Programming Sunlight: How Reflect Orbital Is Building Satellites to Redirect Light From Space (Ben Nowack, Founder & CEO)

[00:00] You are doing one of the boldest, weirdest, most interesting things in the world at the moment. What is it that you are trying to build? We are building the tools to control sunlight. So right now it's completely impossible to control the amount of sunlight you get at night. We are building a constellation of satellites to change that. You can use it to grow plants. You can use it to power on solar farms at night. Just an absolute ton of things. What are the pieces that you think folks tend to miss most about where this is headed?

You can just keep adding satellites together and keep increasing the power. You can have 4,000 satellites working together at one time. [00:30] thousand satellites working together at one time. You don't have to have the satellites talking to each other to do that. You just have them all pointing at the same spot at the same time. So I'm curious what it was that gave you the confidence and the agency to think, yeah, I'm the type of guy who might be able to figure out beaming sunlight from space down to earth. I would get obsessed with ideas like this month.

I have to build an underwater vehicle. I'm going to figure out how to do it. And I just like did all these weird projects. Like I made a jet boat. I just went kind of crazy. And that gave me a ton of confidence that I could do basically anything [01:00] Here's a crazy idea: What if the solution to humanity's rising energy needs isn't nuclear fission, fusion, cheaper batteries, or geothermal? [01:13] but massive. [01:14] carefully engineered mirrors [01:16] that bounce sunlight from space [01:19] straight down to solar farms on Earth. That's the wild future that Ben Nowak and Reflect Orbital are working to make a reality.

And though it seems like a concept straight out of science fiction, [01:29] which it is. [01:30] it may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. [01:33] In the 1990s, Russian engineers succeeded in bouncing a beam of light from space to Earth. And it was actually about the brightness of a full moon. [01:42] This year, [01:43] More than 30 years later, [01:45] reflect plans to bring that technology back to life. [01:48] using modern materials to direct a ray of light [01:52] to our planet. [01:53] Now, remarkably, getting one of Reflex products into orbit [01:57] maybe less than half the battle.

[01:59] The bigger challenge will be to transform its potential constellation of space mirrors [02:03] from an incredible science project [02:05] into a viable business capable of meeting customer demand [02:09] earning real revenue, [02:10] and turning a profit. In today's episode, [02:13] Ben and I dig into these questions. [02:15] and what it took to go from a high schooler building a fusion reactor in his spare time [02:20] to a founder. [02:21] trying to change something as fundamental [02:23] as the way that light [02:24] reaches planet Earth. [02:25] I'm Mario. [02:26] and this is The Generalist.

[02:28] Well, Ben, I've been super looking forward to this conversation because you are doing [02:33] one of the boldest, weirdest, most interesting things in the world at the moment. And maybe let's start there. For folks who aren't familiar with you and reflect, what is it that you are trying to build? We are building the tools to control sunlight and allow people to program when, where, what sunlight they're going to get. So right now it's completely impossible to control the amount of sunlight you get at night. We basically get none all around the entire world.

[02:57] And we are building a constellation of satellites to change that. So if you, you know, this is the Earth, you imagine the sun over here, it lights up this half of the Earth and this half is completely in shadow. [03:07] If you put a mirror right here, you can reflect the sunlight that misses the earth down onto a specific area. [03:12] And we do that specifically with a constellation of satellites that are arranged in rings just like this. They're sun-synchronous orbits over the Terminator, and you can keep adding rings to go all night.

And then as a satellite is passing over an area, we can reflect sunlight down onto that spot. [03:27] The spots themselves are very precise. It's basically smaller than the point of a needle at this scale. And we can place that anywhere on Earth for any amount of time. You just hand it from one satellite to the next. That way you can go all night. [03:39] And then if you want it to be brighter, you just add more and more satellites to one area and you can get whatever brightness you want.

[03:44] from full moon brightness, which is like 0.1 lux, all the way up to about a million times brighter full sunlight, depending on how many satellites you have working at one time. [03:53] It's really cool because, you know, if somebody wants some sunlight back here and they hit a button on a Garmin inReacher or whatever it is, a satellite connected device, we can just rotate a satellite and send sunlight down within 30 seconds because our constellation will be up there all the time. [04:06] So you could use this for [04:08] basically anything.

I mean, you can use it to grow plants. You can use it to see at night. You can use it to power on solar farms at night. You can use it for mining operations, keeping people safe. You [04:18] growth in forests, absorbing more CO2, just an absolute ton of things. We keep hearing about new use cases every single day. I mean, sunlight is the [04:27] source of 99 of life on earth it's one of the most fundamental resources the sun is the most powerful [04:33] resource in the whole solar system.

Like it's powering basically everything, like, you know, even fossil fuels or sunlight with extra steps. And we currently have very little control over it. You know, it's, it's either sunny or it's not sunny. And there's not much you can do about that. Well, we're trying to change that for the first time ever. Yeah, it's, it's quite a, an aspirational project. It's, it's a ton of work. But now a lot more people are working on it. It's, it's getting really exciting. And, you know, the technology is there to support it, right?

You have the rockets, satellite technology is quite advanced these days. And we've spent a lot of time developing [05:03] a couple of extra missing pieces. And, you know, we're launching a couple of vehicles this coming year. [05:08] I'm excited to get into all of those pieces for for folks that don't have the video. This is, you know, one of the podcasts where the video really helps because what Ben was really showing us was sort of this model of the Earth and the constellation of satellites really in this ring. [05:38] rings such that you could get full coverage of the earth in some future.

[05:42] state. Yeah, the Terminator ring is basically just where the shadow starts on the backside of the from day to night. [05:48] Yeah. Yeah. If you imagine just holding a basketball outside at noon, like with the sun coming straight down over it, the bottom of it's going to be in shadow. The Terminator line would be that line around the center of it. [05:59] So that's just where the shadow starts. I mean, the nighttime is really just a shadow on a ball. The Earth is just a ball. And then one half is behind and one half is in front.

