When Baiju Bhatt moved away from his role as Director of Creation of Robinhood last year, only those who were able to predict his next move: the launch of a space company built around technology that the aerospace industry has largely rejected, and which could be more revolutionary than anyone who does not realize it.
If people do not pay much attention, it is very good with Bhatt, who co -founded the trading application in 2013, five years after obtaining his mastery in mathematics in Stanford. This means less competition for its new business, Aetherfluxwhich has so far collected $ 60 million to prove that the influence of solar energy in space is not science fiction but a new chapter for renewable energies and national defense.
“Until you do spaces in space, if you are an aerospace company, you are actually a budding space company,” said Bhatt on Wednesday evening in a Techcrunch strictlyvc event Hold in a glass structure on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. “I would like to go from” Aspiring Space Company “to” Space Company “earlier.”
Bhatt’s spatial ambitions go back to his childhood. He says that his father, who worked as optometrist in India, spent a decade applying for physics programs graduates in the United States, finally taking a hard turn and landing in NASA as a researcher.
He then used the powers of reverse psychology on his son, explains Bhatt. “My father worked at NASA throughout my childhood” and “he was very categorical:” When you are big, I will not tell you that you should study physics “. Which is a very effective way to convince someone to do exactly that. »»
Now, almost in the same age, his father was when he joined NASA, Bhatt makes his own movement in space, apparently in order to create even more impact than Robinhood.
He certainly has a big swing with the effort.
The traditional concepts of solar energy of space have focused on massive geostationary satellites, using microwave transmission to pass the energy to the earth. The scale and complexity made these projects perpetually “at 20,” said Bhatt on Wednesday evening. “Everything was too large … The size of the table, the size of the spaceship was the size of a small town. It’s real science fiction tricks.”
Its solution is both much smaller and more agile, he suggested. More particularly, instead of massive microwave antennas which require precise phase coordination, atherflux satellites will use fiber lasers, essentially converting solar energy into focused light which can be targeted precisely on the ground receptors.
“We take the solar energy that we collect from the sun with solar panels, and we take this energy and put it in a set of diodes which transform it into light,” said Bhatt. “This light enters a fiber where there is a laser, which then allows us to point it to the ground.”
The idea is to launch a demonstration satellite in June of next year.
National security, first
While Bhatt finally plans to build “a real energy company on an industrial scale”, he begins with national defense. In fact, the Ministry of Defense approved the financing of the Aetherflux program, recognizing the military value of the ray power to transmit the bases without the logistics nightmare of fuel transport. “This allows the United States to have energy on the battlefield,” said Bhatt.
Bhatt precision is promising is remarkable. Aetherflux’s initial objective is a laser spot “more than 10 meters in diameter” on the ground, but Bhatt thinks that they can reduce it to “five to 10 meters, potentially even smaller than that”. These compact and light receivers would be “little or no strategic value if they were captured by an opponent” and “small and portable enough so that you can literally bring them out on the battlefield”.
Although many remains to be seen – almost all shebang, really – success for Aetherflux could potentially change the game for American military operations in the world.
So why hasn’t anyone already did what Etherflux is trying? As Noted last year In space news, a 2007 study Found promising in the approach and recommended more research, but no one acted on the report (Bhatt said that it was not aware of it). Anyway, for Bhatt, it is the kind of neglected opportunity that a stranger is well positioned to grasp. Indeed, in addition to his own father, Bhatt said that he was inspired by someone else who proved that if you are curious and ready to work hard, you can master several industries: Elon Musk. This original perspective “is actually an advantage,” Bhatt told the crowd.
Of course, contrary to the mentality of implementation of companies like Robinhood which can deploy, and also sometimes to move backSoftware features, space hardware involves much higher issues. You get a single blow when your satellite is launched.
“We build a spacecraft, we boul it towards the fairing inside the SpaceX rocket, we put it in space, and it stands out, then the better thing,” said Bhatt. “You can’t go up there and tighten the bolt.”
Asked when he tests the pressure of this spaceship, Bhatt said that Etherflux is pursuing a “material” approach, which means building and testing components while refining conceptions. “The good balance does not wait five years, 10 years, 15, 20, as is the case with many important space programs,” he said. “People’s career is often shorter than that.”
He also noted that if Aetherflux succeeds, the implications extend far beyond military applications. Spatial solar energy could provide basic renewable energies or solar energy that works day and night, anywhere on earth. This could mean increasing the way we are currently thinking about energy distribution, offering power to distant locations without massive infrastructure investments and providing emergency power during disasters.
Aetherflux has already hired a mixture of physicists, mathematicians and engineers from Lawrence Livermore Labs, Rivian, Cruise and Spacex, among others, and Bhatt said that the organization of 25 people still hired. “If you are the kind of person who wants to work on great, super difficult things, come and contact us,” he told participants.
Bhatt has more than his reputation on what is happening from here. He self -financed the first 10 million dollars of Aetherflux, and said he also contributed to a more recent $ 50 million turn which was led by Index Ventures and Interlagos, and included Bill Gates of Breadthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Nea, among other things.
The chronology of Aetherflux is also aggressive. This plan to launch a demonstration satellite precisely in a year means that it is essentially to our doors.
However, there is a prototype for the approach of Bhatt. GPS began as a Darpa project before becoming an omnipresent civil infrastructure. Likewise, Aetherflux works in close collaboration with the radiant expert of Darpa, Dr. Paul Jaffe, whom Bhatt called “a very good friend of our company”. Jaffe also works with other companies developing similar technology, positioning the DARPA as a bridge between military applications and commercial potential.
“There is this precedent of doing things in space where there is a really important part to work with the government,” said Bhatt. “But we actually think, over time, because technology matures and things like [SpaceX’s reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle] Starship really opens up commercial access to space, it will not just be something from the Ministry of Defense. »»
