Ed and John on The Space Show - Feb. 16, 2024

Feb 17

https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/16-feb-2024/broadcast-4162-john-bucknell-ed-tate

David Livingston 0:01

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Good morning, everybody. Welcome to The Live Space Show for Friday. It's great to be back from my little jaunt over to Los Angeles, and I'm glad all of you are here. We have a terrific program with one of our favorite guests: John Bucknell is with us with one of his associates with Virtus Solis; I'll talk about that in just a minute, and we're doing a full-length Space Show program today. So, if you have a question for either of our guests, or a comment, please do pay attention to the time, we definitely want to hear from you. But make sure you do it within the time limits where we're broadcasting, because often I get emails and phone calls after the show has gone off the air. So that doesn't work very well does it everyone, our toll free number: 1-866-687-7223. And we do prefer phone calls over email, but obviously we are happy to take your email, too. But once again, we prefer your calls: 1-866-687-7223. Email remains as always: DrSpace@TheSpaceShow.com. How about that, there's a call before we even start and, caller, hopefully you're listening on the on the line and I'm putting you on hold for a few minutes. So we can at least complete the introduction and get John and Dr. Tate talking. So just sit tight, and I'll be happy to bring you up on-air in just a minute. Don't forget if you want our Space Show email newsletter, make sure I have your email address. It goes out 6am Pacific Time, every Monday morning, we archive everything and you can hear things right off of our website. You can download the MP3, and you can also pick us up on almost every podcast server because we're podcasting as well. After the live program ends, I record the show notes and turn them into podcast. We do have our store if you're interested in space show logo where and you click on Pepper, the Siberian Husky that listen to the space show and she takes you to our CafePress Space Show store. And your feedback on that store is always welcome; product suggestion is also always welcome. Don't forget we're a nonprofit, 501(c)(3), listener-supported program, meaning those of you who listen and participate with us, because you send in generous contributions, we're able to do these programs and bring you great, great guests like you're going to hear today, there is a PayPal button in the upper right corner. That is the easiest way to support us. If you want to use a check, it has to be made out to One Giant Leap Foundation. Do not make it out to The Space Show, because Chase Bank is not accepting Space Showl checks only One Giant Leap checks, claiming there are new Federal Audit rules now. I don't know the Federal Audit rules for banks and nonprofit accounts, but Chase is our bank accounts so I'm playing the game the way Chase wants us to. So your checks need to be made payable to One Giant Leap Foundation and they mail to our Las Vegas office. That address is on that PayPal button. And, if you want to use Zelle, Zelle has a special email account that goes directly to the Chase account. David@onegiantleapfoundation.org. Please don't use The Space Show account. That is not a registered account with Chase Bank. And we appreciate your support. Don't forget we have sponsorships with the banner ads in the PR messages. Sponsorships run on a calendar basis, they're $500 per year. And we'd love to have you as a sponsor, or as an advertiser, which is what Dr. Bennett Roya does with his two great lunar development books. Other sponsors are Northrop Grumman, AIAA, Helix Space in Luxembourg, the National Space Society, Celeste, this ASRock Corporation, the Space Foundation, and our our great participant, John Jossey, with his space settlement progress blog.

Listeners, we have two great guests today. As I said, we're talking space solar power. John Bucknell is back with it. And those of you who listened to Space Shows know about John, he has been a guest many, many times. Over the recent years, he started his space solar power company, a couple of years ago and we've been getting constant reports from him, he moved out of California, is in a more business friendly state, he can mention that if he wants to. His full bio is up on the website, so check him out. We used to have him on talking about nuclear power, but he switched over to space solar power. And his company is actually moving down the road with demos and getting ready to make that happen. Our additional guest is Dr. Edward Tate, and he is the CTO and co-founder of Virtus Solis Technologies, which is commercializing space-based solar power, and you can read his full bio. And I'll let him talk a little bit more about his very interesting background. I'd want to talk to John and Ed more than I want to read about both of them. So John, we'll start out with you and welcome you back to the space show again.

John Bucknell 6:54

Thank you, David, appreciate the opportunity. Your guests always have great questions for us. And, we know that the hot button topic, I don't know how many times you've said the words "space-based solar power" on your show over the years, but it's got to be thousands. And we appreciate that because we think that we're finally ready. Not just us, but several other businesses. globally. We're not alone, we're one of two commercial entities that are operating publicly. And notably, we'll tell your listeners, there's two big things we want to share. There was a conference in Orlando a few weeks ago, called SpaceCom. It's been ongoing for a long time, this was the 50th version of that conference, and I was on a on a panel discussion around in space assembly and manufacturing. And at the end of that panel, we were able to announce that ourselves and our partners, which is the name is Orbital Composites, are based in San Jose, we're going to fly the first space-based solar power pilot plant, which means it's a subscale version of a whole plant, in 2027. And the other big thing is that we released a white paper around the economics of recent designs of space-based solar power systems, comparing detailed analyses that have been done in the European Union, by the ESA, and as well as in the UK, and comparing that to our system, as well as the 1980 NASA reference. So those are two big things that we're sharing. And we'd like to have more public discussion. Now, the white paper itself is published on our blog, as well as on ResearchGate, you can find both of those things. And if you follow us on LinkedIn at all, you know that we publish frequently and often on a number of topics around energy economics. And the solution is solar power as a technology is really very favorable compared to all the solutions we might have to solve our global energy challenges. So we can have those as the topics. And certainly I like to have Ed introduce himself, since he hasn't been on the show before. And tell listeners a little bit about how it came to be working with me and his very nonlinear path, just like my nonlinear path to this to this technology.

David Livingston 9:11

Ed, welcome to the Space Show. It's nice to meet you. How are you?

Ed Tate 9:15

Hey, I'm doing great, David, it's great to be on the show with you and John, the background of myself. I'm the CTO at Virtus Solis, and I'm here because I like solving really big problems. I started my career out in automotive, working on electric vehicles at GM, and actually fell in love with the factories and the scale of operations that automotive has. The automotive sector literally turned dirt into mobility for the world. While I was there, I worked on cleaning up the automobile. My first car program was a GM EV1, and I ended up doing a lot of bad a lot of work on batteries. And it wasn't because I love batteries, but just simply I was the youngest guy there and nobody wanted to work on batteries. I was fortunate because I got to learn the problems well enough that I had solved two big problems while I was there. One was how to accurately estimate how much energy was left in the batteries, which back in the 90s, that was actually a really big problem. We actually stranded a couple of directors and chief engineers on the road because it wasn't accurate enough, and the range wasn't very good. And that led to a series of patents. And basically, if you drive an EV today, chances are some of the foundation of work that we did back in the 90s is actually helping give an accurate estimate on range and things like that. The second one sort of led me to the next steps in my career, which was looking at how to speed up engineering. I mean, there's two things that really make engineering take time: that's building prototypes, doing physical testing, and then having a lot of manual processes and doing simulation analysis. And we needed to get answers faster, because electrification, EVs, hybrids, all these things, were driving the need to understand what could really be done in this entirely new design area. And I was, once again, fortunate to get thrown into an area that they need to have something happen quickly, and was able to speed up some of the engineering processes from the point that that will take a small team months to get an answer, so that we can get answers overnight. That in turn, really allowed us to understand deeply what was going on in the problem so that we could figure out what engineering could do to match what marketing wanted to do. While I was at GM, I got my fellowship, I got fellowships to get my masters at Stanford, PhD at University of Michigan, I authored dozens of patents, covering stuff like EVs, wireless charging, autonomy, and navigation. And then John and I actually met when we were there. So we have known each other for more than, like, 15 years. And because of the work I was done, I got recruited out by a company called Exa, because they were looking to take on the audacious challenge of trying to help automakers reduce the amount of capital they needed to build cars. But it wasn't familiar, it takes like between about a billion and $6 billion to bring a new car to market. And a lot of that comes down to building prototypes, that may be a million or million dollars or more each, using equipment, that's hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase and keep running. And the idea was if simulation was accurate enough in the 2000s, that you could actually completely design a vehicle without ever having to go to these test facilities. And we were successful, we managed to help some of our key customers get to the point, they could completely design a car without ever going into building a prototype, verifying it worked, putting it into the wind tunnels and other testing environments. And it collapsed the time it took to go from that concept to that first vehicle that you can really say is ready to go into production. We were acquired by Dassault Systèmes, and I was leading a team that repeated that recipe we had for automotive across different sectors: automotive, aerospace, heavy industry, etc. While I was there, John contacted me said, hey, I want to build space based solar power satellites. Well, my first reaction was "Hey, that kind of sounds like science fiction, does that even work?" And so, not to be one to back away from a challenge, I spent the next two years learning everything I could about it. I've learned about power beaming, learned about antennas, learned about power transmission. And it wasn't easy, and I understand why a lot of the questions that come up, come up. Because you have to pull together a lot of disciplines to say this is going to be a real solvable problem. And it's really not that much different from automobiles. There's a lot of technologies that come together in cars, to make something like this. There's a lot of technologies that have to come together. Well, the good news is after about two years of looking at it, I understood it. And I said John, yeah, this is going to work, it can and it will work. We got funded, and I joined him full time. And we've been proving step by step now that this can happen, and this is gonna be the next big thing. So here we are discussing it today. And I appreciate you having me on joining you.

