What changed, what it does not mean, and where to read the source.
Notes on beamed power, the ground segment, and the standards both rest on. Written from public documents, checked against the issuing body rather than the coverage, and published when there is something worth saying — usually about twice a week.
The only project writing the method for measuring a power beam has no draft and fifteen months left
Exposure limits for a power beam exist and are not in dispute. The measurement method does not exist, and the one chartered project to write it, IEEE P63480, has been an Active PAR since June 2023 with no public draft and an authorisation that runs to December 2027.
The Pentagon did not buy orbital power beaming this week. Its own solicitation says it bought a robot.
The ASGARD award announced on 21 September 2026 is being read as space-based solar power going operational. The government's published request for project proposals says the primary focus is the persistent platform and lists power beaming as the payload that demonstrates it. The one dimension in the document, a 0.7 by 0.9 metre panel, explains why.
ITU-R approved three Recommendations on 8 September. Its own editions pages still show the old ones.
The ITU decides by correspondence and announces it in an administrative circular, weeks before the page you would check catches up. Sitting in that gap right now are a revision that adds a band for beam wireless power and drops the paragraph telling administrations to consider exposure limits, and a clutter-loss revision that would cover 5.8 GHz Earth-space paths for the first time.
A £1.3m contract points a 5.8 GHz beam up at the stratosphere. The design is settled on the ground.
ARIA is funding RF power beaming to a solar aircraft at about 20 km. The binding constraint is not transmitter power, it is the width of the ground array, and the same choice decides the exposure question. At 5.8 GHz a 30 m array needs tens of kilowatts, and a 217 m array needs under one.
Space mirrors offer a faster route to orbital power than microwave transmission
By reflecting sunlight directly onto existing solar farms, Reflect Orbital bypasses the need for orbital power conversion, but the company faces fierce opposition from astronomers over light pollution.
Orbital Reflectors Expose a Regulatory Vacuum Over Light Pollution
The FCC's approval of Reflect Orbital's first space mirror reveals that no US agency has the authority to regulate visual light pollution from orbit, setting up a clash between the orbital power industry and astronomers.
A Report is not a Recommendation, and the difference is the whole regulatory question
ITU-R Report SM.2392 names the bands used for RF power beaming, including 5.8 GHz. It is a Report. Reports describe; Recommendations bind. The Radio Regulations still carry no Article 21 row letting a spacecraft transmit power into 5.8 GHz.
The same labels the rest of the product uses.
Every article carries one of the evidence classes below, chosen for the strongest claim the piece makes. They are not article-specific — they are the labels attached to numbers everywhere on this site, and Trust explains what each one asks you to check.
- Measured — Produced from an observed or computed source with a stated method and epoch.
- Documented — Supported by a public or access-controlled record whose source remains attached.
- Estimated — BeamDesk modelling or an assumption, shown as an estimate rather than a retrieved fact.
- Provisional — Incomplete, constrained, or not yet offered for reliance.
- Simulated — A product demonstration using the console’s deterministic mock network.
A summary is a pointer to a source, not a source.
A claim is checked against the body that issued it before it appears here — the ITU's own site rather than a report about the ITU. Where something rests on a single second-hand account, the sentence says so. Every article ends with the documents it was written from, in full, so the reader can go and disagree.
Each piece also carries a section on what would change its mind. That is not a stylistic tic: an argument that cannot say what would falsify it is not an argument, and a reader deciding whether to trust a company deserves to see the edge of what it actually knows.
These are drafted with an AI assistant, then researched, edited and approved by a person before anything is published. Saying so seems the least a site can do when the rest of it is about labelling where a number came from.