Space Solar Power Expands Into Orbital Computing and AI Infrastructure

Space Frontier Foundation Updates

• 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! 
  

  

  
  

• In case you missed it last month, on April 30, the Space Frontier Foundation presented to the U.S. Energy Association audience on the role Space Solar Power could play in addressing future energy demand. The webinar brought together ~130 attendees across the energy, space, research, and policy communities worldwide. The Space Frontier Foundation speakers outlined Space Solar Power’s potential as a reliable, scalable, and dispatchable clean energy source, while highlighting the technology, regulatory, and market-development steps needed to make it a reality. A link to the webinar is here.

Notable News

• Star Catcher, a Florida-based developer of orbital solar collection and transmission technology, raised its total funding to $88 million after a $65 million round led by B Capital, and is building a constellation of power-beaming "nodes" positioned just above low Earth orbit to recharge client satellites via laser, freeing up mass and design budget that would otherwise go to onboard batteries. CEO Andrew Rush expanded on the vision in a wide-ranging interview covering orbital regulation and the geopolitics of the commercial space economy. Star Catcher sells energy as an in-space commodity rather than beaming it to Earth, an early, revenue-generating variant on the broader SSP thesis.
  

• UK-based Space Solar and US sovereign-data-storage company Lonestar signed a letter of intent to host Lonestar's StarVault data modules aboard Space Solar's in-space-assembled power platforms, with a first rideshare demonstration planned for 2028 and larger hosted structures from 2030. Co-CEO Sam Adlen called it a pairing of orbital power with a data customer that badly needs it, positioning SSP as the missing piece for a scalable orbital data economy.
  

• TerraSpark, the Luxembourg-based SSP startup co-founded by former ESA Solaris lead Sanjay Vijendran, is exploring in-orbit compute applications for its satellites alongside Belgian edge-AI chipmaker EDGX, whose Sterna processor already has flight heritage. The tie-up reflects a growing pattern: SSP companies eyeing in-orbit compute as an earlier, more forgiving revenue path than gigawatt-scale power beaming to Earth.
  

• China's Sun Chasing project, led by a Xidian University research team, reported wireless power transmission of 1,180 watts over 100 meters at 20.8% DC-to-DC efficiency, plus a successful demonstration powering a moving drone target. Researchers say in-orbit testing is next, another marker of the international race, alongside the US, Japan, and Europe, to prove SSP at meaningful scale.
  

• The World Economic Forum's 2026 Technology Pioneers cohort, spanning 23 countries, includes eight companies working on the convergence of energy and compute for AI infrastructure, among them Overview Energy, which proposes beaming space-based solar power to Earth's grids via satellite. The Forum's role is to spot technologies it expects to shape the next decade, so naming SSP alongside fusion and geothermal signals mainstream institutional buy-in, beyond just the space industry.
  

  
  

SSP Systems Enablers

• The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, working with Boeing and the U.S. Army, demonstrated a dual-use laser system capable of wirelessly transmitting power over long distances and then switching instantly to a counter-drone defense role, testing the technology in realistic field conditions including near-whiteout snow. The dual-use framing shows military investment in ruggedized power-beaming hardware, a core SSP enabler, advancing in parallel with, and sometimes ahead of, civilian programs.
  

• Volta Space Technologies is preparing to test how its photovoltaic receiver array withstands lunar dust, working toward a demonstration of beaming laser power from lunar orbit down to the Moon's surface. Lunar regolith is abrasive and clings electrostatically, a reminder that power-beaming hardware built for Earth orbit still needs re-engineering for other environments, a hurdle SSP's Earth-facing receivers don't face.
  

• Barron's covered investor Ron Baron's thesis that SpaceX could become a major data-center and utility-like player by building solar-powered compute infrastructure in orbit, where sunlight is more abundant and cooling requirements differ from Earth. Whether or not SpaceX delivers on Baron's timeline, the attention one of the market's highest-profile IPOs brings to orbital energy economics adds momentum to the broader case for space-based power.
  

• Energy Solutions Intelligence published a market analysis of long-distance wireless power transmission, noting that 2025–2026 milestones include DARPA's 800-watt laser transmission over 8.6 kilometers and the U.S. Army's 1.6-kilowatt, 95%-efficient microwave link over 1 kilometer. The report calls SSP the technology's "flagship application," since wireless transmission is the only way to get orbital power to the ground, though it cautions terrestrial WPT remains a niche business case for now.
  

• The Space Studies Institute has begun digitizing and releasing, for free, its archive of hundreds of original U.S. government-funded Solar Power Satellite feasibility studies from the 1970s through the 1990s. Making decades of prior research freely searchable gives today's SSP engineers and policymakers a foundation to build on, from decades of prior work.

SSP Systems Enablers

• The Association for Project Management's International Space Sector Interest Network is hosting a Spotlight webinar on solar energy from space featuring David Homfray, CTO of Space Solar, who will discuss how the company's work on space-based solar power aims to support the transition to net zero and deliver secure, affordable, clean energy globally. 
  

