Space Based solar to replace oil using the Nuclear Turbo rocket

Keith Henson has some concerns that high volume flight rates for the SpaceX BFR could be a problem for the atmosphere if it was used for many thousands of flights to place massive amounts of space-based solar power to replace the usage of oil and other fossil fuels.

SpaceX BFR has cheap orbital launch costs and can reach the moon. But it needs refueling on the moon in order to bring lunar material. The Nuclear turbo rocket can do it all without refueling.

Bucknell’s air-breathing nuclear thermal rocket could emit water vapor for very benign super-high volume rocket system.

Space based solar power satellites could replace fossil fuels. This would require both lower cost and higher volume than SpaceX could deliver. The cost to GEO can’t go to over $200 per kilogram and the required traffic level is 15 million tons per year to LEO. (12 million to GEO.)

Bucknell’s air-breathing nuclear thermal rocket could bring the cost to orbit down to $50-100 per kilogram and have high reusability to enable the high traffic volume with a few hundred rockets to build space based solar to replace human oil usage.

Space based solar power satellites could replace fossil fuels. This would require both low cost launch and very high volume. The cost to GEO can’t go to over $200 per kilogram and the required traffic level is 15 million tons per year to LEO. (12 million to GEO.)

Bucknells turbo air-breathing thermal rocket could deliver even lower cost and higher volume than what Henson has described. SpaceX BFR could as well but there is a question about atmospheric effect of very high volume BFR flight.

The main advantage of orbital space based solar is you get 5 times as much sun as the best deserts and 15 times for places like Japan and the UK.

Henson’s space based solar plans solve energy concerns without subsidies and make a lot of money. Low energy cost makes everyone better off.

Initial target cost is 3 cents per kWh to undercut coal, 2 cents per kWh or less to replace oil. The Bucknell turbo rockets could bring costs below 1 cent per kWh

Henson uses a method of designing to cost. Design to cost is a management strategy and supporting methodologies to achieve an affordable product by treating target cost as an independent design parameter that needs to be achieved during the development of a product

Synthetic Oil from electricity. Hydrogen in a barrel of oil takes ~20 MWh. At two cents, $40 per bbl.

Capital $10 per bbl based on this plant below

Potential cost for space based power satellites?

For low maintenance and zero fuel cost, the levelized Cost of Electricity is capital cost of 80,000

That is $2400 per kW for the target of three cents per kWh

$2400 per kW is split
$200 per kW for the rectenna,
$900 per kw for the power satellite parts.
That leaves $1300 per kw for transport.

At 6.5kg per kW, that’s $200 per kg.

At 2000 km, the stack unfolds to make a propulsion power satellite.

81 thoughts on “Space Based solar to replace oil using the Nuclear Turbo rocket”

  1. Considering that beaming energy to earth can not be 100% efficient, then this is folly to use large amounts of SBP. Basically, this will heat the atmosphere just in a different manner.

  2. Considering that beaming energy to earth can not be 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} efficient then this is folly to use large amounts of SBP. Basically this will heat the atmosphere just in a different manner.

  3. Need laser SPS to reasonably pull off beamed thermal propulsion at GEO distances if you don’t want a stupidly large thermal receiver on the vehicle, though some MEO/LEO concepts like HESPeruS might make microwave practical. One could use a microwave GEO SPS beaming to a relay sat in LEO which retransmits somehow, but the conversion efficiencies will be problematic.

  4. Need laser SPS to reasonably pull off beamed thermal propulsion at GEO distances if you don’t want a stupidly large thermal receiver on the vehicle though some MEO/LEO concepts like HESPeruS might make microwave practical. One could use a microwave GEO SPS beaming to a relay sat in LEO which retransmits somehow but the conversion efficiencies will be problematic.

  5. You could start out beaming power up from the ground rather than down from GEO to get to LEO without needing an immense collector/heat exchanger (leveraging the technology you needed to develop for the SPS anyway). Once in orbit you no longer need the kind power that the thrust to weight ratio necessary for lift off from Earth implies you can use a low thrust/high Isp motor. It may be a bit less tidy than using a single motor to get you from ground all the way to LEO but I suspect that a vehicle in space capable of the kind of beam intensity implied by concentrating gigawatt power levels onto something you could reasonably attach to a rocket might make some folks a tad nervous. A nuclear thermal rocket or air-breather would I think make folks at least as nervous (shades of project Pluto).

