Star Catcher Industries has set a new record for beaming power at a distance. Its Star Catcher Network technology beamed 1.1 kW of power at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida using off-the-shelf solar panel components.
In 1941, science fiction author Isaac Asimov introduced the public to the concept of beamed solar power from space, decades before it became a serious engineering proposal by Peter Glaser in 1968.
The concept was very simple. Instead of using up land on Earth to collect sunlight that won't be equally available in all parts of the world, would be drastically diminished by the atmosphere and weather, and not available at all at night, why not go for an alternative? That is, put solar collectors in an orbit in space where sunlight is always on tap unimpeded and a collector can be of any size desired. Just collect the energy, convert it to microwaves, and beam it back to power-starved Earth.
Interest in the concept has waxed and waned over the decades, however, recently there have been serious efforts to find a practical application for beamed power. The giant collector stations of Asimov's imagination are still, at the very least, decades away, but engineers are looking to beam power on a smaller scale, not to Earth, but from one spacecraft to another.
This would help to overcome a limitation of current satellite design, which is that the electricity supplied to them by solar panels is a bit limited. That means that any attempt to generate more power requires adding much larger arrays with a corresponding increase in size, mass, and launch costs.
What Star Catcher is working on is similar to DARPA, which holds the previous beaming record of 800 W set in June 2025. Instead of generating microwaves, a grid of solar panels power an optical multi-spectrum laser that can be aimed at a client satellite. These carefully controlled wavelengths are optimized to best suit the target solar panels.
Put simply, this would be like holding a huge magnifying glass on the target spacecraft, greatly increasing the efficiency of the panels without having to enlarge or even modify them. According to the company, the increase in power generation would be between two and 10 times using off-the-shelf panel components.
The latest test used a variety of solar panel designs and was a run-up to a planned orbital demonstration in 2026.
"Our existing Power Purchase Agreements confirm that the market understands both the value and scalability of our technology to revolutionize power delivery beyond Earth," said Andrew Rush, CEO and Co-Founder of Star Catcher. "These real-world results offer definitive proof of the soundness and maturity of our approach to building a resilient orbital power grid."
Source: Star Catcher