David Livingston 13:49

Well, it's good to have you and when you were doing your due diligence and learning everything about space solar power, I mean, this is back when launch wasn't as low cost - I'm not gonna say cheap because it's not cheap - as low cost as it is today. And there were lots and lots and lots of voices, and there still are lots of voices, talking about how this can never be economic because of maintenance, because of you know, the amount of stuff that's going to be in space, and this and then the other. And yet you, somehow, I guess didn't believe a lot of the criticism, a lot of the anti-economic voices,what prompted you to go to the positive side, and not get sucked in to the "this is just not going to work" side with all of their facts on the economy and launches and, and everything else. Was it your friendship with John or what did you see that that got you to "go to the light" so to speak?

Ed Tate 14:58

My experience working on batteries. I spent first basic 15-20 years of my career doing something all the time that was associated with batteries. Actually, I remember one of the engineers I worked with said, "Hey Ed, be very, very careful on the first assignment you ever take, you will probably be doing it for the rest of your life." So far, I've managed to escape that curse by going over space-based solar. But, the key point was that when I looked at things like lead-acid batteries, and at the time we did the easy one, it was actually starting with lead-acid batteries and it was everything possible to make a car that sees 100 miles on a perfect day in Southern California with 100 miles. And then, you know, as it went into production, the numbers dropped off with it, I believe it was around 70, or 80 miles was the actual sticker number. And it was really, really tough. It was all the engineering you could to get that car just to that point. But then nickel-metal hydride came in, and nickel-metal hydride, and that you could reliably get more than 100 miles on a good day. And then lithium was sitting in the wings while I was working on the nickel-metal and the lead-acid systems. And I still have this intuitive feel, having been somebody that lived through that initial engineering when it was so tough when it was so hard, just to eek out another mile. And now I look at cars that are getting 300, 400 of miles of range with battery packs in them. And there's a piece of me that still says "Hey this, this doesn't really seem like it's going to be economic, it doesn't seem like it's really real economics." And that was, when you look at, that I look at my experience as somebody who's kind of an expert in this area. And my gut reaction is just that simply can't be right. But then I look at the numbers, I see the energy density is going up, I see the cost of battery production going down, and you really start to look at it numerically with hard economics, hard data; and you see the trends. And it's apparent that, it was really apparent early on. If you looked at those charts, even back in the 1990s, you can see the trend in battery energy density going up, you can find the old battery reports that say "Yes, the battery cost is going to come down to the point that makes sense." So, when you look at something that's happening right now with space, we've got a lot of trends that are coming together that are just at that point where the data is becoming incontestable. SpaceX is doing an incredible job. And people can see the launch mass that they're putting up increasing. But there's other stuff that's hidden out there. The pace at SpaceX is increasing their booster launches, like the amount year by year you're seeing them go from like, you know, about a week of launch to two or two launches a week to three launches a week. It's just a continual improvement, like you see in any other manufacturing enterprise. And you look at all the other companies that are sitting in the wings right now with alternative launch technologies, with alternative approaches. And it's very, very similar to me to what batteries were at in the late 90s. That technology is there, there's an ecosystem evolving, and there's enough demand that it's going to be able to sustain itself. And that says to me that things that we're looking at with space-based solar are no longer orders of magnitude away from what industry can do, the things that we need in terms of logistics, in terms of launch, in terms of manufacturing, these are all now part of the industry. There's the scale, we need this within what can be done today. And so what I could see a couple of years back now is glaringly obvious. And so I'm confident it can be made to happen and the economics are going to work in our favor.

David Livingston 18:26

So this brings me to the NASA recent report that is getting a lot of criticism through the industry. But when I hear reports on mainstream news and the not-so-dedicated space community, it's all poo-pooing space solar power. So somehow, they have economics that don't agree with your confidence. So either one of you, or both of you, want to comment on that?

John Bucknell 18:54

Sure. I mean, David, you're describing almost the reason why we wrote the white paper I described earlier. So you, your readers are interested, or your listeners are interested. ResearchGate is website that trades a lot of publications, ours is on there. And what you have to understand about the NASA report is it's coming from an organization that developed a really detailed methodology on how to evaluate these technologies, but then considered designs that were between 20 and 40 years old. I think the older version, it's not quite that old, but it's similar. And the methodology is great, they figured out like all the sensitivity, and they gave - I would urge all of you, if you haven't read the NASA report, to go look at Figure 3, the chart. It shows you the impact on carbon emissions and the impact on cost of energy of all the different ways you could build space solar power and they compare it to terrestrial production. And we actually had one of our interns go and pull the data out and plot it a little bit differently, because the way it's plotted you can't learn anything useful out of it. But at the end of the day, you actually have to understand their assessments. And I would say, if you read the executive summary, it actually said, hey, you know what, there are ways to make this work. And among all the different variables, they consider they chose a baseline that is the reason for the criticism, right? We have all these variables, and they chose basically the worst of the worst. But if you look at the best of the best, this technology is actually quite competitive among energy technologies, even considering these older designs that aren't as capital- and cost-efficient as the solutions that are coming out today. So we said okay, look, the underlying assumptions around building power plants is actually very variable across all these studies. You can go and project finance a new a new power plant, most utilities will issue bonds, or if you're not a utility, you don't have assets like that, you go out raise capital, you go to a bank effectively, and say "Hey, I need a couple of billion to build a power plant, you know what interest rate are you going to charge me?". And because it's an asset that the bank can repossess, if necessary, you can usually get a pretty good interest rate. And so some of these studies had interest rates a couple percentage points above the reference rate, and whatever the Fed sets it at, some of them were very low like the Department of Energy guarantees, some of them were very high, like you're like a 20% interest rate. If you didn't pay your credit card bill, you're gonna pay 22%, is I think in the US the maximum by law. But if you vary those variables, you can get huge range in performance, financially, for these systems. So we've, we've flattened it, and said, Hey, let's just make it all 14%. Let's all make the profit the same. And then last, let's just make them all use the same launch vehicle. Let's not speculate around future magical launchers or in-space transportation systems. And as a result of the paper, we published saying look, among all these solutions, if you look at compared to other greenfield energy technologies, space solar is actually really good. And that's the assessment that came out with the NASA paper, if you look at the at the assumptions that we would argue that, even given the whole range of assumptions they made even the best of the best is still relatively conservative. So it's just an engineering judgment call, and economic system call on what is reasonable, what isn't. One of the big ones. And if you've read it, and I think you've had other guests that were much more incensed by it than we were, but one of the underlying assessments is this: these solar power satellites were only last 10 years. And we look at each other and say there are satellites in orbit that are over 40 years old, and there's the Voyager spacecraft are still operating, and they were built with like 60s- and 70s-era technology. So saying something newly built today is only gonna last 10 years? Those engineers you shouldn't contract your development work to if they say they quoted me something to last 10 years at my company, automotive my friend, as we said, and we're used to building things that have to have to survive by law and past emissions tests. After 15 years, 150,000 Miles is a minimum. And they should last a long, long time. I have a Chevy Volt, which is the last vehicle I had worked on at GM back in 2008 or 2009, I think that's when I left, but that vehicle has 150,000 miles on it, and I've never changed the brakes on it. It'll probably last half a million miles no problem. So anyway I'll let Ed talk some more.

