>China's proposal, meanwhile, appears to suggest converting solar energy into electric energy in space, before beaming back to Earth using a microwave or laser and feeding into the grid via a ground receiving system.
Do they need to? I wonder how feasible it would be to put large computational centers in space and have space solar farms powering these computational centers. So if we want to test complex or long-running programs/models/algos, we can just beam it to the computational centers orbiting earth and wait for the results when it's finished.
Radiators. Need pretty big ones if the computers want to run cool.
Probably would be better to manufacture most of the stuff on some asteroid or on Mercury and have the computation radiation shielded by a significant mass.
First you build a space elevator to geosynchronous orbit, then you can use full batteries as counterweight for lifting empty batteries. That way you only have to overcome friction losses.
Even better! Now it's less of a joke idea. You still have a small shuttle transfer from geosync orbit to wherever the solar farm is (heliosync or a lagrange point to avoid earth shadow), but the delta-v for that is tiny.
However space elevators are still soft SF (still missing a material with enough tensile strength), whereas BFR cheap reusable launchers are hard SF, achievable with current known tech.
A small part of me wants to see this turn into China deploying a solar powered death laser under the guise of a green energy initiative.