Pioneering Space-Based Solar Power Companies Market Analysis 2026

Key Takeaways

• Seven startups are racing to make space-based solar power commercially viable through laser, mirror, and microwave technologies
• Companies span both Earth-to-ground power delivery and in-space power beaming, serving defense, grid, and satellite markets
• From U.S. AI compute infrastructure to UK grid baseload, each firm takes a distinct technical and commercial route to orbit-sourced energy

The Promise of Sunlight Without Limits

The idea of harvesting solar energy in space and beaming it down to Earth is not new. It has been kicking around in scientific and engineering circles since the late 1960s, when Peter Glaser published a seminal paper sketching out what such a system might look like. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy poured resources into studying the concept, producing detailed technical blueprints before budgets dried up and the idea was shelved for a generation.

What kept space-based solar power in the realm of speculation for so long was cost. The classical vision called for enormous structures in geostationary orbit, platforms stretching kilometers across, assembled by fleets of spacecraft and launched on rockets that simply didn’t exist at anything approaching a commercially rational price. The energy economics never penciled out, and the concept drifted into the category of interesting-but-impractical.

That calculus has shifted substantially in the 2020s. The dramatic reduction in launch costs, led by reusable rocket systems and the rise of the commercial launch sector, has made it genuinely plausible to put large numbers of capable satellites into orbit at a fraction of what it cost a decade ago. At the same time, photovoltaic cell efficiency has improved, power-beaming technologies have matured, and the global energy landscape has become considerably more urgent. Climate commitments, energy security concerns triggered by geopolitical instability, the explosive power demand of artificial intelligence infrastructure, and the logistical nightmares of supplying remote military outposts have all converged to create a richer menu of potential customers for anyone who can deliver energy from space.

The result is a genuine startup ecosystem now forming around space-based solar power and closely related concepts. Seven companies in particular illustrate the breadth and ambition of what’s happening: Aetherflux, Reflect Orbital, Space Solar, Star Catcher Industries, Virtus Solis, Volta Space Technologies, and Overview Energy. These companies span the United States and the United Kingdom, target markets ranging from terrestrial power grids to the lunar surface, and employ technological approaches from infrared laser beaming to passive solar reflection. Each has its own thesis about where the real opportunity lies and how to get there.

This article profiles each company in depth, exploring their founding stories, technical approaches, target customers, funding positions, and development roadmaps. It also examines where each fits within the broader opportunity of space-derived energy, and what distinguishes their strategies from one another.

Understanding what these companies are attempting requires a brief grounding in the physics of the concept. On Earth, solar panels are hampered by a fundamental problem: the planet gets in the way. Panels on the ground only generate electricity during daylight hours, and even then clouds, atmospheric absorption, and the angle of the sun all reduce the amount of energy that actually reaches the panel surface. Satellites in certain orbits don’t have these problems. In geostationary orbit, roughly 35,786 kilometers above the equator, a satellite sees the sun more than 99% of the time. Even in lower orbits, a satellite in full sunlight receives solar radiation at an intensity roughly 40% higher than the best ground-based panels can achieve, because there’s no atmosphere scattering or absorbing the incoming light.

The challenge is getting that energy down to the surface. The classical approach, still pursued by some companies today, involves converting solar electricity into microwave radiation and beaming it to a large receiving antenna on the ground, where it’s converted back to electricity. Newer approaches use laser wavelengths, which allow tighter beam focusing and smaller ground receivers. Some companies don’t even convert the energy to electricity first, instead simply reflecting sunlight toward the ground with large orbital mirrors. Each approach involves different trade-offs in efficiency, infrastructure cost, safety profile, and regulatory complexity.

Aetherflux

Origins and Leadership

Aetherflux entered public consciousness as a company with an unexpectedly high-profile founder. Baiju Bhatt, who co-founded the financial technology company Robinhood and served as its co-CEO until November 2020, left his day-to-day role at Robinhood in 2024 specifically to build Aetherflux. That backstory matters because it speaks to both the pedigree and the conviction behind the venture. Bhatt grew up with an unusual connection to space: his father was a research scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center. He studied physics as an undergraduate at Stanford and earned a master’s degree in mathematics from the same institution, which gives him a more grounded technical foundation than many startup CEOs. The decision to leave a publicly traded company worth billions to start a hardware space venture was not one taken lightly, and the seriousness of that commitment has shaped how Aetherflux is perceived by investors and potential partners.

The company is based in San Carlos, California, with additional operations in Washington D.C. That dual location reflects Aetherflux’s dual commercial focus. California is the center of the commercial space and tech ecosystem, while Washington D.C. gives the company proximity to the defense and government clients that represent its nearest-term revenue opportunity. The team has been assembled from organizations with deep technical credibility: SpaceX, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Anduril, and the U.S. Navy are all cited as background institutions for key team members.

Technical Approach: Infrared Lasers and Small Satellites

Aetherflux has made a deliberate choice to depart from the classical model of space-based solar power, which typically imagined single enormous structures in geostationary orbit. The company’s approach instead involves constellations of small satellites in low Earth orbit, transmitting power to the ground using infrared lasers. This design philosophy has several significant implications.

Small satellites are much cheaper to build and launch than large geostationary platforms. Using many small units instead of one giant structure also means the system can be scaled incrementally, adding capacity as demand and revenue grow, rather than requiring a massive upfront capital commitment before a single kilowatt of power reaches the ground. It also provides resilience: the failure of any one satellite doesn’t bring down the entire system.

The infrared laser approach, as opposed to microwave transmission, enables a meaningfully different ground infrastructure requirement. Microwave power beaming typically requires very large receiving antennas, sometimes called rectennas, that can span kilometers. Infrared laser receivers can be considerably more compact, which matters enormously for the military and disaster-relief applications Aetherflux is targeting. A forward operating base in a conflict zone can’t realistically host a multi-kilometer antenna farm; it can potentially host a compact receiver.

The core physics of laser power beaming involve transmitting concentrated coherent light at wavelengths where the atmosphere is relatively transparent, converting that light back to electricity at the receiver using photovoltaic cells tuned to the laser’s wavelength. Aetherflux’s choice of infrared wavelengths reflects a practical engineering judgment about the balance between atmospheric transmission, conversion efficiency, and the maturity of available components.

Low Earth orbit does introduce a complication that geostationary orbit doesn’t: each satellite is only overhead for a fraction of the day from any given ground point. A single satellite in a low orbit might be visible from a particular ground station for perhaps ten minutes per orbital pass, which isn’t long enough to provide continuous power. Solving this requires either a large enough constellation that some satellite is always overhead, or the acceptance that power delivery will be intermittent in the early stages. Aetherflux’s roadmap suggests the company is building toward the former, but the intermediate stages before a full constellation is in place are an important practical consideration.

Galactic Brain and Orbital AI Compute

One of the more unusual aspects of Aetherflux’s strategy is its explicit pivot toward orbital data center infrastructure as an initial commercial application. The company’s “Galactic Brain” concept envisions satellites that don’t just generate and transmit power to the ground, but that perform AI compute workloads in orbit, using the abundant solar energy available in space to power on-board computing systems.

The logic here is a response to a genuine and pressing problem. The rapid scaling of large language models and other AI systems has created an extraordinary demand for electricity. Data centers that power AI training and inference are consuming electricity at a pace that is straining power grids in many regions. Building new data centers requires securing real estate, negotiating utility connections, and constructing facilities, a process that can take anywhere from three to six years. Aetherflux argues that an orbital data center, powered directly by abundant space solar power, can sidestep the terrestrial infrastructure bottleneck entirely.

