[net.followup] Why do solar powersats imply the death of ground based astronomy?

js2j@mhuxt.UUCP (sonntag) (09/04/84)

Have I missed something?  Everyone else seems to be pursuing this discussion
on the assumption that powersats would reflect an amount of light roughtly
equal in magnitude as the moon.  Why should a powersat do that?
    I know there are many different ways in which such a satellite could be
configured, but all of the ways I can think of would involve focusing
sunlight onto some kind of (on the satellite) collector and then beaming the
energy down to a huge microwave antenna.  In this kind of scheme, little
or no light would be reflected back to the earth.  
    So what kind of powersat are all of you talking about?  How does it
work and why does it reflect all of this sunlight instead of collecting it?

Or are you talking about astronomy in the microwave spectrum only?  I guess
spillover from the power beam would give you unusually high amounts of
background "noise", but it would all be at one known frequency anyhow, so
it could be filtered out.

Confused,
Jeff Sonntag
ihnp4!mhuxl!mhuxt!js2j