 Great. Well, thank you so much. Wonderful to be here. This is my, I think, third time in, or total, if I remember correctly, but I think the first time was back in 2023 and then 2019 and then this time. And having been back to India since COVID, so I took this opportunity to visit my family who lives in Mumbai and all of Delhi, so it's fantastic to be back. And I have a fun talk which is focused on basically how the space program where I spent the bulk of my career leads to a sustainability mindset and ultimately something really important with climate change as we're seeing today. And this fun graphic I actually had made like a set of artwork for this thing that I did with USC. So it's meant to be Mars. There's the TARDIS for anybody who's a doctor who there's a Star Trek shuttle for anybody's a Star Trek fan because I'm a massive science fiction fan. And that one is actually supposed to be me outside of a Mars base that we are working on. But I have two jobs. Everybody in the startup space knows you probably have more than one job. So I have my founder, CEO role, my startup hydroplane. And then I'm also a professor at the University of Southern California. But I definitely spend more than 100% of my time working on my startup because as everyone knows, it takes a lot of energy to get a company off the ground and, you know, get it to be sustainable and solvent moving forward. But when I talk about sort of the things that I've worked on in my career, I spent 16 years working for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and three years before that working for Boeing on the development of cryogenic launch vehicles. And in each one of those situations, it was a really complicated problem that required a sophisticated engineering solution to be able to provide, you know, the performance that we were looking for. And then I spent a couple of years working on my PhD research on electric propulsion systems for spacecraft as ironic because now I'm doing electric propulsion systems for aircraft many years later. And then I spent several years working on entry to set landing systems for Mars curiosity for landing on the surface of Venus and then Earth reentry systems. And I had a few years spent working on an atomic physics facility for the International Space Station as well. But after about 17 years, I felt as though it was important for me to start doing something here on Earth quite literally and sort of take my engineering skills and put them into the green transportation space. And so I got recruited to be, I think it might be a little loud, a little bit much feedback. What do you think? I'll let you take care of that. But I got recruited to join Virgin Hyperloop, which is, which was, I mean, it's not doing as well now as it was a couple of years ago, developing a form of ground transportation, which is like airline travel, but on the ground and it can go to airline speeds and even in excess of that, which was very complex engineering system, which has a lot of space program, ESC technologies associated with it. And then I shifted over to electric aviation, specifically now hydrogen fuel cell powered electric aviation. And I'm also a very active pilot. So part of creating a system which is decarbonized for aviation will also help, you know, my pilot community in addition to the rest of the planet by helping to decarbonize emissions. But in all these situations, there is a theme of rocket science behind these different technology developments and I'll kind of weave that into the talk going forward. But the space program does, however, face a lot of criticism. It faces criticism in the United States. It faces criticism here with ISRO and it faces criticism in Europe. And the argument is that there's a lot of money being spent on technologies that don't directly help solve problems going on right now. And there is some truth to that. But then there's also, that's a very short-sighted view because when you look at all the different technologies that have come from the space program, they actually have revolutionized our society and they've grown our economy tremendously. The obvious one, of course, is telecommunications industry, right? That's enabled entirely by satellites and satellites can't get into space without launch vehicles. So once again, it all comes back to rocket science. But there is a shift now to away from government space now into privatized commercial space and even ISRO and even Indian government is looking at putting more money into the private sector for space exploration. And in the United States, specifically, there are several companies who are developing launch vehicle technologies for space tourism purposes. And so one of them that takes a lot of heat is Virgin Galactic, obviously, because it's Richard Branson's joyride for very wealthy people. Jeff Bezos has the same thing with the Blue Origin rocket and then, of course, SpaceX has a mixed model of both payload launches as well as people launches to the International Space Station. But it is a good debate to be had because as a taxpayer of whatever country you may be in, your money should go towards things which are useful. So you have to think about, you know, am I making an investment in something which will have a good return on investment wherever you are, whatever sector you're in. And I myself have always been inspired by the space program. I think probably the greatest return on investment, at least for NASA, and I think NASA has a global reputation, is it motivates lots of young people to become engineers and scientists because they're so fascinated by the idea of, you know, alien worlds. And I myself was always a massive Star Trek fan. I used to watch Star Trek original series with my dad, who was a PhD mechanical engineer. And, you know, sadly, my dad is no longer with us. He passed away over a decade ago, but I had the opportunity to do a program with William Shatner, who is Captain Kirk. And so that was a lot of fun for me as an extreme Star Trek nerd. And he actually interviewed me, so it wasn't the other way around. So I was teaching him about like how you land things on the surface of Mars. But many people, myself included, find the space program inspirational because you're able to solve really difficult problems and you're able to make brand new technologies come to life. And one of the things which if you are a science fiction fan, is that there are so many technologies that we use today, whether it's our cell phones, started out as a flip phone, actually came from Star Trek with their communicators, whether it's tablets like our iPads, or whether it's new forms of transportation, like the Enterprise for Star Trek actually used Ion Drive. My PhD thesis was in ion thrusters, right? So it's kind of cool how we get inspiration from science fiction and we can turn it into reality. And as engineers, as technologists, as computer scientists, we're the ones that make that technology basically a reality. But a lot of that is driven by this space program mindset to create new and innovative things. And in the utopian genre of science fiction, it's to make a better world. But as everybody knows, there's more than one different type of science fiction. I'll pass that quote. There's also dystopian science fiction, right, where things aren't going so well, a kind of in between example of that would be the book, the movie, The Martian, where this person was left behind, they thought he was dead, but he was able to use his science and engineering skills to survive. So I think that is absolutely the case for COVID, right? With the development, rapid, rapid development of mRNA vaccines, we were able to science our way out of that problem relatively rapidly. And I think now more than ever, as the challenges grow for climate, as the challenges grow for a growing population, we will need more scientific solutions to solve unique challenges that happen here at home. And when we go full dystopian sci-fi, such as Blade Runner 2049, this is a futuristic Los Angeles, where essentially all plant life and animal life is dead. The air quality is terrible. And it's really not a nice place to live. And you know, if we don't do something about our CO2 emissions, this is direction that we're headed. And you obviously live in a big urban environment here in Begalluru, same thing in Mumbai, same thing in Los Angeles, where I live. And the air quality is getting worse. And that has not only implications to changes to the environment, the weather, but it also has implications to human health. So whether we're feeling it as individual, or whether