Star Catcher just raised $65 million to build the world's first power grid in space — with lasers

Star Catcher Industries now has a big war chest to help bankroll its big dream — building a power grid in space. The Florida-based space company announced today (May 12) that it has raised $65 million in an oversubscribed "Series A" funding round, bringing its total investment haul to date to $88 million. Star Catcher will put the money toward the development of the world's first in-space power grid, which it thinks will supercharge the burgeoning off-Earth economy. A rendering of a Star Catcher power-beaming spacecraft transmitting concentrated and conditioned solar energy to client satellites. (Image credit: Star Catcher Industries) "Fundamentally, the vision of Star Catcher is to make it as easy to operate in space as it is to operate terrestrially," company co-founder and CEO Andrew Rush told Space.com. The way to do that, he said, is to build out the same kind of infrastructure in space that we have on Earth — chiefly, reliable methods of transport, communication and power generation. The first two of those are already pretty well established in the final frontier, but the power element is lacking. "We all just go on these camping trips to space, and basically every satellite at some point in its life cycle is power limited," Rush said. "That's why, at Star Catcher, we're focused on building the world's first power grid in space — to eliminate that bottleneck and take us from a world of power budgets into a world of power abundance," he added. …