The Galactic Corporation (Galactic) is a vertically integrated orbital solar company. We build giant solar power stations in space and beam power back to Earth. Our three bets:
Clean baseload power is the holy grail of energy. Space solar is the key to unlocking it.
Space solar power (SSP) outcompetes Earth solar only if launch costs drop below $10/kg.
Only a non-rocket orbital launch system gets us there.
The Conditions for Victory
Victory means delivering gigawatts of the world’s cheapest energy from space, 24/7, forever. For us to win, only two conditions have to be met.
1.
Drop orbital launch costs to $3/kg
Cheap mass-to-orbit is the missing layer for humanity to become a fully solar-powered civilization. Rockets will not get us there: they are 90% fuel, less than 10% payload, cost $2,500/kg, and fly only a few hundred times per year. To collapse launch costs, we’re building Bifrost: an electromagnetic track that streams mass into orbit continuously, without rockets, at $3/kg.
2.
Ship gigawatts of solar power to space
With a single Bifrost loop, Galactic could deploy a 50 GW constellation in 12 months, and match global electricity generation (3,700 GW) in just under a decade. At 5,000 GW, our levelized cost of electricity falls to $0.02–$0.03/kWh, undercutting every power source on Earth.
SUMMARY
The Mission
Galactic builds giant solar power stations in space and beams power back to Earth.
Solar generates only ~6% of global electricity today, yet it is the fastest-growing power source in history, growing ~30% year over year.1 Our goal is to scale solar by delivering the world’s cheapest 24/7 energy, from space, forever. To get there we are taking a contrarian path: first build the world’s cheapest orbital launch system, use it to ship gigawatts of solar power stations into orbit, then deliver power too cheap to meter.
Humanity’s total primary energy demand is ~170,000 TWh a year — a continuous load of ~19,000 GW. Meanwhile, the solar energy striking Earth in a single hour exceeds everything humanity consumes in a year. Earth-based renewables cannot capture it: they are bound by night, cloud cover and land. Nuclear is slowed by permitting and fuel supply chains. Fossil fuels run out.
Beamed power is the first scalable industrial application from space. In geostationary and high Earth orbit the sun does not set. Solar energy there is continuous, intense and unfiltered, with zero fuel cost — and it can be beamed to Earth by safe microwave transmission.
No new physics needs to be invented. Bell Labs built practical photovoltaics in the 1950s; NASA demonstrated wireless power beaming in 1975. Space solar hasn’t happened because no one has solved launch: millions of tons to orbit, on a reasonable budget, at a cadence rockets cannot sustain. Rockets are structurally expensive — about 90% of every vehicle is propellant — and structurally rate-limited, flying only as often as they can be built, fueled and turned around.
Table 1. Launching a 1,000 GW constellation (~5,000,000 metric tons).
Launch system
Launch bill
Timeline
Falcon Heavy
$12.5 trillion
80+ years
Starship
$3.75 trillion
80+ years
Bifrost
$15 billion
2.5 years
As a fixed magnetic structure, Bifrost scales launch capacity at the marginal cost of electricity. The more space solar we deploy, the more launch capacity we can power, which deploys even larger constellations — an exponential flywheel. That capturing the sun’s energy will create one of the most valuable enterprises in history is a bet worth making.
THE BUSINESS
Solar is All You Need
Figure 1. In high orbit, the sun never sets.
Galactic launches with Prometheus: a full-scale, baseload space solar constellation delivering 50 GW to Earth. Prometheus requires orbiting approximately 206,000 metric tons of structural and optical hardware. The table below shows the schedule realities across launch paradigms.
Under a rocket regime, even with aggressive assumptions for fully reusable vehicles, launching 50 GW means monopolizing the world’s launch capacity for a single project over a decade — a fiscal and operational fantasy.
Our Moat: The Bifrost Launch Loop
Named after the burning bridge of Norse mythology connecting Earth and the heavens, Bifrost is an electromagnetic mass driver — a Lofstrom launch loop2 — capable of delivering payloads to orbit at a fraction of chemical-rocket cost. Imagine a fixed structure that streams mass to orbit continuously, every few minutes, at the marginal cost of electricity, beholden to no vehicle manufacturer’s flight cadence.3
Bifrost cuts Prometheus’s launch bill from hundreds of billions of dollars to hundreds of millions, over just 12 months of continuous operation. It also opens a business of its own: the orbital launch industry is worth ~$30B today, and Bifrost can carry mass for national satellite constellations and orbital data centers at a small fraction of today’s prices.
The moat is geographic. A 2,000-kilometer launch track needs a flat, straight line over open equatorial water to launch safely into the right orbit. Only a few ocean stretches on Earth meet these geographic, weather and safety requirements. By securing the rights and anchors for these routes first, Galactic locks up the best real estate on Earth for non-rocket launch.
MARKET
The Opportunity
Beyond the Bifrost loop, Prometheus is 206,000 metric tons of mass-printed thin-film photovoltaics, phased-array microwave emitters, composite structural trusses and thermal radiators — plus ten 5 GW rectennas on the ground. Operating at 95% capacity in continuous, unfiltered sunlight, 50 GW generates 416 billion kWh of clean baseload electricity a year.
Sold wholesale at $0.03/kWh, Prometheus’s output yields $12.5 billion a year. And because sunlight in high orbit is continuous, our primary input costs nothing: Prometheus operates at ~60% margins.
Galactic turns a large upfront bet — Bifrost and solar manufacturing — into a low-cost utility engine, so scaling from 50 GW to 500 GW, then 5,000 GW, gets cheaper at every stage, and almost every new gigawatt flows straight to cash flow. Bifrost earns on its own, too: carrying 3 million tons a year for satellite constellations and orbital data centers at a blended $20/kg is a $60 billion launch business — twice the size of today’s entire orbital launch industry.
Table 3. Value stack at maturity. Illustrative model outputs, not guidance.
Revenue stream
Basis
Annual revenue
Wholesale baseload power
50 GW (Prometheus) @ $0.03/kWh
~$12.5B
Wholesale baseload power
500 GW @ $0.03/kWh
~$125B
Wholesale baseload power
5,000 GW @ $0.03/kWh
~$1.25T
Bifrost third-party launch
3M tons/yr @ $20/kg
~$60B
Orbital data centers & industry
Direct space-to-space beaming
~$150B
Total at maturity
5,000 GW + launch + data centers
~$1.5T/yr
CLOSING
Towards Energy Too Cheap to Meter
The story of humanity is the story of energy. Our capacity for civilization expands or shrinks with our ability to produce more energy, cheaper and faster. Since the atomic age we have grown afraid of our own power, and our material progress has stalled — everywhere except solar. The exponential growth of solar is the great energy story of this century. But it is only the beginning. For solar to reach its true potential, it must go to space.
Bifrost solves the mass-to-orbit constraint that made earlier concepts from NASA and others too costly to build.4 With it comes an era of abundance: power for the Global South without costly grid build-outs, carbon pulled from the air and turned into fuel, fresh water from the sea, more food from the same land, and industry in orbit as we become a spacefaring civilization. The universe is awash with energy waiting to be harnessed. Galactic’s purpose is to unlock that future for our species.
Lux Aeterna
CONTACT
We are assembling a lean, world-class team to attack this problem with absolute mission criticality. Join us.
The physics have been public since Lofstrom’s 1985 paper. What has been missing is a buyer for the throughput. Galactic, and the rise of orbital data centers, are the buyers.
Glaser, “Feasibility Study of a Satellite Solar Power Station”; NASA, “Space Based Solar Power.”