The company has announced that its first commercial data center node is targeted for launch in the first quarter of 2027. That’s an aggressive timeline for any space hardware program, and it reflects both the urgency of the AI power problem the company is trying to address and the competitive pressure of the startup environment. Whether that timeline holds will depend on a range of technical and logistical factors, but the target itself speaks to the company’s ambition and its reading of where investor and customer interest lies.

The Department of Defense reportedly spent $16 billion on energy in 2023, and over 3,000 U.S. military members or contractors are estimated to have been killed in fuel supply convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2007. These figures frame Aetherflux’s defense pitch in stark terms. The ability to deliver power to a contested location from orbit, without needing to run supply convoys or establish fixed power infrastructure, represents a genuine operational capability that military planners have long wanted.

Power Beaming Applications

Beyond the AI compute angle, Aetherflux positions power beaming itself as a direct product for several markets. The military application is the most immediate, targeting U.S. military operations that need power in locations where traditional infrastructure is compromised, absent, or under threat. A satellite that can beam power to a ground receiver regardless of local conditions, day or night, in a location that might otherwise require expensive fuel logistics, addresses a real need.

Disaster relief is a closely related application. When a hurricane, earthquake, or other natural disaster knocks out the electrical grid in an affected area, hospitals, emergency responders, and communication systems lose power at exactly the moment they need it most. An orbital power beaming system that can deliver electricity to a compact ground receiver in a disaster zone, with no local infrastructure required, could dramatically improve the effectiveness of emergency response.

Looking further out, Aetherflux envisions its technology serving commercial and industrial markets as well, though the near-term commercialization focus remains on defense and high-value applications where the premium pricing that early power-beaming technology will require can be justified. The company is explicit that it sees space-based solar power not just as an energy technology but as a national security asset, and it positions itself accordingly in its communications.

Investors and Funding

Aetherflux has attracted backing from some of the most prominent venture capital firms in technology investing. The company’s disclosed investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and NEA, alongside other backers. The presence of Andreessen Horowitz, which has been one of the most vocal advocates for deep technology and hard-tech investment, is particularly notable, as is the breadth of the investor syndicate. Construct Capital, BE Ventures, and other firms round out a backing list that reflects both the financial resources Aetherflux has assembled and the perceived legitimacy of the technical and market thesis.

The funding environment for space-based solar power startups has improved materially in recent years, both because of the demonstrated cost reductions in the launch sector and because of the urgency of the energy challenges the technology could address. Aetherflux has been able to capitalize on that environment, and its investor roster gives it a credibility that many earlier space energy ventures lacked.

Competitive Position and Differentiation

Within the landscape of companies working on power beaming and space-based solar power, Aetherflux occupies a distinctive position because of its explicit focus on the U.S. defense and national security market alongside its AI compute angle. The company’s messaging consistently emphasizes American energy independence and the protection of military assets, which positions it favorably for U.S. government contracts and defense procurement processes. The D.C. office reflects this orientation. Aetherflux is not purely a commercial energy play; it’s deliberately positioning itself at the intersection of energy technology and national security technology, which gives it access to a different set of capital and customer relationships than a purely civilian-focused competitor would have.

The laser-based, small-satellite, LEO approach also distinguishes Aetherflux from companies that have pursued larger, higher-orbit architectures. Whether that distinction proves to be an advantage depends on how the technology and economics play out, but it represents a clear thesis that the company has committed to and built its technical roadmap around.

Reflect Orbital

Company Overview and Vision

Reflect Orbital takes a fundamentally different approach to space-based solar than any of the other companies in this article. Rather than converting solar energy to electricity in space and then transmitting it, Reflect Orbital’s concept is simpler and more direct: deploy large mirrors in orbit that redirect natural sunlight toward specific locations on Earth. The idea isn’t to generate power as such, but to extend the availability and controllability of sunlight itself.

The company’s tagline captures the concept concisely: “Sunlight after dark.” The promise is a constellation of in-space mirrors that can deliver a spot of sunlight on demand, adjustable in intensity from something comparable to a full moon to something approaching midday brightness, to a defined area on the ground. The spot is described as covering an area of at least five kilometers in diameter, localized to an approved end user, and adjustable in intensity and location.

This is a genuine departure from the paradigm most people associate with space-based solar power, which involves complex energy conversion chains. Reflected sunlight is natural sunlight. It’s not electricity, not a laser beam, and not microwave radiation. It can be directed at solar panels on the ground, which then generate electricity in the normal way. It can also provide illumination directly, which opens up markets that pure power-beaming companies don’t serve.

Technology: The Mirror Constellation

The core technology of Reflect Orbital’s system is a constellation of satellites carrying large, lightweight reflective surfaces that can be oriented to redirect sunlight toward a specified ground location. The geometric challenge of doing this is non-trivial. A satellite in low Earth orbit is moving at roughly seven to eight kilometers per second relative to the ground, and the sun is also moving relative to both the satellite and the ground. Maintaining a reflected spot on a fixed ground location requires continuous, precise adjustment of the mirror orientation. The company’s engineering challenge is building satellites that can make these adjustments accurately and autonomously, using attitude control systems capable of the required precision.

The reflected light can be controlled in several ways. The intensity can be varied by adjusting how many satellites in the constellation are contributing to a given spot, or by adjusting the orientation of individual mirrors to reduce the effective reflected area. The spot can be turned off essentially instantaneously by rotating the satellites to point their mirrors away from the target area. The company emphasizes that the system is designed with safety in mind: the light intensity cannot exceed natural maximum sunlight irradiance, and the reflected beam can be interrupted at any point.

From a safety standpoint, reflected sunlight is a familiar phenomenon. It’s the same type of radiation as the light that comes through your window on a sunny day. The concerns that arise with laser or microwave power beaming, particularly around eye safety and potential heating effects, don’t apply in the same way to reflected natural light within the intensities Reflect Orbital’s system would produce. This safety profile is a meaningful advantage in terms of regulatory acceptance and public perception.

Constellation Roadmap

Reflect Orbital’s published roadmap is detailed and staged in a way that reflects a thoughtful approach to building up capability over time. The company’s plans call for a modest initial deployment in 2026, with just two satellites offering a basic lighting service at about 0.1 lux for five minutes, roughly comparable to a full moon. By 2027, the plan calls for 36 satellites providing around 2 lux for 2.5 hours, comparable to street lighting. A jump to more than 1,000 satellites in 2028 would enable illumination up to 100 lux for two hours, similar to indoor work areas, as well as the continuous equivalent of street lighting. By 2030, with more than 5,000 satellites, the system would be capable of delivering up to 5,000 lux for short periods, approaching outdoor daylight levels. The 2035 horizon envisions more than 50,000 satellites capable of delivering up to 36,000 lux for hours.

The energy service roadmap is less aggressive in the early years, reflecting the reality that enhanced illumination for solar panels is a more straightforward initial application than power grid augmentation. Testing is planned through 2028, with initial energy service contributions expected around 2030, when the constellation would be large enough to meaningfully boost the output of a ground solar farm. By 2035, the company projects the ability to add a 20% capacity factor increase to ground solar installations by delivering 300 watts per square meter of sunlight for three hours.

These projections are ambitious by any measure, and the number of satellites involved in the 2030 and 2035 scenarios would make Reflect Orbital’s constellation one of the largest in orbit. The economics of building and launching tens of thousands of satellites, even small and lightweight ones, are significant, and the commercial case for doing so would need to be demonstrated through the early deployment stages.

