Baiju Bhatt, Aetherflux CEO: A Fortt Knox Conversation

How's it going, man? Thanks for having me on.

Actually, the technology transmits power with infrared lasers.

So, a different way of power beaming. Very challenging for sure. And it's been an idea that's actually been in the sort of NASA Department of Energy world for the better part of 50 years. So it's an old idea from the 1970s. You think it'd be worthwhile for me to kind of zoom out and explain what the concept?

Yeah. So based on my readings of history, you kind of look back at the last time the world and the United States faced an energy crisis, the 1970s, where there was big focus on what are the alternative fuels of future sources of energy for humanity. And an idea came out of that which was this idea of space solar power. So solar technology was, you know, in its infancy. One of the main use cases for it was powering satellites because how else do you get power out to these devices that are, you know, far away from anywhere to plug them in? And the concept was, well, what if you could collect solar power at orbit and use that to transmit it down to the ground? And the original idea called for building basically an array the size of a small city, number one. And number two, it called for building that in geostationary, which is, you know, quite far from the Earth. It's like nearly a tenth of the way to the moon. And while that was a very cool idea, the problem with it was you just couldn't build it. There was no real path towards building it that didn't involve building a city in space. Our approach to this was the core idea of building power in space and power infrastructure in space. My goal in starting this company was like, how do you make that real? And our approach is pretty different and it's two-pronged. The first one is instead of having to use these monolithic arrays to transmit power, is there a way of power transmission that lets you kind of miniaturize it, which is what our first mission is doing, which is actually using near optical infrared lasers to transmit the light. The benefit of that is that you actually don't have a minimum size in space to do it as you would with radio frequency power transmission.

So you do lose energy in the power transmission process for sure. The idea is that for the places in the world where there's no power grid, right? So imagine like a contested environment for the Department of Energy or, sorry, Department of War, or disaster recovery, or just like expeditionary power. That's kind of where we think the use case for this technology comes to life, where you'll be much more agnostic to energy losses through the transmission. For the really energy-intensive applications, we announced about a month, month and a half ago that we're actually building solar-powered AI data center satellites, which actually kind of circumvents the problem by taking the things that consume the power and putting them directly on the satellites. And that approach actually involves just using lasers or RF to transmit data down. So kind of two applications of this idea of we need to build big power infrastructure in space because the sun is always shining, or nearly always shining depending on the orbits that you're in.

Yeah. So you got two options. Column A is you transmit power, or sorry, column A is the old approach which is that you have jet fuel that gets transported out to the battlefield or wherever this contested environment is and you've got a diesel generator that's running that powers the thing. The challenge with this, as the Department of War has written about, is that during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the process of getting the fuel out in the battlefield was a major driver of US casualties because the trade lines, right? The way that you transport the fuel out there is like a major attack vector. And so what the US government shifted to was actually transporting the fuel out via planes and actually having jet fighter support to do it. And so then you can continue to do this, but you quickly realize that it's very costly and that you're actually burning fuel to transport fuel. And so the motivation there came from is there a way to do this where on the ground you can have a small receiver where all the power infrastructure is actually just in orbit. So if you've got the receiver and you can put it out and you have line of sight to, you know, clear skies, you can just transmit power directly from space. And that's the version that we're obviously pioneering. And with this, we'll do the first demonstration of optical power beaming or near optical power beaming from low Earth orbit, ideally starting this summer, which is when the first satellite goes up. And that technology will be building a dedicated receiver for it, which at first will be about 10 meters in diameter, but we hope to shrink that down to like 2 to 5 meters roughly speaking in diameter for future versions of it. And so that's when you start...

Yeah.

Yeah. And you can also imagine a world where this is packaged up and you can kind of unfold it once you are in a place where you need the power.

That's kind of the trajectory we're trying to take this thing, is how small can you make the receiver. And our architecture for the receivers actually is largely unpowered. So it's not generating power to power up the receiver so you can get the power. And it also has a mechanism that communicates back up to the satellites without needing, you know, to generate its own return signal. It actually uses reflective optics on the receiver to do it. So, some kind of some ideas in there that make this, we think, more operationally useful. And like I said a second ago, this has not really been done before. And there's been a lot that's kind of been talked about this. My motivation for starting the company was I kind of saw a direct path towards taking this really old idea and just bringing it to life and saying, 'Hey, this is not fiction.' You know, me and a group of 35 people, 30 people were able to go from zero to a version of this that demonstrates capability in two, two and a half years.

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's an attack vector. It's kind of as old as warfare, right? And the first thing that you attack is whatever installation the US government has, it needs fuel out there, right? Any of our allied forces, they need fuel to be able to do just about anything. And that's why this is like a solution that we think kind of provides a really meaningful advantage once we obviously demonstrate it and get it up and running. And potentially on the scale of the way drones have changed the battlefield because you take a key limitation. You know, with drones, it has to do with size. It has to do with whether you need an actual person to be in the vehicle that's acting on the battlefield. Once you alter those conditions, you see, you know, Ukraine able to have in some cases an asymmetric advantage over Russia. And then if you've got something similar on the logistics line, I imagine with energy, you could have a similar impact.

