Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Baiju Bhatt builds something that the space industry has largely rejected, and this could be more revolutionary than anyone who does not realize it.
When Baiju Bhatt moved away from his role as Director of Creation in Robinhood last year, only those who get him to predict his next move: the launch of a space company built around technology that a large part of the aerospace industry was considered impracticable.
It is very good with Bhatt, co-founder of the trading application who has democratized the investment for millions-this means less competition for his new company, Aetherflux, which has collected 60 million dollars for its quest to prove that the radiant solar energy of space is not science fiction but the next border of renewable energies and national defense.
“Until you are doing things in space, if you are an aerospace company, you are actually a budding space company,” said Bhatt on Wednesday evening during a strictlyvc techcrunch event organized 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,” said Bhatt. “He was very categorical:” When you grow up, I’m not going to 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 of the size of small cities, 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 big,” said Bhatt. “The size of the table, the size of the spacecraft 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 – a strategic decision that could give America a significant advantage.
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. “It allows the United States to have energy on the battlefield for the bases deployed, and it does not have the limitation of needing to transport fuel,” said Bhatt.
The Bhatt precision is promising is quite 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, the success of Aetherflux could potentially change the game for American military operations in the world.
In addition to his own father, Bhatt said he was inspired by another entrepreneur who proved that you could master several industries: Elon Musk. Above all, like Musk, which has gone from payments to revolutionize electric vehicles and space trips, Bhatt thinks that its strange perspective “is in fact an advantage,” he said, echoing the way fresh eyes sometimes see what industry veterans are missing.
Of course, unlike the mentality of setting up companies like Robinhood which can deploy, and also sometimes the return, software functionalities, spacecraft requires a higher challenge approach. 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.
He has more than his reputation on what’s going on from here. Bhatt self -funded the $ 10 million from Aetherflux, and he also contributed to a $ 50 million This was led by Index Ventures and Interlagos, and included, among other things, Energy Ventures by Bill Gates, Andreessen Horowitz and Nea.
Its calendar is also aggressive. The plan is to launch a demonstration satellite precisely in a year.
But 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. »»