Promising Use Cases

Image Courtesy: Space News

Continued Energy Demand from Data Centers

As AI firms scramble for power, Canary Media rounded up their increasingly unconventional strategies to secure it, from jet-engine turbines to floating ocean data centers to Elon Musk's ambitions to put entire data centers in orbit, treating the trend as a sign of real desperation even while doubting the space-based options scale quickly. SpaceNews framed that same scramble as a business opportunity, laying out the different ways companies are trying to monetize continuous orbital solar energy: communications, in-space compute, grid-delivered SSP, and eventually in-space manufacturing, with Overview Energy's Marc Berte arguing that electricity delivery is "the bigger bet" because it skips the conversion step and can serve every market, not just compute. Between them, the two pieces point to the same underlying use case: AI's exploding appetite for power. Where jet turbines and floating data centers are stopgaps, SSP's pitch is to meet that demand directly, delivering continuous energy into grid infrastructure that already exists rather than requiring compute itself to relocate to orbit. 

SSP Coverage in the News

Outsiders' Perspectives

• The World Economic Forum published a skeptical technical deep-dive on space-based data centers, arguing that cooling, not power, may be the harder engineering problem, since a satellite's only way to shed waste heat is radiating it into space, a far slower process than water or air cooling on Earth. The piece estimates that a modest 1-megawatt orbital data center would need radiators roughly the size of a hockey rink, raising a heat-radiation issue that doesn't get much airtime in the broader SSP conversation.
  

• Forbes reported on the World Economic Forum's Energy Transition Index 2026, which found that global grid readiness declined for the first time in over a decade even as AI infrastructure demands trillions in new firm power, with more than 2,500 gigawatts of projects worldwide stuck in interconnection queues. The piece argues that how fast a project can get firm power, not just its cost, is now the main factor in where AI infrastructure gets built, the same bottleneck SSP advocates say their technology could help ease.
  

• CSIS introduced the concept of "Watt's Law", the idea that AI capability will increasingly be gated by available electricity and full-stack system efficiency rather than by transistor scaling alone, and warned that whichever country pairs compute strategy with power strategy first will hold the innovation advantage. The piece doesn't mention SSP directly, but its underlying argument, that power availability is becoming the defining innovation constraint, is exactly the premise on which the case for space-based solar power rests.
  

• EE Demystify walked through NASA's 2024 engineering assessment of geostationary SSP concepts, finding that launch costs dominate the levelized cost of electricity (accounting for up to 77% of costs in one design) and that a 2-gigawatt system could require nearly 20 square kilometers of collecting area and 10 million kilograms of hardware. The analysis is bullish on the underlying physics but blunt that economics and launch cadence, not technology, remain the binding constraints on SSP reaching the grid.
  

Experts and Advocates on SSP

• Andrew Rush, CEO of Star Catcher, told Cheddar that the next phase of the space industry will be defined by power delivery rather than launch, likening today's self-powered satellites to water wheels in the pre-industrial era. His comments reinforce a broader argument advocates make for SSP: that the constraint on what's possible in orbit is shifting from getting there to having enough energy once you're there.
  

• Marc Berte, founder and CEO of Overview Energy, argued in a World Economic Forum piece that space is becoming a genuine new "energy layer" for the planet, not just an information layer, and that beaming power from orbit to existing utility-scale solar farms lets those assets generate electricity around the clock without requiring new sites or transmission lines. He frames data centers as merely the visible tip of a much larger power-hungry economy (manufacturing, desalination, hydrogen) that will eventually need the same continuous, dispatchable supply SSP promises.
  

• Paul Warley, CEO of thin-film photovoltaic maker Ascent Solar, told Renewables Now that he sees significant near-term opportunity for his company's flexible solar panels in the expanding space-solar-power market, underscoring how the SSP supply chain extends well beyond the handful of headline SSP startups to established space-qualified component makers.
  

• In a LinkedIn post, deep-tech investor Pablos Holman shared his survey of the space-based solar power landscape and his firm's investment thesis behind Virtus Solis, the company co-founded by John Bucknell that is working to commercialize satellite manufacturing at scale to make orbital solar power cost-competitive. Holman has been one of the more vocal public advocates for SSP, framing falling launch costs as the tipping point that finally makes the decades-old concept an engineering problem rather than a science-fiction one.
  

• Darko Filipi, VP of Space Systems at Overview Energy, discussed his path from astrophysics into spacecraft engineering on the Techne Connect podcast, and broke down what it takes to design and beam safe, near-infrared energy from orbit at kilometer scale. He described the industry's shift from a government-research domain to an industrial infrastructure layer, and argued the future of space is "less about science fiction and more about industrial-scale systems thinking."
  

• At the WMF – We Make Future digital innovation festival in Italy, space-based solar power featured as a topic of discussion among speakers exploring frontier energy and technology themes, another sign of SSP's migration from niche space-industry conferences into mainstream innovation and technology events.
  

• UK space trade association UKspace highlighted developments at the intersection of small satellites and space-based solar power within the UK sector, reflecting the country's continued positioning, alongside companies like Space Solar, as a hub for commercial SSP development.
  

Originally posted on Substack.