This Boeing artwork depicts the late-1970’s concept for a receiver station on Earth for the energy transmitted from an orbiting solar power satellite. The SPS would convert sunlight into electricity, and then into a tightly collimated beam of microwaves; this would be captured at ground level by a vast receiver. Since microwaves are fairly easily captured, the receiver would appear as not a whole lot more than a vast elliptical field of chickenwire. Sunlight, wind and rain would pass right through it, thus the underside, as the painting depicts, could be conventional farmland.
Most of the time I’ve seen this painting reproduced it has been black and white; this rendering, scanned from Gatland’s “Space Technology,” is the only one I know of in color. Anyone have the full-rez version?
