Project Elara overview#
Project Elara is a broad effort to to push frontiers in science and engineering and make world-changing technologies possible. We have a research program covering a wide variety of areas, but our current focus is on space-based solar power, a technology that promises to deliver sustainable energy to nearly everywhere around the world. It is a very ambitious and challenging task, but it is one we choose to tackle, because we believe that developing the technology that can create an energy-resilient world, freed from power scarcity and inequity, is more than worth the effort.
Project Elara actively supports open-access research, in which we freely exchange our knowledge and expertise. Our team believes in the strength of collaboration, and is keen to participate in research partnerships with other groups and institutions. We hope to form strong alliances and bring together teams from around the world, to build a future worthy of our future generations.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
John F. Kennedy, 1962
A tourist’s guide to the project#
We are a research organization based at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute. As mentioned earlier, our primary focus is on developing space-based solar power technology. This technology collects energy from our Sun from space on a massive scale and beams it back to Earth. When fully-realized, this technology would generate power orders of magnitude above nearly any means of power generation we could conceive of, even above nuclear fission and fusion. This technology could very well power the world one day with clean energy, one that can last for hundreds of thousands of years, and one that protects the Earth’s natural environment and keeps it pristine. It also allows us to send that energy to nearly anywhere on Earth in essentially all weather conditions, allowing us to provide power to the people that need it most. That means providing power to hospitals cut off from electricity, so their emergency wards can keep on running; providing power to rural schools, so kids stay warm inside in freezing winters; and providing power to emergency workers in disaster zones, so their equipment can operate around the clock and help save countless lives.
Further, the same technology used in space-based solar power could pave the way to creating a true spacefaring civilization, and achieving interplanetary and interstellar spaceflight with lightsail-equipped starships. Realizing these capabilities would protect our future generations, ensuring that even if disaster strikes on Earth, they can find a home among the stars. And as a power source with immense energy-generation capabilities, it could even pave the way for highly-advanced technologies that are likely centuries away, including advanced interstellar propulsion and possibly even spacetime engineering. At the same time, closer to home, it could bring about improvements in fields as far-ranging as laser surgery, cancer treatment, and gravitational-wave research, due to its broad technology-transfer potential. For all these reasons, and more, we believe that space-based solar power technology is not only beneficial to develop, but essential to develop for securing our future.
As part of our pledge to future generations, we are committed into ensuring our technology and research will remain openly-available to everyone, forever. The entire project is open-source, and many components are dedicated to the public domain, meaning they are copyright-free and patent-free. In addition, we will make sure that the services we provide are as low-cost as possible, and eventually, can be given completely for free.
We realize that working on research and technology this ambitious is not possible to complete within any short time frame, especially for an organization determined to share its technologies without regard for profit. For this reason, we have written this Handbook to document our work, so that others can easily pick up our work from where we left off. We hope that our vision of a hopeful future inspires solidarity and unity that will act as a positive force against cynicism and division around the world. Whether we succeed or not, we believe that our work can inspire others to carry forward our ideals and our mission, and that, alone, is worth fighting for.
What is Elara?#
In a constructed language devised by the Project’s founder, elära (anglicized: elara) is the word for hope. Project Elara is a choice to have hope, despite knowing of the nearly impossible odds in succeeding in our mission. We hope that it can represent the best of us, the good we can accomplish when we put our efforts towards the good of the entire world.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead