Anna-Sofia Lesiv

Fusion could be the most consequential technology ever produced by humanity. There’s a profound, almost mystical, symbolism in our ability to confine the power source of our solar system into a test tube. In some ways, achieving fusion will feel like a final triumph over nature. After millennia of staring up at the Sun and worshipping its role in giving energy to all life on Earth, we are now learning to mimic and reproduce this power for ourselves.

Our version of fusion, however, will arguably be even more efficient than the processes happening in the Sun, because it will need to happen faster, at higher temperatures and in a smaller area than that available to the Sun. In fact, fusion on Earth will need to happen at temperatures ten times higher than those in the very core of the Sun, a fact that seems like it should be impossible.

However that’s not the only thing that sounds impossible about fusion. Its promises of energy abundance, a near infinite fuel supply, the ability to fuse new elements and increase the power available to each person have the ability to completely reshape human life on Earth. As hard as it is to fathom that we are now capable of developing technologies that produce tiny stars, it’s even harder to imagine what this technology will allow us to achieve in the decades and centuries to come.

For these far-reaching economic, but primarily security implications, fusion research has been kept secret for decades. It has been shielded under the umbrellas of national defense departments, given its close relation to efforts to build weapons of mass destruction, a security measure which has nonetheless delayed humanity’s ability to achieve energy abundance. Despite the years of secrecy, incredibly specialized knowledge required to understand it, and the prohibitive costs involved with studying it, the fusion space is now saturated with numerous private companies determined to find breakthroughs that help propel this technology to mass adoption as soon as possible.

For over a hundred years, we’ve been aware that when two hydrogen isotopes fuse together, an incredible amount of energy is released and a helium atom is produced. For over a hundred years, we’ve known that this reaction has been responsible for powering the Sun and every other star in the universe — and for just as long, scientific debate has raged about whether it would even be possible to replicate this same process on Earth.

On December 5th, 2022 the National Ignition Facility in the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory laid all such doubts to rest. A multi-billion-dollar undertaking of the Department of Energy, home of all things nuclear in the United States, the National Ignition Facility is the largest and most powerful laser on Earth. Actually, it’s not just one laser — it’s 192 lasers lined up next to each other, spanning the length of two football fields. The light from these lasers is accelerated and amplified six times before being converted into ultra violet light and targeted precisely onto a metal cavity that contains a tiny capsule filled with hydrogen isotopes. The lasers are shot at the capsule for a billionth of a second and produce a temperature ten times hotter than in the center of the Sun.

At about 100 million degrees Celsius, hydrogen isotopes are colliding into each other with such immense speed that they begin to fuse. As they do, they release a blast of energy so powerful it pushes other hydrogen isotopes to fuse, and so on, until all the fuel in the capsule is used up. 

This process of heating up the capsule to the point that all its fuel is consumed in a fusion reaction is called ignition. The concept is nearly equivalent to the act of producing enough friction to light a match. Theoretically, it sounds simple enough, but practically, it has taken decades, billions of dollars, and hundreds of attempts to get right. For years, the NIF’s failed attempts led to it being ridiculed as the “Never Ignition Facility” or the “Nearly Ignition Facility”, so you can imagine the relief that ensued when the thirteen-year-old, $3.5 billion laser system finally managed to light fusion’s match. Upon hearing the news, Tammy Ma, who heads the fusion initiative and has worked at the Lawrence Livermore lab for over 14 years, burst into tears while waiting to board a plane.

Ultimately, the NIF laser beamed 2.05 mega joules of ultra-violet light at the fuel capsule, inducing a fusion reaction which released 3.15 mega joules of energy. 

To be clear — 3.15 mega joules is not even one percent of what a nuclear power plant produces every hour. In fact, it’s just about the amount of energy required to boil two pots of water. However, the NIF was not built to be a functioning power plant, it was built as a laboratory experiment to with the explicit purpose of achieving fusion ignition. That effort was a resounding success, and it has placed the coveted milestone of achieving ignition into our rearview mirror once and for all.

The coming challenge for the scientific community devoted to making fusion power a reality now lies in figuring out how to scale this process to an industrial level. Achieving feasible fusion power is a massive design problem which currently presents more questions than answers. Though to better understand all the possible paths forward, let’s review the history of our attempts to unlock star power on Earth.

The secret behind the Sun’s endless power was always a deep, cosmic mystery for a long time. Ironically, it was a quest into the nature of the very small that unlocked insights into the very big.

In 1919, Francis Aston, a precocious British chemist, was determined to measure the weight of an atom. It was just a year after the end of the First World War, which had him enlisted in the army servicing some of Britain’s earliest air force fleet. The war had thwarted his desire to burrow away in a lab and focus exclusively on research. Finally, he had returned to Cambridge to conduct his experiments in peace. The early 20th century was an exciting time in chemistry. There was a firm understanding that all matter was composed of elements — particles of an essential nature, which could not be transformed from their fundamental state. Centuries of discovering solid elements like metals, and distilling various liquids and gases, resulted in humanity collecting a list of such fundamental elements. The list included things like gold, silver, sodium, oxygen and hydrogen. Various forms of chemical analysis helped established the approximate relative weights between the elements, which allowed Dmitry Mendeleev to organize them according to their mass in a table — today’s periodic table.

At the time, the properties of elements and their relationships were understood only approximately, but Aston was not satisfied with approximation. He wanted to measure the precise weights of the atoms themselves.

The way to do it was a clever trick, analogous to determining someone’s height by measuring their shadow. He figured that if he could run ionized atoms through a magnet that deflected the path of their flow, he could determine the weight of ions by the amount the magnet deflected them. The lightest atoms were easiest to deflect, and the heavier atoms were the hardest.

This device created to enable this measurement is known as a mass spectrometer, and it revealed something weird about the weights of the individual atoms. Aston found that the elements were not actually perfect multiples of hydrogen’s weight, they always weighed ever so slightly less than a perfect multiple of hydrogen. For example, helium wasn’t four times the weight of a hydrogen atom, it was actually 3.97 times its weight. This discrepancy carried a clue. 

The results of Aston’s experiments made the rounds, and caught the attention of an astronomer and physicist named Arthur Eddington. Eddington had read Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper years ago, which claimed that there was an equivalence between mass and energy — E=mc^2. The mystery of the missing mass could only mean one thing in Eddington’s mind — the conversion of mass into energy. Eddington was preoccupied with thoughts of stars, planets and galaxies, and suddenly this insight from a chemist opened his eyes to the mechanism that makes the Sun shine.  

Eddington announced his reflections from Aston’s experiment at a conference, saying:

“Aston has further shown conclusively that the mass of the helium atom is less than the sum of the masses of the four hydrogen atoms which enter into it and in this at least the chemists agree with him. There is a loss of mass in the synthesis amounting to 1 part in 120, the atomic weight of hydrogen being 1.008 and that of helium just 4.00. . . . Now mass cannot be annihilated and the deficit can only represent the mass of the electrical energy liberated when helium is made out of hydrogen. If 5% of a star’s mass consists initially of hydrogen atoms, which are gradually being combined to form more complex elements, the total heat liberated will more than suffice for our demands, and we need look no further for the source of a star’s energy.”

The year was 1920. A hunch had clued Eddington in to the fact that the fusion of hydrogen atoms into more complex elements was secretly powering the Sun. It was a guess that predated the existence of quantum mechanics, and even predated our understanding of the atomic structure — but it was basically spot on. The only thing Eddington got wrong was the assumption that only 5% of the Sun’s mass consisted of hydrogen. It was actually 100%. 

The dream of fusion power on Earth was born then and there. "If, indeed, the subatomic energy in the stars is being freely used to maintain their furnaces, it seems to bring a little nearer to fulfillment our dream of controlling this latent power for the well-being of the human race — or for its suicide,” said Eddington.

The discovery of this process was the first time that scientists stopped looking at atomic elements as rigid and unchanging and began looking at them as dynamic particles in the universe, capable of being fused or broken up into smaller parts under the right circumstances. It was also the first time they realized just how much energy was locked inside even the smallest of particles.

Measuring the weights of all the atomic elements revealed an interesting trend. Atoms lighter than iron weighed progressively less than the sum of their constituent particles. It seemed that whenever lighter atoms fused to form a heavier element, energy was released. However, that pattern only held for atoms lighter than iron. 

Atoms heavier than iron needed energy injected to help them fuse. Elements as heavy as uranium, with 92 protons and anywhere from 141 to 146 neutrons, were so heavy they naturally wanted to come apart. These atoms were so unstable, they became radioactive, releasing energy as protons and neutrons naturally broke away from the precarious core.

It was clear that way more energy was released when two small atoms fused than when one heavy atom fissioned. However, the activation energy required to get an already heavy and radioactive element to break apart was way lower than the energy required to force two hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium. Doing that would require conditions as hot and dense as in the center of the Sun.

In the core of the Sun, temperatures reach 10 million degrees Celsius. At this temperature, the atoms get so hot, they form a plasma. Plasma is basically a gas that has become so hot, its electrons start roaming around freely and the entire plasma starts conducting electricity. 

The process of fusion begins with two protons. Protons are positively charged and, under normal circumstances, repel each other. However, inside a hot plasma, particles are flying into each other so fast that they overcome electromagnetic repulsion and instead fuse together. Once this happens, one of the proton becomes a neutron and together, they form an atom called deuterium, which is really just a hydrogen atom, with an extra neutron. The resulting deuterium is then involved in a second fusion reaction. It actually fuses again with more deuterium, or with  tritium — hydrogen but with two extra neutrons — to produce helium.

The energy released during the constant fusing of hydrogen atoms creates enormous outward pressure that is 400 billion times higher than the atmospheric pressure on Earth. However, due to the Sun’s enormous mass, its gravity is strong enough to counteract the outward pressure and keep the hot, fusing plasma compact in a sphere.

Trying to recreate the Sun on Earth was a good first blueprint for designing a fusion plant. In theory, the concept was very clear — heat hydrogen gas to the point that it becomes a plasma, wait until the hydrogen atoms start fusing, and collect the energy produced. The fusion between deuterium and tritium requires less energy to initiate than the fusion of two protons, so this reaction became the focus of fusion efforts on Earth. George Thomson, whose father J. J. Thomson discovered the electron, was the first to propose an idea for a fusion plant along these principles.

The only problem here is that plasma is extremely unstable. In the Sun, the explosive energy released by fusion reactions is contained by the Sun’s massive gravitational force. On Earth, the task of stabilizing an exploding, hot plasma has been compared to “holding jelly with elastic bands.” 

It’s important to keep the plasma stabilized during the course of the fusion reaction so that all of the fuel in the plasma can be used. Otherwise, an unstable fusion reaction would just blow the plasma up and spew perfectly good hydrogen fuel all over the place. More importantly though, the hot plasma would instantly melt any part of the reactor it physically touched.

One approach to solving this problem was by taking advantage of the fact that plasma conducted electricity. The laws of electromagnetism state that every electric field induces a magnetic field, and vice versa. So, a sufficiently powerful magnetic field interacting with the plasma might be able to control its shape and keep it contained. This approach was called magnetic confinement but in practice over the past fifty years, holding plasma together for a long enough time to induce a protracted fusion reaction has been unsuccessful.

Having failed to realize fusion via magnetic confinement for many years, around the 1970s, physicists began looking for other approaches. Rather than heating a plasma, and stabilizing it while all its hydrogen atoms fused, they wondered if you could induce a small fusion reaction so fast that you didn’t have to deal with the problem of holding the plasma together. The amount of fuel used would be smaller, but the reaction would happen so quickly that all the fuel would instantly be used up. The inaugural paper for this approach called inertial confinement was co-authored by John Nuckolls in 1972. Years later, Nuckolls became the director of the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, which started building experimental equipment to test this new approach. Planning for the National Ignition Facility began under Nuckolls’ directorship in the early 1990s, but ground was only broken in 1997, and the facility didn’t become operational until 2009. This excruciatingly slow timeline is a telling detail that lends partial insight into why fusion has taken this long to mature. Finally, fusion ignition was achieved on Earth. It did not happen by magnetic confinement, but by inertial confinement, in the same lab where the approach was initially developed, some fifty years earlier.


Fusion is one of the only means of generating energy where abundance of fuel is not a concern. Unlike wood, coal, natural gas, or even uranium, which are all limited in supply — deuterium and tritium are very easily obtained. Deuterium is just an isotope of hydrogen, and roughly one in every 7000 hydrogen atoms is exactly the deuterium isotope we need. Deuterium can easily be distilled from water, and tritium, the hydrogen isotope with two neutrons, can be produced by reacting neutrons with lithium in a fission reaction.

However, whereas igniting fuels like wood or coal is pretty straightforward, the process of igniting hydrogen isotopes has taken decades. Now that we’ve finally achieved the milestone of ignition, the work begins to build a fusion plant that can generate enough energy to power a city. 

Though we’re far out from that reality, here is the general idea of how a large-scale fusion plant should run:

Deuterium and tritium fuel would be heated from an external energy source until they fused. The fusion reaction would produce a helium nucleus and a neutron. 80% of the energy released during the reaction would be carried by the neutron, and the other 20% would be carried by the helium nucleus. 


Helium nuclei are stripped of their electrons, and thus have a positive charge. When produced by the fusion reaction, they would be trapped by the magnetic field surrounding the reaction, and their energy would be used to heat the plasma further and ignite more fusion reactions. 


Eventually, more and more of these trapped helium nuclei would provide the energy required to continue the fusion reaction until the entire reaction becomes self-sustaining, which is the goal of ignition.


