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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 12:01pm Jul 17, 2003 EST (# 13041 of 13042)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

At a shadow price of 10$/barrel energy equivalent, at the collector, a 30% efficiency collector would generate $5.15/square meter/year - or 51.5 million dollars per "collector"/ year. For 3% collector efficiency, values are 10 times smaller ( $.052/square meter/year ). My guess, which is only an estimate, but a careful estimate, is that collectors with efficiencies well over 10% (perhaps over 20%) and working lives longer than 10 years could be built for between 2 and 3$/square meter.

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The question "Is this worth doing" would depend on who owned the assets. For a company or nation controlled by people with a big stake in current oil reserves and current energy industry arrangements - the gain might be partly or completely offset by losses in their old petroleum businesses. For a company or nation with a smaller stake in the old arrangements - the same investment might be far more attractive.

For the industrialized nations as a whole, looking hard at this job would be very much worth doing.

Is ocean based solar power a unique alternative? No.

But it is an alternative - one that offers engineering challenges - but no difficult scientific challenges at all.

There are always different ways to do things. Each may be optimized in terms of specific assumptions - and with work - both the assumptions and the optimization can be very good. Then you pick the best alternatives - or try to.

I think that the equatorial proposal would work - and my guess is that it is likely to be the best alternative, considering everything. But the cost of simulation is now much, much lower than it has been - and it should make sense to evaluate a lot of basic approaches.

Optimization is "doing the best you can." It takes some work to find out what "the best you can" is. 12759 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.iD1ZbD4SqI5.1722@.f28e622/14430

I've been concerned about the technical aspects of doing this job - and have spent a lot of hours in the last few weeks working through details. The technical part of the work looks doable, and with good organization, fundable on a basis that can proceed rapidly - effecting world energy supplies within a few years.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense