Imagine telling your grandparents you can send electricity through the air and watching them immediately ask whether you also invented free Wi-Fi and a dishwasher that does taxes.
In a demonstration that sounds like a Kickstarter for a sci-fi roadside attraction, researchers at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range successfully beamed usable power as laser light across about 5.3 miles and turned it back into electricity at the far end.
Yes, lasers — not wires, not magic — moved electrons from Point A to Point B like postal drones for energy.
The numbers are the kind of detail that makes engineers giggle: 800 watts delivered during a roughly 30-second burst, with measured efficiency near 20% at shorter ranges, and more than a megajoule transferred over several shots.
Those aren’t just academic trophies — they’re the kind of specs that let you picture a drone in the sky getting a mid-flight pick-me-up without ever touching a charging station.
This is called optical power beaming, and no, it won’t let you microwave your popcorn from across the state — yet.
So how does this not look like a flashlight argument?
The system converts electrical power into a tightly controlled laser beam, shoots it through the air, and a specialized receiver catches and converts it back into electricity.
The receiver is a small miracle of optics: a parabolic mirror focuses incoming light onto photovoltaic cells, and a compact aperture traps the light so almost none leaks out — because any stray photons are wasted energy and potential hazard.
The recently tested Power Receiver Array Demo (PRAD) routes the beam to dozens of solar cells around the inner surface so the workload is shared, and — impressively — the whole receiver was knocked together in about three months.
Modular, scalable, and shockingly industrious.
Why is this different from previous toy demos?
For starters, the path wasn’t a pristinely clear laboratory tunnel. The beam crossed the thickest, dustiest chunk of atmosphere near the ground — the most brutal optical gauntlet of all.
That the link survived is what prompted the DARPA program manager to note the milestone outpaced earlier demonstrations in both distance and power, challenging assumptions about how far laser transmission can reliably go.
In short: they beamed more, farther, and didn’t cry about dust.
Practical uses are where the headlines get sensible.
Need power at a disaster site without waiting for fuel trucks? Beam it in.
Want a remote research station to run a water pump without lugging diesel? Beam it in.
Military planners like the idea because fewer fuel convoys mean fewer targets — and because a drone that never needs to land is a drone that hates airports.
Early adopters are likely to be uncrewed aircraft and other edge-of-grid platforms where wires are impossible and batteries are heavy.
The long game is to hang relays in the sky and stitch together a chain of hops that climb above atmospheric messiness; each vertical hop faces cleaner air, so the sum is better than the parts.
That said, this is not a replacement for the grid.
The skeptics have good points: eye safety, rigorous beam control, air-traffic geofencing, and the unpredictable behavior of turbulence, aerosols, and heat all reduce efficiency and increase complexity.
Thick fog or dust can scatter the beam and rob you of power — so most planners prefer shorter ground legs or higher altitude hops.
Space-to-ground is possible in principle, but the engineering, safety, and atmospheric heating trade-offs are nontrivial.
Next milestones are obvious and oddly cinematic: show the relay that catches the beam and hands it off with acceptable losses; demonstrate reliably charging moving targets like UAVs in real flight; and scale receiver arrays so they can serve vehicles or mobile bases.
If that works, the scene shifts from “cool lab trick” to “useful emergency and defense tool.”
For now, the headline is charmingly modest: scientists sent hundreds of watts across miles of dusty New Mexico air and got juice on the other end.
The optics, the modular receiver design, and the careful controls make the experiment repeatable — and that’s the important part.
The door is open, the physics checks out, and the engineers are delighted.
Whether your future commute will include a complimentary laser top-up is still a few relays away, but the demo proves the idea wasn’t just a fantasy in a TED Talk; it’s a practical technology with real possibilities — and a very photogenic one at that.
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