Ed Tate 23:50

I'll throw in a few other comments on that, if you don't mind. I mean, it's like there's one wishes. I think there's a great quote Arthur C. Clarke nailed it on which he says "when an distinguish but elderly scientist states that something's possible, he's almost always certainly right; when he states it's impossible, he's probably wrong. You know, I think a lot of technology's got the history of showing that, you know, there's early on there's a lot of people saying it can't happen. EVs are another one that asked, you know, why do I believe this can happen? It's like looking at the transition with EVs. There were a lot of things I you know, I saw being on the inside, I didn't think would work. But even in aerospace, it's the same thing. I mean, it's one of the stories I love to go back to is the story of our Langley versus the Wright brothers. You know, in 1903, literally a week and a half before the Wright brothers did their first manned flight, Langley was a fully-funded government project, that he basically clashed his aircraft into the Potomac, walked away into that said, "that's it, it's going to take years and millions of dollars to make happen." The New York Times even said it would take between like one and two million years for humanity to make a working flying machine. Nine days later, the Wright brothers had something that was in the air. So it's where people have a will, and the physics and engineering make it possible, things can usually be made to happen. You know, and I think space-based solar is positioned to take advantage of that right now.

David Livingston 25:11

I've had other guests on that have mentioned the NASA report. And one of the things that they point out about the report has to do with launch costs. And I didn't hear John mention that. But they seem to indicate that launch costs aren't going to get any cheaper than where they are today, which I don't think any listeners to The Space Show buy into that scenario. Do either of you have any comments about their launch cost assumptions in that report?

John Bucknell 25:42

I would say that how characterize what they what they said reported that they assumed that things were not going to progress from today, that they weren't, that their launch costs in 2050 are going to be the same as today. So even with that assumption, the advent of reusable launch vehicles and you know, amortizing that capital across a number of missions is as true in the future as it is today and probably going to be better. So, assuming things don't get better is a really bad assumption. I don't know if you guys pay attention, but the Falcon series at SpaceX flew its 300th flight this week. 300. That's more than any other single rocket family ever, by a large margin. I think they've had 278 consecutive flawless flights, which is really amazing. So if you take the I think so most reused rocket in the Falcon family has flown 19 times. And if you only assume that future rockets can only get to 15 times those launch costs are very low, even considering the Falcon Heavy, and none of these other forthcoming vehicles that are gonna get better yet. So yeah, that's one of the conservative assessments that we saw on the NASA report, which we said "Okay, well, if it works today, on today's launch cost, it's going to work way better with tomorrow's."

Ed Tate 27:04

If you look at the data, if you start plotting, like there's a law called Flight's Law. It's used by a lot of folks to look at how cost of production will drop with the amount of stuff you produce. If we simply take the space industry since 1957 and plot the cost of launch up till the day with the Falcon and Starship on there, what's interesting is the 1970s, with the shuttle, the prices exploded in the wake of Apollo. But once they can start coming back down, you can see a continual trend, like a 90% reduction in cost per doubling of launch mass in space. It's a little bit arcane, but it definitely - if you plot it correctly, you can see that there is a downward trend that is very aggressive. And you can even go to the point to say this looks more aggressive than we've seen in decreasing electronics cost and other industrial areas. I think there's just a lot of potential to be mined, that the launch startups can take advantage of to crop the cost.

David Livingston 27:59

Guys, I forgot our caller that called in when he showed started. Caller, I hope you're still with us.. No, he hung up or she hung up. I really apologize. I got so involved in in with what John and Ed were talking about. Caller, I do apologize, if you are still with us and listening, please do call back. The line is available. Now, for my good graces sometimes telemarketers call this line and I can only hope that I offended a telemarketer and not a Space Show listener. But the line is available. I do apologize, please call back at 1-866-687-7223. And I do have a Todd from San Diego email, who's beating me to the punch. Because he says: Guys, a noted NASA scientist and engineer that David has had on the show many many times over the years, Dr. Dennis Bushnell published on the Howard Blum email list a series of why SSP will never be competitive, and he went into great detail on how terrestrial solar and wind had changed so much, with storage and new batteries and new materials. And this, that, and the other, that the economics were unbelievable, and nothing could touch it, not fusion coming onto the market, not vision, and certainly not space solar power. I'm not sure if he saw the Dennis Bushnell quote that was published on Howard's newsletter. But, what have you to say about existing space solar, and probably wind, technology? is it really making that big of an improvement?

John Bucknell 29:46

Believe it or not, we do a lot of analysis around the energy industry in general. And to be fair, every single solution set around generating energy from intermittent sources, and that wind and solar primarily, there are other forms of clean energy, the geothermal and the hydros, but those are not available very often anywhere. And the challenge is that the generation costs specifically, not the transmission and distribution, all those other fun things, is not the primary problem. The primary problem is distribution and transmission. So those words are similar. One is local, on your local grid, if you live in a very beautiful, but obviously, some places have towers bring your energy to you from wherever it's being generated. I would say that Dennis is missing the economics. And thats the underlying challenge is that everywhere that it's gone to heavy penetration renewables, has figured out that the firming cost, the cost of making the energy available to the degree you want it: available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, any season, which now it's a big deal. So I'm seeing their energy costs go up a lot. Those of you who are living in California, I understand that the base rate for charging your EV now is $350/MWh, which is $0.35/kWh. And a lot of us that worked on EVs back in the day we were saying "Hey, you know what, those, the operating costs of EVs are gonna be lower way lower, because energy costs are going to be maximum, about $110/MWh." So at those price points, I would be buying gas for my plug-in hybrid than I would be charging it. But the reason they're more expensive is that you've added all this generation capacity, and then the unit economics of the firming, whether it's batteries, or long distance distribution or standby fossil fuel-powered power plants, has all gone up. So all those markets that have high penetration, and Germany is a great example, are struggling with high energy costs. Germany is a great example, of what not to do. If you've paid attention, they've been on a 20-year run of installing renewables and their energy costs have gone up so high that their GDP has gone down a lot. They've call it "deindustrialization," because businesses can't afford to operating anymore because energy costs are high. So the challenge is that any of those technologies need to be scalable in order to solve the global energy challenges. And if you have a solution set that is more expensive than fossil fuels, most of us the world that can't afford to the high price of energy won't transition, right. And the reasons for the energy transition are many, but all of them are underpinned with the fact that fossil fuels themselves are easy to dig out of the ground; the stuff has been, unless you want to go back to coal, and coal is more radioactive and more damaging, even ignoring the energy costs, than any other form of energy. So given that context, you need something that is firm, and low cost and - again, space solar is a technology is very competitive with all these other technologies, I would say, among the lowest cost possible, even compared to fossil fuels, and that is key to solving energy globally.

