Ask Starpath CEO Saurav Shroff his thoughts on America’s space priorities and he’ll say we’re “one order of magnitude high on cost and one order of magnitude low on ambition.”
Starpath’s answer, at least to part of the problem, is ultra-low-cost space power, which is generated by solar panels.
Starpath’s new space-rated solar panel business kicked off sales in the U.S. on September 25 with an eyebrow-raising pitch. The company says its solar panels, called “Starlight,” are priced around 10 times cheaper than typical industry pricing of $75-250 per watt, roughly a 90% cost reduction versus the status quo.
There will be two product tiers at launch, an “engineering model” and a “flight model.” The engineering model is priced at $9.81 per watt, with shipping beginning the second week of October. This model goes through a streamlined testing process, but is not flight-rated, making it suited for prototyping, lab use, and building a satellite ahead of launch, a Starpath representative said.
The flight model, designed for in-space use, is $11.20 per watt and is slated to ship in the fourth quarter of this year.
The startup says the steep cost reduction comes in part from building its own automated production line.
That production process — details of which Starpath is largely keeping private — is designed to dramatically increase throughput. By next year, the startup claims its line could produce more than the rest of the world’s supply of space-rated solar power combined, with enough capacity to service every satellite made on Earth.
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“It’s a win for humanity if our solar panels are available commercially for the entire space industry at a price that is 90% cheaper than what you can get today,” Shroff said. Panels “won’t be made to order … they’ll be stocked.” Shipping times will be as short as three weeks to the customer’s door initially, and just three days from December onward. It’s a dramatic reduction from today’s five- to 14-month lead times, Starpath says.
The new product line grew out of Starpath’s broader ambition: to terraform the solar system, starting with the moon and Mars. When the team priced power for a serious lunar base, “the current solar solutions were not economically viable,” Shroff said. “You’d literally be looking at spending more than the GDP of the entire world on solar power” to scale today’s satellite-supply-chain economics.
“The economics sort of kind of work for the satellite industry,” he said. “They’re very expensive, but they do not work for building a city on Mars.”
That prompted Starpath to design its own product and process. Shroff says the low prices mean “for a multimillion-dollar satellite … it will only cost you $100,000 to get the power system.”
Starpath’s roadmap is aggressive. Shroff said the underlying production system is designed to rapidly scale. “If demand called for it,” the company could scale to upwards of 40 megawatts “within a year,” he said.
Without naming names, Shroff said companies are interested in building applications for low Earth orbit that require a lot of power.
Selling panels, he argued, doesn’t distract from Starpath’s core mission. Instead, it monetizes a capability the company had to build anyway. Shroff pointed out that Starpath will be the consumer of around 98% of its own output, using the vast majority of its own panels for its off-world infrastructure.
“We think that people should dream bigger,” he said. “Everybody should take a careful look, particularly NASA, at their goals, and ask themselves if they’re dreaming big enough.”
The story has been updated to reflect that the system could scale to 40 megawatts.
