MEO for SSP

[Kathryn or Steve Leete]

I've been trying to promote an idea if a few venues regarding SSP. The idea is that SSP should start in LEO or MEO. 

Getting started with SSP is quite different from getting started with satellite communications. With SatCom, it made perfect sense to start at GEO. From GEO you can provide useful comms to a vast swath of the Earth with a single satellite. You can start with decent bit rates, point to point from anywhere within the very large area covered by an earth coverage antenna. For a modest antenna size, transmitter power, and a simple bent pipe system, it's useful immediately. 

Try to replicate that early stage with SSP, and you produce nothing of any value at all. To make the first GEO SSP useful, it will have to be enormous, and it will only provide power to a small area at a time. To keep the promise of continuous baseband power 24/7 at levels useful to cities, you need to dedicate each satellite to one city. Alternately, you could hop the beam around, but now you are getting less payback for the ground infrastructure at each location, and if intermittent power were OK why not stick to wind and solar? 

My thought for some time is that SSP needs useful stepping stones. Now that we know we can operate LEO constellations of thousands of satellites with a modest cadre of operators, let's apply to at logic to SSP. A MEO constellation will be on par with wind and solar, but the intermittency will be highly predictable and can be planned on. Each satellite will be contracted to provide service to various customers on a schedule as it passes over them. As the constellation is built out, clients can carve out power that gradually builds up to constant. Consider the number of GPS satellites we have, and how many are in view worldwide at any time. A similar number of MEO SSP satellites could provide similar possibility of continuity. A city that is far from other cities could readily rely on the constellation. 

The sats are easier to get to MEO than GEO, can be sized to each fit into a Starship or comparable HLV, and either deploy out or be assembled by robotics. 

What do you think?

Steve Leete

[Erinn van Wynsberghe]

Hi Steve,

Happy to see your message. I completely agree on "stepping stones". I founded my company VanWyn for that exact purpose, to commercialize the inaugural steps toward SPS.
 
I see it as a matter of how much funding one can attract will determine how large to go at first. Since I'm an SME, my approach is to go much, much smaller and thus more early-stage than LEO: I'm focusing on commercializing wireless transmission over very short distances (1 mile), to send small amounts of power (200 W) from ground up to drones (DARPA is working on this too), and to send radio comms with extremely narrow main lobe and negligible side lobes to prevent against hacking (NATO just issued an RFP for this). We've acquired $2M+ so far from Canadian National Defense and government grants, and are constructing prototype now. I know it's not Prime / OEM money, but for me it's a good start.

My aim is to help create a thriving and lucrative industry for radiative (far-field) power beaming before seeking funding for even farther distances. I want to make customers in defense and industry (plus the public) comfortable and familiar with WPT, getting used to seeing it rural fields, having their kids and grand-kids talk about it since maybe they did a school project on a recent nearby installation, etc. I want Generals and Admirals to become enthralled with perpetual surveillance from wirelessly powered drones, and excited for future WPT capabilities to and from space. That enthusiasm will entice more and more RFPs.

The trick is to find a near-term use case for each step that's not just commercially viable, its got to be a market disruptor in its own right to entice early adoption (and subsequent funding) each step of the way.

So, the path I'm taking is in this order:
 - Ultra-narrow beam radio comms (double-digit GHz)

 - WPT up to drones

 - WPT up to small aircraft

 - WPT up to stratospheric craft
 - WPT up to LEO satellites
 - WPT down from stratosphere as a power relay tool (and to test for SPS)
 - SPS from constellations in LEO for Defense
 - Large SPS in LEO
 - WPT on the moon
 - Space-to-space WPT
 - SPS GEO

I hope many others will also adopt this vision, because it will lead to more RFPs, more funding, and faster growth of a WPT industry.

And of course there will need to be other such paths in parallel, including robotic in-space assembly and repair.

I'll share our deck directly to give you more details.

Cheers,

Erinn

Erinn van Wynsberghe
President & CEO
VanWyn Inc.

eri...@vanwyn.com

www.vanwyn.com

(289) 260-8825

USA:         205 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 810,Chicago, IL 60601

CANADA:  175 Longwood Road South, Suite 105, Hamilton, ON L8P 0A1

Book a meeting: https://calendly.com/vanwyn

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Power Satellite Economics" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to power-satellite-ec...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/power-satellite-economics/a1231135-eec0-4fb5-b352-21bbb27768b0n%40googlegroups.com.

