LONDON — SpaceX’s Starship will be a game changer for space-based solar power generation and will make orbiting power plants not only affordable, but cheaper than many other methods of generating electricity on Earth, according to Michigan-based start-up Virtus Solis.
Virtus Solis, founded by former SpaceX rocket engineer John Bucknell, introduced their solar power beaming concept at the International Conference on Energy from Space held in London on Wednesday, April 17.
“For space-based solar power to work, you need to have heavy-lift launch, you need to have wireless power transfer and you need to have the economics,” Bucknell said at the conference. “Once you have low-cost access to space, that’s one less miracle that you need to have solved.”
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The cost of launching satellites to space has plummeted in recent years thanks to the advent of reusable rockets pioneered by SpaceX. The company currently charges under $3,000 per kilogram of payload, but that’s still too much for space-based solar power generation, which will require enormous orbiting arrays larger than the world’s largest currently orbiting object, the International Space Station.
SpaceX promises that once Starship is fully up and running, it will cost as little as $10 per kilogram to loft satellites to space. Although that estimate might be a little too optimistic, Bucknell says that once the cost of launch into low Earth orbit falls below $200 per kilogram, space-based solar power will become cheaper than Earth-based nuclear plants or gas and coal-fired power stations.
“Once Starship is fully reusable, that will drive down the cost,” said Bucknell. “SpaceX has recently flown a Falcon 9 booster for the 20th time and they are recertifying for 40 launches. Conceivably, Starship could do hundreds of launches. But we are basing our assumptions on a 15-times use.”
Currently, Earth-based photovoltaic panels provide the cheapest source of electricity at less than $30 per megawatt-hour. But the sun doesn’t shine at night, and energy experts struggle to make up for that daily drop with other renewable sources. So far, nuclear, gas and coal-fired plants need to be on standby to cover the…
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