Our solar system’s sun is a force to be reckoned with, and NASA intends to harvest the sun’s energy with their latest idea – a gargantuan ‘margarita glass’, which in essence, is a solar panel that will float around in space. It will be made out of thousands of curved mirrors, soaking up the sun’s rays many thousands of miles above the earth, beaming this energy down to our planet where power stations will then “process” the energy and send it to our homes. Known as the SPS-ALPHA machine, it could very well offer a far greener future as we reduce our dependence on coal as well as nuclear powered plants here.
John Mankins, the person behind the California-based firm Artemis Innovation Management Solutions, claims that the SPS-ALPHA (which stands for Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large PHased Array), might eventually end up as reality sometime down the road. No idea on the costs involved in such a mammoth undertaking though.