麻豆淫院

Solar power satellite (SPS) advocates have been dreaming of using space resources to build massive constructions for decades. In-space resource utilization (ISRU) advocates would love to oblige them, but so far, there hasn't yet been enough development on either front to create a testable system. A research team from a company called MetaSat and the University of Glasgow hope to change that with a new plan called META-LUNA, which utilizes lunar resources to build (and recycle) a fleet of their specially designed SPS.

Let's start with that SPS. The Multi-domain Operations using Rapidly-responsive PHased Energy Universally Synchronized (MORPHEUS) SPS system is a "sandwich-type," meaning the solar panels are on one side of the satellite, the electronics to convert the electricity from solar panels into a microwave are in the middle, and the microwave transmitters are on the other side鈥攍ike a sandwich.

According to the MetaSat authors of a recent , which was presented at the International Astronautical Congress in October, it is the first SPS system to undergo a combination of "eco-design principles" and life-cycle assessment (LCA), which is commonly used on Earth to quantity the environmental impact of a piece of technology.

When they did the LCA on MORPHEUS, the authors found that the numbers didn't look good. It required significant resources to construct on the Earth and then even more resources to launch its massive bulk into space. Simply making up for the energy to get it into position to start producing its energy would take years to repay.

So, the authors decided to take a different approach鈥攂uild it out of materials already available in space鈥攑articularly on the moon. The moon is covered in a substance known as "regolith" down to a few meters. It consists of fragments of rocks from the moon's surface that were blasted about by meteoroid impacts, which already created materials called "agglutinates," which are basically melted glass particles that contain an agglomeration of materials. It is also extraordinarily abrasive and can cause potential long-term health problems for humans or maintenance problems for machines.

However, it has useful materials, and META-LUNA plans to use them to build MORPHEUS power satellites automatically. The paper describes, admittedly at a very high level, the key components needed to build not only a fully autonomous manufacturing line for the various components of an SPS but also additional pieces of the factory itself, allowing it to grow over time in a way that would be familiar to John von Neumann.

Using readily available materials in the regolith, like silicon and aluminum, and advanced 3D printing techniques, an autonomous factory on the moon could, in theory, at least produce almost all of what the MORPHEUS SPS would need. It would even be capable of making its own propellant to launch the SPS components into lunar orbit.

One glaring exception, though, is advanced microcontrollers commonly used for control and communication. These, presumably, would have to be made on Earth and then flown to the moon, though there's no detailed discussion in the paper of how that would work. Luckily, microcontrollers are light, and only a few kilograms could supply significant parts for the automated factory.

Another critical factor is that the factory can recycle the SPSes themselves. The paper describes getting them back into lunar orbit by using a series of tugs that are also used to drag the original satellite from lunar orbit to Earth orbit and then disassembling them at the same on-orbit construction yard used to assemble the parts. However, the paper doesn't describe how to get the disassembled satellites back down to the surface, where they could be scavenged without causing a massive dust explosion.

The environmental modeling from this different architecture looks vastly superior to the original LCA done on the Earth-constructed MORPHEUS鈥攚hich comes as no surprise as there's no environment to disturb on the moon, and the energy cost of launching something to geostationary Earth orbit is dramatically reduced.

However, there's still a long way to go before any of the technologies necessary to make it happen are available. As the authors describe, advances in robotics and AI technology bring this dream closer daily. But, the true melding of SPSes and ISRU is still a long way off.