To power an aircraft carrier will require about 200 MW of power, which I assume will be received by the ship’s entire deck area of very roughly 20,000 square meters, for a power density of 10,000 Watts per square meter, which is 900 Watts per square foot. So the people running around the flight deck will be getting baked like they were in a medium-power microwave oven.
But perhaps the system would work for guided missile cruisers and destroyers, except that the reflected microwave power would have them radiating like an enormous “target me” beacon. You could turn off the satellite beam if a threat is detected, but then your ship would be powered continuously except in combat.
I’m thinking this idea comes from some of Obama’s bundlers, probably the same ones behind the Navy’s “green fleet” boondoggle, who are set to skim off hundreds of millions of dollars before the concept is abandoned as a spectacular failure.
I figured they would beam the power to a safer land-based location, and run a reaaaallly long extension cord out to the vessel.
The Navy is more than aircraft carriers. Think Marine expeditionary forces.
It costs the military an awful lot to deliver fuel to forward bases in remote areas. During World War II, the Army was paying over $1000 a gallon to fly gasoline over the hump into Burma. Real 1940’s dollars, not today’s inflated greenbacks. That’s comparable to what it costs to launch payloads into orbit today.
Before you start spreading Obama conspiracy theories, please note that the NRL’s interest in space solar power dates back to the Bush Administration.
Conflict of interest notice: I had a (very) small contract with NRL last year, which was totally unrelated to this project.
For a remote base it would make sense, except that somebody has to go set up a big rectenna field, yet you still have to bring in lots of fuel because we’re not going to be using battery powered tanks and aircraft anytime soon. But such a system would be more useful to the Army than to the Navy, which generally locate its facilities where ocean transport is cheap and convenient (after all, much of the oil the world burns is already transported by ship).
Also please note that, contrary to environmentalist rhetoric, hydrocarbons are not “non-renewable fuels.” Given enough energy, you can make kerosene and gasoline.
And not really all that much ‘extra energy’ if you’re clever.
Biodiesel is just a buck a gallon more than diesel. And cracking diesel (bio or not) to gasoline isn’t -that- bad.
Add “coal” to the renewable and sustainable list also.
Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) need a considerable amount of energy. Some of it comes in the form of jet fuel or kerosene and there’s no replacing that. They do consume quite a bit of electricity too. There are the computers that they use to manage the FOB and run operations, the batteries to operate radios and devices like night vision goggles and a host of other things that consume electricity. Most remote FOBs had diesel generators and those were very expensive to operate. Due to the hazards of truck convoys being hit by IEDs, they resorted to flying in the fuel using helicopters like the CH-47 Chinook. That’s a very expensive way to deliver fuel.
They did experiment with solar panels and other alternative means of generating electricity in Iraq and Afghanistan but those technologies don’t work everywhere. Having a fast deploying rectenna array that could tap into a solar power satellite’s beam could be an effective solution to remote units’ electricity needs. It could also be a lot more transportable and deployable than large solar arrays or windmills and would work in areas that are cloudy (and at night) or those that don’t have much wind.
Actually there was a DoD proposal for an all electric tank not so long ago. You would use the electricity to power the engines and a railgun or electrochemical gun. I remember people proposing batteries and superconducting magnetic storage and all sorts of weird things. More recently there were several proposals for hybrid-electric vehicles including HMMWVs. The idea behind it was to reduce noise and thermal emissions in order not to show up on night vision systems.
For large ships I think nuclear propulsion is a better idea.
Oh and Tank Electric Reactive Armor. Nearly forgot that.
Some quick calculations.
The Defense Logistics Agency said we used 270,000 gallons of fuel per day in Afghanistan in 2006, a year in which we had 20,400 boots on the ground (monthly average). That gives 13 gallons per person per day. Average US domestic electricity consumption per capita is 33 kWh per day, and modern small scale diesel generators can produce 15.8 kWh per gallon of diesel, so even if our soldiers were living in big American style houses with central air and big screen TV’s, they should only be consuming about 2 gallons/day for electricity, which would only represent 16 percent of the total daily fuel consumption in Afghanistan. I’m thinking the tanks are burning more fuel than the popcorn poppers and laptops put together. ^_^
Except Soldiers in FOBs eat power like crazy. Radar, Lighting, insane A/C requirements,
crappy insulation, satellite data links, Big HF Radios, Water purifying plants,
Now the Jeeps and Trucks burn lots of diesel too, but, yeah, everything is sucking power.
