Star Catcher’s Andrew Rush: Harnessing The Sun To Build The First Energy Grid In Space

0:00I deeply believe in the fantastic future of space. I believe in a world where we can vacation in Leo and take expeditions to climb mountains on the moon and that we're doing manufacturing and research and development in microgravity. There's a lot of big swings in those things. And what we're doing at Starcatcher, I think, is a general and transformational technology.

0:24Andrew Rush:Welcome to the Upstarts Podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging tech leaders about their Upstart moment. An Upstart is a challenger who punches above their weight and takes on the status quo to achieve a big outcome in the world and build a big business too. I'm your host, Alex Conrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. I'm excited to be joined today by Andrew Rush, co-founder and CEO of Starcatcher Industries. Andrew is a veteran of the space race with work at Made in Space. And he's now trying to become something of an energy tycoon in space, beaming photons to satellites in this space to space new kind of power grid.

1:00Andrew Rush:Is that right, Andrew? Thanks. Thanks for joining us. That's right. We're building the power lines to connect and enrich all satellites. I cannot wait to hear about that. So Starcatcher, pretty, pretty cool name. You guys have been around since 2024, if I have that right. You've raised a bit over$10 million, you and your two co-founders, and you previously worked on Made in Space with one of them, Michael Schneider. Then you also worked with someone I've known for a long time, Brian Landvert, who's a reformed VC. This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking that's already loved by 300 ,000 entrepreneurs.

1:35What are you guys trying to do at Starcatcher? So at Starcatcher, our big vision is to make it as easy to operate in space as it is to operate on the ground. To cause that paradigm shift, we are building the world's first energy grid in space to solve the biggest bottleneck for space operations after launch. And that is the power budget. So we're building the StarCatcher network to provide satellites with more power, higher concentrations of power, and power in eclipse via optical power beaming.

2:05Andrew Rush:So this is basically space energy, space to space, beaming to make satellites much more efficient to kind of enable the expanding power usage in space from satellites and other devices over time. Is that kind of the gist for maybe a non-scientist? Yeah, 100%. Because right now in space, everybody basically goes on camping trips. Like you bring your solar rays with you when you see the sun, you can power yourself up. When you don't see the sun, you have to live off of batteries. And that is just a hugely constraining way to operate that leads to less than 100 % uptime. It leads to us, you know, choosing to fly less capable hardware.

2:43And our daily lives are based on and enriched by space regardless of who we are. And so providing more power ultimately enriches humanity.

2:53Andrew Rush:So there's like so much cool innovation happening around space. Why was this problem specifically the one that you guys were interested in right now? This is the problem that we got really interested in and attacked next after the first couple of space companies that Mike and I founded or scaled together. Because you guys have done a few at this point, right? That's right. That's right. Yeah, you know, I've worked with Mike for more than a decade. First at Made in Space, where we were the first folks to make functional objects off the face of the planet and really doing some pioneering work around in-space assembly and manufacturing of satellites.

3:33We were part of the founding team of Redwire, which is a really great diversified space subsystems manufacturer. I had the privilege of leading or co-leading the first six or seven acquisitions that Redwire did and then was part of the core team that developed the strategy and then ultimately took that firm public. And, you know, throughout those experiences, we're governed by SWAP. You know, every satellite mission is governed by size, weight, and power constraints. Really what we found is that the advent of lower cost launch vehicles, reusable launch vehicles has really opened up the aperture on size and weight.

4:10but power is still super constrained. The average satellite in the Earth orbit has like 1 ,500 watts of power generation available, which is as much as like my kid's gaming computer uses. You know, what we'd really like to have is like the amount of power a house has available to it or a small industrial part has available to it. And so StarCatcher is aimed at solving that problem because, you know, we had every mission we were involved in, the power budget was a bigger constraint than the mass budget.

