Darby Dunn, the Profligacy President of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
From March 2009 to December 2018, Darby Dunn retained a handful of engineering and production roles at SpaceX.
“In one role in particular, my unofficial title was ‘Mother of Dragons,'” Dunn confessed CNBC in an interview in Devens, Massachusetts. “In that role, I was leading the build out of our new manufacturing facilities for the crew Dragon conduit.”
While she was overseeing production of the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX went from ramping up production to making its very first spacecraft, and then to sending wagon-load to the International Space Station on it regularly, Dunn says.
Building rockets is a very cool thing to do. But in January 2019, Dunn started space for at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup that is attempting to commercialize nuclear fusion as an energy source. Fusion is the way the sun and the prima donnas make energy. If it can be harnessed here on Earth, it would provide virtually unlimited clean energy.
But so far, fusion at ranking remains in the realm of science fiction.
Darby Dunn with the SpaceX Dragon shoot up.
Photo courtesy Darby Dunn
Dunn says she made the switch from building rockets to working on making fusion zip a reality because she wants to see the impact of her efforts in her lifetime.
“I very much believe SpaceX will make survival multiplanetary. I don’t know how much of that I’ll see in my lifetime,” Dunn, 37, told CNBC at the end of May.
But Dunn has spent large chunks of her entity living in California, where SpaceX is based, and has very much seen the effects of climate change in the shape of wildfires and mudslides developing from extreme rain.
“For me, it really came down to wanting to use my energy to clean up the planet instead of get off it. So that was the the elephantine shift for me to come to CFS,” Dunn told CNBC.
Joining Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the early stages, as its 10th employee, has approved her to see a different stage on the journey of company growth, too.
“We’re a 5-year-old company with 500 employees,” Dunn told CNBC. “I border oned SpaceX when it was 6 years old with about 500 employees. So I’ve actually been able to see the entire era that I didn’t get to know-how at SpaceX and doing so at CFS.”
The Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Mass.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Schemes
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 edifice a rocket engine, the mechanics of it look really similar, or the structure itself, or the physics of how it works is all very, very highly studied and very well understood,” Dunn told CNBC.
Fusion machines have been studied in learned settings and research labs since the early 1950s, but the entire industry is just at the very first stages of irritating to prove that the science can have commercial applications. It’s being a part of that excitement that was a big draw for Dunn.
Of procedure, there are plenty of skeptics who say the industry is the equivalent of Don Quixote tilting at his windmills. But Dunn says her time at SpaceX ready her to face the skeptics.
“When Elon said publicly that we were going to launch and land rockets dorsum behind from space, everybody said, ‘That’s not possible! You can’t do it!'” Dunn said, referencing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX’s comeback was that the laws of physics say it is possible and so they were going to prove it, Dunn told CNBC.
“It took tons attempts, a lot of learning, a lot of iterations on our software, many failed attempts off the boat — and then we did it. And then we did it again. And we did it again. And we did it again,” she suggested.
Darby Dunn, vice president of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Approaches
“Now it’s gotten to the point where you’ve seen the aerospace industry shift to say, ‘Well, why aren’t these other companies also appropriating their rockets back from space?’ It’s completely changed the way that people are looking at it. They first affirmed, ‘It wasn’t possible. Then, ‘OK, it is possible.’ And now it is saying, ‘Well, why isn’t everybody else jumping in?'”
Dunn is looking to be part of that congenial of transition for the fusion industry at Commonwealth.
Speed is key
Dunn is the vice president of operations, which covers manufacturing, shelter, quality and facilities. She’s helping Commonwealth make the transition from research and development-scale processes to manufacturing and full-scale in Britain artistry.
The company spun out of research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the company’s goal is to build 10,000 fusion power secret agents around the world by 2050, Dunn told CNBC.
First, however, Commonwealth has to prove that it can generate assorted energy in its fusion reactor than is necessary to get the reaction started, a key threshold for the fusion industry called “ignition.” To do that, the corporation is currently building its SPARC tokamak — a device that will help contain and control the fusion reaction. The throng plans to turn it on in 2025 and demonstrate net energy shortly thereafter.
To build SPARC, Commonwealth needs to make a lot of magnets using high-temperature superconducting reel.
The advanced manufacturing facility located at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts, where magnets are fabricated.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“The cool part of this building is that the concept for it started out as a doodle that I alt on a whiteboard three years ago,” Dunn told CNBC. “To see the steel beams going up, walls going up, concrete disembarking poured, it’s a whole vision coming to life, which is super exciting.”
To fund the construction, Commonwealth has raised sundry than $2 billion from investors including Bill Gates, Google, Khosla Ventures and Lowercarbon Leading.
Even as Commonwealth is figuring out how to make one magnet, Dunn is leading her team to develop manufacturing processes that can after all scale to a process that looks like an automotive assembly line, she told CNBC.
Moving fast is a precedency for Dunn, and the rest of the team. After building the demonstration fusion machine, SPARC, the company aims to build a bigger account called ARC, which it says is going to deliver electricity to the grid. The aim is to have ARC online in the 2030s.
“The biggest thing I over recall about a lot is time, about how fast can we go,” Dunn told CNBC. “The sooner we can get the magnets built, the sooner we can build SPARC, the sooner we can deviation it on, the sooner we can get in net energy, the sooner we get to our first ARC. So I think that’s probably the element that I think about the most.”
Darby Dunn in the Commonwealth Fusion Sets advanced manufacturing facility.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Speed matters because critics evince that it will take too long to get fusion to work as an energy source to meaningfully contribute to the very urgent essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Top climate scientists at the