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Story of the week
This week I wanted to highlight a new startup that’s taking aim at a technology that’s been studied for decades but never materialized: space-based solar power.
Aetherflux, emerging from stealth Wednesday, says it is developing a novel design for space-based solar to unlock this energy source for the first time. The startup was founded by Baiju Bhatt, the co-founder of financial trading platform Robinhood, who said he became interested in the rapid commercialization of space. “The thing that’s always been my interest is, how do you bring more capitalism to space?”
If you’re bullish on hard tech as an investing category, then this will be very good news: I learned this week that Interlagos, the venture capital firm started by former senior SpaceX leaders, is looking to raise $550 million for its first venture fund.
Prospective LPs are no doubt drawn to the bona fides of the founding team, which includes Achal Upadhyaya, who was a senior engineer at SpaceX for a decade before leading investments in space and defense at Cantos Ventures; Tom Ochinero, a former high-ranking SpaceX executive who left the company in March after a 10-year stint; and Spencer Hemphill, Interlagos’ CFO, who was a former Sequoia finance leader.
This week in space history
This week in “women are awesome” news: Five years ago on October 18, NASA astronauts conducted the first-ever all women spacewalk! Astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch ventured outside the International Space Station to replace a faulty charge/discharge battery unit. This was Koch’s fourth spacewalk and the first for Meir.
Meir brushed off the accomplishment at the time, telling then-president Donald Trump, “We don’t want to take too much credit because there have been many others — female spacewalkers — before us,” Houston Public Media reported at the time. “This is just the first time that there have been two women outside at the same time … For us, this is really just us doing our job.”
At the time, 15 women had participated in 42 spacewalks, with cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya making the first venture outside the station in 1984.
Here’s some great footage from the agency showing the spacewalk in action.