Ed Tate 33:14

Another piece to look at: you can look at what the breakdown is on a monthly retail power bill. The NRL did a great study on this, and the net conclusion is you basically pay about 25% for financing and overhead, 25% for neighborhood distribution, 25% for transmission, 25% for fuel. So if you simply say "I'm gonna get no fuel," in theory, you get a 25% savings and power gets cheaper. The problem is that you can see things like BloombergNEF and others have looked at what it takes to rewire the country to be able to tie the grid together to deal with the intermittency, because intermittent renewables are made in places away from where people live in places away from where industry uses it, so you have to move it. And wires are centuries old - I think I can say centuries old - technology, that's just not going to get but a little bit better. That being the case, you're looking at a large fraction of what you pay for is financing for the initial system, and transmission lines. The distribution actually becomes more complex if you start trying to make power in houses and then move to distributing power back around neighborhoods and all. So all of that says that we can generate power for free, but distribution transmission are where you're gonna end up paying for it. The key thing about space-based solar, space-based solar is actually two solutions in one. It's power generation, but it's also transmission. One of the back-of-the-envelope calculations is that simply we'll use as much minerals to be able to beam power from the East Coast to the West Coast using a space-based solar program as it will take to move power about 100 kilometers. So literally trying the amount of stuff it will take to bring an offshore wind power plant into a city, we're going to use that same amount of minerals and we could do something from providing power to Boston and providing out to LA from the same generation system.

David Livingston 35:04

I have another email for you, from Bill in Boston. But first, listeners, the phone line is available, I will put you on when you call, I will not hold you indefinitely and let you hang up. It is 1-866-687-7223. And of course, you can continue with email: DrSpace@TheSpaceShow.com. Bill in Boston says in terms of space solar power, can an individual with a business, or a resident, put up some sort of a dish like they do for satellite TV, or Starlink, and receive the power themselves, and convert it to electricity in their house? And, will we no longer need a power company?

John Bucknell 35:58

I'm sorry, I have sad news for that person. So, no. Unfortunately, unlike the Sun, we have to build the power plants and space to make the power beam that comes to the ground. So, if you were the sun, you can just spray your energy everywhere, someone can just come along and pick it up. We need to collect all the power we generate, in order to, you know, amortize the cost of putting stuff in space. So that means to these power plants are relatively large compared to what your household uses. I don't know if you look at your power bill, but my house with three teenagers runs about 3-6 kilowatts. And our power plants are about 200 megawatts at the smallest, and 1500 megawatts is the standard size. It's about the size of a nuclear power plant. So that has to do with the physics of the wireless power transfer. And even though we're more intense, I'm sorry, we're able to recover more energy than sunlight even though we're less than intense. So we're about half the intensity of sunlight at most. But, the good news is we capture about 90-95% of energy and turn it into electricity. Whereas your solar panels, if you're lucky, capture about 40% of the area of solar farm is solar panels, then those solar panels only capture between 18-20% of most of the energy that lands on them. So in order to make this work, you have to have roughly a large area to collect it. So you're gonna have to still deal with your local utility or whoever it is, ultimately, to get energy from space.

David Livingston 37:38

We have a caller who wants to talk to you. And this is another reason to be out of California: I no longer have to deal with Pacific Gas and Electric. But hi, caller, welcome to the show. And who are you? Where are you? and we appreciate your call.

John Jossey 37:52

Hey, David, this is John in Fremont, California.

David Livingston 37:55

You do get to deal with PG&E. My congratulations to you, John.

John Jossey 38:01

Yeah, my power went out yesterday. So yay!

David Livingston 38:04

Of course, of course, and the bill went up! How perfect is it? Go for it, John.

John Jossey 38:11

Hey John, good to talk to you again. And thanks for the white paper. By the way, I linked it on David's blog for this show, so it'll be easy for listeners to go pick it up; so, it's there. So in describing your system, this is the first time I've seen this. You talked about having two hours of ground energy storage for each ground station. This is the first time I've heard of ground- Is it battery storage that you're talking about here?

John Bucknell 38:11

Yep, yep.

John Jossey 38:18

Okay. Well, I thought one of the advantages of space solar power was, I mean, we beam directly into the grid, and we didn't have to worry about battery storage. So can you provide some more detail on what that is?

John Bucknell 39:13

Absolutely. So I will tell you that if you look at that white paper, if you look at the orbits selected, Virtus Solis is the only one that's not in GEO, or geosynchronous or geostationary - those are two slightly different orbits but they're effectively the same. We've chosen a lower orbit, Molniya, which is a 12 hour, ground-synchronous orbit. So, if you want to have something fixed on the ground and have line of sight on it regularly, you're going to take the time it takes the Earth to rotate, which is a little bit shy of 24 hours, and then divide by an integer. So geostationary is easy, divided by one, and divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and still have an orbit that basically passed over the same spot on the ground every orbit. So, Molniya's great is that delta-V is about half of what it takes to go from LEO to GEO. And every single heavy lift launch vehicle that can get to geostationary transfer orbit, the delta-V is exactly the same for Molniya. And the key thing about Molniya is the highly-elliptical orbit, so it's apogee, the peak of its orbit, is about 35,000 kilometers, it's exactly the same as geostationary. In fact, if you're going to get to geostationary, you need to do a highly elliptical orbit and circularize it when you're at your Apogee, such that you stay at that 35,000 kilometers all the time. But the Molniya has a perigee - a minimum orbit - it's about 800 kilometers of altitude. And because it's highly elliptical, you can go to our website and see an animation, or go to our YouTube channel, and look at it. They spent about 11.5 of every 12 above or in line of sight of ground stations. So the way we take care of the intermittency and that regard is because every 12 hours, it's on opposite sides of the planet, actually, because the period of the day versus the period the orbit. So this solution that actually serves one customer on one side of the planet, and another customer on the other side of the planet sequentially. So in order to solve that, you have to put a constellation up. So you're going to put up another array, a few hours out, if you have a constellation of two, you're going to have a gap of about a half an hour every 12 hours. If you have a constellation of three, you have no gaps whatsoever, and we actually plan a constellation of about 16, with eight in northern hemisphere and eight in the southern for the initial deployment. And to be fair, there are all these economics assume the "Nth" powerplant, however many films, we actually include quadruplly-redundant battery in our cost model, just to cover the worst of the worst, and keep that battery in there, even after the constellations deployed, to be conservative from a cost perspective. So customers don't come in and say "Hey, wait a minute, you told me my power plant was going to be able to generate energy that's $35/MWh." And then we say "No, well, we have the battery, and it's actually 40," we actually include the battery to say "Hey, worst case, you're gonna pay 35, and if we get the constellation up, and you're in the right spot on the ground, you don't need that battery." So that's really, why are the batteries there is to say, "Hey, look, until the constellation is big enough, it's kind of redundant coverage. Let's be conservative, and let's conclude battery energy storage, just in case, there is a ground track for the orbit that passes near enough to your ground station." So that's just a way to say "under promise, over deliver."

John Jossey 42:44

Okay, thanks for that. So this launch, or this demonstration coming up in 2027. It's a smaller demonstrator experiment, right? So are you going to you're going to assemble your solar power satellite with robotic spacecraft, right? That take the elements and out of the launch vehicle, and then take them and assemble them?

John Bucknell 43:28

Yep.

John Jossey 43:30

How does how does that work? And shouldn't there be like an interim experiment first, to demonstrate that technology? Or are you just going to do it all at once?

