The first adopters of deep tech already understand the physics | Max Arshavsky

Max Arshavsky (0:00)

They are people who are literate in engineering, and in particular in the concept of superconductivity. So they don't need to really buy in a novel concept. They've been familiar with the concept for a while, but they haven't been familiar with that. It looks like it's now feasible in space.

SPEAKER_2 (0:15)

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Brett (0:49)

Max, welcome to the show.

Max Arshavsky (0:51)

Brett, thanks for having me.

Brett (0:52)

I know you're from New Zealand, but I'm sure you're familiar with Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving's coming up. And just imagine you're sitting around a Thanksgiving table talking with the grandma, and they say, Max, what do you do? How does it work? How would you explain it to grandma? What your technology does and how it works?

Max Arshavsky (1:06)

Well, grandma, we build the most powerful magnets for space. Yeah. So I think it's pretty simple. My grandma would understand. And then she would probably ask, but why?

And say, you can do all the great things with these magnets in space. You can move things around, you can protect things. And in general, it's the best way to do useful work in space, converting solar energy straight into useful work. That's where the big magnets come into play.

Brett (1:29)

And how do you uncover this? What's the backstory behind this?

Max Arshavsky (1:31)

I was in New Zealand, I was thinking about the space industry. At some point, it became undeniable that we're expanding beyond Earth, humans, technology is expanding beyond Earth clearly, and human presence. And I tend to think in the limit. I immediately extrapolated, so where is it all heading? And what's needed for this to work? And immediately became obvious that we can't really rely on Earth-based resources as we scale. Because inevitably it's going to become a very harsh bottleneck for us. We can't really bring fuel from Earth with us all the time, because then we run out of it, you know, have to refuel in space. We don't want to assemble things on Earth and then launch them in one piece into space. And we want to be really space native as much as possible. And inevitably space native technologies that are simple and scalable, they will define how we expand into space, how robust that presence is. And so I thought, what is the missing piece? Is there anything even missing at all? And I thought, yes, one thing that is missing, we are not utilizing one of the fundamental forces of the universe, which is the electromagnetic force. It's thoroughly under deployed in space.

A question to why and whether it should be deployed or not. But the bottom line is, we should be able to convert solar energy into useful work in space at scale. And that's how we become very sustainable and very capable as we expand beyond Earth. And the solution there is to master very powerful and strong magnetic fields, which is what we do, superconducting magnets for space.

I sound like such a nerd brush.

Brett (2:54)

I'm nodding along. I think grandma's nodding along. Maybe let's complicate things a bit more for grandma. So maybe explain how the technology actually works.

Max Arshavsky (3:02)

In grandma terms, we want to create very, very strong magnetic fields or magnets in space. And we want to control them. And we don't want it to be sort of like a one-off occurrence. We want to master these things. And to master these things, you really have to master superconductivity, which is the phenomenon of creating these very powerful magnetic fields without any kind of effort or resistance. That's like the simple way to put it. To make it work, really, there's a few things need to come together. But fundamentally, it's superconductivity, which is a type of wire that has no resistance to the flow of electrical current. And from these wires, we make coils. We coil them and we push current through them. And the more current, the better. And that's how it works, essentially. But then you have to make sure that they're always at the right temperature and you can provide enough power to them. You know, and the things are compact and controllable.