Scientists from China have announced a plan to build a massive 1-kilometer-wide solar power station in space, which will continuously beam energy back to Earth via microwaves.
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The project, which will see its components lifted into a geostationary orbit above Earth using superheavy rockets, has been called "another Three Gorges Dam project above Earth."
The Three Gorges, located in the middle of the Yangtze in central China, is the largest hydroelectric project in the world, generating 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. According to a NASA, the dam is so large that, if completely filled, the mass of water contained within would lengthen Earth's days by 0.06 microseconds.
The new project, according to chief scientist Long Lehao and chief designer of China's Long March rockets, will be "as important as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36,000 km above Earth."
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Despite recent advances in the economics and efficiency of solar energy, the technology still faces some fundamental limitations – such as intermittent cloud cover and most of the atmosphere absorbing solar radiation before it hits the ground.
Scientists have proposed a series of Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) that would continuously collect and transmit energy from sunlight in space, where it is 10 times more intense than on the Earth's surface.
But the creation of a suitably gigantic array would require many launches, which means that most proposals failed to get started.
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To overcome this challenge, Long and his team are working on developing the reusable heavy-lift rocket Long March-9 (CZ-9), which will have a lifting capacity of at least 150 tons.
Source: livescience
