A new NASA study seems to pull the plug on space solar power, by saying its vastly more expensive than Earth based solar.
A new NASA study seems to pull the plug on space solar power, by saying its vastly more expensive than Earth based solar.
34 comments
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No one has ever explained how the energy is suppose to come back to Earth in a non-crazy fashion. Until then, this will always come off as an impossible idea.
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Yeah, we already have space-based solar power. It's called "The Sun". The best thing is, we don't even need to go to space to get it. The Sun beams the energy all the way down to the ground where we can easily collect it!
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The sun is space-based fusion power, with photon-based transmission
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Reminds me of Sim City (I forget which one.. 2000?) where one of the power plants was a space based one that would beam the power down to a station. You’d then have a chance of getting a disaster where the beam “missed”.
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That makes sense. In space you need to deal with free bodies and a harsh environment. What's worse is that you need a way to send it all the way back to earth.
Solar on earth can sit near a city and is fixed.
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I've never understood some people's fascination with space-based solar. Why go to all that over-engineered trouble to do something you can do on Earth anyway, except in an orders of magnitude simpler way.
Also, I love to see people devote efforts to space development, but it depresses me to see people do it and waste their time. I know it's a simplistic way of looking at things, but I wish they'd devote their time to something useful, like creating a commercial space station.
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I think it makes sense in a Kardashev scale sort of way.
In the distant future, human energy demand may exceed what we can gather from terrestrial solar, especially since we wouldn’t devote the entire Earth to solar panels.
But it makes no sense in this century.
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It doesn't even make sense in the future. Not only have power requirements decreased over the past two decades, fusion would be a much smaller and denser power generation method than space-based solar.
If solar power improves and power requirements are reduced, eventually you might just slap a few solar cells on every electronic item and call it a day. Solar powered calculators were very popular.
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You say this like NASA doesn’t also do everything on your wishlist. And like discoveries in one area doesn’t enable progress in another.
No one is wasting their time by doing this research.
Our view of what’s “useful” also varies - a commercial space station is not that appealing IMO given that corporations will own the research as opposed to it being publicly funded & transparent.
Did this particular research yield the outcome you desired? No - lots of research doesn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s useless.
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It is one of the steps to get to a Dyson swarm.
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34 comments