Lunar-Based Self-Replicating Solar Factory

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Climate change, as currently precipitated by human activity, threatens the Earth's future. The causal activity, burning fossil fuel to generate electricity, remains unthreatened by sources of renewable energy due to renewable energy consistently being significantly more expensive than fossil fuel alternatives. Space solar power (SSP) is a potential solution for a portion of the cost; however, when launch and wireless energy transmission costs are considered, SSP is still more expensive than its fossil fuel counterparts. This proposal asserts that if the solar power satellites were constructed on the lunar surface out of lunar materials, there would be a dramatic enough reduction in cost for SSP to undercut fossil fuels by four orders of magnitude. To generate enough photovoltaic panels to fulfill global energy demand, the factory itself will be a self-replicating system (SRS) able to construct replicas of itself out of the materials of the lunar surface. The SRS would also construct a linear electromagnetic accelerator, or Mass Driver, which would be used to send the SSP components to geostationary Earth orbit, the ideal location for SSP. By constructing all of this with a SRS, only the initial R&D costs would be of any consequence and energy production capacity would grow exponentially at virtually zero cost.