they're feeling it as a society with loss of crops, drought, flooding, it's a big deal. So even my own house, where I live in Los Angeles on a hill, experienced a mudslide because of the change in climate that exists even on the West Coast of the United States. So it is a real thing. And we always have to think about the environmental cost of what we do in our personal lives, as well as in our professional lives and in our businesses. And then I'll take that back to the space program. Because one of the primary motivations of NASA, of ESA, of ISRO, is to actually explore the universe, its formation, as well as explore our solar system and how it evolved. And so the terrestrial planets that you see here, Earth in the middle, Mars on the right, and Venus on the left. Venus is one planet in from us towards the Sun, and Mars is one planet out from us. When the solar system first formed, these planets actually had water on the surface, and they had a more comfortable environment. But over the course of the past four and a half billion years, thank goodness Earth is still a nice place, Mars's atmosphere has been ripped away. So it has primarily CO2, 1% of the surface density of what we have here on Earth, a really strong radiation environment. Venus, on the other hand, experienced a runaway greenhouse gas effect, where all of its oceans boiled, then basically created a massive thick layer of clouds, and now the heat can escape. So the surface temperature on Venus is 470 degrees centigrade, that's incredibly hot, and the surface pressure is 100 atmospheres. And one of the primary reasons why NASA is investing in missions to go back to Venus, because they think that Venus represents a great, great is a bad word, but a representative example of climate change at the planetary scale. So if we can understand what happened on Venus, hopefully we can understand more about climate shifting on the planetary scale, so that we can prevent that happening here on Earth, right? So, and we were talking about this last night at dinner, but the ocean actually is a sink for carbon dioxide, it's saturated now, which means as the temperature of the Earth rises, that CO2 comes out of the ocean and further exacerbates climate change and global warming. So this is a real thing with its origins in terms of scientific understanding, modeling and interest that comes from the space program. So when we come back down to Earth, I like to focus now on transportation because that's the sector that I'm in. There are CO2 emissions from a variety of different sectors, but the transport sector represents roughly 22 to 27% of greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 emissions. When you look at the transportation sector as just by itself, 40% of those emissions come from passenger cars, but then the remaining 60% come from heavy duty use vehicles like buses, trucks, aircraft, marine sector, and rail. So we have to decarbonize not just individual passenger cars, we have to decarbonize all forms of transport. And then when you look at the CO2 emissions from different modes of transport in terms of CO2 emitted per passenger kilometer, what's interesting here is that the long haul international flight, because it's flown at capacity, every seat is filled, actually has a relatively low CO2 per passenger kilometer, as compared to the domestic regional flight, as compared to driving around in your car, that's because mass transit is a more efficient way of getting around. So the takeaway from this, of course, is not that everybody should be flying everywhere, but the takeaway should be that more mass transportation, more shared transit is the way that we can reduce CO2 emissions more effectively, basically, which means going away from passenger cars, which is good because who likes traffic? I live at LA, tons of traffic too. But it's important for us to understand these numbers, but there is a bad additional negative thing associated with aviation, and that's that it also produces NOx emissions, and when you release those NOx emissions in the upper atmosphere, it has even more of an effect on radiative heating. So it actually exacerbates climate change further. But at least you can see how everything is spayed out here in terms of transportation. And then the other trend, which I like from this graph here, is that the red trend is CO2 emissions from the aviation sector. More airplanes are being bought, more people are flying. The blue line is emissions from the ground transport sector. That's because ground transport is easier to decarbonize because you can use batteries or you can use a catenary running electricity off the grid for rail systems. So getting rid of passenger cars or making them purely battery powered or shifting over to mass transit with metro, light rail, subways is a way that you can decarbonize the ground sector. But what that means is that in 2050, aviation will actually be the primary source of CO2 emissions if we don't do something to decarbonize it. So we have to think about technologies that have evolutionary path to get us to where we want to go. So when as an engineer and as a systems engineer, as I was for many years at NASA JPL, we're always having to reinvent ourselves. And we also have to reinvent transportation. But as an engineer, you don't just make things up on the fly. You kind of figure out what your customer wants. And so the customer for transportation system is obviously you, the end user, as well as the government that probably puts a lot of money into investing in it. So you come up with some pretty obvious requirements, like whether you're a software developer or a hardware engineer, you want requirements to work to. And for transportation, those of course are safety, accessibility, interoperability, environmental impact and cost, right? If something is too expensive, that means everybody isn't using it. You're not solving the mass transportation system. But if you always keep this in mind, understanding what your top level requirements are, then you can come up with a better solution, I would argue. So the first thing I like to talk about with regards to space program-ish technologies is the hyperloop. So there was a lot of interest in the hyperloop, I would say, you know, about five to eight years ago in India, there was a project being planned in Mumbai to connect Mumbai to Pune, which of course, I don't think it is going to happen for a variety of reasons because it's very expensive. So probably the government didn't want to put the money in. Hence the cost piece of the equation has to be affordable for someone to pay for it. But the principle of operation of the hyperloop is basically a maglev train, which already exists, but putting it inside of a vacuum tube. So basically simulating the space environment, removing all the air from around the vehicle, then eliminating aerodynamic drag. So that concept is basically leveraging how would one do things in the spacecraft, which is you're cruising at speed because you have no aerodynamic drag and that's a super efficient way of running. So although it's not happening right now, we did build one. So when I worked for the startup that I worked at, we actually built a subscale hyperloop, which could fit people. So it wasn't subscale as a mouse hyperloop. It was a people sized hyperloop, but it only went for just under a kilometer. So it was a proof of concept demonstration, which would have to be extended over, you know, 50, 100, a thousand kilometers to make it a useful system for actual implementation. But what's so interesting, and this was also kind of a topic of dinner conversation last night, is that this space, which is trying to reinvent ground based mass transport, is not being done by the big traditional infrastructure and companies that work on rail technologies. It is being done by the startup space exclusively, because one of the real ways that you can disrupt any sector is you go away from the traditional big companies and you go into the startup space and the startup space can be more agile, can be more efficient, can be more able to take risk, right, because you're not yet a publicly traded company. So there's so many reasons why the startup space is a fantastic place to develop new technologies and to implement them because of that high risk posture, which is acceptable, because you're not yet publicly traded. And so there's Hyperloop company in India, there's one in Canada, there's two in the US, there's one in the Netherlands, there's probably a few more, actually there's one in Switzerland as well. So there are several companies in