Apex Space's Ian Cinnamon on satellite platforms, Golden Dome, and why the US needs to move faster in orbit

you there? I think we're trying to get audio. Can you talk again? Can you hear me now? We can hear you. How you doing? Awesome. I'm doing very good. How are you? I'm great. Uh can you start with just quick introduction? the company and then uh the announcement. Sure. So, we're Avalanche Fusion.

Uh I like to say we're trying to build the world's smallest fusion machine. So, we're trying to do a a very SpaceX style test fail fix approach to fusion. Try to be really capital efficient. Uh the fusion machines we're building in our lab today are about 12 centimeters in diameter. That's the plasma core.

Um and yeah, uh raised a 40 million series A in, you know, fall of 2022. Uh that was not an easy time back then and we've been sort of in the lab grinding and and improving these machines ever since.

Um and so we've kind of made it to the point where we have something interesting and so the announcement that we're doing today is we're announcing our new test facility uh which is going to be in Eastern Washington in the Tri Cities area um called the Fusion Works.

And so what the fusion works is is it's basically a facility where you can come test different, you know, fusion technologies. So we're going to provide the neutron generators with our fusion machines.

We're going to have a broad scope radioactive materials license including the most advanced uh capability to handle tridium that's available commercially. And so you can kind of think of this like a wind tunnel facility for fusion.

So if you have some, you know, blanket technology you want to come test and see how it does, you can bring it to the Fusion Works and we'll hit it with neutrons from our machine and you can go qualify your hardware and then, you know, off you go. So I think uh I'm really excited.

I think it's sort of like the next level and sort of, you know, expanding the fusion supply chain workforce, all that kind of stuff. And then we've got some really great partners we're going to be working with in Eastern Washington as well.

I remember talking to AJ at Hermus uh building hypersonic planes and one of the main uh hiccups to their progress is just getting wind tunnel time. Uh and so I haven't heard of anyone building a wind tunnel startup. Maybe that's a good idea.

Uh can you talk about where you're seeing demand, who you were talking to that made you realize that you needed to build a facility that would service a broader swath of the fusion community? Yeah, so funny should they mention that. So like uh AJ and and Hermus just recently announced their heat facility, right?

Which which which is like basically so what it sounds like after that conversation what they did was they went and built a hypersonics test facility themselves. Makes sense.

And so the the herbous announcement I think it was a couple weeks ago now was basically they are opening up their test facility to the rest of the DoD because there is a shortage of hypersonics testing. That's great.

And so it's kind of it's kind of like duh like if you spend all this money standing up this like unique thing um you know if it's operating 247 obviously it's going to be a much better facility and you probably don't have enough work to operate this thing at that cadence. So why don't you open it up?

Um you can bring in some revenue while you do that and you can make this like really awesome facility that's just sort of like grinding day in day and day out getting really good at what it does.

So it turns out that idea uh applies to aerospace and hypersonics and it I think it's also going to apply to fusion at the end of the day. Yeah, it's commoditizing your compliments. Okay, I got to ask I got to ask. New presidential order this morning, zerobased regulatory budgeting to unleash American energy.

Uh there was a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo in here, but it seems it seems important. Uh would would love your take. Yeah, uh I read that this morning. Uh I kind of love it.

Um, you know, this idea that every now and then regula a regulation is going to come up for review and it needs to justify his existence is kind of awesome. I can give you an example of how it applies to fusion. So, you know, tridium is regulated at the state level if you're in an agreement state.

So like we're working with Washington Department of Health to get it licensed, but the NRC has this rule that if you can't account for 10 curies of tridium in your system, you have like 30 days to report it as an incident to the NRC that you've like lost 10 curies of tridium.

And to to give you an idea of how small that is, an exit sign has like 25 curies of tridium. So you know, here you are running your fusion machine. If you can't account for 20 or 10 cury because it got like absorbed into the walls and it's self shielding, so you can't even measure the X-rays from it.

You just don't know where it went. Yeah. Uh uh that's a big deal and you need to report that as an incident. But like if someone like throws an exit sign in the garbage and nobody knows where it went, like nobody cares, right?

There's no like What do you mean an exit sign like like an LED exit sign you see at a theater or like what what do you mean by exit sign? Is that something that like like an exit sign above the door, right?

