Orbital Power Gains Ground as Data Center Demand Grows

Space Frontier Foundation Updates

• This month marks two years of SFF’s Space Solar Synergy newsletter, and we celebrate Sowmya Venkatesh, the volunteer Chief Editor of the newsletter who has been at its heart since its inception. A Pleasanton, CA native and Georgia Tech Mechanical Engineering student, Sowmya is a budding leader already making her mark in the space industry. In celebrating Sowmya, we also celebrate the young talent like her whose passion, initiative, and commitment will be the bedrock of the emerging space solar industrial base around the world.

  
  

  ~ Srikanth Raviprasad, Program Manager, Space Solar Power 
  

• The Space Frontier Foundation is partnering with Experience POWER and the Data Center Power Exchange to introduce Space Solar Power directly to utility and energy sector leaders through a first-of-its-kind half-day program on Sept 30, 2026 in D.C. The effort is designed to begin sustained engagement between the space and energy communities around the future of firm, dispatchable clean energy. Register for this event now!
  

  

  
  

• The Space Frontier Foundation is partnering with RE+, Las Vegas, to conduct an hour long Space Solar Power event at the Exhibit Hall on Tuesday, Nov 17, 3:30 to 4: 25 PM at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Expect more details on this event soon! 

Notable News

• Star Catcher signed a Power Purchase Agreement with Aethero, a developer of space-rated high-performance compute, marking the company's 10th major commercial customer and pushing its contracted backlog past $60 million. Under the deal, Aethero will draw on-demand power from Star Catcher's forthcoming orbital energy grid rather than sizing its own satellites around peak power loads, freeing up mass for compute hardware instead of batteries and solar panels; internal Star Catcher research cited in the announcement estimates the arrangement could multiply revenue for orbital compute architectures by 1.9x to 3.5x.
  

• Orbital data center startup Starcloud raised a $250 million Series A extension at a $2.3 billion valuation, with new investor Nvidia joining existing backers Benchmark and EQT as the company races to secure launch capacity for its next-generation compute satellites. The round, which brings Starcloud's total funding to $450 million since 2024, underscores how much capital is flowing into orbital compute specifically, a market SSP companies are increasingly positioning their own power-delivery businesses to serve.
  

• President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum aimed at enabling more than 1,000 U.S. launches and reentries annually by 2030, directing agencies to expedite permitting, develop cost-recovery policies for shared launch infrastructure, and co-develop transportation infrastructure with private companies. The memorandum doesn't mention SSP directly, but any policy aimed at easing launch cadence and cost bottlenecks affects the economics every SSP company's business case ultimately depends on.
  

  
  

SSP Systems Enablers

• SatNews reported on investment bank projections that SpaceX's transition from Falcon 9 to Starship could cut orbital transport costs from roughly $2,700 per kilogram down toward $100 per kilogram, while expanding net LEO payload capacity from 23 metric tons to more than 100 metric tons per launch. The analysis frames this cost collapse as converting low Earth orbit into a viable industrial infrastructure layer, exactly the kind of shift SSP's backers have long argued is the precondition for building utility-scale solar structures in orbit.
  

• Brooklyn-based Beyond Reach Labs unveiled Flarewing, a line of deployable solar arrays that fold flat for launch and unfold into rigid structures up to 625 square meters, delivering as much as 200 kilowatts of power without the added mass and fragility that come with scaling up conventional designs. The company's pitch, that power constraints are already determining which orbital missions can exist at all, speaks directly to the structural mass problem any SSP satellite eventually has to solve at far larger scale.
  

• Researchers from Korea published a rectenna design in Microwave and Optical Technology Letters that packs receiving elements roughly a third closer together than the conventional spacing limit. The tighter, dual-polarized layout delivered about 12% higher RF power density per unit area in testing, stayed stable across a range of polarization angles, and cut the number of rectifying diodes needed by 75% through RF power combining. The rectenna density and component count are exactly the kind of incremental gains that compound at the kilometer-scale receiving arrays a real SSP system would eventually require. 
  