The half in front is day, the half behind is nighttime. And yeah, the Terminator separates them. That's where it transitions. So I mean, the geometry is pretty simple, right? It's just you're not able to get that high. I mean, the ancient Egyptians were doing this back like, you know, 3000 years ago, they would put mirrors outside and they would reflect light into shadowed areas like indoors. [06:28] No way. Yeah, they just, you know, they didn't have rockets back then, or maybe the aliens didn't give them access to rockets. But we're, yeah, we're doing a very similar thing.

We're, you know, we're just going up a lot higher because we have access to these rockets. And a sun synchronous orbit is a really cool orbit. It's a little bit complicated, but it's what they use for Earth observation telescopes, where if they want to take a picture when there's no shadows, they'll get an orbit that's synced up perfectly. So it's at noon every single time the satellite passes over. [06:58] And the way you do that is you actually [07:00] have a very polar orbit with a very high inclination and you have it slightly offset so it picks up the earth's obliqueness the earth is a little bit squashed and that perturbs your orbit just so and if you pick the exact right inclination it will perturb it

[07:16] exactly the right amount so that it [07:18] does one full rotation every single year. So it processes once around the earth every 365.25 days. So it's exactly synced one specific time. [07:26] What we do is we select, you know, 6 m. term LTAN and we just stay at those exact times. So our satellites are... [07:33] are a little bit timeless. They're actually locked to a specific time of day. So the satellites will be passing overhead [07:38] every day at 6 m. And if you do one at 7, it'll be every day at 7

m. [07:41] all around the world. So it'll be 7pm on the east coast of America. And then three hours later, it'll be 7pm on the west coast. And a couple hours later, it'll be 7pm in China, then a couple hours later, it'll be 7pm in Europe. And it just stays at that exact time. It's not locked to a location on the earth, it's locked to a time, which is really cool. And this is a standard orbit that has been used for decades. [08:00] There's some really interesting sort of market reasons why you want to sort of target that, you know, that part of the day that we'll get into.

So, you know, I'll save that for a moment. But you mentioned that this is really a big year for you guys and really the sort of first half of the year when you're going to be sending these things into orbit. What exactly are you planning to send up and what are you hoping sort of to de-risk most in that? [08:23] First. [08:24] first initiative. Yeah, we're building three satellites right now. And we're launching them all a few months apart. [08:30] And we're launching the exact same satellite for all three of these vehicles.

We really just want to get something up, something working. And it's a very new vehicle. So there's a lot of risks in the way we're risking that is launching multiple vehicles. What we're launching is an 18 meter by 18 meter heliostat. And I have a small model kind of what it looks like. Amazing. [08:49] It's a small, silvery sail. [08:51] Yeah, it's a small little bus. It's a SpaceX quarter plate, about 130 kilograms. And it's, you know, it's like two feet by two feet. And then it deploys out to 60 feet by 60 feet.

[09:02] We have some very special deployable boom technologies. [09:06] And once those booms are fully unrolled, they unroll kind of like tape measures. They're actually two tape measures. [09:11] Stuck together, but made out of carbon fiber and much bigger. So they're very strong. They'll hold about 220 pounds in compression. Those unroll, and those are basically the masts that pull the reflector tight. And then we hoist the reflector out onto those masts. The reflector itself is a very thin material made of a very special plastic that's coated in aluminum and a couple other layers that prevent degradation.

And this is a similar model. When you pull that material tight, it gets incredibly specular, and it turns into a very good mirror. [09:41] is very important because it keeps the spot that we're reflecting very sharp. And that keeps sunlight from going into neighboring customers when you're serving one person. It reduces light pollution. If you're serving one city and you want to go a couple miles away, you actually won't see the satellites because the reflectors are so perfect. That's critical to the technologies, delivering photons to customers and not to people who didn't buy it.

So we spent a lot of time on the mirror. And the mirror is really cool. It's only a few thousand atoms thick. The whole mirror, [10:11] kilograms. Wow. The entire thing. [10:14] So it's really a crazy material. And micrometeorites can pass right through without damaging the whole thing. You have a lot of ripstop layers. And there's also a bunch of special qualities in the mirror itself that prevent [10:25] things from growing like holes from growing and things like that. Um, so we're, [10:29] We're quite excited about this mirror. We've put a lot of novel technology into it.

We hired a lot of experts who had worked on similar things before. Wow, fascinating. And with that, you know, first... [10:39] first test, so to speak, these three satellites going up, I think you said, you know, you want it to be working in some capacity. Are you targeting, hey, we really want to, you know, shoot for X lumosity or, you know, certain number of customers within this first batch? Or is it sort of just like, hey, if we can, if we can get this up and running in some sense, like that's the right place to begin?

That's a great question. For this first vehicle, we initially were just going to do an engineering demonstration where, you know, you send something up, you measure a [11:09] mirrors are working like now let's build the real thing and then make some money it turns out [11:14] it wasn't that hard to just build the one that can make a lot of money on the first vehicle. Wow. [11:18] So that's what we ended up doing. [11:20] Part of that was realizing there was a market for much lower brightnesses than we initially expected.

When we started this company, we were originally going for energy alone and just lighting up solar farms, providing power, doing that whole thing, competing with electricity as a commodity. [11:35] But then when we started looking into it and the other markets for sunlight, we realized there's markets for much dimmer service, particularly moonlight was really interesting. You can go surfing during a full moon. You can go hiking during a full moon. You can land a full size aircraft on a runway in the middle of nowhere just with full moon brightness. And it's it's literally like 500,000 to a million times less bright than the sun at noon.

[11:55] And it's a useful amount of light. So we discovered that there's... [11:59] this really useful amount of light that's a ton easier to achieve and we could do that with just one [12:06] relatively tiny satellite, you know, instead of tens of thousands of satellites, you know, [12:11] And like these huge constellations, we actually had a market with just potentially a couple of very small, very easy to build satellites. And that was a really big deal. The other thing that was really interesting about these markets is people are willing to pay a lot more for it.

