With recent hair-pulling issues, other things have fallen by the wayside of have been forgotten, ignored, etc. But this morning I noticed something vaguely interesting, if not terribly exciting.
A week-ish ago I bought a document off of eBay. Normally I wouldn’t have bought this *specific* document, because it’s available on the NASA tech report server. No point in spending money on something that’s available for free. But I bought it because the NASA PDF is, like a lot of them, scanned rather poorly, especially the art and diagrams. The intent is to scan the graphics from this and make it available to APR Patrons. The document is a 1980 DOE/NASA conference proceedings on the solar power satellite program.
The document is in fairly good shape except for a torn-off corner on the aft cover:
I saw the mailing label on the aft cover. The conference proceedings were originally mailed to one Peter Glaser of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Something about the name seemed familiar, so off to Wikipedia. Turns out he has his own entry:
Peter Edward Glaser (September 5, 1923 – May 29, 2014) was a Czechoslovakian-born American scientist and aerospace engineer. He served as Vice President, Advanced Technology (1985–94), was employed at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Cambridge, MA (1955–94); subsequently he served as a consultant to the company (1994–2005). He was president of Power from Space Consultants (1994–2005). Glaser retired in 2005.[1]
OK, not too surprisng that the guy who originally owned this conference proceedings on the Solar Power Satellite program back in 1980 would ahve been an aerospace engineer. but here’s the one kinda interesting bit:
In 1968 he presented the concept for,[6] and in 1973 was granted the US patent on,[7] the Solar Power Satellite to supply power from space for use on the Earth.
Huh. Turns out the SPS document I just bought was originally owned by the guy who patented the SPS.
Not world shatteringly important, just kinda spiffy.