We need sources of clean, renewable energy, and scientists have set their sights on solar energy. A new approach, called SPS-ALPHA, gives a new twist on power generation in space, proposing to construct a platform arbitrarily large, curved, capable of generating tens of megawatts and send them to Earth as microwaves. The project has the support of NASA, but some doubt that it is possible to build it in the near future.

Modern society relies heavily on the availability of enormous amounts of energy . Throughout the day we use different forms of energy electricity but mainly to work, move, inform, communicate, feed us and make our homes a more comfortable. However, energy is an expensive, limited and often, their generation is an attack on the integrity of the environment. Today no one disputes it's crazy to continue burning fossil fuels to meet energy demand, and we know that that source was exhausted within a relatively short time. In this scenario, is working to develop alternative energy sources, which have a low impact on the environment and is not exhausted in the near future. The wind and solar power are two of the systems in which more work has been done and some countries like Spain have invested heavily in solar power generation by huge "farms collector of energy.



However, some dream of bringing these collectors into space, where their spoils the landscape installation does not interfere with agriculture and, above all, the amount of solar energy incident on the PV panels is much higher. The idea is not new , and is to bring energy collectors out of the atmosphere, produce electricity, sent to Earth by a narrow beam of microwave and convert it back into electricity by converting plant installed at the surface. Now a group of scientists is evaluating a new twist on this system, proposing the construction of SPS-ALPHA, a gigantic, modular system of mirrors that concentrate sunlight on photovoltaic collectors so that the amount of electrical energy that can generate much higher. These stations would have a conical shape, would be thousands of miles of land area, and be able to generate tens of thousands of megawatts. The project was presented by John Mankins, CEO of Artemis Innovation Management Solutions and has received recognition from NASA.



Although the idea is very good and could provide a virtually inexhaustible energy source, the costs involved in building and launching a satellite of this kind are certainly outside the budget of any business today. We are talking about taking space solar cells and mirrors to build some sort three-dimensional parabolic larger than anything we've put into orbit, where each piece of this mechano weighs between 100 and 200 kilograms. The technology available today allows us to put objects into orbit, relatively small-at a cost close to $ 10 000 per kilogram, so the number of rocket launches required to build one of these stations would be very large, and possibly the risks and related costs would not allow, with current technology, we can put in place something like the SPS-ALPHA. In the future, perhaps the space near Earth is full of power generating stations. But now a lot (but a lot!) Cheaper to build solar power plants on the earth's surface.

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