A Florida Startup Is About to Test Laser Power Beaming Between Two Satellites

Every satellite in orbit runs a budget war between solar panels, batteries, and the work it actually came to do. Add enough cells to power a high-wattage AI workload or an in-space manufacturing run, and the kilograms stack up fast: kilograms that could otherwise be sensors, antennas, or finished product. Star Catcher, a Florida space-energy startup, is about to test whether that trade can be broken by beaming watts from one free-flying spacecraft to another. Its Protostar prototype is preparing to launch as the first end-to-end orbital demonstration that combines energy harvesting, acquisition and tracking, and energy transmission in a single mission (PR Newswire).

The mechanism is older than the company. Power beaming by laser has been demonstrated on the ground: Payload reports Star Catcher's terrestrial setup has delivered more than 1.1 kW to off-the-shelf commercial solar panels, and the company ran an orbital acquisition-and-tracking demo called Sextant Alpha in late 2025 (Payload). Protostar adds the orbital step the company has not yet run: a free-flying receiver. After launch and commissioning, Protostar is intended to deploy a CubeSat and beam measurable power at it as the distance changes, with the goal of comparing the received wattage to the company's models (WIRED).

The test exists to make that comparison. Star Catcher's headline figure, that its system could deliver "up to 10x more power" to a customer satellite, is a company claim rather than an independently measured result. The startup frames it as a way to keep existing solar panels productive through eclipse, recover satellites whose arrays have degraded, or push high-duty-cycle payloads past the watt ceiling their own panels set. Star Catcher's Andrew Rush said the demonstration will measure received power as the CubeSat moves away and line it up against the models Star Catcher has used for years. If the on-orbit numbers track the terrestrial ones, the claim graduates from a sales slide to a measurement (WIRED).

Researchers get their first clean test of four barriers that have kept orbital power beaming in the demo phase. Hanieh Fattahi, a researcher focused on directed-energy systems, identified the open problems in conversation with WIRED as efficiency at the cell, beam tracking across kilometers of relative motion, heat management in the receiver, and long-duration operation in a space environment that punishes any moving part. Protostar will not answer all four. It is designed to put a number on the first three, and on whether the receiver hardware survives the trip and points where it is told to point. Long-duration survival is the one the test cannot close: a CubeSat mission runs in months, not years, and thermal-cycling data on a full-size receiver panel does not yet exist.

The test does not claim to solve the satellite industry's power problem. A 3U CubeSat with a duty-cycled sensor payload has no use for ten times more power; the trade there is launch cost, not watts. The missions that benefit are the ones already bumping the ceiling: orbital AI inference nodes, in-space manufacturing, and observation satellites that want to run their instruments harder when demand spikes. The PR Newswire announcement describes a successor intended to deliver operational power, separating the current measurable-power experiment from any commercial service (PR Newswire).

Receiving wattage at a single distance is the easy number. The interesting result from the demonstration is how received power falls off as the CubeSat drifts, and how well the optics hold lock. If the curve matches the model out to a useful range and the hardware comes back healthy, the 10x claim has an engineering spine behind it. If it does not, the orbital power grid stays a slide for a while longer.