Right, but like… whatever you’re doing in space is going to be more cost effective to do on earth. Not to mention the insane amount of energy lost to the atmosphere
Unless you really need to optimise for land use. An arbitrarily large solar array in space could transmit to a fairly small collector in the surface.
As for losing power to atmospheric attenuation, high frequency microwaves will pass right through most everything that would scatter visible light. Clouds, dust, etc wouldn’t really impede it.
I won’t say it’s not a silly idea, because it is. It’s fun to think about though.
musk wants datacenters in space. which makes sense, 24/7 sunlight and no transmission of power is grand; but I do wonder about the shielding and moving the data back and forth.
Right, but like… whatever you’re doing in space is going to be more cost effective to do on earth. Not to mention the insane amount of energy lost to the atmosphere
Energy loss for wireless energy transmission is actually surprisingly low. Here is an example of 80% efficiency over 1 kilometer: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1123672
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Big solar panel
Unless you really need to optimise for land use. An arbitrarily large solar array in space could transmit to a fairly small collector in the surface.
As for losing power to atmospheric attenuation, high frequency microwaves will pass right through most everything that would scatter visible light. Clouds, dust, etc wouldn’t really impede it.
I won’t say it’s not a silly idea, because it is. It’s fun to think about though.
You could also have a constellation of satellites with area greater than the surface of the earth. It’s not that silly of an idea.
musk wants datacenters in space. which makes sense, 24/7 sunlight and no transmission of power is grand; but I do wonder about the shielding and moving the data back and forth.
yeah but imagine you can put the plant and all the pollution on an asteroid or something.