The idea of beaming electricity down to Earth from satellites in space is back in the news, now that worldwide concern over global warming is bringing about some rethinking of our current ways of generating power. Power plants that burn coal, oil, or natural gas create combustion-product problems. Nuclear power plants have spooked certain segments of the population since the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl events of a generation ago, though the fact that they are actually quite safe these days and have none of the emission problems of fossil-fuel plants has begun to attract support for them even from environmentalists who long opposed them. Hydroelectric power and wind power are also carbon-free, but generating them involves building giant dams or covering great swathes of land with windmills, which engenders ecological problems of its own. The use of solar-power panels also is land-intensive, and in any case is suitable only where long hours of sunlight can be consistently counted upon. And so, since the relentless rate of growth in annual demand for electrical power is unlikely to slow down in the years ahead, the concept of shipping power down from space is getting major attention these days, nearly eighty years after it first turned up in science fiction.

One big backer this time around is the Pentagon, which issued a report in October 2007 asserting that beaming energy down from space satellites would provide “affordable, clean, safe, reliable, sustainable, and expandable energy for mankind.” Those powerful political buzzwords are to be found in a seventy-five-page study conducted for the Defense Department’s National Security Space Office, which has been examining potential energy sources for worldwide U.S. military operations. The Pentagon people do note, however, that although the technology for building such space-based power plants already exists, the cost of lifting thousand of tons of apparatus for collecting and transmitting the energy into space would be formidable.

While the Defense Department ponders the budgetary aspects of such a project, the tiny Pacific nation of Palau—twenty thousand inhabitants scattered over a cluster of islands—is ready to go ahead. Palau got involved after the American entrepreneur Kevin Reed, speaking at the Fifty-Eighth International Astronautical Congress in India in September 2007, suggested that Palau’s Helen Island would be a fine site for a demonstration project in which a satellite in orbit three hundred miles up would ship down microwave beams carrying one megawatt of power, enough to run a thousand homes. A 260-foot rectifying antenna, or “rectenna,” would act as the receiver. Since Helen Island is uninhabited, there would be no immediate economic benefit, but the pilot rig, Reed said, would at least demonstrate the safety of power transmissions from space.

The government of Palau quickly showed interest in the scheme, suggesting that it might well be extended to the populated islands of the archipelago. “We are keen on alternative energy,” said Palau’s president, Tommy Remengasau. “And if this is something that can benefit Palau, I’m sure we’d like to look at it.” Reed has organized an American-Swiss-German consortium and is looking for corporate financing for the estimated eight hundred million dollar cost of the system, which he thinks can be in operation as early as 2012.

NASA has for many years been studying much more grandiose ideas for beaming power down from space. One NASA plan involves satellites in geostationary orbits, 22,300 miles up, that would be equipped with arrays of solar panels eighteen square miles in size and transmit power continuously to rectennas of similar vast area on Earth. Each of these orbiters would yield twice as much power as Hoover Dam, and, according to studies independently carried out in Japan, the beams from them would be no more dangerous than microwave ovens, though no-go zones would have to be established to keep aircraft out of their path. Another proposal—and I am indebted to SF writer Allen Steele for details of this one—is the SunTower, an array of photovoltaic cells ten miles long in orbit six hundred miles high, that would collect solar energy (available twenty-four hours a day up there, remember), convert it into electricity, and send it via low-power microwave beams to rectennas on Earth. The cost of hoisting all this hardware into space and assembling it there would be enormous, of course, but once the initial investment had been made, limitless supplies of carbon-free electricity would head our way.

The progenitor of the modern proposals for beaming power down from space seems to be Peter Glaser of the Arthur D. Little Corporation, who first set it forth in an article in Science in 1968. Gerard K. O’Neill, an advocate for the development of permanent space stations who had been working on space-colonization plans for NASA, expanded on Glas-er’s ideas in a 1976 book, The High Frontier, that led to a flood of further books and studies. Of course, power-generating stations in space began to turn up in science fiction, also. The Canadian writer Donald Kingsbury, who attended a 1977 meeting of the American Astronautical Society in San Francisco where much attention was paid to the theme of the industrialization of space, embodied the idea in a 1979 novella, “The Moon Goddess and the Son,” and then a 1986 novel of the same name. In 1981, rocketry expert G. Harry Stine published under his “Lee Correy” pseudonym the novel Space Doctor, about the problems of constructing a power satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Allen Steele’s 1989 novel Orbital Decay shows a gang of rough-hewn construction guys working aboard a space satellite called Olympus Station—nicknamed “Skycan”—to build a power-transmission plant. And plenty of other writers have dealt with the subject since.

