NASA Wants to Collect Solar Power Directly From Space... But.

Solar Energy / Space & Other Applications

Date posted: 02/24/17

Christianna Reedy reports that space-based solar power has had a slow start, but the technology may finally take off in the next few decades. Since its inception, solar power has had a severe limitation as a renewable energy... it only works when the Sun is shining. This has restricted the areas where solar panels can be effectively used to sunnier, drier regions, such as California and Arizona. And even on cloudless days, the atmosphere itself absorbs some of the energy emitted by the Sun, cutting back the efficiency of solar energy. And let us not forget that, even in the best of circumstances, Earth-bound solar panels are pointed away from the Sun half of the time, during the night. So, for over half a decade, researchers from NASA and the Pentagon have dreamed of ways for solar panels to rise above these difficulties, and have come up with some plausible solutions. There have been several proposals for making extra-atmospheric solar panels a reality, many of which call for a spacecraft equipped with an array of mirrors to reflect sunlight into a power-conversion device. The collected energy could be beamed to Earth via a laser or microwave emitter. There are even ways to modulate the waves energy to protect any birds or planes that might wander into the beam path. But security concerns have also limited orbital-based solar systems applications. Such orbital collection stations would be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. However, lunar-based systems may be the answer. See Chapter 8 of the EMD-AAPG Memoir 101: http://i2mconsultants.com/downloads/corp/Memoir101-T0fC2016.pdf