Beam Solar Energy From Space? These Scientists Achieve a Breakthrough
Caltech researchers are experimenting with a space-based solar power system that would assemble itself after being launched by rockets.
A model of Caltech’s self-deploying solar array.
Photographer: Philip Cheung for Bloomberg Green
Even by the standards of the Space Race, the idea seemed bold, maybe a bit crazy.
In 1968, before the first human set foot on the moon, an engineer working on one of the Apollo mission’s experiments proposed a new way to power the world. Giant orbiting solar power plants could soak up the constant sunshine in space—unhindered by clouds, night or seasons—and beam it back to Earth, Peter Glaser wrote in the journal Science. Only space-based solar and perhaps nuclear fusion held the potential to one day replace fossil fuels as civilization’s main energy source, and fusion was so far off that Glaser dismissed it as “the physicist’s dream.”