Journal 11, November 8

http://www.physorg.com/news176879161.html

This article discusses the possibility that Japan will launch a space station consisting of solar energy panels to harvest energy directly from the sun, in space, where the solar energy is more powerful, and beam it down to Earth with laser beams or microwaves. It sounds like a ridiculously difficult idea to make come to life, especially the part where they actually transport materials into space and construct this multiple square kilometer solar panel. Apparently Japan has been researching this since 1998, and recently selected many technological giants to participate in the project, so hopefully research is moving along nicely in Japan. This could be a plausible solution to energy difficulties, since solar energy isn't going to run out, and if it did, we wouldn't need the energy anyway because there wouldn't be a sun. Regardless, the solar energy is more powerful in space than it is within the atmosphere, so as long as they can figure out an effective method to transport the energy from the space station back to Earth and actually make use of it, then this seems like a great idea for energy. This article describes more about the idea, and goes in depth on cost and use of the energy. The $21 billion price tag of the project is pretty high up there, but over the course of this semester I've read about a lot of other projects that cost a lot of money and are much less useful. This space station could power 294,000 homes. The Japanese plan to test a small satellite with this technology by 2015, so this could also be done in a reasonable time frame, at least for this size of project.