From November 2022 to January 2023 this website pitted Government Solar Power Satellite documents against each other, and let YOU decide the winner. That 8 week test of tech and content is now complete.
For those who were involved, my sincerest thanks and I truly mean that because this site actually took a lot of time and real work to create and maintain.
If you’re just hearing about this site now: HI! Sorry you missed out, but take heart that what this site taught is being put to great new use. You’re invited to head over to the Solar Power Satellite areas of the Space Studies Institute website to see what we mean.
Q: Is this some kind of game?
A: That’s a great question. A question that a lot of people have been asking about the plodding of helpful technologies like Solar Power Satellites for a very long time.
Q: What can I win?
A: Power. Because knowledge is power and… you know, solar POWER for you – yes, for you – via satellite.
Q: I select all the text on a page copy it to my clipboard then paste it into Word and the text isn’t right. Why?
A: I feel your pain. Have some of mine: The first one of these I grabbed and started working on I went through each page, line by line, letter by letter. I fixed subscripts and superscripts, I finagled in extended character set icons for umlauts and got tildes to be nicely over their characters. For every inline and block of Greek symbology (often originally drawn into the pages by hand) I searched for fitting replacement characters that didn’t exist and looked into buying and learning latex math display tools. After about a week and a half down that rabbit hole it occurred to me that I would never get any of these documents done for you.
The ultimate goal is not to create self-adjusting kindles or convert all of these to Word documents, they are already books and people can look at the pages just like looking at the physical pages of a book. But I can provide enough OCR of selected areas of text so that folks can do searches for concepts and points of interest without having to use the printed indexes. AND I can get the reports done and delivered to you in a timely manner.
As with all things, it all comes down to ROI, Time and Money.
Q: Why are you calling it “SPS”, it is SBSP [SSPS, SBSPS, etc. etc. etc.]
A: A rose by any other name. The concept and the tech gets a new set of acronyms every time it comes back up. (Robin Snelson of SSI jokingly told me that the ones with a “B” usually come from the military, because the military really likes the idea of bases.)
You can call it what you want. We may go down the pronoun rabbit hole at times because it is nice to try to make everyone feel comfortable, but for the most part we will stick with the name and acronym that their father gave them.
“Our book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Gerard K. O’Neill”
-Peter E. Glaser, Frank P. Davidson, Katinka I. Csigi
Q: Space Based Solar Power is a very important topic with the potential to directly impact the lives of now 8 billion people in a positive way. Some of the pages have what I think you might call “levity.” This is serious stuff. Why aren’t you taking it seriously?
A: I hear you. I feel you. I am serious. And I do take this seriously. But… it’s my site and, with a very small nod to my love of Douglas Adams, this is the character that it seems it wants to have.
Q: There are a lot of Space Studies Institute things on this website. Is this an official project of SSI?
A: This is NOT an official project of The Space Studies Institute. But here’s the deal: The Space Studies Institute is the place that has the SPS goods. In hand. Physically.
In Princeton in the 1980’s Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill’s Space Studies Institute became a custodian of United States Government taxpayer paid-for SPS research documents. And unlike just about every other place that says they have neat stuff and that may even thrill the “space hoarders” by offering links to a long list of downloads, SSI still has the original physical documents.
The Hundreds of them.
Over the years, most of the originals in other vaults had succumbed to the realities of lowest-bidder digitization. Fast scans by bored people reduced readability right at the start and then lead to years of re-re-re-“optimizations” adding digital blur on top of original scanned schmutz. The final result was that even the most dedicated researchers were finding important documents but saying: “Ick, I can’t read that.”
Add to that pain the current reality of PDFs. Phones no longer like them. Mobile browsers have left PDF rendering to the past and now a link to a PDF file means a download of the document and MAYBE being able to find it and then trying to read it with some 3rd party app. A better reading experience than just checking off a dump of PDFs is required today, IF you want people to read instead of just hoard, anyway.
The physical government backup documents held by SSI were still around. Still as clean as the original pre-digital printing systems made them. It’s time to break them out and get them easily read.
At first I expected that they should just make the time and money to do everything for me, then I realized their non-profit reality and I asked if I could do something for them.
Q: Why was SSI chosen?
