The high power electricity generation and WPT demonstration mission — Proposed first step to develop space solar power

The solar power satellite (SPS), first proposed by Dr. Peter Glaser in 1968, is a huge spacecraft capturing solar energy in space and supplying electric power to the electric grid on the ground. With the rapid progress of reusable launch technology and the ability to develop large-scale spacecraft, developing space solar power (SSP) is gradually becoming of great practical significance from both technical and economic perspectives. Many countries and organizations consider SSP to be one of the promising clean energy sources. Due to the huge size, immense mass and high-power of an SPS, there are still many technical challenges to achieve an SSP. There has been no scaled technology demonstration system developed in the world so far. According to various SPS development roadmaps proposed by various countries and organizations, technology demonstrations at different levels, including component level, subsystem level and system level, need to be carried out in space. Some small space demonstration missions have been carried out recently or will be carried out in the near future. According to a proposed SSP roadmap by Chinese experts, the key technologies related to SSP need to be demonstrated in space step by step, including high-power electricity generation, wireless power transmission (WPT), space super-large structure deployment, assembly and control. As the first step, the high-power electricity generation and WPT demonstration mission is presented in this paper. The mission will demonstrate high voltage electricity generation, kW-level microwave power transmission from lower earth orbit (LEO) to the ground, kW-level laser power transmission (LPT) from LEO to the ground and LPT between two spacecraft simultaneously, and validate the theoretical energy transmission efficiency chain and long-distance beam control precision, which will lay the foundation for the subsequent missions.