4:40Andrew Rush:Well, so walk me through that because you guys sent a printer up into orbit, right? My space aficionado friends are very excited that I'm talking to a made in space, you know, veteran here. Was power something you guys were already thinking about back then? Or as you're sending this printer up, what is the through line maybe to these same challenges? Yeah, a couple of great through lines from the early Made in Space days to now. The second printer we sent up was owned and operated by us at Made in Space and printed in a wide variety of really amazing space-rated materials. And the terrestrial versions of those printers pull like two kilowatts of power each.

5:27but the power budget we had on the international space station for where we were installed was 400 watts so okay after applying the technology that we had developed for making 3d printers work in microgravity most of the work actually went into trying to lower that power could draw from two kilowatts from 2 000 watts down to 400 we also were working on missions where we were 3d printing structures in microgravity in space and the naked space environment. And due to the power constraints that existed on the satellite bus itself, we were actually contemplating turning the 3D printer off in the middle of a print, which if anybody's ever, you know, dealt with 3D printing, they know that that is just a bonkers thing to contemplate.

6:17And that was because of the constraints that, you know, the current state of the art, you know, camping trip based satellite design imposes upon us as mission designers and operators.

6:28Andrew Rush:So besides just the creative thinking and maybe the grumbling, did it, was it in the back of your mind? Like, gosh, I wish the space station had more power or like, this is ridiculous what they're making to with right now. Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, that was that was always something. hey wouldn't it be nice to have more to have more power to to have the paradigm in space be like it is on the ground you know like when we hire more folks at starcatcher when we buy more equipment you know more industrial equipment we're generally not thinking like oh boy i have to you know we hired jonathan so i have to tell katon that she can't she she can only use her laptop half the time that's that's just not that's but that is what happens on you know in a in a space mission And that's what happens, you know, can happen in on commercial on space stations and eventually commercial space stations.

7:16Andrew Rush:Wow. OK, so so made in space, you guys have this great run. Why not take on power right then? What got you to to the next phase? That's a great question. And we sold made in space to Redwire that my made in space executive team with along with folks from air equity really became the core, the core leadership team, the V1 leadership team of Redwire. And then we had this great challenge of saying, hey, how do we, can we bring together some of the really talented folks in different companies and through that combination, create something greater than the sum of its parts. And I really think that is what we accomplished at Redwire.

7:59Redwire now is the largest independent provider of space solar rays in the United States because we brought together some really amazing and talented folks and then helped them help them scale and you know we put new solar rays on the International Space Station you know we did a lot of work.

8:16Andrew Rush:Okay so you did you did partly address the problem I guess yeah and then and then just kind of building upon that right and then also you know we also did a lot of work Redwire does a lot of work in you know high performance compute, high performance imaging in space. Actually, Artemis 2, which will fly soon, is all the cameras on Orion are cameras that my teams built at Redwire when I was there. So I'm really excited to see the imagery from that. It's the same thing with Artemis 1 and see them work well and also see that historic mission have a great and successful outcome. That's really cool.

8:56Andrew Rush:So for people who are not, you know, experts in this area, can you talk a little bit about the scale of these arrays and sort of how much space, no pun intended, is being taken on satellites and stations just for the power side? Because the first time I looked into, you know, what percent of a satellite is just that, it kind of blew my mind. So if you look at your average satellite, if you picture your mental model of an average satellite, most of what you're picturing is the power generation system. Most of it is big solar rays, you know, because you need to put out, you know, about a square meter of surface area for every, you know, four or 500 watts that you are collecting.

9:39If you're just having the one naked sun as your source of incoming photons of power. So the International Space Station, you know, is about the size of a football field. most of that football field is covered up by these enormous solar rays that you know power

9:56Andrew Rush:and keep the station flying operating i think that that's kind of what i'm driving at is my mental image of a satellite and even the emoji on our phone it's basically the array right it's basically the the power of the photon absorbing array it's not you know the computer or the maybe satellitey part that we we might think is actually doing the cool science or collecting the data right yeah and contrast that with you know with like when you think of like a cell phone tower you just picture like this tower with these you know with these antennas hanging off of it and a lot of a lot of satellites are just you know telecommunications are antennas or cell phone towers in space but to your point we picture the we picture the power plant that that is like driving that not the actual you know the actual like you know you know the business end of the system.

