LaserMotive Update at Space Solar Power Meeting

Friday Space Power Technology Session - Transterrestrial Musings - Rand is blogging from the State of Space Solar Power Technology workshop in Florida Disney country. The conference page says that the workshop's "relevance to the DoD is to identify within the services, if and to what extent, a space centric beamed power energy system may provide energy at tactically, operationally, or strategically significant levels to ground base rectifying antennas or receivers over a majority of the globe."

The second half of Rand's post is about a talk by Jordin Kare from Beam Power team LaserMotive. Some of this talk covered last year's Space Elevator Games from LaserMotive's perspective; for comparison here's what I picked up from a talk on this subject that Jordin gave at Space Access '08. Rand's post also covers some newer Beam Competition information, and gives an outline of the kinds of steps LaserMotive would like to take next.

Hopefully if the Beam Power prize is won this year, a new version of the competition will be made (with a prize funded by NASA? DoD? Someone else?) to address some of these steps, now that interest is growing and the Games are becoming a regular event. It's good to see that LaserMotive has achievable business and technology goals after the current Games to bridge between the Games and big steps like Space Elevators, Solar Power Satellites, and Power Relay Satellites.

Thursday Afternoon At The Space Power Tech Workshop - Tranterrestrial Musings - The end of this post covers Jordin Kare talking about different space applications using lasers, in many cases with the laser part on the Earth.