Like let's say the fire there's a fire and the lights go out and you have this glowing exit sign like those are powered by 25 curies of tridium. I had no idea. Yeah. And so like we decided a long time ago that you know people being able to see how to get out of a burning building in the dark. Okay.

The safety associated with that was worth the very small risk of having tridium in these exercises. No idea. We decided, you know, human safety over like some very They're going to freak out Jordy. He's going to avoid He's going to avoid every exit sign he sees now cuz he's super paranoid.

They're made with microplastics, too. Yeah. Oh, no. We can't have that. Yeah, that's hilarious. Uh can you give us a There's no agency. So, there's no agency out there investigating missing Yeah. exit signs whenever one goes missing, right? That would be like silly. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, um, you know, I think this NRC 10 cury missing thing is an example of a regulation that maybe made sense at the time, but man, if it had a sunset clause and had to go defend itself, like everyone in Fusion hates this one. Sure. Sure. Sure. unanimously.

Like, I feel like this was an example of something that probably should die. And, you know, if this uh executive order is a way to get rid of some of that stuff, I'm I'm all for it.

At the same time, it seems like uh my kind of novice understanding of it is that uh on the fision side, we are highly regulatory constrained and there's there's high regulatory risk and relatively low uh high regulatory risk, relatively lower science risk.

In in fusion, we're higher on the science risk and lower on the regulatory risk. Is that the right frame to think about it? And and can you just give us a brief overview of how American science scientists broadly are thinking about progress in fusion? We hear, you know, papers go viral.

Oh, it's solved every couple years. We're trying to get to uh, you know, net energy created. Where are we on the path of progress towards uh, you know, this amazing uh, fusion future? Yeah.

So, I mean, we've demonstrated ignition or Q greater than one using lasers, like hitting, you know, a pellet of of dutium tridium with lasers and making more fusion energy in than the laser energy that went out. That's awesome.

And so, there's a bunch of fusion startups that are working on laser approaches to doing fusion energy. There's another crew that are working on like magnetic confinement or com combinations of that. That's like what I would consider what we're doing essentially.

uh CFS, Helion or Zap Energy are other companies that are kind of doing that. Um they have not hit Q greater than one yet, but we're all building machines that have a chance at doing that in the next couple years. And so I actually think it's going to be really exciting.

There's a chance that one or multiple magnetic confinement fusion companies are going to cross Q greater than one during this administration. And those machines look a lot closer to what a fusion power plant is going to eventually look like than sort of the laser fusion techniques.

And so if that happens, and I think there's a good chance there is, um, that's going to really change geopolitics around energy. You're going to see this like amazing, you know, rush to kind of try and commercialize magnetic fusion confinement, which is going to be super exciting. Yeah.

Um to give you an idea of like the regulatory split. So right now there was a decision about a year ago that um fusion machines are going to be licensed like particle accelerators and specifically on the radioactive materials they produce.

And so what that does is that pushes the regulator you work with to the state level if you're an agreement state. So in Washington state, it's an agreement state. We work with the Washington Department of Health to license our fusion machines as particle accelerators.

The process is essentially we design our radiation vault and do all the calcs with that and then we apply for a particle accelerator license.

They come in, they review it, they do a tour, we show them what we've built, they have some suggestions on how to improve it and then a month later I get like a letter in the envel in the mail from the Washington Department of Health with my particle accelerator license which I hang on the machine and now I'm licensed.

So that's like pretty great especially for like you know at the point where we're building experimental machines and then you contrast that with what fision has to deal with it's like many many years of uh regulatory work working directly with the NRC.

It's a really really tough process and we haven't actually even licensed any of these small um uh SMRs that we're trying to like build here. Right. So I hope that Vision gets some regulatory relief in this administration. They definitely deserve it.

Um, we should probably talk about Texas and Utah that are suing the NRC to try and um get regulatory control over small modular reactors. That's Yeah. Can you break that down for us? I saw uh a couple founders tweeting about that, but I didn't really have full context. Yeah.

So, I went to this uh investor event in Dallas, Texas in December uh that Bolyriion Ventures put on, and Rick Perry was the special guest speaker there. And I almost think I was in the room when this got decided. But like Rick Perry's advice to all the vision people in the room was you should join up with Texas.

