What happens if We Covered the Moon With Photovoltaic Panels?
Not too far from Earth is a giant space rock that has silently played host to just twelve people in its entire history. What would happen if we put our cosmic satellite to work by covering it with solar panels? What would it take to build an enormous power plant on the moon? How big would this facility be and how much time would it take to finish this mega construction? This is what, if and here’s.
What would happen if we covered the moon with solar panels, because the moon has little to no atmosphere there’s? No wind, no rain, and no clouds on that space rock. If a lunar weather man were to tell you the forecast, it would always be the same.
Imagine how much energy we’d, collect from a place where the Sun never stops shining, but how would we even build a solar plant on the moon? One Japanese company Shimizu already has that covered. They want to build a so called lunar ring and, yes, it would look just the way.
It sounds a ring of solar panels spanning around the moon. The construction would stretch for 11,000 kilometres along the moon’s equator and would reach 400 kilometres and width. That’s enough to cover half of the United States.
Where on earth? Would we even find enough materials for assembling this enormous solar plant? Well, the answer lies outside of our planet’s, natural budget, most of the building materials would come from the moon itself.
We’d, only have to launch the initial equipment over there just enough to start building more equipment and manufacturing lunar robots. Then a team of robots, together with a group of astronauts, would handle the rest.
For starters, they’d, construct huge excavator and ore processing machines to mine, the moon. Then they begin assembling solar panels from the lunar materials with nothing but lunar soil and gravel. They make concrete ceramics and solar cells.
Meanwhile, astronauts on earth would be working on building space ports in low-earth orbit to ship. The remaining supplies like hydrogen to the moon, even with the most advanced technology we can think of the construction, would take at least two generations of humans to complete, but once it’s done, we’d.
Have a super efficient lunar power plant churning out power 24/7 because there are no bad weather days on the moon ever, but what about getting that power back to earth? Well, that’s. The fun part on the moon, the lunar power plant, would transmit solar power to the energy converting facilities from there.
The converted power would be beamed to power collecting stations on earth with lasers and microwaves. How cool is that, potentially it could deliver so much energy that we wouldn’t need any other power sources at all.
Maybe building the lunar power plant would happen. At the same time, we constructed a human occupied moon base that would one day grow into a fully operational human colony, but that’s, a story for another what-if
