Comment Re:Poorly described (Score 2) 120
IAARS (I am a rocket scientist) (see my wikibook if interested: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/... )
Beamed power for space launch has been discussed for decades - I have several ring binders of data on the subject. Practical depends a lot on your power storage. Space launch of anything larger than a teacup takes a lot of power. For example, the three liquid engines on the Space Shuttle put out a combined 21 GigaWatts of power, of which 156 MegaWatts was just to run the turbopumps to shove the propellants into the main combustion chamber (the turbopumps had their own combustion system to power themselves).
So this launch system seems to have batteries between the power grid and the microwave generators. That makes sense, because you can't suck GigaWatts on demand off conventional grids. Batteries have been improving in cost and performance pretty well recently, so that may have put it in a practical range. I wonder, though, if on-demand turbogenerators might not be cheaper.
The other parts of the system: heat exchanger, phased array, high power microwave amplifiers, are relatively straightforward, you just need a lot of them. What I wonder about is traffic model. High power launch systems like this cost a lot to build. If you only use them a few times a year, that investment has to spread over relatively few launches. You really want to use them a lot, like daily or hourly. But where is the traffic going to space to fill that much capacity?