SRC-542

On the Military Implications of a Satellite Power System: A Working Paper; no DOE/ER number printed; December 1980

Commissioned by PRC Energy Analysis Company, McLean, Virginia, for U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Research, Satellite Power System Project Division; Under Contract No. AC01-79ER10041. Who paid for a study is recorded because it bears on how its conclusions should be read, not because it makes them wrong.

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-1039 The programme's own military studies did not treat the beam itself as a real weapon. The 1980 study said one captured beam would carry rather little power and has no known harm to living things, so at most it might be used to frighten people, as the 1978 study also suggested. Twenty satellites pointed at one spot would reach 3.3 times the sunlight figure the study used, which is about the strength of sunlight above the air; that is about 4.6 times standard sunlight at the ground. What the studies worried about was the lasers a satellite could power, and someone faking the pilot signal, for which they listed the countermeasures.
• CLM-1040 The programme's first military study said the satellite could not be fully protected; its second said it was no softer a target than a power station or a refinery, that it could not be made to fall on anyone, and that the one real threat was the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear detonation in space.
• CLM-1408 In the late 1970s, US studies sketched receiving stations raised on posts or legs so the ground beneath could still be farmed or built on. They noted a trade-off: panels close to the ground are easier to reach for repairs.

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