Spaceflight

I thought all solar power came from space? (Okay, I’ll show myself out)

Where else would solar power come from?

I'm not a fancy space laser scientist so I want to ask: Does this not result in an increase of solar energy on Earth? Like, the problem with global climate change is that the planet is retaining heat and they want to literally fire lasers from space into the atmosphere.

Aim the space laser at a tank of water, we harness the steam as it boils.

It's gonna be interesting to see how hardware that's meant to run a lot of power through it will survive over time in the harsh radiation conditions of space over a prolonged mission, even if it were in LEO. A lot of these components would have to run at lower than intended voltages to provide operational margins of stacking single event effects, which is a huge problem for something that's supposed to act as a kind of power plant. Mitigating failures with redundant components would also not be very effective if they're effectively the same design as they'd be susceptible to the same failure modes as the parts they're supposed to substitute during the mission.

Good luck to them either way. We need creative ways to get a constant source of renewable energy to get us off fossil fuels.

It's a good idea, but what happens if one of these high energy LASERs misses the collector?

I'm still skeptical, but I'm glad that some folks are going to try.