The US Airforce's plan to beam energy from space

Taking solar energy to a whole new level.

May 13, 2021

I’d like to start this week off by thanking each and every one of It’s Not Rocket Science’s subscribers. The following for this newsletter has increased dramatically over the last few months and it’s all thanks to your participation, support, and excitement. I hope to continue to entertain and hopefully surprise you for months to come. Here’s to you. Now let’s get into this week’s edition…

Welcome back to It’s Not Rocket Science! Today we’re getting into more current events—namely the US Air Force’s plan to beam energy to Earth, from space. This experiment is meant to send solar energy from satellites to forward operating military bases. According to space.com, the US Military faces significant challenges ensuring these bases have power. [1] They have things like generators, solar panels, and even direct connections to the area’s electrical grid but unfortunately, when you’re in enemy territory, with unreliable solar energy and access to gas, all of these power-producing options can go offline. To combat this, in 2024, the Air Force is trying to take solar energy from space, where it’s much more readily available, and send it down to troops in need.

Note that the US Air Force is not disclosing how and why this technology works, this is a good ‘ole college attempt at rationalizing what makes this work.

We’ve talked about this in previous newsletters, but as a general reminder, the intensity of the Sun’s radiation decreases as it travels through our atmosphere. While it may not feel like it on a summer day, this is immensely helpful. Without it, the Sun’s radiation would be extremely dangerous to us. This protection that our sky provides, however, does not translate to effective solar panels. Only about 25% of solar energy that hits Earth’s atmosphere directly makes it to the surface. [2] That means solar panels in space can generate 4 times more energy than their Earth-bound counterparts. This is our first obvious plus.

Now I know you’re thinking, “well great, we got a whole bunch of power up there, but sending energy down to the surface would yield the same fate as the sun, 75% of it would be lost in our atmosphere.” Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Once we harness this energy, we don’t have to send it the same way it came in. We now have a plethora of options that you may have heard of: radio waves, gamma rays, infrared rays, and visible light. If we use radio waves, which are how we already communicate with satellites, we can get through the atmosphere more easily. If we’re feeling particularly cool, we can even use lasers. Why these would be our two best bets will be revealed later. [3]

Through unfortunately grainy quality, this chart shows which types of light are able to make it through our atmosphere. As a rule of thumb, the farther left you go on this chart the higher energy—and more dangerous—the light is. In other words, the shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy, and vice versa. You’ve probably heard of Gamma rays, which are what radioactive elements emit. These are extremely harmful to humans and just small doses can be lethal. Thanks to our atmosphere, the Sun’s Gamma rays don’t make it to us. Moving further right on the chart, we’re also protected from X-Rays and most UV light. The first “atmospheric window” we see is at UV, visible, and infrared. Funny coincidence that the light humans are capable of seeing is exactly what makes it through our atmosphere? Not unless you consider evolution a coincidence. That choice, however, is on you. Anyway… The most noticeable trend from this chart is that visible light and radio waves have no problem cutting through the atmosphere. This is why they are our prime candidates (lasers are pure visible light). So now we have our method and value proposition—and my take on how the Air Force would pull this off, let’s get weird with it.

According to Nikolai Kardashev, there are three levels of civilizations. I told you this would get weird. They essentially all come down to energy usage. In short, they are the following:

Type I: Can harness all of the available energy on their home planet.

Type II: Can hardness all of the available energy in their solar system (their home Star(s))

Type III: Can harness all of the energy at the scale of their galaxy.

There are additional levels that get into multiverse theory but we can talk about that later. We, humans, are a measly Type ~0.7. This experiment by the Air Force is our first real attempt at jumping to a Type II. In order to harness the energy of the Sun, we’ll need a way of converting the energy and a way of getting it to Earth. Now obviously solar panels have a very long way to go until they're perfect, (currently, the best ones we have are about 25% efficient), but the first step towards beaming it back to Earth is a huge one. Who knows, maybe this experiment is the beginning of the journey to a Dyson sphere—a theoretical concept to harness all of the Sun’s energy by making a giant sphere of solar panels around it. There are not currently enough materials on our planet to construct such a thing, but we have a lot of other options, namely asteroid mining, that can be a solution. But as always, I digress.

So there it is. The method to the madness of beaming energy from space. Can the Air Force really pull this off? Who knows… but the good news is we only have to wait 3 years to find out. Thank you as always for tuning into It’s Not Rocket Science. I look forward to talking your ear off next week. See you then!

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