Beam It Down

Bill Whittle Network

News

4.9 • 720 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2024

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The idea of space-based solar power has been around for at least half a century: trillion-dollar orbital behemoths with tens of square miles of solar power cells beaming gigawatts of energy to enormous earth-based rectennas via microwaves. It’s an industrial-era solution to an information-age problem. But what if there’s a 21st Century solution: something smaller, lighter and much, much, MUCH cheaper? Join our crack team of elite anti-elitists by becoming a member or making a one-time donation right here: https://billwhittle.com/register/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, we're constantly excited about anything that shows us about big, vast amounts of money going up into space, like the SpaceX booster catch and all the rest of it.
0:07.7	But what about something that brings money back down from space?
0:10.2	Hi everybody, I'm Bill Whittle here with Steve Green and Scott.
0:12.7	And gentlemen, I saw a story that in the space of 10 minutes made me re-envision the future.
0:18.2	Really did.
0:19.2	Let me give you a little bit of back story here. Back when
0:21.9	I was a junior in high school, I was on the debate team in junior and senior years in high school,
0:27.7	I know it's going to come as a big shock to people because you definitely are going to talk about
0:30.8	being a chip magnet. But my junior year was about alternative energy sources. This would be in
0:36.8	1976 in high school. And one of the alternative energy sources. This would be in 1976 in high school.
0:38.3	And one of the alternative energy sources was microwave-based space power stations.
0:43.3	And the idea would be that unlike solar power on the Earth, which is
0:48.3	bothered by clouds and gets turned off every 12 hours and turned back on again,
0:53.3	a solar power grid in space is on all the time.
0:57.5	It's getting absolutely as much sunlight as it possibly can.
1:00.9	And during the course of this discussion back in 1976,
1:04.5	the way we were talking about getting solar power from space
1:07.3	was to build this enormous stations that would be miles and miles across full of
1:13.2	these vast arrays of solar cells that would then send a beam of microwave radiation down
1:18.3	to a receiver on the earth.
1:20.3	It would be a mile in diameter.
1:21.5	It would absorb all this energy.
	...

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