You should sue the NRC because there's some clause in the in the regulations that say the NRC has the right to regulate large power plants. But it's not clear they have the right to regulate some of these smaller things because the risks associated with them are so much less if something goes wrong. Yeah.

And so I I like, you know, Brent Cougs was in there from Last Energy and he's like one of the main parties to the lawsuit.

So I feel like I was like a an observer to history when the fision community decided we're going to sue the NRC and get them out of Texas and uh and and if they if they succeed and Texas becomes the regulator for SMRs, um that's going to be really exciting in in terms of their ability to innovate and go faster. Yeah.

Uh can you talk about the positive sum nature of sort of nuclear broadly? It feels like it's been so hard to build in the space that everybody just generally wants to see people be successful in the space. So maybe it actually creates a dynamic where yeah you don't see energy companies suing each other.

They're suing the government which is very different than what's happening in AI and every other startup. I don't see a lot of spying going on like we do in B2B SAS. Seems like a lot friendlier community. It is. I mean, the fusion people definitely, you know, kind of get rid by the fision people.

It's like, if only you could solve your science, blah blah blah. Um, but you know, like I want I want my Fision siblings to to, you know, do awesome. I think there's room for both Fision and Fusion.

I think my personal belief is that Fision is going to go bigger, like hundreds of megawws to gigawatts, and Fusion is going to be really great from the kilowatts to a few megawatts. Um, and Fusion is going to be really great for mobility and stuff.

So like autonomous vehicles, fusion powered, like a Andro Dive XL or something like that. Like I think that's going to be a really great application for fusion in defense in space. I I think the Russians are the only people crazy enough to put a fision reactor on like an autonomous vehicle.

So I don't think that's a thing that's going to happen with vision.

But I think you know if you have lesson um I think if you have sites where there's people around like guards and stuff uh that's a great use case for vision um and uh it's going to scale like nobody's business if they can get the regulators if they can get some regulatory reef and get some reasonable regulations there.

So I'm really excited to see what happens over the next couple years.

Can you talk a little bit about lessons from the past two decades in um in rocketry and specifically lessons learned from how Elon and SpaceX approached uh building rockets versus other players in the space uh and the decision to go more modular, smaller, higher iteration speed.

I I I've talked to you a lot about that, but I'd love to hear you kind of retell that story. Yeah. Yeah. I mean the idea that like so like I was at Blue Origin for six years working on New Glenn.

It was super exciting to see it fly in January for the first time and so like one of the things we learned there was like the importance of size right if your rocket is too big all of a sudden there's only like three suppliers in the whole country where you can get castings made and now you're at a 9month every iteration takes nine months right and it's just it's too slow.

So, you know, that was the thing that we really tried to bring from Newspace is like you don't necessarily know what the final answer is, but you need to be able to try things. You need to be able to try things quickly and have low barriers to build things and test things.

And so, that's that's sort of the key takeaway I took away from New Space. And we're trying to bring that to Fusion, right? Like very low barriers to test. We said in the beginning of Avalanche that we want a physicist to be able to go from like I have an idea to testing it in a week.

And we've actually achieved that a couple times. Like someone had an idea on Monday, they worked with the mechanical team to design it and then we fabbed it on, you know, Wednesday, Thursday, broke vacuum on the machine, implemented it, pumped down over the weekend and then off we were going testing on Monday.

Like we've hit that cadence a couple times and it's really kind of exciting to see that happen. And I I believe that's how you solve really hard engineering and technical problems is you try it and you iterate on the thing and eventually you're going to find something that works and then off you go. Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about um uh the the pipeline of talent in the fusion community because it feels like there's a lot of like thankless PhD tracks that are more theoretical. But again, I've been to the facility. It's a lot of wrenches and hammers. Uh it's a very different culture, I imagine.

But uh what has that been like scaling the team and uh and getting people to adapt to kind of the different style of experimentation and work? Yeah, that that's a really hard one, right? Um there is not a lot of places you can go to learn how to do fusion. Um and so what we've taken is a very broad approach.

Look, we'll teach you fusion. We'll teach you plasma physics, but you bring your mechanical engineering degree, your electrical engineering degree, right?

