Nanotubes are to Space as Silicon is to Electronics w/ Gadhadar Reddy #31

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite podcast series. We're not about to enter into what so called the 4th industrial revolution where we're going to be connected to devices and and that, I mean, if that's it, if that's our future, then we're not heading in the right direction.

What we believe here is that if we do things right, if we are ahead of the curve, if we're thinking differently, we could enter in what into what's called the age of infinite, infinite possibilities, infinite resources. And through our podcast, we wish to show you new ways of redefining a new future.

Now our podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, h u t, through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. Then to use those endeavors, that paradigm shift thinking, those innovations, and turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're gonna be exploring an amazing topic. It is nanotubes, art of space as silicon is to electronics.

And we have with us Gadhaddar Reddy. How are you, Gadhaddar? I've been good, David. How are you? I'm doing great. I love that you've been good. That's a good sign. Gadhaddar has a degree in electronics and masters in molecular sciences and nanotechnology. He's done the normal type amazing things, been to Singularity University. He's, gotten a scholar. He's a Schevening Scholar at Oxford.

But more importantly is a story that I'd like to share with you so that you get a framework for why he's on this program. I'm the head judge at the Global Technology Symposium in Palo Alto and San Francisco area, the the valley. And 1 year several years ago, there was a presentation that was offered by Ghadadar about the technology that could be used as a on on Mars to give clean, fresh water to people on Mars. And it and it was an amazing presentation in terms of where he was going.

He's probably going to go over many of that information the those that construct today. But one of the things I realized sitting in the audience is he has one major issue. With all the tech, everything he's built that he solved, he or we as humans are not on Mars. It doesn't have a market. He has a product without a market. And often, innovations that are created for space are not the winner.

Sometimes they somebody else's, air filtration system or somebody else's, component for a a rocket is used over yours. And that's the game. Yet in there, there are might be 8 other competitors. They don't just fold up, collapse, and disappear. What they do is they take their innovations and turn them back on earth and use them in different ways. I saw Gad Hadar's technology as a means to change how we live on earth. We didn't talk much about it.

And just last night, I was reading an article about a new motor company a car company, and several of the engineers are former space, engineers working on a car. And so we will find that if we accelerate the Earth and space based ecosystem, that many of the ideas will never make it into space. And I do hope that Godard's ideas make it into space and get where he wants to go. But on the flip side, these type of innovations change how we live on earth.

That said, I know that's longer than we normally do it on the program, but it was a it's apropos to what we're talking about when we talk about the foundation, Prajman Hutt Foundation, and he's a perfect guest. So, Godhard, do you have an outline for us? Yes. Indeed, David. Have an outline for today. How many points are we gonna be covering? So we're gonna have 3 main points, and I'm gonna answer 3 simple questions about why nanotubes are displaced as silicon is to electronics. Wait. Wait. Why?

Wait. Wait. The first one is what? Why nanotubes? Is why. Yep. The second is what. 3rd is how. So it's why is there anything after that? Why nanotubes are or just why? Yep. It's, it's it's why nanotubes, why are nanotubes required? Okay. And why are they the fundamental building blocks for a space pairing humanity? And what are carbon nanotubes? Okay. And how are we building nanotubes and creating this new future for ourselves?

Okay. I didn't think that the why, what, how was enough to work off an outline. So let's start with your first point, why are nanotubes required and teach me. And let's let's hear what, why nanotubes are to space the silicon is to electronics. Sure. So, I'll, I'll start with a brief context of for the question why, David, because that's been something that's been very close. It started off as a personal goal and something that set off as a journey to find out, like, the reality of the universe.

So that's how my journey started with getting into carbon nanotubes. And so it started with debates with my grandfather when I was a kid, and these debates centered about the question of why we exist. Like, what's why do humans exist? What's the meaning of life? And I was in my 3rd or 4th grade when these debates happened, and he used to tell me, an old Indian philosophy that said, okay. Everything in the world is just an illusion.