[Al Globus]

See these two papers on small SSP.

• "Towards an Early Profitable PowerSat," Al Globus, Space Manufacturing 14: Critical Technologies for Space Settlement, NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA, October 29-31, 2010. This paper examines a new design that, using technologies proven in space and on the ground, may be profitable or nearly so given optimistic but reasonable assumptions for near term R&D results.

• "Towards an Early Profitable PowerSat, Part II" Al Globus, Ion Bararu, and Mihai Radu Popescu, International Space Development Conference 2011, National Space Society, Huntsville, Alabama, 18-22 May, 2011. This paper suggests an approach to developing a small, single-launch SSP system that may be profitable in certain high-priced niche markets. The underlying technologies could be developed by a modest R&D program, suggesting that critics who claim SSP is multiple orders of magnitude from profitability are wrong.

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 5:57 PM Kathryn or Steve Leete
<swak....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've been trying to promote an idea if a few venues regarding SSP. The idea is that SSP should start in LEO or MEO.
>
> Getting started with SSP is quite different from getting started with satellite communications. With SatCom, it made perfect sense to start at GEO. From GEO you can provide useful comms to a vast swath of the Earth with a single satellite. You can start with decent bit rates, point to point from anywhere within the very large area covered by an earth coverage antenna. For a modest antenna size, transmitter power, and a simple bent pipe system, it's useful immediately.
>
> Try to replicate that early stage with SSP, and you produce nothing of any value at all. To make the first GEO SSP useful, it will have to be enormous, and it will only provide power to a small area at a time. To keep the promise of continuous baseband power 24/7 at levels useful to cities, you need to dedicate each satellite to one city.

I have considered this in some detail. What makes the most sense is
just to dump the power into the grid. For example, there is a power
line from Mojave over to LA that runs through some uninhabited areas
that would be ideal for a rectenna.

> Alternately, you could hop the beam around, but now you are getting less payback for the ground infrastructure at each location, and if intermittent power were OK why not stick to wind and solar?

My estimate for a 5 GW rectenna is a billion dollars out of $12 B for
the whole thing.

> My thought for some time is that SSP needs useful stepping stones. Now that we know we can operate LEO constellations of thousands of satellites with a modest cadre of operators, let's apply to at logic to SSP. A MEO constellation will be on par with wind and solar, but the intermittency will be highly predictable and can be planned on. Each satellite will be contracted to provide service to various customers on a schedule as it passes over them. As the constellation is built out, clients can carve out power that gradually builds up to constant. Consider the number of GPS satellites we have, and how many are in view worldwide at any time. A similar number of MEO SSP satellites could provide similar possibility of continuity. A city that is far from other cities could readily rely on the constellation.

I don't think this gains enough over GEO to be worth it. MEO or GEO,
the cost of producing power is not much different. Reducing the
distance to half cuts the transmitter diameter by half and the mass to
1/4, but the transmitter is not a large fraction of the total mass.
One problem is that the beam comes in at varying angles, increasing
the rectenna area. MEO does reduce the amount of reaction mass needed
to move the power satellite out of LEO, but it is less than you would
think because most of the delta V is getting up to MEO and from MEO to
GEO is not that much.

> The sats are easier to get to MEO than GEO, can be sized to each fit into a Starship or comparable HLV, and either deploy out or be assembled by robotics.

Absolutely no way. It takes about 100 Starship launches per GW.

Keith

> What do you think?
>
> Steve Leete
>

[k.a.c...@sympatico.ca]

The ionizing radiation environment is *much* worse in MEO than in LEO or GEO. Photovoltaic cells will degrade much more quickly there, and other electronics will either all have to be rad-hard (driving up their cost a lot), or will degrade quickly. This will have a big effect on the lifetime of any solid-state power amplifiers used (although if tube amps are used, e.g., amplitrons, that's not an issue for them), and also on the electronics in the robots that would have to be used to service an SPS in MEO (the environment would quickly be fatal to any humans at that altitude).

Of course, if we figure out a way to get rid of the radiation belts, that issue goes away...