  6. If you don’t worry too much about shielding, a nuclear power plant with 90% fissile uranium should be far more compact than a heat exchanger big enough to collect a gigawatt thermal from hundreds of kms away. This thing only has substantial shielding on the front. If it was using air flowing through the reactor, like Project Pluto’s nuclear ramjet, it would leave a trail of radioactive carbon 14 produced from the nitrogen flowing through the core, but with only hydrogen going through, its exhaust should be fairly benign, unless it shed fission products, or crashed. If it crashed in the deep ocean, the core should sink to the bottom, but might stay critical.

  7. Man’s ability to pollute the earth is actually pretty impressive. Most of the land surface is farmed, grazed, deforested, burnt, or otherwise affected, and we’ve vacuumed up ninety percent of the edible fish, with most of the whales that used to recycle ocean nutrients, and replaced them with a mass of plastic approaching equality. We’ve also burnt most of the readily burnable hydrocarbons between the surface and a thousand feet or so down, and are turning our attention to the deeper and harder to process stuff. If Professor William Ruddiman’s Early Anthropocene theory is right, we’ve been modifying the climate since the dawn of agriculture, and well before that, the early Aboriginals fire-sticked the Australian forest, and the first Amerindians wiped out most of North America’s large mammals. ( The ones there now are mostly immigrants from Asia.)

  8. You could start out beaming power up from the ground, rather than down from GEO to get to LEO without needing an immense collector/heat exchanger (leveraging the technology you needed to develop for the SPS anyway). Once in orbit, you no longer need the kind power that the thrust to weight ratio necessary for lift off from Earth implies, you can use a low thrust/high Isp motor. It may be a bit less tidy than using a single motor to get you from ground all the way to LEO, but I suspect that a vehicle in space capable of the kind of beam intensity implied by concentrating gigawatt power levels onto something you could reasonably attach to a rocket might make some folks a tad nervous. A nuclear thermal rocket or air-breather would, I think make folks at least as nervous (shades of project Pluto).

  9. If you don’t worry too much about shielding a nuclear power plant with 90{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} fissile uranium should be far more compact than a heat exchanger big enough to collect a gigawatt thermal from hundreds of kms away. This thing only has substantial shielding on the front. If it was using air flowing through the reactor like Project Pluto’s nuclear ramjet it would leave a trail of radioactive carbon 14 produced from the nitrogen flowing through the core but with only hydrogen going through its exhaust should be fairly benign unless it shed fission products or crashed. If it crashed in the deep ocean the core should sink to the bottom but might stay critical.

  10. Man’s ability to pollute the earth is actually pretty impressive. Most of the land surface is farmed grazed deforested burnt or otherwise affected and we’ve vacuumed up ninety percent of the edible fish with most of the whales that used to recycle ocean nutrients and replaced them with a mass of plastic approaching equality. We’ve also burnt most of the readily burnable hydrocarbons between the surface and a thousand feet or so down and are turning our attention to the deeper and harder to process stuff. If Professor William Ruddiman’s Early Anthropocene theory is right we’ve been modifying the climate since the dawn of agriculture and well before that the early Aboriginals fire-sticked the Australian forest and the first Amerindians wiped out most of North America’s large mammals. ( The ones there now are mostly immigrants from Asia.)

  11. Keith Henderson’s SPS proposals are basically that. Skylon to bring SPS parts to a marshalling yard in LEO, then a ground array feeding a rectenna equipped tug attached to the merged payload package bound for GEO. While I appreciate the fears revolving around a laser being used as a weapon, it’s functionally the same whether dropping a rod from orbit or even microwave beams (if you simply ignore the lack of pilot beam and do all the active beam forming on the transmitter-side). Now a true airbreathing nuclear engine might be problematic from oxidized chunks of reactor flying out the back, but if you aren’t running so close to the edge of the reactor materials limits and only running hydrogen through the reactor, there’s less of a concern. Everyone was cool with using NERVA NTR’s to go mars until fairly recently (though serious proposals for NERVA NTR upper stages largely disappeared in the 70’s).