10:46Andrew Rush:What made the transition from Redwire into Starcatcher? Was it a moment in technology? Was it a moment in your own journey that it felt like the right time? When you think about sort of the inception moment, what was it? Starcatcher is really a now, is meeting the moment right now, you know, compared to five years ago or 10 years ago. And that is because we have seen this the sea change in where people deploy satellites and in what we're asking satellites to do for us. You know, five or 10 years ago, we were a very multi-orbit regime in space. There were, you know, a decent number of folks operating satellites in LEO, lots of folks operating satellites in GEO.

11:33And we've really seen with the proliferation of mega constellations, The majority of satellites now are, you know, in LEO. And that is, you know, and that's where we're projecting it to continue to be. Generally, you have a smaller platform, less power on a LEO satellite, but you have more coverage and all the kind of benefits you get from micro constellations.

11:53Andrew Rush:For someone who is ignorant, i.e. me, who had to research this, give us a sense. What is a LEO satellite? What makes something LEO? You know, let's give a little science lesson. That's great. Yeah, absolutely. So LEO stands for low Earth orbit, which is essentially about 100 kilometers above the surface of the planet up to about 1500 kilometers in altitude above the surface of the planet. And so there's sort of tiers of altitude where these satellites can operate. And there's limited space and complex mapping of where they're orbiting within those tiers, right? That's right. Yeah. And depending on your altitude, the length of your orbit may vary a little bit, but generally about every 90 minutes, these satellites are going around the Earth and doing that coverage.

12:44Contrast that with GEO, which is a geosynchronous orbit. These satellites are 33 ,000 kilometers out and kind of stay over the same spot on Earth all the time. Their orbital period is the same as our day. It's like 24 hours, basically. And so those are really useful for providing, you know, telecommunications to a set spot on the ground or set swath of the planet because they can only see that one spot. You know, whereas constellations in low Earth orbit in LEO can provide more global coverage if you put enough satellites up in the right kinds of orbits.

13:19Andrew Rush:And the size of these satellites is roughly constrained by what we can send up from the ground, right? What we can fit in a rocket. I mean, because otherwise I could, you know, people might wonder why isn't every satellite a football field length, you know, just get even more power from from bigger scale. So it's a it's a basic payload problem in a way, right? Yes, exactly. So every satellite that goes to space, you know, gets origami folded up and then launched into space and then unfolded to do its operations. And they ride up on a variety of launch vehicles. you know increasingly um you see folks actually even more flying on as as what we call ride shares on vehicles like spacex's falcon 9 and you can think of ride share as almost saying like kind of like with with over the road trucking where you say hey i have a pallet of stuff and it's a defined volume and then there's you know your pallet and and you know 40 other pallets in a given truck going to a common destination that's really what a what a ride share is uh and And so a lot of these satellites that go to low Earth orbit now, they ride up with a bunch of other satellites and they have, you know, a couple of cubic meters or so of space that is dedicated to them in a finite mass budget that they're allowed to put in that volume.

14:37And then they ride up and then get dropped off in a common orbit in low Earth orbit and then either maneuver or have a kick stage to take them to more interesting orbits that they if they so need that for their mission.

14:50Andrew Rush:Was conventional thinking just let's make bigger arrays and we can just use scale to solve the power problem here? Or like when you guys were thinking about, hey, maybe we could do star catcher, maybe we can concentrate these photons, you know, get more for your mileage, that could work. But then there's, you know, these other ways to do this, too. I'm kind of curious what the conventional thinking would be without you guys, you know? Yeah. So the state of the art is you have a mission and you say, OK, I need X watts to do this mission. And I'm going to go buy a satellite bus, basically like a car chassis or space.

