Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace

Generation · Transmission · Storage · Use

Power in space

A daily science publication about how power is made, moved, stored, and spent beyond Earth. We read government releases, agency reports, and first-party primary sources, and we ask what each new fact changes for the field.

Daily analysis · 79 published · How this publication works

Image of the Day · 2026-09-08

Every Photon Accounted For

On a world with no weather and no soil worth the name, supper is a bookkeeping of light: the ridge hands the sun down rank by rank, and every tower burns its share green.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A flat hard-edged illustration on a pale ash plain under a black sky. Along a low ridge at the horizon, a rank of heliostat masts with gold mirror heads catches a small low sun at the left, and three broad pale gold beams of reflected sunlight descend from the ridge into a field of tall glass grow towers ranked in perspective across the right of the frame. Every tower is a pale frosted silo with a dark cap and plinth, its interior stacked with green growing decks drawn as rows of small geometric leaf ribs around a bright grow-light core, and where the beams land the towers burn brighter, with small pools of struck light sitting on their crowns. Hundreds of towers run off the right and bottom edges of the frame, and a dense band of tiny far towers glows along the horizon. One tower stands pulled out of the front rank near the lower center, its front open: a green-lit bay holding one deck of crop, two faceless suited harvesters and stacked cut trays, the only tower not burning. A lone suited figure walks the empty plain at the lower left past faint craters, casting a long shadow, and a small crescent Earth hangs in the sky at the upper right. No text or insignia appears anywhere.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: a grow tower field on the Moon near the terminator, where heliostat masts on the ridge hand sunlight down into hundreds of glass silos and every tower burns its share green, spending the beamed photons on stacked decks of crop. LED grow lights already grow food in orbit aboard the International Space Station, but a lunar farm of this scale is speculation; the one tower standing open with its two faceless harvesters is the day's reminder that even out here, supper is light kept in careful accounts. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.

Latest analysis

October 15, 2026 An audit system for space power beaming claims
A 58-page review of wireless energy transfer for space introduces an R0 to R7 reference-plane framework so that beaming efficiencies reported at different electrical boundaries stop being compared as if they were the same quantity. Its closure audit of six flight and ground experiments finds that no demonstration, from Goldstone 1975 to MAPLE and Tianzhou-7, has validated a complete source-to-useful-load chain, and that the segments everyone skipped are exactly where space power engineers live.
October 11, 2026 Mars tumbleweed swarms: the storm is the propulsion
An Oxford and Toronto team simulated how a swarm of 4 m, 20 kg wind-propelled tumbleweed rovers disperses inside a Martian global dust storm. The swarm holds together as a radio mesh over a full sol with a per-rover range of just 1.6 to 4.1 km, which converts almost the entire surface mobility budget into communications, sensing, and storage instead of drive power.
 October 10, 2026 A 175,000-parameter watchdog for a 400 Hz power bus
Guzman, Babiceanu and Pekoz built a Boeing 787-inspired 400 Hz power system model, generated 21 classes of faults and disturbances, and trained a Compact ResNet that classifies them at 96.94% with only 175,685 parameters. Deployed with 8-bit quantization on a Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA it holds 95.87% accuracy at 6.90 ms mean latency, but every waveform it was tested on came from the same simulator that trained it.
 October 10, 2026 One rectenna, two polarizations, power plus identity
LAAS-CNRS researchers built a rectenna that either harvests incoming RF power or modulates its reflection in two orthogonal polarizations, controlled by two GPIO lines. Bench tests show 25 to 29% RF-to-DC conversion at minus 5 dBm and a 16-byte AES-128 payload backscattered over a 2-meter link, a meter-scale proof of concept whose polarization trick has a real space-power parallel.
 October 3, 2026 The 2003 AMOS open-air laser beaming tests, and the missing numbers
By 2003 a NASA-led, multi-institution program had moved laser-photovoltaic wireless power transmission from the bench to initial open-air tests at the AMOS facility on Maui. The record documents what was tested, but it publishes no range, power, or efficiency figure, and that absence is as instructive as the milestone.
 October 2, 2026 NASA's Mars surface power paper: the load is the propellant, the constraint is the repair
A NASA white paper from the 2023 Moon to Mars Architecture Concept Review sizes human Mars surface power from about 10 kW at the low end to megawatt class for ISRU-intensive architectures. Its harder message is operational: the power plant must deploy itself, years ahead of crew, with no possibility of repair.
 October 2, 2026 NASA's OPAL study: beam focusability as the hinge of lunar orbital power
NASA Langley's OPAL concept study beams laser power from lunar orbit to surface assets through the night, and its central finding is about the beam, not the laser: focusability is what makes the system safe and light. Every efficiency figure in the chain is an assumption, and the study says so.

All analysis →

Sections

Daily Image of the Day
A daily 3000x3000 artistic imagining of power in space: generation, transmission, storage, and use. Browse the archive or open today's image at full resolution.
 Section Generation
Solar arrays, space nuclear power, fission surface power, radioisotope systems, and ideas not yet invented.
 Section Transmission
Power beaming, wireless power transmission, microwave and laser transfer, rectennas, and the wiring that moves electrons.
 Section Storage
Space batteries, energy storage, flywheels, fuel cells, and the buffers that bridge generation and demand.
 Section Use
Computation and power budgeting, spacecraft power systems, in-space grids and microgrids, refueling and ISRU propellant.
 Section Analysis
Daily readings of new research from government and first-party primary sources, newest first.

How we work

We trace every claim to a named government or first-party source. We do not repeat marketing copy as fact, and we distinguish demonstrated results from announced intent. The full method, including how pieces are selected and produced, is on the about page.