You know, if you look at energy for one of these satellites and the amount of money that you're going to make per satellite, you know, it's in the like the tens of dollars per hour. And you can make the economics work. Like you can build a satellite that's cheap enough. You can get it on a rocket that's cheap enough and all of that. And it. [12:34] does work out. [12:35] But with these lighting customers, people are willing to pay thousands of dollars per hour per spot, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour per spot for some of these services.

And it's like hundreds of that, like literally can be hundreds of thousands of times easier to build. So we realized actually this is fully commercializable right now. And we can build something that can make money immediately. So that was a huge game changer. So our first three vehicles will not be engineering demonstrations. They'll be [13:00] full revenue generating vehicles. We'll be able to make money with these. Obviously, it'll just be three of them, so we won't have constant service. But the year after, we plan to launch basically a full rocket full of vehicles.

We're not sure if we'll fill it up completely. If we filled it up completely, we could fit 150 of our satellites in a Falcon 9. We'll probably underfill it a little bit. But we could launch that many vehicles, and that would give us continuous service for a number of hours. And then the product kind of goes from being a concept sketch to, oh, wow, you can just buy sunlight every night. Oh, wow, it's on the shelves. It's like... [13:30] being on the shelves of Walmart instead of just [13:32] being a concept sketch.

So that's [13:34] We'll have the constellation very shortly after having the first couple of satellites. The first couple of satellites are, you know, kind of like, oh, I tried it, you know, but I couldn't buy it yet. But then the year after, we'll have the full on constellation. Well, I'd love to... [13:45] Take a step back and and talk a little bit about the journey that that brought you to reflect, because one of the things that I thought was was so interesting in. [13:53] In reading about this company, reading about you is [13:56] the way in which [13:57] from a super early age, it seems like, [14:00] you have sort of been scaling your ambition around [14:03] you know, what you want to build.

Uh, and I'm sort of perhaps because I'm, you know, a newish parent obsessed with the childhoods of, uh, [14:11] remarkable people and, you know, people, I think, you know, even in this current generation who show signs of this exceptional ability or exceptional ambition, [14:19] And so I'm curious what it was you think about sort of, [14:22] your environment, the inputs that you had that gave you the [14:27] The confidence in the agency to think like [14:29] Yeah, I'm the type of guy who might be able to figure out beaming sunlight from space down to Earth.

I've talked about this a lot with my parents because I've been kind of interested in it too. I ended up building a ton of stuff in high school, but even in the early years, I would [14:43] I'd build all kinds of things, even when I was like three or four. My dad said one time... [14:48] I think I was two or three and I was like, I really want like a saw like you build all the stuff with sauce My dad was a carpenter [14:54] you know, all kinds of houses, like these super mansions and stuff.

And I was like, I really want to saw like I'm super interested in this thing. And he was going to like the toy section of the store. And he was like, oh, I get this like plastic saw. And he was like, this is stupid. Like, why am I going to get him this thing? [15:06] And he just went right to the tool section, bought me a real metal saw and like a real metal hammer and all this stuff and gave it to me. [15:13] And I just started like using these things when I was extremely young.

I was using a table saw when I was like three or four. And I would build like little cars, like little blocks out of wood, all sorts of stuff. I also built a ton of things with like Lego and stuff. But really, I think the woodworking was a lot better because I learned how to use real tools. Like I was using a drill press when I was super young and all of that. Wow. And then. [15:32] Through like elementary school, I would help him build houses here and there. I get about like playhouses, sheds, things like that.

And then like, you know, all the science kits. [15:40] that, [15:40] that I could get my hands on. And then it wasn't until middle school when I started building RC planes on my own. Yeah. I kind of started with just, [15:49] a bunch of foam board. I took an RC car apart and turned it into a foam board airplane. [15:53] like sixth grade and just trying to fly that thing around. And then like one thing led to another, you like, you find all the like RC powers videos on YouTube and stuff.

And then you like start downloading the plans and putting things together, taught myself how to fly. Like I would fly all these, all these planes in a local field near my house. I don't even know how many planes I built, probably like 30 or 40. I've like pictures of a ton of them. Some of them would go like 150 miles an hour. I started putting cameras on them in like the 2010s. And then I could fly down cliffs. [16:23] fun and I could fly these things like 10 miles away. Like, and you know, I make videos about it on this old YouTube channel.

Um, and that was super fun. And I just like really got into these planes and that's, I think that was kind of the first breakthrough because when you're, [16:36] like really young, you know, I was like, [16:38] 12 or 13 flying these planes and like all these adults would walk up and be like oh my god how are you doing this like did you build that yourself like how high does that go how fast does that go like [16:48] no way how'd you do that and it's kind of like i i don't know i just kind of put it together um i actually thought i was really really dumb in these years i was like i don't know so that was a huge confidence builder initially um it was like building these planes that people were really impressed by um and i think that was really special and then in high school i just started getting into building crazier and crazier stuff one day i built an x-ray machine or i was like i really want to build an x-ray machine i think that would be super cool and then i was like [17:11] I can just like get all the parts on eBay.

It'll be like a hundred bucks. Can I do that? And my dad was like, sure. And then he told one of my teachers that I was doing that. And my teacher was like, what the hell? An x-ray machine? That's the craziest thing ever. If he writes a paper on it, I'll give him school credit. And then I was like, really, I can get school credit for just building things. This is crazy. So then that was a huge hack because then I could have the right idea, get like school credit for it.

And then actually sometimes my teachers would help me buy some of these projects. So like that teacher actually ended up buying me a metal lathe, you know, [17:41] this like little vapor deposition system. I built like a sputterer. A sputterer is really cool. You put it in a vacuum chamber and then you can basically deposit thin metals onto surfaces. You actually have like these magnetic flux lines that have electrons spinning around them and it pulls in argon liquid. They chip off components of the material. They fly up, they deposit on a surface and you make like clear flexible circuits and things like that.

So I just started getting in all this crazy stuff. This was all in high school. [18:04] I built this thing that could liquefy air. And it was just like one thing led to another. I would upload the videos, the videos would get traction. [18:10] And then it kind of just kept snowballing. And the cooler things I built [18:14] the more people would trust that I could build a cool thing. And then they were more likely to give me resources to do it. I also found a ton of stuff at the dump and like, you know, I would take like lawnmowers apart.

