
Solar Power Satellites: A Visual Introduction - mkuhn
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/solar-power-satellites-a-visual-introduction
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JoeAltmaier
Cool idea. But the engineering seems fixated on mechanically hooking
everything together with heavy frameworks, even having cargo building where
arriving pods get racked.

Turns out space is big; things don't go anywhere if you just put them nearby.
So no need to have buildings to store them.

And thousands of independently-operating solar cells would work as well as a
big rigid frame. Why not have each cell in a swarm beam its energy to a single
large transmission facility? No need to wire-and-bolt them together.

Probably its improvements in compute power that made this inconceivable
decades ago. But now it seems obvious.

