Space Solar Power: Japan Eyes Solar Station In Space

Yahoo! News:

TOKYO (AFP) -- It may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan's space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.

Read the whole story: Yahoo! News

Comments

[SwingingFromCenter]

Psh, Japan can spend their money on things like this. The US knows better though. It's MUCH better to send our overinflated military to a foreign land rather than explore things like "science".

[Tom95134]

If they use WIndowz as the operating system for steering the beam the term, "Blue Screen of Death" could have real meaning. Can you just imagine something like that losing sync with its ground station and the beam wandering around trying to re-lock.

Maybe that's what happened to Atlantis. I read a SciFi story many years ago that had a group of newly discovered pyramids at the South Pole as the ground station for power beamed down from space.

[OneEarthling]

Whoa. Don't want to get in the path of that!

[Levonsky]

"The government has just picked a group of companies and a team of researchers tasked with turning the ambitious, multi-bill­ion-dollar dream of unlimited clean energy into reality in coming decades."

I guess every body else's government can solve problems but ours, cause it can't do anything right.

[Sumocat]

Orbital solar power is the future (at least until we're using an extra-atmospheric geodesic sphere to strip electrons from the solar winds).

[Mike4Obama]

Pretty cool.

[Eris23]

Indeed. :)