Welcome to the Project Elara Substack!

Our Substack is 100% free to read, because we believe in not putting up paywalls and making our work available for all of humanity. If you believe in what we do, please consider sending us a voluntary donation.

Hi everyone! I am Jacky Song, Head of Project Elara. We are a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing open-source space-based solar power (SBSP). SBSP is a technology that collects solar energy from space, where the Sun always shines, day and night. It can offer virtually limitless power around the clock, 365 days a year. Unfortunately, it is also a technology whose vast potential could be exploited for profit, weaponized, or locked away for everyone except a privileged few.

At Project Elara, we aim to develop the world’s first open-source SBSP system. This means a transparently-developed system of solar mirrors, power satellites, and ground-based receiver stations, with all of its designs, software, and hardware freely available to everyone. And we want to make it possible for anyone around the world to have full access to our knowledge. We’ve written nearly 220,000 words of documentation, including a Handbook that teaches you everything from basic algebra to advanced physics and mathematics. We want to make it possible for any high school student with a laptop to get access to a comprehensive education in physics and engineering — something that is often out of reach for many people around the world — and develop the level of sophistication in physics and mathematics to understand even our most advanced research.

Rather than gatekeeping our work under patents, we release a large portion of it into the public domain, meaning that it no longer belongs to us — it belongs to everyone. We keep our work patent-free to the maximum extent possible, because we want to encourage innovation, not stifle it. And we’ve taken steps to ensure that even after we’re gone, we’ve preserved enough documentation and research that someone can easily pick up where we left off. If all of this sounds too good to be true, we have a Charter that keeps us grounded to our principles, and you can look through all of our work on Codeberg.

Our mission depends on the support of people who believe in what we do. Unlike corporations, we are not here to sell you a product. We are funded through donations, which are managed transparently through OpenCollective, making our work completely not-for-profit. While some might scoff at us for funding space technology on donations, there is power in numbers. If a million people gave us only $5 each — the price of a coffee — it could be enough, one day, to launch our in-development prototype satellite into space. That’s why building a community matters so much to us: your support is vital to helping us succeed.

We believe that volunteer-developed, open-source projects can change the world. This is not without precedent: Linux was developed by volunteers, yet has become the most widely-used operating system today. Our community is our strength, and we want to keep our community engaged and in-the-loop, so we’ve created this newsletter (just cool stuff, I promise!) to post many things that otherwise wouldn’t make our news page, including:

• Updates on our progress

• Video demos of our builds

• Deep dives into a particular part of our technology

• Philosophical articles on our mission

• And more!

It is tempting for us to monetize this newsletter — indeed, I considered it while in the early stages of creating it — but we choose to keep this free because we believe in not putting up paywalls around our content. In addition, everything posted on our Substack (unless otherwise stated) is posted under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license, meaning that you can freely share it, remix it, and reuse our work (with proper attribution and sharing your modifications).

We want to see a future where SBSP technology is used to benefit everyone, where solar energy captured from space can supply power to every corner of the world. We want to build a repository of technical knowledge that can outlast us, and create open-source software and hardware that will remain open for generations to come. Even if we don’t succeed, we believe in the worth of this mission, and we choose, in the words of Bernard Shaw, to “dream things that never were, and say, ‘Why not?’”

This article is open-source. A full repository of our articles can be found at https://codeberg.org/elaraproject/substack-archives.

Originally written by Jacky Song · edited by Emily Lin · January 6th, 2026