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.
\n\nStar 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.
\n\nIf 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.
\n\nIt 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 elsewhere rarely made practical sense,” says Hanieh Fattahi, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. But now, falling launch costs are making it more feasible to have orbital industries that will be able to provide such energy.
\n\n“There isn't a power grid in space,” says chief executive officer…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/