Over the past year, I have undertaken a quantitative evaluation of America’s options for “going green”. I performed a top-level engineering evaluation of the path to green energy that the Biden administration is now undertaking, comparing these to primarily using space solar power-generated astroelectricity. Biden’s path emphasizes wind, ground solar, and nuclear fission power as the means to replace America’s use of fossil carbon fuels.
To be clear, the question before America is NOT whether or not to “go green”. If America’s freedoms, middle-class prosperity, and national energy security are to be maintained, we have no choice but to go green this century. Acknowledging this reality, the key question is how to successfully undertake, both technically and politically, an orderly transition to practicable green energy. This is the question that my evaluation addressed.
As I have done in the past, I published my results online at The Space Review as a four-part article. Due to the length of these articles, here are the links to the Space Review published versions.
Part 1 – https://thespacereview.com/article/4481/1
Part 2 – https://thespacereview.com/article/4485/1
Part 3 – https://thespacereview.com/article/4490/1
Part 4 – https://thespacereview.com/article/4494/1
My intent is to incorporate these results into a new book on why America needs to undertake space solar power-generated astroelectricity.
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James Michael (Mike) Snead is an aerospace Professional Engineer in the United States, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and a past chair of the AIAA’s Space Logistics Technical Committee. He is the founder and president of the Spacefaring Institute LLC (spacefaringinstitute.net) which is focused on space solar power-generated astroelectricity and the astrologistics infrastructure necessary to enable the spacefaring industrial revolution that will build space solar power energy systems. Mike Snead has been involved in space development since the mid-1980s when he supported the U.S. Air Force Transatmospheric Vehicle (TAV) studies, the National Aerospace Plane program, and the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) project. In 2007, after retiring from civilian employment with the Air Force, he began to study the need for (and politics associated with) undertaking space solar power. Beginning in the late 1980s, he has published numerous papers and articles on various aspects of manned spaceflight, astrologistics, and energy. His technical papers are located at https://www.mikesnead.com and https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike-Snead/research. His blog is at: https://spacefaringamerica.com. His eBook, Astroelectricity, can be downloaded for free here. He can be contacted through LinkedIn or through email sent to spacefaringinstitute@gmail.com.