#orbital-solar-power

#orbital-solar-power

The term 'Lunar Iron' refers to the class of heavy construction machinery required for lunar base development, including excavators, trenchers, and surface miners.

NASA has 30 days to kick off a program for a mid-power space reactor ready for launch by 2030. A lunar variant is required, as is an option for nuclear electric propulsion.

People who could afford to do it at that time realised that it was much cheaper and cost-effective and better for them in the long run to do a one-time investment in rooftop solar as opposed to keep paying high electricity bills from a grid that is also unreliable, said Nabiya Imran, an associate at Renewables First, a Pakistani thinktank.

The most consequential shift for anyone considering rooftop solar in 2026 is the expiration of Section 25D, the Residential Clean Energy Credit. That 30% credit, which was worth up to $9,000 on a $30,000 system, is no longer available for home solar installations. The One Big Beautiful Bill, signed July 4, 2025, accelerated the phase-out that the Inflation Reduction Act had originally extended through 2034.

Redwire focuses on space infrastructure and autonomous systems. The company completed its Edge Autonomy acquisition and reported 50.7% year-over-year revenue growth. Management maintained full-year guidance of $320 to $340 million, and the book-to-bill ratio of 1.25 suggests demand is holding. But the business is bleeding cash with a net loss of $41.2 million in Q3, nearly double the $21 million loss from the prior year. Gross margin sits at just 16.3%, leaving almost no room for error.

Could IT infrastructure, and even the rise of AI, eventually migrate beyond the atmosphere? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted in October that gigawatt-scale, solar-powered data centers would be a reality within 10 to 20 years. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Elon Musk was even more ambitious: AI data centers in the "final frontier" could be viable within two to three years. Google also plans to deploy its TPU chips in orbit via Project Suncatcher.

Now say you want to run some modest AI stuff. That's a bigger job, so let's scale up our cubical computer with edges twice as long as before. That would make the volume eight times larger (2 3), so we could have eight times as many processors, and we need eight times as much power input-2,400 watts. However, the surface area is only four times (2 2) larger, so the radiative power would be about 4,000 watts.

Earlier this week, the Sun unleashed a powerful X-class solar flare, a major burst of electromagnetically charged particles that lit up the Earth's night sky as they entered our planet's atmosphere. The effect was stunning: a dazzling display of auroras reaching as far as southern California. Forecasters that it was one of the largest solar storms in decades, making for a particularly unique opportunity to watch the show unfold.

By the end of the year, Northwood, based in El Segundo, California, had shown the ability to build eight of these Portal arrays a month. And in January the company had deployed operational Portal antennas across two continents. These deployments, which comprise an area of 8 to 15 meters, have the equivalent capability of a 7-meter parabolic dish, said Griffin Cleverly, co-founder and chief technical officer of Northwood.

In the vacuum of space, the amount of debris-spent rocket stages, splintered satellites, micrometeoroids- numbers in the millions, all zooming about, often at 17,000 mph speeds. They're also constantly hitting each other in a tsuris of exponential littering. Most of these pieces are tiny, and many are not anywhere near the altitude of the ISS. But the area isn't completely clean.