A: Because the organization that Gerard K. O’Neill founded and devoted so much of himself to, the Space Studies Institute, had been directly involved with Solar Power Satellites / Space Based Solar Power since before it was even conceived. SSI incorporated in 1977, but Gerard K. O’Neill and the SSI originators had already been hard at work with Peter Glaser and William Brown pushing power beaming SPS benefits and tech for years before that.
Over the decades, the Space Studies Institute and some few other organizations have tried a lot of things to boost SPS from good theory to real hardware – and keeping it all out in the open. Getting on stages around the world, doing interviews under hot lights, talking to governments… calling on people with the means who say for a while that they are looking to help the world… doing anything to get the technical and background ideas of SPS/SBSP/SSP/Solar Power Satellites understood and to get the money it requires dedicated to having it actually, openly, worked on. Always looking for a way to help others have the AH HA! moment based on facts, not blind childhood faith.
And it added up to? When SPS comes around – and it has several times – it’s always:
- “You want to make a death ray?“
- “What about the birds?”
- “What about the Chiiiiiildren!?”
- “Don’t you know that microwaves are deadly?”
- and the biggie: “If it is such a good idea, why hasn’t the government ever looked into it?”
(Answers to those: “No“, “It depends“, “This is for them and for us living now”, “They can also make delicious pot pies”, and to the biggie: “They have, and their conclusions may surprise you.”)
Anyway, one night I was at the Mojave Spaceport SSI office and the boxes of volumes were out and opened. It was a “Grand Canyon moment.” You hear all your life that the Grand Canyon is big, you might have statistical memories of that bigness from middle school and so you think that you understand what “big” means. And then you stand on the edge of The Grand Canyon. I had heard OF the SPS collection, I had read ABOUT it in historicals. And then I saw it. Just like Human Spaceflight, being there makes a difference.
Now I am going to take advantage of this being MY site. “I can say what I see, so obviously.” The people at the Space Studies Institute are busy. Unfortunately, most of their busy-ness has to be used for paying their humble mortgages and rents and buying their families food. While their O’Neill stuff is often used on giant screens by big name celebrities who say they grew up passionate about Dr. O’Neill’s work and that they honest-to-goodness want to help, that talk has been mostly exciting talk for them and not the money it would take to let these good SSI folks afford to do the work that they really should be doing.
So I asked if I could be allowed to prep, scan, clean, ocr, hyperlink and compile volumes from the coveted SSI Research Library’s physical SPS Collection and put them out to the public in a way that hadn’t been tried before – clean and easy to read on today’s devices. For an initial 6 week test. With no cost to them and no tax deduction requested.
I hope that this test game site will show that people can look at interesting stuff that is over 120 characters and doesn’t have a sidechained dancetrack. I truly hope that. Perhaps this test site will instead prove that my hopes are misplaced but, if so, even that will be some research.
But if a bit of a smashbros can get these American Taxpayer Paid-For Department of Energy, NASA, Department of Defense and commercial contractor reports out to the people who paid for them and gets some of them skimmed and maybe actually read then: Let’s play!!
It’s all up to you: Skim, Read, Decide, Click!
Q: But who the hell are you?
A: I’m a Smith.
If it does interest anyone besides my mother’s ghost, I will say that I am a guy who made a short presentation back when SSI President Gary Hudson needed a warm body for a meeting he wasn’t able to attend. I am still amazed that the Gods got me through all of those powerpoint clicks live without any glitches and I attribute that to their Olympian belief in the content. I also believed in it then. I still believe in it now. This recorded 12 minutes – and something that SSI’s second president Freeman Dyson told me once, privately, about SPS – are the reasons for the work and for the sliver of hope behind this light little site.
Q: There are no affiliate links, no paypal donate buttons. What do you want?
A: Want? I want a trip to Europe… to hear the complete bodrum birthday recordings. But a thing I know is needed is a 4.2 million dollar donation made to the Space Studies Institute.
There’s your specific amount, B.
More would make their work easier but less will not get the job done.
Q: Any more questions?
A: No? Ok. Then this being the internet, cat pictures.
Now Bill Brown is really worried about this site. Relax sir, no one will ever scroll down this far.
