“Many times, we asked colleagues at [NASA and Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory] and in the Southern California space industry for advice about the design and test procedures that are used to develop successful missions. We tried to reduce the risk of failure, even though the development of entirely new technologies is inherently a risky process,” Pellegrino said.
Still, the payoff could be huge, and not just for space-based solar power.
“DOLCE demonstrates a new architecture for solar-powered spacecraft and phased antenna arrays. It exploits the latest generation of ultrathin composite materials to achieve unprecedented packaging efficiency and flexibility. With the further advances that we have already started to work on, we anticipate applications to a variety of future space missions,” Pellegrino said.
What is space-based solar power?
Space-based solar power isn’t a new idea, but it is an exciting one. Unlike ground-based solar power, space-based satellites would be able to avoid a lot of the drawbacks of a ground-based solar cell, like inclement weather, and prolonged day-night cycles.
The challenge, of course, is that space-based solar power is in space, and space is hard to get to and build in, no matter how easy SpaceX can make it look sometimes.
Lifting a 50-kilogram solar array hundreds of miles off the Earth’s surface is an expensive proposition, which is one of the things that makes ALBA so important. These 22 solar cells are going to be testing for the most efficient form of solar collection so that Caltech researchers can see which technology holds the most promise for making space-based solar power economically practical given the cost of setting it up in the first place.