Falling launch costs, private investment, and advances in orbital power are turning space-based solar power from a distant concept into an emerging industry.

Don’t bet against humanity. Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) is inevitable, but we have the agency to decide how soon we get this amazing technology. Solar power on Earth is already among the fastest-growing sources of energy. It is among the cheapest when the sun is shining, but the combination of night and clouds results in a low duty cycle, a need for accompanying storage, and long transmission lines. 

Space-Based Solar Power is an attempt to make an end-run around the problem of intermittency and the need for storage, using geometry. The problem is that the atmosphere, weather, and day-night cycle degrade the power and constancy of sunlight. By locating the solar collection mechanism in space, high above the Earth’s day-night cycle and atmosphere, we move from a less than 25 percent capacity factor to a nearly 100 percent capacity factor. 

Moving the source of collection has other benefits. Pick your metric—carbon intensity, energy payback time, energy return on energy invested, water usage, and land usage—Space Solar Power comes out on top. Scale is yet another benefit. The resource is almost unimaginably vast—the Geostationary Belt alone could host many times what a fully developed world would need.

Why the Skeptics Could Be Wrong about Space-Based Solar Power 

SBSP has its share of haters. Many are smart and well-credentialed. But consider Arthur C. Clarke’s first law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

Life doesn’t ignore large pools of resources. The Arctic, the deep sea, and the power of the atom were all beyond reach until they weren’t. Critics asserted the ocean was too deep, too violent, and too expensive to ever extract oil profitably. They dismissed commercial shale fracking, telling George P. Mitchell, the “father of fracking,” he was wasting his time. During the railroad boom, critics asserted that a transcontinental railroad was a technical impossibility, that it would take centuries to build, and that it would not be a commercial success if it were built.

The curse of expertise is that you know too well what appears possible in your field today, but you don’t know what innovations will undermine your assumptions. As Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” If the physics permits the tapping of some resource, it is just a matter of time before some ingenious engineer finds a way to tap it. One day you can’t access some vast energy resource and then—boom—you can. 

The Economics of Space-Based Solar Power Are Getting Harder to Dismiss

When the European Space Agency wanted to explore SBSP, they hired real energy consultancy firms Frazer-Nash and Roland Berger, which both concluded: “SBSP could provide competitively-priced electricity to European homes and businesses by 2040, displacing fossil-fuel sources of power and complementing existing renewables such as solar PV.” The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), trying very hard to avoid anything that would distract it from planting flags and footprints on new worlds, did no such thing. NASA’s report (done internally) came to startlingly different conclusions from the energy experts, sparking controversy because of its pessimism and lack of ambition. 

But beyond the obviously shaded conclusions in the introduction was this concession: “Cost competitiveness can be achieved by varying multiple assumptions…This favorable combination reduces the [Levelized Cost of Electricity] LCOE to 0.03 $/kWh…competitive with terrestrial alternatives. This combination also reduces the GHG emissions intensities to values less than nuclear and wind-without-storage technologies.”

What were these revised assumptions? Launch costs below $500 per kilogram (kg), electric propulsion transfers from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), 15-year satellite lifetimes, 85 percent learning curves, and servicing and debris removal vehicles costing less than $100 million and $50 million, respectively. Considering that electric propulsion is mature, GEO satellite lifetimes already exceed 15 years, and current servicing and debris-removal missions cost $30–55 million, that leaves learning curves and launch. Modern systems are hyper-modular with millions of identical parts, so normal learning curves and low per-unit costs seem likely. Falcon Heavy today is $1,500/kg. Starship, already in testing, is expected to achieve costs below $100/kg and perhaps as low as $10/kg.

Having followed space solar power since 2005, I’m very familiar with the arguments of the haters. They don’t sway me. Henry Ford said, “He who says he can and he who says he can’t are both usually right.” And George Bernard Shaw and James Baldwin both said something close to “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”