15:28And that chassis will provide a certain amount of volume and mass that it can support and power. And in fact, you know, the state of the art really is if you want, you know, kind of your average satellite size, you're going to be able to buy a chassis for five six million dollars and it produces you know 1500 to 2000 watts of power but with the advent of smartphones and more generally how we've been able to really densify electronics we can make payloads that use a lot more power than that and that are small both from a mass and a volume perspective and so you end up putting a payload on these things that is this power start and so what you do is you charge up batteries operate the payload for a limited amount of time and then do that again if you want more power you you bolt out you like intellectually be like intuitively you'd be like well i'll just bolt on more solar rays but it's not that simple because the bigger the solar rays are the more control authority you need the more stability you need the more structure you need to support all that so you get into this engineering doom loop and you basically have to move up a size in satellite chassis and so if you wanted to go from let's say 2 000 watts to like to 20 000 watts you're gonna go buy a 20 to 50 million dollar bus from someone else and so that's a huge jump it's much more than just the cost of this whole ray um and it makes and it you know that's a big issue from a space perspective because that that upfront cost is what strangles the deployment of new capability in space because it's hard to raise just boatloads of capital before you have any revenue so our solution at star catcher is to say hey we can actually beam our highly concentrated power beams to your satellite to your existing solar array and that solar array just a fundamental property of it is if I put more photons on it, it will generate more power in a roughly linear fashion.

17:28So we can say, hey, you have a 2000 watt capable system chassis, but I might put 10 suns of concentrated energy on it. And I'm going to do that with photons that are in wavelengths that your solar ray already really likes to consume. That's basically visible in near infrared light, And that can supercharge the satellite and allow this smaller, cheaper asset to have the power availability of much larger, more expensive assets. So then you can dramatically increase your uptime. You can run higher, more highly capable payloads and ultimately provide more mission to your customer, provide more revenue to your stakeholders.

18:12Andrew Rush:When I launched Upstarts Media last year, I had big ambitions and a lot to figure out. I knew I needed a bank that could move at my speed and grow with me too. With Mercury, I was able to get started in minutes without leaving my desk. Mercury made it easy to send and receive wires and manage the cash flow of our growing business from day one. Now, I can spend less time with busy work and more time with the founders I like to cover. Building a media startup comes with new challenges every day. But with Mercury, banking is one I don't need to worry about. You don't accept outdated tools like floppy disks and fax machines anywhere else in your work and life.

18:46Andrew Rush:Why accept them for something as important as your money? Visit Mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes, like I did. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC. Obviously, there's a lot of excitement, generally speaking, around space with, you know, SpaceX maybe approaching an IPO and, you know, we're going back to the moon. and everyone's everyone's excited about space did people think that this problem that you specifically are trying to solve was cool did people think it was crazy what was the reaction when you guys you know announced yourselves yeah yeah so i generally people get it right saying hey we we think that in order to to deliver on the grand promise of space we should have the same kinds of infrastructure in space that we have on the ground, you know, namely transportation infrastructure, telecommunications infrastructure, power infrastructure.

19:42And space has all that, you know, except our roads are rockets, our telephone lines are big dishes and aices, but there isn't a power grid in space. It's like, you know, you're just out there alone. And so that really resonates with people. We did, you know, one of the things I did when we were in

20:01Andrew Rush:ideation phase of star catcher because i initially was like okay this is cool but it also is kind of also seems kind of bleeding and it's kind of wacky uh so i what made it wacky just that it's unproven technology or no because it is that paradigm shift like the way like like it's it's it's like like reusable rockets like people people laughed people laughed after the first falcon 9 reusable falcon 9 flew and still said no that's never gonna that's never gonna work And of course, now we're like, of course it works. This is, this is the way. And, and really like externalizing parts of your power generation is, is as transformational as reusable launch, but it is also as paradigm challenging as reusable launch.

20:46so i initially like i just called like a like a dozen of of my my colleagues in the space sector um you know that run other space companies or you know c-suite and other space companies and then also some tech fellows at primes at prime uh space contractors and i ascribed to them i said look this is what we're building and this is how i think it would be relevant to you and how I think it would be useful to you. And almost every single one of those people, like actually like 11 of the 12 said, this was really validating this. Andrew, this isn't crazy. This is actually really useful. And here's some other use cases that we could imagine for this.

