Two spacecraft built to beam power reached orbit on 1 October 2026. Neither has beamed anything yet,

every number attached to them is a target rather than a measurement, and when the first results arrive

there is no published method by which anyone outside the two companies can check them.

The launch itself is well attested. Via Satellite reported on 1 October 2026 that SpaceX's

Transporter-18 lifted from Vandenberg at 11:32 a.m. PT with 130 payloads aboard, with deployment

concluding at 3:41 p.m. ET. Two of those payloads are power beamers. Star Catcher's Protostar is a

prototype power node intended to beam power to another free-flying spacecraft. Cowboy Space's

Reason-1 is intended to send power the other way, from low Earth orbit down to a receiver on the

ground.

What was launched, and who said so

The figures circulating for Reason-1 come from trade press, not from the company. Payload reported on

1 October 2026, under Victoria Woodburn's byline, a goal of 30 to 100 W delivered into a spot of 10

to 20 m at a ground facility, with a first beaming attempt possible as soon as late October, and

described the spacecraft as carrying the "first commercial kilowatt-class laser in space designed to

deliver energy to Earth". Via Satellite, same day, says only that Reason-1 is designed to prove out

using a high-power laser to move energy from orbit to a ground receiver. The same laser is reported

to return in the first half of 2027 on Reason-2 as a data link rather than a power link.

Those delivery figures are targets. Treat them as documented statements of intent and nothing more.

They are also the one pair of numbers in this story worth holding onto, because they are quoted at

the two ends that matter. A kilowatt-class source is a transmitter rating. Thirty to a hundred watts

is what is meant to land. If the source is taken at a round kilowatt, the implied end-to-end delivery

is roughly 3 to 10 per cent, and that is my arithmetic on two reported targets rather than anybody's

published budget, so treat it as an estimate. It is not a criticism. A first flight that delivers a

few per cent of its source power to a spot on the ground would be a significant result. It is only a

problem when the kilowatt travels alone in a headline and the watts stay behind.

Star Catcher has published a first-party statement, which is more than the other side of this story

has. Its release of 28 September 2026 says Protostar will conduct a "landmark power beaming

demonstration between two untethered spacecraft, a feat that has never been achieved". That release

names no power level, no wavelength, no separation distance and no customer for the demonstration

itself. Payload's description adds that Protostar will deploy a cubesat and "beam measurable power to

its off-the-shelf solar panels", and names Starcloud and Aethero as publicised customers of the wider

grid the company is selling. The company's own updates index carries a November 2025 item about a

record-setting ground test at Kennedy Space Center. I could not get that page to render its figures

to a fetch on 3 October 2026, so I am not restating them here.

On the Cowboy Space side the first-party record is close to empty. On 3 October 2026 the company's

own site described its Stampede constellation as satellites harnessing solar power in low Earth orbit

to run on-orbit GPU data centres, with no mention of Reason-1, no mention of beaming power to Earth,

and no watt figure anywhere. Its news index returned a placeholder: "Nothing to report yet. Check

back soon." The company does appear to have described the mission on its own X account, but that post

could not be retrieved for this piece, so everything above rests on trade press. Readers should weigh

it accordingly.

One correction belongs here rather than in a footnote. The register this project keeps recorded, on

5 September 2026, that this company had left power beaming for orbital data centres, and called it

the first programme in that table to leave the field rather than enter it. That was wrong. The

hardware flew. The data-centre pitch turned out to be where the beaming work is pointed, not a

replacement for it.

"Detected" is not "delivered", and the field has done this before

Space-to-Earth beaming already has a precedent, and the precedent is instructive about numbers.

Caltech announced on 1 June 2023 that its MAPLE experiment on SSPD-1 had transmitted power wirelessly

in space and beamed detectable power to Earth, picked up on 22 May 2023 by a receiver on the roof of the

Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering in Pasadena. The release describes the received

signal as arriving at the expected time and frequency with the predicted frequency shift. It gives no

figure in watts for what arrived. Caltech's own wrap-up of the mission, published in January 2024,

says MAPLE demonstrated its ability to direct a beam to Earth and calls that a first. It also

publishes no delivered-power number.