The neutron carrying 80% of the reaction’s energy lacks any electric charge, and would not be confined by the magnetic field. It would fly outward, into a surrounding structure containing lithium, there it would react in a fission reaction with the lithium to produce more tritium fuel and generate a great amount of heat.


The heat given off would boil water, which would produce steam and power a turbine that would generate electricity, just like any major power plant.

Though we have a good sense of how the picture should work as a whole, many details are still unresolved and pose massive engineering challenges for the coming generation of physicists and engineers. These are some of the most immediate problems that would need to be solved provided we stick with the inertial confinement approach:

Finding a repeatable way to heat the fuel capsule. The external source of energy used to heat the fuel capsule is called the driver. The National Ignition Facility used lasers as their driver to heat the fuel. However, the NIF’s lasers can only be fired once a day, since doing it more often would damage them. This is pretty problematic since a fusion plant using the inertial confinement method would need to drive the reaction something like 10 times every second.


Finding an energy efficient way to power the driver. The NIF’s laser requires 300 mega joules of energy to power a 2 megajoule laser blast, which means their driver system converts only 1% of its energy into heating the target. The 2 megajoule blast is capable of igniting a 3 megajoule fusion reaction, but relative to the energy required to power the laser in the first place, the total fusion reaction in the laboratory comes to a massive big energy loss.


Designing a reactor structure that could withstand the effects of neutron bombardment. The neutrons flying out the reaction chamber slam into surrounding walls, putting great strain on the reactor walls and structure overtime. A feasible reactor would need to withstand this kind of bombardment for years, while maintaining its structural integrity. Overtime, the reactor structure would become radioactive, with its internal atoms being destabilized by the neutrons. At the end of the reactor’s lifetime, the structure would need to be sealed to protect from its radioactive effects.

There are dozens of private companies working on solving these problems. Some, like First Light Fusion, are developing an entirely new type of driver system, which would heat the fuel capsule by blasting it with ions at incredibly high speeds. They’re calling this amended version of inertial confinement, ‘projectile fusion.’ 

It’s unclear, though, if inertial confinement can be successfully commercialized. It could be that a completely new direction might prove more practical in the long run. The nine-year-old startup Helion, for instance, has developed a unique reactor design around the principles of both magnetic and inertial confinement. On either ends of their seventh generation “Trenta” reactor, two symmetrical discs of hot plasma are generated before being slammed into each other and compressed by strong magnets to induce a fusion reaction. 

The most interesting part of Helion’s design is that its reactor can generate electricity directly from the reaction. When fusion begins to occur and the plasma starts creating outward pressure, it causes changes in the magnetic field which can be directly recaptured as electricity. This way, no water has to be boiled, and no steam-powered turbines are required to generate electricity. Though these are the traditional methods every major power plant uses, Helion has brilliantly designed a mechanism that reimagines what a large scale fusion reactor could be capable of. It’s due to complete building its 8th generation reactor, “Polaris,” in 2024, which should be capable of converting fusion energy directly into electricity.

Despite these incredible efforts, it’s not obvious when fusion will be ready for commercial use. Extreme optimists say we’re only about a decade away, while skeptics say we could be waiting fifty years or more. Whenever fusion power comes online, there’s no telling what a fusion-enabled society will look like. The promises of abundant energy and nearly infinite stores of fuel could open up the feasibility of everything from inter-planetary travel to developing a functioning artificial general intelligence. The only thing that’s certain is that the cone of possibilities for humanity will widen immensely.

Below are the companies breaking new ground in fusion research:

Helion is designing and building reactors that can generate electricity directly from the fusion reaction.

First Light Fusion is developing a new approach to inertial confinement fusion. Rather than heating the fuel capsule with laser beams, they heat it by blasting it with high velocity ion projectiles.

TAE Technologies is developing reactors that can induce fusion reactions using the magnetic confinement technique. They have been operational since 1998 and have raised nearly $1 billion since then.

General Fusion is a Canadian fusion company developing a reactor that produces fusion via a magnetized target fusion approach.

Tokamak Energy is building out various models of magnetic confinement reactors.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is designing and building magnetic confinement reactors using powerful types of superconducting magnets.

A deep dive into the core concepts of fusion technology.

The Promise of Fusion

Metallurgy is really modern day alchemy. It's sometimes mesmerizing to stare at your laptop and realize that most of the materials used to make it were once rocks. 

Of course, it's not just our laptops. Every important economic activity, whether it's construction, transportation, electrification or computation relies on metal. No other material has this amount of useful properties. Metal can be strong yet light, durable yet malleable — it can even conduct electricity. The more we discovered about the properties of metals, the more types of technologies we were able to build. In fact, the history of metals very closely traces the history of modern technology. 

However, the story isn't over for metals. We're not done figuring out how to use them nor are we done figuring out how to make them. Our reliance on them is a bit of a double-edged sword. We need them for everything, but metals are also a finite material. 

Some estimates suggest that in a few decades, the global demand for steel, aluminum and copper will be three times what it is today, which will be a real challenge for the industry since over time, mining new metal or recycling used metal will only get more challenging, and new strategies will be needed to continue supplying our economies with the materials they need. Even if common metals like steel and aluminum are relatively abundant, modern devices like our phones feature nearly a third of all the elements on the periodic table, and a lot of those elements are more scarce than we'd like to admit.

We're entering an interesting new era in the world of metal production, where our most crucial industries and manufacturing processes will need to evolve drastically in an environment of growing material uncertainty. It's why there's no better time than now to trace the history of how we learned to work with metals, and become better acquainted with the techniques we'll need to address the challenges of the future.

The first metals were likely discovered by accident in prehistoric times. Nuggets of pure gold are known to have been lying in river beds all across the world, having been found in places as far flung as the waterways of present-day California to those of Egypt and the greater Middle East. Likewise, deposits of silver, copper, tin, lead and iron were discovered early on in their pure state.

The quantities of naturally occurring pure metals were limited though, and without knowledge of processing techniques, metals were originally mostly used for decorative purposes. In their pure form, gold, silver and copper and soft and pliable — useful for making jewelry, but terrible for use in armor or as weapons.

Most often, metals are found fused with other elements, like oxygen, in the form of ores. These ores are often colorful and eye-catching, so it's no wonder that prehistoric man was interested in collecting these rock ores too. Somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, whether by accident or experimentation, metal ores were dropped into fire. 

Applying heat broke the chemical bonds between the metal and the other elements making up the ores, transforming the ore from crumbly rock into a distillation of pure metal. Heating an ore to unlock its hidden metal, also known as smelting, was the earliest technique of metal extraction discovered, and it launched the millennia-old craft of metallurgy.

Smelting allowed early civilizations to produce larger quantities of metal. By throwing ores into hot kilns, collecting the resulting metals and fashioning them into useful forms, it became possible for early civilizations to manufacture instruments, weapons and sturdy vessels like copper pots or lead pipes used to carry water in the Roman Empire. 