You uh you know, we love people from Blue Origin, SpaceX, Tesla who've kind of worked in that kind of an environment that like go fast, try stuff, iterate, stuff like that. And then we will teach you the plasma physics. Don't worry about that. And then we'll turn you into a fusion engineer, if you will.

So, I think that's kind of how we're going to have to do things for for a while. Um, until sort of the universities catch up and you can take a degree in in fusionering, if you will.

And, you know, I would love to put a couple fusion reactors on campus at some universities so like like programs can get some experience actually like operating them and building them and running them. But, that's maybe something for a future. Yeah. But, we'd like one for the studio. Yeah. Yeah.

Bring it in the studio in case the power goes out. We'd love that. Um, yeah.

Yeah, I mean there actually are some small nuclear reactors, some fision reactors at like MIT, I believe, and some and and and they work on them and they produce a small amount of radiation and there's a little bit of risk, but it's much people don't realize they're all over the country. Uh Oregon State has one.

I've been there like I've stood on top and like looked down at like the vision. Yeah. Uh Washington State, WSU has one. Um last they're called they're called trigger reactors. So they're used uh basically for nuclear engineering programs to teach you have like basically students like undergrads running these things.

They're licensed by the NRC as nuclear human operators and stuff like that. So uh I I have one last question. Uh I mean we saw everyone saw Oppenheimer and everyone knows the progression of the the the the fision bomb to the fusion bomb.

I if these if these uh you know uh if your devices really get baked into you know society and and autonomous vehicles, is it even possible to turn it into a weapon? I know obviously we'd want to be careful, but from a from a science perspective, like what is it just impossible? No, it's a it's a vacuum chamber, right?

And it needs to have very very deep vacuum to maintain the plasma and do the fusion. Yeah. And so we actually had a machine break on us when it was running. So, we had this cathode that was held on with this set screw. It was like one of the first janky machines we ever built.

And this set screw came loose and the whole rod cathode fell through the bottom, hit the window and like ended up on the floor in the factory somewhere and the whole thing just like imploded and spread glass all over the thing. But like nothing bad happened. Like it's just like why is the cathode on the floor?

What's going wrong here? I don't understand. So fusion is going to be very safe. Uh, you know, some of the conversations I've had with the DOD, he's like, "Well, what happens if I shoot it like with a like with a gun? " It's like, "Well, same thing with the cathode.

Like, it'll implode and then it'll stop and that'll be the end of it. " Like, yeah. So, makes sense. Yeah. The the real problem is just getting it to produce energy and that's uh that's the path we're on. It's hard enough, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's hard enough to just shut it down.

Can you be before you leave, could you give us like a one minute uh rant around the the you know when fusion is really working and we have these sort of small I don't know exactly sort of like cooler sized devices that can create energy. Yeah.

Where where are all the places that we're going to put that mirror just dropped. I want to hear the white mirror version.

I understand like you know the DoD applications but like uh yeah is it like backup power you know at when when a Hollywood uh you know if if they even make movies then uh in person uh is it you know uh you know for your house right like you know what are the what are all the different use cases future I want I mean the practical one is they're probably going to be containerized and you're they're probably going to just be shipping containers all over the place like powering a neighborhood you So that's like probably what's going to happen.

Uh cont everyone wants this containerized 1 to 5 megawatt form factor it seems like. So that's like probably what's going to happen.

But like the atom punk like future would be like you're driving around and you've got one in the trunk of your cyber truck and like you don't have to like you know supercharge if you're going to Eastern Washington because there's actually not that many charging stations.

You could just like flip on the fusion reactor and go go on fusion power. Um pretty awesome. I've driven around San Francisco in a Delorean with a plastic 3D printed fusion reactor last year at Deep Tech Week. I'd love to do that with a real one someday. So, that'd be fantastic. Uh, well, thanks so much for stopping by.

We'll we'll we'll talk to you soon. Congratulations on the launch. Yeah, congrats. Thank Cheers. Take care. Hopping on next, we got Russ. Is that right? Yes. From LiveKit IO. That's right. That's right. Coming into the studio, we got our next guest joining. Some big news today. Big pivot from watches to fusion reactors.

But that's the nature of the show, folks. We're we're we're men of many talent. Keep you on your toes. Keep you on your toes. Uh we'll do dedicated days where there's one theme. Some days you just get a tour