Google, SpaceX, and a host of startups are all planning to build data centers in space. But for those plans to work, they’ll need power. Lots of it.
Star Catcher, a startup based in Jacksonville, Florida, aims to provide it by concentrating the sun’s energy and using lasers to beam it to satellites’ waiting solar panels. The company is preparing to launch its prototype system aboard a SpaceX rocket this week that will transmit energy to another satellite in orbit.
If it’s successful, it would be the first time lasers have beamed energy between two untethered objects in space. But the idea of generating solar power in space goes back decades.
It showed up in a 1941 sci-fi piece by Isaac Asimov, and NASA studied it in the 1970s. “Launching large amounts of hardware into orbit was extremely expensive, so generating power in space and transmitting it elsewhere rarely made practical sense,” says Hanieh Fattahi, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. But now, falling launch costs are making it more feasible to have orbital industries that will be able to provide such energy.
“There isn't a power grid in space,” says chief executive officer and cofounder Andrew Rush. “Everybody just goes on these little camping trips.”
Star Catcher’s solution is an array of what it calls power nodes that serve as both a solar power plant and power line. To generate energy, the firm’s satellites gather sunlight using a collection of lenses and refine it into the wavelengths of light that Star Catcher says can provide up to 10 times more power than diffuse sunlight. It then emits a laser beam—think of it as an ethereal transmission cable—that can be directed at satellites in need of power. That promises more uptime and, Rush says, more profit for satellite operators.
In a world where launches cost thousands of dollars per kilogram of weight, reducing battery size while adding more useful instruments—or in the case of space data centers, GPUs—can pay dividends.
ArrowArrowThere’s clear interest in what Star Catcher is offering. The company announced a $65 million round of funding earlier this year, and it won a $30 million award from the US Space Force. The company has also inked 40 letters of intent from prospective buyers and, more importantly, 10 power purchase agreements, which are long-term contracts. There’s also a sign of optimism for space-based industries launching on the same SpaceX mission as Star Catcher’s system: Google’s first attempt at a space-based data center is also hitching a ride on the rocket.
The satellite launching this week, dubbed Protostar, is a small-scale version of the satellites Star Catcher hopes to eventually deploy that Rush says will provide “meaningful commercial power provisioning services in orbit before the end of the decade.” But it’ll be the first time the entire system comes together in space, with the company using its tracking technology to beam energy to an untethered cubesat that’s launching at the same time.
“Part of this demonstration is testing how much power is received by the cubesat as it moves away from Protostar and comparing that against our models,” says Rush.
The company has done a space-based test of its technology that would allow it to track satellites it’s transmitting energy to, and it set a record last year for beaming power on the ground, besting a mark set by DARPA.
That test delivered more than 1 kilowatt of power to off-the-shelf solar panels—enough juice to power a microwave. That means there’s a ways to go to power telecommunications satellites, let alone space-based data centers, but Rush says the proof-of-concept on the ground is what gives him confidence that the company is ready to see what it can do in orbit. He says Star Catcher is still in the “crawl” phase but on its way to walking, then running.
This won’t be the first test of lasers in space. The Naval Research Laboratory completed an experiment in 2023, operating a space laser to generate power for 100 days. However, the system was a single unit, and the beam traveled less than 5 feet. (If Star Catcher is working on crawling, then this experiment was akin to tummy time.) That laser only operated with 11 percent efficiency, an issue Fattahi says will need to be overcome. She also says tracking systems, managing heat, and ensuring equipment can operate in the cold vacuum of space for years also need to be teased out to make space-based lasers economically viable.
Researchers have also explored other forms of space-based solar, including successful tests by Caltech scientists to transmit solar power via microwaves back to Earth. That technique can transmit more energy, but it requires a massive receiver to harness it, whereas lasers can hit a much smaller target.
“As we grow the infrastructure in space,” Rush says of Star Catcher’s satellites, “we begin to make it more economical to put larger and more capable industry in space. I view what we're building as transformational for the space sector as reusable launch vehicles.”
