One day in 2016, a scientist visiting the Caltech campus in Pasadena ran into one of the professors from his old aerospace department. After the two exchanged greetings, the instructor told the former PhD student about an audacious idea: Instead of building solar power plants on Earth, what if we built them in space? Forget the desert or rooftops. Space is the best place to catch our nearest star’s energy. The sun never sets. Clouds never obscure it. No atmosphere dampens its radiation. An orbiting power plant could suck sunlight 24-7 and beam power—whoosh!—to anywhere on the planet. If successful, it could offer a perpetual source of affordable, clean energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and combating climate change in a major way. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, perhaps such a power plant could refuel spacecraft near the moon or on interplanetary journeys.
These were the motivating ideas behind Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project, co-led by the professor, Sergio Pellegrino. “It sounded very, very, very futuristic,” recalls the former student, Terry Gdoutos, who at the time was applying his engineering skills to failure analysis. Missing the excitement of working on space programs, he soon joined Pellegrino’s team.
The Space Solar Power Project has since expanded that team of researchers and
