NASA Testing Solar Array

What do you think is the most worthless material that one can find? How about dust, that material that seems to be everywhere. It balls up under your beds and makes stringy shapes in the corners of your walls and requires constant attention to stop it from taking over your home. If you said dust, you would be wrong. No I am not talking about the dust in your home or even that exotic dust that forms on your electrical devices, I am talking about Moon dust. Those of you old enough to remember the Apollo landings on the Moon might recall all the problems that moon dust caused with the astronauts. They tracked it back into their capsules and it got into everything. The world thought that the Apollo capsule was sterilized, when it came back to Earth and I am sure the outside was, since it had to pass through the atmosphere and reached very high temperatures, but the dust was still inside the Apollo capsule and I believe that there was really no way of completely sterilizing the astronauts, since that must have breathed in some of this stuff. It was impossible to avoid.

We keep hearing about how solar cells are advancing and becoming more and more efficient. Some say that they will reach the point some day, where they will be able to power the average home and this home will no longer have to be tied into the power grid. It turns out that NASA has found that Moon dust contains material that will allow them to manufacture solar cells on the Moon. The plan is to manufacture them and create huge arrays that will supply power to a moon station. They discovered this in a strange way. A contract was given out to a company to create simulated Moon dust. This dust was then examined to test different methods of manufacture for these devices. The experts say that the material they need is contained in the Moon's "regolith". So how are they planning to to manufacture these things? "Our plan is to use an autonomous lunar rover to move across the moon's surface, to melt the regolith into a very thin film of glass and then to deposit thin film solar cells on that lunar glass substrate. An array of such lunar solar cells could then be used as a giant solar energy converter generating electricity," I just hope and pray that this will not be used to power weapons of any sort. "These solar cells would have lower efficiencies compared to devices currently used on Earth, but by using such a large surface area, we could eventually generate enough electricity to supply a lunar base, support lunar manufacturing or colonies."

Here is something that I don't understand. We have been working on developing more efficient solar cells for years and we haven't reached the point where we have cells that are efficient enough yet. The scientists working on the project to develop solar cells for the Moon are in the process of creating much lower efficiency solar cells. These will be far less efficient than those on the satellites that we send up. Why can't NASA just figure out how to send things to the Moon cheaper. The Moon is pretty close to the Earth and even if it took a ship a month to get there, so what? Maybe an inflatable ship with a tiny engine is the answer. It could coast to the moon with a cargo of the most efficient solar cells in it and no rovers would be needed. I guess you might have to hope that no meteorites hit it, but it could have different chambers, so that if one deflates there are still others to maintain structural integrity. Sorry but I just think that building devices that are less capable and take up more more area are not the answer.

So how good are these cells really? It is said that they will be able to convert about 1% of sunlight to energy. This means that you would need about 25 times more of them to equal the same amount of output as our most advanced solar cells. This is sort of a backward technical step. There has to be other ways. Another method of supplying power to a moon colony might be by satellite. I wonder why we couldn't station a few satellites around the Moon in geosynchronous orbit that would beam power down? This way there wouldn't be any work to do on the Moon at all concerning supplying power, all you would have to build is a receiving station. This plan has already been proposed for the Earth, so why wouldn't it work there? Sometimes I think that no matter how crazy an idea is, it is not judged on its merits, but on who is suggesting it. To clarify what I am saying, if an idea is put forward by someone and backed by a powerful politician, it has a much better chance of being accepted, even if it is inferior, in a government agency. This is what I never cared for in government. So many good things have gone down the tubes because members of congress have backed other projects because they were either manufactured in their district or because powerful lobbyists were behind them. No thought was ever given to what was better for the country. As far as NASA is concerned, this would not be their first mistake, just look at the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station which eat up the budget and kill people.

I just can't help it. I feel about solar cells the same way that I feel about electric cars, wind and water power, and that is that we are being kept behind on purpose by the monopoly known as big oil. Why is it that when a true breakthrough comes along like an advanced battery, big oil buys the company and you never hear about it again? I don't think that this question really needs an answer, since we all know what it is. So why aren't solar cells further along and why aren't we using a combination of technologies to kick the oil habit? The answer is very easy to get to. The most powerful lobbyists in Washington work for the oil companies. They have managed to keep us down for years by getting legislation passed that was favorable to them. This government is full of oil men, from the President down. Need I say more?

Flexible Copper-Indium-Diselenide Solar Cell

It is very strange, but reports that came out in 2002 about this project proclaimed that the solar cells that were going to be made on the Moon would be 35% efficient, thus shattering the old record for efficiency. Later reports stated what I wrote above, that the solar cells would be far less efficient than the ones used now and might only be 1% efficient. Why did these reports change over the years? Could some of this be misinformation? Maybe the government doesn't want anyone to know that these solar cells are far more efficient and that they are resistant to radiation as first claimed? It seems to me, knowing how the government works, they would want to keep these facts secret, but the genie was let out of the bottle and if the early reports are true and these cells are far more efficient than we have been led to believe, they might have some weapons applications that we wouldn't want anyone to know about. What I have always failed to understand is why, when our enemies are known to know about something, that it is still kept from us.