  12. Note I said beamed THERMAL propulsion. Heat is the point. In the context of transportation systems. Now, if only in orbit (AKA orbital tugs), you could potentially bear the burden of having a very large rectenna to drive an electric thruster assuming you could handle rectenna array pointing. Accepting microwaves from any source, be it a GEO SPS, or a ground array. But the physics of it requires a very large receiver rectenna. You can cheat by going to higher frequencies to reduce receiver size, but that cripples power throughput if beaming from the ground. Kieth Henderson usually has a SPS presentation where bulk SPS supplies are brought to LEO, then driven as a single package to GEO using a ground array powering a rectenna equipped tug attached to the bottom of the merged payload.

  13. Agreed. Overall cost and complexity need to be considered. Since mass still drives costs, light-weight, thin-film PV would probably be ideal. Use the lightweight truss systems or inflatable films to deploy the sheets of PV. Use of high-temperature power electronics reduces need for cooling, and if the thin-film PV can work well has high temperatures as well, then radiative cooling may not have the expected cost. Radiative cooling effectiveness exponentially improves as temperatures increase, so operation at 250C instead of 50C dramatically reduces cooling radiator size and mass.

  14. Use 60Ghz microwave instead of 2.4Ghz. That minimizes the size of the transmitter and receiver. Minor downside is that it is absorbed by oxygen. 🙂 However, using SPS to fuel LEO->GEO lift might be an interesting way to bootstrap the system. Rather than requiring a limited slot in GEO, along with the additional lift costs, you could build the SPS in a sun synchronous orbit, broadcasting hundreds of MW’s to shuttles using ion drives to lift payloads from LEO to GEO (or LTO). Later on you can repurpose that infrastructure to broadcast power to earth surface.

  15. You really think laser can achieve anywhere near microwave conversion efficiencies? You’d have to discard half of all incoming power as heat!

  16. Keith Henderson’s SPS proposals are basically that. Skylon to bring SPS parts to a marshalling yard in LEO then a ground array feeding a rectenna equipped tug attached to the merged payload package bound for GEO.While I appreciate the fears revolving around a laser being used as a weapon it’s functionally the same whether dropping a rod from orbit or even microwave beams (if you simply ignore the lack of pilot beam and do all the active beam forming on the transmitter-side). Now a true airbreathing nuclear engine might be problematic from oxidized chunks of reactor flying out the back but if you aren’t running so close to the edge of the reactor materials limits and only running hydrogen through the reactor there’s less of a concern. Everyone was cool with using NERVA NTR’s to go mars until fairly recently (though serious proposals for NERVA NTR upper stages largely disappeared in the 70’s).

  17. Note I said beamed THERMAL propulsion. Heat is the point. In the context of transportation systems. Now if only in orbit (AKA orbital tugs) you could potentially bear the burden of having a very large rectenna to drive an electric thruster assuming you could handle rectenna array pointing. Accepting microwaves from any source be it a GEO SPS or a ground array. But the physics of it requires a very large receiver rectenna. You can cheat by going to higher frequencies to reduce receiver size but that cripples power throughput if beaming from the ground.Kieth Henderson usually has a SPS presentation where bulk SPS supplies are brought to LEO then driven as a single package to GEO using a ground array powering a rectenna equipped tug attached to the bottom of the merged payload.

  18. Agreed. Overall cost and complexity need to be considered. Since mass still drives costs light-weight thin-film PV would probably be ideal. Use the lightweight truss systems or inflatable films to deploy the sheets of PV.Use of high-temperature power electronics reduces need for cooling and if the thin-film PV can work well has high temperatures as well then radiative cooling may not have the expected cost. Radiative cooling effectiveness exponentially improves as temperatures increase so operation at 250C instead of 50C dramatically reduces cooling radiator size and mass.

  19. Use 60Ghz microwave instead of 2.4Ghz. That minimizes the size of the transmitter and receiver. Minor downside is that it is absorbed by oxygen. 🙂 However using SPS to fuel LEO->GEO lift might be an interesting way to bootstrap the system. Rather than requiring a limited slot in GEO along with the additional lift costs you could build the SPS in a sun synchronous orbit broadcasting hundreds of MW’s to shuttles using ion drives to lift payloads from LEO to GEO (or LTO). Later on you can repurpose that infrastructure to broadcast power to earth surface.