Markets and Applications

The range of markets that Reflect Orbital identifies for its technology is notably broader than that of companies focused purely on power generation. The company identifies seven distinct application areas.

Energy is the most obvious, and Reflect Orbital’s pitch to the solar power industry is that its service can make ground solar projects effectively more productive by extending the hours during which they receive sunlight. A solar farm that currently generates power only during daylight hours could, with the addition of reflected orbital sunlight in the evening, produce electricity for longer periods without requiring battery storage or other backup capacity. This is particularly valuable in locations with short winter days or frequent cloud cover.

For disaster response, reflected sunlight can provide illumination to disaster zones and search-and-rescue operations without requiring any ground infrastructure, fuel, or logistics chain. In the aftermath of a major natural disaster, when electrical infrastructure is compromised, having an orbital source of controllable illumination available on demand could meaningfully improve the safety and effectiveness of rescue operations.

Industrial applications include extending working hours at remote sites, improving safety through illumination of areas that are otherwise dark during parts of the day, and serving locations that are expensive or difficult to connect to conventional electricity infrastructure. Agricultural applications include the possibility of tailoring light cycles for crops, extending growing seasons, and boosting yields in controlled outdoor environments.

The defense application is similar in some respects to what Aetherflux is targeting, though delivered through reflected light rather than laser power beaming. Uninterrupted illumination for military operations, particularly in forward positions where artificial lighting might compromise operational security or require logistical support, has genuine value.

Event and experience applications, while perhaps the least immediately lucrative, illustrate the breadth of the concept. The ability to provide dramatic nighttime illumination for a major outdoor event, a city celebration, or a public installation represents a market that doesn’t require any infrastructure investment on the ground beyond the act of being present in the spot.

The company maintains what it describes as strict exclusion zones for astronomy and sensitive environments, acknowledging that the concerns of astronomers and wildlife researchers about uncontrolled orbital illumination are legitimate and need to be addressed through policy and design rather than simply brushed aside.

Energy Service and Solar Augmentation

The solar farm augmentation application deserves particular attention because it represents what is probably the most commercially scalable near-term market for Reflect Orbital’s technology. Solar power is already the fastest-growing form of electricity generation globally. The core limitation of ground solar is its intermittency: it only generates power when the sun is shining, which means grid operators need either storage or backup capacity to cover evenings, cloudy periods, and seasonal variations.

Reflect Orbital’s energy service, once the constellation reaches sufficient scale, would allow a solar farm to receive additional sunlight in the evening hours, effectively extending the generation day without requiring any modification to the ground infrastructure. The receiving farm uses its existing panels to convert the reflected sunlight to electricity, and the orbital constellation handles the complexity of directing that sunlight at the right time and place.

The economics of this service depend on how much the reflected sunlight increases the output of a ground solar farm relative to what it would otherwise produce, and on what premium customers are willing to pay for that additional dispatchable generation. Reflect Orbital’s own estimates suggest that by 2030, with 5,000 satellites, the service could add roughly 1% to the capacity factor of a typically sized solar farm, with larger contributions as the constellation grows.

Whether that level of augmentation is economically compelling will depend heavily on the prevailing cost of electricity storage and the value of dispatchable solar generation in a given market. In markets where the evening peak in electricity demand is large and battery storage is expensive, even a modest percentage increase in solar capacity factor could justify substantial payments. In markets where storage is cheap or demand is flat, the value proposition is weaker.

Regulatory and Environmental Considerations

Reflect Orbital occupies a unique regulatory position because reflected sunlight from space doesn’t fit neatly into existing frameworks designed for telecommunications satellites or power beaming systems. The company has acknowledged the need to engage with astronomers, environmental researchers, and regulators, recognizing that the experience of Starlinkand other large constellations has sensitized both the scientific community and the public to the potential impacts of very large numbers of satellites in low Earth orbit.

The company has committed to sharing satellite positions in advance so that scientists and other stakeholders can plan observations around the service, and to maintaining strict exclusion zones around sensitive areas. This proactive engagement with potential critics is a sensible approach, though the scale of the eventual constellation if Reflect Orbital’s roadmap is realized, potentially tens of thousands of satellites, will inevitably raise questions about cumulative impact on the night sky.

Space Solar

A UK-Based Pioneer

Space Solar is one of the few companies in this space that is explicitly based in the United Kingdom and operating within the context of UK energy policy and government support structures. The company describes its corporate priority in unambiguous terms: to develop space-based solar power for the benefit of its stakeholders and the world, with a particular focus on enabling the UK’s transition to Net Zero and providing global energy security.

Space Solar is structured as Space Solar Group Holdings Ltd and positions itself as the commercial developer of a full SBSP system, targeting the baseload electricity market rather than niche military or disaster applications. Its pitch is that space-based solar power can provide the continuous, dispatchable, all-weather power generation that grid operators need to complement the intermittency of wind and conventional solar, and to do so at a cost that independent analysis suggests could become competitive with other forms of generation.

The UK provides a particularly interesting context for space-based solar power development. The country has ambitious Net Zero targets and has made substantial investments in offshore wind and other renewables, but the intermittency of renewables remains a live policy challenge. The UK lacks the geographic scale of continental Europe, which limits the extent to which it can smooth out renewable intermittency by connecting to a large, diverse grid. Space-based solar power, which could provide baseload generation regardless of weather and time of day, addresses a genuine policy gap.

Technology and Architecture

Space Solar’s technical approach involves what the company describes as a novel approach to converting and transmitting solar energy. The company completed a significant milestone that it describes as the world’s first 360-degree wireless power transmission demonstration, a test that showed the ability to transmit power wirelessly in all directions, which the company and the UK Space Agency both highlighted as a meaningful advance toward practical space-based solar power.

The company’s technology uses microwave transmission, which is more aligned with the classical SBSP concept than the laser-based approaches favored by some U.S. startups, but with significant innovations in the architecture of the spacecraft and the ground receiver. Space Solar argues that microwave transmission at appropriate frequencies can be made safe, efficient, and compatible with existing grid infrastructure.

The scale Space Solar is envisioning is substantial. The company talks about delivering affordable, scalable baseload power, which implies systems capable of generating hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts of power. Such a system would be significantly larger than anything currently in orbit and would require new approaches to manufacturing and assembly in space. The company acknowledges that achieving this within a six-year horizon, as its own projections suggest, is highly ambitious and will require substantial investment, innovation, and international collaboration.

Key Technical Claims and Milestones

Space Solar makes several specific claims about the advantages of its approach that are worth examining. The company’s website highlights that the ground receiver takes up a small fraction of the area occupied by either wind or ground solar for comparable power output. It also emphasizes that the system has a very low carbon footprint, described as about half that of terrestrial solar, and uses up to 1,000 times fewer critical minerals than other renewable energy systems. These claims, if they hold up under independent analysis, represent meaningful advantages in the context of both land use concerns and supply chain resilience.

The claim about critical minerals is particularly interesting. One of the growing concerns about the renewable energy transition is that technologies like lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles, and high-efficiency solar panels require significant quantities of materials like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements, many of which are extracted from a small number of countries and supply chains that are subject to geopolitical risk. A power generation technology that avoids this dependency would have significant strategic value.

Space Solar also highlights the exportability of the power: once a satellite is in orbit, it can beam power to receivers in different countries, acting as a wireless interconnector without requiring undersea cables or fixed infrastructure. For a country like the UK, which already exports electricity to neighboring countries, this could represent a significant economic opportunity alongside the domestic energy security benefits.

