That's a great question. The thought of an orbiting IR collector crossed my mind while typing that comment, but I didn't want to think about it hard enough to address that. :)

The "beam" this generates is really more of a floodlight than a spotlight, so only a tiny part of the energy would hit your satellite. If you could focus it down to a narrow beam which hit only your satellite, my gut feeling is that you would simultaneously be focusing the surface heat of the satellite onto your panel. So once again, your panel would only "see" a hot surface, and would lose the benefit of cold space.

Also, as others have calculated in other comments, the amount of energy coming from the sun dwarfs what these panels radiate, so you are better off just pointing your satellite collectors at the sun.

> Also, as others have calculated in other comments, the amount of energy coming from the sun dwarfs what these panels radiate, so you are better off just pointing your satellite collectors at the sun.

Especially in space! We lose a good amount of irradiation energy from the sun to the atmosphere.

The ISS has no shortage of warmth. Their challenge is keeping cool. Adding IR heat will only make things worse and require the use of more (solar) energy to remove that heat again through its cooling panels, which themselves work like this invention by radiating IR heat into space!