The beam dream: Should we build solar farms in space?
October 30, 2025 2025-10-30 11:19The beam dream: Should we build solar farms in space?
The beam dream: Should we build solar farms in space?
At an American football stadium in Florida last March, an unusual test took place. Here, it wasn’t footballs being thrown, but beams of light across the length of the pitch. The concentrated streaks of light lasted for a few minutes, fired from an emitter on one side of the field in the Jacksonville Jaguars’ stadium and collected on a screen on the other.
The light was collected from the Sun and them beamed out by large lenses on the field like a magnifying glass, each about 1.2m (4ft) tall. “We had to get up a ladder to pull the cover off,” says Andrew Rush, president and chief executive of the Florida-based company Star Catcher that carried out the test.
“We knew some folks at the Jaguars and we thought this would be a cool thing to do,” says Rush. “We beamed 100 watts about 105m [345ft].”
Star Catcher is one of several companies around the world developing space-based solar power technologies, a concept that has languished in a grey area between science fact and science fiction for decades. The idea is to provide Earth with abundant clean energy by capturing sunlight in space and beaming it to the ground or other satellites.
Solar panels on terra firma are, by contrast, limited by the atmosphere, the weather and Earth’s day-night cycle. These all affect how much sunlight those panels can soak up, filtering out varying amounts of the Sun’s radiation before it can reach ground level. But in space, it is possible to collect sunlight almost around the clock at much higher efficiencies.
“I remember telling my father about this and he thought I was a bit bonkers,” says David Homfray, co-founder and chief technology officer of UK firm Space Solar. But multiple countries, including the UK, US, Japan and China are now investing in the technology.
