Starpath Space launched a new line of space solar panels today—called Starlight Air—which claim to be far lighter than anything else on the market.
The panels are just 73g per square meter, and are priced around $15 per watt.
“Starlight Air enables satellite designs that are virtually unbounded by the constraints of power,” Starpath CEO Saurav Shroff told Payload. “The approach behind designing it was: Let’s design right up against the limit of physics, so that we know that the product we’ve made is definitely the best possible product,”
Splitting hairs: Starlight Air uses a photovoltaic crystalline structure that is measured in the “hundreds of nanometers,” according to Shroff. The solar cell is printed onto a substrate fabric to increase its handleability.
The idea was to get the structure as close as possible to the wavelength of solar light (around 400 and 1,100 nanometers). This design aims to minimize the total mass of the panel, and allow customers to increase the power capacity of their sats, without driving up launch costs.
Despite its thinness, the panel has the same advertised in-space durability as Starlight Classic—the company’s thicker, but lower cost-per-watt alternative (at ~$11.20 per watt)—and comes with a money-back guarantee, according to Shroff.
Alien tech: Starpath didn’t originally set out to be a solar panel manufacturer. The CA-based company was founded with dreams of making life multi-planetary, and raised $12M in seed funding in 2024 on aims to build extraterrestrial rocket fuel production capabilities.
Unfortunately, lunar or Martian production plants require a lot of power, and Shroff told Payload that the math wasn’t mathing with COTS options.
“The market was only interested in selling us panels that were one, hard to get; two, produced at a volume that was about 25,000 times below what we needed to make a city on Mars; and three, a cost that was about 100 times too high,” Shroff said.
Starpath has plans to break ground on a 50MW production facility for Starlight Air this year. In the meantime, the company has some production capacity at its current facility, and is already locked in to deliver the first models to customers this year.
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Austria is prepping to launch its first military-commissioned satellite to fight a growing, invisible threat—interference with satellite navigation.
BEACONSAT, which will also be the country’s largest locally developed sat, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in February 2027, where it will operate for at least one year to detect instances of satellite jamming and spoofing.
While the total cost of the mission is undisclosed, the project is being financed through a €1M ($1.2M) contribution from the Austrian MoD, and €500K ($585K) from ESA.
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