Good question.
Space technology and space-related development have both been closely tied to the development and employment of solar power technology. Ever since the creation of NASA and the first Mercury missions, we have been using some form of photovoltaic technology to power our satellites and other vehicles where conventional batteries, fossil fuels, and fuel cells aren’t a practical option. Almost all of the modern space-faring vessels humans have manufactured have solar panels installed somewhere on them. For a while, there were even plans on lining the inside of the Space Shuttle’s cargo bay with solar panels in order to help maintain power on longer missions. What’s even more amazing is the new creation of Hall Effect Drives, and Electronic Thrusters that require only electricity to power them, providing a thrust by which space-vehicles can maneuver.
Image of Hall Effect Thruster in operation, courtesy of Wikipedia.org.
These new thrusters have been theoretical for almost 40 years, but only thanks to recent materials science developments and enhancements in super-conducting materials, we are now able to manufacture small working models. These thrusters burn up a lot of power for only a small amount of output, however. Nearly 2 kW is required to power a single thruster, which only provides about 80mN of force, which is equivalent to about the weight of three pennies stacked on the palm of your hand. It’s virtually nothing, but when applied over a constant time frame over several months, the force adds up and can increase the velocity of a satellite by about 8000 meters a second (~17,000 mph).
NASA is proposing to place several small “towing” vehicles in orbit, designed to tow low-flying orbital objects into higher-level orbits, using nothing but electricity provided by the sunlight that’s already available. This proposal would allow many companies requiring geosynchronous orbits or escape-velocity to be able to conserve an impressive amount of fuel, which also allows companies to build smaller rockets and larger payloads. So considering that space-faring technology is now becoming more dependent on solar power, combined with the augmentation of electronic population, it’s not a very far stretch of logic to discuss space-related topics and technology.
As for Net Neutrality and internet-related topics, much of modern solar-power technology actually requires the internet to function properly. In the past 10 years, focus from “how much possible power can I get” has shifted toward the new concern of “how well is my system running now?” As a result, technologies making it easier to simply look up the performance of your solar array have been developed, all of which pretty much require the internet in order to transmit the data.
Glu-Networks, Fat Spaniel, Power One…all of these companies are centered around acquiring performance monitoring data and transmitting it onto a web-page for their customers to see. Their entire business livelihood revolves around sending massive amounts of data across the internet on a pretty-much constant basis. There is in fact, an entire sub-industry of companies within the solar-power industry as a whole who are all very nervously watching to see what will happen with Net Neutrality.
You see, once limitations on content and traffic priority are established, it’s these companies that are going to immediately take the hit. If they’re not blocked out of doing business entirely, they’ll have to fork over a fortune to other companies such as Verizon and AT&T in order to be given preferential access for their data.
Gone are the days where a single industry is isolated on its own, impervious to the changes and effects of other industries. Now that the entire world is tied together through the digital framework of the internet, what happens to the net effects EVERYBODY, in every facet of life. The same goes for space-travel. As it becomes more and more privatized, we’ll start seeing more and more innovation and more wide-spread adoption of these technologies, as well as new rules and limitations on our freedoms. I’ll do my best to filter things through a solar-only lens, but I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for other important topics that crop up from time to time.
