Virtus Solis Technologies, Inc.

Overview

Virtus Solis Technologies, Inc. is a Troy, Michigan company developing space-based solar power: satellites that collect sunlight in orbit and send it to Earth as a microwave beam. Its July 2024 filing with the Michigan Public Service Commission says it was founded in 2019. John Bucknell is founder and chief executive; his company biography lists vice president of propulsion at Divergent Technologies and principal engineer on the SpaceX Raptor engine. The team page names two co-founders beside him, Seth Elliott as chief operating officer and Dr. Edward Tate as chief technology officer. Michigan News Source in July 2024 named only Bucknell and Tate. An April 2024 Interesting Engineering headline described the founders as former SpaceX and General Motors engineers, and the article says Tate began his career at General Motors. The company's biography for him does not list it.

Mike Robertson is chief commercial officer. David Berger, a former mayor of Lima, Ohio, handles government affairs. Bryan Zetlen joined as director of strategic initiatives in February 2026 after roles at Axiom, Blue Origin and Sea Launch. The board, headcount and state of incorporation are not public.

Everything demonstrated so far has been on the ground. No satellite has launched and no launch contract has been announced. The near-term milestone is a ground power-beaming test under a federal ARPA-E award that runs to March 2027. The Brae Systems contract is the company's one announced offtake agreement.

The company's team page shows an Intersect Powerlogo as a strategic partner without description, and a 2022 conference deck by Tate and Bucknell lists a "Partnership with Intersect Power." Its nature and stage are unknown, and no Intersect Power statement on it was found.

Architecture

The design has three parts: small satellites assembled into large arrays, an orbit chosen to keep those arrays in view of the ground, and a microwave link to a receiving antenna. Every performance and cost figure below is the company's own.

What has been demonstrated

A timeline graphic in the company's February 2024 Michigan filing lists three ground tests of wireless power transfer: 1 W at 1 meter in December 2021, 10 W at 6.5 meters in July 2022, and 68 W at 100 meters in March 2023. The 2023 white paper says that test "controlled 6,400 transmit antennas via software with beam steering and transferred 68W across 100 meters." The 4% DC-to-DC efficiency is the company's figure, as reported by the Space Frontier Foundation. All of these results are company-reported.

No independent measurement, national lab validation or peer-reviewed paper on any Virtus Solis test was located. The company blog lists conference papers at IEEE WiSEE in 2021 and AIAA SciTech in 2026; both are by company authors describing their own work.

The next test is funded by ARPA-E award DE-AR0002036, "Virtus Solis Wireless Power Transfer," under the Vision OPEN 2024 program, with a period of performance from September 19, 2025 to March 18, 2027. The Department of Energy's NEPA categorical exclusion for the project, published September 16, 2025, sets the target: "over 1 kilowatt of radio frequency power" from a 4 m phased array across 200 m to a 4 m receiving array, at a "minimum 70 percent end-to-end efficiency from source to delivered direct current (DC)." That transmitted power is about 15 times the 68 W the 2023 test transferred, at twice the distance, and more than 17 times its reported efficiency. The document does not state a test location. The Brae release sets a public demonstration for March 2027, the month the award period ends.

The orbital schedule has changed from one company statement to the next. In June 2023, announcing an agreement with Orbital Composites, the company targeted a "first on-orbit test in 36 months of 100+ satellites," which pointed to mid-2026; that has not happened. In February 2024 the two companies announced a 2027 orbital demonstration of in-space robotic assembly transmitting more than 1 kW to Earth, with megawatt-class systems by 2030. The Michigan filing that month added a 60-mile terrestrial beaming test in 2025 and a timeline of 1 kW at 100 km in 2025, a 100 kW orbital pilot in 2027 and a 200 MW plant in 2029. No evidence that the 2025 ground test took place was located.

In June 2024 Bucknell described the 2027 mission to Engineering.com as a 28 m array of 217 modules producing 100 kW in orbit and delivering about 4 kW to the ground. He put its cost at $25 million and said it would use a Northrop Grumman ESPAStar bus with Kuka KR6 robotic arms. The July 2024 Michigan filing gave an orbital demonstration in 2027 and commercial operations in 2030. The Space Frontier Foundation report of January 2026 put the orbital pilot plant at 2027 to 2028 and first power delivery at 2030.

Two conflicts run through that record. The 2027 mission is described as delivering more than 1 kW (February 2024) and about 4 kW (June 2024) to the ground. The first commercial plant is dated 2029 in one Michigan filing and 2030 in the next. No update on the Orbital Composites mission since February 2024 was located as of September 2026, and no launch contract with a named provider has been announced. Starship is the reference vehicle in the company's modeling.

The Brae Systems agreement

Virtus Solis and Brae Systems of Chicago announced a 20-year power purchase agreement on September 30, 2026. The release describes "100 MW of 24/7 orbital solar baseload power, delivering 876,000 MWh annually," with an option for Brae to expand to 250 MW, or 2.19 million MWh a year, within three years of initial commercial operations. It also cites a "dedicated terrestrial receiving station to be constructed in Illinois," a "guaranteed 99.9% uptime," and a "multi-billion-dollar lifetime gross contract commitment." It discloses no price, no commercial operation date, and no conditions precedent, credit support or termination terms.

The stated volume implies continuous full output: 876,000 MWh is 100 MW multiplied by all 8,760 hours in a year, a 100% capacity factor. The company's own survey models its first plant at an 89% capacity factor, which at 100 MW would give 779,640 MWh, and its technology page claims "greater than 90% availability." The release does not say whether 876,000 MWh is a delivery obligation, an expression of nameplate, or subject to shortfall provisions, or how the 99.9% uptime figure is measured.

The release attaches the "multi-billion-dollar lifetime gross contract commitment" to the 250 MW expansion option, so the figure appears to assume the option is exercised. "Multi-billion" is not defined, and without a price the value cannot be checked against the stated volumes.

Brae has little public record. The release describes it as building "high performance subsea GPU data centers" that deploy compute modules in marine environments, and names Vishnu Indukuri as chief executive. Its website advertises "The cheapest bare metal GPUs in the world" from an underwater data center and carries a copyright notice in the name of Pelgo Industries Incorporated; it lists no deployed capacity, location, team, funding or investors. No funding round or Form D was located. The only coverage of the agreement found was syndicated copies of the release, and no public evidence was found that Brae operates data center load of any size today. No interconnection, siting or permitting filing for the Illinois receiving station was found.

The release subheadline calls the deal the "world's first commercial space-based solar PPA," and Bucknell is quoted calling it "the world's first commercial RF space solar power purchase agreement." There is an earlier U.S. contract. On December 3, 2009 the California Public Utilities Commission approved, in Resolution E-4286, a 15-year agreement under which Solaren would sell PG&E200 MW and 1,700 GWh a year from satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Power was to be transmitted by radio frequency to a receiving station in Fresno County, with commercial operation due in June 2016. The CPUC attached conditions, including that PG&E not rely on the project for procurement planning until construction began. No record of any delivery under that contract was located. The Brae release does not mention it.

Funding

The one award on the federal record is the ARPA-E grant. USASpending lists $1,922,273 in federal funding and $213,585 of recipient cost share, $2,135,858 in total, with the recipient in Troy, Michigan. The cost share is 10% of the total, which matches the lender Enduring Planet's description of a "$2 million" DOE contract reimbursing 90% of eligible costs. The Brae release calls it a "$2M corporate development agreement with ARPA-E." The federal share is $1.92 million, not $2 million. The Space Frontier Foundation report says the company advanced to the next round of ARPA-E selection in September 2024; the award's period of performance starts September 19, 2025. No primary source gives a selection or award date.

No Form D appears on EDGAR as of September 30, 2026, and EDGAR has no company entity under the Virtus Solis name. A filing under another legal name cannot be ruled out. No equity round, lead investor, amount or valuation has been disclosed in any primary source. The Space Frontier Foundation report says the company submitted two NASA NIAC Step B proposals in September 2024; no award was found. Searches found no SBIR or STTR award, no Air Force award and no Michigan state grant, though SBIR.gov was not queried directly.

Two accelerator programs are on the record without amounts. The company blog reports its selection for Cohort 11 of the Seraphim Space Accelerator in a post dated May 4 with no year shown; Seraphim's investor showcase video for the cohort is dated June 29, 2023. URBAN-X by MINI named Virtus Solis in its 14th cohort in March 2024.

Enduring Planet, a climate-focused revenue-based lender, says in an undated case study that Virtus Solis "returned to Enduring Planet for additional capital," without an amount, and quotes Bucknell saying the financing "allowed us to meet all the DOE's milestones." The same case study carries company claims that could not be verified: a customer pipeline of five across two continents, including material terms with two customers and a memorandum of understanding with a third, and more than $2 billion of potential future revenue. None of those counterparties is named.