Space Solar Power Is Becoming an Industry

And doing it they are. Sixteen years ago, the International Academy of Astronautics stated the technical feasibility of SBSP had already been accomplished, and the time to mature depended more on platform concepts and organization of capital. In the last few years, I’ve seen individual academics and inventors turn into businessmen with startups. Their designs are all radically different. There are now at least six dedicated SBSP companies (Virtus Solis, SST, Solaren, Overview Energy, TerraSpark, Space Solar) with at least eight countries and organizations in the mix (China, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the European Space Agency [ESA], Canada, the United States, Australia). I’ve watched leading proponents vote with their feet, leaving secure jobs at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, and the Space Force to join these startups. Whether any of these particular companies succeed is immaterial. Like coral, others will build upon what they have done and learned until someone breaks the surface. But the winds are changing, and some may succeed in this crop of companies. One company, Overview Energy, already has an agreement to power Meta’s data centers. Another, Virtus Solis, has a contract with the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

The Department of Defense is taking note. The new Space Force Operational Energy Office has spoken publicly about its interest in power beaming. The Defense Innovation Unit was bullish enough that it recently released a commercial solutions offering for space power beaming. That interest will grow the number of innovators working on the problem, and the number of investors funding them. 

Those problems include beaming the power, achieving scale in space-qualified PV, and solving thermal issues. The six SBSP startups are not the only ones working on those problems.

Already, at least an additional five companies are pursuing in-space power beaming and advancing the fundamental enabling technology for power beaming (Star Catcher, Mantis Space, Powerlight, Volta, Cowboy Space). 

The important point is that SBSP is now an industry.  It is also a rapidly growing industry.  According to Kevin Barry, who tracks the sector annually, direct investment into space solar power reached $1.07 billion in 2024, $1.9 billion in 2025, and $5.3 billion in 2026, including $865 million from private and corporate funding. 

SpaceX and Orbital Data Centers Change the Equation

Few people even recognize how radically SpaceX has altered the industrial learning curves for innovation in on-orbit power. SpaceX has already proven factory production of satellites, enormously reducing the cost of space hardware. It has changed the game on power. The entire Space Force, which took decades to place in orbit, has a combined power of well less than a megawatt. In contrast, SpaceX orbited the Starlink constellation in just a few years, which has a combined power of about 100 megawatts. 

But Starlink is just the beginning of power innovation in orbit. The amount of capital in the race to build data centers is staggering: $7 trillion by 2030. Some of that will go to the widespread interest in orbital data centers, which share the same challenges of large-scale power, in-space assembly, and thermal management. SpaceX’s planned compute constellation “STARMIND” would deploy 100 gigawatts (GW) with a path to one terawatt (TW) per year, and even more from the Moon. Orbital data centers are also growing the number of innovators working on SBSP-adjacent problems. And once you can assemble a large in-space data center, it is a small step to a solar power satellite, and the $2.5 trillion global electricity market and $3.4 trillion per year investments in grid infrastructure in generation and transmission. Capital, educated in orbital data centers and power beaming, will be 

The Case for Betting On Space Solar Power

Space solar power is in an extremely small club of technologies that offer 24-hour, dispatchable and firming-appropriate, baseload-appropriate, industrial-scale-appropriate, environmentally friendly renewable power that can scale to all global demand. Space Solar Power is also likely to revolutionize astronomy.  The unheard-of scale—kilometer-scale satellites, gigawatts of power—and the astounding infrastructure that SBSP will give birth to in launch, in-space logistics, mobility, and power are likely to enable in-space observatories nearly impossible to imagine today (facilities many times larger than the James Webb Telescope or even the ground-based Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China). Extraordinary opportunities demand extraordinary resources. 

Space solar power is on an accelerating curve. The number of companies, countries, interested government agencies, innovators focused on adjacent problems, and capital raised is all increasing. You have to be an extraordinary pessimist not to be bullish about space solar power. And some of you (as government actors or investors) will have the power to deploy resources to make it happen sooner rather than later.

About the Author: Peter Garretson

Dr. Peter Garretson is a senior fellow in defense studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, co-director of its Space Policy Initiative, and host of The Space Strategy Podcast. He previously served as the chief of the future technology branch for Air Force Strategic Planning and as a strategic planning engineer supporting the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate. He was the lead author of the 2008 Pentagon study on Space Solar Power, and organized the Space Solar Power team that won the interagency Diplomacy-Development-Defense “D3” competition in 2015, and catalyzed foundational work on power beaming at AFRL, NRL, and DARPA. He is the author of Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space, The Next Space Race: A Blueprint for American Primacy, and Space Shock: 18 Scenarios that will define Space Power.

The post Space-Based Power: Why It’s Gonna Happen appeared first on The National Interest.