Chapter 18
The Long Way Home
Spencer Lockwood fumbled through the glove compartment and pulled out the map of California from the rental car packet. It didn’t show many details, but he needed only the major highways to find his way back home.
His return flight to Albuquerque did not take off until the next day, but Spencer had no intention of waiting in Livermore. He would only sit in a stuffy hotel room and read a few of the journals he had brought with him, go to bed early, fight traffic back to the San Francisco airport, then fly on to New Mexico.
Or he could drive most of the way back in the same time. It looked like a straightforward trip, a long, peaceful drive.
At Caltech in his grad-student days, Spencer and his buddies would hop into the car and take a road trip for the weekend, heading for the San Gabriel Mountains, Palm Springs, or Tijuana. It had been years since he’d done that.
Spencer relished the prospect of having no distractions, being able to think things out. Driving refreshed him, and the hum of the wheels on the highway gave him a sense of freedom.
He’d cancel his flight, then return the car at the Albuquerque airport. He’d even make that Tech Transfer ceremony in plenty of time. Grinning, Spencer checked the gas gauge—still three-quarters full. He cycled the radio through its SEEK mode twice, searching for surfin’ music, and finally settled for an oldies station. He turned the car east onto Interstate 580.
The broad landscape seemed to open its arms to welcome him. The five-lane highway wound upward into line of grassy hills that rose like battlements on Livermore’s eastern flank. The Altamont range held something special, one of his favorite sights each time he came to Sandia in Livermore. Stretching for miles across the mountains stood thousands of wind turbines, row upon row. The world’s largest wind farm captured gusts whipping over the range, spinning white aluminum blades and generating power.
As he cruised along, he craned his head to stare at several different types of windmill, the standard sunflower shape, three-bladed wind turbines, whip-like two-bladed propellers that spun around in a blur. Vertical-axis Darrieus wind turbines stood near the freeway like giant eggbeaters stirred by the breeze.
Tax incentives for alternative energy development had made most of the Altamont windmills feasible during the Reagan administration; when the tax credits ended, many investors sold their windmills, and some of the turbines had fallen into disrepair. The sprawling wind farm still generated a great deal of power, though, which was sold to the state electrical grid.
The windmills were set up much the way Spencer’s microwave antenna farm would work in White Sands. Windmills in the east; solar-power satellites in the southwest. Oil spill to the west. Spencer smiled: the future would have its way, sooner or later.
The car raced onward, leaving the windmills behind.
O O O
The Central Valley lay like a swath of the Great Plains down the middle of California.
Without a panicky chaos of cars around him, Spencer liked to drive and let his mind wander. He enjoyed daydreaming while racing down a desert highway, surrounded by the sprawling horizon, wide-open spaces. It was how he brainstormed, throwing out crazy ideas to himself until he found something that made sense.
And he wasn’t going to let this road trip go to waste.
He thought of his smallsats orbiting over the antenna farm. The technology of the collectors was nothing new. Silicon photovoltaic cells had been around since 1954, when the prototypes achieved only a six-percent energy conversion from direct sunlight. The energy crisis in the 1970s turned an enormous research effort toward developing “clean and inexhaustible” solar power, pushing photovoltaic cells up to twenty-percent efficiencies. In 1989 a concentrator solar cell used lenses to focus sunlight onto the cell surface, yielding even higher efficiencies. Gallium-arsenide and other types of photovoltaic materials also showed promise. Unlike electric generators, solar cells had no moving parts and could operate indefinitely if they were protected from damage. And they produced no pollution.
But widespread application of ground-based solar energy had always been hindered by its cost—up to a thousand times more than electricity generated by oil, coal, or hydroelectric plants.
Now that he had successfully demonstrated the technique of staggering focused microwave beams from low orbit, though, Spencer’s team had solved that problem. But there were practical considerations as to how many smallsats they could loft, and how many antenna farms could be scattered across the landscape.
The only way to convince people was to complete the experiments, get the facility providing real power for real people. It wouldn’t be difficult to hook up to New Mexico’s main power grid.
Spencer’s team had operated on shoestring budgets before. Life in grad school, even with Professor Mansfield’s generous help, had taught him how to make do. Thanks to the lukewarm review from Lance Nedermyer, Spencer’s gang back at White Sands retained only the minimum amount of money to keep going—“maintenance budget” the Department of Energy called it. Just enough to keep the lights on and the custodians employed. But ingenious use of resources could always counterbalance budget cutbacks. They could even sell electricity to the Public Service Company of New Mexico.
Spencer intended to keep calling his own shots, performing the research he could afford. It was the type of challenge he enjoyed.
He pushed down on the Mazda’s accelerator, listening to the engine hum louder, but the landscape was so vast it crawled by. He couldn’t wait to get back to White Sands.
***