- Darby Dunn spent a decade at SpaceX, where she held a handful of engineering and manufacturing roles related to rocket building. In one of those positions, she was unofficially known as the “Mother of Dragons” due to her work on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.
- Dunn has been with Commonwealth Fusion Systems for four and a half years where she is part of the team working in the commercial fusion industry.
- CNBC traveled to Devens, Massachusetts to tour the company’s campus and spoke with Dunn about her role and journey.
Darby Dunn, 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 engineering and production roles at SpaceX.
“In one role in particular, my unofficial title was ‘Mother of Dragons,'” Dunn told CNBC in an interview in Devens, Massachusetts. “In this role, I led the build-out of our new production facilities for the Crew Dragon vehicle.”
While overseeing production of the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX went from ramping up production to building its first-ever spacecraft and then regularly sending cargo with it to the International Space Station, Dunn says.
Building rockets is a very cool thing. But in January 2019, Dunn started work at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup trying to commercialize nuclear fusion as an energy source. Fusion is the way the sun and stars create energy. If it could be harnessed here on Earth, it would provide virtually unlimited clean energy.
So far, however, large-scale fusion remains in the realm of science fiction.
Darby Dunn with the SpaceX Dragon rocket.
Photo courtesy of Darby Dunn
Dunn says she made the switch from building rockets to working on making fusion energy a reality because she wants to see the impact of her efforts while she is still alive.
“I firmly believe that SpaceX will make life multiplanetary. I don’t know how much of that I’m going to see in my life,” Dunn, 37, told CNBC in late May.
But Dunn has spent much of her life in California, where SpaceX is based, and has clearly witnessed the effects of climate change in the form of wildfires and mudslides resulting from extreme rainfall.
“What really mattered to me was that I wanted to use my energy to clean up the planet rather than leave it. That was the big shift for me, coming to CFS,” Dunn told CNBC.
Joining Commonwealth Fusion Systems in its early stages as the tenth employee has also allowed her to experience a different phase in the company’s growth journey.
“We’re a five-year-old company with 500 employees,” Dunn told CNBC. “I came to SpaceX when it was six years old and had about 500 employees. So I actually got to experience the entire era at CFS that I didn’t get to see at SpaceX.”
The Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Mass.
Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
A major difference between the two professions is the degree of maturity of the respective industries.
“The aerospace industry has been around for a long time. The construction of a rocket engine, the mechanics that look a lot like it, or the structure itself, or the physics of how it works, is all very, very well studied and very well understood.” Dunn told CNBC.
Fusion engines have been studied in academic institutions and research labs since the early 1950s, but the industry as a whole is only in the very early stages of trying to prove that the science can have commercial applications. For Dunn, being a part of that excitement was a huge draw.
Of course, there are plenty of skeptics who say the industry is the equivalent of Don Quixote powering his windmills. But Dunn says her time at SpaceX prepared her to face the skeptics.
“When Elon said publicly that we were going to launch and land rockets from space, everyone said, ‘It’s not possible! You can’t!'” Dunn said, referring to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. SpaceX’s response was that the laws of physics say it’s possible and they would prove it, Dunn told CNBC.
“It took a lot of tries, a lot of learning, a lot of iterations of 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 got to the point where the aerospace industry is starting to say, ‘Why don’t these other companies borrow their rockets back from space?’ It has completely changed the way people look at it. They said at first: “It wasn’t possible. Then, “Okay, it’s possible.” And now it’s like, ‘Why doesn’t everyone else step in?’”
Dunn wants to be part of such a transition for the Commonwealth’s fusion industry.
Dunn is the vice president of operations responsible for manufacturing, safety, quality and facilities. It is helping the Commonwealth transition from research and development-scale processes to large-scale manufacturing and production.
The company grew out of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has a goal of building 10,000 fusion power plants worldwide by 2050, Dunn told CNBC.
First, however, Commonwealth must demonstrate that it can generate more energy in its fusion reactor than is required to start the reaction, a key threshold for the fusion industry known as “ignition”. To that end, the company is currently building its SPARC tokamak — a device designed to help contain and control the fusion reaction. The company plans to turn it on in 2025 and demonstrate net power shortly thereafter.
To build SPARC, Commonwealth must make many magnets from high-temperature superconducting tape.
The advanced manufacturing facility is located on the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts, where magnets are manufactured.
Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
“What’s cool about this building is that the concept for it started as a doodle I drew on a whiteboard three years ago,” Dunn told CNBC. “To see the steel beams being pulled up, the walls being pulled up and the concrete being poured, it’s a whole vision come to life which is super exciting.”
To fund construction, Commonwealth has raised more than $2 billion from investors including Bill Gates, Google, Khosla Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital.
As Commonwealth ponders how to make a magnet, Dunn is leading her team to develop manufacturing processes that can eventually be scaled up into a process that looks like an automobile assembly line, she told CNBC.
Acting quickly is a priority for Dunn and the rest of the team. After building the SPARC demonstration fusion machine, the company plans to build a larger version called the ARC, which it says will reportedly feed electricity into the grid. The goal is to have ARC online in the 2030s.
“The biggest thing I think about a lot is how fast we can go,” Dunn told CNBC. “The sooner we can build the magnets, the sooner we can build SPARC, the sooner 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 I think about the most.
Darby Dunn at Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ advanced manufacturing facility.
Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Speed matters because critics argue it will take too long for fusion to work as a power source to make a meaningful contribution to urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Top climate scientists at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said that “nil or limited” exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius warming from pre-industrial levels by 2030 would result in a 45% reduction in carbon emissions from 2010 levels and more would require net zero by 2050.
“I was like, ‘Why am I doing Fusion and not something that’s going to be deployed next year?'” she told CNBC. “To me it boils down to fusion being the most energetically dense reaction in our solar system.”
However, she doesn’t think fusion should be the only solution.
“I firmly believe in solar power, wind power and many other renewable energies – that we absolutely need them. We need them now. We need them all over 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 on building the energy sources the world will need in the decades and centuries to come.
However, if Commonwealth is to deliver this solution, Dunn must first produce a whole series of very powerful magnets.
“My personal opinion is that I will continue and keep building. And we have a poster in the back stairwell that says, ‘Keep calm and hang in there,'” Dunn told CNBC. “Regardless of what the outside world says, we work every day on our mission to harness grid-positive energy from fusion. And I look forward to proving that to the world in a few years.”