I apologize for not including your text in my response, but Yahoo!'s new
html formatting makes that somewhat difficult.

I find your pessimism about solar electric propulsion surprising - it's
been used at least twice with quite remarkable success already - the
EU's SMART-1, and Deep Space 1. It should at most add a few months to
get from LEO to GEO. Claiming it will take over ten times the cost to
deploy to GEO as to LEO for something with as much power available as
SPS components seems very unlikely. I'm not going to get into
engineering details, but any business working those angles would be
clearly malfeasant if they wasted that much of their investment on such
an orbit transfer.

Mass requirements for rocket launch and deployment shouldn't be any
worse than for the solar sail, which was why I mentioned that example.
Something that's in thin foldable or rollable sheets can surely be
easily compacted and made safe for launch without adding hugely to mass
requirements. I'm not trying to account for 10% effects, really just
orders of magnitude at this point. A Japanese group recently launched a
suborbital rocket looking at rapid deployment of a triangular thin sheet
of this sort with robotic assistance.

The problem with any form of solar concentrator is the pointing
requirements are very strict, which limits what you can do as far as
maneuverability via sailing. That's part of why I believe PV is a better
choice - but a concentrator might be the right choice anyway depending
on engineering details - if it's possible to do it economically with one
and the other is better, then it's certainly possible to do it
economically with the other.

Yes, certainly, the farther you go out in the solar system, the less
effective solar energy becomes. Inverse square law etc. The lowest
material requirements for space solar power would, conversely, be in
orbits much closer to the Sun. There's 90 million miles of room
sun-ward; if we ever do choose to build space colonies and space
manufacturing facilities, heading in would be much more effective than
heading out.

I wasn't referring to a human-inhabited lunar colony, in talking about
Criswell's lunar solar power project. Rather, it is a robotically run
system that should require little or no oxygen or hydrogen for
construction or operations, other than for occasional human visits to
replace or tend equipment. The moon is ideal for the construction
proposed; solar panels have already been made from the equivalent of
lunar regolith in experiments (only 1% efficient so far though).

Arthur