Beaming Solar Power Down From Orbit Sounds Insane. It's Also a Real Program Now

A satellite in orbit that catches sunlight around the clock, unfiltered by atmosphere or weather, and beams that power down to Earth as microwaves — for most of the last fifty years, that idea lived almost entirely in thought experiments and NASA studies. In 2026, it has actual hardware behind it, on three continents.

The proof of concept that already flew

Caltech's Space Solar Power Demonstrator already answered the most basic question — can this work at all — by flying to orbit and using its MAPLE experiment to wirelessly transmit detectable power for the first time from space, a milestone that shifted the conversation from "is this physically possible" to "how do we make it efficient and affordable at scale."

China's 2026 ground tests

That second question is exactly what a team at Xidian University tackled in 2026, under a project called "Sun Chasing." Using spherical crown concentrators to capture sunlight, a 1.2-meter phased array antenna to generate a microwave beam, and a 5.2-meter rectenna to convert that beam back into electricity on the receiving end, the team demonstrated wireless transmission over 100 meters to a stationary target and more than 30 meters to a moving one, achieving 20.8% DC-to-DC efficiency while delivering 1,180 watts — and, in a more vivid demonstration, powered a drone in flight with a stable 143 watts from 30 meters away. The receiving rectenna captured roughly 87% of the microwave power aimed at it. Researchers say the next step is in-orbit testing, with an eventual goal of powering multiple moving targets from a single space-based platform.

The team powered a drone in flight with a stable 143 watts of wirelessly transmitted energy from 30 meters away — a small, concrete demonstration of a very large idea.

The other programs racing in parallel

China isn't alone. Japan has a satellite mission planned for 2026, OHISAMA, specifically designed to test wireless solar energy transmission from space. In Europe, the European Space Agency's SOLARIS initiative has been studying the case for orbital solar power stations that could each span roughly a kilometer across, feeding ground receiving antennas several kilometers wide — at a scale ESA's own studies suggest could eventually supply a meaningful share of Europe's power demand, with an in-orbit demonstration targeted around 2030 and a first operational station envisioned closer to 2040.

Why anyone still thinks this is worth the trouble

The pitch for space-based solar power is the same one driving other orbital infrastructure bets we've covered, from orbital data centers to Nvidia's space computing push: a solar panel in the right orbit sees sunlight essentially continuously, unfiltered by atmosphere or interrupted by night and weather, which no ground-based solar installation can match. The tradeoff is the same too — enormous launch costs, unproven at-scale manufacturing and assembly in orbit, and now, with real transmission-efficiency numbers on the table, a genuine engineering question about how much power actually survives the trip from a kilometer-wide satellite to a receiver on the ground.

What to actually watch

The realistic timeline here is long — ESA's own roadmap doesn't target an operational station until around 2040 — but 2026 is the year the technology stopped being purely theoretical on multiple continents at once. The next real signal will be whether China, Japan, or a Western program actually gets a wireless power transmission test into orbit, rather than a lab or ground demonstration, in the next few years.