As an aerospace engineering professor, your NASA criticisms made uncomfortable reading for me, but they are good and necessary. There are plenty of good reasons to oppose moon or Mars missions, but space solar power makes a Mars mission look sensible by comparison. Even assuming breakthroughs in solar panel efficiency and power beaming efficiency, a space solar platform capable of powering only one small city (i.e. a few megawatts) would require building a structure several times larger than the space station, which cost $100 billion. Getting enough space solar platforms into orbit to make a noticeable dent in United States electricity consumption would require such a breathtakingly expensive commitment to building very large rockets. I teach spacecraft design to college juniors, and in one class, we went through the sizing, cost, design and risk factors for space solar and found it lacking in every category.
Like I said, space based solar power is absurd.
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