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DMITRIY TSELIAKHOVICH: Thanks a lot, everyone.
I'm Dmitriy.
I'm a co-founder of Escape Dynamics.
We started the company with the moon shot vision
of opening space for large-scale exploration.
And so the huge problem that drives and motivates our team
is enabling affordable, reliable, and efficient access
to space.
Why space access today represents a huge problem--
well, first of all it costs about $5,000 to $10,000
to put anything useful-- a kilogram of useful
payload into orbit.
It's very risky.
About four out of every 100 rockets
fail to put payload into desired trajectories.
And it's very inefficient.
If we think about a rocket today, about 2% of it
is useful.
The rest is fuel and structure.
And what's more important is that the structure
is non-reusable.
We are throwing away basically the vehicles every time we fly.
The cost, the complexity, and risk,
they are linked to the lack of innovation in this field.
Think about the computer in 1950's.
And this is the computer today.
There are orders of magnitude of price-performance improvement.
And now think about rockets.
There has been very little changed--
very little innovation.
It is pretty much linear.
It used to be very expensive and risky.
And it still is.
It prevents us from tremendous opportunities.
This is the problem.
We are locked from amazing opportunities present in space.
A single nickel-iron asteroid has more rare earth elements
than we've ever mined in the industrial history.
And companies like Planetary Resources
are designing ways to bring those opportunities
into our economic ecosystem.
But to enable this, we need to be
able to fly into space affordable,
and whenever we want, and efficiently.
Space has already demonstrated giant potential
to change lives of people.
It's estimated that more than $5 billion
has been saved by putting geospatial technology to use
to save fuel, to increase the fuel efficiency.
And now, imagine what will be possible
if we can deploy thousands of low-earth orbit satellites
to provide geospatial technology and telecommunication
to the developing world.
Most importantly, what excites me
is that space is the frontier for exploration.
We are genetically designed to explore.
The scientific opportunity of space are enormous.
With Hubble Space Telescope with the Kepler mission,
we know that there are thousands of planets around other stars.
Now, imagine that we can put several dozens of Hubble Space
Telescope and build an interferometer in space.
This technology will enable us to see with our own eyes
the planet around other stars.
This is pretty much the only way for us
to see the planet with our own eyes.
How we as a society will change when
we see habitable planet around a different star?
So this becomes possible when we go and explore--
when we transcend this frontier and create technology
that allows us to go there efficiently enough.
We ask the question, how do we make it possible?
Our moon shot became creating a system that
is completely different from the rockets today--
an airplane-type operation that can
fly into orbit from the space port
and come back-- fully reusable, single-stage to orbit system.
This was the question that we posed as the company.
How do we make the space launch not a few percentage
points better, how do we completely transcend
the paradigm-- make it 10x or more more efficient
and make the system fully reusable?
It became pretty clear early on.
And during my studies at Cal Tech
and later at the Singularity University,
I've been analyzing what are the possibilities there.
And it became very clear that chemical combustion
and the systems we use today cannot accomplish this job.
We needed to new paradigm.
We needed to transcend what we do today.
And so we came up with the concept of external propulsion,
which closed both physics and apparently can
close the economics.
In this case, instead of carrying all the energy
on board of the vehicle, we are delivering energy
in the form of a microwave beam to the vehicle as it ascends.
The energy comes from electric grid.
So electricity is transformed into microwaves, and output
from the phased array of microwave antennas,
delivered to the vehicle as it ascends.
So we are providing all the energy needed for launch
from the ground in the microwave beam.
This completely changes the way the vehicle functions.
We do not have combustion, so it's safer.
And it is much more efficient, because we're not
carrying energy on board.
So our efficiency percentage points
go from 2% of useful payload to above 20%.
It also changes the economics.
Now the complexity and risk is left on the ground.
And the system is scalable from the ground up.
We want more payload, we put more antennas
on the ground-- we put more meters on the ground.
And it also offers an opportunity for us
to make the system powered with eventually renewable energy,
because the energy comes from the grid.
So the breakthrough technology that's needed for the system
to work is wireless energy transfer--
safe, reliable, and efficient wireless energy transfer.
And that's what my team, we've been focused
on this problem for two and a half years now,
finding ways to make wireless energy transfer
to be safe and efficient.
We calculated and tested efficiency of power beaming.
And we believe that 10% to 30% efficiency is possible,
depending on what receivers we use.
The key challenges here is making
this affordable, and efficient, and safe.
And so the breakthrough components of this technology
is making high-power microwave transmitters
that take energy from the grid and output them
in microwaves economical.
And we discovered very early on that today it
costs millions of dollars to buy a single meter.
And by putting the innovation in, and bringing
this technology in house, and making a number of efficiency
improvements, we are dropping the cost close
to an order of magnitude now.
So we are building this technology
into that will allow us to convert energy
efficiently int microwaves.
The next big question is, can we really
do the power beaming over tens and hundreds of kilometers
safely and efficiently?
If you think about the typical antenna
and you try to beam power upwards,
there is a significant horizontal component
that would either fry a human or be basically very unsafe.
And so what we came up with is the radon system
that suppresses or completely eliminates the silos.
We also obviously thought about the simple questions
like what happens if a bird flies into the beam?
And this is actually very simple problem
to resolve and eliminate.
For two years we've been designing safety interlocks
that allow the system to be safe.
And obviously, we are working on the conversion.
So once we have unlimited energy on the vehicle,
we need to convert it efficiently into thrust.
And the interesting thing, that there is multiple ways.
If you have unlimited energy on the vehicle as it flies,
there are many, many ways to convert it into propulsion.
We are working on thermal thrusters,
so we built a heat exchanger that receives that energy
and heats the fuel-- hydrogen, for example--
that flows through the heat exchanger
and then is exhausted in thrust.
There are also approaches to couple it directly into plasma.
There are many ways.
Once you've got unlimited energy on the vehicle,
there is no limit of how much innovation
we can bring into the new propulsion concepts.
And so to create this, we established the lab currently
in Colorado.
And we are building and testing all of those technologies.
It all comes together into this moon shot vision
of making the space launch more efficient,
making the space launch more economical.
We believe that we can reduce the cost of space access
by one or two orders of magnitude,
because we are changing the economics of flight,
because we are transferring the complexity
and cost on the ground, and because we
are making the vehicles more efficient.
We know that we can build vehicles
that will be fully reusable and can be operated in the way
as airplanes are operated today.
And we also look forward to transitioning
airspace and flight in general from combustion
to potentially renewable energy and to much more
efficient systems.
We've been flying in the atmosphere for 100 years.
We've been flying outside of the atmosphere
for about six decades now.
And we've been using the same technology.
I think it's pretty naive to think
that we've reached the limits of technological innovation.
There's clearly something better,
something that transcends the way we do this.
And I believe that this technology has the potential
to be the next step of technological innovation
of flight.
I know that with this technology, what
will be possible is pretty much unlimited.
We know that once we are able to fly to space
and open this frontier for economic expansion
and for scientific exploration, what we will get out of it
is much more than just economics.
We will get excitement, and we will
get people passionate about this, to explore.
I know that one day, I will wake up
and I will see this picture out of my window.
And I know that because of the technology we are building,
hundreds of people will be able-- millions eventually--
of people will be able to do the same.
We are not doing this alone.
We are looking and we are working with phenomenal people.
This is a complicated problem, very much worth solving.
And so solving this problem is what fascinates me.
This is our moon shot.
And I look forward to solving this moon shot with you.
Thank you.