this ecosystem who are still looking for more funding because it is a very expensive endeavor. I used to think the space program is expensive, the space program is cheap compared to ground-based infrastructure projects. That's actually the most expensive is ground-based infrastructure because you're talking about land acquisition, rights of way, leveling surfaces, doing tunneling, things like that are quite expensive. But the point is though, is a lot of these technologies have been taken to a pretty good level from a prototype perspective thanks to the startup ecosystem and thanks to the capital that went into developing these technologies. And a lot of that capital came from not the United States, but a lot of that capital has come from the Middle East, because the Middle East has a more long-term investment view when it puts in sort of like a venture capital into companies and not trying to get a return really quickly. In a hardware-oriented transportation company, you're probably not going to get a return in like a year or two years. It's going to be a little bit longer time horizon as a result. But when we talk about decarbonizing transportation, we're really talking about how we're creating our energy and how we're storing our energy. And once again, I go back to the space program, right? Every single spacecraft out there produces its energy, assuming it's not going all the way out to Pluto, using solar panels, solar arrays, solar photovoltaics, the photoelectric effect, right? And so that development of that technology, which has been honed, optimized for space applications, both because of the radiation environment and because of the need to be as mass efficient and as volume efficient as you can be, has gotten its way back to Earth to create better solar panels for us to use here on Earth. And in Los Angeles, where I live, which is in the southwestern United States, tremendous amount of sun. There's a huge amount of electricity, which is now produced by renewables from both solar and wind. I think it's pretty close to 40 percent now. So that's a significant chunk. And everybody knows Americans use far too much energy. So the fact that we're able to produce 40 percent of it goes to show that it is a completely an excellent solution and a cost effective solution, because electricity is cheaper when you look at it per unit energy cost than gasoline is. So that's why electricity is a great way to go in future, even just from an economy scale perspective. But when we talk about energy production, we talk about solar, we talk about wind, geothermal, potentially nuclear. But when we talk about storage, because you can't always feed directly off the solar panel, if you're in a moving vehicle, we're talking about batteries, which right now the best technology out there is lithium ion and also hydrogen fuel cells, which has its origins. Guess what? In the space program, I'll talk about more as the presentation goes on. There is also the ability to potentially put solar panels on your vehicle, but that's kind of limiting because you're not always going to get sun and you have to have a large surface area to facilitate that. And you also can have hybrid electric systems where you're still using gasoline, right? But you're using it in a hybrid sense with the regenerative breaking. But that isn't a truly emission free solution, but it's a stepping stone that we've seen used in the automotive space, for example. But these are basically the solutions that we have, the small triangle of getting ourselves away from direct combustion with hydrocarbons over to something which is a lot more efficient, which is with either energy storage in the form of batteries or energy storage in the form of hydrogen. And another great space derived technology is solar concentrator facilities. So this is a research facility that we have in the desert in Los Angeles close to where my company operates, where you have mirrors which concentrate basically the sunlight onto them and focus it back onto a column of salts, which become molten, which then got hot, then expand, turn to turbine and generate electricity. And so these are more efficient per unit area. So there are many places in the world where they don't have enough land mass to be able to have massive solar array farms. And so this is a way where you can produce the same amount of energy, but with a smaller area. And these mirrors are actually actuated using, I mean maybe artificial intelligence is too strong of a word, but they're actively actuated to maximize their, you know, sun angles so that you can get maximum output from them. Otherwise you wouldn't get as much energy. So a really smart system, which is being demoed, but we also have larger facilities without that actuation in both California and Nevada. And they're kind of impressive because you can fly over them and it kind of looks like this alien Dyson sphere facility, but it's not. It's actually human developed. But I think the most sensible solution moving forward is to utilize our most renewable resource and that is hydrogen. So hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It's also the element which powers our sun, which then gives us our nuclear reaction, which gives us our radiation, which keeps our planet warm and keeps our cycle going. But using that energy from the sun, which ultimately does come from hydrogen, is the way that we already do get all the energy here on earth with regards to the growing of plants and how we actually have weather that we can survive in here. And how does one make hydrogen? I'll talk about the different ways that you can make it from other substances, but the most clean way to make it is born in the name of hydrogen. So hydrogen actually means water, genesis, and Greek. So hydrogen plus oxygen makes water. If you have water, you can apply electricity to it in a process called electrolysis to break up the water and then you create hydrogen and you create oxygen. So the green way to make hydrogen is to take water, which is an abundant resource. It could be gray water. It could be sea water as long as it's clean and distilled and then use that to create hydrogen and that hydrogen can then be your energy carrier for hydrogen fuel cell technology or even hydrogen combustion or however you want to use the hydrogen. But hydrogen fuel cell technology, which I'll talk about in more detail later as to how it works, was actually developed by the space program. So it is an alternative to a battery is a much more energy dense, a power dense system than the battery. And it was developed for the Apollo program for energy storage. And it was also developed even further and used again for the space shuttle for energy storage. And NASA is interested in it for different technologies such as power generation on the surface of the moon for a future lunar colony, power generation on the surface of Mars for a future Mars colony, and then even for transport applications such as rovers and airplanes to be used on Mars. So Mars does have a little bit of an atmosphere. You can have an airplane, although it's not air. It's CO2 that you're using as a fluid medium. So once again, development in the space program, tremendous ROI because now it is in a commercial sector. So this is my car. This is a hydrogen fuel cell car. It is a commercially available product. There's three different car models that you can buy in the United States. Right now you can only buy them in California because we're the only state that has hydrogen infrastructure, but it is cheaper than a Tesla around the same price as a four door sedan. And it is fueled by hydrogen, not hydrogen combustion, but hydrogen fuel cell technology. So this addresses a portion of the passenger car market in terms of CO2 emissions. But this obviously doesn't address larger vehicles such as buses, trucks, planes, marine and rail. But the point is, is this technology developed in the space program has now been leveraged in a very affordable way for the passenger car market in the United States. And it's developed by Japan and Korea and even China also has a company that's developing it. And so these technologies can now be used commercially. So once again, the return on investment from the space program I think is quite clear in this regard. What's so nice about fuel cell technology is that unlike lithium ion batteries where lithium is a non renewable resource, it has to be mined. Hydrogen is not, it is a renewable resource. It is present in the form of chemically bonded water, for example. So when we talk about different types of hydrogen, we're talking