We need more capitalism in space. At the time when we started Robinhood, young people were not really a part of the financial system. The process of creating Robinhood put the importance of capitalism, especially for rapid industrialization, very much into focus for me. If you give more people access to capitalism, the rate of progress is going to be very quick. Put that side by side with the space industry outside of a handful of companies, right? My thought process was we need more capitalism in space. The idea behind this is that there's going to be verticals of the economy that natively live in low Earth orbit that people haven't really thought about yet.
Baiju. Welcome to the show.
Yeah, my pleasure. You just finished up giving a talk on going from Robinhood to space. So, let's start there. How does one go from Robinhood to going and starting a space company?
Yeah. So, I've actually wanted to do this for a pretty long time. My background growing up, I grew up around NASA and the aerospace industry. My dad was a research scientist working at Langley Air Force Base when I was a kid. I went on to study physics at Stanford. And it was kind of my entire life I thought I was going to be studying string theory or quantum gravity or fundamental physics or math. In the 2008 time frame, my life took a little bit of a detour and I went into finance and obviously that led to starting Robinhood. But I'd kind of had this dream in my heart from the beginning that if I ever got a chance to, I wanted to be a part of the space industry. In particular, it was the advent of heavy launch vehicles, seeing the first landing of the SpaceX rocket. I was like, man, this is happening in my lifetime, this is so transformative and it's something I want to be a part of. So, I'd been thinking about wanting to do something space related for a long time. I think also the process of creating Robinhood put the importance of capitalism, especially for rapid industrialization, very much into focus for me. Because at the time when we started Robinhood, one of my core observations was that young people were not really a part of the financial system. And it was this sort of sentiment and other factors. And fundamentally, it resulted in a society where a lot of the younger population wasn't a part of the financial system. Our idea was if you give more people access to capital markets, it's going to be pretty transformative. If you give more people access to capitalism, the rate of progress is going to be very quick. Now, put that side by side with the space industry outside of a handful of companies. It's very much government driven. And in turn, my thought process was we need more capitalism in space. The idea behind this is that there's going to be verticals of the economy that natively live in low Earth orbit that people haven't really thought about yet. If you look at the industrial applications for space, a lot of them are telecommunications, Earth imaging, defense stuff. Our thinking is that there's room for more. And one of the ones that are going to be native there that we intend to pioneer is building an energy grid in orbit. So actually taking low Earth orbit and some of the orbits that are going to be nearly continuously illuminated and building substantial infrastructure for power in those orbits.
So talk to me about why build energy grids in orbit now or the base concept of Aetherflux being putting satellites, large satellites up in space that beam solar energy down to Earth. Why do that now? Because that's been a concept that's been explored since the 80s with NASA papers, right?
Yeah. It's actually been around even before the 80s and 70s. The original idea for space solar power comes from an Isaac Asimov short story from 1941. The early concepts for space solar power called for building it in two ways that are pretty different from the way that we're thinking about doing it. The first one was you would achieve near continuous illumination in geostationary orbits. The challenge with that is that it's really far away, very expensive to get there. The architecture for satellites that exist in that environment have to be substantially radiation tolerant. Number two was to use a method of power transmission that uses microwave radiation and something like a phased array of microwave antennas that use constructive and destructive interference to beam form and beam shape. The problem with this is that in order to do this, especially at an altitude of low Earth or geostationary, the size of your spacecraft is frankly gigantic. You're talking about satellites that are going to be several kilometers in diameter. Great idea, but the problem is that we don't know how to do stuff like that. I say we, I mean we as humans in 2025, that's not something that humans do. I fundamentally believe that we'll get there in the future, but I think this is the crux on which a lot of these space solar power ideas have suffered and died on the vine because the upfront cost to demonstrate it is so gargantuan that there's not really a starting point. Our approach is very different: to use largely commercial components and to fly it in lower Earth orbit and instead of having the method of power transmission require these gigantic aperture sizes, to leverage the fact that there's been 50 years of advancement of things like fiber optic lasers to actually use that as a method of power transmission. The other benefits of that is that you get a collimated beam of light or near collimated beam of light which will project a relatively small spot on the ground. We have two demo missions that go up next year. The first one targeting summertime next year. Both of these missions will project a spot on the ground that's roughly 10 meters in diameter. Still pretty big, but we think in the future we're going to be able to get that down substantially smaller, to 5 meters or even smaller.
Off the top of your head, what sort of energy densities do we expect at a 10 meter diameter? What would it power?
Yeah. The first mission is going to be more of a demonstrator mission. The goal is to actually generate electrical current on the ground. This will be hundreds of watts in a good scenario that we'll generate on the ground. But again, a lot of these limitations are how do you get this capability in orbit and demonstrate it in a two year time frame. In the future, we'll make satellites that are much higher power density. The beam will get smaller and then you'll be able to really look at the power density on the ground and optimize that and turn it up.
Talk a little bit about the commercial off-the-shelf parts as much as possible, but your mission one bus is made by Apex, correct? And how do you view partnerships within the industry where you have to make buy decisions on certain parts and what you choose to build in-house and what you choose to procure like an Apex bus?
Yeah. Working with Apex, they've been super helpful. Shout out to Ian and Max if you guys are watching this. Our goal was to try to make this an engineering and an economics problem, not a science problem. And I think that's led us to the path of using largely commercial components. I think as we get to industrialization scale, we'll look to insource more of the components. For the first mission at least, we're focusing on the power transmission, the pointing algorithms, the ground stations, the actual power rectification on the ground. As we get to bigger scale and we start to think about what a constellation of these things looks like, we'll get much more optimized on the actual pipeline that makes them.
You've outlined the demo architecture, single bus, proof of concept, 10 meter diameter spot on the ground. What does a version one of Aetherflux look like? How many satellites would you need to deliver meaningful amounts of power to a customer on the end?
Yeah. It depends on how you construct a constellation. If you were to pick a single spot on the ground, you would be able to achieve around the clock coverage with roughly 100 satellites. The number might be a little bit more or less, but that's the ballpark in my mind. The benefit of that is you'll be able to have one satellite that's beaming power and then as it moves out of the field of view of the ground station, you'd have another satellite that picks up behind it. So it'll be a handoff mechanism satellite to satellite.
And who are your main customers in a broad sense?
The first application is going to be Department of Defense, Department of War applications. Think for deployed military bases where there's really no power infrastructure. The way the US government generates power in these places today is by getting diesel fuel transported out there. In really hostile environments, you actually have planes carrying the diesel fuel with fighter jets for defensive capability. You're burning fuel to transport fuel. It's very costly, but these are the solutions our government's using to avoid putting actual troops at risk, which was a big driver of casualties during the Iraq war of actually transporting fuel on the ground out to hostile environments. So it continues to be logistics, supply chains, how do you get power out into the battlefield. These are hotly contested things. Being able to provide power from space with relatively little infrastructure on the ground is what we're hoping to deliver.
Yeah. So you talked about the DoD, Department of War applications. In today's environment, how are you positioning Aetherflux to be at the forefront of energy security and national security?
You just said it right. The goal here is to provide another source of energy. When we think about these DoD, Department of Defense applications, these are initial markets that we're getting into. If you think about the broad goal of the company, it's to build an energy grid in orbit. This is like one appliance in some ways that you're plugging into that energy grid. We do think that there's going to be quite a few commercial applications for it in the future, but you'll have to stay tuned on that.
