Let’s start at the beginning. It’s a widely accepted fact that there’s to many people in the world. It would be easy to refute, if it were not having an effect on resources, economies, and liberties worldwide. Energy is at the forefront of the resources that is scarce. Ignore the arguments about climate change for now, we’ve only got about 30 years of fossil fuels left. Not that scary, except that we’re consuming the fuels faster and it could lead to wars over the last scraps left.

It’s scary enough for the department of defense to take note. Yes believe it or not, the military does do research on how to avoid wars. These guy’s job is to make reports on how to avoid future wars, or at least win them. Not that they’re always right, but somebody has to fill the job. The same guys reading through the piles of information available stumbled upon a particular concept. Space Power, referred hereto after as SPS.

SPS has the potential to provide more power than all other sources of energy combined. The concept is fairly old, first being promoted in the 1970′s, and it drives space nerds mad that it hasn’t been done. Here’s the rundown as quick as possible. A solar panel in space receives the full brunt of the sun 24 hours a day, 7-days a week, somewhere between 3 to 5 times the energy of a land based solar panel. The idea is to lauch gigantic amounts of solar panels, attach them to a satellite, and beam the energy down to a receiving station on earth. The energy of the beam would not be unlike the cell phone signal we put near our faces every day. Yes it is true that SPS can provide practically infinite, location independent, renewable, base-load energy. Remember SPS is location independent, meaning that it can be beamed anywhere it needs to be.

So the department of defense guys in charge of space security asked the question. Since there’s a looming threat of war over fossil fuels, and heck we have already had a few over the stuff, who is looking into this crazy idea? They did research, and found out that the claims about the potential were true. The idea could provide enough energy to make oil and coal obsolete. They started asking around about the idea. NASA: We do space not energy. Department of Energy: We do energy not space. Great NASA lied, they fund green energy initiatives, and the Department of Energy lied, they fund technology studies on spacecraft.

The claims were not entirely true by all three parties. However, there is no way on earth to make it financially feasible unless the only customer is the military, or resources from the moon are used. Yes, there’s a twist in the plot ladies and gentlemen. To put the satellites into the desired orbit it takes a rocket, rockets expend above 90% of their mass to achieve orbit.

To get this massive amount of solar panels into space costs a lot of dough. Since the military pays top dollar for supply chains of fuel, why not bypass the need for a supply chain and beam it to wherever the troops need it. I’ll let you make the judgment call on that one. It doesn’t sound like the best idea.

However, NASA and the Department of Energy also had ulterior motives in the plot. The Department of energy has as it’s darling Nuclear Energy. They’re not about to advance any other notion. NASA, however, is where the story get’s interesting. They’ve known for quite some time about the potential. Their reply was just for expediency. There’s no reason to explain extremely difficult subjects like orbital mechanics, solar weather, or rocket science to the military…

There’s a few Achilles heels to SPS. NASA knows this fairly clearly. First problem, the concept is not popular. People don’t know about it, so there’s not much political cost in marginalizing the idea. Second, launch costs are at a choke point. The Space community is going through an upheaval over how to get launch costs down. Politics have kept launch costs at a high premium ever since the inception of the space shuttle. However, no matter how low launch costs get, there seems to be no way to make a geostationary SPS platform profitable using materials from earth. Third, there’s a pesky technical problem with coronal mass ejections frying an SPS system if it’s not shut down properly when the space weather gets bad.

This is where it starts to get interesting. Take note that the moon is very important in this, as insane as that may seem. Geostationary orbit is the preferred location for an SPS system.  It just so happens that it’s easier to get from the moon to geostationary orbit, than to get there from the ground on earth. This is an interesting factoid to keep in mind when looking at the Constellation Project, a Mars Mission, and the 1967 Space Treaty.

So what does this have to do with SPS? It just so happens that if a facility was built on the moon, it would have the capability to produce solar panels. It would make the financial feasibility of SPS a reality.

The roadblock is the 1967 space treaty. It bans governments from claiming territory in space. This is something that a moon base would have violated. We had a president that was willing to bend the rules to get what he wanted. However, his opposition is much more courteous to the international community. The hope and dream of a Mars Mission, SPS, and much more hinged on the Constellation Project. Even though some of NASA management had made bad decisions in the early stages of the design, there was still hope that it would have some success.

Enter a new set of characters. Elon Musk, Google, Bigelow, Virgin Galactic, and a long list of others. The Space treaty forbids governments from setting up shop on the moon. How novel of an idea that in the future colonial revolutions can be avoided by simply removing the colonial power. However, this places the burden of blazing the frontier on private individuals and companies. The new characters’ general purpose is to wrest some of the market of space away from the government, and in exchange reduce launch costs. Part of a greater effort to privatize space.

Why would these companies be interested in the moon? The common sense notion is that the first company to get a foothold on the moon will make the first trillionaire. This company, or set of companies will have access to energy and mineral resources in excess of a million times earth’s. Imagine being able to sell energy worldwide, and your supply is practically infinite, and that’s just the tip of an enormous iceberg of things that are possible. To explain the potential would take volumes of text, but the simple explanation is this: it would solve a lot of problems we have down here, if they did that up there. Again, It would solve a lot of problems we have down here, if they did that up there. The pressure we place on earth’s resources would be greatly relieved. Not just the energy demands, but the mineral, and ecological demands.

This is why many get excited about space, it’s why Stephen Hawking says we should go into space, it’s why Elon Musk risked some of his fortune to found SpaceX, it’s why Google is sponsoring the Lunar X-prize, it’s why space is so important to so many people. Not just people who are excited about space for it’s possible altruistic environmental impacts, but rich men who want to build a better world, and powerful men who don’t want to be left out of the next big game.

This is where our story ends. It’s pretty simple, yet there are many details left out for expediency.