The April 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction included "Reason," a story by Isaac Asimov later published in the collection I, Robot. The story in Asimov's Robot series was set on a space station that beams power in the form of microwaves directly to planets.
More than 30 years later, Peter Glaser, a NASA engineer who worked on, among other projects, the Apollo moon missions, took a big step in turning Asimov's plot device into reality. Glaser designed — and in 1973 was granted a patent for — a system that would use satellite-mounted solar panels to convert solar energy to microwaves and then beam that energy back to Earth.
At that time, it was "conceptually possible" to imagine a system like Glaser's in orbit, says Harry Atwater, "but the cost of getting it there was prohibitive."