It's a Maya, and you can't really change anything because nothing is real in the first place. So you have to just accept things as they are and leave them. And I'd be like, okay. That doesn't sound like the kind of life I want to live. I wanna make things happen. And, you know, I wanna make things happen. I want to, like, touch things with my hands, and that's more exciting, and this is, like, so ridiculous.

And he'd give examples of saints who would question and who'd argue, and then he'd be like so there was he'd give an example of one saint that my family follows, and this guy had a disciple who used to be very argumentative. And his guru one day apparently touched him. He got electrified, and then then he's, like, he got enlightened. And I would sit there and ask him, like, no. Maybe he was just wearing silk robes, and he got charged up, and he just released a bunch of electrons.

And that's what happened there. So you're an engine you were an engineer from birth? Yeah. I I like to find an explanation of why it is like that and try to prove it myself. And if it is then it's, like, okay. It makes sense. If it if it can't prove it, then, okay, there's no point in believing that. It doesn't make any sense. So that that's why even now, like, when I talk to people and some people are, like, okay. We had this thing in ancient times. We were, like, so big and all that.

I'll be like, okay. Fine. Like, what are we doing? Did that lead to now? And it's like, no. It's like, okay. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't matter anymore. So that would be me. I'd like I'd just like to see things in a practical way and to understand them and be able to replicate that in a in an experiment so that I can actually feel that.

And, so this as this journey progressed and we were asking these questions, at the same time, I I was, like, trying to understand, like, how we humans exist. Like, are we connected to each other? If so, like, how is that happening? And I used to try like, once I ran out of asking questions to grandpa and I couldn't find proper answers, I turned towards books to read more to learn about, like, what people have been saying.

And one book that fascinated me a lot was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The book's interesting because it's just a collection of anecdotes of a bunch of people who made big changes to the world we live in. And the common thread, the message that I got from the book was that, that every human, like, if we set an end goal and if we follow through on the end goal and if we are, like, persistent about it, then we can make anything happen.

And at the same time, another philosophical understanding. So, like, a a lot of things I say are, like, kind of nonlinear in a sense that things happen at different time frames, but I'm, like, putting them all in as linear fashion. So what I, realized was, like, we're all, like, particles in a vessel, like, pollen grain that's having Brownian motion. And if we reach the end of the vessel, that's when we get the enlightenment.

We, like, become super calm and we can observe everything and we lost all the energy and stuff. But while we're in the middle of it, we just keep moving in random directions. So if you choose one direction, going that direction, we reach the end of the ball. We hit it, lose the energy, and we get to that perfect calm state. And And so that kinda became the philosophy of life. And I was like, okay.

So I need to be focusing on one goal, choose anything that's there in the world, pursue that completely, do not get deviated, and as we go keep going in that direction, we'll reach the end.

And the other philosophy that developed was that all of us humans are interconnected, and so if all of us are interconnected, then for me to realize something to get on this pathway, it has to be something that's a massive and audacious goal that's impossible to do as an intuition for which a lot of strangers have to come together.

So I thought, okay, if I'm gonna pursue such an audacious goal in life, then I'd be able to meet all these, insane people which can otherwise not happen unless we're all interconnected. And that, if that event happens, then that means that that philosophy of life is true, that everything in the universe is interconnected and there's nothing that's discreet and by itself. This is this was the basic philosophical underlining behind everything I've been trying to do in my life.

And the goal I set for myself on making this was that I wanted to be the first human on Mars. That's the goal I set for myself. And then it was, like, okay. So now you have an end goal, an end in sight, and now how do we work things backwards? So okay. So if you have to get to Mars, we need to have a lot of spacecraft. The spacecraft have to be regularly accessing, going up there, launching payloads, or building stuff.

And for that to happen, we need to have rockets that are not the rockets of today. We cannot have rockets that are multiple stages where you throw away half with SpaceX at first time, still that. Otherwise, you throw away the entire vehicle every time we launch payloads. But we need something that can be a single vehicle that can go up there and come back just like us driving a car or a truck with just fuel being reloaded every time.

