May 23 - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Cindy Tumiel San Antonio Express-News

As the price of oil hovers at $70 a barrel, a Texas scientist claims to have a surefire way to deflate the escalating cost of energy and ease the political vise-grip that oil-producing nations hold on the rest of the world.

David Criswell, a professor at the University of Houston, says there is a source of power out there bountiful enough to light every household on Earth for the next 4 billion years, end worries about greenhouse gas emissions and set OPEC on its ear.

There is a catch, though. You have to fly to the moon to get it.

Energy from the sun is 30 percent stronger on the moon because it has no atmosphere to shield it or kick up weather events that interfere with the solar rays hitting it with full force.

So while some earthbound thinkers are trying to turn wind, corn, household waste and cow dung into consumable energy, a small group of far-reaching physicists and engineers has already spent years testing the theories and working on the practicalities of tapping into solar power that abounds in outer space.

Some say the moon is the perfect place to set up shop, but others think humans don't need to go nearly that far. Their idea is to float satellites full of solar collectors in an orbit where the devices would face the sun 24 hours a day, capture the energy and transmit it back to Earth.

Criswell's vision calls for establishing lunar mining camps populated with human prospectors who would work six-month shifts building and operating the gear that harvests solar power and sends it streaming 240,000 miles back to Earth.

They would fly to the moon with the equipment they need and use raw materials already on the moon to build thin sheets of silicon-based solar collectors and microwave converters. Receivers on Earth would catch the microwaves, turn them into electricity and feed the energy into the global power grid.

Harvesting a small part of the solar energy that strikes the moon would solve environmental problems caused by coal-burning power plants and provide enough power to bring a reasonable level of prosperity to 10 billion people, the projected population of Earth in 2050, Criswell said.

"You get rid of having to search for the fuel, you get rid of the ash, you don't have to buy the land or build the power station, and you don't have to maintain it, at least for another 4 billion years," Criswell said.

Not everyone has embraced his ideas, though; he meets skeptics as he travels to alternative energy conferences and professional meetings with his slide presentations and published studies.

"I think they are scared of it," said Criswell, a former NASA engineer who helped examine moon rocks brought back to Earth by Apollo astronauts. "I think it is too far out there for some people."

But the Houston scientist is hardly out there alone.

Neville Marzwell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory envisions the day when motorists will have their own saucer-sized receivers on the top of their electric-powered cars, drawing fuel directly from an orbiting solar satellite as they drive along the freeway.

Las Vegas may have its own dedicated solar cells in outer space, beaming down power to light up the millions of flashing bulbs outside the casinos and wedding chapels.

Marzwell worked on one of the earliest studies in 1979 that examined the idea and concluded that it was safe and technologically feasible. The only thing in the way was money.

"Congress asked, 'What is the cost?' and the cost was out of this world," said Marzwell, now manager of advanced concepts and technology innovations at JPL. "And at that time, oil was $12 a barrel, so it was just insane to do it."

Money is still an issue, Marzwell said. But as fuel prices rise and political woes ripple through oil-producing nations, business executives in countries that rely on imported oil are dusting off these old studies and using the Internet to find Marzwell's phone number.

"I am being flooded with phone calls from companies, begging, 'We can make a lot of money now. Why don't we revive this project?'" he said. "Calls are coming from China, India and Chile."

Still, big ideas come with a big price tag.

"This is something that has been studied for 40 years, and the only reason it hasn't happened yet is money," said Gregg Maryniak, a space scientist who has spent much of his career advising companies about commercial applications of space.

"Do you know what it costs to put something into orbit around the Earth? It costs $10,000 a pound," said Maryniak, now director of the McDonnell Planetarium in St. Louis.

"If people are unwilling to pay for clean power, it won't happen for a while because it will take awhile before this gets competitively cheap, compared to fossil fuel," he said. "We have lots of coal, but if we use it, we die."

Criswell estimated that it would take a $500 billion investment over a decade or more to get a moon-based operation going. But that is a fraction of what it will cost to build and fuel enough coal- or gas-fired power plants to support the burgeoning world population 50 years down the road.

Marzwell's plan is to start small, with one solar satellite serving selected targets on Earth.

"Don't try to replace every kilowatt in the United States all at once," he said. "Do it step by step, and then move to bigger markets."

Costs will come down, though, as space flight becomes a common activity by private industry, the scientists said. And if the price of oil keeps going up, private businesses will have the incentive to make the investments. Already, aerospace companies, which have technical know-how and infrastructure, are starting to form consortiums to explore the potential space power business, Marzwell said.

"It is starting to make financial sense," he said. "If oil goes to $80 or $90 (a barrel), then people will be begging on their knees to go that way because there will be guaranteed profit."

It also could transform the trade balance for the United States, turning it from an energy consumer to an energy producer.

"The punch line on this whole story is that people think the world is sort of in a bottle," Maryniak said. "But it is not closed at all. All our energy ultimately either came from the sun or comes from the sun. If we can reach out just a little beyond the Earth's biosphere, we can solve some of the most pressing problems the biosphere faces."