← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Space Power Grid.
00:23:22
Star Catcher is creating the first energy grid for space. Learn more about their plans from President and CEO Andrew Rush.
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A
You're listening to the N2K space network. Happy holidays from all of us at N2K Networks. We're taking some time to be with our families over the holidays.
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B
So in the meantime, we hope you enjoy this encore episode of T Deep Space. And we look forward to seeing you in 2026.
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C
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When spacecraft are sent to space, they currently have to carry all of the fuel to power them for their entire mission. Once that energy runs out, the mission ends. But what if there's a solution to that space conundrum? Welcome to T Minus deep space from N2K Networks. I'm Maria Varmazes. Starcatcher is creating the first energy grid for space. They're developing orbital infrastructure that they say will transform how satellites are powered.
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D
I'm Andrew Rush. I am the president, CEO and co founder of Starcatcher. I have basically always been obsessed and wanting to work in the space sector to enable people to do more stuff in space, enable them to do cooler stuff in space. I was raised on a pretty steady diet of science fiction and science fact. Grew up watching Star Trek and my mom was a physics and chemistry teacher. My father was a chemical engineer. So this is kind of where I was destined to wind up. Despite taking a little bit of a detour and being a patent lawyer for a couple of years. Oh yeah. Much to my parents temporary chagrin, I got into grad school for physics after doing an undergrad and then decided to go be a patent lawyer for a while because it was this cool mix of entrepreneurship and the technology. Really worked on, really worked in the space sector, worked for space companies with my practice and then became the CEO of Made in Space, which was founded in 2010. It was the first company to do manufacturing off the face of the planet. And we did a ton of work with NASA and DARPA and Air Force and Space Force on satellites that manufacture and assemble themselves in space because we felt that manufacturing in space is this incredibly transformational technology. Right. Like, you know, you're going to build starships in space, not on the ground. You're going to, you know, all of these awesome industries that, you know, taking gravity out of the manufacturing equation enables. And it's really exciting to see after we like bootstrapped that company and sold it successfully, that there are multiple generations of companies really, that are leveraging now the additional financial tools that exist for the space sector to move that bull forward, commercialize and industrialize LEO and beyond. From there, I became the president and chief operating officer of Redwire, which is now a unicorn. Publicly traded space subsystems and components provider about to become a, you know, a really differentiated and awesome, you know, space and defense tech firm by. By combining with another, by combining with another really cool company. At Redmire, we built at the time the largest independent provider of solar arrays and space structures in the United States and, you know, put new solar rays on the space station. Did a lot of work for dod, did a lot of work for commercial companies in that arena. And I've always felt when designing a space mission, you're focused on swab size, weight and power. And for a lot of us, the aperture has opened up on the size and weight portion of that equation because of reusable rockets and launch costs coming way down because of Falcon 9, because of electron and now new Glenn and Starship and Stokes vehicles and all these things that are coming online. It's really, really amazing. And they're really building the roads to space though, like that sort of transportation infrastructure. But power is still done in this like camping trip kind of mentality. You know, we take our Solaris with you and you got to build to that. And you know, if you, if you don't have enough power, which spoiler alert, on basically every space mission I've ever been involved with, we're power limited, you're kind of out of luck. And so that really motivated us to start Starcatcher to build power grid in space, to build the power infrastructure to go alongside the transportation infrastructure that SpaceX and others are building to enable us to commercialize and industrialize and settle and explore the stars.
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A
That's awesome. Your journey is fantastic. And I just huge fan of Redwire also. I've spoken with them in the past and big admirer of their work, so. And I'm also really fascinated by that law and physics coming together background because that had to have given you such a fascinating insight. And so much in space overlaps in that way, but a lot of people don't have that specialized knowledge, but you do, so that's really cool. I imagine that's come in handy Quite a bit.
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D
Yeah. It was a little bit worrying the first semester in law school because I was like, oh, they're totally English majors, they're really good at writing. And I just have this physics background. But it turned out to be just physics.
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A
I'm sorry, my dad was a physics professor, so I'm like just physics.
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D
Well, it turned out to be really useful because at the end of the day, thinking like a lawyer or the process you use to build good arguments as a lawyer is really just the scientific method. But you don't have the immutable laws of the universe that you're applying. It's like these great federal, state, local, human written documents.
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A
Yeah. The bounds are different.
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D
Right. The boundaries are different. Yeah. And so it was, you know, so actually the technical background I felt was really useful as a lawyer. And you're right, like having like kind of marriage of that not only has helped me reduce legal fees for the companies I've worked at, but also, you know, helps. Helps us build things.
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A
Yeah. I would imagine, especially at your level, being able to present the, you know, persuasive arguments and that kind of thing is extremely important. Doing what you do. I'd love to get a bit more into also the company that you're building. You mentioned earlier being a Trekkie. I'm also a Trekkie. So I'm the thought of like providing more power to the engines is like the most Trekkie thing I can possibly think of. So that is, it's really cool that that is what you are working on. So tell me a bit. Let's go into a little bit of detail about what you all are building and how it's different from how. You know, I've talked to people about like space based solar power, but what you all are doing is not to ground but to other. Yeah, so let's get into that.
