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Darby Dunn, the vice president of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
From March 2009 to December 2018, Darby Dunn held a handful of technical and production roles SpaceX.
“In one role in particular, my unofficial title was ‘Mother of Dragons,'” Dunn told CNBC in an interview in Devens, Massachusetts. “In that role, I led the construction of our new production facilities for the Dragon vehicle crew.”
While overseeing production of the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX went from ramping up production to creating the first-ever spacecraft and then regularly shipping cargo to the International Space Station, Dunn says.
Building rockets is a very cool thing to do. But in January 2019, Dunn started working at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup trying to commercialize nuclear fusion as an energy source. Fusion is the way the sun and stars make energy. If it could be harnessed here on Earth, it would provide virtually unlimited clean energy.
But so far, fusion at scale remains in the realm of science fiction.
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Darby Dunn with the SpaceX Dragon rocket.
Photo courtesy of Darby Dunn
Dunn says she made the transition from building rockets to working on making fusion power a reality because she wants to see the impact of her efforts in her lifetime.
“I very much believe that SpaceX will make life multiplanetary. I don’t know how much of that I will see in my lifetime,” Dunn, 37, told CNBC in late May.
But Dunn has spent much of her life in California, where SpaceX is based, and has seen the effects of climate change very well in the form of wildfires and mudslides resulting from extreme rainfall.
“For me it really came down to wanting to use my energy to clean the planet rather than get rid of it. So that was the big shift for me coming to CFS,” Dunn told CNBC.
Joining Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the early stages, as the 10th employee, has also allowed her to see another phase of the company’s growth.
“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 able to see the entire era that I haven’t experienced at SpaceX and I do at CFS.”
The Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Mass.
Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
A major difference between the two jobs is the maturity of the respective industries.
“The aerospace industry has been around for a long time. So building a rocket engine, the mechanics of it are very similar, or the structure itself, or the physics of how it works are all very, very well studied and very well understood ,” Dunn told CNBC.
Fusion machines have been studied in academic settings and research laboratories since the early 1950s, but the entire industry is still in the very early stages of trying to prove that the science can have commercial applications. Being part of that excitement was a big draw for Dunn.
Of course, there are plenty of skeptics who say the industry is the equivalent of Don Quixote overturning its windmills. But Dunn says her time at SpaceX has prepared her to face the skeptics.
“When Elon said publicly that we would launch and land rockets from space, everyone said, ‘That’s not possible! You can’t do that!'” Dunn said, referring to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX’s response was that the laws of physics say it’s possible, so they went to prove it, Dunn told CNBC.
“It took a lot of tries, a lot of learning, a lot of iterations on our software, a lot of failed attempts off the boat — and then we did it. And then we did it again. And we did it again. And we did it again,” she said .
Darby Dunn, vice president of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“Now it’s gotten to the point where you’ve seen the aerospace industry shift to say, ‘Why don’t these other companies borrow their rockets back from space as well?’ It’s changed the way people look at it. First they said, “It wasn’t possible. Then, “OK, it’s possible.” And now it says, ‘Well, why isn’t everyone jumping in?'”
Dunn wants to be part of that kind of transition for the fusion industry at Commonwealth.
Speed is key
Dunn is the vice president of operations, which covers production, safety, quality and facilities. She helps Commonwealth make the transition from research and development-scale processes to production and full production.
The company grew out of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the company’s goal is to build 10,000 fusion power plants worldwide by 2050, Dunn told CNBC.
But first, the Commonwealth must prove it can generate more energy in its fusion reactor than is needed to kick-start the reaction, a key threshold for the fusion industry referred to as “ignition.” To do that, the company is currently building its SPARC tokamak – a device that will help contain and control the fusion reaction. The company plans to turn it on in 2025 and demonstrate net energy soon after.
To build SPARC, Commonwealth has to make a lot of magnets with high-temperature superconducting tape.
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The state-of-the-art manufacturing facility on Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ campus in Devens, Massachusetts, where magnets are manufactured.
Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“The cool thing about this building is that the concept for it started as a doodle I made on a whiteboard three years ago,” Dunn told CNBC. “To watch the steel beams go up, walls go up, concrete is poured, it’s a whole vision come to life, which is super exciting.”
To fund construction, Commonwealth raised more than $2 billion from investors including Bill Gates, Google, Khosla Ventures And Low carbon capital.
Even as Commonwealth figures out how to make one magnet, Dunn is leading her team to develop manufacturing processes that could eventually be scaled up to a process akin to an automotive assembly line, she told CNBC.
Being fast is a priority for Dunn and the rest of the team. After building the demonstration fusion machine, SPARC, the company wants to build a larger version called ARC, as it says supply power to the grid. The goal is to have ARC online by the 2030s.
“The main thing I think about a lot is time, about how fast we can go,” Dunn told CNBC. “The sooner we can get the magnets built, the faster we can build SPARC, the faster we can turn it on, the faster we can get net energy, the faster we can get to our first ARC. So I think that’s probably the element what I think about most.”
Darby Dunn at Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ state-of-the-art manufacturing facility.
Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Speed is important because critics argue that it will take too long for fusion to work as an energy source to meaningfully contribute to the very urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Top climate scientists of the That is what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that to have “no or limited” exceedance of warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would require a 45% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 compared to 2010 levels and achieving from net zero around 2050.
“I’ve asked myself, ‘Why am I doing fusion instead of something that will be deployed next year?'” she told CNBC. “For me, the bottom line is that fusion is the most energy-dense reaction in our solar system.”
But she doesn’t believe fusion should be the only solution.
“I’m a big believer in solar and wind and a lot of other renewables — that we absolutely need them. We need them now. We need them around the world,” Dunn told CNBC. “But I don’t think they will be enough to take us to 2050 and beyond.”
Electric cars, heat pumps, green steel and green cement all depend on large amounts of clean electricity. Dunn’s focus is to build the energy resources the world will need in the decades and centuries to come.
However, if Commonwealth is going to deliver that solution, Dunn will have to make a lot of very powerful magnets first.
“My own personal opinion is that I keep going — keep building. And we have a poster in the back stairwell that says, ‘Keep Calm and Keep Going,’ Dunn told CNBC. our mission to bring net positive energy from fusion. And I look forward to proving that to the world in a few years.”
