beamed-power-interface

§0 Status of This Document

This section is placed before the abstract deliberately, following IETF practice. It is the most important section in the specification.


What this document is

A draft specification, version 0.1.0-draft, published 2026-08-22 as a Request for Comments. It describes an interface between a spacecraft that beams power and a segment that receives it.

What this document is not

It is not a standard. A standard is what a recognised body publishes after a consensus process. This document has been through no such process. Specifically, it has not been published by, submitted to, reviewed by, or endorsed by:

ITU, ITU-R, CCSDS, IEEE, IEEE-SA, ISO, IEC, ETSI, ANSI, or any national standards body or regulatory authority.

No consensus has been sought or achieved. No working group exists. At the time of writing, no person outside the authoring project has reviewed it.

It confers no permission. Nothing in this document creates, implies, replaces or substitutes for any regulatory authorisation — spectrum licence, type approval, environmental clearance, aviation coordination, or operating permit. Conformance to this specification is orthogonal to regulatory authorisation, by design: §7 exists so that a system can declare, in machine-readable form, precisely which authorisations it does not hold.

Version 0.1 SHALL NOT be cited as normative in any compliance representation to a regulator, customer, insurer or investor.

Known weaknesses, stated by the authors

  1. One implementation is not interoperability. A specification with a single implementer is a configuration file with an ambitious README. One partial implementation exists, at conformance level BROKER · L1 · no-annex. Nothing has been tested between two independent implementations, because there is no second one.
  2. Several numbers are proposals, not measurements. The token lifetime, refresh rate, probe level, abort deadline and corridor angle are derived from stated arithmetic, not from hardware. Every one of them lives in profiles/ rather than in a normative sentence, with its rationale shown, so it can be corrected without touching the requirement it parameterises.
  3. No hardware has been built to these requirements. The specification constrains systems that do not yet exist. Some constraints will prove impractical.
  4. Some profiling claims are unvalidated. Where this document says it follows another specification’s information model without having validated against that specification’s published schema, it says so in the row concerned (§1.4). A profiling claim that has not been validated is the most common way a draft specification misleads without intending to.
  5. The optical annex does not exist. It is a stub that states what is missing.

Offer to be superseded

Parts of this document belong to bodies that already exist. Where a body opens a relevant work item, this specification will be contributed to it and this repository archived. The authors would prefer that outcome to adoption of this document.

Part Body that should own it
Spectrum, PFD, band sharing (§7, Annex RF) ITU-R WP1A / SG3
Cross-support scheduling (§4.4–4.7) CCSDS Cross Support Services area
Human exposure (§7.3) IEEE ICES / ICNIRP
Grid interconnection behaviour (§5.5, §6) IEEE 1547 neighbourhood / IEC TC 8
Metering and settlement (§6) IEC TC 13

gap-analysis.md records the dated basis on which we concluded none of these currently covers beamed power. If that file goes stale, it is evidence this project should stop, not evidence it should continue.

Authorship

Edited by Ido Yahalomi. Drafted with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic). There is no consortium, no working group and no member list; inventing one would be the first dishonest thing in the document.

On the GitHub organisation. This repository sits under an organisation named BeamDesk. That is the authors’ own account, not a standards body, not a consortium and not a membership organisation, and its name should not be read as an endorsement by anything. BeamDesk is also the name of the console that is this specification’s only implementation, which makes the arrangement exactly as circular as it looks: the author of the specification, the author of the sole implementation and the owner of the repository are the same people. An organisation account is a place to keep repositories and nothing more.

The specification would be better off owned by a body with a membership and a voting rule. It is not, and the offer above stands.

Comment period

The RFC period for 0.1 closes 2026-11-30. Every substantive comment received will be published with a disposition of accepted, rejected or deferred, and a reason, in DISPOSITIONS.md — including comments arguing the whole document is misconceived.