Reaching for the stars, finally - will the young ones among us get pics of Alpha C.?

[Alex K]

The article noted the launching lasers require similar power to launching a space shuttle.

This is an appreciable percentage of the total installed electrical generating capacity of the United States.  Either the lasers are spread around the country, near poser plants (unlikely since it complicates an already complicated laser system) or we build a massive set of electrical power transmission lines to the launching lasers. Pricey.

It would be very suboptimal if they had to draw several Gigs directly from powerplants for a few minutes and nothing before and after. This cries out for some form of short term energy storage like a giant capacitor array which can be charged for a day with a few megawatts (something a truck sized diesel plant can do nowadays) and then release the power into the lasers in 2 minutes.

This beauty here delivers 35 Megawatts. Let it run for an hour and you have the necessary 2 GW*min. The High Magnetic Field Labs in Dresden are using an almost 1 Megawatt-minute capacitor bank already (50 MJ). This should be scalable by a factor 2000 for finite money if it's an international effort. So I'm not too worried about the power supplies for a Gigawatt-scale laser drive.



The capacitor bank