Technology think tank Arthur D Little of Cambridge MA did solar power studies in the 1970s. These schemes beam down the power as muicrowave radiation captured by antenna arrays in the desert. NASA later did a study and nixed it because the cost of launching all this stuff into synchronous orbit. Of course NASA blithely ignored the work by Gerarld O'Neill and others at Space Studies Institute where they uses mass drivers on the moon to launch mined lunar materials into space at a much lower (theoretical) cost than launching from the Earth's deep gravity well.

Yet again NASA manages to inhibit manned space activities.