Cost of Earth-manufactured power systems delivered to Mars

Determine how much a 10–100 MW solar power system manufactured on Earth and shipped to the Martian surface would cost, including the effects of transportation and excluding or separately accounting for energy storage.

Background

The paper compares a conventional Mars surface solar-power system with a system augmented by orbiting solar reflectors. The comparison depends on the poorly constrained cost of manufacturing and transporting solar panels and associated equipment from Earth to Mars. The authors explicitly identify the cost of such an Earth-manufactured, Mars-delivered power system as unknown, making it an unresolved benchmark for evaluating the economic advantage of orbiting solar reflectors.