Cowboy Space launches Reason-1 to test laser power beaming from orbit
Cowboy Space
Cowboy Space's first satellite will try to beam solar power from orbit to a ground laser receiver.
what happened
Cowboy Space launched its first satellite, Reason-1, on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission Oct. 1 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, the company said. Reason-1 is designed to collect solar energy in orbit and transmit it to a ground receiver using a kilowatt-class laser, which the company says is the first attempt at laser power beaming from orbit to Earth; Cowboy says it designed, built and tested the satellite's laser systems, large-aperture optical telescope and beam-steering architecture itself.
why it matters
Cowboy Space is building toward orbital data centers it says will eventually run on a purpose-built rocket whose upper stage doubles as a megawatt-class compute node; a working power-beaming link is one of the optical and thermal building blocks the company needs before it can sell orbital compute or power delivery as a commercial service. The same laser and beam-steering tech underpins Reason-2, a 2027 mission planned to beam data rather than power using H200 GPUs.
signal-to-noise
quick facts
- Companies
- Cowboy Space
- Category
- product
- Impact
- notable
- SNR
- 4 / 5
- Event date
- 2026-10-01
- Published
- 2026-10-01 23:12 UTC