about how it's created. And so green hydrogen, meaning sustainable hydrogen, is produced by a renewable electricity into an electrolyzer to create hydrogen, which is then stored. It can be stored in a liquid form or it can be stored in a gaseous form. It's more efficient to store it in a liquid form in terms of transporting around because you can carry more of it. And then it is used by end users, whether that's the chemical industry, which is the primary user right now, or shipping, or aviation, or ground transport. So this is the ecosystem and the goal in many countries, including India, because I think the Prime Minister of India recently put out a hydrogen policy, including Europe, the EU has, and including the United States with the Biden administration, is to invest more in the production of green hydrogen, which then is also synergistic with producing more green electricity, meaning solar, wind, geothermal. So it's really nice cycle that you create more green energy which is then used to create hydrogen, and also can be used for direct electricity to charge lithium-ion battery powered cars, as well as for electricity for your homes and your businesses. So it's all a nice ecosystem in that sense, right? So you can eliminate hydrocarbons all together in that scenario. So this is important because people oftentimes will say, oh, but hydrogen is actually very dirty. And they're true in the sense that currently, globally, most hydrogen is produced as gray hydrogen. And gray hydrogen is basically you take a hydrocarbon, you reform it, you create hydrogen, and that means you put out CO2. So that's the cheapest way to get hydrogen right now, but dirty, it's not clean. So everybody wants to go away from that, and there's tremendous investments being made globally to create more green hydrogen. But what does that mean? Right now, green hydrogen is more expensive per kilogram than gray hydrogen. But in California, where we have fuel cell vehicles, we pretty much only have green hydrogen at the pump. So the goal there was to make a shift over to that model pretty quickly. And so in that sense, it can be done. And when you run the numbers of the cost per mile of a hydrocarbon powered car versus a green hydrogen powered car, they're actually the same now because of the efficiency of the fuel cell. So as the price of hydrogen drops, as it will, because of the government investments, then it will become cheaper to operate through vehicle on green hydrogen versus hydrocarbons, which is good for the environment, good for business in that sense. So I will once again go back to my argument of the space program as inspiration for everything. Guess what is the most energy-efficient form of propellant and oxidizer for launch vehicles for the rocket application? Liquid oxygen as the oxidizer, and liquid hydrogen as the fuel. So the space program are the people who develop the use of hydrogen and oxygen cryogenically for the purpose of generating a tremendous amount of thrust to be able to get out of earth's gravity well. And so the reason is pretty simple. If you look at this bar chart, jet A means jet fuel means hydrocarbon. Hydrogen is hydrogen. It is three times as energy dense. That's significant. When you normally talk about performance improvements, you're talking about, you know, 10, 15, 20, 30 percent, three times as energy dense, right? So energy per unit mass per unit kilogram, that's the reason why it is the propellant of choice if you could do it. It's more complicated for launch vehicles. And we'll talk about that more at the end of the presentation. So that's the argument for it from an efficiency perspective. And there's a lot of other arguments for it as well. You know, when you combust hydrogen, you're producing water. When you use it electrochemically, you're also producing water. So it's emission free from a carbon perspective. And you can also produce it locally. So you could produce it at your airport. You could produce it someplace where you have enough space to have a solar panel field and put the excess electricity into an electrolyzer. And you get off of oil, which means you get off of foreign oil, which means that you basically take, pull the rug out from under the people who currently manipulate energy price market because they're the only providers of it, right? So if you are a country that currently does not have any oil or any natural resources in that way, but you do have access to solar, to wind, to geothermal, you can produce your own fuel. So it's actually an incredibly powerful argument in terms of energy independence and national security. And everybody knows this, by the way, including militaries around the world, that it is a desirable solution because it takes away our dependence on other countries. And even lithium ion batteries, that lithium comes from somewhere and it probably doesn't come from your own country, right? So, you know, this is one way to truly remove that dependence and then, which basically helps, right? You never want power to be centered in one place. You want people to be, you know, more equal to each other in that regard. And then a nice thing from a business model perspective that I'm interested in, because that's what my company is focused on, is that when you look at passenger transport, you look at how much payload you want to carry and how far do you want to go. And right now, airplanes, buses, trucks and sea vessels like marineships all have similar needs in the payload to the range perspective, which means same total energy requirements. So you can conceivably develop a fuel cell technology which services that entire sector, which is what we're working on at my company. I will say it is a lot more difficult to develop a brand new fuel cell than it is to stick a bunch of batteries in the back of a plane in the back of a boat in the back of a truck. You can't put it in the back of the plane because then the plane won't pitch up. But it's much harder to develop this. But the easy solution is typically the most efficient solution. So you usually have to have some complexity up front to develop a really fantastic efficient solution, which in the end is cheaper for your end-use customers. You pay up front for the research and development. You get the really good product with the high efficiency as well as design for good unit cost. Then you have a better solution. So as JFK said, we don't do these things because they're easy. We do them because they're hard. And the same applies to developing new technologies for transport and energy storage. So I'll show a really short video that we made for Oshkosh, which is a air show. And it's fun. So hopefully it plays. I'm Dr. Anita Sandoval. For Professor of Astronomy and Founding at Pahek University. After two decades of working on college-based technologies like the energy system ran into the world throughout the world and developed a land approach for deep space exploration for NASA. I founded Hydroplane to develop advanced technologies to decarbonize aviation. At Hydroplane, a team of expert engineers and scientists has solved this problem by developing and building a 200 kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell power plant for the aviation industry. Hydroplane's innovative approach of stacked modular fuel cells allows for easily scalable solutions from single-engine air power to helicopters, EVETO platform and regional air power plants. In our admirable workflow, we use all the shell components where possible and develop new technologies and systems where necessary. Our novel approach will lead to significant improvement in efficiency and a substantial weight reduction, making us an emission-free alternative to piston and turbine engine power plants' radiation. Hydroplane's innovative fuel cell power plant will provide over 300 miles of range with no charge time, no battery replacements, a low-noise profile while only emitting water. You can be part of a cleaner future. Join us as Hydroplane develops the world's first single-engine air power hydrogen fuel cell power plant. We had a lot of fun making that movie, but we're located in the desert just north of Los Angeles, but it's still Los Angeles County, so we've got lots of nice wide-open spaces to do our flight tests coming up later this year. But ultimately, hydrogen fuel cell electric propulsion is just electric propulsion. You have electricity that you're producing from the fuel cell and then you're putting that into an electric motor to either turn a shaft for a ground-based vehicle application or to turn a propeller for a marine or for an aircraft