Electrical Bus

1. SSP can take advantage of our current and historic investment in aerospace expertise to expand employment opportunities. SSP’s technologies are near-term and have multiple attractive approaches. Many thousands of STEM jobs, on inspiring work that we understand how to do is needed to bring them to practical fruition.
2. Unlike coal and nuclear plants, SSP does not compete for or depend on scarce fresh water resources. Various liquid fuels, such as anhydrous ammonia, can be created from electricity, air and sea water and moved through the same sort of pipeline system as motor gasoline. It has 111 octane, whereas corn-based ethanol has a very low octane. We have a 50 year history of making and using liquid ammonia, primarily for farming, but also as the fuel of the X-15 rocket.
3. Unlike coal, oil, gas, ethanol, and bio-fuel engines, SSP emits very little CO2, only an antenna is on the Earth (the proper term is rectenna, or “rectifying antenna”).
4. Unlike bio-ethanol or bio-diesel, SSP does not compete for increasingly valuable farm land or depend on natural-gas-derived fertilizer. Corn and other foodstuffs can continue to be a major export instead of a fuel provider.
5. Unlike nuclear power plants, SSP produces no hazardous waste, does not proliferate nuclear weapons, or provide ready targets for terrorists.
6. Unlike terrestrial solar and wind power plants, SSP is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in endless quantities. SSP ignores cloud cover, night, storms, dust and wind. Our understanding of the magnetosphere & solar wind interaction – SSP’s GSO operating environment – has become highly mature since 1962.
7. Unlike coal and nuclear fuels, SSP does not require environmentally problematic mining operations.
8. SSP can provide true energy independence for the nations that develop it, eliminating a major source of national competition for limited Earth-based energy resources and dependence on unstable or hostile foreign oil providers.
9. SSP can be easily “exported” anywhere in the world, and its vast energy can be converted to local needs, from appliances in Asia to desalination of sea water in the American West.
10. Only SSP can provide a market large enough to develop the low-cost space transportation systems required to enable the SSP business case. We will not “drift” to SSP. As the FAA’s 2007 Commercial Space Transportation Forecast shows a declining launch market. Sunsat Corp must incentivize the orbital market fleet it needs to close the business case. SSP is the only market big enough to do this. The FAA forecasts show it won’t happen with business as usual assumptions, we need Sunsat Act.


With lower cost space transportation, many new ventures in space become possible – mining interests have been planning to mine Near-Earth-Objects (NEO), protection of space power satellites will also be needed, numerous lunar development projects become more doable. Led by a Lunar Development Authority many other opportunities open; conceivably commercial products from the Moon could be sold to Sunsat Corp. The highway to the future begins with chartering Sunsat Corp, inspiring our children with a real and bright future again.

SSP would revitalize America by showing that a multitude of space-development-related educational fields, from telerobotics to space transportation, from wireless power transfer to photovoltaics and environmental sciences, are vitally relevant to these great problems. Reduced launch costs, the key enabler, will provide unprecedented access to space and space operations beginning with clean, baseload SSP - reliable power delivery and global energy security at greatly reduced environmental impact.

Only SSP’s immense need for freight to orbit can support this vastly expanded space launch market necessary to lower the cost of the crucial space access component. The proper path to build SSP, is a new congressionally chartered corporation; we suggest calling it SunSat Corporation. Rough draft legislation chartering SunSat corporation and initiating SSP construction is shown in the Appendix.