This seems like an incredibly inefficient way to generate power. It’s a cool engineering project, but it’s not going to generate more power than a solar farm on earth, no matter how cloudy it gets.
It can’t be used as a weapon either. The wavelength needs to be in the radio range to not be absorbed by the atmosphere, and it will spread out over a large area once it reaches earth.
Pretty cool that this is being seriously worked on, especially since it’s a sci-fi trope.
That sounds like a weapon if anything does.
Not really. A system like this would have to have its orbit synchronized to a single point on the ground, where the receiving station is. Which would make it a pretty shitty weapon. Even with thrusters, it will be very slow to move and would run out of fuel very fast if it needs to do much more than make micro-adjustments, like existing satellites use their thrusters for.
I think the hurdles of targeting/aiming could be overcome without thrusters. The Mars land rover doesn’t use fuel. The sun would be the source of power.
The sun would be the source of power.
In the vacuum of space, you need to eject mass to move. Unless you’re talking about a light sail, which is limited to tiny objects. I don’t know how the mars missions worked, but I imagine they would take advantage of Mars’s (thin, but still present) atmosphere.
We’re talking 2 different things. Satellites are stationary. The movement would be to target something on the ground. That can be done with servo motors (electro-magnetic). No mass has to be ejected for that.
