Ruminations

“In terms of our competitiveness, it mostly comes down to our pace of innovation. Our pace of innovation is much, much faster than the big aerospace companies or the country-driven systems.” - Elon Musk

This quote by Elon depicts the essence of the transition the Space ecosystem is going through right now and one that few are aware of let alone planning for. I’ve spoken about this multiple times and will continue to do so, we are in a massive move to a space ecosystem powered not by countries and their space programs but by private industry and investments. This is because of innovation speed, efficiencies, and better capital allocation. It’s that simple. County-driven systems will still be a large part of the pie, but the future will be privately driven.

This is even more prevalent in the Remote Power segment. People constantly send me articles depicting the future of Remote Power Transmission (It is typically called “Space Power Beaming”, which to me has weapon connotations. Which goes against LITEPULSE’s aims. We are a company that is focused on expanding the possibilities in space for everyone not just some country’s militaristic ambitions). These articles depict scenarios where microwaves are transmitted down from LEO or GEO to Earth. These scenarios are problematic for a couple of reasons but first and foremost the cost to efficiently transmit power 10 thousand kilometers plus will be astronomical regardless of the efficiency of solar panels, rectennas, and optics. The wavelength of a microwave over those distances requires very large arrays (kilometers) of rectennas to convert the wavelengths into usable electricity. These costs alone will be in the hundreds of millions. If you focus the beam to the point where you can reduce the size of the receivers to something more reasonable, you may run into the risk of frying the atmosphere or organic matter within the beam. (More research needs to be done on focused beams). The aforementioned assumption is directly reliant on massive governmental funding and years if not decades to develop.

Now conversely, Remote Power Transmission does really well in a vacuum, and that coupled with the explosion of private orbital vehicles, lends itself well to the technology being deployed quickly, under budget, and within years, not decades. Going back to Elon’s quote, this applies to almost every case of space technology and market development. Thus as we go forward governmental-driven development will be a portion of the pie, however, you will see privately driven enterprises becoming a larger and larger factor in the ecosystem.

Plan accordingly.

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