The radars and satellite links aren’t going to use much power, probably a few kilowatts average for a whole base. An ordinary 200-mile ATC radar will typically have an output power of about 500 watts, about a third of a kitchen hot plate. They also aren’t going to use more lights than normal, because bright lights screw up night vision, and rows and rows of fluorescent bulbs aren’t really something you want over your head if big booms might be going off nearby.
How much of that fuel was used in helicopters, tanks, jet fighters and other vehicles? It sounds like you don’t understand the scope of military operations. Troops don’t just sit in their FOBs all day, except for the Fobbits (AKA REMFs).
It would have been nice if the article mentioned just what the Navy intends to power with their technology. The implication seemed to be that the target is ground installations. If so, it seems to me the Army and Marines, or even the USAF, would have a lot more use for this stuff than the Navy. In any case, the carriers are not likely beneficiaries. All of them are nuclear powered with 25-year fuel load lives. Their escort vessels are all still petroleum powered, but I share your skepticism that they could ever be converted successfully to space-based beam power drive. Anyway, unless you had one of these powersats per ship or, still better, more than one – you’d just give an enemy an easier way to effectively knock out multiple ships at once by clobbering a single powersat. I don’t think anything space-based that’s a klick or more in size is going to be capable of sprightly evasive maneuvers.
I’ve posted a new article that discusses some of the military applications NRL has been looking at:
I have an obvious question about the sandwich design. If the solar cell is on the front side and the microwave antenna is on the back side, how do you beam power to the Earth’s night side when the solar cells are still pointing toward the sun and the antenna is pointing somewhere in the outer solar system?
“Producing enough energy for a rail gun is another problem.
The Navy’s new destroyer, the Zumwalt, under construction at Bath Iron Works in Maine, is the only ship with enough electric power to run a rail gun. The stealthy ship’s gas turbine-powered generators can produce up to 78 megawatts of power. That’s enough electricity for a medium-size city – and more than enough for a rail gun.
Technology from the three ships in that DDG-1000 series will likely trickle down into future warships, said Capt. James Downey, the program manager.
You do know that the Marine Corps falls under the Navy Dept, don’t you, Dick?
Yes, I do. I also know that the Marines tend to suck hind tit on Navy dept. expenditures for any purpose. Maybe this is one of the rare exceptions. That would be nice.
I find itsort of odd that Elon Musk is so anti-SPS. It sort of makes sense, SPS requires conversion from solar liight to local satellite power to RF to grid power; which seems inefficient just due to the number of steps. But I think that is an unfair comparison to a perfect ideal. In practice the conversion in space is highly efficient and the conversion to and from RF can be in the 90% range. More importantly, SPS offers power 24/7 without being diminished by clouds or local night. And because of the longevity of satellite systems the depreciation of capital is slow ccompared to equivalent ground installations.
A single SPS installation will be much more expensive than an equivalent installation of the same solar panels on Earth, but it will likely last much longer and produce an order of magnitude greater electrical power. Also, any realistic ground based solar installation designed for providing base load power must necessarily convert that power to some stored form in order to smooth out the production curve to match demand. And that conversion (to/from batteries, or hydrogen, or super capacitors, or hydro storage, or whatever) will have efficiency losses both ways, imposing just as many lossy conversion steps as SPS. Except without the benefit of being able to bathe the primary solar panels in 33.6 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day for the lifetime of the spacecraft.
What a big fat target.
Any comparison to terrestrial solar is missing the point, in my opinion.
One does not go to space to build solar power satellites. One builds solar power satellites because it’s the best way to make money with people in space.
Exactly. Also, SPS has many advantages that ground based systems do not. All you need on the ground is a rectenna grid and a small amount of equipment for conversion and power conditioning. Which means that you can build, even temporarily, “power plants” in lots of locations where it used to be hugely difficult and where it wouldn’t make sense to dump an enormous long-term capital investment. The military uses are pretty obvious, but it opens up a lot of other new opportunities as well. SPS doesn’t have to compete in the 5 cent per KW-h market along with hydro, it can compete in the spot market, in remote locations, on mobile platforms, etc. The ability to put megawatts on station anywhere on Earth in a moment’s notice is a “big deal” and something that is likely to make SPS technology highly profitable in the short term (assuming much lower launch costs, of course). And that will provide the funding for R&D and technological improvements as well as pay down the initial capital investment costs so that SPS can be profitable in more and more use cases.
