“Are you collecting solar energy now, Mr. McLanahan?” one reporter asked.
“We’ve been collecting and storing solar energy for about three weeks now,” Brad replied. “The solar-energy-collection-and-storage systems were the first to be attached to Armstrong Space Station.” He motioned to a large model of the station that the team had set up for the press. “These are the nantennas, or nanotube sunlight collectors, designed by Jodie Cavendish, assisted by Kim Jung-bae, whom we call Jerry around here. They are double-sided so they can collect sunlight directly from the sun or reflected off the Earth. Here on the truss are ten two-hundred-kilogram lithium-ion capacitors, each capable of storing three hundred kilowatts, designed by Jerry Kim. We’re not going to fill them up for this test, but you can see we have the capability of storing three megawatts of electricity on the station, just with this small experimental system.”
“How much energy will you fire on this test?”
“We’re planning on shooting a total of one-point-five megawatts,” Brad said. “The station will be in range of the rectenna for approximately three minutes, so you can see we’re going to send a lot of juice to Earth in a very short period of time.” He pointed to a large poster-sized photograph of a round object sitting in a desert landscape. “This is the rectenna, or receiving antenna, which will collect the maser energy, designed by Jodie Cavendish along with Casey Huggins,” he said. “It is two hundred meters in diameter, installed out on the White Sands Missile Test Range because it’s a large secure area that can be easily cleared of aircraft. As you can see in this photo, we only have the rectenna and some pointing controls and data-monitoring equipment—we’re going to measure how much electricity is being received, but we’re not going to store or put any electricity into the grid on this first test. Lane Eagan here wrote the software and programmed the computers here on Earth and up in Armstrong to allow us the precision we need to hit that rather small target from two hundred to five hundred miles away.”
“Why do the test in a large isolated area, Mr. McLanahan?” a reporter asked. “What would happen if the maser energy from the space station hit an aircraft or object on the ground, like a house or a person?”
“It would be like putting a metal dish in a microwave oven,” Brad said. “The maser beam is mostly microwave energy, designed and built by Casey Huggins and Jerry Kim, but collimated with Armstrong’s free-electron laser subsystems to strengthen and help aim the energy.”
“You’re going to fire the Skybolt laser?”
“No, not at all,” Brad replied. “The Skybolt laser system uses a series of electromagnetic gates to channel, strengthen, and align the free-electron laser beam. We’ve disconnected the free-electron laser and have installed Casey Huggins’s microwave generator, power by the stored solar energy. We’re going to use the Skybolt subsystems to do the same thing with the microwave energy: strengthen, collimate, and focus it, and then we use Skybolt’s aiming subsystems, thanks to Jerry Kim, to send the energy earthward.
“But to answer your question: We really don’t know what would happen exactly, so we don’t want anyone anywhere near the beam when we fire,” Brad went on. “We’re going to close a lot of airspace before we set Starfire off. Obviously Starfire is more suited for firing the energy into isolated areas, to spacecraft, or even to the moon, so firing the maser into populated areas won’t necessarily be an issue, but we will be making the aiming control and beam propagation better and better as we go on, so the rectenna can be smaller and the dangers greatly reduced.”