Seeing how these are basically the saim claims regarding solar power as in the other recently posted articles...

>The concept of harvesting solar energy in space is not a new one, but until now, high launch costs and limited technology have hampered progress

High launch costs still hamper the idea. NASA concluded in a 1999 study that to even be competetive launch costs would have to come down to $200-$300/kg to GEO. That is not going to happen for a very long time, and probably not with purely chemical launch systems either. The "limited technology" argument applies to both space and terrestial arrays - only that gains in efficiency and manufdacturing capacity benefit terrestial arrays more, if anything, especially as far as decentralised power generation and storage is concerned.

>a cost modelling analysis by consultancy Frazer-Nash shows that the LCOE (levelised cost of electricity), used to compare different methods of electricity generation on a consistent basis, falls between £37 and £74/MWh, which is competitive with terrestrial renewable technologies, the organisation said.

No it is not. Even assuming the best case here this is still outperformed by utility-scale solar installations. Even wind power can outperform this. I highly doubt that this is competetive on any level if taking into account the difficulty of maintenance alone.

>[...]and with much lower land usage than conventional renewables, is helping the idea gain traction.

Also a false claim. Unless you want to sent a literal death ray in to orbit you still need about as much space on the ground for the receiving array as you would with regular solar installations - only with all the added downsides of doing things "in space":

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/

>A space-based solar power system might sound very cool and futuristic, and it may seem at first blush an obvious answer to intermittency, but this comes at a big cost. Among the possibly unanticipated challenges:

>* The gain over the a good location on the ground is only a factor of 3 (2.4× in summer, 4.2× in winter at 35° latitude).

• It’s almost as hard to get energy back to the ground as it is to get the equipment into space in the first place.
• The microwave link faces problems with transmission through the atmosphere, and also flirts with roasting ducks on the wing.
• Diffraction of the downlink beam, together with energy density limits, means that very large areas of the ground still need to be dedicated to energy collection.

>Traditional solar photovoltaics in good locations can accomplish much the same for much reduced cost, and with only a few times more land than the microwave link approach would demand. The installations will be serviceable and will last longer. Batteries seem an easier way to cover storage shortcomings than launching stuff to space. I did not even address solar thermal schemes in this post, which competes well with photovoltaics and can very naturally build in storage capability.

>I am left puzzled as to why we would want to take a harder, more expensive road to solar power. I think it is just not intuitive to most how difficult and expensive space is. **And perhaps they think it’s very futuristic and cool to push our power generation out to space: it fits the preferred narrative about where we’re going. I don’t know—I’m just guessing.

>Astronomers frequently face this issue: should we build a telescope/observatory on the ground, or launch something into space? The prevailing wisdom is that if the science can be accomplished on the ground, then by golly you’d best do it that way. You’ll have the result sooner, at less expense, and with a greater chance of success.

I am not certain this would even have realistic use cases for military applications, outside of actual space-based weapon systems (the afromentioned death ray).

The math simply doesn't add up, even if you assume unrealistic optimal conditions. Looking at the involved companies it's quite clear that these are bascially hand-outs to the industry. "Space base dsolar power" isn't any more "feasible" than it has been in the decades since the idea was first envisioned, simply because the underlaying physics don't change. Either you build a death-ray in orbit or it's more attractive and straight-forward to simply build collecting arrays on earth.