SRC-556

Solar Power Satellite System Sizing Tradeoffs; NASA Technical Paper 1804; February 1981

Commissioned by National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center; in-house report, 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-1036 The programme's own sizing arithmetic, with its rate of return stated: in the cases studied a bigger antenna always raised the cost, but much less if the ionospheric limit rose with it. The 152.3 in its cost formula is the capital-recovery factor for 15 per cent over thirty years.
• CLM-1037 By the end of 1980 the programme office was saying in writing that its own design limit was too cautious, that fifty or sixty might be reasonable, and that the cost case depended on raising it.
• CLM-1089 The higher industrial band would have shrunk the receiving field to a fifth or a third of its size, at the price of a satellite that could not shed its heat, a bigger electricity bill, and a beam that rain could knock out. Every time the programme costed it the answer was the same and 2.45 GHz stayed.

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