ENERGY AND SPACE

This side of science fiction, but only just, is the proposal of a 25 square mile space platform which would collect solar power (in the absence of clouds and "night" ) and send the energy to earth in a microwave radio beam.

The project may be on the fringes of feasibility with present space technological know-how, but it is well beyond the fringes of any reasonable capital cost. It would take decades to install and close to $100 billion in costs only to end up with an energy yield that can be produced by a handful of nuclear units.

And yet space does offer hopes for energy conversion and efficient energy use bulk freight transport between distant points on the globe, for example. Its time has not yet come, but it will, if the problems are investigated by profit-minded individuals dedicated to free enterprise, rather than by congressional sunworshippers who waste taxpayers' money on boondoggles to buy themselves popularity among gullible voters.

For individuals of the former type, there is an organization Space/Earth, Inc., which publishes an excellent newsletter for people interested in space technology, "the possibilities and barriers to Free Space enterprise . . . and ways of overcoming economic, legal and design obstacles for the free pioneering of Space." (Earth/Space News, 4151 Middlefield, Palo Alto, CA 94303; $10/year.)

Its July 1976 issue, incidentally, is largely devoted to migma fusion, giving many more details than we had space for in our May issue.