application. And then the other benefit, does anybody have an electric vehicle in the room? I know they're not as ubiquitous here as they are in Los Angeles and Southern California, but they also are incredibly quiet. So you actually have to have an intentional noise which is made by your vehicle when you're reversing so you don't freak people out or accidentally they run into you. And they have really low-noise costs. So cost is way lower for an electric or a hydrocarb and the fuel aeroplane operator, your operations cost will be a lot lower too because you're using much less fuel because of the efficiency of the hydrogen as well as the efficiency of the fuel cell which is an electrochemical process. And then I won't belabor this point, but the point is there is a evolutionary use case, right? You're not going to start off with flying a Boeing 767 but you're going to start off with a smaller plane which is what we're working on and then you'll work your way up with bigger and bigger systems because every time you do a new product iteration you improve efficiency, right? And so then you can translate that efficiency into operating at higher power levels and lower heat dissipation. So whether you're in the software space or in the hardware space you could still use that multiple iterations of design to generate new products which are at higher power levels for us in our case and higher efficiencies going forward. And the real argument behind it just so you understand why it's so powerful is that this is a plot of volumetric density so energy per unit volume and gravimetric density energy per unit mass. I'm sorry, this is power, not energy. And lithium ion battery is the worst. So when it comes from the density perspective lithium ion battery is the worst solution. Gasoline is kind of up there in the middle so it's a good one, diesel up there is a good one. Hydrogen is great from the mass perspective, terrible from the volume perspective so you have to store it as liquid or as a high pressure gas. So that's the challenge for hydrogen is how you store it but even that is something which has been mitigated for launch vehicle space applications and mitigated for ground use applications for example in my car. And the advantage is that if you need more energy because you're going to fly or drive for a really long time you get up to 10x the benefit using a hydrogen fuel cell technology versus a lithium ion battery where you're just adding more batteries so you never get any improvement efficiency. So you really start to see the benefits for larger vehicles, heavier payloads and longer total endurance that's required for your application. So I already talked about these points but I know most of us who fly think about flying in a 200 seat aircraft or a 100 seat aircraft or a 400 seat aircraft we don't think about flying in smaller aircraft. So I fly in smaller aircraft all the time because that's part of what I do for my job and part of what I do in my civil air patrol role but you actually can have smaller aircraft to serve a regional transit use case you just would have fewer people on board the aircraft and that's already being proposed for urban air mobility I worked in that space quite a bit and it has tremendous use cases for Medevac other government humanitarian aid disaster use cases light training, helicopters right there are many different smaller aircrafts and ironically you can take it up to regional transport and when you look at CO2 output from the aviation sector on the graph I showed you earlier regional transport has the most CO2 because people are flying much older propeller aircraft that are not as efficient they're actually putting out more CO2 per passenger kilometer so the really big jets have been optimized which is great so the CO2 per passenger kilometer is a lot less so we're not trying to solve that problem we're trying to solve the regional market on down problem and all the other synergistic use cases with marine and heavy duty vehicles so how does a fuel cell work this is the science part of the presentation it is a passive device it is a low temperature device it has no moving parts all the engineers in the room should be like oh that sounds good right that means it's going to last a really long time combustion high temperatures and high pressures as well as high RPMs meaning lots of wear mechanisms but hydrogen gas is brought in through the anode this is a single cell configuration you stack the cells together for a fuel cell the hydrogen gas is disassociated with a catalyst it releases electrons those electrons are your electricity on the other side of the fuel cell on the cathode you bring in air it's an air breathing system and then you disassociate the oxygen oxygen ions combined with hydrogen ions that pass through an electrolyte a very different electrolyte from what you have in a battery and that forms water and then water is exhausted from the system as liquid because it's a low temperature device so it is very simple in that sense but you can imagine there's lots of complexity in the design of the individual piece parts that go inside of the fuel cell and then you also have to disalign you know somewhat sophisticated thermal management system to handle the heat load but the point is it doesn't have moving parts and it's low temperature which means it can last for a really long time which then ends up being great as an owner operator of a vehicle who doesn't have to service their engine every couple of months or in the case of an aircraft you actually have to remove it and replace it per the FAA requirements so our product that we're developing is actually a power plant for inside of a single engine aircraft it's custom everything from the fuel cell stack to the pallets of plant and it does fit within the existing compartment and this is significantly smaller but higher power than the automotive the systems that exist on the market which is the reason why we can use it for buses and trucks as well we think now in terms of what I think is really exciting about this space because I'm also a professor is that in the past if you were an automotive engineer or you were an aviation engineer or you were an automotive technician or an aircraft maintenance technician you're only dealing with combustion systems so this is gonna generate an entire new set of skills which are required for these disciplines as well as new jobs so there is tremendous economic opportunity by shifting our energy economy away from traditional combustion systems into this new area so anytime you implement these new technologies it ends up actually being good for everybody's business and we are currently working with lots of young people because we can train them directly on how to service, maintain and design fuel cell technology so we do have a lot of students in turns most of them are graduate students but we do have a few undergrad students and lots of young people right out of the school working for the company because they are a better fit than somebody who's entrenched in the way things have always been done in the combustion powered portions of the world so this is the start-up life that we're all living but I think we're having a good time and we are planning for our first flight demonstration a little bit later on this year in our Piper aircraft in Los Angeles desert region which is where we're at and really great thing as well is that this aircraft will be flown in exactly the same way as a combustion powered aircraft the pilot won't feel any difference I will eventually, I won't be the first pilot because my investors don't want me to be but I'll fly in the future I already flew this plane from Texas to over to LA and it really is the same experience just like if you have a battery powered car so once again, easier to adopt because the customer will be comfortable with it but I'm sure in your space in the software world you think about what's important to your customer our customer cares about lower cost higher durability, lower weight those are the performance metrics I don't know if it'll work if I click on it but this is not that interesting but I'll play it anyway in case it works yes, so what it makes a hydrogen fuel cell that's developed using a low temperature PEM technology polymer exchange membrane is the membrane so the membrane is the electrolyte and the membrane is basically like a piece of plastic wrap that you put over your food and because of the chemical structure of the membrane it allows the transport of hydrogen ions through it and the more efficient that membrane is and the transport