SRC-551

Solar Power Satellite Microwave Power Transmission and Reception; NASA Conference Publication 2141; workshop held January 15-18, 1980, published 1980

Commissioned by National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center; in-house/sponsored workshop, no contract number printed. 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-1088 By 1980 the programme remembered its first study as having picked 2.45 GHz. The first study's report says it picked 3.3 GHz. The 2.45 GHz decision was made three years later.
• CLM-1090 The programme's two printed tables of how much beam the weather eats do not agree. One has the ionosphere numbers the wrong way round, and its rain and hail figures are a million times too small for the unit printed over them. The other is internally consistent.
• CLM-1091 The people running the programme said 2.45 GHz was sensible and also said, in the same breath, that nobody international had agreed to it and the choice was open. Their own account of the 1979 world radio conference is that no frequency was given and one might be, if the environmental case were made.
• 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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