Additionally, SPS is one of the best possible near-term energy sources on the martian surface. Rectennas could be built on Mars using entirely in situ supplied materials (use CO derived from the atmosphere to process iron ores and manufacture rectennas). You avoid the dust problem. You avoid the storage problem with ground based solar. You avoid the nuclear materials problem. And you heavily leverage equipment shipped from Earth. Companies who pioneer SPS technology are going to get rich from providing services to Martian colonists as well as premium customers on Earth (like the military, mining facilities, etc, etc.)
When you dismiss ideas because they are not the most efficient you eliminate most common ideas in use. If something has never been done before it often just means the environment where it makes sense isn’t being developed. Efficiency comes with competition but competition is not a given.
Has anyone modeled the cost per KiloWatt of SPS?
I’m not aware of any recent studies but the new Navy effort will likely do the analysis. Whether they publish the results or not remains to be seen. There were studies done back in the 1970s but the technology has changed so much since then that they are no longer applicable. For example, modern gallium arsenide solar cells are much more radiation resistant than the old silicon cells that lost about 3% of their power output per year in geosynch. Newer cells are also much more efficient, meaning you need smaller arrays to generate the same amount of power. The drawback is that gallium arsenide cells are also more expensive than silicon cells but for a large satellite designed for a long life, they’re the only way to go. Other electronic components are also more capable and lighter weight today than in the 1970s which can help reduce launch costs. If you’re willing to tolerate a wait of several months, you can further lower the launch costs by using electric propulsion to self-deploy the satellite to geosynch instead of chemical propulsion, as is being implemented by the new satellites designed around the Boeing 702SP bus. A rocket like a Falcon Heavy could deliver a sizeable satellite into LEO or a subGTO orbit and electric propulsion would take it the rest of the way to GEO. That technology wasn’t available when the earlier studies were done in the 1970s. It might also be possible to make the power satellite modular. Launch the biggest pieces you can into LEO, assemble them into the full up satellite and then use electric propulsion to get to the operational orbit. The first launch might consist of a deployable truss along with the central section containing propulsion, TT&C, power transmission and other components while subsequent launches carry the main solar arrays that could be attached similar to those on the ISS.
End the end, the cost per kilowatt-hour will likely be very high compared to more normal means of power generation but it could possibly be cheaper than the current means of generation (and associated logistics support) at remote operating locations. Back in 1990, I was stationed on Shemya near the end of the Aleutian Island chain. All of our electricity came from a series of 3 MW diesel generators. We had 6 generators and it took 3 running continuously to meet the base’s power needs. Our diesel was delivered by a fuel barge. That had to be expensive, but I’ll bet it was likely an order of magnitude cheaper than delivering fuel to a remote FOB in Afghanistan by helicopter.
Do you think it would have been cheaper to have a windmill on shemya or
some tidal generators?
Based on the storms I saw on Adak in the early ’80s, I doubt either would have a prayer of lasting more than a year or two, maybe three, before having to be replaced/rebuilt. The winds and weather are … drastic. There’s no such thing as a protected bay at Shemya, so I don’t know where you’re going to put tidal generators. The very corrosive salt spray would’ve played hell with windmills, too. And there was that 15+ MW RF output Cobra Dane radar that had to be fed. I really enjoyed Adak, though (probably not so much if I’d lived in the barracks, though). But Shemya was a god-forsaken rock from everything I ever heard.
This might be the best way to deliver “power”* to the ground from SPS sats in the vicinity of Navy, Marine, and Army assets on the ground.
An observation about the rectenna receivers for solar power satellites: The rectennas may cost peanuts compared to the satellites. The cost of land under the rectennas may be almost a non issue. With the arrays being mostly transparent to sunlight, rain, and air, farmland would be little disturbed by a rectenna field suspended overhead. The farmer may even like what the array does to keep birds out of his crop.
In a military deployment I’d expect a rectenna to continue functioning with minor loss of performance if a few bombs blow holes in it. The pilot transmitter that allows the satellite to aim true would be a much smaller target, but could be wiped out with a single well aimed bomb.
I have a few questions.
To power an aircraft carrier will require about 200 MW of power, which I assume will be received by the ship’s entire deck area of very roughly 20,000 square meters, for a power density of 10,000 Watts per square meter, which is 900 Watts per square foot. So the people running around the flight deck will be getting baked like they were in a medium-power microwave oven.
