New details about a milestone step toward space-based solar power beaming.

A press briefing today in Washington, D.C. will detail a “first-of-a-kind” long-range demonstration of solar-powered wireless power transmission. The experiment made use of a solid-state phased array transmitter planted on the U.S. island of Maui (on Haleakala) and receivers placed on the island of Hawai’i (Mauna Loa) and airborne.

The power demo done May 5-9 was carried out by Managed Energy Technologies LLC of the U.S. - with Discovery Communications, Inc. bankrolling the 5 month project at less than $1 million.

The transmission of radio frequency (RF) energy shot across some 90 miles distance - and that’s almost 100-times further than an experiment done by NASA back in the 1970s.

Even better, a host of technologies were integrated and tested together for the first time, such as a “field-deployable” system.

Project leader of the test was a former NASA technologist, John Mankins, with professor Nobuyuki Kaya of Kobe University in Japan and Frank Little of Texas A&M University also key participants, as was Neville Marzwell of CalTech. Students were largely responsible for fabrication of the hardware for this unique experiment.

Mankins has advised me that the end-to-end efficiency of the experiment was very, very low - but by design. Budget limitations cut into the scale of the testing, with only a tiny fraction of the RF power going “straight” along the plane of the transmitter array.

“That wasn’t really the purpose of this test,” Mankins told me. “Rather, we were after the end-to-end integration” of hardware used in the power beaming experiment, he said.

The wireless demonstration was spotlighted today at a press briefing pulled together by the National Space Society.

The project was sponsored by Discovery Communications as part of its Project Earth series, produced by Impossible Pictures Ltd. of the U.K. Look for the September 12th showing of the series that will detail the wireless power transmission experiment.

By the way, there is increasing chatter in various circles to make use of the International Space Station to carry out a power beaming experiment, coupled with a select receiving site on the ground. So stay tuned, be it via grape vine or radio frequency transmission.