Star Catcher launches Protostar to test power beaming between satellites
Star Catcher Industries
Star Catcher's Protostar will try to beam power to a tracked cubesat, the first attempt between two free-flying spacecraft.
what happened
Star Catcher launched its Protostar power node on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission Oct. 1 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, per Via Satellite, which reported SpaceX confirmed the mission's full deployment sequence had concluded. Protostar is designed to deploy and track a cubesat and beam measurable power to its solar panels, which the company says is the first attempt at optical power beaming between two untethered spacecraft in orbit, testing the energy-harvesting, tracking and transmission stack end to end.
why it matters
A successful demonstration would validate the technology Star Catcher needs for its planned orbital power grid, which the company says could let customer satellites draw two to ten times more power without hardware changes. It is one of three orbital-data-center building blocks riding Transporter-18 alongside Google's Suncatcher AI-chip trial and Cowboy Space's Reason-1 laser power-beaming demo, underlining how crowded the early orbital-compute infrastructure field has become.
signal-to-noise
quick facts
- Companies
- Star Catcher Industries
- Category
- product
- Impact
- notable
- SNR
- 4 / 5
- Event date
- 2026-10-01
- Published
- 2026-10-01 23:12 UTC