charlesrwest
New member
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2021
- Messages
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Hello!
I'm a laser newbie, but I'm looking into the feasibility of building a laser solar power satellite to help power stuff on the Moon. I'm trying to figure out if you could build a 200-2000 kg package that would be able to deliver meaningful amounts of power to a target on the Moon, such as an industrial site. The Moon takes a ton of fuel to land on due to the lack of atmosphere and is a pretty horrible operating environment, so if you could keep most of your power systems from needing to land, that would be a pretty big win.
The furthest range I've seen discussed in power beaming literature so far is ~10 km. While you could potentially have a lunar orbit which went that low, it would have problems with being in shadow a lot, requiring power storage and having to have really fast tracking/high power lasers to dump the power to the ground before it was out of sight. This would be less of a problem if you had a bunch of satellites, but most of the point of using lasers in this scenario is to be able to achieve a useful amount of power without sinking in a ridiculous amount of resources first.
An ideal location would be the Earth/Moon L1 point, but that is about ~61,350 km from the Lunar center. That's far enough away that it's probably impractical.
Essentially, the longer the range you can get while maintaining relatively power conversion efficiencies the better a single satellite or small constellation is likely to work out. I've hear that diode lasers have crappy divergence but high efficiencies solid state lasers have crappy efficiency but low divergence.
Do you guys have any suggestions on what sort of laser system would be best for this sort of application and what sort of range you could reasonably expect?
Thanks!
I'm a laser newbie, but I'm looking into the feasibility of building a laser solar power satellite to help power stuff on the Moon. I'm trying to figure out if you could build a 200-2000 kg package that would be able to deliver meaningful amounts of power to a target on the Moon, such as an industrial site. The Moon takes a ton of fuel to land on due to the lack of atmosphere and is a pretty horrible operating environment, so if you could keep most of your power systems from needing to land, that would be a pretty big win.
The furthest range I've seen discussed in power beaming literature so far is ~10 km. While you could potentially have a lunar orbit which went that low, it would have problems with being in shadow a lot, requiring power storage and having to have really fast tracking/high power lasers to dump the power to the ground before it was out of sight. This would be less of a problem if you had a bunch of satellites, but most of the point of using lasers in this scenario is to be able to achieve a useful amount of power without sinking in a ridiculous amount of resources first.
An ideal location would be the Earth/Moon L1 point, but that is about ~61,350 km from the Lunar center. That's far enough away that it's probably impractical.
Essentially, the longer the range you can get while maintaining relatively power conversion efficiencies the better a single satellite or small constellation is likely to work out. I've hear that diode lasers have crappy divergence but high efficiencies solid state lasers have crappy efficiency but low divergence.
Do you guys have any suggestions on what sort of laser system would be best for this sort of application and what sort of range you could reasonably expect?
Thanks!