Further experimentation revealed that separate metals could be mixed together when melted. Bronze was the first alloy ever produced, created from a combination of copper mixed with tin. Alloys, it turned out, could have entirely different properties than their constituent ingredients. Instead of being soft like pure copper or tin, bronze was strong. The first durable swords, daggers and nails were made from bronze.

The adoption of bronze reached a natural limit, however, due to the scarcity of tin. In its place, another metal, initially known as a 'gift of the gods' soon took over the world.

Today, iron is looked upon as pretty unremarkable, but thousands of years ago, it was seen as a cosmic miracle. It was first discovered in its pure state by ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians after it fell from the skies, carried to earth by massive meteorites. 

Earthly iron, though, is not usually found in a pure state, which explains why it took longer to develop than other metals. Normally, iron is contained in iron ore, a granular and reddish compound of iron and oxygen atoms, better known to us as rust.

To extract it, iron ore needed to be smelted. Unlike copper, iron had a much higher melting point, so smelting it required hotter furnaces which burned for longer. The early attempts to refine iron were pretty disappointing. Pure iron was a lot weaker than bronze, but rumor had it that master metal workers who were around iron for longer, like the Assyrians as well as the Chinese and Indians, had figured out ways to turn this apparently soft metal into legendarily strong swords. It would take the rest of the world hundreds of years to approach the clever techniques used by ancient Chinese and Indian metallurgists. Everything from cooling the metal quickly, repeatedly heating it, folding it, beating it, heating for longer was tried. Though early metal workers didn't know why these techniques tended to work, the best ones were passed down with time and taught.


As populations and demand for iron grew during the medieval period, production needed to ramp up to keep pace. The limiting factor to smelting more ore was the ability to create a fire that was bigger, hotter, and could burn for longer. 

A fire needs two things — fuel and oxygen. Early smelting furnaces, built with bricks to look something like a chimney, created an interior structure that contained the ore, fuel, and preserved the fire's heat. To introduce oxygen, hand-held bellows were used to blow more air in and keep the fire going. Designing a scaled up smelting furnace was tricky because even if you made these furnaces larger to accommodate more ore and more fuel, you would still need to solve for getting more oxygen to flow through them. A hand-held bellow just wouldn't do the trick.

In the 12th century, Europeans had developed a brilliant design for a smelting furnace that solved this problem. Unbeknownst to them, this technique was already standard practice in China for hundreds of years, but information traveled very slowly back then. Nonetheless, European metal workers were very proud to have independently figured out the 'blast furnace.'

Rather than use human labor to operate the bellows, a blast furnace relied on the awesome power of nature. Furnaces were built close to waterways so giant water wheels could mechanically operate bellows which would blast huge gusts of air into the furnaces to keep the fires roaring. 

Blast furnaces could process a great amount of iron ore, getting the iron so hot it would melt. The problem was, when the melted iron cooled, it came out tough but very brittle. When whacked with enough force, it would just crack. Molten iron that came out of these blast furnaces would typically need to be poured into troughs to cool, and then worked to be made durable again.

What medieval metallurgists didn't realize was they weren't really in the business of making pure iron as they thought. All these years, they had actually been producing an iron alloy. Inside the furnaces, those big gusts of fresh oxygen were actually fusing with the carbon in the fuel to produce carbon dioxide, which exited through the top of the furnace. The remainder of the carbon in the fuel, however, mixed in with the molten iron. The substance that was being collected in those cooling troughs was an iron-carbon alloy, better known in the present day as steel. 

Steel is a fickle beast. You need to hit a delicate iron-carbon ratio to produce a strong steel. Too much carbon, and the steel becomes tough and brittle. Too little of it, and the steel is soft and pliant. Getting the ratio just right was a headache for centuries and required tons of working and re-working either to get excess carbon out, or to get more carbon in.

It was only in the 19th century that a better solution was devised. An Englishman, named Henry Bessemmer, realized that traditional blast furnaces were introducing way too much carbon into the molten iron. To get it out, he suggested blasting the molten iron with even more oxygen. The extra oxygen would fuse with excess carbon and escape as CO2, leaving behind a low concentration iron-carbon alloy.

This technique became known as the Bessemmer process, and it single-handedly made the production of steel cheaper and more plentiful. If good strong steel normally took weeks to make, the Bessemmer process accomplished it in minutes.

When Andrew Carnegie imported the Bessemer process to America, not only did it make him a magnate, it gave birth to industrial America. Cheap steel changed everything, and became an essential material in building the modern world as we know it today.

With steel, railways could be built long enough to span continents, connecting disparate markets, people and ideas which had previously been isolated. As a building material, steel proved so strong it eventually became a critical component in all forms of construction, allowing for the creation of the first skyscrapers.

Steel was also used to reinforce bridges, dams and roads. This meant more surface area for the burgeoning automotive industry, which itself drew heavily on steel as it became crucial to developing powerful engines that could withstand the high pressures of combustion reactions. Finally, in 1912, chromium was added to steel to produce a corrosion-resistant alloy known as stainless steel, which virtually all domestic appliances are made from today.

We're still living in the age of steel. As Vaclav Smil, author of Still the Iron Age puts it, "Steel is truly a ubiquitous material: there is no industrial enterprise that would not, directly or indirectly, rely on it. There is no modern construction activity that can proceed without it ... There is no commercial or household activity that would not, or ultimately, owe its existence to it."

Besides steel, the other metal most responsible for the creation of the modern world was the advent of cheap aluminum. Aluminum ore was first discovered in 1823, but it couldn't just be smelted. Throwing aluminum oxide into a hot fire would do nothing. It would take another half century to figure out how to separate aluminum atoms from oxygen, but eventually an American, Charles Hall, and a Frenchman, Paul Héroult, would solve the problem independently in the same year.

The basic idea was to dissolve the aluminum oxide into a solution — kind of like how salt dissolves in water — then, use a powerful electric current to separate positively charged aluminum ions away from negatively charged oxygen ions, a technique known as electrolysis. A lot of innovations in chemistry and electricity had to come first, but eventually, this process, called the Hall-Héroult Process, soon became standard practice in refining aluminum.

Before the Hall-Héroult process, pure aluminum was so rare, it was more expensive than gold. Napoleon Bonaparte was particularly fond of aluminum when it was first discovered. It was a marvelous metal — extremely strong yet light at the same time. Napoleon wanted the entire French army's armor made of the stuff. Though when that proved too expensive, he settled for making tableware out of it, serving only his most esteemed guests on plates of pure aluminum.

The going rate of aluminum around 1852 was around $1,200 per kilogram, but after the Hall-Héroult innovation, the price fell to $1 per kilogram by 1900. Once a material fit only for kings and emperors soon became a common kitchen occurrence which today, nearly every American uses to wrap last night's leftovers.

