Space-based solar power is the cool technology of the future, although the concept was conceived hundreds of years ago. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist, proposed the idea of harnessing space-based solar power in 1923. Years later in 1941, American writer Isaac Asimov based a science-fiction story on this concept, in which a solar power satellite beams energy down to our home planet and even to the other settlements in the solar system.