Powersat Education
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who know about powersats, and those who are going to find out.

Introduction

Think high. 22,300 miles up, in a very wide orbit, so high that you take 24 hours to go around the world. Looking down at earth, you see the same part of the surface all the time.

Think bright. The sun blazes away here, five times brighter than the brightest day in the hottest desert on the blue planet below. It's never night here, the sun's energy pours over you twenty-four hours a day.

Think vast. At your feet, stretching for five miles, a shimmering plain of solar cells hungrily devour the searing white light. But, for all its size, the PowerSat you're floating over is made up of millions of identical modules, rectangular building blocks, stacked like a giant's playthings. These cobalt blue blocks send their tremendous energy to a towering transmission array, which beams it safely to the surface below

Think silent. 22,300 miles below, there is a wide field of corn. Above it, mounted on widely spaced poles, are the receivers: small antennas that capture the energy you're sending. There is no sound: no rush of water, no roar of turbines, just the whisper of the cornfield in the wind.

Think light. A hundred miles away, in the middle of the night, the lights of Los Angeles blaze with the energy you've sent.

The Technology

A powersat is conceptually simple. Solar cells in orbit convert light into electricity.  This electricity is converted into radio energy and transmitted to a receiving station on earth.  The receiver converts the radio energy back to electricity and puts it on the power grid, ready to serve customers.

When powersats were first envisioned, solar cells were heavy and hard to produce, launch vehicles cost billions of dollars, and computers took up several rooms. Dramatic advances in technology have occurred in the thirty years since.  We wear watches with more computing power than the entire Apollo space program, we print solar cells on aluminum foil, and launch technology is just waiting for a large enough market.

Unlike futuristic systems like nuclear fusion, no technological breakthroughs are required to bring powersats into service. Both solar cells and the wireless power transmission system are well-understood and tested technologies.

The ISEC

The Independent Solar Energy Converter (ISEC) is PowerSat Corp's patent pending technology that makes deploying a powersat in orbit economically feasible. When powersats were first conceived, the designs called for some version of space-tug to raise the components from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO). This required a substantial amount of fuel, about twice the total mass of the satellite. This fuel also had to be lifted to orbit, significantly increasing the number of launches and raising costs beyond the point of economic feasibility. A PowerSat Corp powersat is made up of many identical components that are boosted to LEO on a standard launch vehicle used to carry satellites to LEO. After a component is deployed in LEO, it unfurls it's solar collector array which powers an ion drive that pushes  the component 22,000 miles to GEO. There it connects with other powersat components until a the entire collector is assembled. The effectiveness of solar-to-ion propulsion was proven by NASA’s Deep Space 1 probe, which was launched October 1998. The system worked effectively through the unit’s official retirement in December 2001.

Download our information video: Introduction to PowerSats

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