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China Wants to Harvest Green Energy from Outer Space and Send It on Earth

Believe it or not, China is serious about solar power and the country’s plans to push back the alarming carbon emissions. The latest audacious project is to build the biggest spacecraft that will harvest solar power around the clock, and then beam it down to Earth. Bigger than the International Station, the solar power station will orbit at 36,000 kilometers above ground.
China Wants to Harvest Green Energy from Outer Space and Send It on Earth 1 photo
Photo: news.softpedia.com
We might have gotten used to always looking towards Western countries whenever it comes to new space projects, but that’s not even half of what is going on in the industry.

China is about to make its boldest financial reform in years, creating a similar system to US’s Federal Deposit Rate Insurance Corporation. But that's not the only thing they're keeping themselves busy with, the communist country is also pushing the pedal in their future energy department too.

The power station was designed as a super spacecraft on a geosynchronous orbit equipped with giant solar panels. The electricity generated - as opposed to ground-based plants, a space-based generator can collect energy 99 percent of the time - would be converted to microwaves or lasers and sent to a collector on Earth.

It’s somewhat similar to what happened in the famous sci-fi short story "Reason" by Isaac Asimov. In fact, according to China’s Xinhuanet official press agency, scientists claim the writer’s fiction has a scientific basis.

Wang Xiji, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics, has spent more than half a century to space technology research, and believes the system is economically viable.

A total area of solar panels that will reach 5 to 6 square kilometers ( 3,1 to 3.7 square miles)

An economically viable space power station would be really huge, with the total area of the solar panels reaching 5 to 6 square kilometers,” Wang believes. We’re talking about a space station that big, people on Earth would most likely see it, similar to how they look at the night sky's stars.

According to the source, an experimental first should be constructed by 2030, while a commercially viable space power station should be here by 2050. It might sound extremely daring, but it wouldn’t be the first time sci-fi stories would become reality. Since we’re talking about Asimov, just think of the submarine for instance.
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