China reveals military capabilities in new space solar power plant design

Duan Baoyan, a leading architect of China’s “Zhuri” space solar power initiative, wrote in a paper published in Scientia Sinica Informationis last month, that his team had revamped the design of the giant orbital infrastructure.In addition to energy transmission, the new system was required to support a wide range of tasks “such as communication, navigation, reconnaissance, interference and remote control”, he said.Duan, a professor of electromechanical engineering at Xidian University in Xian and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, also stressed the need for extremely narrow, precisely steerable microwave beams to deliver energy from space to the ground over long distances.While designed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of wireless power transmission, these capabilities could, in principle, enable targeted signal transmission, including potential applications such as jamming or securing military communications.China is one of the world’s leading countries developing space-based solar power. Unlike solar panels on the ground, which are limited by weather, seasons and the day-night cycle, space-based systems can collect sunlight almost continuously.The energy is converted into electricity in orbit, transmitted as a microwave beam to the ground, and then converted back into power by receiving antennas on Earth.