Gartner interviewed me for the article last week – here’s my part (though I don’t recall saying all the funding should go through NASA):
Arthur P. Smith, a physicist who has written about solar power from space for the American Physical Society (PDF), said that interest in beaming solar power from satellites has waxed and waned since it was first proposed more than 30 years ago. Smith said that research funding was highest during the oil crisis in the Carter administration, but after gas prices retreated the program was shelved for almost 20 years.
Pursuing solar power from space “should be part of our plan for energy independence,” Smith said. He said that if NASA invested $10 billion in research over the next 10 years, the technology would likely become cost-effective enough to begin launching satellites.
Nevill Marzwell of JPL is also quoted, among others:
The United States “doesn’t have the political will to fund the research” because of pressure from fossil-fuel lobbyists, Marzwell said. “We could have become the Saudi Arabia of the world electricity market,” Marzwell said. But because the coal and oil industries don’t want threats to their profits, they applied political pressure, causing the program to be scrapped, according to Marzwell.
Was that what happened? I wish we knew more! I wonder if the secretive Cheney Energy Task Force had anything to do with it – after all, Vice Presidents have traditionally been in charge of US space policy.