Armed with a freshly raised Series A round of $50 million, billionaire Baiju Bhatt wants to move from Wall Street to space.
The co-founder of stock-trading platform Robinhood and son of a NASA scientist, Bhatt announced his new company, Aetherflux, in the fall of 2024, and the startup’s goal is straight out of sci-fi: harvest solar power closer to the source, gathering it from the heavens and beaming it back down to Earth via laser.
Aetherflux wants to move fast, too. The plan is to launch a demonstration of its technology in 2026, hence the war chest, which also includes $10 million of Bhatt’s own money.
“Our goal is that we figure out what the shortest path is to being able to demonstrate this — to do a first breaking of the ground, so to speak, of power being transmitted from space to Earth, and it being useful for the first time for something,” Bhatt told Christian Keil on the First Principles podcast.
“My view is you’re not a space company until you’ve got some stuff in space — until then, you’re an aspiring space company,” he added.
Bhatt and Aetherflux are part of a constellation of academic, government, and private efforts to get solar power from orbit to Earth, an idea that’s been kicking around since author Isaac Asimov first floated it in 1941.
Recent strides in research labs, the development of reusable rockets, and new support from space agencies may finally make space-based solar power a reality, but the difficulties are still very real — NASA itself threw some cold water on the idea in a January 2024 report.
“We found that the space-based solar power designs … are 12 to 80 times more expensive than if you were going to have renewable energy on the ground,” Erica Rodgers, the report’s author, told attendees at the 2024 AIAA SciTech Forum.
Unsurprisingly, supporters of the idea believe that NASA’s conclusion is based on outdated assumptions and that advancements in technology and cheaper launches make their vision more achievable than ever before. Bhatt wants to lead the way.
Closer to the source
In a way, pursuing space-based solar power seems like a no-brainer.
The sun is a dynamo, radiating enough energy in a single hour to power our entire planet, and the cost of harvesting that energy has dropped dramatically in recent years — today, solar is the cheapest option for generating new electricity on the utility-scale.
However, there are inherent challenges that limit our ability to take advantage of solar power. Sunlight is not available 24/7, wanes due to the very tilt of the planet, and some regions do not receive enough of it ever to make solar a truly viable option. Storing solar power to be used later has proven difficult and expensive, as is transporting it from sunnier locations to shadier ones.
While researchers are working on overcoming those challenges, some simply can’t be fixed through engineering — not if we’re trying to harvest solar power from Earth, anyway. In orbit, though, the sun is always shining. Bombarded by more intense solar energy, satellites high enough to never know night could beam this solar power back down to us via microwave or laser, an endless wellspring from a harnessed star.
Building momentum
Several groups have taken fresh notice of the potential for space-based solar power and invested in its development, with promising results.
In 2015, JAXA, Japan’s national space agency, made a breakthrough in the field when it used microwaves to send a small amount of power from a transmitter in its lab to a receiver 170 feet away, proving for the first time that energy could be transmitted wirelessly.
A perhaps even more impressive step came in March 2023 when Caltech researchers finally took the technology to space with their Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment, which can be shortened to the catchier “MAPLE.” Once in orbit, the team’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator satellite was able to use microwaves to beam solar energy wirelessly to both a receiver on another part of the spacecraft and all the way to Earth.
Space-based solar power was finally a reality.
To take full advantage of the new power source, though, we need it to be cost-effective and reliable, and other successful experiments have been moving the ball forward on those fronts.
In October 2023, researchers from Swansea University in Wales and the University of Surrey in England shared an update on a satellite they’d equipped with a new kind of light, efficient, and economical solar panel. While the power cells’ output did decrease in the six years since the satellite’s launch, the fact that they were still working at all serves as a proof-of-concept for affordable space-based solar power, according to the researchers.
Then, in 2024, Queen’s University Belfast and UK company Space Solar successfully demonstrated 360-degree power-beam steering in a simulated space environment — a critical step toward building a satellite that can always face the sun and yet still beam energy to Earth.
Aetherflux’s approach
Aetherflux’s approach to space-based solar power is unique in the field. Rather than targeting large Earth-based receivers with microwaves, its plan is to use infrared lasers to send solar energy from an array of small satellites — rather than a more expensive and ponderous to build and test larger satellite — to a series of small ground stations.
“Aetherflux is using lasers and optics to create a power grid in space for demand anywhere on Earth,” Andrew Yarmola, head of engineering at Aetherflux, told Freethink.
For their planned 2026 demonstration launch, the startup has purchased a satellite bus from LA-based Apex Space and booked a rideshare on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Aetherflux is building the payload for the satellite, which includes the telescope, pointing mechanism, optical equipment, and laser system.
“One of our core technologies is the ability to provide power to a relatively small receiver,” said Yarmola. The optical sensors and other subsystems allow them to achieve this, and using lasers instead of microwaves means they can not only achieve a higher power density, but also aim at smaller spots on the ground.
The team is using mostly off-the-shelf parts for this first satellite, and Yarmola told Freethink that a major challenge will be ensuring the system can withstand the temperature of its environment.
The satellite will have to deal with the heat from direct sunlight, from sunlight reflected off the Earth, the Earth’s own emitted heat, and the thermal emission to deep space, and like the tires on a Formula 1 car, keeping everything at the right temperature will be crucial to performance.
“Many of the system components need to be kept within a tight thermal range,” said Yarmola. “Balancing heaters and heat radiators will be a key challenge.”
In addition to building the satellite’s payload, Bhatt told TechCrunch that Aetherflux is also building the ground station that will receive the power.
While it has not chosen a location yet, he said that the startup is considering military sites because of the more controlled airspace. This first station will be stationary, but ultimately Aetherflux wants to build smaller ones, around 16 to 32 feet in diameter, that can be moved around.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher.”
David Steitz
In addition to the airspace benefits, building on a military site first would also make sense given that Aetherflux has received an undisclosed amount of funding from the Department of Defense to develop space-based solar power for the US military.
“Space solar power represents a strategic military advantage that can transform military operations,” Bhatt tweeted on February 24. “By delivering reliable energy, day or night, in contested environments, we can protect warfighter lives, safeguard military assets, and save taxpayer money that would otherwise be at risk.”
The military advantage afforded by space-based solar power is just one reason the US is eager to tap into it before any other nation, but beating China to the tech is going to be tough. The global superpower is currently aiming to place a kilometer-wide solar station in geostationary orbit in 2030, a plan so ambitious it’s been called the Manhattan Project of energy.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” David Steitz, NASA’s former deputy chief technologist, wrote in 2024. “Energy represents roughly 10% of global GDP. Whoever masters space solar power gains not just energy independence but potential control over a multi-trillion-dollar market that will define the next era of space operations.”
“We’re committed to working with the US Government to deliver this emerging technology. This is just the start.”
Baiju Bhatt
The US military might be the first recipient of Aetherflux’s space-based power (assuming it can overcome the challenges to harnessing it), but Yarmola told Freethink that the startup’s ultimate goal is far bigger: it wants to be a commercially viable operation that can provide clean, affordable power to Americans everywhere, not just on the battlefield.
“At a massive scale, space solar power can provide cheap and nearly continuous renewable energy, make the US energy dominant, balance our grid, deter enemies, and help during disasters,” said Yarmola. “I see our technology providing power during heat waves, frigid winters, and lightening the load on failing electrical infrastructure so it can be repaired before causing catastrophic damage.”
“We’re committed to working with the US Government to deliver this emerging technology,” Bhatt tweeted. “This is just the start.”
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