I spent one summer just breaking grills and like melting the aluminum down and like and making muffin tins like the whole summer, every single day. I would just go to the dump, get all the grills they had and like break them down. And I just like did all these weird projects. Like I made a jet boat. Like, I don't know, just I just went kind of crazy. Just nonstop. Yeah. Yeah. Just nonstop building. [18:44] to, [18:45] Basically anything if I just [18:46] tried hard enough and people always ask like, Oh, where do you learn how to do all this stuff?

I would just look up YouTube videos. [18:52] or [18:53] like pictures or like read documents as soon as you want to build something. And I was like, [18:58] I would get obsessed with ideas. I'd be like, I'm obsessed with like, [19:02] underwater vehicles like this month i have to build an underwater vehicle i'm going to figure out [19:07] how to do it, whatever I need. [19:10] oh man, like I need an Xbox controller. I need Arduinos. I need to figure out how to control it. Okay, cool. Like, let me start writing code.

And I like literally didn't sleep for like two weeks while I like wrote this code for this underwater vehicles control system. So I could like, you know, move all the motors around and like literally fly it underwater. And I was like, [19:24] this is great and then i spent like 10 hours just like building the cable for it like the tether it had like fiber optic lines and like all these wires and stuff i just spent 10 hours doing it and really [19:34] I think that's it. You just get obsessed about something, you start doing it.

But then once you build enough stuff and everything kind of builds on itself, [19:40] and you have this huge base of things that you know how to do and you also have the track record of like oh well everything i've wanted to build i've been able to build and then you just like end up with this confidence um and then i ended up getting [19:50] So this was all in high school. And, you know, I was like, I should probably go to college, you know, kind of do the normal thing.

I had a couple of projects that I tried to turn into companies. And it was very clear that I was just like one kid in the middle of nowhere who had never worked with a real team before. So I was like, you know, I'm just going to go to college, do the normal thing, try to get a job at a really cool company. I ended up getting very lucky. [20:10] Somebody was watching my videos at SpaceX and a bunch of SpaceX people reached out. My freshman year of college, I was able to get an internship at SpaceX my freshman year of college.

And then that kind of kickstarted my career. [20:20] real career as a huge resume builder. And then, yeah, I don't know. The rest is kind of like more standard. It's like, oh, I got this cool job and then like finished my degree and like got this other cool job and all that. Totally. I mean, there's so many interesting threads there. And I'm, you know, I think I think I watched a bunch of your videos in preparation for this. But even in just you going through this, there were probably like, [20:41] three dozen different projects that I never heard about.

So like the depth to which you were doing this was is really quite striking. It really stays with me, the fact that [20:50] your dad decided, hey, like, let's give him a real saw and a real hammer. Like, there's something about that, that, [20:56] does come up actually a ton, I think, in reading about some of these unusual childhoods is just an adult really treating their kid at a very young age seriously and sort of taking their interests seriously. And so that's so interesting that that was so formative for you.

I think there's the fact that I'm sure you've heard that something like, [21:15] four out of the six members of the the PayPal founding team had built a bomb in high school. What is the percentage at Reflect? Because it seems like it's at least 50% from what I could tell. Yeah. [21:29] I don't know if it's 50% of the whole company. Of the founders. Because you built one, right? Yeah, I built some things that blew up fast. Oh, I guess we do have a lot of rockets. [21:41] A lot of rocket engineers here.

Yeah. You know, it might be it might be around 50. It might be a little over 50. I don't. There's definitely some people here who have never built a bomb. And those are the pariahs, which sometimes is a good thing. Sometimes you want people who've never built a bomb. Like you have the place. You know, exactly. The yin and yang. Two types of people in the world. Your career is sort of you had the SpaceX moment and then you had actually sort of like a period at I think it was like a was it a bicycle helmet?

[22:11] where it was like maybe the one thing that I could see in your track record where I was like, maybe this product [22:16] project didn't work. And it wasn't you that, you know, you weren't the founder of it, but it was a sort of bicycle helmet, [22:21] company that raised some money on an Indiegogo or a Kickstarter or something like that, and it never shipped. [22:27] And as I wonder, like how that stays with you, is there something about like, [22:31] that period where you're, you took some lesson from how that company run or how that project ran that [22:37] yeah, has informed how you do things.

[22:40] Yeah, that was kind of a big risk that didn't really pan out as I wished it would have. Yeah, so I had done two internships at SpaceX. I worked on Dragon 2 prop tanks and rocket engines. Had an unbelievable experience. It was clear that at SpaceX, the thing you had to do was go and work on Starship. [22:54] And just like absolutely send it live in Texas. [22:57] never sleep, like basically have no social life and just only work. And I was pretty down for that. But I was like, oh, man, everybody else is already doing this.

And all these people at SpaceX are so much smarter than me. I'm definitely not going to be the best down there like. [23:10] What I am the best at is starting brand new things and doing stuff that's super hard and kind of taking things from literally nothing to something. So I'm going to try to take something from almost nothing to something. I don't want to start my own company yet. [23:21] Let me learn how to do that. And one of my friends from SpaceX was working at this company. He was like employee three.

[23:27] And I was like, he was like, dude, come come work here. Like as an internship, you could be employee for at the startup. It's going to be super cool. We're making folding bike helmets. And the entire idea behind these folding bike helmets was people have traumatic brain injuries because they aren't wearing helmets. So the problem with helmet is like, and if you're wearing a helmet, it's fine. But the problem is people aren't wearing helmets. So if we could just make a helmet. [23:47] Not even safer, just easier to bring places.

[23:50] more people would wear them. And especially with like the ride share days, it was like, oh, we can make it foldable. It could fit in a water bottle container. That would be super cool. Like we'll make a helmet that's basically a baseball cap, but it's super safe. And I was like, [24:01] oh, that's crazy. That doesn't exist. Let me try that. And I was pretty interested in the consumer market as well. I was like, I want to learn more about consumer markets and what people buy. Like, obviously, the rocket industry is this crazy thing that's totally different.

