Chinese scientists have announced a plan to build an enormous, 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves. According to the LiveScience article, the solar array could collect more energy in a year than ‘all the oil on Earth.
The project, which will see its components lofted to GEO using super-heavy rockets, has been dubbed “another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth.”
The Three Gorges Dam, located in the middle of the Yangtze river in central China, is the world’s largest hydropower project and generates 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year.
According to one NASA scientist, the dam is so large that, if completely filled, the mass of the water contained within would lengthen Earth’s days by 0.06 microseconds.
The new project, according to lead scientist Long Lehao, the chief designer of China’s Long March rockets, would be “as significant as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36,000km (22,370 miles) above the Earth.”
Read the entire LiveScience article at this direct link…
This news article was written by Ben Turner, a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist.