But perhaps the system would work for guided missile cruisers and destroyers, except that the reflected microwave power would have them radiating like an enormous “target me” beacon. You could turn off the satellite beam if a threat is detected, but then your ship would be powered continuously except in combat.
I’m thinking this idea comes from some of Obama’s bundlers, probably the same ones behind the Navy’s “green fleet” boondoggle, who are set to skim off hundreds of millions of dollars before the concept is abandoned as a spectacular failure.
I figured they would beam the power to a safer land-based location, and run a reaaaallly long extension cord out to the vessel.
The Navy is more than aircraft carriers. Think Marine expeditionary forces.
It costs the military an awful lot to deliver fuel to forward bases in remote areas. During World War II, the Army was paying over $1000 a gallon to fly gasoline over the hump into Burma. Real 1940’s dollars, not today’s inflated greenbacks. That’s comparable to what it costs to launch payloads into orbit today.
Before you start spreading Obama conspiracy theories, please note that the NRL’s interest in space solar power dates back to the Bush Administration.
Conflict of interest notice: I had a (very) small contract with NRL last year, which was totally unrelated to this project.
For a remote base it would make sense, except that somebody has to go set up a big rectenna field, yet you still have to bring in lots of fuel because we’re not going to be using battery powered tanks and aircraft anytime soon. But such a system would be more useful to the Army than to the Navy, which generally locate its facilities where ocean transport is cheap and convenient (after all, much of the oil the world burns is already transported by ship).
Also please note that, contrary to environmentalist rhetoric, hydrocarbons are not “non-renewable fuels.” Given enough energy, you can make kerosene and gasoline.
And not really all that much ‘extra energy’ if you’re clever.
Biodiesel is just a buck a gallon more than diesel. And cracking diesel (bio or not) to gasoline isn’t -that- bad.
Add “coal” to the renewable and sustainable list also.
Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) need a considerable amount of energy. Some of it comes in the form of jet fuel or kerosene and there’s no replacing that. They do consume quite a bit of electricity too. There are the computers that they use to manage the FOB and run operations, the batteries to operate radios and devices like night vision goggles and a host of other things that consume electricity. Most remote FOBs had diesel generators and those were very expensive to operate. Due to the hazards of truck convoys being hit by IEDs, they resorted to flying in the fuel using helicopters like the CH-47 Chinook. That’s a very expensive way to deliver fuel.
They did experiment with solar panels and other alternative means of generating electricity in Iraq and Afghanistan but those technologies don’t work everywhere. Having a fast deploying rectenna array that could tap into a solar power satellite’s beam could be an effective solution to remote units’ electricity needs. It could also be a lot more transportable and deployable than large solar arrays or windmills and would work in areas that are cloudy (and at night) or those that don’t have much wind.
Actually there was a DoD proposal for an all electric tank not so long ago. You would use the electricity to power the engines and a railgun or electrochemical gun. I remember people proposing batteries and superconducting magnetic storage and all sorts of weird things. More recently there were several proposals for hybrid-electric vehicles including HMMWVs. The idea behind it was to reduce noise and thermal emissions in order not to show up on night vision systems.
For large ships I think nuclear propulsion is a better idea.
Oh and Tank Electric Reactive Armor. Nearly forgot that.
Some quick calculations.
The Defense Logistics Agency said we used 270,000 gallons of fuel per day in Afghanistan in 2006, a year in which we had 20,400 boots on the ground (monthly average). That gives 13 gallons per person per day. Average US domestic electricity consumption per capita is 33 kWh per day, and modern small scale diesel generators can produce 15.8 kWh per gallon of diesel, so even if our soldiers were living in big American style houses with central air and big screen TV’s, they should only be consuming about 2 gallons/day for electricity, which would only represent 16 percent of the total daily fuel consumption in Afghanistan. I’m thinking the tanks are burning more fuel than the popcorn poppers and laptops put together. ^_^
Except Soldiers in FOBs eat power like crazy. Radar, Lighting, insane A/C requirements,
crappy insulation, satellite data links, Big HF Radios, Water purifying plants,
Now the Jeeps and Trucks burn lots of diesel too, but, yeah, everything is sucking power.
The radars and satellite links aren’t going to use much power, probably a few kilowatts average for a whole base. An ordinary 200-mile ATC radar will typically have an output power of about 500 watts, about a third of a kitchen hot plate. They also aren’t going to use more lights than normal, because bright lights screw up night vision, and rows and rows of fluorescent bulbs aren’t really something you want over your head if big booms might be going off nearby.