I was like, I want something that people can just buy. Because I was also a little bit mad at like, oh, you know, SpaceX, we're going to Mars. And I was like, Mars? Like, yes, Mars is really cool. But there's like so many other things we can also do. What about consumer markets? Like, what if you could make something valuable for people today, tomorrow, not in like 20 years? [24:31] and I was like, yeah, I think I can maybe make this work. And I really did just start as an intern.

[24:36] And I did like, you know, the fall. And then they were like, oh, man, Ben, you're you're cool. Like drop out of school and join us. And I was like, I don't want to do that. So what I ended up doing was driving back and forth to Boston like twice per week. [24:49] to go to classes while I was working at this company for basic for [24:52] three semesters. It was actually kind of insane. And they ended up like, you know, I went to China for like nine months out of the year as well, like all in like one year.

So I was like working like crazy at this company. [25:04] And honestly, we just couldn't really make it work with the resources we had. Also, the bike helmet market is fairly small, so it's not like [25:13] a trillion dollar market, you know? Yeah, you can't go fully nuts on it. Like, you know, you can't have the resources of SpaceX going for folding bike helmets. It just wouldn't make sense that you'd never make a return. Um, [25:24] So that became kind of clear. And the scale of the problem was pretty difficult.

And there were a bunch of disagreements with the founders. And I was like, dude, I'm literally just trying to finish school here. I should just do that. Like, why am I getting so involved in this? This isn't my battle. This is not my idea. I don't think this like I joined after they had done the Kickstarter. And I was like, yeah, I think I can maybe make it work. And I realized, actually, I'm not as good as I thought. I can't do everything. I was kind of a jerk before that.

Honestly, I was like, I can do literally everything. I can fix any problem. I'm the [25:54] I'll do everything perfectly, just exactly right. [25:58] Like I can fix it. I'll just figure out a way. You know, I'll find a way. I was there. I was like, oh, [26:02] I can't find a way here. There are limits. There are limits. And they're real. And yeah, I think it was it was really humbling for me. And right after that, I kind of jumped into a similar situation actually worked at a company that was embedding electronics and oil and gas pipelines with a rocket engine closeout technology.

And it was [26:19] The same thing, a couple friends from SpaceX were starting this company. And yeah, I was employee four again. And as we got into that technology, we kind of realized exactly what it was and they ended up getting acquired. And I didn't stick around for the acquisition. I ended up, you know, getting the job at Zipline then. But it was a similar thing. It was like, [26:34] you know, we set out to solve this big problem. Let's get data from the bottom of the oil and gas wellbore.

Like you basically get no data from these things. Like they're, you know, they're going down like 20, 30,000 feet and they have mud pulse technology, which gets you like a couple bits per minute. It's like crazy how low the data rate is. Or there's this like multi-million dollar fiber line that can go down the side of the pipe, but then you have to drill a way bigger hole and then it's millions of dollars per weld. So the idea here is just embed something on the side, [27:04] And then you could do like seismic readings, you can do pressure readings, and you can figure out exactly where the oil is in the formation so you can get more oil per...

[27:11] for a while and i was like obviously i hated the the oil and gas industry i hated fossil fuels like i had tried to build a fusion reactor and stuff realized like [27:19] you know, fusion is not going to work. So maybe fossil fuels is the only way for a little while. So I'll try to make that better. I also hate hypocrisy where like people drive to work in a Prius and complain about the climate crisis. And it's like you drove like you're driving a Prius, but it's still burning gas like [27:32] what if we could make the oil and gas industry a little better?

Like if you could make it even like 1% more efficient, you're making a huge difference today. A huge difference. Yeah. That was kind of the thought. And it's a startup. It's not like a big evil oil company or whatever. So I was like, you know what, this will be good. Like maybe I can figure out a way. And again, like [27:47] We kind of figured out some some things that were cool and then got acquired for that. But [27:51] You know, it was it was a similar story. And then after that, I was like, I'm done with startups.

I'm joining a big company that's fully there. And then I joined Zipline and Zipline was like unbelievable. Like, I absolutely love Zipline. But then I had the idea for Reflect. Before we jump there, you said something that I, you know, reminded me of the fact that, yes, I read somewhere that you built like a basic fusion reactor in your basement or something like that in high school. [28:21] but it is quite important in understanding why you ended up [28:24] doing reflect and taking sort of a very alternative path to a lot of other folks when you think about, you know, how to increase energy usage for humans.

What does it mean to build a fusion reactor in your basement? [28:38] Yeah, the fusion reactor... [28:40] was one of those school projects that I was going to write a report on and get some credit for. I was like, oh, yeah, I think I can do this whole thing for like a thousand bucks. [28:47] You know, you can look up a couple videos of people doing like Farnsworth fusers. I think like 14 kids had made one. And I was like, oh, that's super cool. Like I could be one of like these 14 kids that have made a fusion reactor in high school.

[28:58] And then I just did it. It took like a month. It was like a welding project. You buy a bunch of stainless flanges. You buy a TIG welder. You like weld all the stuff together. That's how I learned how to TIG weld. You make a high voltage power supply. You need like minus 10 mil. You need negative 30,000 volts at 10 milliamps. You need like a bunch of high vacuum feed-throughs. You make this little thing on the inside. You have to get deuterium. That was pretty hard. You have to register with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and get all of that.

But then the actual tank is like 300 bucks. And then, yeah, you just like, you put all the parts together. It's, I wouldn't say it's, [29:28] like particularly difficult. It's just like a month of work. Why did that make you bearish on fusion? The way you tell if your fusion reactor is working is if it's making neutrons. And you have to go and measure the neutrons. So there's a couple different ways to measure neutrons. You can either do a neutron detection tube and a hydrogen moderator. [29:44] and it's it's basically like a geiger counter but it's specifically tuned for for neutrons um so when a neutron goes through it you know changes the charge in the tube and then you can detect that and get a count um the other way to do it is you have a again a hydrogen moderator and then a piece of silver and you can transmute the silver in silver 109 into silver 118 or something like that and then it decays with a half-life of 18 seconds so you can measure that half-life decay um and see if it's working and there's a couple other ways to do it um you also as you're running this thing [30:14] is like 60 millisieverts an hour of x-rays.