And then, okay, to build such a ship, these are called as the single stage to orbit rockets. What's the challenge? What's what's preventing us from doing that? And that question brought it back to materials. It said, okay. We don't have a lightweight, strong enough material that could be used to build a rocket that could actually function like an automobile, where you just refuel it, it delivers payloads and comes back down to earth. And so this is how carbon nanotubes came into the picture.

I used to attend a lot of summer schools, and from the summer schools, I realized that every summer school in the 2,005 time frame, every Astronomy Magazine used to scream that, okay, carbon nanotubes are the future. They're the way for us to get to space. And then when I put everything together, I realized, okay, the way these are going to do that is by having a lightweight, extremely strong material that is, like, is perfectly designed, for space.

And so that's how the why of this journey started. So, a few questions very quickly. 1, and I don't normally ask this question, how old are you? Because I wanna get a timeline for my understanding of your educational positioning where we are in the world. So how old are you? I'm 33 now. Okay. So at 33, you live through the space shuttle. Mhmm. And before I get to next question, what was your thought of the space shuttle construct?

Okay. So space shuttle, the objective was great, but the execution was horrible because, the system ended up becoming so it it wanted to be everything I wanted a rocket to be, but it ended up being something that nobody wanted it to be.

It was mostly a lot of politics going in, decisions made that were not rational, made for reasons that had nothing to do with science or technology, and it just became ended up becoming something that that just led money and was also extremely difficult to handle and maintain.

So So you were you were happy of the when you heard about the fact that they were building it, but when you learn more about the individuals and the politics involved and then the actual final product, it was not it didn't fit the needs that you had, but it was in the right direction. Yeah. The philosophy was correct, but the execution was horribly out of place. Okay. So then, the next one was and it was earlier on. I'd like to keep on going because I just wanna ask.

Did your grandfather come from a, a faith based belief in the meaning of life is and were you or why you misexist, and did you subjugate yourself from that thinking? Or, I mean, I'm trying to get a sense of your grandfather's answer and what made you tick. What made that not work for you?

Okay. So he was an, he he, was a self professed atheist, and he used to follow, like, one particular guru, like, in India called it Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and his teaching so what this guru did was, like, a small anecdote just throws a lot of light about him. So he used to, he used to be a Hindu priest, at a temple, and he used to worship the goddess there. And one day, he got enlightened.

Like, he felt like the whole world is connected, and he got into that phase where, like, he could just sense that, okay, all of us are not discreet and stuff. And then he decided, okay, so I've gotten into this state from worshiping this goddess. Now would I get to that same state if I worship Jesus? And he took up Christianity, followed that, and then he got to the same state, and then he took up Islam.

He followed everything according to the scriptures, and then he got to the same state, and he just went by different religions and and the and the state was the same. And then he came up with this philosophy that, okay, so god is like an ocean and all the religions are just reverse joining the same ocean. So it doesn't matter which path you take, you're gonna end up in the same place at all times. So it used to be the philosophy, and he used to be a self read, guy.

Like, so he he used to, like, he he self taught himself. He used to learn about relativity and stuff like that. He picked up as a kid, like, by reading about people talking about things. So that's, how his philosophical bent had been. But, as you know, like, in India, like, it's like when you have the elders, the elders are like, okay. Whatever I say is, like, the right thing, and everything else is, like, false and all that, and I I just don't like that.

I I like to question things, to know them, feel them for myself, and only can accept anything. Okay. It was just that I when you were saying it, I felt like I brushed over something because you were sitting in a cultural position going back 30 years ago where it was more difficult than it is today to question, and you made that question that, something inside of you saw science and that made the jump. So it's just it's more of a personal thing that I wanted to know.

It helps me to understand how you had to make a a big jump. Did your and, would not don't wanna, spend too much time on this. Your father, your family, how did they feel when you went the science way? So, I, so I sometimes still have friction with my dad. My dad keeps telling me, like, okay. You need to sit in front of a god, worship, and everything will be fine. Like, all your narratives will come out really well if you just believe in god.

