China Looks To Build The Largest Human-Made Object In Space

By Alex Kimani of Oilprice.com

Two months ago, we reported that Baiju Bhatt, one of the co-founders of the investing app Robinhood, debuted space solar power company Aetherflux. The startup plans to build a constellation of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites that will use infrared lasers to transmit power to small ground stations on Earth.

The startup notes that space solar power can revolutionize energy distribution, especially where delivering power is expensive, challenging, or dangerous. Powering hard-to-reach places like remote military bases, islands, or areas hit by disasters unlocks new capabilities and advantages for our country. 

Although rarely discussed, harnessing solar power from space is hardly a new concept. In 1941, writer Isaac Asimov introduced the world to space solar power. Back in the 1970s, NASA explored space solar power, with its approach requiring massive, billion-dollar structures in space, using radio waves for power transmission. Unfortunately, NASA quickly abandoned the idea. However, the attractions of beaming solar power from space are obvious: Unlike on Earth, sunlight in space is more powerful, available day and night, and unaffected by weather.

And now China is looking to upend the U.S. in yet another futuristic energy technology: China is charging ahead with plans to build a prototype Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) device by 2030 that would become the largest human-made object in space. 

“China will be producing this in less than 20 years, and we’ll be buying from them,” Peter Garretson, a leading SBSP expert and fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, warned congressional staff during a recent briefing.

The stakes are high: energy represents roughly 10% of global GDP, meaning the first country to successfully build out SBSP infrastructure will potentially control a multi-trillion-dollar marketspace. The global SBSP infrastructure and manufacturing industry is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2040. An ambitious U.S.-led space-based solar power project would translate to thousands of high-paying engineering and support services jobs right here on Earth.

As David Steitz, former Deputy Associate Administrator for Technology at NASA, has warned, America risks losing the space solar power race to China as it has done with conventional solar power unless it acts immediately. Steitz says what the U.S. is lacking is national coordination and commitment, noting that, unlike China’s focused national program, U.S. efforts are fragmented among NASA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense–each of which expects someone else to take the lead.  

China Wins Fusion Race

But it’s not just the SBSP race that the U.S. is likely to lose to China. According to Jean-Paul Allain, who leads the U.S. Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, Beijing has been pumping in ~$1.5 billion annually into nuclear fusion research, nearly double Washington’s fusion tab at $800 million a year. China has been making rapid progress over the past decade, and now owns more fusion patents than any country according to industry data published by Nikkei. 

“To me, what’s more important than the number, it’s actually how fast they’re doing this,” Allain told CNN.    

Interestingly, a small, relatively unknown Chinese fusion startup has been able to achieve what even France-based International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), funded and run by seven countries since 2006, has been unable to pull off. Shanghai-based Energy Singularity has effectively completed the engineering feasibility verification of high-temperature superconducting for its Honghuang 70 (HH70) tokamak device, giving China a first-mover advantage in the critical field of high-temperature superconducting magnetic confinement fusion. Energy Singularity has also become the world’s first commercial company to build and operate an all-superconducting tokamak.

“The design work of the device began in March 2022, and the overall installation was completed by the end of February this year, setting the fastest record for the research and construction of superconducting tokamak devices worldwide,” Yang Zhao, Energy Singularity’s Chief Executive Officer, has revealed.

So, how did this little-known Chinese company manage to pull off in two years what ITER has failed to achieve in nearly two decades? 

According to Yang, using high-temperature superconducting materials can reduce the volume of a device to about 2 percent of that of traditional low-temperature superconducting devices, allowing the construction period of the device to be shortened from ~ 30 years to just 3-4 years.

According to Yang, the company owns independent intellectual property rights of HH70, with a domestication rate of over 96 percent, adding that all of the device’s magnet systems are constructed using high-temperature superconducting materials. Despite its commendable success, Energy Singularity is not resting on its laurels, with Yang revealing the company plans to complete the next generation high magnetic field high-temperature superconducting tokamak device dubbed HH170 with a deuterium-tritium equivalent energy gain (Q) greater than 10 by 2027. In nuclear fusion parlance, the Q value reflects the energy efficiency of the fusion reactor, that is, the ratio of the energy generated by the device to the energy input required to sustain the fusion reaction. Q values greater than 1 means the reactor generates more energy than what it consumes, which is essentially what fusion research has been trying to achieve in a commercial reactor for decades. Currently, the greatest Q factor that scientists have achieved is just 1.53.

Meanwhile, Deven, Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems is collaborating with MIT to build their small fusion reactor. Dubbed Sparc, the reactor is ~1/65th the volume of ITER’s reactor. The experimental reactor is expected to generate about 100 MW of heat energy in pulses of about 10 seconds – bursts big enough to power a small city. However, its first commercial reactor is at least a decade away.