I guess as a broader question, how does wireless power transfer work in general and how are we able to transfer it from space, as I saw an article on it a while back.
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The movement of electrons and magnetism are very closely linked to one another. The right kind of magnetic field will move electrons (creating power) and the movement of electrons will create a magnetic field. It is a fundamental part of how both work.
This is how we generate most power today – _something_ causes a shaft to spin, and that shaft spins a set of magnets inside of a coil of wire. Those spinning magnets create a magnetic field, and the electrons in the coil of wire start moving. Almost all power generation is about _what we use_ to make the shaft spin – sometimes it is wind, sometimes it is boiling water to have steam make it spin, sometimes it is water flowing through a river, etc.
Wireless chargers create this magnetic field, which causes electrons in the receiver of your phone to move, generating power that the phone stores in the battery.
The issue is that magnetic fields are subject to the inverse square law – they decay _rapidly_ the further away you get from the source. They work well _enough_ over very short distances – the centimeter or so your phone is from the charger – but don’t work well at all over longer distances (even a few feet). The amount of power you’d have to put into generating the field would be orders of magnitude higher than what you’d get out of the receiver, making it pointlessly inefficient.
We’ll likely never be able to use magnetic fields to transfer power from space, but there are other technologies that may be able to do the job.
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