The Launch Market Space Solar Power Would Create
How would space solar power change the launch industry, and could it drive its own launch costs down?
Chapter summary
a single 2 GW plant at 10 kg per kilowatt needs about 200 heavy launches, close to two-thirds of all orbital launch attempts worldwide in 2025, but each carrying a hundred tonnes.
Key takeaways
- 1
A programme of ten plants would need about 2,000 heavy launches, more than the world has ever flown in a decade.
- 2
That scale would make SBSP the largest launch customer in history and could, as Starlink did for Falcon 9, justify reusable fleets operating at very high cadence and low cost.
- 3
But it creates a circular problem: plants are viable only if launch is cheap, and launch becomes cheap only if there is volume.
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This chapter (1 exhibits, 410 words) is part of Space & aerospace. Space access opens every chapter of all 11 Space reports, with the interactive models, Excel downloads, Ask and named Atlas records.
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- Satellites to Phones: Direct-to-Device Connectivity, Spectrum and Economics, 2026–2035
- Space Supply Chain Bottlenecks: Components, Minerals and Capacity, 2026–2030
- Lunar, Cislunar and Settlement Economics: What the Moon Costs and Who Pays, 2026–2060
- Earth Observation and AI Analytics: What a Square Kilometre Is Worth and Who Captures It, 2026–2035
- In-Space Manufacturing and Microgravity Biotech: Products, Platforms and Economics, 2026–2035
- Space-Based Solar Power: Physics, Costs and the Path to Firm Power from Orbit, 2026–2050
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