Aluminum's remarkably high strength to weight ratio transformed the world of transportation. Aluminum made train cars lighter, yet just as strong. Suddenly, engines were pushing a lighter load, which made trains faster. Aluminum made cars lighter and faster too, but most importantly, it allowed us to fly. Steel engines were just too heavy to propel airplanes, so with the emergence of a cheap alternative, the Wright Brothers designed their own engine made entirely out of lighter aluminum. In 1903, their aluminum engine allowed them to fly a controlled aerial vehicle for the first time in history. 

Today, we produce over two billion tons of pure metal each year, and mine over three billion tons of ore to do it. The vast majority of the metal produced today is steel (at 1.95 billion tons per year), with aluminum at a very distant second (at 70 million tons per year). All the other metals on the periodic table barely even register when compared to the scale of the global steel industry today.

In total, the modern metals market is worth roughly $4 trillion globally, though this is likely to grow given the pressures of a growing world population, further industrialization, urbanization and digitization. By 2050, some estimate that global demand for steel and aluminum will grow up to three times today's output.

Over just the past 200 years, metallurgy has evolved from an artisan craft, relying on inherited techniques to a large-scale industry that draws on cutting-edge science to optimize production.

With breakthroughs in modern computing and physics, modern day metallurgists can control the composition of alloys with extreme precision and observe the internal structures of metal at the atomic level. They can even engineer metallic microstructures to achieve the exact structural characteristics that are desired. We're past merely discovering new metals. We're entered an era of unprecedented material invention.

The tools and machines we operate on a daily basis are now produced with hundreds of unique types of alloys. Digital devices feature up to a third of all the elements in the periodic table — and research is ongoing to produce newer, useful types of alloys.

These include new metal mixes that would make our car engines lighter, medical implants more resistant to corrosion, and the disposal of nuclear waste safer. New alloys are also in high demand in the aerospace industry, which needs to make rocket engines out of metals that can withstand tremendous heat. For example, SpaceX employs an in-house metallurgy team to engineer the uniquely powerful superalloy steels from which its Raptor Engines are cast. 

Outside of the advanced techniques used by specialist metallurgists, most metal production processes have not strayed too far from those employed in the 19th century. As a result, the metal industry is one of the most energy-consumptive on Earth.

8% of the world's annual energy use is consumed via metal production. Roughly 75% of that energy goes toward making steel, while most of the remaining ~25% is devoted to producing aluminum. The process of electrolysis involved in the Hall-Héroult process is extremely energy intensive. Currently, one ton of aluminum is roughly six times more energy intensive to produce than a ton of steel. Overall, metal production accounts for over 30% of all annual greenhouse gas emissions. 

To compound the issue, ore grades, which denote the concentration of a desired element in an ore, are decreasing so more ore is required over time to yield the same amount of metal. As our annual demand for metals grows, many are searching for ways to make current processes cleaner and more economical.

One solution that would address both issues is relying more heavily on scrap or recycled metals in the production process. After all, metals are infinitely recyclable. Throwing them in a landfill at the end of their lives is ridiculously wasteful. It's like re-burying something you spent a ton of effort trying to dig up in the first place.

Most don't realize it, but the metal industry already has a pretty big circular economy going, even if it's not an entirely closed-loop system. In fact, Coors was one of the first companies to figure this out way back in 1959, when they launched a recycling program for their aluminum cans. Coors would buy back empty cans to melt down and re-shape into their next batch. That way, a few grams of refined aluminum could produce an infinite number of cans in the future, decreasing material and production costs. 

Today, nearly all shrewd manufacturers are following suit. After Boeing stamps large sheets of aluminum to fashion into planes, it sells off the leftover scraps to downstream recyclers who play a role in refining the aluminum into reusable sheets all over again.

Over half of the metal goods we use each day are made of recycled metals. Each year, between 80% and 90% of all discarded steel in the United States is recycled. Nearly all cars, for instance, are recycled for scrap. Steel beams that used to make up old buildings or bridges are transformed into future screws and hammers. Old fridges and microwaves are broken down and made into cell towers or engines. Even hardware producers like Apple have plans to re-engineer their manufacturing process such that 100% of the metals used in production come from recycled sources. 

Recycling scrap metal makes metal production remarkably cheaper, especially when dealing with metals that require a lot of energy to refine — like aluminum. Producing ready aluminum out of scrap uses 16 times less energy than making it out of ore, since you’re circumventing the process of electrolysis altogether.

One of the forthcoming challenges will be developing and managing a system that can effectively recover metal products at the end of their lives. But even with effective recovery of metals, we would still need to figure out how to sort the different types of metals we recycle. The proliferation of more and more complicated types of alloys makes this a very hard problem and un-alloying all the alloys could actually prove to be very expensive. 

Extremely sophisticated techniques are required to ascertain the precise composition of elements in an alloy. Everything from expensive X-Ray fluorescence machines to optical emission spectroscopy devices are used to deduce the exact chemical composition of metals in an alloy. 

Successfully and cheaply separating out important metals will be a game changer in an environment where everyone is scrambling to secure a reliable supply of metals — particularly,  rare metals which essential for batteries and digital devices, and are typically found in low concentrations.

Some researchers are also concerned that without diligent recycling measures, the metals in circulation might possess more and more foreign alloying elements which would alter their inherent structural characteristics — putting more pressure on engineers and designers to work around these defects. 

Valuable materials aren't just found in mines anymore. Modern landfills are themselves veritable gold mines — today’s landfills often have more gold than literal gold mines. Whereas 200 tons of gold ore yield an average of one kilogram of pure gold, only 3-4 tons worth of circuit boards are needed to yield the same amount. 

The growing emphasis on recycling and the management of new material flows is a new chapter being written in the evolving history of metallurgy. A story that began with swords being fashioned out of solid rust now finds itself in a phase where cars can be fashioned out of soda cans. The story of metallurgy and metal use, however, will only continue to change as it encounters new, more challenging constraints. 

Some have called upon decreasing our dependence on metals as construction materials, but it's difficult to imagine any material that could realistically take their place. Given that metals will remain fundamental to our economy, the ways we create and use them is a story that will continue being written in the years to come. 


Below are the companies working on the biggest challenges in metal production:

1. ReMatter is creating a modern software stack for recyclers to help them source, manage and more effectively price the recycled metals in their inventory.

2. Nth Cycle is developing a process which can cheaply sort rare metals like lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese out of discarded and pulverized batteries.

3. Foundation Alloy is creating technology to produce precision alloys, optimized at the microstructure, which can be quickly, and efficiently 3D printed.

4. KoBold Metals is using artificial intelligence to identify rare metal deposits crucial to the production of batteries in electric vehicles.

5. Modumetal is using nanotechnology to improve the structural characteristics of conventional metals.

6. Boston Metal is eliminating the need for coal in steel production by using electrolysis to separate pure iron from its ore, resulting in a greener process.

7. Elysis is creating a technology that will allow us to produce aluminum without producing greenhouse gasses, and emit oxygen, rather than carbon dioxide as a byproduct.

