Founders’ Stories — David Homfray

Giving our everything to make Space Solar the next Big Thing — to benefit life on Earth.

 Clean, scalable and affordable. This is the new energy revolution. And Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) is at the helm. Join us for the latest instalment of our Founders’ Stories series where we take a seat at the exec table to see exactly how they’re steering the clean energy ship. Over to you David.

By David Homfray, Co-founder and CTO

Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) will have a significant impact on the Net Zero transition and energy security, there’s no two ways about it. I’m happy to say that with confidence, as Space Solar’s CTO, my job is to lead the team in the design, development and implementation of the very technologies that will make SBSP a reality. Of course, there will be (and have been!) challenges along the way, but what drives us every day is knowing that what we’re creating is a truly feasible clean energy option. One that’s scalable, manufacturable and most importantly, commercially viable.

Before something becomes normal, it’s just pure magic

Just take a look at anything humanity has done before. If you’d told somebody 400 years ago that I could get to my place of work in Oxfordshire without a horse (and in just 20 minutes!) I’d have been called a witch. And even 100 years ago the idea that we could split the essence of everything and produce incredible amounts of energy while doing so, would have landed you in a hospital bed. But now these things are obvious; they’re no longer magical, they’re just normal. It’s the same for our advancement into space. We’ve gone from a launch every few years in the 60s to many hundreds on a yearly basis.

Now, we’re trying to take all of those learnings from the previous 60 years of energy systems and space exploration to speed up and make commercial SBSP ‘normal’ too. Instead of doing things sequentially, we focus on several staggered concurrent designs. We build, we test, we reflect and then we go straight back to building. Every lesson, every design, every iteration feeds into the other ones, allowing us to move at speed — which is exactly what we need to achieve Net Zero by 2050.

We don’t build the past, we invent the future.

We don’t want to look backwards and say “we’ll do this because that’s what everyone else has done”. Instead, we’ve made room for a level of creativity that lets us think about what the world will look like. So that we can focus on developing ideas to reach that vision, rather than taking what we’ve got and trying to make it viable for the future.

It’s an approach I’ve taken for the majority of my career. In 2018 I was one of few in a leadership team developing the future of the UK’s fusion commercialisation programme. We had to work out how we get from where we are now, to where we want to be, with the resources available to us. I do think fusion is incredibly important, and it will work. But I just couldn’t work out how to industrialise it quickly enough to significantly impact Net Zero time frames.

It feels different with SBSP, it has the manufacturability and scalability of renewables but it’s a high energy density, 24/7, all-weather baseload, and from a resource perspective, it is sustainable. Quite frankly, when I first came across it, I thought the concept was a bit wild. But then I read some papers and dove deeply into the maths behind it. I quickly came to the conclusion that it really would work — it was both technically and economically viable. That’s when I joined the Satellite Applications Catapult, and met Sam and Martin. Starting with just a few bits of paper, spreadsheets, models and simulations, we’ve taken that idea and built a business, a market leading architectural design, and actual demonstrations of the critical technologies from it.

The real challenge is scale

I started my career in human brain mapping. But the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe, so I focused my efforts on fusion instead — because trying to hold a star in a bottle is far easier than the human brain, right? And now that I’ve moved to SBSP, it’s actually the least hard thing I’ve built. We’ve done the maths and the physics, and all of the individual parts are well understood. It’s technologically feasible and can be commercialised within 6 years. We just need to get building and we need to go now.

The challenging bit is actually manufacturing those parts at a commercial scale. Because we don’t just want to make one spacecraft. We want to launch many. So, every part we make must be easily manufacturable at high volumes… If we can’t make thousands of this or that specific part, then we don’t want it. We have to find another way. Every component of our spacecraft has been developed and built in this way — weighting designs based on manufacturing capabilities — to ensure that we can commercialise and get to market quicker. We have a series of increasingly large demonstrations utilising the same manufacturable modules but just more of them. Our commercial product in year 6 will just have refined, improved and matured versions of the modules we use in the first trial — that’s the beauty of our market leading solar power satellite design.

Making SBSP reality is a team effort

One of the challenges for startups, when working on new development, is the need for both technical and strategic direction. I’ve been honoured to lead several awesome teams over the past 20 years, as well as actually building out the tech itself, so that’s something I can definitely provide! I don’t just wave my hands at engineers and scientists telling them to do this or guide them towards that, I actually get stuck in. We work closely together aligning what we’re doing today with what we’re trying to achieve overall.

Of course, you’ve got people with different ideas and sometimes you’ve got to make decisions which don’t make everybody happy. But it is so important to get different viewpoints from people with diverse backgrounds and worldviews, all coming together to create a centralised view. And that’s really exciting; to be part of such a brilliant, unified team that’s leading a clean energy revolution.

It’s not just the Space Solar team either. We’re building something that the UK supply chain, other companies, and partners can all get behind and make value from. And my role as a council member on the Global Future Council on Energy Technology Frontiers for the World Economic Forum is another way to build out this support on a global scale. Our mission is to envision the energy transition, and how to make it a reality. We want to lay out exactly which technologies are involved, how things should be financed and what challenges we’re facing. In doing so, we can help inform businesses and governments on how to make a secure, sustainable, and equitable energy future, and how we can feasibly get there, not just from a tech viewpoint, but policy and investing too. Because it’s not just about the tech — it isn’t in a vacuum. It lives within a regulatory, legal, financial and sustainable environment; areas which all need to come together to enact real change. Of course, I’ll still be a strong advocate for other clean energy technologies, because I believe they have so much to offer.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to having the confidence to take action. Tech like SBSP will change the tide on global warming and energy security and help us achieve Net Zero by 2050, as long as the world remains brave enough to believe in it. We need to act and we need to act now.

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