The Space Force Just Paid $40 Million to Beam Electricity Through Space With a Laser. Every Satellite in Orbit Could Be About to Get Unlimited Power.

A satellite runs out of power. Normally, that's where the story ends.

No gas stations in orbit. No extension cords. When a spacecraft exhausts its batteries and solar panels can't generate enough electricity, the hardware goes dark. Thousands of functioning components — cameras, sensors, computers — become useless debris. The satellite is dead.

On July 9, 2026, the United States Space Force awarded a startup called Pulse Space $40 million to build something that could change that forever: a laser system capable of beaming both power and data between spacecraft.

Wireless electricity. In space. Using light.

Tesla Tried This 120 Years Ago. On Earth. It Failed.

Nikola Tesla spent years and most of his fortune on the Wardenclyffe Tower — his attempt to transmit electricity wirelessly across the Atlantic. He believed power could travel through the Earth and atmosphere without wires. He was right about the concept. Wrong about the medium.

The problem? Radio waves spread out. By the time power reaches its destination, most of it is gone. At any useful distance, efficiency collapses — sometimes below 1%. You lose more than you send.

A laser doesn't spread. It stays in a beam. Focus it on a photovoltaic cell tuned to the right wavelength, and the conversion from light back to electricity is shockingly efficient.

In orbit, there's no rain, no fog, no turbulence. A laser can travel between two spacecraft — potentially hundreds of kilometers apart — with almost none of the losses that make the idea impractical on Earth's surface. The physics that killed Tesla's dream on the ground might be what makes this work above it.

What Pulse Space Is Actually Building

According to SpaceNews, Pulse Space's system is designed to transmit both power and data simultaneously using the same laser. That's the key detail most people will miss. This isn't just a charging cable in space — it's a cable that carries information at the same time.

NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), currently operational in geostationary orbit, already moves data between spacecraft at speeds that put most fiber-optic internet to shame. Pulse Space appears to be proposing a system that piggybacks usable electrical power on top of that data link.

Think about what this means for spacecraft design. Right now, every satellite has to carry enough solar panels and battery capacity for worst-case scenarios: deep eclipses, hardware faults, unexpected power spikes. Those systems add mass, cost, and complexity. If a satellite can draw emergency power from a neighbor — or from a dedicated relay satellite acting like a space-based charging station — the entire engineering philosophy changes.

You can already see how many spacecraft this might one day serve — the SkyLens live tracker is showing nearly 16,000 active and tracked objects in orbit right now, every one of them fighting the same power constraints.

Why the Military Specifically Wants This

The Space Force isn't funding this out of curiosity. Military satellites underpin GPS, missile warning, reconnaissance, and secure global communications. When a critical spacecraft runs low on power during a crisis — or has its solar panels degraded by radiation, debris impact, or deliberate interference — having a way to remotely top it up could be strategically decisive.

The Pentagon's Golden Dome initiative — a proposed layered space-based missile defense shield — would require more satellites operating in more configurations than any previous military space program. Some of those configurations are intensely power-hungry. A laser relay network could make the entire system more resilient, more flexible, and harder to degrade.

The Space Force has not released detailed specifications. Pulse Space has not published performance targets. We don't yet know the operational range the system is designed for, how many kilowatts it can transfer per second, or what attitude coordination is required between spacecraft. A $40 million contract suggests the technology has cleared proof-of-concept — but funded to advance is not the same as proven to work at scale.

The Engineering Problems Nobody Is Talking About

To be honest about what we don't know: there are real obstacles here.

• Pointing accuracy: Two spacecraft moving at 7+ km/s in different orbital planes must keep a laser aimed at a receiver roughly the size of a dinner plate across hundreds of kilometers — in real time, compensating for vibration, attitude drift, and orbital mechanics simultaneously.
• Beam divergence: Even the best lasers spread slightly over distance. At 500 km, a 1-milliradian divergence becomes a 500-meter error. The optics have to be extraordinary.
• Dual-use risk: A high-powered laser that can beam meaningful electricity is also, by definition, a high-powered laser. The same system that charges a friendly satellite could theoretically blind a sensor on an adversary's spacecraft. Where that sits under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — which bans weapons of mass destruction in orbit but is silent on high-powered lasers — is a question lawyers, not engineers, will answer.

What a Working Laser Grid in Orbit Would Look Like

Picture this: a constellation of dedicated relay satellites, positioned so that any operational spacecraft is almost always in view of at least one. When a satellite's battery dips below a threshold, it requests a link. The relay locks on, fires the beam, and tops it up in minutes — automatically, without human intervention, without a service mission.

It would also transform the economics of satellite servicing. Right now, physically docking with a dead spacecraft to refuel or repair it costs tens of millions of dollars and requires a robotic arm mission planned years in advance. Laser power beaming could make a version of that service continuous, autonomous, and cheap — no docking required.

If you want to understand the orbital mechanics behind why power constraints shape so much of spacecraft design — and why altitude and orbit type matter so much for how satellites function — the SkyLens learn section breaks it down clearly.

The Bigger Picture

Space Force's investment in Pulse Space fits a pattern: the military is funding technologies that blur the line between capability and infrastructure in orbit. Laser jammers. Inspection satellites. Rendezvous vehicles. And now laser power systems — which, depending on implementation, could be a charging cable or something considerably more significant, depending on the power level and who's pointing it at what.

What's clear is this: the era of isolated, self-sufficient satellites may be ending. The future of orbit might look less like a sky full of lone spacecraft and more like a connected grid — satellites sharing power, data, and resources the way devices share a network on the ground.

Forty million dollars is a bet that this is possible. The next few years — and Pulse Space's next test results — will say whether it becomes real.

For more stories on how the new space race is reshaping orbit, technology, and national security, visit the SkyLens blog.