Aetherflux, founded by Baiju Bhatt, plans to build a constellation of satellites that can beam renewable energy to the surface using lasers.
The rapid decline in price for solar power has fueled a revolution in renewable energy, but it has a terrestrial cost. The average solar farm is around 40 acres in size, helping reduce carbon emissions but taking up green space. But there is a potential solution to this problem: build the solar panels in space, then beam the power back to Earth. It’s a sci-fi vision that Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire cofounder of fintech company Robinhood, wants to turn into a reality with his new company, Aetherflux, which aims to build a constellation of power-generating satellites and receiving stations.
“This goal of having infrastructure in space that’s truly resilient to conditions on the ground is really appealing,” Bhatt told Forbes. “It’s the kind of direction that we’ve already seen be hugely important with Starlink,” he added, referring to SpaceX’s constellation of satellites that have provided internet on the ground in places with little infrastructure, in conflict areas like Ukraine and during natural disasters.
Aetherflux isn’t the only company working on space-based solar power, an idea that NASA and other government agencies began exploring in the 1970s that ultimately never went anywhere. But now, the field is “experiencing a bit of a renaissance,” analyst Chris Quilty told Forbes by email. He said the shift has been driven by the need for clean energy, as well as the lower launch costs enabled by SpaceX.
For example, Michigan-based Virtus Solis and U.K-based Space Solar are planning to launch large arrays of solar panels into high, geostationary orbit. That way, they constantly receive sunlight while pointing at the same general area on Earth, beaming the energy they generate using microwaves toward a receiving station. This is similar to technology first developed by researchers at CalTech, which was demonstrated in orbit last year. California-based Reflect Orbital is taking a different approach, working on giant orbital mirrors that can reflect sunlight onto ground-based solar panels at night.
Most of these projects have long timeframes, in part because of the size of infrastructure they’ll require in orbit. Bhatt said that Aetherflux has a different approach than its competitors, which he thinks is more scalable. Instead of microwaves to beam power to the surface, his company plans to use infrared lasers to deliver power.
One big advantage of this approach is that it allows for smaller, cheaper satellites instead of large, costly satellites or solar arrays, which makes both iteration and scale easier and reduces launch costs. Plus, it requires less of a footprint on the ground. Microwave power requires a receiver the size of a soccer field or even larger. Bhatt said that receivers for infrared lasers can be much smaller–less than 10 meters in diameter, or about the size of a backyard swimming pool.
Aetherflux’s smaller, more nimble satellites are designed to circle the planet every 90 minutes. The 45 minutes that they’re out of sunlight, he said, they can continue to deliver power from their batteries, which will be charged by their solar panels. This is a similar approach that SpaceX took with Starlink–instead of a few large, costly, geostationary satellites to deliver internet, which had been the case since the 1990s, Starlink instead consists of hundreds of small, cheap satellites in low orbit.
Another advantage, he said, is that his company isn’t waiting on any particular breakthrough or innovation in order to make the project a reality. It’s just working the problem using tools that already exist–for example, rather than developing a whole satellite from scratch, it’s using an off-the-shelf satellite from manufacturing company Apex, to which it’s adding its own power-generating and transmitting components.
“We know how to build constellations of spacecraft, we know how to integrate all these different components, we know how to build the ground receivers,” Bhatt said. “There’s obviously a lot of complexity in our particular model, but none of these are hard science problems in and of themselves.”
In March 2024, Bhatt stepped down as Chief Creative Officer and marketing chief of stock trading app Robinhood, which he’d held since moving on from his co-CEO role in 2020. Bhatt cofounded Robinhood with CEO Vlad Tenev, who he met when they were both physics students at Stanford, in 2013 and he remains on the board. His impetus to leave, he said, was because he was “just too passionate about wanting to make something like this happen.” Bhatt’s father worked for NASA throughout his childhood, he said, and “I thought I was going to be a mathematician or a physicist someday.”
Right now, Bhatt plans to fund the company from his own fortune, which Forbes estimates to be over $1.5 billion. That will carry the company through its first mission: a satellite to test and demonstrate the company’s technology, which it plans to launch in the first quarter of 2025.
After that, Bhatt acknowledges that the project is “going to require a lot of outside capital,” which may come from the private sector but may also involve government funding. The company has been talking to the Department of Defense, he added, which may have interest in using Aetherflux’s power solution for remote base locations or on the battlefield. Initially, the company will explore these types of operations as well as other customer applications where power infrastructure is difficult to build, such as remote mining operations.
Bhatt sees his company as part of a shift in the way orbital infrastructure can support life on the ground. “We’re entering an era of space exploration that is going to become totally different in the next five to 10 years,” he said. “And I think when you have that sort of paradigm change, the benefits of doing this in orbit really start to become clear–but we still have to prove that out.”
This article was originally published on forbes.com.