The Six-Year Target and Commercial Ambition

Space Solar has committed to a bold timeline, stating that it expects to deliver an affordable, scalable, and fully renewable new baseload energy technology within six years. That target, measured from the company’s operational position in early 2026, implies commercial delivery around 2031 or 2032. Given the scale of what’s involved, including satellite design and manufacturing, ground station construction, regulatory approvals, and integration with existing grid infrastructure, this is an exceptionally ambitious schedule.

The company appears to understand the magnitude of the challenge and is framing the six-year timeline as an aspiration that will require not just excellent execution on its own part but also support from government, investors, and the supply chain. The company has engaged with the UK Space Agency, National Grid Electricity Distribution, and other key stakeholders, suggesting it is building the relationships needed to navigate the regulatory and commercial landscape.

In February 2026, Space Solar and National Grid Electricity Distribution launched a joint innovation project called the Wireless Power Transmission project, which explores whether ground-based wireless power distribution technology developed in connection with Space Solar’s work could have applications in conventional electricity distribution networks. This kind of adjacent application development is a sensible strategy for building commercial relationships and revenue streams before the full space system is operational.

Leadership and Team

Space Solar has assembled a team with significant experience in both the energy and space sectors. Chief Engineer Peter Entwistle brings nearly 40 years of engineering consultancy experience and has been described as instrumental in shaping the SBSP concept from theoretical idea to commercial development framework. Chief Space Systems Architect Peter Stibrany brings over 40 years in the technology sector with deep expertise in engineering space systems, including experience on large projects such as the MSAT and Radarsat programs. The presence of people with this depth of experience gives Space Solar credibility that many earlier-stage startups in the field have lacked.

The company has co-CEOs, reflecting a governance structure suited to a company that needs to manage both the commercial and technical dimensions of a challenging development program simultaneously. The leadership has been outspoken about the urgency of SBSP development in the context of both the Net Zero transition and the growing energy demands of AI, framing space solar not just as an energy technology but as a geopolitically significant capability.

Investment and Government Support

Space Solar is seeking investment from institutional and private sources and has been working to build its case for government support. The UK government has shown interest in space-based solar power as part of its broader energy security strategy, and the UK Space Agency has supported early-stage research and demonstration work in the field. Whether the level of public investment and policy support that a full commercial SBSP system would require will materialize depends on political factors that extend well beyond Space Solar’s control.

The company’s pitch to investors emphasizes the long-term scale of the opportunity: if SBSP can genuinely deliver baseload power at competitive prices, the addressable market is essentially the entirety of global electricity generation, which currently amounts to tens of trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment over any decade-length planning horizon. The catch, of course, is that achieving competitive pricing requires successfully navigating one of the most technically challenging infrastructure development programs in history.

Star Catcher Industries

The Space Power Grid

Star Catcher Industries occupies a unique position among the companies in this article because its primary product is not power delivered from space to Earth, but power delivered from one spacecraft to another in orbit. The company describes itself as “the space energy company” and its central concept is the Star Catcher Network, which it describes as “the first power grid in space.”

The problem Star Catcher is addressing is a real and growing one. As the commercial space industry has expanded, the demands placed on satellites have increased substantially. Satellites are being asked to do more: run more capable sensors, perform more computation, communicate more data. All of these activities require more power, but satellites are constrained in how much power they can generate by the size of their solar panels. Larger solar panels mean larger, heavier satellites, which cost more to launch and may create additional orbital drag or maneuvering challenges. There’s a practical ceiling on how much power any individual satellite can carry into orbit.

Star Catcher’s answer is to decouple power generation from satellite design, much as the terrestrial electrical grid decoupled power generation from every home and business that uses electricity. Instead of each satellite needing to carry all the solar panels it needs for peak power consumption, satellites could draw on an orbital power infrastructure when they need extra energy, paying for that power as a service.

Optical Power Beaming Technology

Star Catcher uses optical power beaming to transmit energy from its Power Node satellites to customer satellites. Specifically, the company’s system directs concentrated solar energy at the existing solar arrays of customer satellites, boosting the amount of power those arrays receive without requiring any hardware modification to the customer satellite. The customer’s solar panels simply receive the concentrated light from Star Catcher’s Power Node and convert it to electricity in the usual way.

This design choice, targeting existing solar arrays rather than requiring a specialized receiver, is strategically important. It means that virtually any satellite with solar panels is a potential customer, without any need to retrofit or redesign the satellite. The Star Catcher Network can serve the existing installed base of satellites, not just new missions specifically designed to integrate with it. The company claims the ability to scale a satellite’s available power by up to ten times with no hardware modifications required.

The technical challenge of beaming optical power to another satellite in orbit involves precision pointing, tracking, and the management of relative velocities and orbital geometries that change continuously. Star Catcher has demonstrated progress on these challenges, holding what it describes as the world record for optical power beaming. In 2025, the company demonstrated its technology at Kennedy Space Center, beaming a laser down to the Launch and Landing Facility. The company was founded in 2024 and plans to bring its technology stack to orbit in 2026.

Customers and Partners

Star Catcher has been building a customer base and partnership network that spans multiple segments of the commercial and government space industry. The company’s published partners and customers include Astro Digital, which signed a power purchase agreement for Star Catcher’s orbital energy service, and Loft Orbital, which purchased power from Star Catcher’s orbital energy grid in November 2025.

The Loft Orbital relationship is particularly significant as early evidence that satellite operators are willing to pay for this kind of service. Loft Orbital is a commercial satellite operator that manages shared satellite missions for multiple customers, and its willingness to enter a commercial agreement with Star Catcher suggests that the value proposition for on-demand orbital power is being taken seriously by the industry.

Star Catcher has also secured U.S. Air Force support through the AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research program. AFWERX selected Star Catcher for a Phase II SBIR award in December 2025 to advance orbital power beaming, building on an earlier Phase I award. This government support reflects the defense community’s interest in the capability and provides both funding and validation for the company’s approach.

Additional partnerships include StarCloud, Mission Space, Satlyt, and Space Florida. The Space Florida partnership is notable for connecting Star Catcher to the broader Florida space industry ecosystem and potentially to launch opportunities at Kennedy Space Center, where the company has already conducted its ground-based demonstration.

The Market for Orbital Power

Star Catcher’s market thesis rests on the observation that power demand in space is outpacing what individual satellites can generate on their own. As satellite capabilities increase, as space computing becomes more energy-intensive, as connectivity demands grow, and as national security applications push satellites to do more with every orbital pass, the constraint imposed by available onboard power becomes more and more limiting.

The analogy to the terrestrial electrical grid is one the company uses explicitly and repeatedly. The grid enabled revolutions across every sector of the economy precisely because it allowed companies and individuals to access as much power as they needed without having to generate it themselves. Star Catcher is arguing that the same dynamic will play out in space, and that the company that builds the orbital equivalent of the grid will occupy a structurally valuable position in the space industry.

The markets Star Catcher identifies as benefiting from orbital power access include universal connectivity, advanced computing, and national security. On the connectivity side, low Earth orbit broadband constellations like Starlink need to handle enormous data volumes, and increased power availability could enable higher throughput. On computing, the growing interest in orbital data processing, of the kind Aetherflux is also targeting, creates demand for energy that orbital power beaming could address. On national security, the ability to power military and intelligence satellites more effectively represents an obvious interest for defense agencies.