I'll be like, no. I just can't believe just because you're telling me a tomb unless I experience it. So it keeps happening, and then I think they've now kind of given up and said, okay. Let me do whatever he wants. Okay. Not one of the 21. I I I wanted to add some texture to my understanding of what was going on. Okay. So we've covered the why you got to this point. You saw the nanotubes. You how did you run into you were take doing courses. You were learning.

You were What made nanotubes stand out for you at this point? Sure. That's a great question, David. So, because of this interest in space, I was telling myself, okay, I need to get a marathon. So it was all and there had been one incident where I you I had attended a program in Southern India in a observatory called Vainu Bapu, which happens to be one of the largest vista optical observatories. And I got to see the Milky Way in all its glory, and I was just super fascinated. Why?

It was just so beautiful, and I I knew that there's nothing else that's an alternate for me. And I've been taking up more and more summer school. So at one point, I took up a class where I was in the 9th grade. Everyone in the program were in the 4 year bachelor degrees, and they were, like, the 2nd and third year of their bachelor degrees, and I was the youngest kid in the lot. And By a lot. Teaching about the point. Yeah. You were talking we're talking 17, 18, 19 year olds, and you are 14? 13?

Okay. Yep. So and I was enjoying myself because we were talking gravity. They were teaching they're teaching about why the sun exists, like, what's the chemistry behind the sun. And then we started talking about, like, the step equations to explain how long a photon takes. Like, the professor asked a question, like, okay. How long does a photon take to start from the sun's center to get to the earth? And I was like, okay. It's a general knowledge question. It just take minutes.

And he's like, no. Like, you need to do the math. And he's like, you need to calculate the density function and then look at the step function for random path moment. And it's a couple of 1000000 years for the photon to just get to the surface traveling that dense of a matter. And it was just fascinating. Wow. It takes millions of years, and you can actually calculate those millions of years. And then once it gets to the surface, it just really just zooms in at 8 minutes.

And that had a deep impact, and then quantum physics that was used for explaining all these, explaining why the stars exist, was also incredibly attractive for this reason. That you could use a theory of atoms to connect, and describe how a planet or a star is going to live through its life, and you can tell about the universe in, like, down to picoseconds and with very high when you can narrate that whole story.

And at the same time, while, as I was learning more about quantum physics and was also seeing things about carbon nanotubes, From a cursory glance, what I could gather was that, like, the carbon nanotubes are part of this field of technology called nanotechnology, and the core physics defining nanotechnology is quantum physics.

So here was a field of engineering, nanotech that would allow me to work with atoms, build things, and work with the exact same theories that are used for, you know, describing how a star works and why it exists in the 1st place. And that was just super fascinating. It's like, wow. Like, the best of both worlds. I get it to create stuff that would take me back to the stars, and I get to work and to play with the same physics that does both. And so it was like a no brainer for me. I'm laughing.

I'm trying to think of what I was doing when I was 14. So, that brought so the that's the the at that point, you probably did learn or were exposed to the strength, the weight, the or the structures built in nanotubes, or is that just the start right there you learned about it and said I wanna pursue this even further? Yep. It was the latter. It was more like, okay. So there is a material that everyone's talking about. Everyone stated it's a fascinating material that can get us to space.

And, I was I was just, like, stuck with that fascination. And over time, I understood that the and what I knew at that point was nanotubes are the strongest material that humans have ever known, and it's also formed, the reason for that strength happens to be the way carbon atoms are arranged. So from a nature perspective, we know that that's probably the strongest arrangement of carbon atoms that can exist, and that that was the only fact that I knew about them.

And I think the number and and tell me if I'm wrong. I think it's a nanotube, which is, and it's some unless you're thinking in these dimensions, it's very difficult. But a nanotube is a a tube the size of a nanometer or smaller than a, a 100 nanometers, something sort of the call qualifies. You can tell me if I'm wrong. But it's a 100 times stronger than a piece of steel. Something like that. Is that correct? Yep. Okay. That's correct. That's correct.