[30:18] And like I was hiding behind water because like what neutrons get slowed down by water. But I was like trying to measure these neutrons and they're super hard to measure. [30:26] And I just started looking into like other fusion reactors that are out there. And like, yeah, it's all basically like these neutrons. And you turn the neutrons into heat and then you use the heat to run steam turbines and then like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was just like having... [30:40] It's such a hard time thinking about how this was ever going to work.

I was like, how would this ever work in reality? Like, let's say I wanted to actually go and build a real fusion reactor because I kind of got into this fusion reactor because I was interested in energy. [30:51] And I was like, this just... [30:53] doesn't seem like the thing. Like what would be the next step after this? It's actually not that different. Like I knew this fusion reactor was going to be terrible and never going to produce power. But I kind of realized the real ones are basically the same thing.

And they're struggling with a lot of the same problems. And it's just so much less efficient than what the sun does. The sun has a ridiculous amount of gravity and it just pushes atomic nuclei together because of that. And it does fusion and it's very efficient. Every time we try to do it on Earth, we're like [31:23] magnetic fields that are incredibly dynamic and very hard to stabilize even at the national ignition facility where they do those giant laser pulses if the little sphere that they have is off by like the diameter of a bacteria it won't work it'll go unstable the lasers have to be perfectly balanced so you just end up with these things that are [31:40] that have to be incredibly smooth.

And it's like, you're basically trying to push two springs together or two magnets together. And they always want to explode. [31:48] And it's, [31:49] hard to create the pressures necessary. Like it's hard to create the pressures in the center of the sun in this way. And I just, [31:54] you know, got into thinking about all of that while I was building this fusion reactor and all the challenges and all the radiation and, and all of the, all the stuff about it. And I was like, man, I don't know if fusion is the thing, like, it's really cool research.

I mean, it was super fun to build the fusion reactor, but I was like, I don't know if this is, [32:10] better than just [32:11] like a solar panel or better than just [32:14] you know, burning some some fossil fuels. And I was kind of thinking like, you know, I burned a lot of energy. I actually used like a whole megawatt hour of electricity in high school. Wow. No, my dad was kind of mad about that. So I was like. [32:24] Am I the problem with the world? Am I just creating-- [32:27] like all these problems am I making all this co2 like I made this fusion reactor and it's like actually even adding more co2 to the atmosphere it's like not making anything any better I was like man I really want something that will just work and I started [32:39] working on antimatter a little bit, which is...

[32:42] Even harder than Fusion. But it's like a storable... [32:46] you know fuel source it's just like even deeper in physics and even even more removed from reality and then i i kind of realized like [32:51] I probably won't solve the energy thing. It might be... [32:54] like much more difficult than I can do right now. Like I'm just going to do the normal job thing. That's kind of when the SpaceX thing came out. I was like, you know, energy is very hard, like. [33:01] like super, super hard. If I come up with an idea that might address it later, I will definitely do that.

So I kept thinking about it all the time. But I really realized like, [33:10] Wow, Fusion probably isn't the future. It's probably something else. [33:14] Maybe antimatter, but that's even harder. And so was that, you know, you'd sort of been thinking about this for so long and, you know, had explored these other areas that you thought, hey, you know, [33:23] I don't see this working. [33:26] And then it was at Zipline that sort of you had a little bit of a, [33:29] what sounds almost like a eureka moment where you're like, hey, actually, I think there's, I'm putting this in sort of air quotes, a simpler way of doing things.

It's not simple to beam sunlight from space, but simpler than antimatter to make this happen. What was that moment like? [33:46] What clicked in your head that you suddenly thought, hey, this is viable? Yeah, by the time I was working at Zipline, I was trying to have... [33:53] creative ideas and i was trying to explore them very quickly and [33:59] basically see if they're a viable company or toss them out. And I have been doing that like probably for a decade. Like, I'm honestly, since the, [34:05] Ben and Builds days.

[34:07] Every new idea I'd come across, I'd look into it and see if it was worth starting a company around. And I was doing the same thing as Zipline. And I would... [34:14] I would have like brand new ideas like [34:16] probably once a week and almost all of them, [34:18] don't work. So Reflect started out as that. I was basically watching this video on sunlight in Africa. And there's this project to move sunlight from the Sahara Desert to Europe. And they're going to spend like $40 billion doing it. And something just clicked in my head.

I was like, [34:32] Old. [34:33] Sunlight is a resource you can move around and get paid for. [34:37] And I just saw it like it was it was oil or a resource in a way that I had never seen it before. And honestly, I'm kind of embarrassed. I hadn't seen it that way before. It seems so obvious now. [34:45] It's like, [34:46] Oh, if you could just move sunlight from here to here, [34:48] and get paid for that, like you could create real value. Because you could move sunlight from, you know, like a solar farm down here up to here, and you could make this one generate more power.

So like in Germany, [35:00] They'll make a third... [35:01] a solar farm will make a third the amount of power it would make in Africa. So if you could move this in Africa, [35:06] to Germany, it would make triple the power. And if the solar farm was making $100 million a year, now it could be making $300 million a year. [35:12] And I was like, oh, so somebody could maybe pay me like $200 million a year to do this. I wonder if I could do something like this for like $200 million a year or less.

So then I started looking into all these different ways to do that. And eventually ended on the Reflect idea. [35:25] And how did you start to like crunch through the credibility is not the right word, the sort of [35:31] uh, viableness of this, the viability of, of this project where you were like, you know, one, you have to sort of validate it on some level on the scientific side. And, and there is this sort of rich history of, [35:42] maybe the Egyptians, but also in researching this episode, I learned about sort of the Russian efforts in the 1990s and stuff like that, which we can talk about.