Near-Term Orbital Launch Plans

Star Catcher has stated its intention to bring its proven technology stack to orbit in 2026, a notably fast timeline given that the company was founded in 2024. The company’s ground-based demonstration at Kennedy Space Center, described as achieving the world record for optical power beaming, provides technical credibility for the core technology. The transition from ground demonstration to orbital demonstration is a substantial engineering step, but Star Catcher’s team, which has backgrounds from relevant technical domains, appears to be pursuing it with genuine urgency.

The commercial launch of the Star Catcher Network would represent a meaningful milestone for the broader space-based energy sector, as it would be among the first operational demonstrations of commercially sold orbital power beaming. Whether the early customers are willing to pay prices that cover costs and provide a path to profitability will be the critical commercial test.

Competitive Positioning

Star Catcher’s focus on the in-space power market rather than Earth power delivery distinguishes it sharply from most other companies in the SBSP space. Its primary competition comes from the design choices of satellite manufacturers: as launch costs decline and it becomes easier to build larger, more capable satellites with more solar panel area, the need for external orbital power supply could diminish. On the other hand, if satellite capabilities continue to outpace what individual solar arrays can support, the market that Star Catcher is targeting will continue to grow.

The company’s explicit design choice to serve existing satellites without modification is a key differentiation in the near term. Any satellite operator with a power-hungry mission that can’t be fully served by the satellite’s own solar panels is a potential customer, and that addressable market exists today, not after some future generation of satellites with integrated receivers is designed and launched.

Virtus Solis

Mission and Philosophy

Virtus Solis takes what might be described as the most uncompromising position among the companies in this article. The company’s stated mission is to create access to low-cost energy as the greatest lever for universal prosperity, and it frames the entire global energy challenge in terms that are more systemic than most startups would attempt.

The company’s thesis begins with an assessment of the current energy system: about 85% of global primary energy is powered by fossil fuels, and Virtus Solis argues that this system has no equitable path to sustainability with current technology. The company’s critique isn’t just of fossil fuels but of the limitations of the alternatives that have been deployed so far. Wind and terrestrial solar are intermittent, and that intermittency, in the company’s view, is not solvable with known battery energy storage technology at any cost. The physics of storing enough energy to cover extended calm, cloudy periods at grid scale is genuinely difficult, and the quantities of batteries required would involve enormous amounts of critical minerals and land area.

Space-based solar power, in Virtus Solis’s framing, avoids the intermittency problem entirely. By beaming energy from sunlit space to anywhere on the planet, it provides power that is continuous and dispatchable regardless of weather or time of day, without requiring storage. That’s a genuine technical advantage that the company believes is sufficient to make the economics work, once the development challenges are addressed.

Technological Ambition

Virtus Solis describes having designed what it claims is the world’s first space-based solar power energy generation system able to directly compete with all forms of energy. That’s a strong claim, and it implies a design that achieves significantly better economics than previous SBSP concepts. The company doesn’t publish extensive technical details publicly, but its positioning suggests a focus on cost-per-kilowatt-hour as the fundamental metric and a design philosophy oriented around achieving mass production and scale.

The company’s list of benefits for its approach includes being the lowest-cost firm energy source, being clean, firm, and safe, being scalable and dispatchable, avoiding long-distance distribution and storage requirements, having the lowest critical mineral and carbon intensity, and being capable of achieving what the company describes as “Actual Zero” rather than just “Net Zero.” That last point is notable: Virtus Solis is arguing that space-based solar power doesn’t just reduce emissions but can eliminate them entirely in the sectors it serves, because it produces clean energy without any combustion, waste product, or offset accounting.

Enabling Applications Beyond Electricity

Virtus Solis extends its vision beyond simple grid electricity in an interesting direction. The company specifically mentions enabling large-scale desalination, recycling, chemical synthesis, and urban vertical farming as examples of what access to abundant, low-cost, continuous energy could support. These applications speak to a vision of energy abundance rather than just energy supply.

Desalination, for instance, is energy-intensive and currently limited by the cost of electricity. If space-based solar power can deliver very cheap, continuous energy to coastal desalination plants, it could dramatically expand the availability of fresh water in water-scarce regions. This kind of systemic thinking about energy’s role in addressing multiple civilizational challenges at once gives Virtus Solis’s pitch a somewhat different character than companies that are primarily focused on grid electricity markets.

The recycling angle is similarly interesting. Many industrial recycling processes, particularly for metals, are constrained by energy costs. Cheap, continuous power could make recycling economically competitive with primary production in more sectors, reducing the demand for virgin materials and the environmental impacts of mining.

Stage and Team

Virtus Solis appears to be in an earlier stage of development than some of the other companies in this article. The company has a founding team and an outlined technology concept, but has not announced the same level of customer agreements, government contracts, or detailed technical milestones that companies like Aetherflux, Star Catcher, and Overview Energy have publicized. The company’s website is focused on articulating its vision and technology approach at a relatively high level.

That doesn’t mean the company lacks substance. The quality of the design and the rigor of the underlying economics are what ultimately determine whether a space energy venture succeeds, not the volume of press releases. Virtus Solis’s framing of the problem and its explicit focus on cost competitiveness with all forms of energy suggest a design philosophy that takes the commercial challenge seriously.

The company is engaging with investors and is building toward what it hopes will be a demonstrable system, but specific timelines and launch targets aren’t prominently featured in its public communications at this stage. This is characteristic of many early-stage deep-technology ventures, where the internal development process has to achieve a certain level of maturity before specific commercial commitments can responsibly be made.

Market Position

Virtus Solis is positioning itself in the largest possible market: global primary energy. It’s not targeting military applications, or disaster relief, or the satellite-to-satellite power market. It’s targeting the replacement of fossil fuel power generation at scale. That’s both the biggest opportunity and the most demanding target, requiring technology that can genuinely compete on cost with coal, natural gas, and nuclear power at grid scale.

The company’s differentiation within the SBSP space comes from its design philosophy, which appears to prioritize economic competitiveness above other considerations. Rather than starting with a niche application where the premium pricing of early SBSP systems can be justified and building toward the commodity market later, Virtus Solis appears to be designing for the commodity market from the outset.

Volta Space Technologies

The Lunar Power Problem

Volta Space Technologies stands apart from the other companies in this article in a critical way: its primary target market is not Earth. Volta is focused on delivering power to assets on the Moon’s surface, addressing what the company describes as one of the central limiting factors for the nascent lunar exploration and development sector.

The problem Volta identifies is stark and well-documented in the space industry. Most lunar missions end after approximately two weeks due to an inability to survive the lunar night. The Moon’s rotation means that any fixed location on the lunar surface experiences about two weeks of continuous sunlight followed by two weeks of continuous darkness. During the lunar night, temperatures plunge to roughly minus 170 degrees Celsius, and without access to power, most systems shut down and many fail. The company estimates that $150 billion has been committed to lunar infrastructure without a plan to solve this fundamental challenge.

The consequences of this limitation are significant. NASA’s Artemis program, commercial lunar landers, scientific instruments, and the early elements of what proponents hope will eventually become a permanent lunar presence all face the same basic constraint: the lack of continuous, affordable power on the lunar surface. Battery systems can cover short outages but are far too heavy and expensive to power a surface installation through a two-week lunar night. Nuclear systems are technically capable but face regulatory, cost, and public acceptance challenges.

