NASA Investigates Beaming Energy From Space

May 16 -- Some scientists look down the road and see an Earth with no energy shortages, no pollution caused by fossil fuels, no rolling blackouts, no dependence on nuclear power or foreign oil, no limits on the amount of energy we can have.

Instead, they see giant solar collectors orbiting the planet, or on the surface of the moon, collecting energy from the sun and beaming it back to the Earth.

It may sound like science fiction, but it isn't.

The idea of building space-based power plants has been around for decades, but it came close to being trash-canned in the early 1970s when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration determined that it would be too costly and too technologically difficult to be practical.

The idea, first broached in 1968 by Peter Glaser, then a NASA scientist, resurfaced again during the energy crisis of the late '70s, but died back when the oil began to flow again from the Middle East.

Old Idea, New Interest

There it might have remained had it not been for a little thing called global warming. The concern over greenhouse gasses forced NASA and other organizations to take another look. It turns out that some of the showstoppers of a few years ago have been resolved.

That has led to a bit of a groundswell of support for the concept, but it's far from a done deal. Here's the way John C. Mankins, manager of advanced concepts studies for NASA, put it last year in a hearing before the U.S. House subcommittee on space and aeronautics:

"Ongoing and recent technology advances have narrowed many of the technology gaps, but major technical, regulatory and conceptual hurdles continue to exist."

In simple English, that means we're getting closer, but we've still got a long ways to go. The principal hurdle at this point appears to be cost, especially the pricy fee for putting tons of stuff in orbit. That comes at a time when many of the key components needed to cash in on the sun's energy are already available.

In it's simplest incarnation, here's how it would work.