Competitive position

Caltech's Space Solar Power Project is the only effort in this group that has beamed power from space to Earth. Its SSPD-1 demonstrator launched on January 3, 2023 aboard a Momentus Vigoride vehicle. Its MAPLE experiment first transferred power wirelessly in orbit on March 3, 2023, and beamed detectable power to Earth before the mission ended on November 11, 2023. Caltech's release gives no power levels. The project was funded by more than $100 million from Donald Bren and $12.5 million from Northrop Grumman between 2014 and 2017.

Aetherflux, which beams power from low Earth orbit by infrared laser, raised a $50 million Series A in April 2025. In May 2026 it rebranded as Cowboy Space Corporation and raised a $275 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation led by Index Ventures, turning toward orbital data centers and rockets. It said then that it still planned to launch its first power-beaming satellite later in 2026; no launch was found as of September 30, 2026. Space Solar, in the UK, signed a letter of intent with Reykjavik Energy in October 2024 targeting 30 MW in Iceland by 2030 using its CASSIOPeiA design.

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's Arachne experiment, a Northrop Grumman sandwich-tile spacecraft for radio-frequency beaming from low Earth orbit, will not fly. Its launch, first planned for 2025, was rescheduled for late 2027, and the flight was then cancelled in 2025 after ground testing covered what program manager James Winter put at "99-99.5 percent" of its objectives, he told Breaking Defense in July 2026.

Japan's OHISAMA satellite, from Japan Space Systems with funding from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, is reported in trade coverage as a roughly 180 kg low-orbit spacecraft designed to beam about 1 kW to receivers at Suwa. It is manifested on the fifth flight of Space One's Kairos rocket, which has failed on all three of its flights to date, and had not launched as of September 2026. China's published roadmap, reported by Xinhua in June 2022 around Xidian University's Zhuri test facility, targets a 10 kW low-orbit transmission test in 2028, more than 100 kW by 2030 with transmission tested over 36,000 km, 10 MW by 2035 and a 2 GW commercial plant by 2050. Those are plans. The European Space Agency's SOLARIS study was approved in November 2022 with a decision on a development program expected by the end of 2025; that decision was not found.

Virtus Solis differs in its orbit: Caltech, Aetherflux, Arachne and OHISAMA all flew or planned to fly in low Earth orbit, and Virtus Solis plans a Molniya orbit. It also differs from Aetherflux in its beam, 10 GHz microwave against infrared laser. Of the efforts above, only Caltech's has a published space-to-ground result, so no source compares the designs on measured performance.

Independent economics

NASA's Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy report "Space-Based Solar Power" (Rodgers et al., January 2024) costed two geostationary reference designs of 2 GW each, operating from 2050 to 2080, in fiscal 2022 dollars. Baseline lifecycle cost came to $0.61/kWh for the first design and $1.59/kWh for the second. That is 12 to 31 times and 32 to 80 times the $0.02 to $0.05/kWh projected for terrestrial alternatives in 2050. Launch was 71% and 77% of the respective totals. A multi-variable sensitivity case combining $500/kg launch, electric-propulsion orbit transfer, 50% efficient cells, a 15-year hardware life and cheaper servicing and debris-removal vehicles brought the figures to $0.04 and $0.08/kWh in the report's summary table ($0.03 for the first design in its text). The report says SBSP is "generally understood" to be "cost prohibitive and technically infeasible today."

NASA did not model a Molniya orbit or free-flying tile satellites assembled into arrays. Its second design uses tiles, but as one tethered structure in geostationary orbit, and the report says novel architectures were excluded, so its figures do not price the Virtus Solis design.

The company's February 2024 survey says it takes "exception to the costs generated within the NASA study" and re-ran NASA's designs, and others, on its own assumptions, including Starship launch, a 20-year finance life and a 13% hurdle rate. Its Table 1 lists NASA's designs at a "stated" $30 and $80/MWh, and at $52.96 and $88.73/MWh on the company's own calculation. The "stated" figures are NASA's most favorable sensitivity case; NASA's baselines are $610 and $1,590/MWh. With launch at 71% of the first design's cost in NASA's breakdown, the assumed launch price is the largest single input to either result. The survey does not break out how much of its difference from NASA comes from launch and how much from financing. Engineering.com's June 2024 paraphrase of the NASA result as "12 times" terrestrial solar is the low end of the first design's range.