How much of that fuel was used in helicopters, tanks, jet fighters and other vehicles? It sounds like you don’t understand the scope of military operations. Troops don’t just sit in their FOBs all day, except for the Fobbits (AKA REMFs).
“Fobbits”? Had to look that up.
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmurph/articles/20060102.aspx
It would have been nice if the article mentioned just what the Navy intends to power with their technology. The implication seemed to be that the target is ground installations. If so, it seems to me the Army and Marines, or even the USAF, would have a lot more use for this stuff than the Navy. In any case, the carriers are not likely beneficiaries. All of them are nuclear powered with 25-year fuel load lives. Their escort vessels are all still petroleum powered, but I share your skepticism that they could ever be converted successfully to space-based beam power drive. Anyway, unless you had one of these powersats per ship or, still better, more than one – you’d just give an enemy an easier way to effectively knock out multiple ships at once by clobbering a single powersat. I don’t think anything space-based that’s a klick or more in size is going to be capable of sprightly evasive maneuvers.
I’ve posted a new article that discusses some of the military applications NRL has been looking at:
http://www.citizensinspace.org/2014/03/navy-research-may-hold-the-key-to-space-solar-power/
Nice article. 🙂
I have an obvious question about the sandwich design. If the solar cell is on the front side and the microwave antenna is on the back side, how do you beam power to the Earth’s night side when the solar cells are still pointing toward the sun and the antenna is pointing somewhere in the outer solar system?
“Producing enough energy for a rail gun is another problem.
The Navy’s new destroyer, the Zumwalt, under construction at Bath Iron Works in Maine, is the only ship with enough electric power to run a rail gun. The stealthy ship’s gas turbine-powered generators can produce up to 78 megawatts of power. That’s enough electricity for a medium-size city – and more than enough for a rail gun.
Technology from the three ships in that DDG-1000 series will likely trickle down into future warships, said Capt. James Downey, the program manager.
Engineers are also working on a battery system to store enough energy to allow a rail gun to be operated on warships currently in the fleet.”
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/02/18/us-navy-ready-to-deploy-laser-for-1st-time.html
Could you use lasers instead of microwaves for electrical transfers?
http://lasermotive.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Laser-Power-Beaming-Fact-Sheet.pdf
You do know that the Marine Corps falls under the Navy Dept, don’t you, Dick?
Yes, I do. I also know that the Marines tend to suck hind tit on Navy dept. expenditures for any purpose. Maybe this is one of the rare exceptions. That would be nice.
I find itsort of odd that Elon Musk is so anti-SPS. It sort of makes sense, SPS requires conversion from solar liight to local satellite power to RF to grid power; which seems inefficient just due to the number of steps. But I think that is an unfair comparison to a perfect ideal. In practice the conversion in space is highly efficient and the conversion to and from RF can be in the 90% range. More importantly, SPS offers power 24/7 without being diminished by clouds or local night. And because of the longevity of satellite systems the depreciation of capital is slow ccompared to equivalent ground installations.
A single SPS installation will be much more expensive than an equivalent installation of the same solar panels on Earth, but it will likely last much longer and produce an order of magnitude greater electrical power. Also, any realistic ground based solar installation designed for providing base load power must necessarily convert that power to some stored form in order to smooth out the production curve to match demand. And that conversion (to/from batteries, or hydrogen, or super capacitors, or hydro storage, or whatever) will have efficiency losses both ways, imposing just as many lossy conversion steps as SPS. Except without the benefit of being able to bathe the primary solar panels in 33.6 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day for the lifetime of the spacecraft.
What a big fat target.
Any comparison to terrestrial solar is missing the point, in my opinion.
One does not go to space to build solar power satellites. One builds solar power satellites because it’s the best way to make money with people in space.
To put this in terms that Mr Musk can understand: there are a lot of easier ways to make money than solar power satellites. That’s no reason not to do it.
Exactly. Also, SPS has many advantages that ground based systems do not. All you need on the ground is a rectenna grid and a small amount of equipment for conversion and power conditioning. Which means that you can build, even temporarily, “power plants” in lots of locations where it used to be hugely difficult and where it wouldn’t make sense to dump an enormous long-term capital investment. The military uses are pretty obvious, but it opens up a lot of other new opportunities as well. SPS doesn’t have to compete in the 5 cent per KW-h market along with hydro, it can compete in the spot market, in remote locations, on mobile platforms, etc. The ability to put megawatts on station anywhere on Earth in a moment’s notice is a “big deal” and something that is likely to make SPS technology highly profitable in the short term (assuming much lower launch costs, of course). And that will provide the funding for R&D and technological improvements as well as pay down the initial capital investment costs so that SPS can be profitable in more and more use cases.
