Kent, Wash.-based PowerLight Technologies says it’s joined a team headed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture to design a power beaming system that might someday charge up robots on the moon.
The effort is being funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of its LunA-10 program, which supports concepts for future lunar infrastructure projects. DARPA selected 14 industry teams, including Blue Origin’s team, to receive up to $1 million each for studies that are due this spring.
Blue Origin and PowerLight are focusing on a system that could generate power for lunar operations — perhaps using solar cells manufactured on the moon — and then transmit that power to remote locations via laser light. We’ve reached out to Blue Origin for more information about its plans and will update this report with what we hear back.
The DARPA LunA-10 study takes its name from the goal of advancing a lunar architecture for infrastructure over a 10-year time frame. Hardware development isn’t the point of the study. Instead, DARPA is interested in developing ideas that could give rise to future commercial applications on the moon — and perhaps technology spin-offs here on Earth.
PowerLight, which was known as LaserMotive when it was founded in 2007, is developing laser-based power transmission systems for a variety of closer-to-home applications, including over-the-air power beaming systems as well as power over fiber-optic cable for telecom equipment, drones and hard-to-reach installations on land and underwater.
The company made an early splash in 2009 when it won a $900,000 prize in NASA’s Power Beaming Challenge, so its involvement in a space-related project marks something of a return to its roots.
PowerLight’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Tom Nugent, said the company didn’t focus on space applications at first.
“Early on, it was too speculative,” he told GeekWire. “And so, with all of this development we’ve been doing on the Earth, it really has been quite rapid how strong the interest in power beaming in space has come on.”
How lunar lasers could work
The basic design for a moon-based power beaming system is similar to the over-the-air system that PowerLight has been working on for terrestrial applications. Electricity would be converted to near-infrared laser light, and then beamed from a transmitter to a photovoltaic receiver for conversion back into electricity. A safety system would ensure that the beam doesn’t stray too far away from its target.
Setting up such a system on the moon would be simpler in some ways — for example, you wouldn’t have to worry about atmospheric effects. But because the lunar horizon is closer than an earthly horizon, you’d have to elevate the transmitters and receivers if you wanted to beam power over long distances. Also, “thermal management is always more of a problem when you don’t have air to dump your heat into,” Nugent said.
A lunar power beaming system would come in handy not only for charging up robots and outposts that are far from a central base, but more specifically for distributing power at the moon’s polar regions.
Those regions are attractive targets for exploration and settlement because crater rims receive nearly constant sunlight, while the permanently shadowed crater basins are thought to hold significant reserves of water ice. PowerLight’s system could conceivable transmit power from a facility on a crater rim down into the perpetual darkness to support water extraction operations.
A modified configuration of the laser system could also be used to beam power down to the lunar surface from an orbiting solar power station.
Down-to-Earth applications
In a weird way, the DARPA moon project could support PowerLight’s efforts to develop power beaming systems for earthly applications.
“Because we’re using lasers and these specialized solar cells, like any new technology or new kind of product, the first ones will be expensive,” Nugent said. “And so, you need to find that first market that has that strong need or desire.”
He drew a parallel to Tesla’s first electric cars: The original Tesla Roadsters were priced in the range of $85,000 to $100,000 in 2006, and not many of them were sold, but they primed the pump for later models that sold more widely. Nugent said power beaming systems could follow a similar path to market.
“The urgent needs, or the problems that can’t be solved any other way, are things like these lunar operations or stratospheric drones, where there’s no other way to get power there,” he said.
PowerLight already has several down-to-Earth applications in the works:
- Following up on its 2021 demonstration of beamed power for telecom equipment, PowerLight says it’s working with a select number of telecom companies to commercialize a power-over-fiber system for 5G networks.
- PowerLight has partnered with Raytheon as well as Draper Laboratories on a different DARPA project that aims to build an airborne relay system for high-altitude, long-range energy transmission for global military operations. That project is known as Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay, or POWER. PowerLight previously took part in an initiative for the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory called Safe and Continuous Power Beaming Optical, or SCOPE-O.
- PowerLight has teamed up with Zeno Power to provide the Defense Department with capabilities that could open the way for long-endurance seafloor sensor systems and charging stations for autonomous undersea vehicles. Zeno recently won a $7,5 million defense contract to demonstrate a radioisotope power system for distributed power on the seabed, and PowerLight’s power-over-fiber technology is expected to play a role.
There could be additional military applications in PowerLight’s future. “We’ve got folks from really key elements of the Department of Defense, with CENTCOM and the Navy, coming to our office over the course of this month or next month,” PowerLight CEO Richard Gustafson said.
Bob Zak, the company’s chief operating officer, pointed to places around the world where beamed power could make a difference.
“There are global issues going on right now, relative to the awareness we all have about the importance of drones and how they’ll be used on the future battlefield and in future missions, both in Ukraine and with what’s going on in Israel, what’s going on in the Gulf right now,” he said. “These are real issues that have leaped to the front of being right here in our face, that are driving the demand for this.”
Zak argued that beamed power could also facilitate economic development in regions “where infrastructure needs to catch up very, very, very quickly,” such as sub-Saharan Africa. “You just can’t build the kind of traditional power transmission infrastructure in the way that we did over 75 years here in the U.S.,” he said.
Gustafson said “it’s a real testament to the team and to the shareholders to stick with this for over a decade” while PowerLight developed the core technologies for beaming power through the air and through fiber. “As Bob described, these are really pressing needs, and the company is in the right place at the right time, because of all the work that has been accomplished, to make them a reality for the power distribution side of the equation,” he said.
Next stage for PowerLight
PowerLight currently has nearly 30 employees, many of whom work at the company’s 30,000-square-foot facility in Kent.
“We’re doing just about roughly six and a half, 7 million [dollars] in revenue in 2023,” Gustafson said. “We have had the benefit of substantial Defense Department funding to the tune of about $30 million, with congressional support along the way.”
Gustafson said his company plans to quicken its pace going forward.
“We’re now at a place where we’re going to go through our first institutional round, starting this month, and raising additional capital to help accelerate those areas that we need to press forward on, to be able to disconnect them from the pacing of defense and government funding,” he said. “And so there’s an accelerator there, and we’re excited to be at that point.”
