Pete Dupont is writing in the Wall Street Journal about new energy sources in general, and power from space in particular. (Thanks to Mark Whittington for the heads up.)

I haven’t blogged about this subject much, or perhaps even at all. That’s surprising, because I probably know more about it than almost anyone–I’m certainly in the top one hundred on the planet. I wrote a term paper in college about it back in the late seventies, I reviewed some of the DOE/NASA work when I worked at the Aerospace Corporation a couple decades ago, and I was the program manager for it at Rockwell about ten years ago, when the Clinton/Gore Administration came in, and we fantasized that we could sell it to Gore as a clean/green-energy solution. I also came up with some alternative architectures to the one that Dupont describes in the Journal piece (he’s describing the original DOE/NASA concept, which was almost certainly never practical or economically viable).

I don’t have time to post much on this right now, because I have to work on my Apollo 17 commemoration, but it’s probably worth expanding on, given that energy is such a critical foreign-policy issue right now (Kyoto and the Middle East). Maybe in a couple days.