A problem is that distortions in the air will scatter the beam slightly. It's like wavy window glass. This distortion happens in all layers of the atmosphere. Only slight but the beam must focus on a small area- like in the inches- to stay useful.
There's a technology for terrestrial telescopes where they send up laser pulses and measure the reflection, then use it to create aberrations in real time in an adjustable mirror that will cancel out the aberrations in the atmosphere, yielding a distortion-free image. The same tech will probably make a space laser work well.
Solar power is not laser power and cannot, at least under current tech, be transformed into laser power except for using a solar cell to charge a battery to run a laser.
Lasers have no momentum except under extremely sensitive lab measurements far from the order of magnitude to affect a real world application. Too bad, it would be a great form of spacecraft propulsion, wouldn't it?
I can't believe we're debating James Bond physics...