Imagine this: Around 93 million miles away, the burning ball of energy we call the sun is having an internal battle, different magnetic forces colliding with each other. This energy gets released in a solar storm, which spits out charged particles to earth — space weather that causes the Aurora Borealis lights to twinkle. While the pretty light show is completely harmless, sometimes the solar flare is so strong that it can set off a chain reaction.
In this scenario, nothing falls to earth and the world as we know it remains intact and unaffected— well, mostly. The high level of magnetic energy is strong enough to affect some (or all) of the thousands of satellites orbiting the earth, the knock-on effect being chaos on the ground. No one is physically hurt, but everyone is suffering; these satellites are used to run GPS technology, the banking systems, airlines, and more. The storm shakes up the earth's magnetic field, creating power surges that can cause blackouts and long-term electrical damage.
As a result, billions of dollars disappear into the ether, planes get grounded, and people get lost in the wilderness. “Most people don't realize how fully dependent they are to space,” says Scott Fouse, Vice President of Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto. In this example, it’s his job to figure out a fix for this and get everything online again.
For most people on Earth, space is an abstract concept; we know it’s out there but we don’t think it really affects our day to day lives that much. Sure, developments like Virgin Galactic and new Hubble images are exciting, but the everyman or woman is content to live in relative ignorance. This laissez-faire approach is misplaced, however, as due to how humankind has set up their global networks what goes on 12,000 plus miles above our head can have real consequences. The flipside of this is how space engineering is transforming many industries here on Earth. At Lockheed Martin, there’s been a significant push to explore technologies that have both a national security and commercial element. Fouse’s Palo Alto lab is at the forefront of this, piggybacking off Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial bent to innovate, iterate and expand their footprint.
But this has to happen in its own special way. For Fouse, that means juggling the company's contracts to the government with its desire to innovate. “We’ll always be a little bit different (from the rest of Silicon Valley),” he says. “We have to be focused on making sure we’re not surprised by our adversaries; that's the most important national security objective.”
But that does leave space for innovation as long as there’s no conflict, and in fact, the government welcomes startups — they can’t afford to do all the research on their own. For example, they invested in Rocket Lab, a New Zealand startup that aims to send carbon composite rockets into space for less than $5 million. This leads to Lockheed Martin engineers becoming highly skilled in a number of commercially applicable tools — hence the fact that many of their key personnel get poached for their expertise by Silicon Valley companies.
It has taken over six weeks for me to get this time with Fouse, partly due to my foreign national status which meant a round of security clearances and scans of my passport. Every front door in the complex has a bright orange paper saying ‘foreign national at large.' There are labs that are out of bounds to me because of this. He’s also a busy man; over 500 scientists and engineers are under his control. His office furniture is dark and plush, the space theme evident by the rocket in the corner and the placards on the wall.
I’m led through long windowless corridors to see some of the projects Lockheed Martin thinks has the most potential for growth on the commercial landscape. Many of the doors I pass have labs behind them; their doors are thick, weighty looking things. Some have giant combination locks on them, that need two people present to open them (these were not the labs I visited).
One stop on the tour was the SPIDER labs. Nope, not some creepy horror project but the acronym for a Segmented Planar Imaging Detector for Electro-optical Reconnaissance. You get why they like Spider now, right? In human terms this is about shrinking a telescope — the idea being that in space, every speck of weight counts, and heavy glass equals mounting costs.
“Mass is limited on a spacecraft,” says project lead Greg Feller. The solution: a type of computational photography that processes images with interferometry. Instead of using bulky mirrors and thick lenses, multiple minuscule ‘lenslets’ are used to capture light data, feeding the information to a photonic integrated circuit. Visualize this as replacing a telescope lens with hundreds of tiny cameras, all 1mm thick. The example I saw was the size of a flattened golf ball. The chips are fabricated at UC Davis, who has a partnership with the lab. Fouse says the origination of the Spider came when senior fellow Alan Duncan (part of Feller’s lab), attended a conference. “People were talking and what he heard caused him to think differently about the work he did,” says Fouse.
Application wise, the possibilities are endless. Think use on top of drones, security, driverless cars — anywhere where optical sensors play a role.
I also passed through the flow battery lab, where the lab lead Justin Golightly took me through the potential for this endeavor. Today, there’s a big push for more renewable energies for power but that can also lead to a lag — solar batteries need recharging and drain at night, etc. Golightly sees flow batteries as a way to solve this issue. “We want to sell to not just our government military customers but to industry so they have a way to offset their power usage and implement power demand or into the infrastructure for a city,” he says.
