Subscribe to the newsletter:

New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

****

New Wave is supported by:

Evertrace: the leading founder detection engine for VCs. It traces signals across the digital landscape to uncover emerging founders earlier than anyone else, so you meet tomorrow’s founders today.

I use it myself to source more deals at Climate Club, and I LOVE it. See what Evertrace can do for you here, or ask me for an intro and get a little something from the team ;)

****

🌊 When Does Fusion Actually Become a Business?

Fusion is getting closer to producing net energy. The harder question is whether it can ever produce cheap electricity.

We’re joined by Dan Brunner, co-founder and former CTO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, one of the companies at the forefront of the race to commercial fusion.

CFS has raised billions of dollars, signed power agreements with customers including Google, and is building SPARC, its machine designed to demonstrate net fusion energy.

But proving fusion works is only one step.

As Dan puts it, there’s ultimately another Q that matters: the dollar Q.

Can a fusion plant produce more money than it costs to build, operate, maintain, and continuously repair?

In this episode, we go from the basic physics of fusion all the way to the economics of a commercial power plant.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ What Q actually means — scientific Q, engineering Q and ultimately dollar Q

→ Why tokamaks may be the first fusion technology to put electricity on the grid

→ How high-temperature superconductors changed the economics of fusion

→ Why tritium supply and breeding could become a critical constraint

→ The overlooked problem of materials being bombarded by fusion neutrons

→ Why component lifetime and plant availability may determine whether fusion is economical

→ Whether fusion can ever compete with fission on cost

→ Why the first customers are likely to be Google, Microsoft and other power-hungry companies

→ Where early-stage investors can still play through fusion picks and shovels

→ Why SPARC achieving net energy could trigger a new wave of investment into the industry

✨ Leave a review: Apple Podcasts // Spotify

Subscribe to the newsletter:

New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

****

🌊 Manufacturing in Space

Why the next generation of advanced materials might be made 500 km above Earth.

We’re joined by Josh Western, co-founder and CEO of Space Forge, a UK company building spacecraft to manufacture advanced materials in space — and bring them back to Earth.

The idea sounds almost absurd at first.

Why launch something into orbit just to manufacture a few grams of material?

Because space gives manufacturers something Earth can’t: microgravity, ultra-high vacuum, and extreme temperatures. For certain advanced materials, especially compound semiconductors, those conditions could produce dramatically higher-quality crystals.

And Space Forge doesn’t need to manufacture an entire chip in orbit.

The company wants to produce the seed crystal in space, return it to Earth, then use conventional semiconductor infrastructure to scale it. Josh says one seed crystal could ultimately support the production of more than one million chips on Earth.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why Earth is actually a difficult place to manufacture ultra-pure materials

→ How a few grams produced in space could enable millions of semiconductor chips

→ Why Space Forge built both its own semiconductor reactor and reusable spacecraft

→ Whether launch costs actually break the economics of in-space manufacturing

→ Why regulation and customs may be a bigger bottleneck than technology

→ How better semiconductors could reduce energy consumption

→ Why Space Forge sees space manufacturing as part of Europe’s reindustrialisation

→ What could come after semiconductors: solar cells, metals, graphene and batteries

Perhaps the most interesting idea is that space doesn’t need to replace terrestrial manufacturing. It could simply become another industrial environment, used for the handful of manufacturing steps where Earth’s atmosphere and gravity become constraints.

Josh’s ambition is for that idea to eventually become boring.

Because by then, manufacturing materials in space would simply be another part of the industrial toolkit.

✨ Leave a review: Apple Podcasts // Spotify