maui Space Surveillance System gets a major downgrade, from $36.3 million to a mere $5.8 million. Aloha, space-watchers!

[pablonite]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('DrBang', 'I')f this tin foil stuff was not true...

[DrBang]

For years now I have been debating with people around me who have been contemptuous of these ideas. Now they are becoming mainstream. I am having to bite my toungue and hold off on the "I told you so" front.

The burden of proof with this sort of thing has not been in the official story camp. I have found this is not about the facts but about faith.

Now it is so obvious that it is hard to look away.