of ions the better the electrochemical efficiency so for our system we have a custom membrane that I'm showing you being baked literally in an oven here and that gives a significantly higher basically power density versus current density than what is currently available from automotive sector and so this is the membrane this is an example of what goes inside the heart of a fuel cell in addition to the metallic plate so it is kind of simple but it's also a little bit complex because you can imagine there's a lot of development that goes into making that membrane that is a single cell you stack those single cells together to get you to a fuel cell stack for the power levels that you want so the last place that I wanted to talk about because it is very much becoming a realistic form of transport now is spaceflight and spaceflight is being done all across the world I mentioned earlier that there's a lot of emphasis in commercial spaceflight so any of you who have an Amazon Prime membership are funding this development so Jeff Bezos I believe created Amazon so he could become very wealthy to start Blue Origin so Blue Origin is developing a suborbital vehicle that you see going off here which is doing very rich people flights so you can see Earth from a little bit higher up but they're developing another vehicle which will give you orbital transportation capability because ultimately I think he wants to manufacture stuff in space off of Earth to reduce the CO2 footprint of manufacturing you can debate whether that's a good thing or not but that's for maybe Q&A but in this scenario however Blue Origin is using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen so if that liquid hydrogen was produced by electrolysis which it currently isn't but if it was this actually would be an emission form of suborbital transport and a carbon emission free form of suborbital transport and then eventually a carbon emission free form of orbital transport now there is a catch unfortunately which people are only starting to think about now is that when you combust hydrogen this is not an electrochemical process this is a traditional chemical combustion process the temperatures are quite high and when you have high temperatures and you combine it with nitrogen in the atmosphere you form nitrous oxides which are called NOx emissions those unfortunately are greenhouse gases so you're not greenhouse gas emission free but you are a lot less CO2 emission free than using like a methane or something like that or the virgin galactic situation which is really nasty because it burns a rubber so it's toxic and has CO2 associated with it so this is a better solution for efficiency as well as for putting out carbon emissions but you will still have NOx emissions when you combust hydrogen and the combustion process is not an efficient process because a lot of the energy is lost in heat and so in most cases you want it translated to mechanical energy not the heat but you lose a huge amount in heat which is why fuel cells are great because you're not losing that much energy and heat because you're operating at relatively low temperature another example of hydrogen powered spaceflight is the Boeing vehicle so this is the Starliner it's gonna get people back and forth the space station is not quite right there yet they've done a few flight tests and have had some challenges on the software side if you can believe it not on the hardware side I don't know what the issue had I didn't follow it closely enough but they did have issues where they weren't able to get to the correct orbit just because of their software control related to it and then the final area which I think will be the number one competitor to SpaceX moving forward is the Indian launch vehicle development so currently they are using liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen for the upper stage they obviously are getting bigger and bigger and bigger so they do a heavy lift capability and because of the cost efficiency of the Indian launch vehicle program just like with the Mars Orbiter mission it will be more cost competitive with SpaceX so I think they do have an interest to develop a commercial arm I think they do I was over at ISRO yesterday giving this talk actually and I think this is a tremendous opportunity for India just because it can be like a huge player in the commercial space sector launching people's payloads and I don't know for sure if they're going to shift over to LOX hydrogen for the common booster core but hopefully they do moving forward now this is away from transportation but it is back towards being more sustainable so for all of any future colony on the surface of Mars for example this is an artist's conception of that you're not going to be bringing animals with you so everybody is going to be vegetarians and one of the ways that we can all make a big impact on our carbon footprint is to be vegetarians because from the agriculture sector animal farming has a huge CO2 output and it's because of the efficiency the animal eats the plant and then you eat the animal so you have all these inefficiencies of the digestive process so if you can go closer to eating the actual plant you get closer to the sun you're more efficient so even this goal to grow food in space grow food on the surface of Mars to be able to support human life on the surface of Mars and maybe other life in future that really is a vegetarian diet and there's a lot of technology being developed now and demonstrated on the International Space Station to grow plants in a microgravity environment so this is the veggie experiment which is already up on space station where they grow lettuces and they eat the lettuce the bad news is that when you don't have a gravity vector the poor plant doesn't know which way to grow so it's kind of a bad plant so it knows where the light is but it doesn't know where gravity is so it kind of just grows all which direction the good news of course is on the surface of the Mars you do have gravity so the plant will obviously be able to know which direction to grow but this suggests that because the lettuces don't grow well in microgravity people probably wouldn't grow well either so that may not be a good place to conceive children now another great thing like I think this is my second to last one see I'm doing on time is electric vehicles so electric vehicles are nothing new to the space program right the lunar buggy that the Apollo astronauts drove around was an electric vehicle all of the Mars rovers since the 1990s up until the mid 2000s were always driven around on batteries with solar panels of course more recently we've developed a with a RTG or an AS RTG basically radioisotropanum electric generator where you're generating heat which are converting to electricity and then running electric motors but it's still an electric vehicle for the rovers that exist today so and even autonomy has existed in these electric vehicles right because you don't have somebody driving them with a joystick it's all done via giving it a set of commands and it does its own hazard sensing in terms of is there an obstacle that I shouldn't hit or a cliff that I shouldn't drive off of so that autonomy has also been developed for the space program which I think we're leveraging a lot of that in today for autonomous driving vehicles we can argue whether or not that is a useful thing or not and this is one that's being developed over at NASA Johnson that we were messing around in so this would be for a future Mars or lunar exploration program of course you would either be in a space suit or you would have a pressurized capsule over you you couldn't be out there out in the open but lots of technology development underway in this space for space program applications which definitely has leverages for applications here on Earth and so I think the sustainability mindset can actually be really nicely coupled to this term that we've used for years in the space program which is in situ resource utilization ISRU which basically means living off the land right being sustainable being self sustainable and so you can do that with power generation so future Mars colony will have a whole series of solar panels to generate power we clearly can do that here on Earth as well radiation protection thank goodness on Earth we've got a nice strong magnetic field which keeps out the in-space radiation and a thick atmosphere on Mars they don't have that which means that you would have to either create a structure which is radiation proof or you would go subterrain or you would build structures using