The Potential Energy Revolution by Robinhood Founder

When Baiju Bhatt stepped away from his role as chief creative officer at Robinhood last year, only those close to him could have predicted his next move: launching a space company built around tech that the aerospace industry has largely dismissed, and which might be more groundbreaking than anyone realizes.

If people aren’t paying much attention, that’s just fine with Bhatt, who co-founded the trading app in 2013, five years after earning his master’s degree in mathematics at Stanford. It means less competition for his new company, Aetherflux, which has so far raised $60 million on its quest to prove that beaming solar power from space isn’t science fiction but a new chapter for both renewable energy and national defense.

“Until you do stuff in space, if you happen to be an aerospace company, you’re actually an aspiring space company,” Bhatt said on Wednesday night at a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event held in a glass-lined structure on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. “I would like to transition from ‘aspiring space company’ to ‘space company’ sooner.”

Bhatt’s space ambitions date back to his childhood. He says that his dad, who worked as an optometrist in India, spent a decade applying to graduate physics programs in the United States, eventually taking a hard left turn and landing at NASA as a research scientist.

He then proceeded to use the powers of reverse psychology on his son, says Bhatt. “My dad worked at NASA through my whole childhood” and “he was very adamant: ‘When you grow up, I’m not going to tell you you should study physics.’ Which is a very effective way of convincing somebody to do exactly that.”

Now, at roughly the same age his father was when he joined NASA, Bhatt is making his own move into space, seemingly with an eye toward creating even more impact than at Robinhood.

He’s certainly taking a big swing with the effort.

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Traditional space solar power concepts have focused on massive geostationary satellites, using microwave transmission to beam energy to Earth. The scale and complexity made these projects perpetually “20 years away,” Bhatt said Wednesday night. “Everything was too big . . .The size of the array, the size of the spacecraft was the size of a small city. That’s real science fiction stuff.”

His solution is both far smaller and more nimble, he suggested. Most notably, instead of massive microwave antennas that require precise phase coordination, Aetherflux’s satellites will use fiber lasers, essentially converting solar power back into focused light that can be precisely targeted at receivers on the ground.

“We take the solar power that we collect from the sun with solar panels, and we take that energy and put it into a set of diodes that turn it back into light,” Bhatt said. “That light goes into a fiber where there’s a laser, which then lets us point that down to the ground.”

The idea is to launch a demonstration satellite in June of next year.

### National security, first

While Bhatt envisions eventually building “a true industrial-scale energy company,” he’s starting with national defense. In fact, the Department of Defense has approved funding for Aetherflux’s program, recognizing the military value of beaming power to forward bases without the logistical nightmare of transporting fuel. “It allows the U.S. to have energy out in the battlefield,” Bhatt explained.

The precision Bhatt is promising is remarkable. Aetherflux’s initial target is a laser spot “bigger than 10 meters diameter” on the ground, but Bhatt believes they can shrink it to “five to 10 meters, potentially even smaller than that.” These compact, lightweight receivers would be “of little to no strategic value if captured by an adversary” and “small enough and portable enough that you can literally bring them out into the battlefield.”

While much remains to be seen — pretty much the whole shebang, really — success for Aetherflux could potentially change the game for American military operations worldwide.

So why hasn’t someone already done what Aetherflux is attempting? As noted last year in Space News, a 2007 study found promise in the approach and recommended more research, but no one acted on the report (Bhatt said he wasn’t aware of it). Either way, to Bhatt, it’s the kind of overlooked opportunity that an outsider is well-positioned to seize. Indeed, in addition to his own father, Bhatt said that he draws inspiration from someone else who has proved that if you’re curious and willing to work hard, you can master multiple industries: Elon Musk. That outsider perspective “is actually an advantage,” Bhatt told the crowd.

Unlike the fast-paced mentality of companies like Robinhood that can quickly implement and even retract software features, the stakes are much higher in space hardware. There is only one chance when launching a satellite.

Aetherflux is taking a “hardware-rich” approach to pressure-testing their spacecraft, building and testing components while refining designs to achieve the right balance between efficiency and speed. This approach aims to avoid long delays commonly seen in important space programs.

The success of Aetherflux could have far-reaching implications beyond military applications, such as space-based solar power providing renewable energy that works day and night anywhere on Earth. This technology could revolutionize energy distribution, offering power to remote areas without extensive infrastructure and providing emergency power during disasters.