SRC-546

Workshop on the Radiation Environment of the Satellite Power System -- no document number; September 15, 1978

Commissioned by not stated on pp.1-4 as a contract; workshop proceedings hosted by LBL. 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-1158 The 1978 plan put seven hundred people in orbit at a time, on ninety-day tours of sixty-hour weeks, adding up to about 270,000 tours over thirty years, and this workshop reviewed how much radiation they would get.
• CLM-1159 A ninety-day shift in low orbit would give a worker about 20 rad, the trip up and back about 3, and ninety days at geostationary altitude 29 to 56 rad depending on where over the Earth the satellite sat, most of it from X-rays the trapped electrons make in the hull.
• CLM-1160 A big solar flare like August 1972 would push a spacesuited worker past the skin limit in three hours and the eye limit in two, so the geostationary base needs a storm shelter with the shielding of about 15 cm of aluminium, plus goggles and lead underwear so the shelter can be lighter; and a geomagnetic storm can make the electron belt a hundred times more intense in hours.
• CLM-1161 The 1978 plan assumed space workers would be allowed about ten times the radiation dose an ordinary radiation worker may take, under 1970 astronaut rules that doubled a person's natural cancer odds over twenty years at the career limit; the authors said the design, and possibly the feasibility, turned on whether those rules would be tightened.

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