Space Lasers Are About to Get Their First Real Test Generating Energy
But for those plans to work, they’ll need power. Lots of it.Star Catcher, a startup based in Jacksonville, Florida, aims to provide it by concentrating the sun’s energy and using lasers to beam it to satellites’ waiting solar panels. The company is preparing to launch its prototype system aboard a SpaceX rocket this week that will transmit energy to another satellite in orbit.If it’s successful, it would be the first time lasers have beamed energy between two untethered objects in space.
- ▪But for those plans to work, they’ll need power.
- ▪Lots of it.Star Catcher, a startup based in Jacksonville, Florida, aims to provide it by concentrating the sun’s energy and using lasers to beam it to satellites’ waiting solar panels.
- ▪The company is preparing to launch its prototype system aboard a SpaceX rocket this week that will transmit energy to another satellite in orbit.If it’s successful, it would be the first time lasers have beamed energy between two untethered
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| Original publisher | WIRED — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.wired.com/story/space-lasers-are-about-to-get-their-first-real-test-generating-energy/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 11:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T11:06:08.256Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T11:06:08.256Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | b9zHlWTcJwGa · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Brian KahnScienceSep 28, 2026 7:00 AMSpace Lasers Are About to Get Their First Real Test Generating EnergyStartup Star Catcher is launching a system that, if successful, would be the first time energy has been beamed between two separate spacecraft.Play/Pause ButtonPauseCourtesy of Star CatcherCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyGoogle, SpaceX, and a host of startups are all planning to build data centers in space. But for those plans to work, they’ll need power. Lots of it.Star Catcher, a startup based in Jacksonville, Florida, aims to provide it by concentrating the sun’s energy and using lasers to beam it to satellites’ waiting solar panels.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at WIRED — Science.
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