What can be made in space that can allow moving this abundant energy? Obviously you can't haul ore up into space then refine it with a big magnifying glass and drop it back onto the earth. People talk about asteroids but they seem like they're a big delta-V away from where they'd be useful to put into Kia bumpers.
It's possible to grow extremely high quality crystals in microgravity, so there's your semiconductor and optics industries.
Bulk metallic glasses are easier to make in space for the same reason: crystals grow more slowly, and are easier to prevent.
High quality vacuum on a scale never seen before for experiments and industrial processes.
Imagine building the James Webb Space Telescope without needing to harden it against launch forces.
Nevertheless -- finding ways to move refined products around that embody a huge amount of energy is the traditional way to approach this problem.
And anti-matter, if you could package it, is an obvious example....
Anyway, space based solar power is the end game. Nothing on earth will ever provide the quantities of power (not even nuclear, fusion or fission) that capturing solar energy can.
Worth noting this isn't as much of a benefit as it's made out to be.
If you were designing a perfect power source, it would match demand, so produce more in winter in polar regions, and more in summer for regions with lots of AC. Similarly, you'd generally want more power during the day than at night.
This is part of the reason a mix of solar and wind that varies by latitude is an ideal mix.
Space power might get more bang for buck if it could target its power to different regions e.g. swapping from north to south as the seasons change, and/or following the day/night cycle and/or weather to maximise energy price.
This is really the key, if you can make a solar panel that’s as light and thin as say mylar, and then unfold it when you get to space, we could put up several kilometers of solar panels without requiring much mass at all. It’s not like there’s wind or rain up there to wear it down.
The article addresses this. To my mind 4 minutes per year is equivalent to the parent’s layspeak “no night” comment.
Why?
- You still get better duty cycle from the panels
- The time the power is missing is very small
- The need for storage, etc, is low because it's a short period of relatively low demand that is missing.
Of course, there are loads of problems with the idea but I can see why it's intuitively appealing.
With modern modular designs using phased array transmitters, even getting that much focus requires a reference signal from the ground target.
Really though I don't see this scaling to energy production for the masses due to the beaming logistics.
It'll mainly be used to recharge drones that never land and possibly fry enemy systems / missiles / etc.
Not least by just putting normal solar panels on it and jettisoning the whole space part.
Modern designs use a phased-array transmitter, and a reference signal from the ground for targeting. Overall energy loss is 40 to 60% according to the book The Case for Space Solar Power.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/716070main_Mankins_2011_PhI_SPS_Alp...
IIRC, for n identical parallel resistors of rΩ, Σ = nrΩ, so this only gets better for bigger systems.
To even begin to make sense, space freight to would need to be 1/10th of Musk's overly optimistic $10/kg. You could ship the panels air freight and still beat those numbers by a huge margin.
That says nothing of the construction costs. Which for SBS will cost orders of magnitude more than day laborers in t-shirts assembling arrays on the ground.
Every aspect of SBS is ridiculously expensive and requires as-yet entirely undeveloped space-based construction technologies. There's no near-term horizon where it's anywhere close to competitive with ground-based solar. This holds even if you assume over-building surface solar to 3x to match the duty cycle of SBS.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-to-reexamine-space-based-solar-po...
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...
https://spaceenergyinitiative.org.uk/
https://www.solarspacetechnologies.com.au/
Here's a nice recent summary (despite the publication date):
https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/harvesting-sunlig...
How far does this interference extend? Thousands of kilometers from the receiver[0, see page 250]. Because the transmitter is far, the beam spreads out quite a bit due to diffraction and because the transmit power is gigawatts there's hundreds of megawatts of stray power. Making bluetooth headphones and bluetooth low energy tags work worse will probably make people angry.
Different frequencies could be used, but that requires allocating spectrum, which is a pretty difficult task politically. In the US, there are a couple bands in the sub-10 GHz range where power beaming works best that have few users. So it's not impossible, but still politically difficult.
I know super narrow notch filters up in the gigahertz are difficult, but has anyone thought at all about how narrowband the power transmission could reasonably be? Because then at least notching would be possible to squeeze out adjacent spectrum.
One cool thing we could do is slightly boost the amount of sunlight northern latitude cities receive. This will make solar panels there more viable and will make cities far more livable in the winter season. This could also be done seasonally. This is a cool example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/rjukan-sun-nor...
There's solar heat based power stations, using mirrors that focus light on a point or a pipe to heat up oil; the question there is, would they become more effective if they get more light?
1 square meter of ground currently receives 1370 watts of energy (if my quick google is accurate); if this can be captured, you can do a back of the napkin calculation of how much you need. It's already been posited that filling a relatively small patch of e.g. a desert can fulfil all of europe's energy needs - no space things needed.
I assume someone has considered this scenario previously, but I imagine that SpaceX lift capacity and price might change the economics.
I'm not a huge fan of the artist(s) depicting space concepts in this particular article though (still better than most rendered art). I tried to do a bit of googling to find something better but in 10 minutes the best I could come up with was this site: https://www.kuriositas.com/2013/08/space-shuttle-concept-art...
I think there was more dynamism in the pre-CG concept art, often a bold use of color, sometimes an exaggerated use of shadow/light.
Weird, that's the first time in my life I've ever heard him referred to as 'James' rather than 'Jimmy'.
and the study itself: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2011_Practi...
A book-length treatment of modern SPS designs is The Case for Space Solar Power. It has detailed cost figures but was written before SpaceX had accomplished much, estimating a cost at gigawatt scale of 15 cents/kWh. I plugged in Starship launch costs and it came to 4 cents/kWh, which is not bad for 24/7 clean power without storage.
Also neat that we ended up with complimentary energy generation and storage technologies to fix the "it gets dark at night" problem of solar electricity generation!
