Why ex-SpaceX ‘Mother of Dragons’ Darby Dunn moved to building fusion

From March 2009 to December 2018, Darby Dunn Has held a number of engineering and production roles SpaceX.

“In one role in particular, my unofficial title is ‘Mother of Dragons,'” Dunn said in an interview with CNBC in Devens, Massachusetts. “In that role, I led the construction of our new manufacturing facility Crew Dragon Car“

While she oversaw Dragon production, SpaceX went from ramping up production to building the first spacecraft and then regularly delivering cargo to the International Space Station, Dunn said.

Building rockets is a really cool thing.But in January 2019, Dunn began working on Federal Fusion System, a startup trying to commercialize nuclear fusion as an energy source. Fusion is how the sun and stars generate energy. If it could be harnessed here on Earth, it would provide an almost unlimited supply of clean energy.

But so far, large-scale fusion has remained in the realm of science fiction.

Dunn said she moved from building rockets to working on making fusion energy a reality because she wanted to see the impact of her efforts in her lifetime.

“I really believe SpaceX is going to make life multiplanetary,” Dunn, 37, told CNBC in late May. “I don’t know how much I’m going to see in my lifetime.”

But Dunn, who has lived most of her life in California, where SpaceX is based, has seen first-hand the effects of climate change on wildfires and mudslides caused by extreme rainfall.

“For me, it really came down to wanting to use my energy to clean up the planet and not leave it. So that was a huge shift for me coming to CFS,” Dunn told CNBC.

Joining Commonwealth Fusion Systems early on as employee number 10 also allowed her to see a different stage in the company’s journey.

“We’re a 5-year-old company with 500 employees,” Dunn told CNBC. “I joined SpaceX when I was 6 years old, and it had about 500 employees. So I’ve actually been able to see a whole era that I didn’t experience at SpaceX, and I did at CFS.”

A key difference between the two jobs is the maturity of the respective industries.

“The aerospace industry has been around for a long time. So to build a rocket engine, the mechanics of it look very similar, or the structure itself, or the physics of how it works is very, very well studied and well understood,” Dunn told CNBC.

fusion machine Academia and research labs have been working on the technology since the early 1950s, but the industry as a whole is in the very first stages of trying to prove that the science can have commercial applications. It’s part of that excitement that’s been a huge draw for Dunn.

Of course, there are plenty of skeptics who think the industry is like Don Quixote leaning in front of his windmill. But Dunn said her time at SpaceX prepared her to face skeptics.

“When Elon said publicly that we were going to launch a rocket from space and land it, everyone said, ‘That’s impossible! You can’t do it!'” Dunn said, referring to SpaceX CEO Elon Mahathir. sk. Dunn told CNBC that SpaceX’s response was that the laws of physics say it’s possible, so they’re going to prove it.

“We tried a lot, we learned a lot, we did a lot of iterations on our software, we made a lot of failed attempts on board – and we did it. Then we did it again. We did it again Once. We did it again,” she said.

“It’s gotten to the point where you’re seeing a shift in the aerospace industry saying, ‘Well, why don’t these other companies borrow their rockets back from space?’ It completely changes the way people look at it. They start by saying, ‘This is impossible. Then, well, it’s possible. ’ Now it’s saying, ‘Well, why don’t other people join in?’”

Dunn wants to be part of a transformation of the federal fusion industry.

Dunn is Vice President of Operations with responsibility for Manufacturing, Safety, Quality and Facilities. She is helping Commonwealth transition from an R&D-scale process to manufacturing and full production.

The company, which spun out of the MIT research, aims to build 10,000 fusion power plants around the world by 2050, Dunn told CNBC.

First, however, Commonwealth must demonstrate that it can generate more energy in a fusion reactor than is needed to start the reaction, a key threshold for the fusion industry known as “ignition.” To that end, the company is currently building the SPARC tokamak — a device that will help contain and control fusion reactions. The company plans to launch it in 2025 and demonstrate net energy shortly thereafter.

To build SPARC, Commonwealth needed to make a lot of magnets out of high-temperature superconducting tape.

“The coolest thing about this building is that the concept started with a doodle on a whiteboard that I did three years ago,” Dunn told CNBC. “It was exciting to see the steel beams go up, the walls go up, the concrete was poured, and the whole thing came to life.”

To fund construction, Commonwealth has raised more than $2 billion from investors, including Bill Gates, Google, Khosla Ventures and low carbon capital.

She told CNBC that just as Commonwealth was figuring out how to make a magnet, Dunn was leading her team in developing a manufacturing process that could eventually be scaled up to look like a car assembly line.

Moving fast is a priority for Dunn and the rest of the team.After building a demonstration fusion machine, SPARC, the company aims to build a larger version, called ARC, which is said to be Send electricity to the grid. The goal is to have the ARC online in the 2030s.

“The biggest thing I think about a lot is time, about how fast we can go,” Dunn told CNBC. “The sooner we can make magnets, the sooner we can make SPARC, the sooner we can turn it on, the sooner we can get net power, the sooner we can get to our first ARC. So I think it’s possible It’s the element that I think about the most.”

Speed ​​matters because critics argue that it will be a long time before nuclear fusion becomes a source of energy that can meaningfully contribute to the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

top climate scientist The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said To reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions around 2050, with “no or limited” warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“I’ve asked myself, ‘Why am I doing fusion instead of something that’s going to be deployed next year?'” she told CNBC. “What it boils down to for me is that fusion is the most energy-dense reaction in our solar system.”

But she doesn’t think fusion should be the only solution.

“I’m a big believer in solar and wind and a lot of other renewables — we absolutely need that. We need it deployed now. We need it deployed around the world,” Dunn told CNBC. “But I don’t think they’re enough to get us to 2050 and beyond.”

Electric vehicles, heat pumps, green steel, and green cement are all inseparable from a large amount of clean electricity. Dunn’s focus is on building the energy the world will need in the decades and centuries to come.

However, if Commonwealth were to provide the solution, Dunn would first have to manufacture large quantities of very high-power magnets.

“My personal opinion is that I’m going to stick with it — keep building. We put up a poster in the back stairwell that said, ‘Keep calm and keep going,'” Dunn told CNBC. “No matter what the outside world says, we are working hard every day to achieve our mission of generating net positive energy from fusion. I look forward to proving this to the world in a few years.”