Easy energy calculations are posted

For those folks who are concerned by CO2 rising and environmental degradation, and say that it is because there are too many people on the planet, think again. We already could be starting to use unlimited 24/7 solar-derived energy from solar power satellites placed in GEO by use of a special hoop type transportation structure, that uses internal stored energy for support, instead of requiring super-strength construction materials like required by an anchored tether Earth Space Elevator, which is still not possible - if we had started construction when I first proposed it in 1989. The key part of the transportation is the very small energy that is actually given to payload during the lift from ground to GEO: 15.66 KWh/kg, or at ten cents per KWH, $1.57 per kg of payload mass put into GEO. The hoop-type electrically powered ground-to-GEO transportation structure system is at lest one way to do it. So I have spent my day creating a downloadable pdf showing the general case calculation for determining the energy added to payload by lifting up through a planetary inverse-square gravitational field: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/32802637/CalculatingworkOfLiftingBetweenAltitudes.pdf I wrote it in easy to understand terms. Ought to be a calculation technique that people with interests in space ought to be able to do easily when needed. I point out three ways to calculate the energy required, going through two of them in detail, getting the same result.

What could we build in GEO, besides the current communication satellites, at a cost of $1.57/kg plus overhead and reasonable profit? How about the long-envisioned Solar Power satellites in abundance, and means to maintain them up there. How about large scale solar powered mass-spectrometer total recycling plants in GEO, with low cost lift up there for processing back into their purified components for re-use, instead of dumping them into the environment to poison us all. How about spaceports in GEO, to where components for huge spacecraft are cheaply electrically lifted from the ground, spaceports from which exploration of Mars and its moons, could be done from support crews of several thousand people living in comfort in Mars orbit, enabled by the low cost of lifting their spacecraft construction materials and fuel up to GEO spaceports, where the spacecraft have a 91% head start in energy to distant space destinations.

I ask, do we really really have to squabble and bicker, ego posturing and even war on each other at times, over territory and dwindling resources, instead of going this route? Really? Yikes, I guess so.