Jacksonville space company aims to revolutionize satellite power with orbital grid

Jacksonville space company aims to revolutionize satellite power with orbital grid (Courtesy of JAX INNO) — Andrew Rush envisions a new kind of power grid — one not built on Earth but in space instead.

It’s part of the company he co-founded last year called Star Catcher with space entrepreneur Michael Snyder and venture capitalist Bryan Lyandvert.

The Jacksonville company is pioneering what it called “space-to-space power beaming” which, in essence, would be the technological infrastructure of an energy grid in orbit.

Here’s the basic principle for how it all works: Every satellite in space uses solar rays to generate power with more power generated based on their intensity. But power is a finite amount in space now, Rush said. With Star Catcher’s technology, the goal is to collect that solar energy, intensify it and send it to client spacecraft and satellites.

“Right now they’re going on basically camping trips in space to bring everything with them, they don’t have enough stuff power generation to operate the spacecraft,” Rush said. “They have to turn things on and off. By building an orbital energy grid, just like the energy grid we have on Earth, we eliminate that constraint.”

The proprietary system is being developed to seamlessly integrate with the capabilities of already operational satellites, which Rush said all have solar panels.

With that in mind throughout Star Catcher’s creation, it would be able to provide power without retrofits or custom equipment.

But the company is still a ways away from establishing that in-orbit energy grid.

This week, it reported successfully demonstrating its technology at the length of a football field. The ground demonstration at EverBank Stadium was not open to the public nor the press.

It’s the first real milestone for Rush, who told the Business Journal that the company plans to showcase wireless transmission of hundreds of watts over more than one kilometer this summer, simultaneously powering multiple mock satellites.

After that, Rush aims to have the first in-space demonstration of the technology in mid-2025.

The company has been in motion since first launching in 2024 with three founders. Today, it has 30 employees. Rush — who founded Made In Space, which pioneered space manufacturing, and was the president of Redwire, which operates in the space infrastructure technology sector — said many of those employees came from Redwire and other space-related companies.

Last year, it secured $12.25 million of funding from a seed round led by Initialized Capital, B Capital and Rogue VC. It was also selected by AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force, for a contract to advance space-based energy transmission capabilities in February.

Though Rush wouldn’t directly comment on how much this technology costs to manufacture, he said the company would grow as clients and capital partners join in.

The clientele for this type of technology is expansive, ranging from commercial satellite operators taking photos of earth for applications like Google and Apple Maps to telecommunications as phones are increasingly able to establish connections by satellite.

“We’re really an enabler for those sorts of things,” Rush said. “And those same applications are applicable to national security, they’re applicable to space exploration.”