[35:51] But also... [35:52] you know, the viability on the economic side just to say, hey, yes, maybe we can can beam this. But is there enough of a market for. [35:59] or sort of full moon level, you know, and beyond. What was it actually like to... [36:04] to work through those questions. Yeah, the objective was very clear. Make electricity cheaper than the alternatives. The batteries are like 150 bucks per megawatt hour. [36:14] Normal fossil fuels like a natural gas beaker plant would be actually around that range. But a combined cycle natural gas plant is like $56 per megawatt hour.

[36:23] Solar during the day is like 40 bucks a megawatt hour, maybe like 30 bucks a megawatt hour in some places. Nuclear power is like, you know, in the 140s to 150s per megawatt hour. So that's kind of like, you know, coal is like $109 a megawatt hour. So I was like, okay, these are like things to shoot for. Maybe you make something that's a little bit expensive at first beats batteries. [36:39] Then you get better, you'd be combined cycle natural gas. And then you get a little bit better and you'd be just solar during the day.

Like, oh, man, if you can make something for like 30 bucks a megawatt hour, [36:47] everybody is going to use that. So that was the goalpost. And... [36:52] I looked into what launch costs you would need, what satellite costs you would need, how thin the reflector would need to be, some of the designs. [37:00] And basically, I just put it all into Excel. And it didn't work at first, right? It's like, yeah, you can apply things wrong. And then like, you know, a week later, I was like, oh, I could do this like sun synchronous orbit thing.

And then that completely improved the economics because instead of the satellite passing over once a day, you know, basically going through the day night cycle with the earth, it's like, oh, you can use the satellites all the time, then you can serve hundreds of solar farms at once. So you can spread one satellites cost out over hundreds of solar farms, very large solar farms, that's like a huge breakthrough. And there [37:30] breakthrough that actually was like a dead end path where I was trying to decrease the spot size with [37:36] casagrain optics in parallel and that was like no because then you could serve a small thing in a city without having light pollution on the surrounding area it turns out there's enough big customers out there that you actually don't need to do that um so you can just delete all that stuff and keep a very simple satellite but i didn't spend some time working on things like that a ton of different like [37:53] you know, crazy materials, things like that, that would completely change the economics, like going from, you know, the Mylar you can buy on Amazon to some of these space materials was a massive improvement.

But really, a big grounder for the economics was NASA's ACS-3 vehicles. They're the solar sail satellites that had these super lightweight booms and this very thin material. And they had a certain mass and they had a certain size. And they [38:18] if you just made that thing reflective or something a little bit larger, the economics, you know, we're very close to closing, um, with a couple of these markets. So with just, you know, a couple of changes, it was basically workable in the right orbit, um, and the right altitude and everything like that.

Um, so I was like, wow, this, [38:33] This doesn't take any enormous breakthroughs. We've [38:36] we've basically already built this thing. Yeah. You know, we, I mentioned sort of the, the Russian experiments and I think, I think it was maybe 1993 when there's this, this sort of quite famous engine, Russian engineer from what I was reading about him. I can't, I can't pronounce his name. It's like Siramutnikov. Uh, you, you might, you might know it. There's an omnia is even hard to pronounce. Yeah, exactly. Um, uh, which, which translates to banner I read.

So it's [39:06] and beam about a full moon's level of brightness back down to Earth. [39:11] But when I was reading about this project, he tried for a really long time, right, to raise money, to bring it to reality. And it never worked. You know, I think people will know. [39:22] what's changed in some level, but on a really granular level, like what has changed from, from that era to today that, [39:28] makes that [39:30] that gap closable on the financing side, but also just, you know, [39:34] Launch costs, technology, all of these different inputs.

Yeah, launch costs have gone down by, I think, 97x since then. You know, back then you were shuttle, and they were a Soyuz mission. They were on the Progress spacecraft. So today we have SpaceX Falcon 9 launch costs. Rideshares are, you know, 6,500 a kilogram. A full Falcon 9 is 2,500 a kilogram. Yeah. [39:53] And Starship is... [39:54] It's going to be a lot cheaper than that once it's available. [39:57] That was not around back in the 90s. The other really big difference is solar was not around in the 90s.

There were about 200 megawatts of solar farms around the world. [40:06] and our chief strategy officer has built like multi-gigawatt solar farms like we have nearly two terawatts of solar around the world today so it's you know you go from 10 to the 6 to 10 of the 12 um watts of installed solar capacity so it's it's just completely insane the the difference in solar so xenomia was launched without solar in mind at all they actually had a [40:30] mine fund them um for their first mission [40:33] And yeah. [40:35] So it was pretty interesting.

It was just lighting, like lighting up Siberia. Fascinating. No way. Yeah, that was kind of the impetus. And it's actually pretty... [40:42] Similar for us, like we're huge in Scandinavia, like northern areas really, really like the idea of sunlight. I mean, obviously. [40:48] You know, unsurprisingly, so it's unsurprising that the first satellites were from Russia, where it's super cold and super dark in the winter. But yeah, it was really just to light up areas. And I mean, the reason it didn't work like with anything, it's usually the funding. Like, you know, that's been a thing, like even in high school, like if you can find the funding, you can usually build the thing.

Zanami was able to find funding for this first mission. They launched a second mission and the second mission. [41:13] Honestly, it was a kind of a stupid error, like not saying that it's impossible for everybody else to do something like this, but they basically deployed the antennas before they deployed the reflector. So the reflector just like hit the antennas and then. [41:23] ripped up and then that killed the entire program um [41:27] It's like common in space for things like this to happen because you're so constrained. [41:32] And it's very easy to make mistakes like this.

And yeah, that basically just killed the entire program. So they had one mission that went up and they had one demo. It was on the Progress spacecraft, which was going to dock to this, you know, the Mirror Space Station. And they deployed it and they basically had like one pass over the Earth to test it. It was just cloudy on that day and it wasn't bright enough to break through the clouds. Obviously, if you're bright enough, you can break through the clouds or if you're [41:55] If you have enough passes, you can get a day that doesn't have clouds.

