I always thought this was a bad idea because I pictured microwaves blasting down and frying any bird that happened to fly through the space, or the easy conversion to military use, frying targets like something out of Real Genius, but reading around a bit they say the energy isn't much more than that of the sun on a sunny day.

>I always thought this was a bad idea because I pictured microwaves blasting down and frying any bird that happened to fly through

It's not like that's going to stop tech development. Hell, birds can fly into plane or helicopter engines and it doesn't just kill the bird, it can easily disable the aircraft as well, and it's not like that stopped us from using them. Might sound cold, but that's how things are.

Honestly free cooked meals falling from the sky sounds pretty great

I wonder if this could have an application on Mars, avoiding the dust storms, and they could get the solar unit in place before landing on the planet with a receiver unit ready to go for power to get right to work.

Don't ask them about the laser this solar power is providing ;)

Ever see a bird fly in front of a long range microwave transmission antenna when it starts transmitting? It does what you'd pictured

That is something that I have for sure never seen.

You may have seen a meteor shower, but I bet you've never seen a shower "meatier" than this.

I want you to think about what you’ve done /u/go_comatose_for_me And from now on. Stop playing with yourself

Oh bravo sir. GOOD AFTERNOON.

Yeah it's not a damn microwave oven. They're just not going to be that powerful on the ground. You need big ass antennas covering a lot of area to collect the power. Even if you wanted to fry birds with it, it would be a significant engineering challenge achieving that level of beam collimation.

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Seems like a niche application.

“If you have a flood or a hurricane that knocks out power to an area, it takes weeks sometimes for them to get back online,” Patel said. “This system can provide temporary power during those periods until that infrastructure is built back up.”

Doesn't seem cost effective, but then neither did corn based ethanol.

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That’s just the application they’re announcing, I imagine the military would have other ideas. Nothing stealth obviously.

Nah, it's probably going to be used to extends supply lines. Who needs a gas generator when you can just beam electricity down when you need it? After all they are a military contractor.

Look at you two, thinking birds are real… /s

Isn't that already how much energy would be coming down there, on a sunny day? So where's the extra energy meeting transmitted?

It's that much energy, but the weather isn't supposed to have much of an effect on the output, nor the time of day.

Still isn’t but it wasn’t then either!

What’s the sarcasm for??? They’re not real… man.

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Well, it's about time.

The idea of Space-Based Solar Power has been around since the 1970s, at the time popularized by the book The High Frontier.

Just like the recent milestone in fusion power generation, this technology would need a large investment of time and money to become viable. The higher the investment, the faster the development.

They don't even know that Bird is an acronym for Basic Information-Recording Drone, smh.

Government drone account, block and move on.

> need big ass antennas covering a lot of area to collect the power

Though presumably smaller than the area of solar panels you’d need on the ground, to collect the same amount of power from the sun directly. Otherwise, it would largely defeat the purpose, of course.

I mean that makes a lot of sense right? It literally is the energy of the sun on a sunny day (it's always sunny in space) minus a few conversion losses

Can it work during night to avoid having batteries as backup of solar power? Collect energy in the sunny side, send it to the dark side and from there to the earth.

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Now, just manufacture about 100 million of those, flip ‘em over and lash ‘em together. The Dyson sphere is closer than we think.

No, it is significantly easier and cheaper to put up a bunch of wires somewhere in comparison to solar panels, needs less matinace and isn't as susceptible to "day/night"

Niche? This is game changing remote power.
Really game changing power in general.

Need satellite to satellite transfers for that, because sending energy from halfway of sunny side using atmosphere is not feasible as most of the energy will dissipate because much longer atmosphere pass through. Even then satellite to satellite transfers need to be super efficient because you don't want to cook the satellite receiver.

I’ve had an ass antenna since puberty

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No, the KEY hurdle is getting that energy down to Earth without losing most of it to diffusion and frying everything in the path of the transmission beam. Good luck with that.

Imagine solar powered drones adding a secondary power source that could keep them in flight indefinitely.

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I would assume the ideal early settlement energy on a planet covered in dust would be some form of nuclear, that way you don’t have try to get RF waves through the atmosphere as well.

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I played enough sim city to know this is a terrible idea.

maybe more like 100 billion and put them in orbit around the sun then have that energy transferred 100 million miles. I think there's a few big hurdles still unfortunately.

They would need massive stationary antennas. Those only make sense with geo sync orbit making the diffusion terrible. Going solar > electric > rf > electric. The conversion loss is terrible.

I really wish this tech was viable but it’s just not.

More on the militarization of Space--endangering all life on the Planet, and the Planet itself.

To put this in perspective, this experiment for space solar power is at the same level as Bell Lab's first ground solar panel around 1954. It took decades to reach large-scale use.

The difficulty is in focusing a beam tightly enough for a small setup on the ground. A combination of small nuclear units (around 30kWe + 90 kW thermal each) and solar panels with dust brushes should do for small bases. Various rovers have run for several years without panel cleaning.

It is hard to focus radio waves tightly from space. You need a big transmitter antenna, which only makes sense for high power levels.

For sure. There was an air of sarcasm to that. Shooting a microwave bean 100 million miles doesn’t seem as hard as focusing 360 degrees of Satellite beams in one direction, but I’m sure it can be done.

