Space Lasers Are About to Get Their First Real Test Generating Energy
Google, SpaceX, and a host of startups are all planning to build data centers in space. But for those plans to work, they’ll need power. Lots of it.
Star Catcher, a startup based in Jacksonville, Florida, aims to provide it by concentrating the sun’s energy and using lasers to beam it to satellites’ waiting solar panels. The company is preparing to launch its prototype system aboard a SpaceX rocket this week that will transmit energy to another satellite in orbit.
If it’s successful, it would be the first time lasers have beamed energy between two untethered objects in space. But the idea of generating solar power in space goes back decades.
It showed up in a 1941 sci-fi piece by Isaac Asimov,and NASA studied it in the 1970s. “Launching large amounts of hardware into orbit was extremely expensive, so generating power in space and transmitting it...
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