  20. You really think laser can achieve anywhere near microwave conversion efficiencies? You’d have to discard half of all incoming power as heat!

  21. I’m flattered that you used my artwork, but I require that you include a credit ©Mafic Studios when you do. Mine being the first and the space one immediately followed by “Synthetic Oil from electricity” (this one requires express permission, tyvm). Part of journalism is properly attributing such things, and having permissions.

  22. I’m flattered that you used my artwork but I require that you include a credit ©Mafic Studios when you do. Mine being the first and the space one immediately followed by Synthetic Oil from electricity”” (this one requires express permission”” tyvm). Part of journalism is properly attributing such things”” and having permissions.”””””””

  23. Why not just build nuclear power on earth? I mean if this nuclear reactor is safe enough to fly to space hundreds of times, surely it is safe enough to be used on earth?

  24. Why not just build nuclear power on earth? I mean if this nuclear reactor is safe enough to fly to space hundreds of times surely it is safe enough to be used on earth?

  25. Most have been beaming microwave energy back to the surface, no hydrogen needed. And really, to make hydrogen they would need water or something to crack. All of that is still deep in our gravity well.

  26. Most have been beaming microwave energy back to the surface no hydrogen needed. And really to make hydrogen they would need water or something to crack. All of that is still deep in our gravity well.

  27. why not PV? efficiency will be less than thermal, but you’d need 6000 tons less generators, piping etc. PV is proven technology in space, trying to get a working fluid to expand and condense could be like building a toilet…not as easy as it looks.

  28. why not PV? efficiency will be less than thermal but you’d need 6000 tons less generators piping etc. PV is proven technology in space trying to get a working fluid to expand and condense could be like building a toilet…not as easy as it looks.

  29. The main advantage of orbital space based solar is you get 5 times as much sun as the best deserts and 15 times for places like Japan and the UK.” I would say the main advantage over ground based solar that there is no night or clouds in space, so the power is available all the time.

  30. The main advantage of orbital space based solar is you get 5 times as much sun as the best deserts and 15 times for places like Japan and the UK.””I would say the main advantage over ground based solar that there is no night or clouds in space”””” so the power is available all the time.”””

  31. Link to the paper describing how to replace oil with space-based solar isn’t working, so I have no idea how that is supposed to work. Vaguely sounds like it would produce hydrogen, so I assume it would be dropping compressed hydrogen back to Earth? Sounds expensive, can’t imagine that would be cheaper than making hydrogen here. Even assuming hydrogen can replace solar panels and electric cars or natural gas-powered cars (as long as we’re looking at good alternatives to today’s gasoline powered cars). Until proven otherwise, it seems this is a whole lot of speculation, built on top of pipe dreams, with a sprinkling of fantasy.

  32. Link to the paper describing how to replace oil with space-based solar isn’t working so I have no idea how that is supposed to work. Vaguely sounds like it would produce hydrogen so I assume it would be dropping compressed hydrogen back to Earth? Sounds expensive can’t imagine that would be cheaper than making hydrogen here. Even assuming hydrogen can replace solar panels and electric cars or natural gas-powered cars (as long as we’re looking at good alternatives to today’s gasoline powered cars).Until proven otherwise it seems this is a whole lot of speculation built on top of pipe dreams with a sprinkling of fantasy.

  33. If you assume that the technology necessary for SPS power transmission is in place, then why not use that same technology for a beamed power system for your orbital transport ( http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/surfaceorbit.php#bep ). This has many of the benefits of your nuclear system (Hydrogen monopropellant = high Isp) without many of the messy, radioactive, downsides? I also can’t help but think that although the heat exchanger that a beamed system would use would require significant mass, a gigawatt level nuclear power plant of the kind that Bucknell talks about would be far more massive still.

  34. If you assume that the technology necessary for SPS power transmission is in place then why not use that same technology for a beamed power system for your orbital transport ( http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/surfaceorbit.php#bep ). This has many of the benefits of your nuclear system (Hydrogen monopropellant = high Isp) without many of the messy radioactive downsides? I also can’t help but think that although the heat exchanger that a beamed system would use would require significant mass a gigawatt level nuclear power plant of the kind that Bucknell talks about would be far more massive still.