Additionally, SPS is one of the best possible near-term energy sources on the martian surface. Rectennas could be built on Mars using entirely in situ supplied materials (use CO derived from the atmosphere to process iron ores and manufacture rectennas). You avoid the dust problem. You avoid the storage problem with ground based solar. You avoid the nuclear materials problem. And you heavily leverage equipment shipped from Earth. Companies who pioneer SPS technology are going to get rich from providing services to Martian colonists as well as premium customers on Earth (like the military, mining facilities, etc, etc.)
When you dismiss ideas because they are not the most efficient you eliminate most common ideas in use. If something has never been done before it often just means the environment where it makes sense isn’t being developed. Efficiency comes with competition but competition is not a given.
Has anyone modeled the cost per KiloWatt of SPS?
I’m not aware of any recent studies but the new Navy effort will likely do the analysis. Whether they publish the results or not remains to be seen. There were studies done back in the 1970s but the technology has changed so much since then that they are no longer applicable. For example, modern gallium arsenide solar cells are much more radiation resistant than the old silicon cells that lost about 3% of their power output per year in geosynch. Newer cells are also much more efficient, meaning you need smaller arrays to generate the same amount of power. The drawback is that gallium arsenide cells are also more expensive than silicon cells but for a large satellite designed for a long life, they’re the only way to go. Other electronic components are also more capable and lighter weight today than in the 1970s which can help reduce launch costs. If you’re willing to tolerate a wait of several months, you can further lower the launch costs by using electric propulsion to self-deploy the satellite to geosynch instead of chemical propulsion, as is being implemented by the new satellites designed around the Boeing 702SP bus. A rocket like a Falcon Heavy could deliver a sizeable satellite into LEO or a subGTO orbit and electric propulsion would take it the rest of the way to GEO. That technology wasn’t available when the earlier studies were done in the 1970s. It might also be possible to make the power satellite modular. Launch the biggest pieces you can into LEO, assemble them into the full up satellite and then use electric propulsion to get to the operational orbit. The first launch might consist of a deployable truss along with the central section containing propulsion, TT&C, power transmission and other components while subsequent launches carry the main solar arrays that could be attached similar to those on the ISS.
End the end, the cost per kilowatt-hour will likely be very high compared to more normal means of power generation but it could possibly be cheaper than the current means of generation (and associated logistics support) at remote operating locations. Back in 1990, I was stationed on Shemya near the end of the Aleutian Island chain. All of our electricity came from a series of 3 MW diesel generators. We had 6 generators and it took 3 running continuously to meet the base’s power needs. Our diesel was delivered by a fuel barge. That had to be expensive, but I’ll bet it was likely an order of magnitude cheaper than delivering fuel to a remote FOB in Afghanistan by helicopter.
Do you think it would have been cheaper to have a windmill on shemya or
some tidal generators?
Based on the storms I saw on Adak in the early ’80s, I doubt either would have a prayer of lasting more than a year or two, maybe three, before having to be replaced/rebuilt. The winds and weather are … drastic. There’s no such thing as a protected bay at Shemya, so I don’t know where you’re going to put tidal generators. The very corrosive salt spray would’ve played hell with windmills, too. And there was that 15+ MW RF output Cobra Dane radar that had to be fed. I really enjoyed Adak, though (probably not so much if I’d lived in the barracks, though). But Shemya was a god-forsaken rock from everything I ever heard.
This might be the best way to deliver “power”* to the ground from SPS sats in the vicinity of Navy, Marine, and Army assets on the ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwYJZqBB0ms
http://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/projects/directed-energy-planetary-defense
* by power I mean: “melt the enemy” level of flux
An observation about the rectenna receivers for solar power satellites: The rectennas may cost peanuts compared to the satellites. The cost of land under the rectennas may be almost a non issue. With the arrays being mostly transparent to sunlight, rain, and air, farmland would be little disturbed by a rectenna field suspended overhead. The farmer may even like what the array does to keep birds out of his crop.
In a military deployment I’d expect a rectenna to continue functioning with minor loss of performance if a few bombs blow holes in it. The pilot transmitter that allows the satellite to aim true would be a much smaller target, but could be wiped out with a single well aimed bomb.