Starpath just turned the space solar industry upside down. The startup launched its "Starlight" panels at $9.81 per watt - a staggering 90% cost reduction from the industry standard of $7-250 per watt. With shipping starting in October and ambitious plans to outproduce the entire global supply of space-rated solar by next year, Starpath is betting mass production can finally make off-world colonies economically viable.
Starpath CEO Saurav Shroff has a blunt assessment of America's space ambitions: we're "one order of magnitude high on cost and one order of magnitude low on ambition." Today, his company fired the opening shot in what could reshape how we power space exploration.
Starting September 25, Starpath began selling space-rated solar panels at prices that sound almost too good to be true. The company's "Starlight" panels clock in at $9.81 per watt for engineering models and $11.20 per watt for flight-ready versions. That's roughly 90% cheaper than the current industry range of $7-250 per watt.
"It's a win for humanity if our solar panels are available commercially for the entire space industry at a price that is 90% cheaper than what you can get today," Shroff told TechCrunch. The company promises three-week delivery times initially, dropping to just three days by December - a dramatic shift from today's five to 14-month lead times.
The secret sauce? Starpath built its own automated production line, though the company keeps most details under wraps. What they will say is bold: by next year, they claim their single production line could outproduce the rest of the world's space-rated solar supply combined, with enough capacity to power every satellite made on Earth.
This isn't just about undercutting competitors. Starpath's real mission is terraforming the solar system, starting with lunar bases and Mars colonies. When the team ran numbers on powering a serious lunar outpost with current technology, the economics broke down completely. "You'd literally be looking at spending more than the GDP of the entire world on solar power" to scale today's satellite supply chain economics to city-sized installations, Shroff explained.
"The economics sort of kind of work for the satellite industry," he acknowledged. "They're very expensive, but they do not work for building a city on Mars."
That realization drove Starpath to design its own solution from scratch. The math now works differently: "For a multi-million-dollar satellite... it will only cost you $100,000 to get the power system," Shroff said. The engineering model launches in the second week of October, suitable for prototyping and pre-launch satellite assembly, while the flight-rated version ships in Q4.