Solar energy in space is 36% stronger than on the ground, and available 24 hours a day rather than 3-8 for locations on the ground. So a panel in space generates a lot more power, and on a predictable schedule.

The trick is to get that power down to a transmission line on Earth at a reasonable cost. The military is interested in this, because they have to bring power to field bases in random locations. Beams are steerable. The current method involves tanker trucks fueling generators at absurdly high cost.

Most bird deaths from microwave towers are from running into guy wires, not the beams.

Two military applications are forward bases, which get set up in random locations, and spy devices. Beams are steerable, so it can be aimed wherever a base ends up. Spy devices are low power, so you don't need massive space satellites to send enough.

Terrestrial solar has the same first two steps (solar > electric). But satellites in space get 36% more solar energy per square meter because no atmospheric absorption, and 3-8 times the operating hours depending on location, because no night or weather.

So you are starting out with a big advantage. There are efficiency losses going to RF and back to electric, and then there is cost. Launching to space has been way too expensive to make this idea work.

Don’t forget the inverse square law. The bigger the distance transmission the bigger receiver you need.

We creating a Dyson sphere of drones encircling the sun... bout time

The Raleigh Criterion (1.22 lambda/D) is what sets the beam angle. Lambda is the wavelength, and D is the transmitter diameter. The larger the transmitter, the tighter the beam.

Since the beam spreads as a circle and travels in a straight line, the diameter grows with distance, and beam area grows as distance squared. Total beam energy is constant at any distance till you hit the atmosphere.

The beam intensity goes as the inverse square because the area goes as the square and the total energy is constant. So that is a derived value from the physics.

For a reasonable size satellite and ground antenna, therefore you want the highest reasonable frequency and the lowest reasonable orbit.

Why dust brushes, like a windshield wiper is a thing none of the rovers or stationary landers have ever been equipped with?

Solar farms on Earth actually use robots on tracks with soft brushes to clean the panels. They get used in dry and dusty areas. In areas with lots of water, they just get sprayed.

The Insight lander that just died is 1/10th the weight of a large modern communications satellite. Deep space missions have had incredibly tight weight margins. So anything optional tends to get left behind.

The SpaceX Starship is being designed to land 200-300 times bigger payloads on Mars than Insight, and 100-200 times heavier than Curiosity and Perseverance. So they could include optional stuff like cleaning devices. They will also have people, so a simple dust brush you use once a year to clean the solar panels may be all you need.

Thank you! I guess also they thought the lander/rover to be faulty even before the brush is actually needed. I mean they design these things for a few months only (ofc this is also politics, design it for 90 days, make sure it works 2 years and you get the funds for next year).

If it's too dusty for your solar panels, surely it's too dusty to beam power down?

> but reading around a bit they say the energy isn't much more than that of the sun on a sunny day.

Then you'd need a receiver as big as a normal solar farm. So why bother with orbital solar?

It would be quicker to get normal infrastructure working again than to set up a solar power receiver.

Problem with that is that Mars is devoid of heavy radioactive elements like uranium-235 that would power the reactors.

How do the satellites in orbit get energy to the surface, avoiding the dust storms in the atmosphere in the middle?

Luckily we have an abundance of those metals here on earth.

That is true. If we had an efficient way to transport them, we could power outposts using materials from Earth. We could also get more through astroid mining. Personally I think trying to colonize Mars in the next 100 years would be a bad idea. We should start with an easier project like the moon.

> Collect energy in the sunny side, send it to the dark side and from there to the earth.

This part isn't necessary, the satellite simply has to be placed in a higher orbit so that it spends very little time in the shade. Of course, now you need to transmit the energy over a greater distance, but you probably want to keep your power satellites in a geostationary orbit anyway so you don't need to keep switching between multiple power satellites

That would be cool. Don’t know if that’s possible though.

Who knows, maybe by the time we get there fusion will actually be working.

We are iirc. Makes it a great pit stop to go other places. Launching from earth directly sucks.

Yes we are, it’s the main purpose of the Artemis mission, I think the manned rocket to the moon goes up in 2024-2025

I had forgotten about that. At least we have some proper planning.

It’s a really cool mission, I’m sad I missed Artemis 1 earlier this year but I plan on going to the Kennedy space center for the next one, it’s going to be an amazing accomplishment to set up a permanent base on the moon.

Unfortunately I'll probably miss this one too. That would be an incredible accomplishment though. Setting up a moon base would be an accomplishment on par with, if not great than, the I.S.S.

If you thought that the tin hat crowd went bonkers over 5G they'll be completely bat shit crazy over this.

A reactor would likely be a better choice for Mars

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That would be an interesting idea.

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It's a lot of added weight. The solar array is a thin film that gets fanned out. To add a whiper brush would add a lot of weight, and would need different design array that is rigid enough to be brushed.

Start at the moon, mine it to build a large-ish space habitat that can grow food and perfect closed loop life support systems. Build a second one and park it in orbit around Mars. Then be able to land on Mars and return at will. Profit.

It can be, but not if we meet new challenges with a defeatist attitude.

These small steps might not seem as flashy as the promise of fusion energy within the next decade, but they are progress that we can build upon to do new and amazing things. We just need to be willing to dream a little bigger.

You should make NASA work for you.