The LightGrid System

Volta’s solution is the LightGrid: an orbital architecture that transfers power wirelessly to assets on the lunar surface. The concept involves satellites in lunar orbit that can intercept solar energy even when the surface below them is in darkness, and beam that energy down to receivers on the surface. Receiving systems on the lunar surface, which Volta calls LightPorts, are small and lightweight relative to traditional power infrastructure, enabling easy integration with existing and future lunar hardware.

The commercial model Volta proposes is a pay-as-you-go service, allowing lunar mission operators to reserve power for their missions without the capital expenditure of building dedicated power infrastructure. This eliminates what might otherwise be one of the biggest fixed costs of a lunar mission, and it aligns Volta’s interests with those of its customers: Volta only earns revenue when missions are operating, which creates an incentive to ensure the service is reliable and available.

The promise of extending mission life by up to 100 times is significant. A lunar surface asset that can currently survive the two-week sunlit period but then goes dark and dies could, with LightGrid power, potentially operate through multiple lunar day-night cycles, supporting scientific work, resource prospecting, or construction activities that require much longer operational periods.

Support and Partnerships

Volta Space Technologies has assembled an impressive array of institutional supporters and partners. The company has received backing and support from NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, and the U.S. Department of Defense. NASA specifically awarded Volta funding as part of the Watts on the Moon challenge, a competition designed to identify and develop innovative power solutions for lunar surface operations. The Canadian Space Agency awarded $16 million to support advanced space technology development through a program that included Volta.

The company has also partnered with ispace US on what they’ve called a “Survive the Night” capability for lunar missions. ispace is a commercial lunar landing company with a specific focus on delivering payloads to the lunar surface, and the two companies’ interests are directly aligned: ispace needs its lunar landers and their payloads to survive the lunar night, and Volta’s LightGrid is designed exactly for that purpose. The partnership represents early evidence of commercial traction in Volta’s target market.

Volta’s supporters also include NATO’s DIANA program, which focuses on innovation for defense applications, and several other research and investment partners. The breadth of institutional support across multiple countries and both civilian and defense domains reflects the cross-cutting nature of the lunar power challenge and the perceived value of the LightGrid solution.

The Lunar Economy Context

Volta’s opportunity exists within the context of a rapidly growing lunar economy. NASA’s Artemis program is committed to returning astronauts to the Moon and establishing a sustainable lunar presence. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services program has funded multiple private companies to deliver scientific instruments, technology demonstrations, and eventually cargo and crew services to the lunar surface. China’s lunar program has also accelerated, with the China National Space Administration having achieved successful soft landings on the Moon in recent years.

All of these activities create demand for power. A scientific instrument needs power to operate its sensors and communicate its data. A lunar rover needs power to move and function. Any future crewed facility needs continuous power for life support, computing, and communications. Volta’s market grows with every additional mission to the lunar surface, and the increasing pace of lunar activity suggests that market is expanding rapidly.

The company also has an eye on the longer-term lunar development scenario, in which the Moon becomes a site not just of exploration but of resource extraction and industrial activity. Water ice confirmed in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles could be electrolyzed to produce rocket fuel, but that electrolysis requires substantial power. Mining rare elements from the lunar regolith would also be energy-intensive. Volta’s LightGrid, if successfully deployed and scaled, could provide the power infrastructure that makes these more ambitious activities possible.

Differentiation and Challenges

Volta’s differentiation from the other companies in this article is complete: it serves a fundamentally different market and addresses a fundamentally different problem. This is both its strength and its challenge. The strength is that there’s no direct competition within the lunar power beaming space, at least not yet. The challenge is that the lunar economy is still in its very early stages, and the revenue opportunity, while real and growing, is much smaller in the near term than the terrestrial energy market that most other SBSP companies are targeting.

The company needs to time its development and launch cadence to the growth of the lunar economy. Too early and there are insufficient missions to generate meaningful revenue. Too late and competitors may have moved in. The institutional partnerships Volta has assembled, particularly the NASA relationship, suggest the company is managing this timing challenge by securing early-stage support that can sustain it until the commercial market matures.

The technical challenges of lunar orbital operations are also distinct from those of terrestrial power beaming. The Moon’s orbital environment, surface topology, and the specific requirements of lunar surface hardware all create engineering challenges that differ from those facing companies focused on Earth-directed power delivery. Volta’s team needs deep expertise in both lunar systems engineering and power beaming, a combination that’s rare.

Overview Energy

Space Solar for the Grid

Overview Energy is building what it describes as the first satellite system for gigawatt-scale energy generation, transmitting power from geosynchronous orbit to terrestrial solar farms using near-infrared laser light. The company is based in Northern Virginia and takes a clear-eyed, commercially focused approach to the challenge: design for proven technologies, demonstrate the core concept early, and build toward grid scale systematically.

The company’s founding premise is that space solar energy can solve three problems simultaneously: growing global electricity demand, strained transmission grids, and the unreliability of variable renewable generation. Its system places satellites in geosynchronous orbit, roughly 35,786 kilometers above the equator, where they see the sun more than 99% of the time and can see about a third of the Earth’s surface. From this orbit, a satellite can continuously serve receivers across a large geographic area, switching between them rapidly as demand patterns change.

The choice of geosynchronous orbit, rather than the low Earth orbit preferred by some other power-beaming companies, involves a trade-off. The advantage of GEO is continuous coverage: a satellite in GEO sees the same part of Earth all the time, providing truly continuous power delivery without the intermittency of LEO constellations. The disadvantage is distance: the path for the laser to travel from GEO to Earth is much longer than from LEO, which means the beam must be wider to avoid exceeding safety limits, and the ground receiver must cover a larger area to capture sufficient power.

Technology Architecture

Overview Energy’s satellite design converts solar energy to near-infrared light using laser diode modules, which are then directed to receivers on Earth through an optical array. The satellite uses standard terrestrial photovoltaic cells with concentrators to capture solar energy, laser diode modules to convert that electricity to near-infrared light, advanced radiators to manage thermal loads, and precision optics to combine and direct the laser output.

The choice of commercially available, proven components is a deliberate design philosophy. The company’s pitch to investors and partners emphasizes that its system doesn’t require speculative technology breakthroughs: it uses components that already exist and are manufactured at scale. This reduces technical risk and potentially accelerates development timelines compared to approaches that depend on novel materials or untested systems.

The ground-side infrastructure for Overview Energy’s system is integrated with existing and future solar projects. Receivers, which are large-area photovoltaic systems, convert the incoming near-infrared light to electricity. The company emphasizes that its system “maximizes utilization and multiplies output of existing and future solar projects without additional land,” meaning that solar farms can be augmented with space-derived energy without requiring additional real estate. This is a meaningful design advantage because land availability and permitting are genuine constraints on ground solar expansion in many regions.

Demonstrated Progress

Overview Energy has progressed beyond pure concept development. The company completed an airborne power transfer demonstration that it describes as “first-of-a-kind,” transmitting power from an aircraft-borne system to a receiver on the ground. This airborne demonstration serves as an intermediate step between ground-level testing and orbital deployment, allowing the company to validate the key aspects of its technology in a representative environment before attempting the much harder challenge of doing the same thing from orbit.

The company’s published roadmap shows energy transfer from Low Earth Orbit as in-progress for 2028, with a full geosynchronous orbit energy transfer capability targeted as the next major milestone after that. The full constellation build-out is identified as a subsequent, longer-term objective.

The progression from lab demonstration to airborne demonstration to LEO to GEO is a sensible staged development approach that allows the company to identify and address technical challenges incrementally rather than attempting to jump directly to the full-scale system. Each stage generates data, builds operational experience, and potentially generates early revenue or at least commercial interest that can support the next stage.

