Day 3:Projects at Scale, Interviews & Goodbyes

By Morgan Goodwin, Executive Director

The third and final day of the IAC’s Global Space and Climate Conference in Oslo, known as ‘GLOC2023’, was an exciting conclusion to the event. We gave our first two interviews to journalists. We heard two poster presentations from sunshade teams, as well as talks on more transformative ideas for power generation and transmission that I want to highlight. To wrap up, the farewell drinks affirmed the importance of these connections and the value of maintaining contact over the distance.

Interviews

The wellknown space journalist Remco Timmerman asked to interview Daria (Outreach Coordinator) and I to give an overview of the concept. You can see the interview on twitter, or LinkedIn - check it out and share! We also talked to a team from Space4Climate, a youth education focused media initiative.

Sunshade Presentations

Two different sunshade teams presented interactive poster sessions in the afternoon. First, Johannes Ganzmann presented the work of his team under Tharshan Maheswaran, on logistical methods for construction of a Planetary Sunshade. You can watch here - apologies for the poor twitter live video. Then the team from Politecnico di Torino presented their work with Bruce Chesley, Ph.D., Catello Leonardo Matonti, and Magdalena Gutowska on comparing in-space and in-atmosphere geoengineering concepts.

Leonardo presents during the Interactive Poster session

After the poster sessions, a final technical session included some of the most exciting talks of the conferece, in my opinion.

Space Based Power Projects

Sanjay Vijendran leads the European Space Agency’s SOLARIS project to investigate the feasability of space-based solar power. The basic idea would be for a large solar array in space to collect solar power 24x7, and then beam that energy in a microwave beam to an earth-station to recieve and distribute it into the grid. This would provide baseload power, with a minimum of ground-based infrastructure. Sanjay is tasked with organizing the European member states to fund the ESA research, and address the myriad of challenges that lay between the current world and investing in a working prototype. However, the fact that the work has begun is an exciting step into solutions for the climate crisis. I spoke with Sanjay about the importance of space resources to help offset the launch costs and impacts of doing such a large project and he assured me that space resources will be considered in the feasibility analysis of SOLARIS.

Sanjay presents a key slide in his talk on why space-based solar power is well worth investigating. 

Then we heard from the team at EMROD. They are developing technology to bean power via microwave transmission to and from orbit. They are also currently flying a demonstration mission which is successfully transmitting, and building towards more ambitious goals. The most basic idea is that space-based transmission would be used to send power at long distances around the globe from solar-rich areas to places where the sun has just set, creating clean baseload power without the need for storage. If successful, a grid of orbiting satellites would create a backbone infrastructure to not only support renewable energy on earth, but also in space. 

EMROD discusses the efficiencies and engineering hurdles to achieving cost-competitive power beaming using satellites.

Wrap up drinks

The conference wrapped up with a compelling overview. It was clear that many people found a lot of value from the sessions, and there’s a commitment to doing this again. The sunshaders got to say goodbye, as life-long friendships emerged from the days of discussion. A few of us even went to a local Oslo space meetup to keep the conversation going.

Were so thrilled at the GLOC conference. The Planetary Sunshade has a stronger foundation thanks to this effort.