8. Phoenix Tailings is developing a technique to identify and separate rare earth elements from mining waste.

9. Sortera Alloys is using artificial intelligence to better sort recycled and scrap metals, helping increase the efficiency of the circular economy in metals.

A deep dive into the foundations & frontiers of metallurgy.

The Past and Future of Metallurgy

As the world has grown more complex and interconnected, it has become more valuable to widen our aperture and take in the situation from above. Satellites have been our eyes and ears in the skies, helping us solve important issues concerning food security, greenhouse gas monitoring, scouting new locations to mine for minerals, offering better insights into economic activity on Earth alongside bolstering our communication networks, navigation, and national security.

Until the last decade, building and launching a satellite was a feat only a nation or a massive corporation could do. Today, we find ourselves amid a massive transition, where launching machines into orbit can be an activity practiced by almost any entrepreneur or tinkerer. As the number of satellites and space-based services grows in the coming years, how we connect to the Internet, use our mobile phones and laptops, and even farm, will all change in tandem. This essay offers a glimpse of what life might be like in the midst of this satellite renaissance, and what still lies on the horizon of the space frontier.

It’s difficult to exaggerate Elon Musk’s role in reviving space tech. Before SpaceX successfully launched a rocket into orbit in 2008, the United States had lost both the capability and desire to go to space. By the turn of the 21st century, NASA’s budget was a fraction of what it was at its inception. NASA was getting 4.5% of the US annual budget when the organization was founded, but by the early 2010s, that number had deflated to a mere 0.5%. 

As a result, US rocket engines were being recycled from Soviet-era parts which, according to Musk, were housed in old Siberian warehouses. After NASA retired its space shuttle program in 2011, the Baikonur spaceport, a Soviet-era launch pad based in Kazakhstan, was the only place on Earth that could launch manned missions to space. For years, the route to the International Space Station, the floating laboratory where research on microgravity and space is done some 250 miles above the Earth’s surface, was paved through Kazakhstan.

With no demand for space services, and only a few remaining domestic players capable of scouring together the know-how and resources to build rockets anymore, the cost of sending anything into orbit was astronomical.

The cost of building a weather satellite or a communications satellite fell in the range between $200 — $300 million. It typically fell on the big primes, massive organizations with government support and a history of military or space-related manufacturing to build the satellites that ended up going to orbit. Only they had access to the resources and the knowledge of how to build satellites that could withstand the conditions of space.

It would only add insult to injury that the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and the sole domestic entity that could launch anything into orbit in the United States, was also charging $380 million per launch — with no guarantee that the launch would even be a success. Not to mention, most satellites are only equipped with enough battery life to last about fifteen years. 

At over half a billion dollars apiece, organizations that did launch satellites were typically massive telecommunications organizations or national departments like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). For these customers, it made the most sense to launch their satellites as far away from Earth as possible, since the further away you were from the surface, the greater coverage you had over the planet. 

Satellites orbiting closer to the Earth, at medium earth orbit, MEO, or low-earth orbit, LEO, would orbit around the Earth faster than the Earth’s natural spin. This was suboptimal for companies trying to provide a constant, reliable Internet connection or satellite television to customers since such satellites would spend some of the time on the other side of the Earth. Instead, the best bet was to position the satellite in geostationary orbit around the Earth, or GEO. At around 36,000 kilometers up, satellites in GEO could send and receive transmissions from nearly 50% of the Earth’s surface. These satellites were also in synchronous orbit with the Earth, which meant that from the perspective of a user on the ground, the satellite would seem as though it were in a fixed position in the sky, and always accessible. Each global region typically launched their own satellites which lived directly overhead their location on Earth.

By the 2010s, over one thousand satellites were orbiting the Earth, providing crucial services that humans had come to rely on including everything from ship and plane navigation to military targeting, GPS, weather monitoring and telecommunications capabilities. However, without the ability to launch our own vehicles or personnel, we were dependent on infrastructure we had very limited ability to fix or replace should anything go wrong.

After fifteen years, or whenever the satellites finally stopped working, their owners would just let them die peacefully, orbiting in geostationary orbit around the Earth — forever. To this day, most of the important weather or communications satellites are technological relics. One study conducted by TelAstra showed that over 30% of satellites we rely on are already operating beyond the scheduled expiration dates.

The mindset regarding space began shifting in 2008, when SpaceX’s first orbital launch mission was hailed a success. Its Falcon 1 rocket, priced at only $7 million, became the cheapest rocket in history. An even more important milestone, however, was when SpaceX developed the first reusable rocket in 2015 with a successful launch and landing of the Falcon 9 near Port Canaveral. 

Reusable rockets changed the economic viability of launching things into orbit. Before reusable rockets, launch customers had to pay for the entire price of the rocket to launch a single payload into space. It would be like paying for the cost of an entire plane any time you wanted to travel by air — and when you arrived, the plane would be destroyed so no one else could use it.

A rocket whose cost could be amortized over dozens of trips was a significantly cheaper option. The barrier to entry fell and after 2015, many more customers became interested in experimenting with satellites. That’s when SpaceX changed the game yet again, by rolling out a ridesharing service on their Falcon 9 space bus. The bus could take payloads of up to 200 kilograms up into space for a price of roughly $275,000 per kilogram. 

At this price, building satellites no longer had to be a boutique operation for the wealthy few. There was sufficient demand to begin standardizing and commodifying the process of constructing satellite buses, especially smaller satellite models. The space industry was having its Henry Ford moment, as companies like York Space Systems, Blue Canyon Technologies, and most recently, Apex Space started to roll out their own satellite versions of the Model T.

Today, over 7,200 active satellites are orbiting the Earth. Over half of these are communications satellites, a fifth are used for earth observation, and the rest serve a combination of military and scientific purposes. 

Source: GAO, Large Constellations of Satellites

Though it was once useful to launch communications satellites to geostationary orbit, in a world where launching a bunch of satellites into space is suddenly more affordable, that calculus no longer applies. Plus, the closer satellites are to Earth, the lower the latency between satellites and ground stations since there’s less distance that their signals need to travel over to reach a receiver.

Rather than launching one massive satellite into geostationary orbit servicing a massive geographic area with higher latency, it was now possible to launch a constellation of little satellites into low-earth orbit which could collectively cover the same area as one satellite up in GEO, only with a better connection. This is exactly the idea that SpaceX had with its Starlink program — a mission that over the next few years may to deploy up to 42,000 Starlinks to create a satellite mesh capable of providing Internet to any point on Earth. Since the program’s launch in 2019, SpaceX has already launched over 3,500 of the satellites into space. It should come as no surprise, then, that SpaceX now owns the most satellites orbiting the Earth by far.

However, SpaceX wasn’t the only company to have this idea. Amazon, OneWeb, and China’s Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation have competing programs with plans of launching thousands of their own satellites into space to provide competing Internet services. SpaceX is currently the only vertically-integrated company capable of actually launching their own payload into orbit, but Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin is working on developing this capability soon. 

