Darby Dunn, the Vice President of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
From March 2009 to December 2018, Darby Dunn held a handful of engineering and production roles at SpaceX.
“In a single role particularly, my unofficial title was ‘Mother of Dragons,'” Dunn told CNBC in an interview in Devens, Massachusetts. “In that role, I used to be leading the construct out of our latest manufacturing facilities for the crew Dragon vehicle.”
While she was overseeing production of the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX went from ramping up production to creating its very first spacecraft, after which to sending cargo to the International Space Station on it frequently, Dunn says.
Constructing rockets is a really cool thing to do. But in January 2019, Dunn began work at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup that’s attempting to commercialize nuclear fusion as an energy source. Fusion is the best way the sun and the celebs make energy. If it may be harnessed here on Earth, it would offer virtually unlimited clean energy.
But to this point, fusion at scale stays within the realm of science fiction.
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Darby Dunn with the SpaceX Dragon rocket.
Photo courtesy Darby Dunn
Dunn says she made the switch from constructing rockets to working on making fusion energy a reality because she desires to see the impact of her efforts in her lifetime.
“I very much consider SpaceX will make life multiplanetary. I do not understand how much of that I’ll see in my lifetime,” Dunn, 37, told CNBC at the top of May.
But Dunn has spent large chunks of her life living in California, where SpaceX relies, and has very much seen the consequences of climate change in the form of wildfires and mudslides stemming from extreme rain.
“For me, it really got here right down to wanting to make use of my energy to wash up the planet as an alternative of get off it. In order that was the the large shift for me to come back to CFS,” Dunn told CNBC.
Joining Commonwealth Fusion Systems within the early stages, as its tenth worker, has allowed her to see a distinct stage on the journey of company growth, too.
“We’re a 5-year-old company with 500 employees,” Dunn told CNBC. “I joined SpaceX when it was 6 years old with about 500 employees. So I’ve actually been capable of see the complete era that I didn’t get to experience at SpaceX and doing so at CFS.”
The Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Mass.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
A key difference between the 2 jobs is the maturity of the respective industries.
“The aerospace industry has been around for a very long time. So constructing a rocket engine, the mechanics of it look really similar, or the structure itself, or the physics of how it really works is all very, thoroughly studied and thoroughly understood,” Dunn told CNBC.
Fusion machines have been studied in academic settings and research labs for the reason that early Nineteen Fifties, but the complete industry is just on the very first stages of attempting to prove that the science can have business applications. It’s being an element of that excitement that was a giant draw for Dunn.
After all, there are many skeptics who say the industry is the equivalent of Don Quixote tilting at his windmills. But Dunn says her time at SpaceX prepared her to face the skeptics.
“When Elon said publicly that we were going to launch and land rockets back from space, everybody said, ‘That is impossible! You possibly can’t do it!'” Dunn said, referencing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX’s response was that the laws of physics say it is feasible and in order that they were going to prove it, Dunn told CNBC.
“It took many attempts, numerous learning, numerous iterations on our software, many failed attempts off the boat — after which we did it. After which we did it again. And we did it again. And we did it again,” she said.
Darby Dunn, vice chairman of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“Now it’s gotten to the purpose where you have seen the aerospace industry shift to say, ‘Well, why aren’t these other corporations also lending their rockets back from space?’ It’s completely modified the best way that individuals are it. They first said, ‘It wasn’t possible. Then, ‘OK, it is feasible.’ And now it’s saying, ‘Well, why is not everybody else jumping in?'”
Dunn is seeking to be a part of that sort of transition for the fusion industry at Commonwealth.
Speed is essential
Dunn is the vice chairman of operations, which covers manufacturing, safety, quality and facilities. She’s helping Commonwealth make the transition from research and development-scale processes to manufacturing and full-scale production.
The corporate spun out of research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the corporate’s goal is to construct 10,000 fusion power plants all over the world by 2050, Dunn told CNBC.
First, nevertheless, Commonwealth has to prove that it may generate more energy in its fusion reactor than is vital to get the response began, a key threshold for the fusion industry called “ignition.” To try this, the corporate is currently constructing its SPARC tokamak — a tool that can help contain and control the fusion response. The corporate plans to show it on in 2025 and exhibit net energy shortly thereafter.
To construct SPARC, Commonwealth must make numerous magnets using high-temperature superconducting tape.
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The advanced manufacturing facility positioned on the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts, where magnets are manufactured.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“The cool a part of this constructing is that the concept for it started off as a doodle that I made on a whiteboard three years ago,” Dunn told CNBC. “To see the steel beams going up, partitions going up, concrete getting poured, it’s an entire vision coming to life, which is super exciting.”
To fund the development, Commonwealth has raised greater than $2 billion from investors including Bill Gates, Google, Khosla Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital.
Whilst Commonwealth is determining how you can make one magnet, Dunn is leading her team to develop manufacturing processes that may eventually scale to a process that appears like an automotive assembly line, she told CNBC.
Moving fast is a priority for Dunn, and the remaining of the team. After constructing the demonstration fusion machine, SPARC, the corporate goals to construct a much bigger version called ARC, which it says is going to deliver electricity to the grid. The aim is to have ARC online within the 2030s.
“The largest thing I take into consideration so much is time, about how briskly can we go,” Dunn told CNBC. “The earlier we will get the magnets built, the earlier we will construct SPARC, the earlier we will turn it on, the earlier we will get in net energy, the earlier we get to our first ARC. So I believe that is probably the element that I take into consideration essentially the most.”
Darby Dunn within the Commonwealth Fusion Systems advanced manufacturing facility.
Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Speed matters because critics argue that it’ll take too long to get fusion to work as an energy source to meaningfully contribute to the very urgent need to cut back greenhouse gas emissions.
Top climate scientists on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said that to have “no or limited” overshoot of the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels would require a forty five% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 in comparison with 2010 levels and hitting net zero around 2050.
“I actually have asked myself, ‘Why am I doing fusion versus something that’s going to be deployed next 12 months?'” she told CNBC. “For me, it comes right down to the incontrovertible fact that fusion is essentially the most energy dense response in our solar system.”
But she doesn’t consider fusion ought to be the one solution.
“I very much consider in in solar energy and wind and numerous other renewables — that we absolutely need those. We want those deployed now. We want those deployed everywhere in the world,” Dunn told CNBC. “But I do not think they will likely be enough to get us to 2050 and beyond.”
Electric cars, heat pumps, green steel and green cement all rely on having large quantities of unpolluted electricity. Its Dunn’s focus to construct the energy sources that the world will need within the a long time and centuries to come back.
If Commonwealth goes to deliver that solution, though, Dunn first has to make an entire lot of very high-powered magnets.
“My very own personal opinion is I will carry on keeping on — carry on constructing. And now we have a poster within the back stairwell that claims, ‘Keep calm and fuse on,” Dunn told CNBC. “No matter what the skin world is saying, we’re working daily towards our mission of getting net-positive energy from fusion. And I stay up for proving that to the world in a few years.”