Receiver Integration and Commercial Model

A key element of Overview Energy’s commercial model is the integration with existing solar projects. Rather than requiring entirely new ground infrastructure, the company aims to enhance and augment infrastructure that is already being built and financed by the solar industry. This dramatically reduces the barrier to adoption for potential customers, who don’t need to understand space systems or invest in entirely new asset classes. They simply add an Overview Energy receiver to a solar project they were going to build anyway.

The commercial structure of this relationship would presumably involve a power purchase agreement or similar arrangement, in which Overview Energy sells additional electricity to the solar farm operator at a defined price. The solar farm operator benefits from higher utilization of their existing grid interconnection and a more stable generation profile; Overview Energy benefits from a recurring revenue stream that doesn’t require the solar farm operator to become a space industry participant.

This commercial model, if it can be made to work, is potentially very scalable. There are thousands of large solar projects operating globally and many more under development. If Overview Energy can establish partnerships with a meaningful fraction of them, the aggregate revenue opportunity is substantial. The challenge is that each partnership requires the solar farm operator to believe that the additional power from space will be delivered reliably and at a competitive price, which requires the technical system to be well-demonstrated before commercial contracts can be signed at scale.

Safety Profile

Overview Energy has been explicit about the safety design of its system, which uses a wide near-infrared beam that is always below eye-safe energy limits. The company points out that near-infrared light is already used extensively in fiber-optic networks, medical imaging, and consumer electronics like proximity sensors in smartphones. The familiar applications of near-infrared technology, and the well-established safety standards that govern them, provide a regulatory and public acceptance foundation that more exotic wavelengths or transmission methods might not enjoy.

The use of a wide beam, spread across multiple square kilometers on the ground, is key to maintaining eye-safe energy densities. While the total power delivered is substantial, the energy per unit area, which is what determines the intensity experienced by someone standing in the beam, is low enough to be considered safe. The company notes that a supermarket barcode scanner emits more intense near-infrared light than the Overview Energy ground beam. This comparison, while perhaps oversimplified for engineering purposes, conveys the general order of magnitude in an accessible way.

The constellation approach, in which energy is delivered by multiple widely spread satellites rather than a single concentrated beam, further distributes the power and ensures that safety limits are maintained across the system.

Investors and Partners

Overview Energy has attracted backing from several well-regarded climate and energy investors. Partners include Engine, LowerCarbon Capital, the EQT Foundation, and Earthrise Alliance, among others. LowerCarbon Capital in particular is a prominent climate-focused venture fund that has backed a number of innovative clean energy and climate technology companies, and its involvement with Overview Energy reflects that fund’s assessment of space solar as a credible pathway to decarbonization.

The Northern Virginia location is strategic for the same reasons as Aetherflux’s Washington D.C. presence: proximity to defense and government clients, and access to the talent pool that has grown up around the region’s strong space and defense industries. Northern Virginia is home to many satellite operators, defense contractors, and government agencies with interests in space systems, and Overview Energy’s location puts it in close proximity to potential early customers and partners.

Scale Ambition and Timeline

Overview Energy is explicit that it’s building toward gigawatt-scale energy generation, a level of ambition that implies a massive satellite constellation and ground receiver network. The path from today’s airborne demonstration to gigawatt-scale GEO solar power is a long one, measured in years of development, billions of dollars of investment, and many incremental milestones. The company’s roadmap acknowledges this, describing the LEO demonstration as in-progress for 2028 and the full GEO system as a longer-term objective.

What sets Overview Energy apart in terms of ambition is the explicit targeting of the grid electricity market at scale. The company isn’t positioning itself as a provider of niche or premium power for special applications; it’s explicitly framing its technology as a replacement for conventional grid generation. That framing requires demonstrating not just that the technology works, but that it can work at the scale and cost points that grid operators require.

The Landscape in Context

A New Ecosystem Forming

Taken together, these seven companies represent something that didn’t exist five years ago: a genuine startup ecosystem around space-based solar power and orbital energy. Each company has identified a distinct slice of the opportunity, chosen a technical approach appropriate to that slice, and begun the engineering work required to test that approach.

The diversity of approaches is striking. Aetherflux uses infrared lasers from LEO, targeting military and AI compute markets. Reflect Orbital uses passive mirror reflection, targeting illumination and solar augmentation. Space Solar uses microwave transmission from GEO, targeting grid baseload. Star Catcher uses optical power beaming in orbit, targeting other satellites. Virtus Solis targets commodity energy with an optimized SBSP design. Volta Space Technologies addresses the lunar power problem with orbital energy delivery to the surface. Overview Energy uses near-infrared laser beaming from GEO to augment ground solar projects.

This diversity suggests that the market for space-derived energy is itself diverse, with different customers having different requirements that may be best served by different technological approaches. The military customer who needs power in a contested forward operating base has different requirements than the commercial solar farm operator seeking to increase capacity factor, and both are different from the lunar lander that needs to survive the two-week lunar night.

Common Challenges

All seven companies face common challenges, even as they pursue different market opportunities. Launch costs, while dramatically reduced from where they were a decade ago, remain significant, and getting enough hardware to orbit to make a commercially viable system is expensive. The learning curve for space hardware development is steep, and even technically excellent teams sometimes encounter problems that extend timelines and increase costs.

Regulatory complexity is another shared challenge. Power beaming technology, whether laser, microwave, or optical, doesn’t fit neatly into existing regulatory frameworks, which were designed for telecommunications or conventional satellite operations rather than energy transmission. Getting approval to operate these systems, particularly at the power levels required for commercial energy applications, will require engagement with regulators in multiple jurisdictions and potentially the development of new international frameworks.

Public perception is a related challenge. The concept of beaming power from space raises questions in the public mind that need to be addressed clearly and honestly. Most of the safety concerns that people instinctively have about power beaming, particularly around concentrated energy beams and their potential for harm, are addressed by the design choices these companies have made, but communicating that effectively to non-technical audiences, policymakers, and potential customers requires sustained effort.

Investment Climate

The investment climate for space-based solar power has improved materially in recent years, driven by the convergence of declining launch costs, rising energy prices and security concerns, and the demonstrated commercial success of low Earth orbit satellite constellations in other domains. The willingness of investors like Andreessen Horowitz, LowerCarbon Capital, and a range of government programs to back these companies reflects a genuine shift in how the investment community assesses the risk-return profile of space energy ventures.

That said, all of these companies remain early-stage by the standards of the energy infrastructure industry, which typically requires decades of development and billions of dollars of capital before a new technology achieves significant market penetration. The venture funding that has supported these companies to date will need to be followed by much larger rounds of infrastructure finance as they move from demonstration to deployment at meaningful scale.

The analogy to other large-scale clean energy infrastructure, like offshore wind, is instructive. Offshore wind required decades of government support and subsidized development before it became commercially self-sustaining. Space-based solar power may follow a similar trajectory, with government programs playing a critical role in bridging the period between early demonstration and commercial viability.

Comparing Technical Approaches

The technical choices made by these seven companies span a wide range, and each involves distinct trade-offs that will determine which approaches prove most viable in practice.

Low Earth orbit approaches, favored by Aetherflux and Star Catcher, offer the advantage of proximity. Less distance means less beam spreading, which simplifies the engineering of achieving useful power densities on the ground. The disadvantage is coverage: any given LEO satellite is only in view of a given ground station for a limited time per day, requiring large constellations for continuous coverage.