But the history of the power-satellite theme in science fiction goes back much farther than that —to 1931, astonishingly, and Murray Leinster’s novelette “Power Planet,” which, like so many Leinster stories, introduced a startling new idea to our field.

Leinster is not much spoken of in the SF world nowadays, but he was a major figure fifty years ago, commonly thought of as “the Dean of Science Fiction.” He was a courtly, soft-spoken Virginian, born in 1896, whose real name was Will F. Jenkins. Though he had hoped to become a scientist, circumstances did not allow him to go beyond an eighth-grade education. Nevertheless, he pursued a lifelong interest in technology, maintaining a home laboratory from which flowed scores of patentable inventions, while at the same time carrying on a major career as a fiction writer under the “Leinster” pseudonym, with science fiction as one of his specialties. It was Murray Leinster who gave us the concept of parallel worlds in “Sidewise in Time” (1934), did one of the first generation-ship interstellar stories in that year’s “Proxima Centauri,” and wrote a definitive tale of the problem of communi- cation with aliens in his classic novelette “First Contact” in 1945. His other major contributions to science fiction over the course of a fifty-year career would make a long list.

“Power Planet” appeared in the January 1931 issue of the pioneering SF magazine Amazing Stories. The magazine science fiction of that era was mostly pretty creaky work, but “Power Planet,” despite some crude pulp touches, remains surprisingly readable today. It presents us with fiction’s first power-generating space station: “The Power Planet, of course,” Leinster writes, “is that vast man-made disk of metal set spinning about the sun to supply the Earth with power. Everybody learns in his grammar-school textbooks of its construction just beyond the Moon and of its maneuvering to its preent orbit by a vast expenditure of rocket fuel. Only forty million miles from the sun’s surface, its sunward side is raised nearly to red heat by the blazing radiation. And the shadow side, naturally, is down to the utter cold of space. There is a temperature drop of nearly seven hundred degrees between the two sides, and Williamson cells turn that heat-difference into electric current, with an efficiency of 99 percent. Then the big Dugald tubes—they are twenty feet long on the Power Planet—transform it into the beam which is focused always on the Earth and delivers something over a billion horsepower to the various receivers that have been erected.” The space station itself is ten miles across, “and it rotates at a carefully calculated speed so that the centrifugal force at its outer edge is very nearly equal to the normal gravity of Earth. So that the nearer its center one goes, of course, the less is that force, and also the less impression of weight one has.”

This is astonishing stuff for 1931. Where did Leinster/Jenkins get the idea?

The earliest known reference to an orbiting space station is in Edward Everett Hale’s story “The Brick Moon” (1869), in which a satellite built of brick is launched into orbit by huge flyweels. Kurt Lasswitz’ 1897 novel, Auf Zwei Planeten (Of Two Planets), describes Martian space stations shaped like spoked wheels in orbit above the Earth. Neither of these says anything about power generation, of course: the first story comes from the pre-electrical age, the second from the dawning era of commercial power generation on Earth. For the idea of a power-generating satellite we have to look to the German rocketry experimenter and space-exploration propagandist Hermann Oberth, whose 1929 book By Rocket Into Interplanetary Space (an expansion of his 1922 doctoral thesis, rejected by his university as “too utopian”) speaks of an orbiting station 625 miles above sea level that would use immense mirrors to transmit light beams to Earth for lighting and heating large areas.

Perhaps Leinster had read something about Oberth’s orbiter in Hugo Gernsback’s magazine Wonder Stories, since Gernsback kept up with European speculative thought and frequently ran articles about it. Leinster may also have known of the work of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Croatia-born inventor and physicist who was a fountain of dazzling and revolutionary scientific ideas but died impoverished in 1943 at the age of eighty-six. As far back as the 1890s, Tesla was trying to create a system of wireless transmission of electrical energy across great distances using a high-power ultraviolet beam. SF writer Geoffrey Landis tells me that Hugo Gernsback was a great advocate of Tesla’s work and often featured him in his magazine Electrical Experimenter, which Leinster/Jenkins very probably read.

Short of rummaging through dozens of fragile old magazines, I have no way of knowing whether Hugo Gernsback planted the seed that led to “Power Planet.” But it is just as likely that Leinster, the inveterate gadgeteer and demonstratably ingenious author of dozens of strikingly original science fiction stories, came up with the idea of power satellites on his own. In any case, the credit for introducing the idea to science fiction, and doing it in so presciently plausible a way, must go to him.

Will such power planets be built? I think they will. Not immediately, maybe, but diminishing fossil-fuel supplies on Earth and ever-expanding electricity demand make it inevitable, perhaps not in my lifetime but quite possibly in yours, and certainly in your children’s. And remember: Murray Leinster said it first.