US military looking seriously into space-based solar power

Military Target: Solar-Beaming Sats

blog.wired.com...

I find this is a great idea, as long as the motives are good. The government has been looking into this for quite some time. What I find very interesting is the harnessing and control of the power. We know the means, however to what ends? The follwing snippet gives some enlightenment:

The government -- especially NASA -- has, for decades, toyed with the idea of collecting sunshine, and shooting it to power everything from lunar bases to the terrestrial grid. The space agency just backed a conference at MIT last month on this very subject. But two problems always arose: the collecting "rectennas" would have to be massive (10 square kilometers, in one estimate), and the costs could soar even higher.

I'm not sure that I see what you're concerned about, regarding control of the power. The idea of generating solar power in space and 'beaming' it back to Earth via microwaves goes back at least as far as Gerard K. O'Neill's 1974 paper on space colonization, so that's nothing new in and of itself.

If you're worrid about control as in "keeping the beam targeted on the rectenna", that's solvable with a simple feedback system.

If you're worried about control as in "some government agency is controlling the distribution of the power", that's not very different from the way power's been distributed across most of the US (and particularly the southeast) for decades.

If you're worried about possible military uses for the microwave beams (using them to burn crops, torch cities, etc) the power density is 'way too low to cause much more than a bad case of radio static on certain frequencies.

Perhaps you could be a bit more specific about your concerns?