In the past, technologies at this stage have been heavily supported by government research because we're talking not a year or two from being able to get to the sort of scale and efficiency that you're talking about wanting to get to. It's potentially a half a decade, decade time scale and that can be a difficult one for commercial enterprises to operate under. You did in the past and I guess to some extent do have these labs of very large companies. You had Xerox PARC, you had HP Labs, IBM that did more on balance on the research side, but often it was US government support and their major labs that helped with this kind of thing. Is that still a strong support and ally as some of the funding gets pulled back or perhaps when it has to do with war fighting there's more research funding available there?

Yeah. No siblings, only child. I was born in Warrensburg, Missouri.

My family moved to the US. My dad had always wanted to study physics. So he grew up in India. My mom's also from India and I think he had been applying to PhD programs in the US for a really long time. The way he makes it sound like it was the better part of 10 years. And he kind of was like, I'm going to devote myself to science. Not going to get married. Definitely not going to have kids. Gonna focus on science and eventually get into a PhD program in the US. And I guess my dad was maybe throwing, you know, waving the white flag a little bit, decides to get married to my mom. My mom is pregnant with me and then lo and behold, he gets into University of Huntsville, Alabama, to study physics. So all those things sort of came roaring back. My mom had no real interest in coming to the United States. Like she's, you know, she grew up in India, didn't speak English. She was the daughter of, you know, she's got a bunch of siblings and she kind of wanted to stay at home with the family in India. And so there she was going to the embassy. They see that she's pregnant with me and they're like, 'Oh, cool. Your son's going to be born in America.' And mom's like, tells me she leaves the embassy with tears in her eyes because she didn't want to actually come. And that was how little old Baiju was born in America. We came to the US and my mom had, my parents I think had one or two Indian families that they knew, one of which were doctors in that area. So my mom just went out to stay with the doctors around the time I was being born because they couldn't really afford healthcare, right? And so yeah, that was kind of my childhood. Grew up around physics with my dad studying it. My dad worked at NASA Langley Research Center through my childhood.

Yeah, my mom was basically on a 'my son is going to get born' trip to Warrensburg, Missouri, where there was the one Indian doctor family they knew or one of the few Indian doctors they knew.

And then my dad was doing his PhD at University of Huntsville, Alabama. He unfortunately wasn't able to finish. Had some health problems and needed to get a job. And that's where Langley Research Center comes in. Where my dad was a contractor actually even before he got his citizenship doing research work with NASA. And you can't, you know, it's kind of looking back on it, it's like he was doing atmospheric sciences and doing satellite stuff in the 90s and it's like, you know, the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree, I guess.

No. I never actually lived in...

Yeah, most of my childhood was in Virginia.

Yeah. I was an only child, so I was like, I was also one of the few non-white kids in my school, which 80s and 90s, I definitely stuck out like a sore thumb. I played, I yeah, read a lot of comic books, watched a lot of X-Men. Those are the kinds of things I was into as a kid. I played Magic the Gathering a lot as a kid. I was a nerd. Was a big old nerd.

Yeah. I was also really overweight as a kid, too. And I lost like nearly a third of my body weight when I got to high school. Kind of was like, you know, it was like a butterfly that came out of my cocoon almost.

Very, very intentional. Another bit of my childhood sort of that I glossed over here, my dad's kidneys failed when I was a kid. And so that was like kind of the backdrop of a lot of my childhood, right? My dad was on dialysis, had a lot of healthcare stuff going on. And so when I was actually a little bit older, when I was in eighth grade, his kidney disease took a little bit of a turn for the worse. He was hospitalized for a long time, had some pretty major operations done, which was kind of the point in life where, you know, my dad is thankfully healthy and happy today. He's an older guy, but he's still alive and well. That was kind of the moment in my life where I went from being a kid to kind of feeling the gravity and the weight of adulthood, right, where I was like, what if the worst happens here? Like what the heck am I going to do, you know? Like am I gonna go back to India? Like no, I've never lived there. I'm an American. Like this has been my home my whole life. And I kind of had this realization that like no matter what, if I did really, really well in school, that was going to kind of be my path forward. That was going to be, you know, worst case scenario, the reason why I'd be able to stay in America. And so the other part of this was like in high school, it's kind of those one of those things where like the difficult circumstances in life are the ones that are the character defining ones. And I got a big old wakeup call of reality at like 12, 13, 14. And kind of made studying physics and math the focus of my sort of late childhood, early adulthood.

Yeah. I mean, broad strokes, yeah. It's like you kind of, the version of it that I remember very distinctly is kind of feeling at a really young age like life was happening to me, you know, like the circumstance of my dad was happening to me. We were like grown up pretty not very well to do, like kind of not super wealthy. And just like I was ostracized a decent bit as a kid. Like I was okay at school. I wouldn't say I was like the best student in the world. I was like, I feel like I can't control anything in my life and the one thing I feel like I can control is my education and studying. And once I kind of like realized that I could exert a degree of agency over that, like if I put in more time, I would do better in school. If I did better in school, I kind of at an early age in life realized this sort of power of goal setting, which is like if you set where you want to go and you pick kind of the hardest version of it, like you'll probably get it most of the time, right? You might not get it the first time, you might not get it the second time, but if you keep going for it, you will. And in that case, it was to try to get into a school like Stanford, which, you know, coming out of Southern Virginia was kind of unheard of, right?

I'd actually never been. I just applied. I mean, it was like...

Yeah. Well, Harvard to four schools. And I got into, Stanford was the one that was binding. So, I got waitlisted at Harvard, MIT, so I guess they missed out.