Hey everyone, good afternoon. How's everybody doing? Welcome back. Um, can go back to our seats. Um, I'm really excited for this part of the conversation because um, I have a few interviews lined up starting now to get more into the kind of climate tech and kind of some of the cutting edge technology that people are working on outside of the big industrials which has sort of led the energy conversation here up to now. Two super interesting companies that are taking technologies that you know you're familiar with from the headlines, I mean solar and data centers and also nuclear fusion, and doing them in a completely different and very innovative way. Um, and I think maybe a good place to start for both of you is to just tell us a little bit about what you're doing. And maybe Greg, you know, just to start with Shine, what are you guys doing differently on nuclear fusion? And when we were preparing for this, we made this point that it's actually not a moonshot or you're sort of avoiding the moonshot approach to fusion. What does that mean?
Yeah. So, and I don't know if the room is familiar with what nuclear fusion is, but it's a way of making energy by fusing atoms instead of splitting them, which is what we call nuclear fission, which is the nuclear energy we're all used to today. And the exciting thing about fusion is that the fuel essentially is unlimited. It's the light elements. It's the most abundant materials in the universe. So, once we crack the cost curve on fusion and can make energy with it, it's just going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper over time. We're never going to run out of fuel and essentially we'll have increased access to energy. We're just, as price comes down, we can use more and more of it is the way I think about it. As the unit economics get cheaper, it's almost like chips, right? As the cost of chips came down, we just built more and more compute. The total market grew even though unit costs went down lower and lower and lower. So fusion has the potential to reshape the world in that way. That's what's most exciting. The challenge with fusion is one of the most technically difficult and technically demanding ways of making energy that we know about. And so you have to invest tremendous amounts of money in manufacturing know-how and experience and that's what it's going to take to get it over the line. The unit economics don't work out today. We're nowhere close to where we need to be, 5 cents a kilowatt hour or so to compete with terrestrial electricity generation. So one of our key innovations, and we're a technology company, we have a lot of technological innovations, but I'd say our largest innovation is our business innovation, which is to say, yeah, we're endgame fusion energy. But on the way, there are actually customers that fusion can serve that pay better unit economics than electricity producers. So, while fusion may be worth 5 cents a kilowatt hour for heat, it's actually worth $100,000 a kilowatt hour to certain test customers. So, we said, let's start there. We'll practice. We'll get the cost curve to come down, and as it does, we'll tackle larger and larger markets. And this isn't a new approach. It is new to fusion. But you know, you've seen that.
What other industries are you talking about?
So EVs for example, right? You started with like Tesla started with the Roadster which was a super expensive car that very few people could afford but it was great unit economics and practice and they made the cars cheaper. The Model S and X had about a 20 times larger addressable market than the Roadster and the Model 3 and Y. Again about 20 times bigger than the S and X. And so...
But I mean other users of fusion.
Oh users of fusion. Sorry. Yeah. I was just, so fusion produces its energy in the form of particles called neutrons. And these neutrons, and if you're making electricity, make heat. You capture the kinetic energy from them. They make heat. But you can sell those neutrons for other uses. So one of the most important uses today is in testing products. So you can use neutrons like an X-ray. It's like a neutron X-ray. X-rays pass through light material, get absorbed by heavy material. Neutrons are the opposite. Like they can pass through heavy stuff, get absorbed by light stuff. So, if you want to image things made of carbon fiber or composites, like you find in a lot of advanced jet engines or things like that, neutrons are really good at looking for defects that would otherwise cause the engines to explode. And so, there are markets like that where the unit economics are a lot better. The current supply chains are sort of stretched to their limit because historically actually we've depended on fission to make those neutrons. So, we have very old reactors that are at capacity. So, that's one. Using neutrons to, when you can make more of them, and we've gotten to this point now, you can use them to change matter from low value to high value. Think turning lead into gold, only that's not worth it because gold's not valuable enough. You can turn uranium into medicine, materials that are somewhere between a hundred million and a billion dollars a gram. Okay? If you think of a sugar packet that you dump in your coffee, like that's the market we're now in. So we've gotten the cost of fusion down through test to where we can now produce medicine. So that's sort of where we're at now.
That's so fascinating. Yeah. Um, Baiju, and I mean so people may be more familiar with you from previous venture Robinhood and tell, I mean tell us the stock trading app. Um, tell us about how you got from that to what you're doing now with solar and satellites and just love to hear about how this technology works especially for the military applications that you're imagining.