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D
Yeah, yeah. So at Starcatcher, we are building the world's first power grid in and for space. We are building a series of a constellation of satellites that collect, concentrate and redirect solar energy to our client satellites existing solar arrays to give them more power, higher concentrations of power power and eclipse. Some really important key tenants for how we're building this power grid in space. And operating is we. We want our customers to have to retrofit as little as possible. And what that means is we're not, we're not selling. They don't need a custom receiver to work with us. Everybody has solar arrays on their spacecraft already. Solar arrays are these awesome band gap semiconductors that if you send them, you know, photons in the kind of 400 to 1100 nanometer regime. They're going to take those photons and readily convert them into power at really high efficiencies, depending on who you're getting your solar cells from. And if you increase the flux, like the amount of photons you're sending to them, you'll generate in a relatively linear way, additional power. So what does that mean? That means I can take. If I take a solar array that in Leo generates 400 watts per square meter or something like that, if I give it five suns of what it's seeing in Leo, it'll generate five times that amount of wattage, five times that amount of power. Folks have shown this and we've experimented with this in the lab. You can get up to like 30 or 40 sons of additional power. And this is in effect, in practice. The BepiColombo probe that is at Mercury today sees 12 times the flux that you see in LEO and uses just off the shelf Azure PV and generates about 12 times power with those solar arrays. So that enables us, if we're sending energy in those regimes, to just use the existing solar arrays that customers have to give them more power. We also don't want to.
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A
Can I stop you for a quick second just so I can understand? I'm sorry, you're on a roll and I'm so sorry. I want to better understand, I guess, the problem that. Cause this is genuinely. I know very little about this, so this is mainly for my edification. So what is preventing satellites currently in orbit from getting maybe the most out of their solar arrays? Is it just alignment? And also, is there an upper bound? I mean, for lack of a better term, we don't want to fry the arrays. Right. So is there like an established upper bound for how much power they can receive? Okay, those are my two questions.
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D
No, those are great questions. So the. A pretty standard approach to designing a space mission is that you say, well, I want to, you know, here my. Here's the value I want to provide, or here's the mission I want to fulfill and what are the components I need to buy and integrate together in order to fulfill that? And if we had all had infinite money, we would make custom things for every single mission. You'd never be power, thermal or communications limited. And we'd also just spend ourselves on a house and hell. So the reality is we go to companies that make predefined satellite buses and make really quality products that they've already done the NRE on And we can buy, buy them in like incremental ways. But most of those buses will come especially like low Earth orbit focused like ESPA class buses. They produce on average like 800 to like 1500 watts of power. And, and that's if you're like always kind of keeping your solaris at the sun. So if you're, if you're doing maneuvers or if you need to prioritize your payload pointing and that reduces the amount of power available, right?
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B
Yep.
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A
Okay.
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D
And you know, for some missions that's enough power. But we live in an era now where we want to do a lot more with our spacecraft than we wanted to do even five or 10 years ago. You know, we, we are, we want to do direct to device cell phone connectivity which requires a lot of power. We want to do edge computing with the latest, you know, like off the shelf Nvidia GPUs or TPUs and all that kind of stuff. And those, those things are not designed to sit, you know, tens of watts. They want, they want, they want you know, 100 watts or more or lots, you know, like, you know my kids gaming computers at home would eat up the entire power budget of you know, given ASPA class satellite that you buy off the shelf. So and to say nothing of like the electronic warfare missions and maneuver without regret that we'd like to do from a national security perspective.
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B
We'll be right back.
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A
So good, so good, so good.
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D
So we, we basically have this kind of supply and demand gap for power generation in space that the way we've architected spacecraft so far, the way we traditionally build spacecraft leads to duty cycling, you know, because we don't have, because we don't have enough power generation on board that we onboard the satellite. So we charge up batteries with our solar arrays and Then we use that, that stored energy to operate our payload, but not at 100% uptime, just, you know, and then there's a, there's a whole other area of like life extension. You know, we design satellites for end of life power generation estimates. But we, that we also thought, you know, but it's, you know, but really we can use the beginning of life and end of life is, you know, 30, 40% less than, you know, the beginning of life. You know, we can also, we can fill that gap with providing additional energy and extending the life of the spacecraft. We can also fill the gap between what you want your spacecraft to be at from a power perspective and where, and where it is just natively with just the one sun. So those are a lot of the kind of value propositions. Why in addition to, you know, there's a big cost savings in, you know, in using a small platform satellite to, you know, and sending power to it versus just building a satellite with bigger solar arrays. Because when you do that, you get into this sort of engineering, you know, systems engineering, doom loop where you're so you're sizing up the solar arrays and then you're sizing up the reaction wheels and then you're sizing up the satellite, satellite bus and you know, all of a sudden, and that increases launch costs. All of a sudden you're going from some nice cute little, you know, square meter ESPA class satellite to a cake topper or a totally dedicated launch concept.
