Andrew Rush is the co-founder and CEO of Star Catcher, a company building new ways to power satellites through energy grids in space.
Tell us about yourself and your company, Star Catcher?
My technical background is in physics and law. This is the third space company I’ve built or helped scale. The first was Made In Space, which was the first company to manufacture functional objects off Earth. We developed 3D printers that worked in space and built the company up organically. We sold it to a private equity firm in 2020. After that, I became the founding president and COO of Redwire, which is now a publicly traded multinational company that builds space subsystems and components. I led or co-led the first six or seven acquisitions, helped through the go-public phase, and then eventually left.
What I really wanted to do was build something that connects with my core passion which is enabling people to do more in space. Power is at the center of that. Spacecraft operations are always constrained by size, weight, and power. With reusable rockets, size and weight have become more flexible. But power is still a hard limit. We’re still powering satellites like camping trips. That’s why we started Star Catcher. Our mission is to build the world’s first orbital energy grid to give satellites access to more power, higher concentrations of power, ultimately removing power as a standalone constraint for space operations.
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How are satellites currently powered and where do you see room for improvement?
Every satellite we send to space is powered by solar. They go up with solar arrays sized to fit the spacecraft. When the satellite can see the sun, it generates power. When it can’t, it relies on onboard batteries. This works because the sun is a giant fusion generator that’s always on. But it’s also limiting. Satellite bodies only come in a few standard sizes. Solar arrays also come in set sizes. Every mission I’ve worked on has had some kind of power constraint.
That’s because we only get power from one sun, and from the fixed area of the arrays we send up. But solar arrays are photovoltaics. If you shine higher concentrations of light on them, they produce more power in a linear way. At Star Catcher, we’re building an orbital energy grid that beams higher-intensity light to those solar arrays. That increases power generation without needing to change the arrays. Satellites can tap into this shared infrastructure and reduce their own power systems. That lowers cost and improves performance.
Star Catcher is building the grid. Can any satellite connect to it?
That’s right. We operate like a utility. A satellite operator might say, “We need an extra thousand watts of average power.” We quote them a price and then beam that extra thousand watts to them on a consistent basis. It’s similar to how you work with your local utility. Or how you buy compute from Amazon Web Services or Azure.
What’s the core innovation that makes this possible?
It comes down to two factors. One is the market. The other is technology. On the market side, for the first time, we have a geographic concentration of customers. Companies are launching constellations of satellites into low Earth orbit, which is between 150 and 1500 kilometers above Earth. That’s a big shift from five or ten years ago when many satellites were being sent to a variety of orbits including geosynchronous orbit (GEO) that is much farther away and harder to service. These customers are clustered. They also have a shared need. If they had more power, they could do more. That makes a shared energy grid viable.
On the technology side, it’s a combination of several advances. We can deploy large lens arrays to collect and condition energy. We can focus the light and use tracking systems developed for laser communications. Those terminals are now well tested in space. We use the same techniques, but instead of sending data, we send energy.
Could this approach work in geosynchronous orbit too?
Our technology works in low Earth orbit, and it works around the Moon. GEO is viable from a tech perspective. The challenge is market size. There are fewer customers in GEO right now, so we’re focusing on LEO. But I do think that will change. As we prove the system in LEO and build a market, we’ll see interest grow in GEO. And eventually, as a commercial market forms on the Moon and in lunar orbit, that will be a major opportunity too.
How does government regulation affect your work?
Space is now seen as both a national and global priority. We’ve seen how remote sensing and Earth observation are crucial for national security. We’ve seen how LEO telecom constellations—like OneWeb, Kuiper, and Starlink—are essential. And we’ve also seen how people want to disrupt those systems.
Because of that, even as governments change, the momentum around space has stayed strong. We’re bullish on how people see the value of space and are moving forward with it. Commercially, we’re in the second golden age of space. That’s not going to change based on elections or political shifts. It’s an amazing time to build a space company.
Tell us about your funding approach at Star Catcher.
We’re proud of where we are. We announced the company and our seed round at $12.25 million in July last year. Since then, we’ve grown from three people to thirty. We’ve hit some major technology milestones. We even publicly beamed energy across the NFL football stadium field here in Jacksonville. We already have three paying customers, which is a great start for a company less than a year old.
There is a change in the sector. When I was building Made In Space, unless you were Elon Musk or building a remote sensing company, you couldn’t raise venture capital in space tech. Now it’s different. There’s capital available across the entire spectrum. Seed, Series B, growth stage, IPO, private equity. All of those are tools we can now use to bring new products and services into the world. There are more tools available than ever before.
We ask everyone the same question to finish. How do you define deep tech?
For me, it’s about contrast. A deep tech company isn’t just about software. It’s not just delivering services through code. It’s a blend of bits and atoms. Everything has a software component these days, even rockets. But deep tech includes a physical element. Something you are designing, building, and using in the real world. That’s what sets it apart.