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me here. So, some of you probably know I started my career co-founding Robinhood and ran that as co-CEO for the first, you know, close to 10 years. And I, interestingly, my background is in physics and math and I grew up around the aerospace world. My dad was a research scientist at NASA Langley, which is actually not that far from here. And I made a pretty bold declaration a long time ago that if I hit it big at this finance thing, I was going to start a space company. Lo and behold, about two years ago, I made the transition to work on this full-time. And the concept behind Aether Flux is to build an energy grid in space. And the motivation behind this is actually kind of rhymes with the motivation behind fusion. I think both of these are ideas from the era of the 1970s where the world was at an energy crisis. And my thought process was that as the world was entering a new era of energy usage with things like AI, there was going to be an opportunity to commercialize space and to bring an energy company to life in space. So in the last two years we've been focused primarily for the first year at least on building space-based solar power which is an old NASA and Department of Energy idea around transmitting power from space to earth. We think that the niche application for that is going to be places where there's no existing power grid. So think military bases. As we've explored this further, I think applications such as providing power to upper atmosphere to persistently fly drones is going to be a natural use case for this as well. But kind of in the theme of and the thesis of energy and space, the obvious market that we've wanted to tackle is around data center usage because even in the last two years that has emerged as not, you know, kind of a growing part of the energy usage around the world but rather the dominant new energy user around the world. And so we announced this a few months ago that we're actually going to be deploying our very first data center in space concept in early 2027. We've got a lot more announcements that we're going to be making here relatively soon on exactly how that's going to work. But both of these technologies, whether it's power beaming or data centers in space, we've been pioneering for the last two years and an interesting time to be working.
Good. Can you just explain in like the simplest possible way for like, as if you're talking to like a Labrador, how you get electrons from the satellite to something on the ground? It's just, to me this is still like eluding me from a technological point of view.
Yeah. Two words, space lasers.
I say that in jest but I'm actually being totally serious that the idea is actually pretty easy to conceptualize. If you use large deployable solar arrays in orbit and in particular the cheap ones to collect a lot of power, you turn that into electricity and then you turn the electricity back into energy in the form of light. And so for this we use infrared lasers which transmit that power down to the ground. And on the ground, we have a bunch of new technology that we're building. In particular, some collaborations with parts of the government, the National Renewable Energy Lab, which I think is now the National Lab of the Rockies, around actually collecting the electricity on the ground and converting it, collecting the light on the ground, excuse me, and converting that back into electricity. So you collect light in space and you make electricity on the ground. Kind of magical.
It is. That's totally fascinating and I can't wait to, I mean it's going to be so interesting to see that in practice and we, you know, we've all been talking in other sessions about AI use and, you know, energy use for AI and data centers and, you know, why don't we just put them in space? Nobody's thought about that before. So I think this is a really great idea. Um, it's going to be so interesting to see. Um, Greg, the other thing that we were talking about before was you mentioned the medical applications, was this your technology was also used in some way relating to one of the pilots that ejected in Iran. What's the story there?
Yeah. So, one of the test, so I mentioned there's this whole testing business where neutrons work in an area where X-ray can't. And so increasingly there's components that are mission critical where people will die or billion dollar missions will be lost if every single component doesn't work. And one of those applications is ejection seats. So, you know, pilot gets hit, plane's going down, they want to eject. There's probably two dozen bolts. Every single one of them has a little explosive charge in it. Needs to pop at the same time for that canopy to come off so that pilot can get out of the plane. One of those fails, pilot's dead. And so to make sure every single one of those little charges fires, they actually have to inspect it with neutrons, right? These particles again. And there's a massively growing market as we get more sophisticated. Obviously, there's a war going on right now as well. And for those parts to always work, you used to have to send these like in the United States, there was one fission reactor run by a university that was the bottleneck for producing these things. And now fusion's come into play through us and the United States is no longer capacity limited in being able to take these sort of images and bring these products to market. So yes, obviously keeping people safe in that regard. Same type of components that you...
Has been like highly relevant just in the last few years.
Yeah. Well, and I think you know for those of you who watch the Artemis 2 launch, right? Like I sat there with my four-year-old and that was freaking spectacular and super exciting. And same deal, right? Like you watch those stages separate in the spacecraft. Like you lose one bolt and that thing doesn't separate cleanly and the mission's over.
Greg, can you say a little bit about the competitive landscape for fusion startups at this point? I mean there's a lot of companies that are chasing fusion from different angles. Obviously, what you're doing is pretty unique, but you're up against a wide range of competitors both in the US, also in Europe and especially in China. Um, how are you viewing that kind of domestic and international competition?
