Get ready for... SPACE POWER!

I was still in high school when I first read about the idea of getting solar power from space. Up above the atmosphere, you can collect a lot more solar radiation, and since there's no wind or gravity, you can make the solar panels really big. Loads of energy, right there for the taking. All you have to do is figure out how to get it back down to Earth.

Well, according to SPACE.com, we're getting closer to reaching that goal. A former NASA scientist has set up an experiment in Hawaii, and has converted solar power to radio waves and beamed them 92 miles between two of the islands. It wasn't a complete success, but it shows that the idea works in principle. Now we just have to figure out how to make it work.

The experiment will be featured on tonight's episode of the Discovery Channel program, Discovery Project Earth. Be sure to check it out! I know I will.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Whew!

Image
It's been quite a whirlwind the past couple of weeks. It started right after Thanksgiving, when Lunar Pioneers was named... Best of the Moon 2008 Youth Moon Fiction Category For OutOfTheCradle.net's complete list of the winners, you can click on the banner above. Since then, I've been scrambling to get the word out, and also getting ready for my trip to Indianapolis. Last Saturday was the Holiday Author Fair at the Indiana Historical Society. Here's how it looked: While I was in town, I also paid an author visit to Park Tudor School, where I talked to middle school and high school book lovers: Now I'm home again, and ready to get back to work. There are new projects ahead!
Read more

Where the Wild Things Are

Image
Our job on San Nicolas Island was part of an ongoing project, restoring the natural habitat along a three-mile stretch of roadside terrain. The Navy dug up it to replace the water pipe that runs from the Navy's desalinization plant up to the main water tanks on the highest point of the island. Channel Islands Restoration started the project by collecting seeds from all around the island and growing them in a nursery built near the base, and now it was time for planting. The hope is that the plants will grow and propagate, until the entire roadside is full of native plants. One evening, we got to see an earlier project that had been nicknamed "the Google Site," because the Navy Resource Manager in charge had said he wanted to look up the island on Google Earth and watch the planted area grow from year to year as the plants multiplied. Naval Base Ventura County, which includes San Nicolas, just won an award for natural resource management among the nation's milita
Read more

Recommended viewing

Ken Murphy over at OutOfTheCradle.net has previously written glowing reviews of two anime series, Planetes and Rocket Girls (the latter winning a "Best of the Moon" award along with Lunar Pioneers ), but there's one other series he hasn't mentioned. That's probably because it isn't commercially available in the US, although you can find it online if you know where to look. Twin Spica (or Futatsu no Spica in Japanese) is the story of five kids who make it into the very first class at a special Japanese astronaut training academy. In this version of the near future, Japan has had its own manned space program, but suffered a disaster when one of its rockets malfunctioned on liftoff and crashed into a Japanese city. The main character, 16-year-old Asumi Kamogawa, lost her mother in the accident. Her father was an engineer in the space program, but now he works elsewhere. Asumi's dream since childhood has been to become a "rocket driver." H
Read more