Frazer-Nash Consultancy, working for the European Space Agency with London Economics, estimated in August 2022 a first-system LCOE of €69/MWh, with first-of-a-kind capital of €9.8 billion, €7.6 billion by the tenth system and €15.8 billion of research and development. That study used a 5% hurdle rate; Virtus Solis uses 13%. A higher rate raises levelized cost for a capital-heavy asset, so the two figures are not on the same basis.

Peer-reviewed work by Che, Liu and He in Joule(2025) ran NASA's designs through a European capacity-expansion model. It found the first design could cut total system costs by 7% to 15% if its capital cost fell to about 14 times projected 2050 solar PV capital cost to play a complementary role, or about 9 times to become dominant. The second design would need about 9 times and 6 times.

Henri Barde, formerly head of ESA's power systems division, wrote in IEEE Spectrum in June 2024 that the concepts "all seem to stand on shaky technical ground" and that efficiency gains in research cells have not carried over to low-cost commercial cells. None of these studies evaluates Virtus Solis specifically.

Regulation

Michigan is where the company has engaged regulators. On February 22, 2024 it filed comments in Michigan Public Service Commission Case No. U-21568 asking the commission to name space-based solar power explicitly in rules under Act 235 of 2023 and make it eligible for credits. On July 13, 2024 it filed an amended request for a declaratory ruling under MPSC Rule 448, asking whether space-based solar is a "renewable energy system" under Section 11(k) of Public Act 295 of 2008 and an eligible system under Section 39 for Michigan renewable energy credits. Michigan News Source reported the request pending in July 2024. The docket number and outcome were not found.

No Virtus Solis application to the Federal Communications Commission was found, whether an experimental license, a Part 25 space station authorization or a Part 18 filing. The 10 GHz beam frequency is not among the industrial, scientific and medical frequencies listed in 47 CFR 18.301, which include 2,450 MHz and 5,800 MHz and nothing between 5,800 MHz and 24.125 GHz. Which rules would govern a space-to-ground power beam at 10 GHz is a legal question this profile does not answer, and no U.S. rulemaking specific to power beaming was located.

The FCC's nearest recent action on a space-energy company is its July 9, 2026 approval of Reflect Orbital's first satellite, which reflects sunlight and does not beam power. No FAA launch or reentry license involving Virtus Solis was found, and none would be expected before a launch is contracted. No Illinois filing for the Brae receiving station was found.

Key considerations

Tested scale and contracted scale are far apart. The largest reported test delivered 68 W; the Brae contract starts at 100 MW, about 1.5 million times larger, and the modeled first plant is 200 MW. The intermediate steps are the ARPA-E ground test, due by March 2027, and a first orbital test that has moved from a mid-2026 target to a range of 2027 to 2028. Efficiency has to move from a reported 4% to the 70% the ARPA-E project targets and the company projects for its system.

Every performance and cost figure is self-generated: the test results, the per-satellite output (itself stated as both 1 kW and about 500 W), the availability claim and every LCOE.

The company's cost figures range from $25.40/MWh for an 8 GW build to $74.64/MWh for the first plant in the same table, with $30 and $35/MWh quoted elsewhere, and its first-plant capital appears as $695 million excluding R&D and as "less than $1.5 billion." NASA's baselines for its own designs, $610/MWh and $1,590/MWh, sit far above those figures, though NASA did not model this architecture. The Frazer-Nash first-system estimate for ESA, €69/MWh, used a 5% hurdle rate against the company's 13%, so it is not directly comparable. The company's own recalculation of NASA's first design, on its launch and financing assumptions, comes out at $52.96/MWh.

Capital is the second gap. The federal award is $1.92 million, or $2.14 million with the company's own cost share; the company's modeled first plant costs $695 million before R&D, roughly 325 times the larger figure, and the 2027 orbital mission alone was put at $25 million. No equity financing is on the public record.

The contract carries its own questions: a volume stated at a 100% capacity factor against the company's modeled 89%, a 99.9% uptime guarantee from a system that has not flown, no disclosed price or start date, and a counterparty with no disclosed operations or funding. The Solaren and PG&E contract of 2009 had a CPUC-approved 2016 commercial operation date, and no deliveries under it were located.

Sources