John Bucknell 43:47

Good question, John. I would argue that every single technology demonstration should be incremental. You should choose to do something simple first, and then do more complex stuff later. So there's a whole subset of in-space work that called ISAM - in-space assembly and manufacture - it's primarily robotic, but it also includes a manufacturing part, which is actually taking raw materials and producing finished components. And it's a large part of a lot of the exploration missions, or even commercial missions, you know, in the system in our space. So if you want to build a large structure in space, what complexity should you build first? we would argue that something the complexity of the ISS is probably not the first thing you want to do robotically, but something that large has already been built, and it's been up there for quite a while. In fact, it's getting pretty close to being decommissioned. So that last step, doing the on-orbit assembly is actually a burn-down risk, right? We're doing a pretty small power plant. We're planning something in the neighborhood of 100 kilowatts admitted, which is about 100 satellites, where we plan 100,000 to 200,000 as a minimal commercial system. So In our minds, that is an incremental step, and there's no paying customer. So you know, there's little risk that they are going to get what they paid for. So, you can judge for yourself on whether or not that is a fair milestone to do, but in our mind, that is a demonstration that will happen. In fact, 2027 is going to be several years after some of the first on-orbit robotic assembly demo missions, there's one that's due this calendar year, I believe, that's flying to something similar. So we won't be the first to do on-orbit robotic assembly, but certainly we won't be the last.

John Jossey 45:39

Okay, and and your system also has a co-orbiting, modular, gossamer mirror adjacent to each array, right? So you got to assemble that near in addition to your solar power satellite.

John Bucknell 45:57

Well, we would just make a little bit of definition of terms. Our satellites about a meter-and-a-half across 1.6 meters. So that's a satellite, and we make arrays of satellites. And the mirror, the redirect mirror that allows us to operate without having to worry about the cosine losses is the term you might shirk off. We haven't talked too much about the mirror but yes, there is a mirror which is a very small mass compared to satellite, but yes, we will be assembling a mirror or redirect mirror which actually probably going to be a thin layer of mylar stretched between some streching elements but yes, there will be a mirror as well.

John Jossey 46:45

Okay. I keep getting disconnected from my AirPods, so pardon me, I keep going in and out. Let's see, what was my last question...

John Bucknell 47:08

You can't blame your AirPods on PG&E?

John Jossey 47:09

I think they're charged, but anyway. You use the terminology I hadn't seen before in the description. You call it a "Lucidus" hyper-modular architecture. "Lucidus"? What is that?

John Bucknell 47:30

Lucidus is Latin. It's a name, "Lucid" is a word that you might know in English. Lucidus is the root, It means "clarity."

John Jossey 47:45

Ah, okay, all right. Well, thanks for that. And well, thanks for coming on. And I wish you much luck, and I hope it works out for you; and I'll let someone else call in.

David Livingston 48:00

Thank you John, Appreciate it very much. Bye. Listeners, you can give us a call, with or without AirPods. 866-687-7223. And you can also continue to send in emails to DrSpace@TheSpaceShow.com. And our phone line is available. I have a question from Linda in Seattle. Linda said: I'm curious if the NASA report has crippled the ability for companies such as yourself to raise money in the commercial world. Who wants to be an investor in a business that the government seems to prove has no economic justification? Is that report helping or hurting or neutral so far?

Ed Tate 48:59

So okay, well, I'll do my best. It's like good news- Good press, bad press, It's all good press. I think one of the upsides is the report is focusing a lot more attention on it. And actually, the reports interesting because it's kind of a Rorschach Test. The executive summary says "Hey, it's not going to be successful recommend any of that for 2050." For those that actually read into it more deeply. It pretty much says that if we just make the right assumptions, and we make the right design decisions. Even with the NASA study, it's going to be competitive, it will be the cleanest and the cheap- one of the cheapest sources of providing power on the ground. And I think that's the important piece. The folks that are looking at it in North America are different than the folks that are looking at it Europe. Europe's had other funded efforts that are taking a look at space-based solar. There's different economics that drive it in Europe than there are in the US. So right now just simply say it's a data point that's coming out there. There's Frazer Nash studies that are saying this is viable, Roland Berger has said it's viable, Oliver Wyman is saying it's viable. ESA has been sponsoring studies and the Space Energy Initiative in the UK has. So this was one data point, and you know, once again, it's getting people to talk about it. And we hope that over time, it's like, you know, we can see that what's in the NASA report, it's very clear the assumptions they've made, versus what the private enterprise is saying can be done. And we hope, just like reusable launch vehicles were initially considered to be something that couldn't be done. space-based solar power is something that, you know, we're going to be able to prove that it is a viable way to produce power, and will be the cleanest and cheapest way to make that happen.

David Livingston 50:36

Are you running into challenges or obstacles from the governmental regulatory environment? Or so far, that's pretty benevolent?

John Bucknell 50:49

The regulatory environment types are pretty clear on this one, it's for broadcasting on a radio frequency. We've been working with the FCC for a long time, we have an experimental broadcast license. Our friends at Caltech, who flew for power plant demonstrator over the last year - they completed that in January - they had the first commercial space-based solar power broadcast license. And so they kind of paved the way for us to go after doing the same thing, and we're quite a ways along. The regulatory challenges have been pretty easy in the grand scheme of things. And to follow up on the NASA paper, I don't know how many reads they've got on their paper, but our summary, cross 1,600- I'm sorry, 1,169 reads as of this very moment, so people are reading our summary as well. So to Ed's point, the NASA summary of the technology and ours are getting not just one or two readers, but you know, substantial number of people are looking at it thinking about it.

David Livingston 51:54

Why do you think we, our government, and our policy makers see this so differently than Europeans? Is it because of lobbying? Is it because of our fossil fuel reserves and fossil fuel industry? Why? Why has space solar power always dragged at the federal level?

Ed Tate 52:16

I mean, if you take a look at the history wwe've got in the US, in 1980, coming out of the heyday of the Apollo program, effectively about $80 million was spent to take a look at what could be done to power the US off space-based on that, and quite frankly, in 1980, we didn't have what it would take to make that happen. But, from the stories we hear that were careers that were destroyed over that entire effort. You know, the things that they came up with, where they're going to put 300 gigawatts in orbit, they were going to develop reusable launch vehicles, space tugs, Low Earth Orbit satellites- low earth orbit space stations, GEO space stations, and the system would have had, I believe it was north of hundreds of people would have had to have been in space constantly keeping this thing running. The National Research Council pretty much was asked to come in as a third-party and look at it and say "will this work?" And they said "No, it's not ready. We about another 40 years for some of these technologies to evolve." And in that intervening time, we got as we have robotics of working space, we are got launch costs have dropped, we have the reusable launchers that were needed. And, you know, the electronics themselves have become rock solid compared to what they were looking to use in 1980. So, you know, this is where we think we're at now. And the opinions I think are just driving like any other organization that has a legacy of doing something a particular way, but lessons they've learned, they're going to tend to keep working in that direction. I mean, take a look at EVs. For EVs, I worked on EVs within GM, it was a dedicated team that wanted to make it happen. But the high-level engineering executives didn't see a path to make that into a viable product. So the lead that was had there was let go. You know, it took an upstart like Tesla to come in and figure out a way to claw its way into profitability, and into high volume production. So it's very, very hard for an organization that's optimized to do one job to figure out how to change itself and go through the painful things that need to happen; and I think the national report reflects that.

David Livingston 54:26

John, were you gonna say something about that, too?

John Bucknell 54:29

I was going to mirror was Ed had said. We've got this legacy in the federal government. I mean, there are people like Dennis Bushnell who were at NASA for 40-some years. And there are people who were there was that 1980 when that happened, and we talked to people in other government agencies, who also happen to be at NASA in that timeframe. So we have this legacy of that 1980 NASA report. The teams in the EU and the UK, they don't have that albatross hanging around their neck, so they're open to the concept. And that's really, it's just a difference in perception. Now, we're a US company, and we don't have to ask the government to fund this as a commercial enterprise, you can seek capital elsewhere. So, you know, we're not constrained in that regard. So if we were completely funded by federal agencies, like a lot of aerospace primes. Yeah, this wouldn't happen.

