UCSB Dr. Philip Lubin and his team have NASA, Breakthrough Starshot and other funding to develop laser power beaming to propel missions for eventual interstellar space goals and nearterm orbital and in solar system missions.
They have been developing the hardware and the science. They have written over 2000 pages of research.
They are now building and testing hardware to create an initial one meter laser array system to send a small proof of concept mission to low earth orbit.
They have done lab and outdoor testing.
Within 1-5 years they will send the chipsat and wafersat systems to low earth orbit with kilowatt power systems.
In 7-10 years, they will send larger systems to orbit and missions to the moon.
They have a detailed roadmap.
The roadmap looks at scaling and lowering costs by thousands of times.
One interesting observation is that solar farms only have 10% cost from the solar arrays. The costs would be greatly reduced with system architecture and process improvement and humanoid robotics and other automation to deploy the solar farms. This would mean Teslabot success could lower the cost of solar farms by 5 to 8 times.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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