Deviation Actions
Description
Artwork Courtesy NASA
Source: David S.F. Portree's Spaceflight History Blog Electricity from Space: The 1970s DOE/NASA Solar Power Satellite Studies.
DOE and NASA envisioned building the 60 rectennas required for the SPS system from coast to coast along the 35° latitude line. Cities on or near that line include Bakersfield, California; Flagstaff, Arizona; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Amarillo, Texas; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Little Rock, Arkansas; Memphis and Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Charlotte, North Carolina. If one flew between these cities, one would overfly rectennas on the ground in different settings - forest, farm fields, mountains, swamp, desert - every 50 kilometers or so.
The microwave beam would be de-focused to reduce risk to the Earth's upper atmosphere, aircraft, and people working at the rectennas. As depicted in the painting above, limited agriculture could take place under the rectennas, directly in the path of the microwave beams. In addition, the microwave transmitter on the SPS could be designed to shut off if its beam drifted. DOE and NASA expected that each rectenna would have around it a "buffer" zone of uninhabited land so that if the beam drifted a small distance before it turned off automatically, only the ring-shaped buffer would be affected.
Bio, David S.F. Portree: From 1992 to 1995, David Portree served as Senior Technical Writer and Historian at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He has written several histories for NASA, including Thirty Years Together: A Chronology of U.S./Soviet Space Cooperation (1993), Mir Hardware Heritage (1995), Walking to Olympus: an EVA Chronology (1997), Orbital Debris: A Chronology (1999), and Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning. Astronomy Magazine, Air & Space Smithsonian, and other popular-audience magazines have carried his byline, and he has contributed more than 200 spaceflight and planetary science articles to encyclopedias. The International Academy of Astronautics gave Walking to Olympus its Napolitano Book Award in 1998. Most of David’s history writing at present is published on his Spaceflight History blog.
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