David Livingston 55:37

You have another email. Ben is in Denver, Colorado. And he says, this is for either of you: For the past couple of days, we've been hearing new stories, whether they're real or bogus, I can't tell you though, I think they're bogus, about Russia, having new space-based weapons, ranging from nuclear bombs to who-knows what else. What's the security like, if a rogue nation or maybe another space power, does decide to use space-based or terrestrial-based weapons to take out the grid, except this time the grid is up in space? Can the mylar be destroyed? Can- is any of this system vulnerable in a national security sense? How do you protect it?

John Bucknell 56:28

Ed, I prefer you to talk about the security parts. But I have some other bad news for the listener when it's done.

Ed Tate 56:35

Okay. I mean, the first thing I'll say is like, if you take a look at it, we have all kinds of weapons on the oceans in the air today, and we don't worry about commercial airliners, oil tankers, and all these other commerce that go through international areas being affected by the existence of weapons. Space is the same thing, there's thousands of satellites up there today, they would all be subject to the same things that we're looking at. So, you know, I know, it makes very good headlines to look at some of that stuff and worry about it. But the practical thing is, you know, we do have things in place that keep these sort of threats managed through treaties and everything else. But the second piece is that our systems are inherently very robust. You know, when you're looking at a structure that's going to be hundreds or thousands of kilometers across, all the parts of it are operating massively in parallel. So if you do manage to take out some of it, with a kinetic kill vehicle or something like that, the system is still going to be able to keep working at a degraded level of performance. We don't think that's going to be something we have to worry about in the near term. We think there's other things that will come along that will make it you know, thing that we can say "these are good assets" and etc. But the existing framework that we have around international commerce is going to extend into space, and it should not be realistic issue in normal times.

David Livingston 57:58

Okay. What about maintenance? One of the things I hear people talk about is meteorites damaging the Mylar, or something of that nature. What what kind of damage would it take to require repairs, because you know, there's tiny little things floating around and something that big is likely going to get hit. So does it matter if it gets hit? Or how much of it can take hits before you have to do some maintenance or repairs?

John Bucknell 58:34

I can take of one. So we we haven't done much describing around what we're doing. I know, John Jossey, he did read our report, and pretty in pretty good detail. And we say that we're building something that's hyper-modular, right? we've got hundreds of thousands to millions of devices operating together as a system. As much like the cell phone network globally, we have lots of devices that interoperate with each other and able to function in any small sense. A segment of that can fail and it works fine, just the same way the internet does. So as Ed was saying is a very robust system there. Each satellite we're flying its autonomous. It's got its own calculation onboard it's got its own power management, it's not reliant on its neighbors for any of those things, just structural connection. So the good news is that space is still pretty empty, especially the debris belt that you might know about is pretty low. It's below 2,000 kilometers. The vast majority of debris, and then its a little denser closer the atmosphere. But interestingly, on the debris front the current solar sunspot cycle, it's an 11-year cycle. The more sunspots you have, the more solar wind we have, and that inflates the atmosphere, interestingly, and it heats it up and there's been a rain of debris and satellite included, that have been operating too close to the the upper part of the atmosphere, because of the solar cycle that we're having right now. So we're close to the peak, the peak of the peak should be the next year or two, but the altitude that we're operating at has almost no debris. Even if we were to be hit, it's, we've designed something that fails gracefully. But the key thing to think about, the reason you do maintenance is that you have a very valuable asset, and then if a five-cent part fails, you have to go out and repair it. Well, we're taking a slightly different approach. All of our satellites are built and tested and qualified on the ground. They're put in racks, and they're put in spacecraft and launched. So when it comes to maintenance, each of these are active electronic devices, they've got smarts, they've got sensors on them, and they're reporting back to the ground, or the control station, wherever it might be on the ground or an orbit that can say "Hey, I'm operating at 90% capacity, or 100%, or 0%, and I'm dead. So come do something." And in our case, each of these arrays that we're putting in orbit is a software-definable satellite, right, so you have 20 million satellites all on an array, that's way more than anyone ground station can absorb power-wise. So we actually use software to subdivide that array into smaller arrays, and transmit that energy to wherever the customers are. So if you want to replace a satellite, which only cost a few hundred dollars, that's less than the cost of the laptop, every time we send out more satellites to expand the array, we'll send a fraction - usually about 1% - of the design for maintenance. So you'll use the same robot that we're using to put the array together, you'll remove the damaged or dead one, and replace it with a new one. And then, interestingly, we already are talking to people what salvage rights to those systems that are already in orbit. So they could go to a salvage company, it could be brought back on the launch vehicle back to the factory, so we can look at it and repair it, or understand why it failed. But the number of systems that we can lose is quite high before we see noticeable degredation of performance, but it's intentionally very robust. So the maintenance involves removing and replacing systems that are that have gone down. But ultimately, the design of these components is very long, 30 to 40 years minimum, with an opportunity to last much longer. And I also tell the earlier caller who is worried about attack in space, I will tell you that it is hard to find things in space, even things as big as we're talking about. You might know that the Department of Defence operates a spaceplane, called the X-37, which is a mini space shuttle. It launched a few months ago, and no one knew where it went. And it took an amateur astronomer watching the same part of the sky to find it, and it took six months. So if you're gonna try to go after a satellite or something in space, you have to find it first. And compared to finding something on the ground, it's a lot harder, especially when you're at a much higher orbit, there's only so many devices that are able to get to that high orbit that comes back around to the launch vehicle. So launch vehicles, as you might know, are all derived from ICBMs, and anything that is able to achieve orbit can do point-to-point about 30 minutes or less. So if you think things in orbit are vulnerable, the only things we have is the agreement not to harm each other and announcing broadly to everyone that these are commercial flights, they're gonna go in this direction, they're gonna launch in this direction, and they're gonna go in these orbits. If anyone starts doing something else, the powers-that-be will be aware of that, and probably will not play nice with each other. So it's a gentlemen's agreement for all of us to to use this commercial space launch capability responsibly.

David Livingston 1:04:14

Given the progress you guys are making in the in the visibility, I've gotten two emails so far from different parts of the country. One was Chicago and one was the Bay Area. They wanted to know if your thinking down the road of a SPAC, or some kind of a public presence for people being able to invest in your company at this early stage. Is that a part of your game plan? or not yet or not ever or you do not want to talk about it?

John Bucknell 1:04:50

I will tell you that we are a venture-backed startup. To date, we've been taking small checks from angels primarily, and then we'll be taking larger checks from bigger investments. But all of those investors want to exit eventually. And there is a- a SPACE is one option, but the SPACE boom, that was a couple years ago, most businesses crashed and burned because they didn't have a good business model. But the exit this we're primarily looking at is an IPO and early 2030s, maybe mid 2030s, depending how things go. So that's how investors will get the money back and make a profit. That's how most tech startups are financed. It'd be great if we're able to get big money government contracts. But as we described earlier, it's a little challenging here in the US to do so. But if anyone is interested, and has a big check they want to write to us, you can go to our website, and there's a contact form, its info@virtussolis.space, the email will eventually make its way to me, and we can have a conversation. So smaller checks are possible, but only for a very limited time. If you're interested, please give me a call.

David Livingston 1:06:13

Okay listeners, if you're interested, you can reach them. And another question, I think you've kind of answered it, but this is going to be more specific. This is Beth in Chicago and she says: Is everything that you're planning to do in space going to be robotically created, manufactured and finalized? Or will be there be any room for humans doing anything in space, via EVAs or anything similar to what they do when they have to go fix something on the space station? Will everything be robotic?

John Bucknell 1:06:58

With any luck!