This new generation of Internet service providers is putting up a challenge to legacy cable-based Internet service providers still on Earth. Even chip manufacturers are starting to catch on. Qualcomm’s CEO recently unveiled the company’s plan to diversify their mobile and laptop chips by making them able to communicate directly with satellite partners and provide their users with access to space Internet regardless of where they are on Earth. However, the implications of better satellite connectivity don’t end there. John Deere recently announced that it, too, wants to make use of the coming satellite constellations to provide better connectivity for its fleet of tractors, many of which are often in inaccessible environments without internet connectivity. Tractors fully connected to the internet, and to satellite-based insights on crop growth, could bring the prospect of autonomous farming a lot closer to reality. 

Just ten years ago, the space industry seemed like it was going nowhere. Today it’s buzzing with an exponentially growing number of satellites, creating opportunities for new businesses to service and support the thousands of vessels orbiting the planet. Even NASA has showed renewed signs of life with its announcement of the Artemis program in 2017, which aims to send more missions to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program ended and to establish a lunar base camp at the end of this decade.

After a few dark decades, we’re finally building the space economy we’ve been dreaming of for hundreds of years. 

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke is often credited as the first to propose launching an artificial satellite. In a 1945 issue of Wireless World magazine, Clarke spelled how a man-made satellite orbiting in sync with the Earth could become a very useful tool for cross-continental communication on Earth. However, Clarke wasn’t really the first with the idea.

Visions of cosmic travels had fascinated scientists and engineers ever since Newton’s universal law of gravitation and the principles of motion helped us grasp the behavior of celestial objects. The dream of a star-faring humanity was deeply ingrained into the human imagination — so much so that in 1895, a rural school teacher in czarist Russia named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, published ‘Dreams of Earth and Sky,’ a book that articulated the idea of an artificial satellite orbiting around the Earth. Tsiolkovsky became so obsessed with this idea, he wrote more books on the subjects of astrophysics, devising all kinds of ways that humans might succeed at accomplishing such a thing. In his later books, he articulated the concepts of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as rocket fuels — both of which are in use today — and he even outlined the idea of the multi-stage rocket.

Despite these prophetic blueprints for humanity in space, there was little interest in developing space age technology until 1949, when the United States’ monopoly on nuclear weapons was undermined by the Soviet Union’s successful detonation of an atomic bomb. If the Soviets had the bomb too, it was only a matter of time until they figured out how to launch it halfway around the world. The 50s were marked by both countries scrambling to develop ever more powerful rocket technology — really shuttles for transporting nukes — and in 1957 the Soviet Union shocked the world by showing the world how good their rocket tech really was. On October 4th, 1947, the USSR’s Sputnik 1 became the first man-made object to orbit around the Earth. Soviet astrophysicist Sergei Korolev strapped the primitive spherical satellite to the top of an intercontinental ballistic missile and launched it into orbit around the Earth. 

Though the first satellite only had enough battery life to last three weeks in space before crashing down to Earth, Americans in particular were afraid that the Soviets now had the power to spy on them — or worse. Only a few weeks after the launch of Sputnik 1, the Soviets sent up Sputnik 2. This time with a canine passenger namedLaika. The United States’ space program had barely succeeded in launching a rocket off the ground, while the Soviet Union was already populating space with dogs.

The following year, the United States founded the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in response. After a series of failed attempts to get anything to launch, the United States succeeded at launching the first small satellite into orbit on January 31st, 1958.

Once NASA got off the ground — literally — everything kicked into high gear. 1960, in particular, was a year of many firsts for American space endeavors. That year, NASA launched the Television Infrared Observation Satellite, which could take images of the Earth’s cloud formations, observe weather patterns, and allow us to see the Earth as never before. This was the first meteorological satellite ever launched. Though it only ended up living for 78 days, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was established to take over in its footsteps.

Later that year, the US Navy also launched Transit 1B, a positioning satellite that acted as a prelude to the eventual launch of the first GPS satellites in 1967 by the US Department of Defense. The GPS system is now a 20-satellite strong network located in medium earth orbit. 

1960 was also the year that the United States’ National Reconnaissance Office was established. To this day, it operates a fleet of satellites that survey activities on Earth below. Using the NRO’s first spy satellite, the Corona, the United States was able to acquire information on things like the location of the Soviet Union’s intercontinental ballistic missile silos and launch pads.

As if all that wasn’t enough, that year, NASA also launched its Echo satellite, the first communications satellite whose purpose was to ‘echo’ American radio waves down to ground stations in Britain. That way, the English could listen to American radio too! Echo did this by passively reflecting oncoming radio waves from America down to Britain, which resulted in a pretty weak signal once the radio waves went all the way up to space and back down. To enhance the signal, NASA engineers developed a technology called a ‘traveling wave tube’ which could amplify and re-emit stronger radio signals back down. The first traveling wave tube was installed on NASA’s Relay 1 satellite launched in 1962, and since then, has become a mainstay on every communications satellite today. 

Since the earliest missions, we’ve learned a lot about what a machine needs to survive in space for more than a few days. Space is a tough environment. There are incredible temperature swings, from as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit to over 158 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s no stable reliable source of power. There are all kinds of high power cosmic rays notorious for messing up how computers work in space. If that’s not all, there are other objects flying around that pose the risk of crashing into a satellite, like asteroids or other satellites! To survive in space for over a decade, modern satellites have evolved to come equipped with the following systems:

Solar & battery powered energy — Sometimes between the sun and the Earth, and sometimes hidden behind the Earth’s shadow, satellites need a variety of energy options to sustain their activities in space. Nearly all satellites are equipped with high surface area solar panels that can generate electrical energy from the sun or plug into batteries when in the shade.

Structural and thermal controls — Extreme temperatures can easily damage electrical equipment in space, so radiators which cool electrical components, thermal blankets, heaters and multi-layer insulation, the shimmery reflective material giving satellites their classic look are all key and recurring components of a satellite’s design.

Propulsion and attitude control — Keeping the correct orientation, staying on the correct orbit, and moving out of the way in response to an on-coming object are incredibly important functions required in all satellites. However, they’re also functions that need to be done using the least energy possible, given a satellite’s limited power supply. Clever devices like reaction wheels, which can change the satellite’s orientation by changing the direction of a spinning wheel inside, help satellites maneuver without using fuel. Other satellites can use magnetic torquers which help them stay aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field. Most satellites, however, are also equipped with thrusters or tiny engines, which can help satellites perform larger maneuvers.


Challenges & Opportunities for Satellite Technology

As our ambitions in space grow, so will the challenges that we’ll have to contend with. Below are some of the most impactful emerging frontiers in space technology: 

More bandwidth with space lasers
The more we’ve come to rely on earth observation, the better our remote sensing systems have gotten. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), for instance, is an impressive new technology employed on many modern observation satellites. SAR emits radar pulses, which can travel through difficult atmospheric conditions, to eventually produce a high resolution image of the Earth. However, the size of the data files generated by SAR systems are too big to be effectively communicated via standard radio frequencies, which satellites currently use to communicate with ground stations, and uplink or downlink data. 

