What If We Covered the Moon With Solar Panels?

WHAT IF

How big would this facility be?

Transcript

00:00 Not too far from Earth is a giant space rock

00:08 that has silently played host to just 12 people in its entire history.

00:13 What would happen if we put our cosmic satellite to work

00:16 by covering it with solar panels?

00:18 What would it take to build an enormous power plant on the Moon?

00:22 How big would this facility be?

00:25 And how much time would it take to finish this mega construction?

00:29 This is WHAT IF, and here's what would happen

00:32 if we covered the Moon with solar panels.

00:36 Because the Moon has little to no atmosphere,

00:39 there's no wind, no rain, and no clouds on that space rock.

00:43 If a lunar weatherman were to tell you the forecast,

00:46 it would always be the same.

00:48 "Once again today, you're looking at the daytime high of 130 degrees and sunny, sunny, sunny."

00:55 Imagine how much energy we'd collect from a place where the Sun never stops shining.

01:00 But how would we even build a solar plant on the Moon?

01:05 One Japanese company, Shimizu, already has that covered.

01:09 They want to build a so-called "lunar ring."

01:12 And yes, it would look just the way it sounds -

01:14 a ring of solar panels spanning around the Moon.

01:18 The construction would stretch for 11,000 km (3,000 mi) along the Moon's equator,

01:23 and would reach 400 km (1,000 mi) in width.

01:26 That's enough to cover half of the United States.

01:29 Where on Earth would we even find enough materials for assembling this enormous solar plant?

01:35 Well, the answer lies outside of our planet's natural budget.

01:40 Most of the building materials would come from the Moon itself.

01:44 We'd only have to launch the initial equipment over there.

01:47 Just enough to start building more equipment, and manufacturing lunar robots.

01:52 Then a team of robots, together with a group of astronauts, would handle the rest.

01:57 For starters, they'd construct huge excavator and ore processing machines to mine the Moon.

02:03 Then, they'd begin assembling solar panels from the lunar materials.

02:07 With nothing but lunar soil and gravel, they'd make concrete, ceramics, and solar cells.

02:13 Meanwhile, astronauts on Earth would be working on building spaceports in low-Earth's orbit

02:18 to ship the remaining supplies, like hydrogen, to the Moon.

02:23 Even with the most advanced technology we can think of,

02:26 the construction would take at least two generations of humans to complete.

02:30 But once it's done, we'd have a super-efficient lunar power plant, churning out power 24/7.

02:37 Because there are no bad weather days on the Moon, ever.

02:41 But what about getting that power back to Earth?

02:44 Well, that's the fun part.

02:47 On the Moon, the lunar power plant would transmit solar power to the energy converting facilities.

02:53 From there, the converted power would be beamed to power collecting stations on Earth,

02:58 with lasers and microwaves.

03:00 How cool is that?

03:02 Potentially, it could deliver so much energy that we wouldn't need any other power sources at all.

03:08 Maybe building the lunar power plant would happen at the same time we constructed a human-occupied Moon base

03:14 that would one day grow into a fully operational human colony.

03:18 But that's a story for another WHAT IF.

03:22 [ ♪ Outro ]

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