Ed Tate 1:07:02

The game plan is to start with probably more like telerobotics, where we actually have men in the loop that are making sure things are done properly. But as time progresses, the goal is to get the fully-automated assembly, you can think of it like a lifestyle factory that's going to be assembling parts that are brought up from the ground and putting them into the arrays. We will be doing manufacture on the ground of the satellite tiles that we send up, and when they go up, there will be eventually a fully automated assembly process.

David Livingston 1:07:33

Is any part of the technology you need lagging behind what you need to do a successful demo? I guess what I'm asking if we asked you for the TRL of the different components that you need to bring this business to commercial status and have customers, are there any components with such a low TRL, they're going to have to play a lot of catch-up?

John Bucknell 1:08:03

Ed, that's you but you can tell them that your TRL assessment.

Ed Tate 1:08:13

Okay. So, you know, when I look at it right now, it's like in-space assembly, you know, is going to be going through the TRL progression very quickly the next couple of years. That's one that is enabling technology that will be necessary for us. We don't see that as having anything that's fundamentally going to prevent it from happening. There are some areas with electronics, that we don't see these being TRL issues, which is primarily development of the supplier base, to have parts that have wanted specs that are needed. And those are all on our development plans. You know, the largest issues probably simply going to be the getting the first demonstrator, actually to the point that, you know, we got conclusively through the regulations we've gotten through the deployment, we've gotten through the setup. Technically, even the NASA report says there's no engineering reason this can't be done. They do say they simply say there's things that need to be improved on, and we have the same assessment.

John Bucknell 1:09:13

And I don't know if you guys caught it, but TRL is a very interesting topic. And we would argue that that the system going from TRL four to TRL nine covers a lot of things that liquid-propelled rockets have to deal with, and space stations, what have you. Your cell phone, sitting in your pocket will operate in space if it has a solar cell on it, and the difference in what's in production and operating spaces is that it has never operated the space environment, but it will operate just fine in a space environment. So the difference between the electronic device that we built on the ground and operating space TRL four to nine is the same thing, it's really no different.

Ed Tate 1:09:56

And that's a great point, John. That's a great point to bring up. It's like a lot of the TRL stuff did come out of the challenges with fluids and structures under high loads, getting them into orbit, and getting them to work properly once in orbit. Electronics is a completely different matter.

David Livingston 1:10:12

And some of this, of course, is is not what you're specifically working on. So you're dependent upon other industries in the supply chain, correct?

John Bucknell 1:10:21

I would argue that the supply chain is already there. As far as technical capability, right, and some of it is going to be stressed if space-based power systems are viable, because, you know, you might think that the space industry is huge, and it's enormous. It's not, it's quite small compared to other industries. I don't know if you guys know how many cell phones are manufactured globally, per year. But it's roughly equivalent number of people we have. So I don't know who gets a new cellphone every year, but I don't. But, if you start producing consumer electronic devices and put them in orbit, our plan is specifically in the first eight years production, I think we plan to put about 32 gigawatts in orbit. The tonnage in orbit, from those first eight years would outstrip the whole history of human spaceflight. And that's just we call it a ramp or a singularity or what have you that's already happening. I mean, SpaceX is the plan to do spacel aunch. They figured that that market size is between three and 4 billion. So how much do you think they made on space launch this year?

David Livingston 1:11:44

I don't know. Do you know?

John Bucknell 1:11:45

2.8 billion. And they look like they're gonna make about 10 billion or 12 billion on Starlink this year, so they are already way more communication company than they are a space launch company. You know, it's all relative to how is the technology accessible to as many people as possible, right? So Starlink is accessible to a lot more people than space launch. And this is the chicken and egg problem that most people don't realize, that low cost, commercial space launch can do for you, you just have to figure out a business case that allows you to operate in space. So we think there's a huge growth opportunity in the system and our infrastructure, and even actually having a cislunar economy. But you have to have the infrastructure up there first, and we think power is step one, and we call it step one of our master plan. But you know as well as anyone whether we'll be able to get past that one, but certainly there are lots of other opportunities when that happens. So yeah, that's a huge step function in the operation. If the infrastructure, is there.

David Livingston 1:12:52

Another email. Wanda is in Miami, but first of all, Listeners there's still time, roughly 15 more minutes left in our program today. And we'd love it if you would pick up the phone. You hear me do this on every Space Show, John's probably heard me do it 5 million times already. 1-866-687-7223. We much prefer talking with you rather than email. But if email is your thing, Drspace@thespaceshow.com. And Wanda must have email as her thing. She is in Miami and she says: Have either of you made the trip to DC to go lobby or present space solar power to key members of Congress? If you have done so, what was the reaction? And more importantly, what was their knowledge level about space solar power before you talk with the person?

John Bucknell 1:13:53

So let me just give Wanda some context. We started a business right before COVID. So good news, bad news around COVID Is this: video conferencing has become a thing. And, the interesting thing about that is that we can have many, many meetings with lots of different members of the legislative and the executive branch. And we have. a full-time, dedicated government affairs guy, his name is David Berger, and he was the mayor of Lima, Ohio for 32 years if you ever want to look him up. But we have briefed I think 200 members of the different federal agencies that will be involved, portions of the White House administration and members of staff of different members of the committees and other than the NASA people, who we've got all the way up to the administrator - not the current minister, but the prior one - and other than NASA, almost no one's heard of it as a technology which not shocking. And really our goal when we go inside the Beltway and talk to the agencies is saying "Look, you guys should be ready. This technology is coming. It's not just us. The regular regulatory environment should be ready." And at least the federal agencies in general, the FCC and the Department of Commerce in particular, are very friendly to us. And they've been very keen to see this happen. But yeah, inside the legislative branch, our goal has been "Hey, look, we'd love it if the federal definition of space solar power existed." Because if you look at the definition of renewable energy, you have "solar" - a single word - and then there's like, I think, seven different definitions for ocean power and other forms. So we just asked for an appropriations bill to add terrestrial and space solar to the description of solar power. You might know Congressman Mullins from Daly City, California, put together an order in November and again in January, to tell NASA and the DOE to work together on this technology. So it has been spoken in the halls of Congress, but very few people are aware of it or even aware that there are businesses looking at this. So we're doing our best to communicate. If you are interested, and you want to point your congressman, we have a very extensive blog that talks about energy issues and technology issues and space solar power issues and launch issues, to educate yourself. I don't know how many entries we have. But it's probably 40 or 50 to read, and they're all very informative. Dr. Tate does a lot of great research, for educating people about different elements of the energy economy and the potential for space solar.

David Livingston 1:16:56

You have another phone call that afternoon. Good morning, Caller, Welcome to the program. Who are you? Where are you, please?

John Jossey 1:17:02

Hey, guys, it's John in Fremont, again. Doesn't seem like anybody else is calling in. So, I'm out walking the dog now and I thought I'd call back and ask about ground rectennas. And I know, I think you guys are working with you know, various utilities to establish connections to the grid. So will you be outsourcing the rectennas or are you guys going to build the rectenna is as well?

John Bucknell 1:17:46

So John, the plan is for us to manufacture power plants; and rectennas are part of that. Our rectennas look a lot like solar farms. In fact, the form factor and interface and everything look exactly like a large format, utility-scale solar panels, so anyone that could build a solar farm can build a space solar farm on the ground. So yeah, our primary products will be the components to manufacture a power plant. Now, the construction, when you're building these devices, is almost never the component manufacturers. So that's the case for power plants globally. But that's certainly gonna be the case for us.

John Jossey 1:18:27

Okay, and so, I would imagine that these are going to be all over the place, because you want to eliminate the problem of having to, you know, transmit the power, because of all the losses in transmission lines, so you want rectenna is where the power is needed, right? So these are gonna be all over the US?