So if you so so to to think about it, you've got this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny tube that if you wanted to break it with your hands and was blown up to size, it it it's just massively strong. And do do they Exactly. Do they occur in nature naturally? Yep. There's actually, a very nice backstory to the nanotube discovery. I can tell you about this.

So the Yeah. I'm I'm before we get into how it can be used in the space, I think understanding nanotubes for me would help me to be able to dimensionalize what you're talking about. Sure. So nanotubes, they all belong to a family of materials called fullerenes. And fullerenes were discovered by professor Croto Smalley. Like, they won a Nobel Prize for that. My cofounder worked with, professor Smalley. Like, he was his PhD student.

Now so there there's an interesting story behind the discovery of fullerenes. Now fullerenes are exciting molecules that, with 68 atoms of carbon being one of the popular molecules, but they can have many other sized carbon atoms. Now, the first time they were observed was actually in starlight. Crota had been observing spectrum, from stars and then he saw a a weird spectra from a a a distant, starlight, which seemed to be a variety of carbon that hadn't been recognized.

Because until then, carbon knew carbon had only a few allotropes like coal, carbon black, and stuff, diamonds, and suddenly there was something new. And he could figure out how it could be or what structure it had. So one fine day in a conference, he happened to bump into Richard Smalley from Rice University, and doctor Smalley happened to have one of the world's most powerful lasers.

And as you know, like, with any man with a powerful weapon, all we can do is, like, fire it at everything and see what happens. And Smalley used to do exactly that. Okay. So he used to just so he used so I'm betting I'm betting there are women too who do it, but, yes, men like to shoot at things just to see what happens. Yes. Yeah. So since Smalley started doing that, and Kurto was like, okay. You know what? Why don't you also fire some some stuff at the carbon and see what happens?

Because we I'm looking at the starlight. It doesn't make any sense. And so he said, okay. Fine. And then they did that, and they were able to reproduce the same carbon by firing the lasers at a graphite piece. And that was the discovery of, carbon fillings, that there was a new form of carbon that could exist. And that set off this field that okay. So you have a deep connection to starlight, from the discovery. And one one time in college, I was, like, I was in a library.

I have this habit of just reading random books. And that particular day, I a book on geology happened to land in my lap, and I was just reading the geology book. And it turns out that one of the mass extinctions on earth that happened about a 150000000 years ago was due to an asteroid, that collided. That was a carbon containing asteroid, or a meteor, rock that hit us.

It it was cause of a massive extinction event, and the evidence for that extinction event is a thin layer of fullerenes all across the planet. Really? So we yep. So one so one of the ways we know that the mass extinction event happened is because we can find these and I'm going to ask you because I'm filarenes. Is it p h? Is it Yeah. O how do you spell it? It's f u l l e r e n e. E n e. Okay. Filarenes.

So because you because we can identify around the crater or in proximity, we know that the impact was so great that it caused these filerines to be created. Yep. And and there are, also this event happened about 250,000,000 years ago, so this is one of the evidence for that. So when when we talk about mass extinction, we always talk about the crater, but there's actually secondary there's actually secondary evidence that it happened because of the filerines. Yep. That's right.

And and this was a a very, like, this event, it wiped out 90% of marine life and 70% of land life on earth. It was a massive event. The 70% of, marine. I'm gonna take it percent of land? Sure. 90% of marine. I mean, I I said 90% of marine, 70% of land. Yeah. I'm That's on my on my notes. Sometimes I'm writing, talking, thinking. I'm gonna take a jump. Just maybe you can help me Mhmm. Is Graphene as compared to graphite.

The graphene product is a similar structure design with this I mean, you know, I'm assuming you know what graphene is. Yes. Yep. How different is that in the in the construct of graphite and filerines? Sure. So, graphite is made up of multiple sheets of carbon, and each of these individual sheets are referred to as Graphene. That that's that's the nomenclature for that. Oh, okay. Nanotubes yep.