That is not a criticism of Caltech either. Detecting a beam and delivering usable power are different

experiments, and the team said which one it had done. But it means the entire published history of

space-to-Earth power beaming currently consists of one detection with no watt figure attached. The

next entry in that history is likely to be written in the next few weeks, by a company that operates

both the transmitter and the receiver, and reports the result itself.

An infrared beam is not a radio wave, and that is a regulatory fact

Here is where the standards position gets uncomfortable, and it is the part of this story that is

checkable today rather than in late October.

The ITU Radio Regulations, Edition of 2024, define radio waves at No. 1.5 as "Electromagnetic waves

of frequencies arbitrarily lower than 3 000 GHz, propagated in space without artificial guide". Three

thousand gigahertz is a wavelength of 100 micrometres. A practical high-power infrared laser runs

near one micrometre, which is about two orders of magnitude above the ceiling the Regulations set for

themselves. An optical downlink is therefore not a radio emission in the regulatory sense, and the

machinery that would otherwise apply does not reach it.

The exposure standards go the same way. ICNIRP's current radiofrequency guidelines, published in

2020, cover 100 kHz to 300 GHz. IEEE Std C95.1-2019, an active standard published on 4 October 2019,

covers 0 Hz to 300 GHz. An infrared beam sits above both. What covers it instead is ICNIRP's laser

guidelines, published in 2013, which set exposure limits for wavelengths between 180 nm and 1 000

micrometres and for exposure durations from 100 femtoseconds to 30 kiloseconds. Those guidelines are

explicit that detailed measurement procedures and calculation methods are beyond their scope, and

point to a literature from 1980 to 2004 for the methods instead.

So a ground spot of 10 to 20 metres, illuminated from orbit at kilowatt-class source power, is

governed by an exposure limit written for laboratory and industrial optics, with the measurement

method deliberately left outside the document. One standard does carry measurement conditions, and it

is the wrong one for this purpose: IEC 60825-1, edition 3.0 of 2014, classifies laser products by

hazard across 180 nm to 1 mm. It tells you what class a device is. It does not tell you how to

report the power a beam from orbit puts into a receiver on the ground. On the radio side, the ITU's only publication on

beamed wireless power, SM.2392-2 of June 2026, is a Report, which recommends nothing and binds

nothing, and the only Recommendation in the area, SM.2151-0 of September 2022, is scoped to

mobile and portable devices and sensor networks. Neither reaches a spacecraft, and neither is about

optics at all.

This project is implicated in exactly the same gap. The standards registry behind the BeamDesk

console pins ICNIRP 2020 and C95.1-2019 for exposure, and both stop at 300 GHz. Its optical entries

cover beam propagation, not human exposure and not measurement. A console that can tell you the power

flux density under a microwave beam cannot tell you the equivalent under an infrared one, and saying

so is cheaper than being found out.

What a credible first result looks like

Four things would make the late-October attempt, or Protostar's, into evidence rather than an

announcement. The watts quoted at the receiver, not at the source. The aperture and spot size that

produced them, so the figure can be recomputed. The integration time, because a peak and a sustained

average are different claims. And a receiver measurement someone other than the transmitting company

can stand behind.

None of that requires a new standards body. It requires a published method and a witness. The

awkwardness is that the first of those does not exist yet for optical power delivered from orbit, and

the second is nobody's obligation. Until both arrive, the honest description of any number that comes

back from these two spacecraft is that it is a company-reported figure from a company-operated

receiver, and that is how it will be recorded here.

What would change my mind

A delivered-power figure measured at the receiver, published with aperture, spot size and integration

time, and witnessed by a party that does not operate the transmitter, would make my central complaint

obsolete for that mission. I would record it as a measurement and say so.

A chartered measurement project would change the structural half. If IEC TC 76, ICNIRP or an IEEE

working group opened work on measuring and assessing high-power optical beams delivered from space,

that would be the most consequential development in this area and I would report it as good news,

without hedging.

I would also revise the first-party criticism quickly if Cowboy Space publishes a mission page with a

power budget on it. The company having said nothing on its own site on 3 October 2026 is a fact about

3 October, not about the company's intent, and a single page would move the Reason-1 figures from

trade press to first-party overnight.

Sources