Let’s talk about the beam

When you hear “space lasers,” it’s hard not to picture something dangerous out of science fiction.

That’s not what this is.

We’re using lasers from space for something far more practical: delivering energy to Earth. 

And the way it works is probably not what you’re picturing. Not a narrow, high-intensity beam, and not a mirror reflecting sunlight back to Earth. You can’t really picture it because it’s invisible. 

What actually is the beam?

Our beam is wide and invisible. It’s near-infrared light, transmitted from satellites in orbit to solar sites on the ground. 

In the orbit we chose, solar energy is effectively constant. Our satellites capture that sunlight using photovoltaic arrays just like a solar farm on Earth. Those arrays power lasers on the satellites, and those lasers emit the beam that we send down to a receiver on the ground, where it’s converted back into electricity and fed into the grid.

The beam is the transport layer. It’s how energy moves from a place where it’s always available to the places where it’s needed.

From geosynchronous orbit, a single satellite can see roughly one-third of the Earth’s surface. That’s what makes it possible to direct energy where it’s most valuable at a given moment, rather than where generation happens to sit.

Every aspect of the beam is a distinct design choice, optimized for safety and efficiency.

Why use near-infrared light?

The wavelength isn’t arbitrary. The system is designed around a part of the spectrum that behaves well across the entire chain, from space to atmosphere to ground.

Our selected near-infrared wavelengths travel through the atmosphere with little absorption (except clouds, which the beam doesn’t go through). Just as importantly, we selected these wavelengths based on the peak efficiency of the semiconductor materials in PV panels, so they convert our light into electricity more efficiently than the full spectrum of sunlight.

In practical terms, that means the same solar panel can convert our light roughly 2–3x more efficiently than it converts sunlight. As a result, not only can our beam extend a solar project’s production into nighttime hours, and it can even increase its peak production. 

That matters in places where land and interconnection are the constraint. Instead of building more infrastructure, you can drive more output from what’s already there.

Why is the beam wide instead of concentrated?

The classic image of a laser is a tight, high-powered beam. That’s not how you build a safe, effective system like this.

We deliberately spread the beam over a large area. At the ground, the intensity is on the order of a few hundred watts per square meter, which is less than half the illumination of sunlight on a bright clear day.

That achieves a few things at once. Critically, it keeps the system within safe operating limits. It also makes it more tolerant to small pointing errors and atmospheric effects because the energy is spread across an area, not concentrated at a single point.

How do you keep it pointed in the right place?

This is the part that might look simple and isn’t.

The satellite and the solar project receiver on the ground are linked through a closed-loop tracking system. The receiver provides a reference signal with a homing beacon, and the satellite continuously adjusts the beam to stay locked onto that beacon. It’s not one-time aiming. It’s active, continuous alignment.

If that alignment is disrupted for any reason, the system responds immediately. The beam defocuses and shuts off nearly instantly. It only operates and focuses when that link is actively maintained.

Is it safe?

The system is passively safe, meaning it doesn’t need active safety controls. Of course, we've added some anyway.

The beam is invisible, eye-safe, and doesn’t create negative thermal effects on people, wildlife, or equipment. It operates in a wavelength range that’s already common in commercial and industrial applications, for example what a home security camera uses to see at night.

Coming back to “giant space lasers,” the system isn’t—and can never become—a weapon. At the ground, the beam operates at roughly a few hundred watts per square meter. For context, systems designed to physically damage materials operate at energy densities on the order of hundreds of thousands of watts per square meter—around ~450,000 W/m² to melt steel—while our system is closer to ~350 W/m². That’s roughly three orders of magnitude lower.

The way we point the beam matters here too. If the homing beacon at a receiver shuts off, then the beam shuts off too. If the satellite can’t see the beacon at the receiver, it cannot send energy to that receiver.

This is how you design a system that safely delivers energy from space to the grid. 

Why bother with all of this?

Our grid doesn’t have a generation problem. It has a delivery problem.

Solar is already one of the cheapest forms of energy. But it’s fixed, in place and in time: production where the sun is shining, when the sun is up. 

Everything else in the system exists to compensate for that constraint. Transmission moves it. Storage shifts it. Both are expensive, slow to scale, or geographically limited.

A beam approaches the problem differently. Instead of moving electrons through wires, it routes energy through space, decoupling where it’s generated from where and when it’s used.

That’s what makes space solar energy a new layer of infrastructure, not just another generation source.

What does this make possible?

Once you can move energy this way, constraints start to loosen.

Solar doesn’t drop to zero at sunset. Power isn’t tied as tightly to geography. Energy infrastructure gains a layer that operates above many of the bottlenecks that shape how power is built and delivered on the ground today.

The beam is what gets people’s attention first, for better or worse. But the beam isn’t the point. It’s what it makes possible.

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Further reading: Arena Magazine’s “Making Space Lasers Boring”