Orbital solar power

Date Created: 2024/03/27

This featured in a recent (16/3/2024) article in New Scientist. It’s not really geoengineering, it is another way of generating energy. It overcomes the intermittent nature of solar and wind power: in Earth orbit the sun is intense (1400 W/m2) and constant.

Solar radiation would be converted to microwaves and beamed down to arrays of antennas on Earth.

Indeed, deployment and creation of such orbital power stations using lunar resources rather than Earth ones was part of the business case quoted by Gerard O’Neill in The High Frontier .

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