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A rendering of a Star Catcher power-beaming spacecraft transmitting concentrated and conditioned solar energy to client satellites. (Image credit: Star Catcher Industries)<\/p>\n
“Fundamentally, the vision of Star Catcher is to make it as easy to operate in space as it is to operate terrestrially,” company co-founder and CEO Andrew Rush told Space.com.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n The way to do that, he said, is to build out the same kind of infrastructure in space that we have on Earth<\/a> \u2014 chiefly, reliable methods of transport, communication and power generation. The first two of those are already pretty well established in the final frontier, but the power element is lacking.<\/p>\n “We all just go on these camping trips to space, and basically every satellite at some point in its life cycle is power limited,” Rush said.<\/p>\n “That’s why, at Star Catcher, we’re focused on building the world’s first power grid in space \u2014 to eliminate that bottleneck and take us from a world of power budgets into a world of power abundance,” he added. “That’s really the core vision of the company.”<\/p>\n ‘Power nodes’ in space<\/p>\n Star Catcher plans to operate a network of “power node” spacecraft in Earth orbit, which will harvest energy from the sun<\/a> and transmit it, via laser<\/a>, to other satellites. Those client spacecraft will not need any modifications or special equipment \u2014 just solar panels to catch the laser light.<\/p>\n That beamed energy will make the recipients much more efficient and capable, Rush said.<\/p>\n “We can enable people to operate at full rate in eclipse,” he said, referring to the times when orbiting satellites<\/a> are in Earth’s shadow.<\/p>\n What to read next<\/p>\n “We can give them anywhere from two to 10X the uptime that they would normally have for certain national security missions<\/a>,” Rush added. “We can able enable folks to maneuver while they sense, or to maneuver more aggressively than what they could do with just the one naked sun.”<\/p>\n In addition, Star Catcher power nodes could “trickle-charge” older satellites whose solar arrays and batteries have degraded, allowing them to remain operational further into the future.<\/p>\n “Energy and infrastructure resilience are core national and economic priorities on Earth, as in orbit,” Space Force Gen. Jay Raymond (Ret.), senior managing director at Cerberus Ventures, one of the firms that contributed to the newly announced funding round, said in a statement today.<\/p>\n “Persistent surveillance<\/a>, resilient communications and unhindered maneuverability are all constrained today by power,” added Raymond, who was the first chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force<\/a>. “An on-demand power grid can change that, expanding critical capabilities across commercial and national security missions.”<\/p>\n Some of these commercial use cases have come into sharper focus recently. For example, Rush cited direct-to-cell<\/a> telecommunications and on-orbit AI data centers<\/a> as perhaps the two most promising customer bases for Star Catcher. Both are very new fields. Indeed, orbiting data centers remain purely theoretical at the moment, though a number of deep-pocketed companies, including Google and SpaceX<\/a>, plan to build out such constellations soon.<\/p>\n \n Star Catcher operators test their wireless energy technology at EverBank stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, ahead of a March 2025 power-beaming test. (Image credit: Star Catcher)<\/p>\n Over the longer haul, a decade or so from now, Star Catcher could provide power-beaming services beyond Earth orbit \u2014 to equipment on the surface of the moon<\/a>, for example.<\/p>\n That capability could be of great interest to NASA, which aims to build one or more bases near the lunar south pole via its Artemis program<\/a>. The south polar region is so attractive because it’s thought to harbor lots of water ice, a key resource for a crewed moon base. But that ice is likely concentrated on the permanently shadowed floors of polar craters, making it tough for solar-powered lunar terrain vehicles<\/a> (LTVs) to access.<\/p>\n “We can enable LTVs to not just have to ridge run, but actually go down into Shackleton Crater<\/a>, into places where we’re really, really interested and we think there’s fascinating stuff going on, with the confidence that you have a power line connected to that vehicle,” Rush said. “That, to me, just gets me really excited.”<\/p>\n NASA has already identified nuclear power<\/a> as a key enabler of such activities on the moon. Star Catcher envisions its power-node system as complementing nuclear generators rather than supplanting them, according to Rush.<\/p>\n “It can be a forerunner,” he said. “Or we can put assets on lunar orbit and provide power while we’re building out the base. And it’s also a technology that can distribute the energy that is generated from a nuclear reactor.”<\/p>\n The road ahead<\/p>\n Star Catcher was founded just two years ago, but it has already made a considerable amount of progress toward its ambitious long-term goals.<\/p>\n In March 2025, for example, the company demonstrated its power-beaming tech<\/a> at EverBank Stadium, home of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, in a test that successfully transmitted energy over the full 300-foot (90-meter) length of the football field.<\/p>\n Then, in November, Star Catcher announced that it had beamed 1.1 kilowatts of power<\/a> to commercial off-the-shelf solar panels during tests at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center<\/a> in Florida. This broke the previous beaming record of 800 watts, which had been set by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in May 2025.<\/p>\n Star Catcher is now gearing up for its first-ever off-Earth test, which is slated to launch later this year. The company is currently delivering flight hardware for that mission, which will aim to beam power to a free-flying satellite, Rush said.<\/p>\n Star Catcher plans to follow up that test with a series of missions that will beam larger amounts of power over greater and greater distances, he added.<\/p>\n “If all goes well, we’ll fly [that] series of missions over the next couple of years,” Rush said. “We expect to to be scaling commercial services by the end of the decade.”<\/p>\n There’s already a demand for those services. Star Catcher has signed seven power purchase agreements with seven companies to date, including Starcloud, Loft Orbital and Astro Digital. It has also secured “multiple government customers,” according to Rush.<\/p>\n The newly announced investment round was led by B Capital and also featured Shield Capital and Cerberus Ventures, the venture arm of Cerberus Capital Management. As part of the deal, Raymond will join Star Catcher’s board, as will B Capital General Partner and Global Head of Energy Jeff Johnson and Shield Principal David Rothzeid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Star Catcher Industries now has a big war chest to help bankroll its big dream \u2014 building a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-424016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Space\"](\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/media\/img\/spc-logo-w.svg\"){kind=logo}
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