Aetherflux founder Baiju Bhatt
Jamel Toppin for Forbes
TThe rapid fall in the value of solar energy has sparked a revolution in renewable energy, nevertheless it comes at enormous cost. An average solar farm is around 40 hectares in size and helps reduce carbon emissions, but takes up green space. But there may be a possible solution to this problem: construct the solar panels in space after which transmit the facility back to Earth. It’s a sci-fi vision that Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of fintech firm Robinhood, is hoping to show into reality together with his latest company Aetherflux, which goals to construct a constellation of power-generating satellites and receiving stations.
“This goal of having infrastructure in space that can really withstand conditions on the ground is really appealing,” Bhatt said Forbes. “It’s the direction we’ve already seen as extremely important with Starlink,” he added, referring to SpaceX’s satellite constellation that gives the web in places with little infrastructure, in conflict zones like Ukraine and through natural disasters on the bottom has provided.
Aetherflux is not the only company working on space-based solar energy, an concept that NASA and other government agencies began exploring within the Nineteen Seventies but ultimately never got here to fruition. But now the sphere is experiencing “kind of a renaissance,” said analyst Chris Quilty Forbes by email. He said the shift was driven by the necessity for clean energy in addition to the lower launch costs enabled by SpaceX.
For example, Michigan-based Virtus Solis and UK-based Space Solar plan to launch large arrays of solar panels into high, geostationary orbit. In this fashion, they continually receive sunlight while pointing at the identical general area of the Earth and radiate the energy they produce using microwaves toward a receiving station. This is comparable to the technology first developed by researchers at CalTech demonstrated in orbit last 12 months. California-based Reflect Orbital is taking a special approach, working on giant orbital mirrors that may reflect sunlight onto ground-based solar panels at night.
Most of those projects have long timelines, partly on account of the scale of the infrastructure they require in orbit. Bhatt said Aetherflux takes a special approach than its competitors, which he believes is more scalable. Instead of using microwaves to beam energy to the surface, his company plans to make use of infrared lasers to deliver energy.
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A serious advantage of this approach is that it allows for smaller, cheaper satellites as an alternative of enormous, costly satellites or solar arrays, making it easier to each iterate and scale and reducing launch costs. It also requires less floor space. Microwave power requires a receiver the scale of a football field and even larger. Bhatt said receivers for infrared lasers could be much smaller — lower than 10 meters in diameter, or concerning the size of a backyard swimming pool.
Aetherflux’s smaller, more maneuverable satellites are designed to orbit the planet every 90 minutes. He said that through the 45 minutes that they don’t have any sunlight, they’ll proceed to supply power from their batteries, that are charged by their solar panels. This is an identical approach that SpaceX took with Starlink – as an alternative of a number of large, expensive, geostationary satellites to supply the web, as has been the case because the Nineties, Starlink is as an alternative made up of a whole bunch of small, low-cost, low-orbit satellites.
Artist’s impression of the Aetherflux solar satellite
Aether flow
Another advantage, he said, is that his company is not waiting for a selected breakthrough or innovation to make the project a reality. It’s only a matter of solving the issue using the tools you have already got. For example, as an alternative of developing a complete satellite from scratch, it uses an ordinary satellite from manufacturer Apex to which the corporate adds its own power generation and transmission components.
“We know how to build constellations of spacecraft, we know how to integrate all these different components, we know how to build the ground receivers,” Bhatt said. “Our particular model is obviously very complex, but none of these are inherently difficult scientific problems.”
In March 2024, Bhatt stepped down as chief creative officer and head of promoting at stock trading app Robinhood, which he had held since moving from his co-CEO role in 2020. Bhatt founded Robinhood with CEO Vlad Tenev, who he met after they met after they were each physics students at Stanford in 2013 and he stays on the board. He said he made the choice because he was “just too passionate about letting something like this happen.” Bhatt’s father worked for NASA throughout his childhood, he said, and “I thought I would be a mathematician or physicist one day.”
Currently, Bhatt plans to fund the corporate from his own assets Forbes Estimates put it at over $1.5 billion. With this, the corporate will perform its first mission: a satellite to check and reveal the corporate’s technology, scheduled to launch in the primary quarter of 2025.
Bhatt then admits that the project would require “a lot of debt capital,” which can come from the private sector but may additionally include government funding. The company has spoken with the Department of Defense, he added, which could also be concerned with using Aetherflux’s power solution for distant bases or on the battlefield. Initially, the corporate will explore the sort of operation in addition to other customer applications where constructing energy infrastructure is difficult, reminiscent of distant mining operations.
Bhatt sees his company as a part of a shift in the way in which orbital infrastructure can support life on the bottom. “We are entering an era of space exploration that will be completely different in the next five to 10 years,” he said. “And I think when such a paradigm shift occurs, the benefits of achieving this in orbit become really clear – but we still have to prove that.”
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