You have to admire the sheer bravado in ideas like this.

It has something in common with the Skylon, though – there might be easier ways to do this.

Any space solar power system requires a mechanism to transmit the power from the space panels to the Earth. Most of the systems I studied used microwaves. The transmissions were designed to deliver a relatively low power density to a very large antenna covering a wide area on the ground. The area above the antenna might give a bird a fever eventually if it stayed there. The area under the antenna would have almost no detectable radiation, like outside the door of a microwave. An antenna could be a sheet of mesh open enough for light to pass, raised many feet over the ground on pylons. You could pasture cows under it.

The difficulty and losses increase with tranmission distance. What I’m wondering is if it might not be a bit easier in the short run to build large-scale solar panel farms in places like the Sahara or Australian outback, transmit the power to relay satellites in Earth orbit, then back to where it’s needed most on Earth? It would be a good start, easier than the lunar system, and set up the receivers for when you want to start transmitting power from Earth orbit farms, or even the Moon.

In the “Transmetropolitan” comic series, the future Earth gets its power from solar farms on Mercury. Now that’s a transmission problem.