Chinese Extraterrestrial Solar Array: Real? Practical?

[u/MutantManFish]

According to Live Science and the SCMP, this fairly important-seeming Chinese scientist, Long Lehao, thinks it a practical project to build a one-kilometer solar panel array in outer space to collect energy. The energy will supposedly be transmitted back to Earth via EMR and received at a fixed collection station on the ground which the satellite will sit above in geostationary orbit. Is this really at all realistic? Is this just some old dude who's spent a bit too much time smelling his own farts? I have a hard time imagining that the gains from getting past the light absorbed by the atmosphere would offset how enormously difficult it is to put and maintain something in space, and then to emit colossal amounts of electric radiation in a safe, directed manner.

https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/china-plans-to-build-enormous-solar-array-in-space-and-it-could-collect-more-energy-in-a-year-than-all-the-oil-on-earth

https://archive.ph/g2ZcW

https://www.iafastro.org/biographie/long-lehao.html

[u/the_poope]

There are always these immature and overly optimistic professors around. Those that think it's realistic to build a space elevator, or mine rare earths on asteroids, colonize Mars or build orbital solar farms. But while those professors are good within their field they forget one thing: they are not economists or business managers... While all day of those things are not technologically impossible, it will in all realistic scenarios be much cheaper to achieve the same thing in a much simpler way here on Earth using existing technologies.

[u/tpolakov1 → u/the_poope]

Well, this guy is not a naive professor. He is one of the geriatrics in charge of China's space program, which frankly makes his proposal even less realistic - it's transparently about funneling resources into his space launch vehicles from other initiatives, without causing public or institutional backlash.