Space Solar Power Gains Ground Across Energy, Defense, and Data Markets

SSP Bulletin – April 2026

Our Mission: To create the landscape and conditions for commercial Space Solar Power technology by the U.S. to become successful and self-sustaining.

Space Frontier Foundation Updates

• As part of SF Climate Week 2026, YPE SF Bay Area and the Space Frontier Foundation hosted “Energy from Space,” sponsored by Reach Power on April 21. The event brought together ~60 professionals across energy, climate, venture, and policy to discuss the commercial progress of Space Solar Power. Leaders from Virtus Solis, Overview Energy, and Reach Power shared updates on near-term demonstrations and wireless power transmission technologies moving toward deployment.

• 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.
  

• 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. The effort is designed to begin sustained engagement between the space and energy communities around the future of firm, dispatchable clean energy. Watch this page to know more in the coming weeks and register!

Notable News

• TerraSpark is rapidly accelerating its operations, and have articulated their roadmap in this report, recently securing a competitive €5 million funding round. They also cemented their hardware timeline by partnering with DCUBED for the Araqys deployment mission. Capturing vital capital alongside dedicated flight heritage are major milestones for TerraSpark in transitioning SSP from theoretical concepts into verifiable orbital hardware.
  

• Overview Energy generated massive momentum by publishing their core "About the Beam" transmission architecture and securing a proactive Air Force contract to study military base applications. Furthermore, they initiated a landmark partnership with Meta to supply solar power to data centers. Capturing multi-sector creates the immediate economic demand needed to scale orbital clean energy.
  

• Star Catcher published a focused roadmap addressing the orbital data center power problem and rapidly proved their capability by completing a flawless on-orbit precision acquisition and tracking demonstration. Further accelerating this momentum, the company also just secured $65M in Series A funding, which is an important step towards the company’s goals of an in-space demonstration later this year.
  

• PowerLight Technologies achieved an industry first: autonomous kilowatt-class laser power beaming to a military fixed-wing drone in flight at Poinsett Electronic Combat Range, sponsored by U.S. Central Command. The system tracked the aircraft at altitudes up to 5,000 feet, delivering wireless power in real time throughout the mission. This is a major terrestrial milestone that validates the precision beam steering, atmospheric management, and safety controls that SSP will depend on at orbital scale. 
  

• Volta Space Technologies, in partnership with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and NASA, announced LEPTON: the Laser-Enabled Power Transmission Orbital Network. Funded by the Department of War's OECIF, the program will demonstrate optical wireless power transfer from low lunar orbit to the Moon's surface in 2028, enabling missions to survive the 14-day lunar night, an important capability as the U.S. continues to expand lunar operations. 
  

• Space Solar directly integrated into global defense supply chains by joining the NATO DIANA accelerator program to assist with resilient space operations. Embedding continuous space-to-ground power into this important international defense organization guarantees the institutional support required for the scale and resilience of the grid Space Solar envisions.
  

• Cowboy Space, a recent rebrand from Aetherflux, explicitly targeted the massive infrastructure required for in-orbit computing, completing a massive $275 million funding round to build customized launch vehicles, including their own custom engine, that can truly scale up to the demands of the orbital data center business. Additionally, founder Baiju Bhatt recently addressed top-tier investors at the Semafor World Economy summit in Washington D.C. from April 13-17 to discuss the evolving economic landscape. Baiju Bhatt also shares his vision for the company and its driving economics in this podcast.
  

SSP Systems Enablers

• Arinna has raised $4M in seed round funding for developing ultrathin solar panels for spacecraft using a novel material they created. Fostering a diverse ecosystem of well-funded startups is essential for continually driving down component costs, which remains the primary hurdle for viable commercial energy transmission.
  

• U.S. Borax / Rio Tinto published a deep dive on boron's role in space solar power systems, covering how boron dopants improve silicon solar cell efficiency and how borosilicate glass protects orbital solar arrays from radiation and thermal shock. It's a useful reminder that SSP  is not just a satellite engineering challenge — it depends on a global materials supply chain, and mainstream industrial companies are now paying attention. 

Promising Use Cases

Image Courtesy: South China Morning Post

Prioritizing Clean Energy

The South China Morning Post reported that clean energy met 100% of new global electricity demand in 2025 for the first time, a major milestone, with renewables hitting 34% of global generation and overtaking coal for the first time in a century. In addition, with the growing energy demands of AI, finding a clean source of energy to power it is becoming a bigger imperative. The momentum towards clean energy is growing, and SSP can offer unique value by expanding baseload capacity and providing 24/7 supply.

SSP Coverage in the News

Outsiders' Perspectives

• The Ripon Society published an essay arguing that the new space race is fundamentally an energy race, one whose winner will dominate international power for generations. The piece articulates the higher energy and economic stakes that space policymaking has often neglected.
  

• The U.S. Space Force released its Future Operating Environment 2040 at the Space Symposium in April, a planning document that explicitly calls out China's SSP ambitions as a strategic organizing vision. The document describes China's plan to assemble kilometer-scale solar collectors in geostationary orbit by 2040. While the document does not recommend a comparable U.S. commitment to SSP, it implicitly makes the case for one by identifying China's SSP program as a significant strategic and military technology investment that the U.S. must contend with by 2040. 
  

• The South China Morning Post published an opinion piece on China's Zhuri project, a national initiative to build megawatt-class solar power stations in geostationary orbit by 2030. Senior Chinese scientist Long Lehao has described it as putting the Three Gorges Dam into space, illustrating how SSP has become a national priority in China.
  

• The Sustainable Times published an overview of how SSP is moving from science fiction toward grid reality, addressing public skepticism and rendering eventual municipality approvals for terrestrial receiving stations far easier to secure.
  

• TechTimes explored precisely how space solar power satellite energy could practically light the Earth, proving the SSP is feasible and that progress towards implementation is real and in the near future.
  

• NRC (The Netherlands) expanded global awareness uniquely, illustrating recent progress and developments to show that solar energy straight from space is dramatically closer than they think. 
  

• Springwise spotlighted space-based solar energy as a clean energy innovation worth watching, framing beamed power from orbit as a solution to the energy transmission bottleneck limiting terrestrial renewable infrastructure. Mainstream innovation media is increasingly covering SSP as near-term rather than distant. 
  

• Nate Hagens' Frankly episode on "The World After Cheap Energy" is a thoughtful framing of why the energy transition is so difficult: modern civilization was built on a one-time inheritance of stored sunlight (fossil fuels), and no easy substitute exists. SSP is unique among the energy technologies as a renewable energy source that could operate at civilizational scale. 

Experts and Advocates on SSP

• A new peer-reviewed analysis in Advances in Space Research offers a technoeconomic model for a distributed SSP system using high-efficiency, radiation-hard solar cells and flexible phased arrays in geostationary orbit. The paper concludes that with a decade of technology development, a 10 GHz microwave system can deliver electricity at ~9.4 ¢/kWh, which is competitive with the cheapest clean energy sources. 
  

• Reflect Orbital published a case for extending solar beyond the horizon. They describe their company’s LEO satellites that reflect sunlight onto existing solar farms after sunset, and they also present an analysis of how it complements storage rather than replacing it.
  

• Solestial CTO Stan Herasimenka published an essay making the case for SSP as a space-for-space application, arguing that the first profitable market for in-orbit solar power isn't beaming energy to Earth, but providing power to the booming population of power-hungry satellites and orbital data centers that can't generate enough on their own. This first market will then build the foundation for Earth-based power transmission. View the full SSP Bulletin archive here.