Solar Power Satellites: A Visual Introduction

Cool idea. But the engineering seems fixated on mechanically hooking everything together with heavy frameworks, even having cargo building where arriving pods get racked.

Turns out space is big; things don't go anywhere if you just put them nearby. So no need to have buildings to store them.

And thousands of independently-operating solar cells would work as well as a big rigid frame. Why not have each cell in a swarm beam its energy to a single large transmission facility? No need to wire-and-bolt them together.

Probably its improvements in compute power that made this inconceivable decades ago. But now it seems obvious.