Martian soil which would protect you from the radiation that's actually the most efficient way to do it and even the Apollo astronauts filled sandbags filled with lunar regolith to be able to protect them from the radiation from the sun another one is water so we do know that there is water frozen in the subsurface of Mars that can be extracted and then electrolyzed to create liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen for propulsion off of the surface methane is I'm probably gonna remove this from the slide just because it's not a good solution for Earth but you can produce methane because there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere on Mars and then extremophiles which are plants which take in Martian CO2 to produce oxygen which obviously people need to breathe so these are ways that the space program thinks about being super sustainable because of the limitations of not being able to go to the store to buy your stuff and so I think if we adopt that mindset that will even help us here on Earth and ultimately because of solar power because of wind power because of green hydrogen we actually can have green technologies to connect our solar system which is really interesting because you don't normally associate the space program with being green but I hope today I walk you through some examples of how the technology this space program has developed really is helping us be more sustainable today and so we see the future in terms of my company in the marine sector ground transport as well as space applications and of course we're starting off with aircraft applications because that is the genesis of the company but ultimately yeah I actually think we have many solutions to solve our problems not just one and I actually think they're great solutions which will be good for the economy create jobs and stimulate even more investment so I think if we have time for questions I can take questions thank you are we doing questions or somebody must have one question there's one I have a lot of questions but I didn't really want to talk about how amazing this talk has been it's been so insightful like we hear about a lot of things but we can't put the things in place but amazing storytelling I must say and the way you have built up the story related it to so many things that we could relate to from the transportation space and then the green technology I think that's really amazing so thank you so much for the great session thank you brother so fascinating to hear your stories it's opened up a whole new world for me hydrogen powered cells I'm curious to know you spoke about regional transport so how do you see the future for example say you travel between LA and San Diego on an aircraft hydroplane aircraft how do you see that as a future oh well so right now ironically there is no good way to get between LA and San Diego other than driving there is a train and it's incredibly slow because you have to stop and change the other train so if you actually created a hydrogen powered aircraft network you would be providing a service to people that they currently don't have and one of the things we want to do is connect people who are in the desert regions to these other locations because they're right now so hard for them to get anywhere and they have to drive their cars so it's almost like a ripe for the picking because it doesn't exist and people I guess aren't as familiar with flying in small planes if they're not in island locations so if you live in an island location flying in small planes is completely normal but in general most people just don't have that experience because they only go on the Southwest or the Indigos of the world so it is something which is a new service which could be offered to them I think and that's something that we're interested in but I think for me getting the technology going first is important because you have to go through a certification process for aviation but it's part of the design process to go through that certification process but I think it's a great opportunity but I do think we have to think about things differently so it doesn't make sense to only think about flying in big planes and there's another reason for this so when I fly myself I don't have to go through security I don't have to check my bag I don't have to do anything I just go right so there's a whole suite of general aviation airports that exist all over the United States certainly all over Europe too that are underutilized you could actually use them for transportation and it takes you usually closer to where you want to go if you live in the suburbs for example so there's a whole bunch of efficiencies from the total time door to door last mile that you solve by going flying at a smaller airplane flying at smaller airports versus going to the international airports so this is something that people don't think about because it's not the space that they're in but it's an underutilized asset and I believe you have them here in India as well and then the other advantage too of course is that not everybody in the world has access to nice long runways jet aircraft can only land on nice long runways many places in the world they have dirt landing strips they have grass fields smaller airplanes can land on all those you're trained to land on them because the propeller doesn't really get affected as much by grass and things like that where's a jet engine you pull in anything from dirt into it to the jet engine's toast so ironically we have an aviation system which has been driven around this one jet engine technology when in fact there are so many other solutions out there so yeah it's just and I benefit from it because I can just get up and go to wherever I wanna go because I have access to a bunch of smaller planes and I don't have to deal with the hassles of going through security basically so yeah it's a different way of thinking and urban air mobility which I'm sure you've heard about and certainly people talk about taking basically multi rotor systems across town that's another example of this but there is inefficiency in having a multi rotor system because you're not generating aerodynamic lift off the wings you're a more efficient use of power if you land with a fixed wing aircraft basically so it's a better energy solution in that sense some more questions back there yeah the question I have is that clearly this technology seem to be more is more sustainable as a fact but I'm curious that what is that unsolved technological problem because of which this is not at the forefront of electrification or EVs right we see lithium ion battery driven electric vehicles as the big wave right I'm assuming that is because this might be costlier or there is some unsolved problem which is still there so I'm just curious what are those couple of problems that if solved could lead like snow ball effect into building hydrogen driven cars or vehicles so the energy sector which I have not spent the majority of my career right is incredibly political it's got entrenched interest so the reason why now we say oh but lithium ion batteries are a great solution that's only because somebody came in and disrupted the market which was Tesla and he had enough money to do that because he was already an independently wealthy person but for decades the oil and gas sector and the traditional automotive sector kept any other technologies out so usually it isn't because the technology isn't ready it's because whoever the interest is is not ready to lose their control so that is a truthful answer to it that being said the battery solution is an easy really good one for a smaller vehicle but it doesn't solve the problem for larger vehicles which means you have to innovate again anytime you develop a new energy technology you also need the energy infrastructure so I would say the largest hurdle for hydrogen is the infrastructure but that's where automotive is a more difficult solution because if you have a car you need to be able to fuel it like in a couple of minutes from your house right because I deal with this problem all the time like so it's like I need to go fortunately I have three fueling stations within 15 minutes of my house because that's the way Southern California is but if you didn't have that option and you didn't have an infrastructure then you wouldn't be able to own that vehicle so automotive is the most difficult infrastructure problem because you need a lot more of them aviation is an easier one because there's fewer airports but in terms of technology relation for aviation it's the storage of there is a