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by aab0 3654 days ago
Maybe not electric rockets, but SpaceX could start shooting self-driving cars with robotic arms... into space... to manufacture giant solar panels to beam down energy 24/7 to replace all the nonrenewable baseload.

(Or more prosaically, just use the dropping payload cost to launch some big solar sails with energy collectors and then beam it down as has long been proposed.)

1 comments

Energy is already being beamed down to earth for free.
As usual, though, you get what you pay for. The free energy often comes in at a suboptimal angle, and half the time you can't even use it because there's a planet in the way.
A geosynced satellite would have the same only half the time problem. If you want to correct the angle all you'd need is a mirror.