[tt] Fwd: [Solar Power Satellite Place] 'Drilling Up' into Space for Energy

[Eugen Leitl]

Btw, here's how to make a grassroot launcher.

Build a domestic PV array with built-in phased-array radiator
intelligence, capable of tracking one or more spots with a decent 
duty cycle (almost for free, any microcontroller could do it). 
Sell these at retailers. Make people who operate that capable of donating
resources to a particular celestial target (which could be a plane, a 
sat, space rock, or an orbital mirror), for free, or for cash. 
Accounting is hairy, but nowadays doable.

Put a bird in LEO, unforl your graphite-cloth (or even spun-bucky)
sail some 100 to 1000 m across. Let them hit it with all they've got
on the dayside, which will result in several gees, which is basically 
a vertical (hyperbolic, hypergolic, whatever) takeoff. It has to be 
on the daylight-side, with new small sources coming online as others 
cross the terminus.

(A million contributors will give you ~TW of beamed power, which
might be enough for interesting things).

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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