Diverting hurricanes with satellites a possibility

Hurricane Harvey, which recently devastated the Texas Gulf Coast, reminds us of the awesome and unstoppable power of the Earth's weather. It was followed very quickly by Hurricane Irma that hit Florida and Maria that devastated Puerto Rico. Currently, nothing can be done about hurricanes besides fleeing them or hunkering down in place and riding them out, so the idea of finding a way to stop or divert a hurricane from a densely populated area has a certain appeal.

Unfortunately, most proposed methods of diverting storms, such as hitting them with lasers, blowing them up with nuclear bombs, or bombarding them with soot are either impractical or raise fears of unintended consequences. One proposal, though, may offer a way to not only divert hurricane but to do so with enough precision that they can be steered out of harm's way.

The idea is to use a piece of technology called a solar power satellite, first imagined by Dr. Peter Glaser in the late 1960s.

A solar power satellite would be powered by a massive solar collector, perhaps miles in diameter, deployed in a high geosynchronous orbit. The SPS would collect energy from the sun and convert it into microwave energy to be beamed to Earth to receiving stations on the ground.

The receiving stations would then convert the microwaves into electricity that would be fed into the grid. The concept has the promise of clean, almost limitless energy.

Solar power satellites as a hurricane diversion device was once proposed in a 2004 piece in Scientific America by Ross N. Hoffman, an environmental and atmospheric scientist. The idea is to combine seeding a hurricane with silver iodide crystals with using the microwave energy from the satellite to change the course of the storm. Thus, a hurricane headed for a populated area would be sent to the cold North Atlantic, where it would dissipate and die, having been deprived of the warm water it needs to sustain itself.

Of course, the trick is to build a solar power satellite. Until recently, the concept has proven to be impractically expensive. However, recent technological advances may bring the idea of space-based solar power and, as a side benefit, hurricane diversion, into the realm of the practical.

Asteroid and lunar mining have already been transformed from science fiction to potentially realistic businesses. A number of companies, including Moon Express, Planetary Resources, and Deep Space Industries, have attracted interest and investment with proposals to mine the heavens of valuable minerals.

A company called Made in Space, with the help of NASA, is developing a device called the Archinaut that combines 3D printing with robot arms to create large-scale structures in space. Some recent tests that have taken place using a prototype on the ground have proven to be successful, and the company and the space agency would like to try out the Archinaut in space as soon as 2018, though the date may slip.

Thus the technology of asteroid and lunar mining could be combined with in-space manufacturing and assembly to create the first working solar-powered satellite.

The addition of such an option for energy production would be of great benefit to humankind. The use of a space-based solar power station to divert hurricanes would entail some risk. Messing around with storms of such size and power is no joke. The potential for unintended climate change by sending every massive storm into the far North Atlantic certainly has to be considered. What happens in a computer simulation may not happen the same way in the real world.

On the other hand, names of previous storms such as Ike, Katrina, Sandy, and now Harvey, still fill the people who experienced them with dread. Hurricanes cause tens of billions of dollars in damage, sometimes take hundreds of lives, and make the lives of millions of others miserable for weeks, sometimes months. If a way exists to lift the yearly dread of hurricane season from the tens of millions of people who live on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, as well as in the Caribbean and in other parts of the world, does it not behoove us to see if it will work?

The benefit in lives and treasure saved could be beyond evaluation.

Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration entitled "Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?" He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.