Elon Musk talks about beamed energy propulsion and its concerns and challenges.

Elon Musk: "The beamed energy thing is interesting. I mean, I think it is a worthy area of research. I
think it's worth trying to make something work, trying to get something to orbit, or a really
high delta velocity with beamed energy, and see how well does it work in practice. I mean
I do think there's - I'll state some concerns, but these concerns are not meant to say we
should not work on them. I preface it by saying we should work on it. I think there are some
scaling challenges with beamed energy. You have to say what's the actual power output you
need to send, say, a Falcon-line class vehicle to orbit? And its a very, very big number. You
start needing like, we need like the power of the Eastern Seaboard, you know, to send something
Falcon, call it Falcon heavy class, you know, what do you need to send something like that
to orbit? It's really a huge amount of energy, or a huge amount of power, to be precise. So actually the power level you need is - you don't need, arguably not that much on energy basis, but you can't tell everyone to turn their lights off in Florida. So then you need like a huge power plant or a huge capacitor bank or a huge high-power density battery array. So I'd like to see how well does it scale? And then you say what's the cost of the huge power plant and the huge laser array and that kind of thing, and how does that compare to the cost per unit mass if you just carry your own oxygen with you and have a lower ISP and don't do any of those
things?"

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