The science part: Flow batteries work by exchanging negatively and positively charged fluid to produce electrical current. They can be scaled by increasing the amount of fluid in the tanks and there’s little degradation, meaning they can store power for longer. The size of the battery is determined by the size of the liquid containers, and the energy transfer takes place in the cell that both liquids flow into.
Outer space use: Powering satellites. Silicon Valley solution: powering urban microgrids. Two solutions with the same technology.
It will be a long road to get this rolled out — currently, flow batteries make up about 7% of the global grid storage market compared to 30% for sodium based batteries and around 60% for lithium-ion batteries according to Utility Dive. But with this sector predicted to grow from $231.9 million in 2016 to $3.6 billion by 2025 according to Navigant Research, there’s a lot of room for growth.
The project that everyone seems most excited about is nanocopper, a nanostructured form of copper. Project name: CuantumFuse. At the lab, I slid a rubber glove onto my right hand so Dr. Randy Stoltenberg can dispense a shiny solution onto my hand. “This is copper but you can dispense it like toothpaste,” he said. “Feel free to smear it around. It looks like a small shiny slug on my hand, and I use my fingers to move it around, making it into balls. It’s a small thing, but this is the sum of years of research, and has the potential to be a billion-dollar business.
“What we did is we rearranged the molecules of copper - it looks like copper and behaves like copper but we got it out of its solid form and you don't have to melt it,” Stoltenberg said. “We made squeezable copper that hasn't existed before.”
Here’s why. The electrical circuit boards that are on most products today are kept together by metal solders, melted to provide electrical and thermal conductivity. You want the solder to be strong and have a high melting point, so as not to melt. Tin-lead used to be the go-to for this, but now people want lead free solders, a replacement has to be found. Now a lot of solders are made from tin, silver and copper; fine for casual electronics but generally not strong enough to withstand serious pressure. “People throw their iPhone away after a year,” he said. “We have to last 10-20 years in harsh conditions — we can’t have our solders fail.” Copper is a great conductor but has a very high melting point, which can damage the components it’s attached to. But nanocopper has a much lower melting point and is also stronger — once it can be made in volume this could revolutionize the consumer electronics space.
The number of outside industries this appeals to are endless. This could be used in LCD screen, construction, packaging, TV’s, wearable electronics, as a 3D printing ink ...
However, going from in-house innovations and into to the hands — or awareness — of commercial companies isn't always easy. So much is going on at Lockheed Martin that some of their achievements can be overlooked by the outside world. To change that, they’re borrowing some techniques from Silicon Valley’s playbook.
For instance, Lockheed Martin Ventures, created in 2007 is one way for the company to act more nimbly. “Through this, we’re more connected to [Silicon Valley],” Fouse said. “LM Ventures is trying to find small companies that have tech that's strategic to Lockheed — and also hear conversations about what people are interested in.” Investments include Ocean Aero’s solar and wind-powered ‘ruggedized vessel,’ Contextere’s IOT and Humatics micro-location products. To speed up the process, the venture firm refocused in 2016 to concentrate on longer-term, strategic investments in technology innovations that could drive growth in existing and new markets
In addition, Lockheed Martin’s big on education and getting to talent while they’re young. Many of their labs partner with different universities, creating a stream of ideas, talent, and production.
Culture-wise, Fouse views his location as advantageous — with different culture sets shaping business around the valley he’s in a prime position to collaborate them and use this influence to shake things up in-house. He aims to have employees from different sectors job swap and connect so they can spread their expertise and ideas; different business partners also rotate through the company to share their experience.
“I've always been a fan of trying to create bringing two perspectives together, people work in different domains and as they talk the sparks fly they literally see the world in different ways — we get some pretty interesting sparks.”
It’s a big mind-shift for a security company that used to be all about the secrecy and keeping things in-house. However, Lockheed recognizes that many innovations and discoveries are happening globally, from college labs to small startups in every field — where once they would be purely in the aerospace and tech world. They need to get in on it. “Companies recognize they can't afford to own [the tech entirely,]” Fouse says. “Can we find a way to take a base technology in the consumer world and then maybe do a special trick to it to get where we need that to be?” The answer seems to be yes, with some reservations. As a defense contractor, Lockheed Martin has limited leeway on how far it can go, and that colors their acquisitions.
“The questions is how can we start to adopt some of the practices we see around the Valley,” said Fouse. “For now, it’s the flavor of which we adapt it.” Proving once again, that innovation in Silicon Valley can be both subtle and a space-changer, and that there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you realize.
