Why I chose Overview Energy

In March 2016, I stood on a stage in front of senior U.S. defense and diplomatic leadership to present a seven-minute pitch on space solar energy.

Our team, formed by Pete Garretson, had been selected as finalists in the Defense, Diplomacy, and Development (D3) Innovation Challenge, a competition designed to identify technologies with meaningful national security implications. We walked in with modest expectations.

We walked out wildly successful, receiving four of the seven awards.

It was an inflection point. The idea of space solar energy had captured tangible high-level attention.

But attention is not the same as proof.

The subsequent decade was spent answering a more difficult question: not whether the idea is compelling, but whether it can actually work.

Hardware first

I came to this field with skepticism, curiosity, and a healthy respect for the strongest critiques.

From an economic standpoint, Fetter’s analysis argued that the advantages of space-based solar flux would not overcome the combined costs of launch and transmission. From a technical standpoint, Barde’s pointed assessment in IEEE Spectrum highlighted the impractical scale of many proposed systems, particularly those relying on large microwave apertures.

Those critiques were not obstacles to work around. They were constraints to understand.

The only way to evaluate them rigorously was to build and test real systems.

At the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, I led the development of PRAM, the first hardware designed specifically for a solar power satellite to operate in orbit. It gave us direct data on energy conversion and thermal performance and reinforced a central requirement: achieving sufficient watts per kilogram is a gating factor for any viable space solar energy system.

Across subsequent programs, I worked to advance power beaming technologies (both microwave and laser) and on-orbit experiments designed to answer specific technical questions—either achieving the objective or learning why it was more difficult than it appeared.

There wasn’t a single moment where everything clicked. Understanding accumulated over time.

The constraint that matters

One lesson emerged consistently, and it applies across nearly every power-beaming architecture.

Through the Power Transmitted Over Laser (PTROL) effort, we demonstrated that it’s possible to deliver substantial power through a tightly concentrated beam—but only with highly capable and reliable safety systems. When power is concentrated spatially, safety becomes an active control problem that must work continuously.

Power can be distributed over a large area, maintaining inherently low intensity, or concentrated into a small area, requiring increasingly sophisticated safety mechanisms.

At orbital distances, that second option becomes significantly more difficult. The finite speed of light limits how quickly a system can detect and respond to anomalies. Maintaining reliable safety interlocks over tens of thousands of kilometers is not straightforward.

That tradeoff stayed with me—and became a useful lens for evaluating every subsequent approach.

Why most space solar energy architectures struggle

Most traditional space solar energy architectures rely on microwaves to beam gigawatts from geosynchronous orbit, and the physics of diffraction at 36,000 km is unforgiving. A transmitter operating at 5.8 GHz needs to be on the order of a kilometer in diameter — closer to the size of a city than a spacecraft — just to focus enough energy onto a ground receiver of practical size.

The consequences compound from there: dedicated rectenna receiver farms spanning tens of square kilometers of new land, spectrum licensing and interference complications, legitimate public concern about the safety of gigawatt microwave beams, and financing requirements that dwarf even the largest utility infrastructure projects. Every serious microwave space solar concept I have studied struggles on these points (or avoids them entirely) before it gets to a business plan.

Orbital mirrors avoid some of those problems but introduce many others — extending daylight by perhaps only an hour or two, creating disruptive bright spots in the night sky, and with no path to genuinely dispatchable round-the-clock power. Narrow-beam laser approaches run headlong into eye-safety limits at the power levels needed to be economically relevant; as intensity rises, you approach thresholds that attract weaponization concerns and make regulatory approval challenging. 

After decades of studying this problem, I knew what the answer had to look like before I knew what it was: passively safe, realistically achievable ground infrastructure, scalable with available technology, and manufacturable at cost. 

The turning point

My introduction to Overview Energy’s approach came through a technical discussion over dinner.

Marc Berte walked me through Overview's system architecture. My initial reaction was skepticism, particularly around safety and power density.

The question I kept coming back to was straightforward: how can a system deliver meaningful power from orbit while remaining within acceptable safety limits?

The answer was not one single breakthrough, but a combination of design choices that definitively address the constraint.

Rather than treating the system as a single high-intensity source, Overview distributes transmission across many smaller emitters, creating a wide beam with lower intensity at any given point.

That connects directly back to the tradeoff I had seen before. By distributing power spatially, safety becomes a passive property of the system rather than something that must be actively enforced.

I followed up with additional questions.

The answers held up.

Why this architecture is different

Overview Energy’s approach combines three elements that, together, resolve many of the limitations that have constrained previous space solar energy systems.

Near-infrared wavelengths reduce transmitter aperture size from hundreds of meters to roughly half a meter, fundamentally changing manufacturability, launch, and deployment.

A wide-beam transmission profile distributes energy across a larger area, maintaining power density within safe limits without relying on complex active safety systems.

Geosynchronous orbit provides continuous access to sunlight and the ability to serve large portions of the Earth’s surface, enabling power to be directed where it is needed.

The receivers are existing solar installations. No new land, no new interconnection pathways, no new category of ground infrastructure—just the ability to utilize capacity that already exists but sits idle a significant portion of the time.

Each of these elements has been explored independently. What is different here is that Overview Energy’s approach addresses the full set of constraints simultaneously.

From demonstration to deployment

In November 2025, Overview demonstrated its system from a moving airborne platform, transmitting power under real-world conditions using the same fundamental optical approach intended for orbital deployment.

For me, that matters. It’s one thing to reason about architectures. It’s another to see the system operate under motion, alignment constraints, and atmospheric effects.

It is one step, but an important one. It moves the discussion from what should work to what has been shown to work.

We’re planning to follow the airborne success with a low-Earth-orbit demonstration in 2028, with commercial deployment from geosynchronous orbit targeted for 2030.

Why I joined Overview Energy

My work in this area has included more than 60 peer-reviewed publications, multiple spaceflight missions, and recognition such as the IEEE Journal of Microwaves Best Paper Award and multiple Alan Berman Publication Awards from the Naval Research Laboratory. I also co-authored Power Beaming: History, Theory, and Practice (World Scientific, 2024), a comprehensive technical reference on the field. Last year, I led a team at DARPA that set a new world record for power beaming.

Every program and study contributed to a clearer understanding of the governing constraints—where systems succeed, where they fail, and why.

I joined Overview Energy because this is the first space solar energy architecture I have encountered that addresses those constraints in a unified and internally consistent way, including many of the objections I have raised myself.

Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, who has been evaluating space solar concepts for nearly half a century, put it simply: "This is the first one I've seen that I think might work."

What is different is that the underlying approach aligns with the physics, the safety requirements, and the practical realities of deployment. 

An invitation

To investors and partners: Overview combines real flight heritage, a validated architecture grounded in engineering constraints, and a clear path to commercial operations in geosynchronous orbit by 2030. If you’re looking for deep-tech infrastructure with global-scale impact—and a team that has spent decades earning the right to build it—I encourage you to take a close look.

To engineers and scientists: if you want to work on something that matters at civilizational scale—not a simulation or a proposal, but hardware that goes to orbit and delivers power to the grid—we’re hiring across systems engineering, photovoltaics, power electronics, optical systems, and spacecraft design. The work is real. So is the mission.

Ten years ago, my D3 team walked off a stage with four awards we didn’t expect, for an idea whose time we believed had come.

The next ten years are where we prove it.