One remedy is to switch to higher frequency wavelengths which can encode and transmit more information per second — like optical light. For a few years now, NASA and other organizations like SpaceX have been experimenting and making breakthroughs on developing new protocols that can encode information in optical wavelengths and transmit them through lasers in space! Initially, doing this seemed monumentally hard. Optical lasers emit very narrow, precision beam of light, much smaller than the radio waves in use now. Positioning those lasers onto their targets, especially from satellites moving at a speed of 17,000 mph in low-earth orbit is very difficult. Finally, after years of tinkering with laser communications protocols, NASA will be rolling out its own optical communications systems which will be able to relay information between satellites and ground stations much faster. They hope that by the time their astronauts return to the moon, they’ll be able to downlink high definition footage of the event, rather than the grainy, black and white video we recall from the Apollo 11 mission. 

Companies building hefty satellite constellations, like SpaceX with Starlink, are also eager to use laser communications to more quickly transmit information between satellites. The ability to do this well will also enable these constellations to determine the best routing paths for data packets — which satellites and ground stations to send information through so it gets to the end user in the fastest time — a coordination problem that would be unfeasible with radio frequencies. 

Though the technology for space laser communications is maturing, the current implementation is a patchwork as NASA, SpaceX, and others working in this field all have their own optical communications protocols, which are not mutually interoperable. It remains to be seen whether this new technology will need to be standardized, or what solutions are pursued to make optical communication interoperable with space and ground stations using it.



Even cheaper launch
It costs SpaceX somewhere in the ballpark of $2,750 to send 1kg into space on their Falcon 9. However, SpaceX’s forthcoming Starship is planning to bring that cost down to just $100. Republic Capital, a prolific investor in space tech and SpaceX, believes that Starship is likely to change the world. In their report on space tech, they write that not having to worry about mass and size constraints anymore will mean that manufacturers could become even more imaginative when building satellites. Rather than optimizing for the lightest possible satellite, they can turn their focus to building increasingly capable satellites. 

Of course, Starship’s real goal is to eventually become a shuttle for the solar system — capable of delivering cargo to destinations as exotic as the moon, and even one day, Mars.



Cleaning up space debris 
Though we’ve gotten really good at putting things into orbit, we still don’t really have much of a plan for getting things out of orbit. Increasingly, this is going to be a problem. There’s already more space junk orbiting the Earth than functioning, active satellites. The more crowded space gets, the higher chance of a collision destroying or damaging the equipment we send up there. In the late 1970s, NASA scientist Donald Kessler, who was concerned about the problem of space debris, pointed out that space collisions that produce debris will only increase the probability of evenry more space collisions until we enter a phase of runaway space disaster — a feared phenomenon known as Kessler Syndrome. 

Given the number of independent entities operating satellites, it’s difficult to get great coordination when a close call between two satellites occurs. The problem of better space communication and the development of better satellite navigation systems is one of the areas of interest for emerging space startups. One of these is called Privateer, a new venture co-founded by Steve Wozniak, whose mission is to offer greater visibility into the location of space debris. One of their forthcoming products, called Resslek, will offer a management service for satellite operators, alerting them when their equipment is on a crash-course with another orbiting object.



Commercial space science
In 2022, NASA announced that the International Space Station will retiring in 2031. It’s a big deal because the International Space Station is currently humanity’s only space-based laboratory. Build piece-by-piece in space, across numerous manned missions beginning in 1998, the ISS reflects the contributions of over a dozen countries. The ability of scientists to conduct research in microgravity has unlocked insights on the formation of proteins in low-gravity environments, growth of stem cells, the nature of Bose-Einstein condensates which are widely considered to be a fifth state of matter, better water purification techniques and many more. In 2022, the ISS published a document called Benefits for Humanity, which enumerated the experiments that have impacted humanity most. The incredible value of such research is why China launched its own space station called the Tiangong station in 2021, which will continue being built and expanded in the years to come.

Losing the ISS would just be a loss for science, but for economic opportunity. On the back of its findings, dozens of new ideas with commercial potential have been devised — from space factories that can manufacture everything from carbon nanotubes to fiberglass cables to organic tissue to floating utility stations that could provide Earth with crucial resources. Luckily, the United States is focused on encouraging a number of commercial players to help send up space stations of their own. Axiom Space is working on building a proprietary science laboratory in space, which can act as a successor to the ISS. NASA has also tapped Nanoracks, Northrop Grumman, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which is in the throws of designing an Orbital Reef, to help establish commercial destinations in space too.


After decades of disappointment, we’re dreaming about space once again. A more robust presence in space will have tons of implications on the rest of us back home, from the emergence of new industries like manufacturing in microgravity to the destruction of old terrestrial ones, like cable monopolies. Of course, the further out we go, the more problems we’ll need to contend with from clearing up space debris to figuring out how to better service existing spacecraft. With technology, however, problems often become the source of opportunity. From where we stand today, space is teeming with opportunity. 

Below are some of the notable companies working on the frontier of satellite technology:

York Space Systems is building standardized satellite platforms that can be customized to suit specific mission requirements.

Blue Canyon Technologies, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies, is providing turnkey solutions for small satellites. 

Apex Space is aiming to transform satellite bus manufacturing by making it faster and more affordable. 

Varda Space Industries are building capsule-satellites capable of manufacturing products in microgravity.

Umbra developed a fleet of micro-satellites capable of producing high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of Earth.

Capella Space offers synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of Earth to customers including clients in government and defense sectors.

Axiom Space is working on building and eventually operating the world’s first commercial space station. Its founder, Michael Suffredini previously served as the manager of NASA’s ISS program. 

Privateer is building the data infrastructure and services required to manage the assets in the growing space economy.

A deep dive into the frontiers of the burgeoning space economy.

The Satellite Renaissance

Eric Tarczynski

I’m excited to share that Michelle Brown has joined Contrary from General Catalyst as our very first CFO. 

As we got to know Michelle over the prior few months, it became immediately apparent that she was unique. She’s a natural leader, and has an ability to distill the complex into the easily understood. 

Perhaps most importantly, we were deeply aligned with a shared vision for Contrary and what we expect it to become over the years ahead. Bringing the finance function in-house was a natural next step, and having a world-class leader in Michelle at the helm became an obvious choice.

We're thrilled to announce that Michelle has joined as our first CFO.

Welcoming Michelle Brown

Recent Posts

The Promise of Fusion

The Past and Future of Metallurgy

The Satellite Renaissance

Welcoming Michelle Brown

Recent Posts

The Promise of Fusion

The Past and Future of Metallurgy

The Satellite Renaissance

Get the latest from Contrary

Subscribe