Promising Use Cases

Image Courtesy: Visual Capitalist

New York's Data Center Pause

New York's year-long, statewide pause on permitting new hyperscale data centers, a response to strained grids and record wildfire smoke and flooding in 2026, is pushing companies to look beyond conventional siting altogether.

TRVST covered how that moratorium is accelerating interest in two different orbital alternatives: SpaceX's push toward full data centers in orbit, cooled by vacuum and powered by continuous sunlight, and space-based solar power beamed down to existing terrestrial solar farms, an approach Meta has already backed through its agreement with Overview Energy for up to 1 gigawatt of capacity.

As TerraSpark co-founder Sanjay Vijendran put it in the piece, space solar can be beamed to receivers wherever there's room for them and connected directly to large users or the grid, a flexibility no new transmission line can match.

The moratorium is one state's response to a strain that's showing up everywhere AI compute is scaling, and it's exactly the kind of siting and grid bottleneck SSP is pitched as being able to route around entirely. 

SSP Coverage in the News

Experts and Advocates on SSP

• The Space Energy Initiative, based in the UK, published a paper making the case that SSP is the only energy source that scores well on all seven measures of an ideal power supply: reliability, affordability, sustainability, sovereignty, scalability, exportability, and grid value. The paper cites Space Solar's estimate of roughly £30 per megawatt-hour at scale today, falling toward £10 as launch costs drop, and calls on the UK government to co-fund an orbital demonstrator within five years, warning that without near-term public investment the UK risks losing its current lead in the technology the way it did with the jet engine and the computer. 
  

• Space Solar, in a recent YouTube video, made its public case for the technology, with framing SSP as a real, quickly deployable solution for cheap energy in the UK and beyond. The video is important in engaging the public, not just government lobbying, as a central piece of building the political support its funding ask depends on.
  

• The National Interest ran a pair of opinion pieces on SSP's prospects, with contrasting views. Peter Garretson, a longtime Air Force space strategist, argued space-based power is inevitable, pointing to falling launch costs and at least six dedicated SSP companies now operating across eight countries as evidence the technology has moved from academic exercise to genuine industry. Michael Brown, an astronomer at Monash University, countered that space-based power may never be feasible, using Reflect Orbital's mirror satellites as a case study: even a fleet of 50,000 mirrors could deliver only 10% of midday sun to at most 50 locations at a time, at a price of roughly $5 million per hour, when the genuine article is free at midday. The exchange reflects a disagreement running through this entire sector: whether falling costs make SSP's economics increasingly plausible, or whether the physics of collecting and redirecting sunlight at scale keeps the numbers stubbornly unfavorable.

Outsiders' Perspectives

• Space.com reported on a Princeton-led study finding that Reflect Orbital's proposed sun-reflecting mirrors would appear roughly 40 times brighter than the full moon to anyone standing in their beam, effectively erasing stars from the sky for that duration; astronomer Gaspar Bakos said the effect would be "worse than big cities like London." The company plans to fly up to 40,000 such mirrors, and while its stated goal is extending daylight hours for solar farms rather than pursuing SSP directly, the light pollution and environmental objections it's drawing are a preview of the scrutiny larger, actual SSP constellations are likely to face.
  

• Goldman Sachs' Global Institute projected the global space economy will reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, pointing to collapsing launch costs, more than $55 billion in space investment in 2025 alone, and a wave of aerospace IPOs as evidence that space is shifting from a government-led frontier to an institutional asset class in its own right. The report doesn't single out SSP, but its broader thesis, that space is becoming genuine industrial infrastructure rather than a scientific or prestige project, is precisely the macro backdrop SSP companies are counting on to make their case to investors.
  

• UK investment bank Peel Hunt's Space Chronicle series interviewed Mark Garnier MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Space, on the state of the UK space sector. The conversation indicates how visible SSP is in Parliament and how mainstream the UK space investment story, SSP included, has become.
  

Originally posted on Substack.