Peter Glaser, who in the late 1960s envisioned a way to harness limitless solar power in space and transmit it for use on Earth via invisible microwaves — a notion so intriguing that the government spent $20 million studying it, only to conclude that it was too complex and expensive — died May 29. He was 90.
Glaser developed experiments for the Apollo mission that put a man on the moon in 1969, tantalised many people with an article he wrote for Science magazine where he proposed what seemed incredible: massive satellites that would store solar energy while orbiting Earth in a way that would allow them to virtually never be in darkness.
Several square miles in size, the satellites would hold arrays of solar panels that would capture sunlight unfiltered by the atmosphere, convert it to energy and then transmit the energy wirelessly to 5-mile-wide antennas on Earth. They would generate enough wattage to equal the production of several nuclear power plants.
The basic technology for this largely existed except that it had not been employed at anywhere close to this scale. He received a patent for the idea in 1973 and, with the energy crisis of the 1970s increasing awareness that fossil fuels were finite, Nasa and the Department of Energy began studies of Glasers solar power satellite.
Yet by the early 1980s, the price of oil had come down and Glasers long-term alternative came to be seen as technologically and financially daunting. It would require multiple pieces of equipment being launched into orbit by rockets of unprecedented size. Scores of astronauts would be needed to piece together the finished product 22,000 miles above Earth.
There were also concerns about the health and environmental effects of microwave power transmission. A 1981 study by the National Academy of Sciences estimated that the cost could be $3 trillion over a half-century.
“The Japanese government has continued to pursue the solar satellite idea,” said John C. Mankins, who was head of Nasa's advanced concept studies division. In 2012 Mankins, by then a private consultant, led a new Nasa-financed study of space solar power rooted in many of the ideas that Glaser had proposed, although far more modest in scope and cost. The government has so far declined to adopt the idea.
“The hurdle is not a technical one but one of perception,” Mankins said. He noted that climate change has made the need to find clean sources of energy only more urgent. “If we’d pursued space solar power in the 1980s,” Mankins said of Glaser’s early ideas, “the platforms would be operational today.” — New York Times News Service