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A
Yep. And then of course, if the solar array doesn't unfurl, for lack of a better term, in the way that it should, then you have a really big problem.
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D
Yeah, yeah. And that's actually another area where, where we can help. Right. Like solar arrays have this great inherent property that I could, you know, they'll, they'll readily convert more energy if you send more energy to it. You know, where you have missions, like a lot of these kind of, you know, orbital transfer vehicle folks, like sometimes one of the arrays won't pop out and so they have to just like instantly deploy, you know, their client satellites in orbits. Maybe they didn't want or spin that they didn't want, you know, because they're, because the spaceship's going to die. It's going to run out of power and die. Like when our network is online, those folks can just call us up and say, hey Starcatcher, please send additional flux to the spacecraft so we can keep it power positive. We can assess what's going on and we can, and we can save the mission. For ourselves and for our customers.
- [16:22]
A
I could see that being an absolutely transformative, very transformative to the industry as it is right now. Which is, which is a really interesting thing to hear because sometimes when I talk to some people who are building businesses, it's like we're getting ready for something 10 to 20 years from now. But this would be useful for really right now. So what a really cool thing that you're building. Sorry for nerding out, but I'm like, that's really cool. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah, no. So can you talk a little bit about maybe timelines for the development for what you're all working on?
- [16:51]
D
Yeah. So we announced the company and our initial seed round fundraise last July, $12.3 million led by some really amazing capital partners that are really, really, you know, a lot of experience in helping people build great businesses, as well as a lot of experience and knowledge in the space sector in particular. Since that time, we have started to deal with a lot of really amazing. In the laboratory demonstrations, we've built up a team where we've gone from three folks to over 30 folks, you know, almost all of which are engineers and technicians, you know, doing, doing the things that they do really well. It's like me and a couple of folks who, you know, our jobs are basically to keep them, keep their, you know, you know, keep, keep them in good facilities and keep their cab licenses up to date so that we can build awesome things.
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A
That's awesome. Yep.
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D
For 2025, you know, we have a series of ground demonstrations that we're going to like more and more complex and ambitious ground demonstrations that we're going to do and then talk about publicly as we kind of get some major milestones and then, you know, you know, leading up to both fully integrated, you know, receive sunlight, condition it, beam that, you know, multiple kilometers, multi kilometer distances at really, you know, you know, meaningful power levels, mock satellites on the ground and then all that technology will fold into a first space demonstration in 2026.
- [18:22]
A
Exciting. And I saw also just recently you all got an afworks Cibber Phase one award. Congratulations. I was just looking at my notes, like, that's great. That's a wonderful validation for your mission.
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D
Yeah, thanks so much. Yeah, no, we're really, we're really excited and proud to be partnering with AFWorks, with the DoD to have that first win and really show folks like, hey, in that deep way that you do with those sorts of customers how this can be enabling transformational for current and future missions and provide Additional resiliency and protection for the warfighters mission.
- [19:01]
A
That's fantastic. Well, again, congratulations. That is really wonderful news for you all. All right, so I'm very interested in hearing sort of a bit about how you manage what your day is like. I think a lot of people want to be in your shoes, so it's sort of an interesting view into your world. So if I could ask, what is the best part of your workday and.
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B
What is the hardest part?
- [19:25]
D
That's a great question because I occasionally get to talk to people about it, especially other kind of first time CEOs. And the thing that I tell people a lot is like, look, this is a very emotionally up and down role and you can really sort of get slapped in the face at breakfast and then get patted on the back at lunch and then get kicked in the shins at dinner and then rinse or repeat the next day. And I think that a lot of my role is to, you know, is to, is to enable the team to be set up for success in the face of all those things. Because, you know, because you get, you get a lot of no's as a, especially as like an early startup. Like, you get a lot of no's, you get a lot of like, hey, what about this? Or what about that? Or are you sure? And then, you know, really it's just, it's just kind of overcoming objections and pushing really hard on, you know, pushing hard until things start to really sort of run smoother. And all the while just kind of being that sort of guiding line of that lighthouse for the team so that we can execute together and take the vision that we have and turn it into reality. And honestly, the best. Maybe it sounds a little bit cheesy, but the best parts of the job of the role are like seeing people do that, like seeing them go from like, hey, we have this, we have this idea to, hey, look, like there's this little monk satellite over here across the lab that's on a track that we're beaming energy to completely autonomously and it's moving around, doing stuff and like that's really awesome, you know, and then the hard, you know, and the hardest parts are. Yeah, I mean, you gotta, you know, or the other, the other pieces. And you have to, I feel like you have to kind of be that lighthouse or that rock so that you can create the space for folks to do really cool things in the lab and outside in space.
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B
That's it for t. Deep space. Brought to you by N2K CyberWire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us@space2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Aibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Ramazeski. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time.
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