  35. You could put a solar power system at Earth’s L1, where the blocked sunlight would cancel the beamed power.

  36. You could put a solar power system at Earth’s L1 where the blocked sunlight would cancel the beamed power.

  37. A few terawatts of microwaves would be nothing compared with the vastly bigger amounts of energy the Sun injects every day into the lithosphere and atmosphere, most of it lost as radiating heat at night.

  38. A few terawatts of microwaves would be nothing compared with the vastly bigger amounts of energy the Sun injects every day into the lithosphere and atmosphere most of it lost as radiating heat at night.

  39. Am I the only one who thinks putting more energy into Earth’s climate is a bad idea? Until we stop trapping existing solar heat, adding more is not a very bright thing to do.

  40. Am I the only one who thinks putting more energy into Earth’s climate is a bad idea? Until we stop trapping existing solar heat adding more is not a very bright thing to do.

  41. Keith Henderson’s SPS proposals are basically that. Skylon to bring SPS parts to a marshalling yard in LEO, then a ground array feeding a rectenna equipped tug attached to the merged payload package bound for GEO.

    While I appreciate the fears revolving around a laser being used as a weapon, it’s functionally the same whether dropping a rod from orbit or even microwave beams (if you simply ignore the lack of pilot beam and do all the active beam forming on the transmitter-side). Now a true airbreathing nuclear engine might be problematic from oxidized chunks of reactor flying out the back, but if you aren’t running so close to the edge of the reactor materials limits and only running hydrogen through the reactor, there’s less of a concern. Everyone was cool with using NERVA NTR’s to go mars until fairly recently (though serious proposals for NERVA NTR upper stages largely disappeared in the 70’s).

  42. Note I said beamed THERMAL propulsion. Heat is the point. In the context of transportation systems.

    Now, if only in orbit (AKA orbital tugs), you could potentially bear the burden of having a very large rectenna to drive an electric thruster assuming you could handle rectenna array pointing. Accepting microwaves from any source, be it a GEO SPS, or a ground array. But the physics of it requires a very large receiver rectenna. You can cheat by going to higher frequencies to reduce receiver size, but that cripples power throughput if beaming from the ground.

    Kieth Henderson usually has a SPS presentation where bulk SPS supplies are brought to LEO, then driven as a single package to GEO using a ground array powering a rectenna equipped tug attached to the bottom of the merged payload.

  43. Agreed. Overall cost and complexity need to be considered. Since mass still drives costs, light-weight, thin-film PV would probably be ideal. Use the lightweight truss systems or inflatable films to deploy the sheets of PV.

    Use of high-temperature power electronics reduces need for cooling, and if the thin-film PV can work well has high temperatures as well, then radiative cooling may not have the expected cost. Radiative cooling effectiveness exponentially improves as temperatures increase, so operation at 250C instead of 50C dramatically reduces cooling radiator size and mass.

  44. Use 60Ghz microwave instead of 2.4Ghz. That minimizes the size of the transmitter and receiver. Minor downside is that it is absorbed by oxygen. 🙂

    However, using SPS to fuel LEO->GEO lift might be an interesting way to bootstrap the system. Rather than requiring a limited slot in GEO, along with the additional lift costs, you could build the SPS in a sun synchronous orbit, broadcasting hundreds of MW’s to shuttles using ion drives to lift payloads from LEO to GEO (or LTO). Later on you can repurpose that infrastructure to broadcast power to earth surface.

  45. You really think laser can achieve anywhere near microwave conversion efficiencies? You’d have to discard half of all incoming power as heat!

  46. If you don’t worry too much about shielding, a nuclear power plant with 90% fissile uranium should be far more compact than a heat exchanger big enough to collect a gigawatt thermal from hundreds of kms away. This thing only has substantial shielding on the front. If it was using air flowing through the reactor, like Project Pluto’s nuclear ramjet, it would leave a trail of radioactive carbon 14 produced from the nitrogen flowing through the core, but with only hydrogen going through, its exhaust should be fairly benign, unless it shed fission products, or crashed. If it crashed in the deep ocean, the core should sink to the bottom, but might stay critical.

