🌌 Hi everyone, Robert here. I hope you enjoy The Deep End, a new-ish section of the Airframe newsletter. If you want to opt out but still receive the main Airframe newsletter, you can do that in your Substack settings. 😊
If you haven’t subscribed yet, join the hundreds of aerospace executives, investors, and enthusiasts who read Airframe and The Deep End weekly.
With an emphasis on climate and real estate technology, Fifth Wall is one of the venture funds investing in deep tech startups. This week, managing partner Brendan Wallace shared his vision of leveraging all of the work we’ve collectively done with bits (software) and focusing our attention on atoms (the real, physical realm).
Urgent challenges and unflinching startups: that’s The Deep End. Read on for our stories of the week.
The playbook for building a deep tech startup
After exiting his first startup for $100M, Brett Adcock started Archer Aviation and took it public for $2.7B. Now he’s building his third company, Figure, which is developing a humanoid robot to do manual labor usually reserved for humans. This week he gave us a gold mine of advice on how to build a deep tech startup:
From coal plants to battery storage
The batteries we know today are good at short-duration energy storage: they power our vehicles or devices for short periods of time. But we also need long-duration energy storage (LDES), providing energy to our homes and communities for days or weeks.
This week, Xcel Energy, one of the nation’s largest utilities, announced that with the help of Form Energy, it will be turning two retiring coal plants into large-scale battery systems. These will be used to back up wind and solar production, so in terms of their function on the grid, David Roberts of Volts says the best way to think of these batteries is not as storage, but as the equivalent of a carbon-free natural gas plant.
A great use of retiring fossil fuel plants, and an exciting future for the electric grid.
What’s launch day like? Space.com’s Editor-in-Chief walks us through
Rocket Lab just completed its first launch from American soil. Space.com editor Tariq Malik walks us through what it’s like to see a launch in-person. The satellite-bearing payload reached orbit, and according to Rocket Lab, everything has gone according to plan: