Space-based solar farms, once a topic of science fiction, are rapidly growing into a possibility in the near future. The idea has not just caught the imagination of tech-savvy billionaires but also engineers and professors at prominent institutions in the West and well as the East.
When Isaac Asimov described a space-based facility that could harvest and beam solar energy to the Earth in 1941, it was a piece of science fiction. Humankind had not even sent a satellite to orbit then, and nobody perhaps even bothered to compute the project’s economic viability.
Fast forward to 2023, and humanity has plans to set up a base on the Moon, travel to Mars, and send satellites to orbit in scores at a time. Technology in various domains has converged to a point where building a space-based solar farm is not just possible but also underway in different parts of the world.
