SRC-565

Satellite Power System (SPS) Rectenna Siting: Availability and Distribution of Nominally Eligible Sites -- no document number printed; April 1980

Commissioned by Prepared for PRC Energy Analysis Company (Purchase Orders WS161, WS152) under prime contract with the U.S. Department of Energy, Satellite Power System Project Office; no direct NASA/MSFC 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-1102 The receiving station the siting maps were drawn for is an oval twelve kilometres wide and, in the middle of the United States, sixteen long once its safety margin is added, about 150 square kilometres, with two and a half million panels on it; further north it gets longer because the satellite sits lower in the sky.
• CLM-1103 Mapped at the scale of one receiver per cell, two-fifths of the country was not ruled out; look closer and seven in ten of those cells fail too, mostly on terrain; take out farmland and a quarter is left. The study still found enough room in every region, with the caveats that its own numbers imply.
• CLM-1104 The siting maps kept receivers 150 km from radio telescopes, 100 km from NASA's deep-space stations, 60 km from air traffic radars and 50 km from nuclear plants, on asserted distances; because those places are mostly excluded for other reasons too, the electromagnetic rules only cost about seven per cent of the country.

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