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Lunar Lasers

Posted by michael on from the keep-your-laser-handy dept.

Two different articles about building lasers (well, lasers and a maser perhaps) on the moon. Reuters has a story about a potential lunar power plant, creating electricity with solar panels and beaming it to Earth with microwaves. Space.com has a piece about building a sort of super-sized Star Wars program on the Moon, giant lasers set up to blast incoming space debris and not, of course, anyone here on Earth.

1 of 405 comments (clear)

  1. I've got an even better idea by SIGFPE · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Why not spend $50,000,000,000 on solar panels for use on Earth. This proposal has a number of cool features:
    1. You don't have to send lots of equipment up to the moon
    2. You don't have the hassle of building microwave transmitters and receivers to transmit the energy to the Earth
    3. They couldn't easily be hijacked to make a nasty weapon
    4. The equipment would be easy to service. You wouldn't need regular flights carrying crews to the moon.
    --
    -- SIGFPE