USAF Plans to Beam Energy to Earth from Satellite Power Plants

Written by Dabney B. on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

When discussing the USAF, it’s reasonable to expect a certain level of technological advancement. After all, the USAF has some of the most state-of-the-art, high tech gadgets ever created by man. A lot of what the Air Force does is so seemingly impossible that it borders on science fiction. They’ve created levitating jets, satellites that can track missiles from space, and a host of other tools that you can find in science fiction novels from 50 years ago.

The USAF has recently announced a plan that will put the technological achievements of the past to shame. A publicly available report details the USAF’s intent to revolutionize the military’s energy concerns. Among those plans, they want to create power stations in orbit that transmit energy back to earth.

Solar power is one of the most reliable forms of renewable energy, but planet earth is limiting the amount of energy that we can take from the sun. As solar energy passes through the earth’s atmosphere, a huge percentage of energy is lost, absorbed, or deflected out into space. As a result, solar panels only gather a tiny fraction of energy.

Out in space, with no atmosphere to get in the way, the sunlight is pure and charged with energy. Satellites bearing wide solar panels would suck in enough buy diazepam energy to rival traditional power plants such as coal or nuclear plants, and these solar satellites would be able to perform indefinitely.

The only reason why we haven’t already sent hundreds of solar power plants into space is because getting the energy back down to earth is prohibitively expensive and difficult. Scientists have been working on a way to jump this hurdle by creating technology that could potentially beam the energy back down to earth in the form of a concentrated laser so that we can convert it back to electricity. Additionally, these space-bound satellites would be able to collect energy nonstop, unlike terrestrial solar panels that are useless at night and less effective in gloomy weather.

If this technology works, then the reverse should also be true. The USAF acknowledges that they might be able to build nuclear power plants on earth, which transmit the energy out into space to power spacecraft.

This type of technology could represent the next phase of mankind’s pursuit of energy, an advancement on par with harnessing electricity. It would allow us to transcend the border separating terrestrial earth from space to send a metaphorical power cable into orbit. The energy in space could be used to power earth, and energy we produce on terra firma could power isolated spacecraft indefinitely.

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