Station in the Sky

Over Chicago a bright blue light hangs in the sky, visible 400 miles away. When dawn comes the light jades out in the sunshine, and the sky station stands revealed. It is a great, saucerlike disk supported in the high, thin air by whirling helicopter blades. On its deck perch radar antennas, turning ceaselessly. It stays up month after month. It has no fuel to be exhausted; its power is beamed to it from the ground.

This vision of the future is not science fiction but a serious project announced this week by Raytheon Manufacturing Co., maker of all types of radar. Raytheon believes it has achieved the longtime dream of engineers: the transmission of electrical power by radio waves.

The heart of Raytheon's projected system is an "Amplitron" tube, a chunky object 2 ft. high. The tube transmits as much as 25 h.p. on a beam of 10 cm. waves shot into the air by a dish antenna. A nest of these tubes can be focused at a point about 50,000 ft. up. Some of the beams' energy will wander off into space, but Raytheon scientists believe that a saucer-shaped receiver can capture 35% to 50%. Turned into heat, this energy could drive a gas turbine which would drive the helicopter blades.

Conferring with helicopter people, Raytheon's scientists concluded that a sky station will have to leave the earth under ordinary chemical power and buzz its way up to the spot where the power beams come to a focus. Then its microwave-fueled engine will take over. Test prototypes will carry a human crew, but later models will be automatic. Once they have been maneuvered into the focal spot, they will be kept there by electronic devices which sense when they are beginning to drift out of it. If the supporting beam fails, the station will drift down gently, supported by the autorotation of its blades. When it nears the ground, its chemical engine can take over and fly it to a convenient landing place.

Though Raytheon has not put even a model sky station into the air so far, the Air Force is already discussing a preliminary contract. Sky stations could support search radars to watch for aircraft around the curve of the earth. A chain of them acting as microwave repeaters could carry TV programs and telephone conversations across continents and oceans. Fitted with big glass bulbs filled with neon or xenon gas, which glows red or blue when microwaves pass through it, they could serve as stratospheric lighthouses to guide aircraft flying above the clouds.

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