Geostationary orbit, favored by Overview Energy and Space Solar, offers continuous coverage from a single satellite position, but the much greater distance means beams must be wider and receivers must be larger to capture useful amounts of power while staying within safety limits.

Passive reflection, as in Reflect Orbital’s approach, avoids the energy conversion inefficiency involved in turning sunlight into electricity and then back into a transmission medium. Reflected natural sunlight is directly useful to ground solar panels without any conversion step. The limitation is that it delivers illumination rather than electricity, and the ground infrastructure must convert it.

In-orbit power beaming, as pursued by Star Catcher, operates at much smaller scales and distances than Earth-directed systems, which makes the engineering more tractable in the near term. The market is currently smaller but is growing as the space economy expands.

The lunar application pursued by Volta represents yet another set of engineering requirements, including the need to operate in the harsh thermal and radiation environment of lunar orbit and to interface with the lightweight, power-constrained hardware that lunar surface missions typically carry.

Each of these approaches will be tested by the market over the coming decade, and it’s entirely plausible that multiple approaches prove viable for different applications rather than a single winner taking all.

The Role of Government

Government programs have been significant enablers for several of the companies profiled here. Aetherflux has positioned itself squarely in the national security market. Star Catcher has received AFWERX SBIR funding. Volta has received support from NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, and the Department of Defense. Space Solar is engaging with the UK Space Agency and National Grid. Overview Energy has built partnerships with climate-focused institutional investors.

The degree to which these companies ultimately depend on government support versus commercial revenue will be a key determinant of their long-term viability. The history of energy technology development suggests that most transformative technologies require a combination of early government investment in demonstration and de-risking, followed by private investment as commercial viability becomes clearer. The companies here that are successfully navigating both tracks will be better positioned to sustain their development through the long period between initial demonstration and commercial scale.

Summary

Space-based solar power has moved from the realm of speculative science into an active startup ecosystem populated by funded companies with real technical programs and commercial strategies. The seven companies profiled in this article represent distinct but complementary approaches to the challenge of harnessing energy in space and using it to address problems on Earth, in orbit, and on the Moon.

Aetherflux is building an orbital AI compute and power beaming system using infrared lasers and small LEO satellites, targeting the defense and national security market as its first commercial customers and backed by tier-one venture capital. Reflect Orbital is taking the most unconventional approach, deploying a constellation of orbital mirrors to redirect natural sunlight to specified locations, addressing markets from disaster response and agriculture to solar farm augmentation. Space Solar is a UK company pursuing microwave-based power transmission to deliver baseload grid electricity, with support from the UK Space Agency and commercial partners including National Grid.

Star Catcher Industries is focused not on Earth power delivery but on building the first orbital power grid, beaming concentrated solar energy to other satellites in LEO using optical power beaming, with early commercial customers and government SBIR funding already secured. Virtus Solis is pursuing the most ambitious economic target, designing a system that it believes can directly compete with all forms of conventional energy at commodity prices, with a particular emphasis on serving as a catalyst for energy abundance and the applications it enables. Volta Space Technologies is addressing the critical infrastructure gap in the growing lunar economy, deploying the LightGrid orbital architecture to provide affordable, continuous power to assets on the lunar surface and extending mission life beyond the two-week lunar night. Overview Energy is building geosynchronous orbit satellites that beam near-infrared laser light to augment existing solar farms, using proven commercially available components and a commercial model designed to integrate with the existing solar industry.

None of these companies has yet delivered energy commercially at meaningful scale, and significant technical and commercial challenges lie ahead for all of them. The costs of building, launching, and operating the satellite constellations involved are substantial, regulatory frameworks for orbital power beaming are still developing, and demonstrating the economics of space-derived energy at grid scale requires sustained investment over many years.

What has changed is the credibility of the underlying technical and economic case. The dramatic reductions in launch costs, the maturation of small satellite technology, the advancement of laser and microwave power transmission, and the increasing urgency of the global energy challenge have collectively created conditions in which space-based solar power and related concepts can be pursued by private companies with realistic prospects of commercial success. The seven companies profiled here are the vanguard of what may become one of the most consequential new energy industries of the coming decades, each exploring a different path up the same mountain.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

What is space-based solar power and how does it work?

Space-based solar power involves collecting solar energy in orbit, where sunlight is more intense and available around the clock, and transmitting it to Earth using laser, microwave, or reflected light. Satellites carry large solar panels or mirrors, convert or redirect the energy, and beam it to receiving systems on the ground that turn it into usable electricity.

Who founded Aetherflux and what is the company trying to achieve?

Aetherflux was founded by Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood, who left his role at the financial technology company in 2024 to build an orbital power and compute company. Aetherflux is developing a constellation of small LEO satellites that transmit power using infrared lasers, targeting AI compute infrastructure in orbit and power delivery to U.S. military operations.

What makes Reflect Orbital’s approach different from other space solar companies?

Reflect Orbital uses passive orbital mirrors to redirect natural sunlight to specific locations on Earth, rather than converting solar energy to electricity and beaming it. This approach delivers real sunlight, not an artificial beam, enabling applications from nighttime illumination and disaster response to extending the generation hours of ground solar farms.

What is Space Solar’s connection to the UK government and energy policy?

Space Solar is a UK-based company supported by the UK Space Agency and is engaged with National Grid Electricity Distribution. The company is developing space-based solar power as a source of continuous, dispatchable baseload electricity to complement the intermittency of wind and ground solar in support of the UK’s Net Zero commitments.

What market is Star Catcher Industries targeting and how is it different from other SBSP companies?

Star Catcher Industries is building a power grid for satellites in orbit rather than beaming power to Earth. It transmits concentrated solar energy to the existing solar arrays of other satellites using optical power beaming, allowing customers to scale their available power by up to ten times without modifying their hardware.

What problem is Volta Space Technologies solving and for whom?

Volta Space Technologies is addressing the lunar power gap that causes most lunar missions to end after approximately two weeks when the site enters the two-week lunar night. Its LightGrid system beams power wirelessly from lunar orbit to surface assets, offering a pay-as-you-go service that extends mission life and enables the growing lunar economy.

How does Overview Energy plan to deliver power from geosynchronous orbit to the ground?

Overview Energy’s satellites convert solar energy to near-infrared laser light using commercially available laser diode modules and direct that light to large-area receivers integrated with existing solar farms on Earth. The wide beam is designed to remain below eye-safe intensity limits across its entire ground footprint, and the system uses a constellation approach to spread energy from multiple satellites across multiple receivers.

What is the current state of commercial investment in space-based solar power companies?

Space-based solar power startups have attracted funding from prominent venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz and LowerCarbon Capital, as well as government programs including NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, AFWERX, and the UK Space Agency. Investment levels vary significantly across companies, from seed-stage ventures to companies with tens of millions of dollars in announced funding.

What are the main technical challenges facing power beaming from space to Earth?

Key challenges include achieving sufficient beam precision to keep power concentrated on the receiver, maintaining safety limits for eye and skin exposure, managing the thermal loads on satellite hardware, designing lightweight and efficient receiving systems on the ground, and building satellite constellations large enough to provide continuous coverage from low Earth orbit.

How does space-based solar power compare to wind and ground solar in terms of intermittency?

Unlike wind and ground solar, which depend on local weather conditions and time of day, space-based solar power can deliver continuous, dispatchable energy because satellites in suitable orbits see the sun virtually all the time. This means SBSP doesn’t require battery storage or backup generation to deliver firm power, which its proponents argue is a significant economic and grid stability advantage.