In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at a startup that wants to provide solar power from space, another that’s industrializing big satellite manufacturing, transparent insulation and more. To get The Prototype in your inbox, sign up here.
Over the past decade, solar power has become the cheapest way to produce electricity. But its biggest challenge is that sometimes it’s night. Without sunshine, there’s no way to collect power. And while batteries can help provide backup by collecting excess power during the day, that still leaves solar panels sitting idle a good chunk of the time.
Marc Berte has a solution. His company, Overview Energy, aims to build a constellation of satellites in geosynchronous orbit that can collect solar energy in space, where the sun shines 24/7, then beam it directly to solar power stations on Earth. Overview hopes its first satellites would each be able to provide a megawatt of power directly to utility scale operations on Earth, with an eye toward being able to provide that power to different spots on the planet as needed.
The satellites will do this by converting solar energy into near-infrared lasers, which can be shined down directly to solar panels, which are already equipped to turn those light wavelengths into electricity. (These are wide beams and don’t pose a risk to anyone on the ground—they’re safe enough to stand under, Berte said.) Each satellite, he added, can support a wide geographic area, so during a 24- hour span a satellite might provide power to Western Europe, then California, then back again to Europe at different points in the day.
The company is making progress. One big hurdle was figuring out a way to cut the cost of the high-performance coatings needed to make the lasers work. The second was developing a modular infrastructure for its systems to make manufacturing at scale economically doable. Berte said the company has solved both problems and this week, Overview announced that it had successfully delivered solar power to a receiver on the ground from an airplane, demonstrating “power beaming from a moving platform in a scalable way,” he said.
The company, which has raised close to $20 million to develop its technology so far, is now raising a series A round for its next step: delivering a satellite to low Earth orbit in 2028 to demonstrate its technology works from space. Along the way, Berte said, the company will also be pushing its manufacturing technology forward to ensure his company is “never losing sight of the long-term economics.”
This Startup Is Building Huge Satellites For An Underused Interstellar Sweet Spot
When Redpoint Ventures managing director Elliot Geidt first looked into space tech in 2018 during a time of growing investment activity, his gut told him it was another hype cycle. “I wasn’t prepared to bet my firm’s money on just ideas at the time and wasn’t quite convinced that the risk-reward made sense,” Geidt said. “I was wrong.”
Now, Geidt is leading a $250 million funding round into three-year-old satellite manufacturer K2 Space—the first bet he and Redpoint have made in space tech. With participation from T. Rowe Price, Altimeter and Lightspeed Venture Partners, the round values the startup at $3 billion, quadrupling its valuation in less than a year.
What changed Geidt’s mind was mainly SpaceX’s demonstration of cheap and frequent rocket launches. This year, SpaceX alone has launched more than 100 rockets, more than double the 42 launches from U.S. space companies as a whole in 2018. With SpaceX showing that it’s possible to get to space more often at a lower cost, taking part in the space business has become more realistic for VCs like Geidt, who primarily invests in software. “We had gotten a sense of the opportunity that [SpaceX] created and knew that there were other unique opportunities or potentially could be,” said Erik Kriessmann, a partner at Altimeter and early investor in K2 Space.
Founded by former SpaceX engineer Neel Kunjur and his brother Karan Kunjur, K2 Space creates large satellites for what’s known as Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), which falls between around 1,200 miles to 22,000 miles from Earth. There’s far fewer satellites in this area, which has a hazardous radiation environment that’s more difficult and expensive to engineer for. Instead, most satellite manufacturers build smaller satellites meant to orbit closer to the Earth in lower Earth orbit or larger satellites designed to orbit very far away in the geostationary orbit.
Read more at Forbes.
DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: TRANSPARENT INSULATION FOR WINDOWS
If it’s winter where you are right now, you’re probably painfully aware that glass is a lousy insulator, making the spots by your windows colder than the rest of the house. But that may not be the case for long, thanks to researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder. They invented a transparent, insulating material that can be applied to the glass. It’s a silicone gel with a multitude of microscopic pores that help block heat. In principle it’s similar to the types of aerogels used to insulate other systems, such as electronics in Mars rovers.
WHAT ELSE I WROTE THIS WEEK
In my other newsletter, InnovationRx, Amy Feldman and I looked at Medline’s blockbuster IPO, Fred Moll’s surgical robotics investments, Mark Cuban’s drug pricing plans, Forbes’ inaugural top hospitals list, and more.
SCIENCE AND TECH TIDBITS
Electric vehicle maker Rivian plans to add new hardware and software to enable self-driving capabilities in its cars and SUVs.
Starcloud, a startup backed by Nvidia, successfully trained an AI model on a spacecraft in orbit. The next step is scaling, which is challenging in space because the vacuum makes it harder to dissipate heat.
Researchers at MIT and Stanford developed a robotic gripper inspired by vines that can snake around objects to grab and move them.
AI researcher Tim Dettmers argues that physical constraints on computation make the development of “artificial general intelligence” impossible.
PRO SCIENCE TIP: EATING KALE? ADD SOME FAT
Kale is a particularly nutritious vegetable, though not always the best tasting one. But the good news is that there’s a way to make it taste better and make it more nutritious: add some fat. The nutrients naturally present in the leafy green are hard for the body to absorb, but a recent study found that either cooking kale with oil or serving it raw with a dressing significantly improved nutrient absorption in the body. So next time you make a salad with kale, skip the fat-free dressing.
WHAT’S ENTERTAINING ME THIS WEEK
This week I read Transformer by Ezra Furman, a critical analysis of the album of the same name by Lou Reed—one of my all-time favorites. Furman dives deep into the classic record, looking at Reed’s life and how his experiences at the time influenced the making of the songs, which he dives into one by one. If you’re a fan of Reed or Furman (whose album Goodbye Small Head I praised in this newsletter earlier this year) or just want to know more about the history of rock, I highly recommend it.
