Sam Adlen is Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Space Solar, a company working to harvest solar power in space and beam it wirelessly back to Earth.
After a Physics degree at Oxford, Adlen worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a Mars mission. That early experience cemented a career-long conviction that space holds some of Earth’s most important answers.
Since then, he has held senior strategy roles at Finmeccanica (now Leonardo), successfully exited a logistics startup, and served as Lead Technologist for Space at Innovate UK. Adlen then spent a decade at the Satellite Applications Catapult as Chief Strategy Officer, working with hundreds of businesses to unlock the economic potential of space.
It was at SatAppsCatapult that Adlen met his co-founder Martin Soltau. Together, they identified a glaring gap: the technology and economics of space-based solar power were compelling, but no coalition existed to drive it forward. So they built one. The Space Energy Initiative now unites more than 90 organisations and government bodies. From that foundation, Space Solar was born.
Sam Adlen sees space-based solar power as a trillion-dollar market capable of meeting 20% of the world’s future electricity needs and, ultimately, becoming the cheapest energy source available. Just 2GW in the UK system alone is projected to save £1 billion per annum in energy costs. Beyond energy, the project is also driving advances in in-space robotic assembly, terrestrial wireless power transmission, and provides over 143,000 high-value jobs.
Sam Adlen holds an MPhys and PhD from Oxford and an MBA from Imperial College London. He is an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at Bayes Business School and co-founder of the Spatial Finance Initiative.
