Chinese scientists have announced a plan to build a giant 1km-wide solar power station in space that will continuously beam energy back to Earth via microwaves.
The project, parts of which will be carried into geostationary orbit above the Earth using super-heavy rockets, has been described as “another project of the Three Gorges Dam above the Earth”.
The Three Gorges Dam, located in the middle of the Yangtze River in central China, is the largest hydroelectric project in the world and generates 100 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year. According to a NASA scientist, the dam is so large that if it were completely filled, the mass of water contained in it would lengthen Earth’s days by 0.06 microseconds.
The new project, according to chief scientist Long Lehao, the lead designer of China’s Long March missiles, will be “as important as moving the Three Gorges Dam into a geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above Earth,” Live Science writes.
“This is an incredible project to look forward to,” Long added during a lecture he gave in October at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as reported by the South China Morning Post. “The energy collected in one year will be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth.”
Despite recent advances in the cheapness and efficiency of solar energy, the technology still faces some fundamental limitations – such as cloud cover and the atmosphere absorbing solar radiation before it reaches the ground.
Scientists have proposed a series of space-based solar power (SBSP) technologies that would continuously collect and transmit energy from sunlight in space, where it is 10 times more intense than on Earth’s surface.
But building a proper giant array would require many launches and unimaginable costs, and that’s why most proposals have failed to get off the ground.
To overcome this challenge, Long and his team are working to develop the Long March-9 (CZ-9) heavy-lift reusable rocket, which will have a lift capacity of at least 150 tons.
Besides its use for satellites, the rocket will also be key to China’s plans to reach the Moon where it wants to build a base by 2035.
China is not alone in considering plans for solar power space stations. US companies Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, the European Space Agency and Japan’s JAXA space agency are also investigating the technology, with the latter planning to launch a small, test satellite this year to assess its feasibility.
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