And efficiency, too. Even at a really good 50%, both for the solar panels and the maser, that’s still a fuckton of heat being generated.
Comment on Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day agoThat’s a more interesting idea but still quite questionable, given how expensive sending anything to space is, and then maintaining it.
It made more sense with solar was expensive per square mm, but that is no longer the case.
Also, transmission is a huge problem. It’s easy to say ‘make a maser,’ but making giant one and aiming it reliably and making (without frying nearby terrain as the satellite moves to track the sun), and making a receiver big enough from how much the laser spreads out from geosync orbit is a tall order.
frongt@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
YES. That’s a HUGE one, for the maser in particular. I can’t even think of a precedent for operating something so high power in space.
It’s honestly a bad idea, lol.
crank0271@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Proportionally though, there is far more space in space.
Badabinski@kbin.earth 20 hours ago
Yeah, I think it'd be a pretty silly thing for us to ever try to do. My goal was to take their stupid idea, provide a slightly less stupid idea, and then say "or just don't do space power at all and keep everything terrestrial." Orbital solar power stations were lots of fun in science fiction, but panels are cheap, there's plenty of land, and giant death masers that cook any birds flying into the beam are, uh, suboptimal.