On a blustery November day, a Cessna turboprop flew over Pennsylvania at 5,000 meters, in crosswinds of as much as 70 knots—practically as quick because the little aircraft was flying. However the bumpy circumstances didn’t thwart its mission: to wirelessly beam energy all the way down to receivers on the bottom because it flew by.
The take a look at flight marked the primary time energy has been beamed from a transferring plane. It was carried out by the Ashburn, Virginia-based startup Overview Energy, which emerged from stealth mode in December by asserting the feat.
However the larger objective of the flight was to exhibit the feasibility of a a lot grander ambition: to beam energy from area to Earth. Overview plans to launch satellites into geosynchronous orbit (GEO) to gather unfiltered solar energy the place the solar by no means units after which beam this abundance again to humanity. The photo voltaic power could be transferred as near-infrared waves and acquired by current solar panels on the bottom.
The far-flung technique, often known as space-based solar energy, has turn out to be the topic of each daydreaming and serious research over the previous decade. Caltech’s House Solar Power Challenge launched a demonstration mission in 2023 that transferred energy in area utilizing microwaves. And terrestrial power beaming is coming alongside too. The U.S. Protection Superior Analysis Initiatives Company (DARPA) in July 2025 set a new record for wirelessly transmitting power: 800 watts over 8.6 kilometers for 30 seconds utilizing a laser beam.
However till November, nobody had actively beamed energy from a transferring platform to a floor receiver.
Overview’s take a look at transferred solely a sprinkling of energy, but it surely did it with the identical parts and strategies that the corporate plans to ship to area. “Not solely is it the primary optical energy beaming from a transferring platform at any substantial vary or energy,” says Overview CEO Marc Berte, “but additionally it’s the primary time anybody’s actually performed an influence beaming factor the place it’s the entire useful items all working collectively,” he says. “It’s the identical methodology and performance that we’ll take to area and scale up in the long run.”
The method was compelling sufficient that energy beaming skilled Paul Jaffe left his job as a program manager at DARPA to join the company as head of systems engineering. Previous to DARPA, Jaffe spent three a long time with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
“This truly sounds prefer it might work,” –Paul Jaffe
It was listening to Berte clarify Overview’s plan at a convention that helped to persuade Jaffe to take an opportunity on the startup. “This truly sounds prefer it might work,” Jaffe remembers pondering on the time. “It actually looks like it will get round a whole lot of the showstoppers for lots of the opposite ideas. I bear in mind coming house and telling my spouse that I virtually felt like the issue had been solved. So I believed: Ought to [I] do one thing which is nearly extraordinary—to go away in the midst of being a DARPA program supervisor—to attempt to do one thing else?”
For Jaffe, essentially the most compelling purpose was in Overview’s resolution for space-based photo voltaic’s power density downside. A beam with low power density is safer as a result of it’s not blasting an excessive amount of concentrated power onto a single spot on the Earth’s floor, but it surely’s much less environment friendly for the duty of delivering usable photo voltaic power. A better-density beam does the job higher, however then the researchers should engineer some strategy to preserve security.
Startup Overview Power demonstrates how space-based solar energy might be beamed to Earth from satellites Overview Power
House-Primarily based Photo voltaic Energy Makes Waves
Many researchers have settled on microwaves as their beam of alternative for wi-fi energy. However, along with the security considerations about capturing such intense waves on the Earth, Jaffe says there’s one other downside: microwaves are a part of what he calls the “beachfront property” of the electromagnetic spectrum—a variety from 2 to twenty gigahertz that’s put aside for a lot of different functions, akin to 5G cellular networks.
“The actual fact is,” Jaffe says, “if you happen to one way or the other magically had a completely operational solar energy satellite tv for pc that used microwave power transmission in orbit at this time—and a multi-kilometer-scale microwave energy satellite tv for pc receiver on the bottom magically in place at this time—you would not flip it on as a result of the spectrum isn’t allotted to do this sort of transmission.”
As an alternative, Overview plans to make use of less-dense, wide-field infrared waves. Current utility-scale solar farms would be capable of obtain the beamed power similar to they obtain the solar’s power throughout daylight. So “your receivers are already constructed,” Berte says. The subsequent main step is a prototype demonstrator for low Earth orbit, after which he hopes to have GEO satellites beaming megawatts of energy by 2030 and gigawatts by later that decade.
Plenty of doubts concerning the feasibility of space-based energy abound. It’s an unique expertise with a lot left to show, together with the power to outlive orbital debris and the exorbitant price of launching the facility stations. (Overview’s satellite tv for pc can be constructed on earth in a folded configuration and it’ll unfold after it’s delivered to orbit, in keeping with the corporate).
“Getting down the fee per unit mass for launch is an enormous deal,” Jaffe says. “Then, it simply turns into a query of accelerating the precise energy. Plenty of the applied sciences we’re engaged on at Overview are squarely centered on that.”
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