The CEO, Andrew Rush, is on the latest MECO podcast. Some interesting ideas but I’d like to know what kind of transmitter they’re looking to use for this and what kind of efficiency they’d hope to achieve. I was initially thinking they were talking about using reflectors but if they’re tuning the beam to only deliver usable wavelengths for conventional solar then they’re presumably using their own photo-voltaic arrays.
I was initially thinking they were talking about using reflectors but if they’re tuning the beam to only deliver usable wavelengths
A mirror would be much simpler. To deliver specific wavelengths in a columnated beam implies lasers. Any energy lost in the conversion from light, to electricity, and back to light, will need to be radiated from the spacecraft as heat.
This seems like a good fit for a K2 bus.
What in the… This seems 10+ years too early, like the early asteroid mining companies that folded. OISLs are still far from a solved problem (except for SpaceX), and this is a another level beyond that.
Some of the applications sound really interesting and given that clients need no special hardware means currently on orbit satellites could benefit from this. Keeping lunar payloads alive through the night would be awesome - way simpler than getting nuclear power deployed there.
Yeah, I think the power transmitter and the targeting need a lot of work, but I think there are customers that would pay ridiculous rates to reduce orbit raising times or do more taskings per orbit than their power budget would normally allow.
I’d prefer to be wrong, because it just sounds cool, but this feels like the same conversation as refueling. With mass to orbit and component manufacturing getting cheaper and more available, it seems easier to have bigger solar arrays and more batteries. I’m sure there’ll be some GEO birds that want a light in the darkness, but, like refueling and mission extension so far, that’s not a big market.
I’m just skeptical of startups that feel more built to extract venture capital than turn a profit.
