Powersat (The Grand Tour) Read Free Page A

demonstration solar power satellite in low Earth orbit. It
delivered twelve megawatts to a receiving station built in the Gobi Desert. Yamagata’s program was international in scope; the corporation employed engineers and technicians from many nations, including Daniel Hamilton Randolph, a newly graduated electrical engineer from Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
    Despite the fact that a Solar Power Satellite uses neither fossil fuels nor radioactives such as uranium or plutonium, many environmentalists objected to transmitting a powerful beam of microwaves through the atmosphere. They drew pictures of birds being roasted alive as they flew through the beam and claimed there would be damaging effects on the long-term climate. Thus the original Japanese receiving station was placed in remote, sparsely settled Mongolia. And the microwave beam was kept so diffuse that horses could graze amid the receiving antennas without harmful effect.
    Once the demonstration satellite was operating successfully, Dan Randolph flew back to his native United States and founded Astro Manufacturing Corporation. Pointing to the success of the Japanese, he convinced a consortium of American and Western European financiers to back his company’s effort to build a full-scale SPS, capable of delivering ten thousand megawatts to the ground. He hammered home to them that while the capital costs of building the orbital power station would be some four or five times the cost of a nuclear power plant, the operating costs would be so low that the power satellite would begin showing a profit within three years of its start-up. And once the first full-scale power satellite was operational, capital costs for the next ones would go down appreciably.
    Saito Yamagata’s supporters in the Japanese government told him that the American’s betrayal was what he should have expected from a foreigner. Yamagata held his tongue and his patience. In silence he watched Randolph driving his fledgling corporation at a breakneck pace to produce a practical solar power satellite, while his own efforts proceeded much more slowly.
    Carefully avoiding funding from any governmental entity
and the crippling regulations that came with it, Randolph hired hundreds of workers. He rented time and expertise from NASA to train his team, and convinced aerospace giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin to mass-produce rocket boosters that lifted construction crews and equipment into orbit. Even with the benefits of mass production, the costs of the operation drove Astro Corporation to the edge of insolvency.
    While the massive power satellite took shape several hundred miles above the Earth, and then was boosted to its final orbital position above the equator, Randolph pushed an elite team of engineers to perfect a spaceplane, a vehicle that lifted off on a rocket booster and then could land like an airplane at any major airport, capable of carrying a small payload or half a dozen workers into orbit. That was the key to operating the solar power satellite economically, profitably. Without it, servicing the huge powersat with human repair and maintenance teams would be too expensive to be practical.
    Now Randolph had his solar power satellite. Its construction was almost complete. But the spaceplane project was in a shambles, and he had run out of sources for more funding.
    Except for Yamagata’s offer.

TAOS, NEW MEXICO
    D an sat across the aisle from Joe Tenny, his chief engineer, while Gerry Adair flew the aging twin-jet Cessna Citation to New Mexico and Hannah Aarons’s funeral. Tenny busied himself with his laptop computer, content to let his boss work out his feelings in silence.
    At last Dan asked, “Who’s watching the store?”
    “Lynn Van Buren,” said Joe. “She’ll keep everything under control until we get back.”
    “She was a friend of Hannah’s, too, wasn’t she?”
    “Hell, Dan, ninety-nine and a half percent of the staff was a friend of Hannah’s. We can’t