- Kieran

> economics/CAPiwVB4dwcHgfgXgYs_dcXAqiEC3%2Ba-
> Kqy40sakHW42cOkUJcA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Tim Cash]

Kieran,

The answer is to go from the micro or nano to the macro.  Small airplanes have drones. Small SPS gas nothing, so know kilowatt scale power beaming is the answer, but no single killer app, loads of small apps.  Stephen is on the mark, so am I on this topic of small towards larger.  Kieran can you size out akiloeatt scale laser power beaming system?  Cost, dimensions, level of risk, maturity TRL level?

Tim Cash

cash...@gmail.com

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/power-satellite-economics/0a6f01d9c240%2413c148f0%243b43dad0%24%40sympatico.ca.

[Joshua Gigantino]

Hi All, 

Going down to the micro level makes a lot of sense. Dr. Rick Fleeter has suggested an 'orbital bicycle lane' in a sun-synchronous orbit (-89.5) as space training wheels for university and small private satellites. I've suggested to him that this would be an ideal use for space-to-space SPS testing. Smallsats require little power, in the range of watts to low kilowatts. They can use various methods of power transmission, control and comms can be built into the beaming system. Rectenna in space can be relatively simple. An end result might be a set of standardized control blocs that can be built into a smallsat to tap into the bike lane's network, affording small teams relatively rapid systems development and deployment like one year orbital telescope projects.

It won't look like GEO baseload SPS power but could build confidence if not the actual technology needed. I hedge this because laser transmission is probably smarter for in-space to smallsats than microwave.

Best, 
Josh

(headings trimmed)

On Sat, Jul 29, 2023 at 12:00 PM Tim Cash <cash...@gmail.com> wrote:

Kieran,

The answer is to go from the micro or nano to the macro.  Small airplanes have drones. Small SPS gas nothing, so know kilowatt scale power beaming is the answer, but no single killer app, loads of small apps.  Stephen is on the mark, so am I on this topic of small towards larger.  Kieran can you size out akiloeatt scale laser power beaming system?  Cost, dimensions, level of risk, maturity TRL level?

Tim Cash

ᐧ

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Jul 29, 2023 at 3:38 PM Joshua Gigantino <jgiga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All, 

Going down to the micro level makes a lot of sense.

It depends on the objective.  If you are trying to deal with the energy problem for humanity, micro is not useful.  It takes about 3000 five GW power satellites to pick up the entire current energy load.  Current engineering is good enough that a full scale power satellite could be designed and constructed with rather low chances of it failing to work.

 

Dr. Rick Fleeter has suggested an 'orbital bicycle lane' in a sun-synchronous orbit (-89.5) as space training wheels for university and small private satellites. I've suggested to him that this would be an ideal use for space-to-space SPS testing.

What do you really need to test?  Microwaves from GEO is an exceptionally well understood area of .  As far as I know, there has never been a test of microwave power transmission that failed to do exactly what was expected.

 

Smallsats require little power, in the range of watts to low kilowatts. They can use various methods of power transmission, control and comms can be built into the beaming system. Rectenna in space can be relatively simple. An end result might be a set of standardized control blocs that can be built into a smallsat to tap into the bike lane's network, affording small teams relatively rapid systems development and deployment like one year orbital telescope projects.

The competition is to put solar panels on the orbiters and avoid all the complications.

Keith

[Randen Patterson]

Dear All, I am starting a podcast entitled "Honest Discussions" due to the current plummet of confidence in the scientific community at large.  These conversations are meant to be informative and provide a balanced perspective on everything from AI to astrophysics, medicine, biology, evolution and beyond.  I already have a number of interviews in the can with people like Geriant Lewis who just did the time dilation that was published in Nature, Jake Montgomery with his work on Jupiter plasma reconnection, Ore Gottlieb for his work on gravitational waves, to name a few in astrophysics.  

The motto of the podcast "Listen to the experts, make your own decisions". There will be no censorship.  Ideas can be explored, and controversial opinions can be stated.  Collegiate debate needs to occur.  

I am currently cultivating some media to advertise the launch. Having a good list of guests is helping with that cause.

Anyone that would be interested in participating please let me know.  If you know of someone with some interesting "top of mind" research, feel free to pass this invitation on to them.  I am currently booked out til September, but do have one opening in late August.

Any help would be appreciated.

All best,

Randen