  47. Man’s ability to pollute the earth is actually pretty impressive. Most of the land surface is farmed, grazed, deforested, burnt, or otherwise affected, and we’ve vacuumed up ninety percent of the edible fish, with most of the whales that used to recycle ocean nutrients, and replaced them with a mass of plastic approaching equality. We’ve also burnt most of the readily burnable hydrocarbons between the surface and a thousand feet or so down, and are turning our attention to the deeper and harder to process stuff.
    If Professor William Ruddiman’s Early Anthropocene theory is right, we’ve been modifying the climate since the dawn of agriculture, and well before that, the early Aboriginals fire-sticked the Australian forest, and the first Amerindians wiped out most of North America’s large mammals. ( The ones there now are mostly immigrants from Asia.)

  48. You could start out beaming power up from the ground, rather than down from GEO to get to LEO without needing an immense collector/heat exchanger (leveraging the technology you needed to develop for the SPS anyway). Once in orbit, you no longer need the kind power that the thrust to weight ratio necessary for lift off from Earth implies, you can use a low thrust/high Isp motor. It may be a bit less tidy than using a single motor to get you from ground all the way to LEO, but I suspect that a vehicle in space capable of the kind of beam intensity implied by concentrating gigawatt power levels onto something you could reasonably attach to a rocket might make some folks a tad nervous. A nuclear thermal rocket or air-breather would, I think make folks at least as nervous (shades of project Pluto).

  49. Considering that beaming energy to earth can not be 100% efficient, then this is folly to use large amounts of SBP. Basically, this will heat the atmosphere just in a different manner.

  50. Need laser SPS to reasonably pull off beamed thermal propulsion at GEO distances if you don’t want a stupidly large thermal receiver on the vehicle, though some MEO/LEO concepts like HESPeruS might make microwave practical. One could use a microwave GEO SPS beaming to a relay sat in LEO which retransmits somehow, but the conversion efficiencies will be problematic.

  51. I’m flattered that you used my artwork, but I require that you include a credit ©Mafic Studios when you do. Mine being the first and the space one immediately followed by “Synthetic Oil from electricity” (this one requires express permission, tyvm). Part of journalism is properly attributing such things, and having permissions.

  52. Why not just build nuclear power on earth? I mean if this nuclear reactor is safe enough to fly to space hundreds of times, surely it is safe enough to be used on earth?

  53. Most have been beaming microwave energy back to the surface, no hydrogen needed. And really, to make hydrogen they would need water or something to crack. All of that is still deep in our gravity well.

  54. why not PV? efficiency will be less than thermal, but you’d need 6000 tons less generators, piping etc. PV is proven technology in space, trying to get a working fluid to expand and condense could be like building a toilet…not as easy as it looks.

  55. “The main advantage of orbital space based solar is you get 5 times as much sun as the best deserts and 15 times for places like Japan and the UK.”

    I would say the main advantage over ground based solar that there is no night or clouds in space, so the power is available all the time.

  56. Link to the paper describing how to replace oil with space-based solar isn’t working, so I have no idea how that is supposed to work. Vaguely sounds like it would produce hydrogen, so I assume it would be dropping compressed hydrogen back to Earth? Sounds expensive, can’t imagine that would be cheaper than making hydrogen here. Even assuming hydrogen can replace solar panels and electric cars or natural gas-powered cars (as long as we’re looking at good alternatives to today’s gasoline powered cars).

    Until proven otherwise, it seems this is a whole lot of speculation, built on top of pipe dreams, with a sprinkling of fantasy.

  57. If you assume that the technology necessary for SPS power transmission is in place, then why not use that same technology for a beamed power system for your orbital transport ( http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/surfaceorbit.php#bep ). This has many of the benefits of your nuclear system (Hydrogen monopropellant = high Isp) without many of the messy, radioactive, downsides? I also can’t help but think that although the heat exchanger that a beamed system would use would require significant mass, a gigawatt level nuclear power plant of the kind that Bucknell talks about would be far more massive still.

  58. A few terawatts of microwaves would be nothing compared with the vastly bigger amounts of energy the Sun injects every day into the lithosphere and atmosphere, most of it lost as radiating heat at night.

  59. Am I the only one who thinks putting more energy into Earth’s climate is a bad idea? Until we stop trapping existing solar heat, adding more is not a very bright thing to do.

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