John Bucknell 1:18:57

Or the world, with any luck.

Ed Tate 1:19:04

Whatever you think of us, we've already dedicated a lot of land already to wind farms and solar farms. And those things do have finite lifetimes, so as those roll out of their useful life, that land would be available, plus the infrastructure connections, the right of ways, etc. to convert from one technology to another. And we consider a footprint into many of those farms right now. So that would be part of the the overall thing is you don't need to build new infrastructure, you use what's already there during the repowering phase.

John Jossey 1:19:33

Okay.

John Bucknell 1:19:33

For those of those of you who don't know about the global energy generation industries, specifically electricity, there's about 40,000 power plants globally. And our two-kilometer rectenna farm fits in the vast majority of them, inside their fence line. So to Ed's point around the repairing phase. There's an awful lot of power plants that you could use could level and replace with a space solar power plant and deliver lower cost to end users.

So these existing facilities would be phased out?

If you wanted to. I mean, we're not- certainly when we talk about construction, we talk about greenfield construction, which there's never been a construction project there, and then brownfield, which is an existing construction site that's been repurposed for something else. So if you're operating an energy utility, and you're interested in upgrading, what do you do when your power plant ends its life, right? So you can either let let it go fallow, which happens quite frequently, or you demolish it and put something new in.

David Livingston 1:20:48

Okay, great. Well, that's it for me again, David, I guess that's all I've got, thanks.

Thank you, John. Listeners, if you want to call I know this is Friday, and you listen at work. You've got a couple of minutes, 866-687-7223. And you've got a couple of minutes left to send in an email, DrSpace@TheSpaceShow.com. George says - by the way, he's from Oklahoma City. And he says: it seems to me, you'd have a better bet with your resources to have a media educational program rather than a program to go after members of Congress. The reason people don't know very much about it is because the media doesn't know anything about it, and doesn't write about it. And when it does write about it, it writes a particular point of view from the government, or whoever is giving them the article. Have you thought about a media education plan?

John Bucknell 1:21:51

I don't know that we need to. Certainly, if you read Space News, or Ars Technica, you know, they're more a technology-focused media outlet. Eric Berger at Ars Technica, and Jeff Foust at Space News. They've written very good articles on the topic of space solar. But, you know, to your point, what is the media going to do with that information? Right, it's a what do you- are you a fan of fusion, for example, because there's all sorts of press on fusion, people get excited about it. And it's not available yet. Same thing with space solar. So, what is the outcome of this education program? Certainly, we think it should be part of the discussion, but you have this catch-22 problem where it doesn't exist yet, and people don't know that it will exist, and therefore, what? What are you- you're telling them about a technology that they don't know that it's going to happen or not. So the proof is in the pudding I guess. Our expectation is that education will ramp up once you have a operational system in orbit, or this pilot plant that we're planning for three years from now.

David Livingston 1:21:55

You mentioned briefly fusion, we haven't talked about it, but the there's incredible press on the entrepreneurial fusion programs, not necessarily the big government Tokamak programs, that fusion is just around the corner. Is it going to be competitive with what you're doing? Will it bounce out space solar power in favor of fusion? Will it be just another source of energy? How do you see fusion, and is it a competition to be concerned about?

John Bucknell 1:23:40

Ed and I are both very opinionated. I'm going to answer this one real quick. No one knows if fusion gonna work yet. It might. No one knows the economics yet. So it'd be pure speculation on my part. Because no one has ever built one that works and is commercial. I will tell you that looking at the proliferation of technologies: the simpler it is, the faster it scales. Nuclear Fission is an example, because I have a have a background of that area, it's hard to scale that technology, because it's very- lots of components to try to manufacture a very specialized knowledge to do so. I would argue fusion is in the same boat. No one's built it yet, and no one knows how it's gonna play out commercially. So I wish them all the best. It would be great to have fusion available, but I suspect its a complex technology, if you haven't made it work yet - and they've been trying for a long, long time - it's probably not going to be cheap and easy to deploy.

Ed Tate 1:23:40

Yeah, and it has three phases for all these technologies: The first one is do the physics support what you can do, and do you understand the physics enough to move to the next step? Which is engineering, once you get into engineering, can you build the parts to last long enough to have the high-enough yield to make the materials obtainable, and all the other pieces? And then finally, can you optimize it to become economic? physics is still at that very first step where- I'm sorry, fusion is still what the very first step where the physics has got to be proved out. You know, and there's claims that we're a couple of years off, and you know, that's the key one is getting to the point that they're actually able to really hit breakeven with something that can be built. And then it kicks off the engineering phase. And that's still a big unknown as to how long that will take.

David Livingston 1:25:30

Gents, we're pretty close to the end of 90 minutes. Do you have any concluding comments, anything we have forgotten to talk about that we should talk about?

Ed Tate 1:25:41

Yes, I'll jump in. I'll say one thing, which is: You know, in all the analysis and things that we've been looking at, as we've gone through this, it's like, one thing I'd like to share with people is that space-based solar, people think of solar typically as not an energy dense solution. We can actually produce space-based solar, that the power, the energy delivered per kilogram of space-based solar plant that's built is comparable to pulling uranium out of the ground. I mean, just let that settle in for a minute. This is something we can build today. And we can demonstrate on the ground with these energy densities will be on-par with uranium pulled out of the ground, we see the progression being that, you know, once this works - and this is what the studies have shown since the 1980s is once the first capital barrier to making it work goes past - it will be wildly successful. It will be something that is able to self fund, grow, and scale to power the world at a civilizational level. And that's one of the reasons that we're working on this today is we see this as a scalable solution to energy globally to drive prosperity. And we look forward to making that happen.

David Livingston 1:26:46

Well, I hope you do make it happen. So do a lot of other people. Space solar power has been around since before The Space Show started in 2001. We were on board initially, and so I so was I with my PhD dissertation, actually DBA dissertation to be transparent. And it was around 20 years before that, or 30 years before that. So I hope we're nearing the point where it it's demonstrated and does become operational. And I hope you guys are at the top of the pack when that happens. John, you mentioned there's another company who else is trying to do this, and how do they differ from you.

John Bucknell 1:27:33

So there's one in the UK called Space Solar Ltd. I won't ding their name, because it's hard to get a descriptive name out there. But they're a spin off of the UK Government. And there are a few startups here in the US that really are operating in stealth that seem to be in this vertical, but that's it. There are really no others. So anyway, you can you can read about the Space Solar system, they have a design thats called Cassiopiea, which is a geostationary solution, you can read our report and learn all about it. But it's a technology technology to solve certain problems, but it also has face mirror and by the way - not just us. And it uses a very unique architecture allows them to operate in GEO and not have to rotate the faces all the time. Well, I'll leave it at that.

David Livingston 1:28:30

Okay guys, I wish you the best of luck. And I look forward to the next time we bring you on board The Space Show for updates and to learn what's happening and we hope you are able to keep moving forward and making great progress. And if anything changes, let us know and and we'll bring you back faster than what normally we would probably do so. So I wish you all the best. And Ed, it's great to meet you, I hope that we can have you back in talking about this and other forms of technology on future Space Show programs.

Ed Tate 1:29:06

Thanks for letting me on David.

John Bucknell 1:29:07

Yep, thank you.

David Livingston 1:29:07

Okay. That's it for today, listeners. So back on Sunday about commercial space habitats. You can read about it on the on the newsletter with two guests, and then our normal Space Show programming, because we're not leaving until the end of March where we'll be gone again. So everybody have a great weekend. Keep it safe. Keep it happy. Always, always, always look up as we like to say and goodbye from John, Ed, and Tee Space Show's David. And everybody. really truly have a great weekend. Guys, thank you once again. Enjoy the weekend too. Bye, everybody, from The Space Show.

John Bucknell

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