challenge associated with storing it right so for an aircraft you can't store it as a high pressure gas because aircraft have incredibly tight weight limitations for a car you can store it as a high pressure gas but when you look at the mass fraction of those tanks for a high pressure gas tank you're only getting 6% of that NASA's fuel the rest of the 94% is tank so if you go with liquid hydrogen tanks you can get 70% mass fraction so even that is not an engineering challenge liquid hydrogen tanks are nothing new they're used all the time but there isn't one that's currently made for an aircraft so we're developing that but once again the technology isn't any different it's just a manufacturing for a different marketplace so in reality none of this technology is insurmountable none of it requires anobtanium no none of it requires the development of even new materials but it does require an engineering development to put it all together and that's what engineering is science is developing the new material engineering is developing the new product with all these different scientific discoveries and so that just really needs to happen in these different use cases that being said it's not just the fuel cell it's the balance of plant technology so as you go to larger vehicles you need bigger electric motors if there isn't a demand for a 500 kilowatt electric motor out there somebody has to develop it but that's the opportunity and I would say over the course of the past four years even during the pandemic there had been so many more companies that have started up in the high temperature magnet space in the electric motor space that didn't exist before because they're now seeing the potential of this new ecosystem to create these new products that don't exist so that's why this is kind of like the space program is also this way this is a new growth opportunity, a new sector and it's very rare that you have governments around the world aligning to support it the only person who probably doesn't support it is Elon Musk because it puts at risk his business model but that's one person and it's okay he should be interested in his own business interest but it is a healthy debate to be had and batteries absolutely have a place for smaller vehicles but it is not a scalable solution I go to battery mineral conferences you will never produce enough lithium to match the demand of shifting all passenger cars over to a lithium ion battery so it is not a scalable solution so we have to find something else and in general my goal would be for all of us to not use, have our own individual passenger cars we need to use shared transport so got it just one small if I understand correctly what you're saying is that for this technology to be adopted somebody needs to get behind it and they have to have a lot of money or power and if that happens this will happen well that already exists right so Toyota is behind it, Hyundai is behind it many companies in China are behind it the people who aren't behind it there's GM and Ford and that's because they've already oh no they're already behind the game by putting battery power cars so they're not ready yet to do the fuel sale so I think there are already big companies who are behind it it's just that the passenger car marketplace is very different from the heavy duty marketplace and guess what the only technology which is being developed for trucking for electric propulsion is hydrogen fuel cell technology because batteries don't work so that's why there are niche markets for it where maybe passenger cars isn't the necessary one because you can solve it with batteries but aviation, marine and heavy duty vehicles is the marketplace and when you have the entire United States Department and energy behind it that's a pretty good player to have behind it so thank you I think it's more about sort of like education to the public that it's an option that it's real and even the United States like I this is the car that I drive back and forth you know every day to wherever I'm going so for me it's already here but because everybody else in the country outside of California doesn't have it they still see it as oh it's still five to 10 years out it's not, it's already operational it's just the infrastructure isn't there and you know that's where California has done a fantastic job that as a state government it chose to invest itself and put it in the infrastructure in place but California is also a massive economy right I think it's like the sixth largest economy in the world because the tech sector in the United States is in California so it has the wherewithal to do it and it's always been kind of on the forefront whereas like the East Coast New York is a little bit more you know older finance sector so it's really a cultural mindset more than anything else it's not a technology limitation in my opinion Can you hear me? Yeah Thanks for a great talk I had a follow-up sort of to your what do you think about public policy as the driver for innovation because like you said we need to move to shared transit right and from what I've seen in my personal experience what I've read is that by far the biggest change agent in mass transit is usually the government to give you an example the Delhi Metro is a great example of say driving, quickly delivering a framework for rapid transit and last mile connectivity what do you think is the I guess the hitch in making the jump from breakthrough technology to having public policy adopted as say the framework for implementation Is it difficult one because there are so many entrenched interests right because for me to say like if I was at the LA auto show and I said I think we should get rid of passions occurs I'd like they'd be throwing tomatoes at me right so there's a lot of or maybe something worse but there's a lot of entrenched interests out there that don't want it to happen tomorrow and I'm not the best on the political front so I'm just more interested in pushing the technology but I think there has to be an incentivized structure right which incentivizes people to adopt the technology which then lets the car companies make money lets the infrastructure companies make money also decarbonize so I think I don't like the punitive policy that kind of like the Europeans do the punitive measure I don't think that really works so I think the incentivized structure works but the incentivized structure has to go also for using public transport because in the United States I would say in California and maybe in India there's some sort of like stigma associated with using public transport right so you gotta get rid of that stigma too and so Europe doesn't have that stigma which is why everybody uses public transport but that cultural stigma which is actually driven by the interests that I want everybody to own a passenger car right so people need to be honest about that governments need to align policies to incentivize people to make these decisions and I would argue for any of you who personally experienced problems associated with climate change or health issues associated with the air quality I mean it is something that we have to do we don't have a choice and the irony is the one thing that we don't have to worry about is the financial impact because the financial impact will be positive if we shift over to it I truly believe this and we've seen it in California right because people have shifted already and California is a very wealthy state and it keeps on getting wealthier because it's making these forward-thinking decisions so it is a cultural sort of the way things are a mentality that almost holds everything back but yeah and I think as individuals we could support people who push these kinds of objectives we can adopt these things in our personal lives right those are companies as business leaders as business owners absolutely we should push these things too so give incentives to your employees to use public transportation to ride their bicycle to make these types of purchases like in California and I will be honest with you this is amazing the incentive structure for buying these cars is you don't pay for gas for five years right so right now when the price of fuel is like through the roof not for hydrogen right but you don't pay for gas right so when your cost of ownership becomes less of course you're gonna do it so the positive reinforcement I think works way better than the negative reinforcement and then I think then everybody starts to kind of buy into that system but I'm also an optimist so that's part of it oh I think we're all right okay thank you thank you