A Florida startup is about to try something no one has done in orbit before, sending power from one spacecraft to another using lasers.
Star Catcher says its prototype satellite, Protostar, will launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission no earlier than Thursday and try to transmit energy to another satellite in orbit. If it works, it would be the first time lasers have been used to beam energy between two untethered spacecraft in orbit.
“This mission will yield critical operational data in real-world orbital conditions that will directly support the build out of our commercial power grid in space,” Star Catcher co-founder and chief technology officer Michael Snyder said in a statement.
Star Catcher was founded in 2024 and says it wants to build a power grid in space to support the growing orbital economy.
According to the company, satellites cannot generate enough power on their own to keep up with modern space missions, including direct-to-cell connectivity, AI-powered Earth observations and agile maneuvering for defense applications.
The company’s plan is to use a network of spacecraft to collect sunlight in orbit and convert it to wavelengths that can be transmitted to solar panels attached to satellites.
Star Catcher says its power nodes use a collection of lenses to gather sunlight and refine it to optimized wavelengths that can provide up to two to 10 times more power.
The company has already tested the technology on Earth. It used a suite of multi-wavelength lasers to deliver more than 1.1 kilowatts of electrical power to commercial off-the-shelf solar panels.
Those tests were conducted at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in late 2025, according to the company, and paved the way for the orbital demonstration.
During the mission, Protostar will deploy a cubesat fitted with an off-the-shelf solar panel. Protostar will then track the cubesat and try to beam a measurable amount of power to its solar panels.
Star Catcher says the flight will be the first end-to-end in-space demonstration of its core technologies, including energy harvesting, satellite acquisition and tracking, and power transmission.
Protostar is a small-scale version of the satellites the company plans to launch later, with the goal of having an operational power grid in orbit by the end of the decade.
“Every major application driving the space economy, from real-time national security intelligence to AI-powered orbital computing and Earth observation, is limited by power,” Star Catcher co-founder and chief executive officer Andrew Rush said in a statement. “We are closer to activating an orbital power grid than most can imagine.”
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