21:25Andrew Rush:I was like, oh, that's great. Okay, you had excitement from your peers. What was going to be the hardest part of building this? Was it going to be fundraising or the amount of time it would take to do the test to actually get this into the world? I know you guys have done a couple of demonstrations at this point, But when you're thinking about what am I signing myself up for? What am I signing my team up for here? What was going to be the really upstart challenge for you? One of the greatest challenges for space startups is taking the grand vision and breaking that down into digestible chunks that provide value to customers and that are financeable and And then tie together, you know, crawl, walk, run to the grand vision.

22:12Andrew Rush:Well, crawl, walk, run, fly, presumably. Right, right. No, no, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that's great. I'm going to steal that. You can. Because, you know, the space is awesome in that we are not wanting for inspirational visions, for people sketching on the back of napkins what can be. But where we historically have struggled is going from idea to execution because those ideas are so capital intensive. Most folks know or can very easily Google a Dyson sphere. That sounds really cool. The use cases are clear, but you need more money than the entire planet has to build it. I read Three Body Problem, that series, and got obsessed with space elevators and then had to be disappointed that they are not financially really feasible anytime soon yeah right right yeah yeah and and space elevators like like were an old idea in the 60s when robert heineland was writing you know about them and other folks were writing about them so so we have all these great like an inspirational things but taking that and turning that into a commercial business is a challenge and we we're in this amazing era in space right now and that there is an actual vibrant and capable financial community that believes in it believes in this as a as a vertical and is constitutionally equipped to deploy capital at at all the at all very all the various stages and that wasn't true in the made in space days in the 2010s we we grew that company you know almost completely or like organically because there wasn't a meaningful amount of vc capital out there unless unless you're elon or you were building a remote sensing or a launch company um and we were we were friends with partners at major you know major vcs and you know they and we eventually asked them like hey would you invest in us and they and they were like and they laughed and they were like look we just do sass like that's that's where the money is we you know this all this like all this atom stuff this is really difficult or it's really expensive.

24:23And so now today, in contrast to that, like there, you know, there's, there's a, you can kind of say, Hey, this is roughly what a seed round could be from a capital perspective and the milestones that people will, you know, want to see an, an A round and a series B and on. And, you know, we've seen folks take companies public. Um, you know, I was fortunate to be one of those folks. We've seen private equity and other sources of capital, you know you know facilitate the growth uh you know and scaling of companies in our vertical uh and so for us at starcatcher taking this the grand vision of hey let's make a power grid in space that provides power abundance to everyone and allow that and help and and change the way we're doing space operations through that well that's awesome if you just went straight to that that's an amount of capital again that that people aren't going to write you know write me a check for.

25:17So breaking that down and saying, hey, we're going to take some seed money. We're going to use that to do a series of ground demonstrations to reduce the tech risk and increase the business case. And then we're going to do that. And then in the A, we're going to go to space and do that. And then in the B, we're going to start scaling. That provides a nice glide path to get through crawling and walking and running and then flying.

25:40Andrew Rush:So is this process, because it's a technically complicated you know products maybe compared a printer is obviously complicated too but i could see a lot of moving parts here is this going to be a longer journey for you than made in space like when you guys map that out is it just patience that maybe is one skill because like hey we want to get into space we want to have a product out there asap but unlike that bits you know start software company and the atom side we're talking four years five years to really reach scale, maybe longer. Is that patience or sort of that big picture view a key part of your founder journey?

26:16Taking the big vision and breaking it down and saying, here's a roadmap. And then how do we walk that roadmap and utilize the tools that are available and being patient about that is a key part of the journey. One of the things I have been very excited about has been the ability to accelerate things and go faster it took us about four four and a half years from founding to first flight of hardware at made in space and here at star catcher you know it we're going to do it in half that time that's in large part because of the evolution of both the customers and the financial stakeholders in the sector now in both those cases the first thing that flew who wasn't, you know, was, is the prototype that, that, you know, that begins to deliver upon, you know, where we're going on that grand vision.

27:08So yeah, it's not, that's not the end of the story, right? And then you need that patience and that dedication, as well as having your head on the swivel to, to drive things, you know, drive the roadmap forward.