And they weren't able to line those two things up either. So... [42:01] They basically just didn't get a chance to show that it worked at all. There's some cool pictures of it in space, but that's about it. And yeah, since then, nobody really had picked it up. I mean, this has been an idea since the... [42:12] you know, the 1920s overthrown [42:15] Heard about it in a book. As soon as rockets worked, like it was shortly after the first liquid rock engine worked. Somebody wrote a paper about like mirrors in space that are going to light up the world.

And it's kind of been a thing like here and there at NASA and places like that. But nobody's really... [42:31] done it apart from the Russians. [42:33] So, you know, we've now sort of, I think, fleshed out the core concept here. And to sort of go back, you have this eureka moment. You bring aboard one of your Zipline sort of colleagues, Tristan Semelhack. [42:45] and and raise funding what was it in tristan that like felt like the right sort of partner for you that you know you guys sort of felt like you had the rapport to do something like this [42:54] I mean, Tristan is on the same wavelength at a level that's that's pretty hard to describe.

I mean, you can describe it with stories and examples. Um. [43:03] But we'll just like see the exact same situation and have the exact same thought. [43:06] like just the exact trajectory after that. And he is [43:10] He's just incredible. So Tristan was a... [43:13] high school student working full time at Zipline, [43:16] on [43:17] one of the most important problems there [43:20] and doing exceptionally well on that extremely important problem. And everybody there knew Tristan was there like, [43:26] oh my god this fucking kid like works circles around me like i can't believe it um like like and he's just completely insane and just so good and as soon as you meet him and work with him you're like oh you see it immediately like do that and that and that and that and he can explain this in that way and like pull out this insight from this impossible thing and like really just like

[43:47] find the path in the complete darkness. Like Tristan is amazing on high school. And he knew me from my YouTube videos back in the day. So he was like, oh, you're Ben and builds. Like we should be friends. And honestly, he probably wouldn't have been friends with me if that wasn't the case. Because like he was like, he was like, just like mega famous, like as this high school kid. [44:06] Like... [44:07] he was awesome and and yeah we just became friends at zipline um we started like basically walking around like every day after lunch and just like talking about the various problems we're solving we're on different teams there we would go on like hikes together and stuff we ended up like in the same friend group and yeah just became friends um and then yeah after i left zipline to start reflect you know i was working on it for a little bit and tristan actually went to stanford he got into stanford and was doing the thing at stanford he got through a semester and a bit more and he was like and the reflect was kind of taking off then and he was [44:36] we started working together a little bit more and [44:39] He was like, you know what?

[44:40] I'm going to drop out and just join you, Ben. Like, this is totally the path. [44:45] I mean, the rest is history, really. Like, he added so much... [44:49] value so much clarity to reflect like immediately started like cutting out things like actually it was him that he cut out like the you know the casagrain optic thing like simplified the entire technology like totally simplified the pitch basically invented the lighting market as well and it's just like [45:05] you know, me and him since then. You you've raised, I think, somewhere [45:09] let's say, $35, $40 million from folks like Sequoia and Lux and so on.

One of the interesting quirks in your cap table is that [45:18] the former founder of Robinhood, Baiju Bot, [45:21] was one of your early investors and then sort of created a competitive company that has since pivoted sort of in your same space. Was that something that you were aware of when he joined? Did that create any friction or are you sort of of the opinion we need as many things in space happening at the same time as possible? [45:40] Yeah, we were definitely aware of that before he joined. We were having a ton of conversations about how to do space solar and all of that, and he was...

[45:49] Just super excited about us. Really cared about more companies [45:53] building cool stuff in space and really making money in a brand new way right like space has been so boring for so long it's been it's been telecoms um so earth observation and a lot of defense stuff and you know the mars pitch and all of that but really it hasn't had commercial businesses and leo that are just making money he was interested in developing those he had always been interested in space like we bonded over that we bonded over a love of technology and it just it just made sense um and then yeah we knew [46:18] we knew he was interested before he joined.

And we're just honestly super excited to work with him a bit closer. I mean, [46:25] yeah, Beiju is pretty awesome. I love hanging out with Beiju. I would say it's a competitive technology, but the, like really a rising tide raises all boats. Like we're all booking the same launch. We're all increasing launch demand. We're all going to drive down the cost of rockets. We're all going to get better at building satellites. I don't see us as, [46:40] competitive with other space companies either. I don't see us competitive with other energy companies.

I think these markets are... [46:47] all in the trillions and there is a ton of value to capture and we're all capturing pretty different pieces of the value we may be all kind of [46:54] funneled into the same bucket right now because we're [46:57] just starting to grow. But as you grow a lot more, I think it's going to be very clear that we're in entirely different industries and the entire space industry is so much bigger than anybody thought. It's interesting to me that his company, Aetherflux, feels like it's sort of pivoted more towards orbital data centers.

And it feels like that's going to be a trend as we see demand in AI. You must have considered for a moment at least like, hey, are we running the right race? Should we be changing tack? Why did that not [47:25] make sense for you or not interest you? I think everybody's probably going to pivot to data centers in space except for us. I tweeted about this recently. [47:35] And it's the same thing, right? There's very few good businesses in space. [47:39] most of them are just defense companies and defense companies like missions, like, yeah, that's definitely in the billions.

Um, it's, it's cool and it's super cool and it's, [47:47] like great money and the government loves you and you can be you know [47:50] the government can be a great customer. It's not the same as like the iPhone, right? It's not the same as the internet. It's not... [47:57] brand new it's not changing the world it's not doing all this stuff [48:01] Data centers in space, [48:04] I mean, it's AI, right? So it's like... [48:06] obviously it has all the ai stuff and it's potentially a cheaper way to do ai [48:10] So that's pretty cool.

[48:11] And there's a ton of AI hype right now. So I think it's super easy to raise money for something like that. And theoretically, it could be cheaper than a data center on the ground eventually, which is pretty cool. And like, I think Elon's pitch where it's like, we're going to build the mind of a sentient son.