With nanotubes, the way one one of the ways for imagining them is to imagine the single sheet of graphene and then folding it over itself to form a tube. So that single folded tube is called a single walled carbon nanotube. And Okay. When we roll it up, as a sheet, like, when we have multiple roles, we we call it it it has multiple roles. So it's called a multi walled carbon nanotube. So it's more like a Russian doll.

What do you what would be the purpose of doing a multi role versus a single role concerning how strong it is already? Sure. So this is where nanotubes get really interesting. Like, even though we call them nanotubes, there actually are several different molecules that are present inside them. The multi walled carbon nanotubes are actually relatively easier to produce. They're more, like, derivatives from carbon fiber as we make carbon fibers more and more finer.

Yeah. We end up with these multi walled nanotubes. Now these are what are predominantly used in the world today. So pre multi walled nanotubes have been used for quite some time on car bumpers to reinforce them, and the funny fact is that multi wall nanotubes have been in use since 1983, while the invention of carbon nanotubes is dated to 1991, to Japanese professor. So there was an American company called Hyperion Catalysis that still exists that made these materials as filler for car bumpers.

That's so almost every car bumper in the world has multi walled nanotubes from that, from that clock. Now the multi walled tubes, they mostly are, are used as a filler material. They are also supposed to be good at strength because if one tube breaks, you have another tube inside them. But they also suffer from problems that are okay. If you have multiple tubes, you don't really know which tube is actually strengthening a particular material.

And, also, it's only the outer tube that's participating in any kind of reinforcement. The inner tubes are just occupying volume. And another interesting difference that exists between these two kinds is these single walled tubes, they exhibit some incredibly interesting, optical and electrical properties that have no parallel with multi wall tubes.

You can actually get semiconducting properties from the single wall carbon nanotubes, and the single walls are also extremely difficult to manufacture. Thank you. So, I I cut you off and let I guess we're moving to number 2, building blocks for space faring humanity. Unless we're if there's anything else you wanted to add, but I think you covered, you said you were done with the nanotubes required, or do you have anything more for the why?

So, yeah, on the why, there were, like, there there was 2 additional points that I wanted to just, like, put in place. Okay. So one was how we know why, like, so this end goal of wanting to get to Mars, that was the driving force behind wanting to create nanotubes. And over time, it morphed into an even larger, desire to let anyone want to get to space in a much much safer way.

And this problem of wanting to get to space in a vehicle that's extremely safe for people to use, So to create that, we need a material that's extremely strong, a material that's light in weight, a material that can withstand a lot of radiation, and that can be a basic building block for these spacecraft. So we need something light, strong that can that resists a lot of heat, and the this was there was a search for this material.

And, also, for regular access to space, I was narrating about how we need to have vehicles that can get into orbit in a single deep and come back down without losing any mass, to burning up in atmosphere. And we also need the ability to be able to refuel, in space, like using a common liquid such as water, which is essential for everything, and convert and being able to have the ability to convert the water into hydrogen and oxygen.

So these are the two main things that we need to be able to have the kind of spacecraft that can enable regular access and enable us to explore beyond the planet. So, one is the the rocket that's a single stage to orbit vehicle and an ability to refuel. So these were two main requirements. Okay. So that would so get to our number 1. Is is there a second point then? You said the first point was this, getting to Mars you need it. What was your second point then? So the, okay.

The the second point was, it it was, the same one. It was just about getting to Mars and getting everyone to be able to get to Mars and the tools required and the systems required to be in place for achieving that. So the 2 things that Right now, when rockets are being manufactured, and I think there's about a 150 space launch companies today, how many of them are using the this technology, nanotube technology, to be able to build lightweight product? Okay. There's none right now.

Okay. Yep. And, I'll be getting to the challenges that existed and how we have solved them. And there's one company that's exploring their usage in California, again, to build, systems to get us to Mars, on using the carbon nanotubes on some of the composite structures. They just started with the engines, and the structural parts will be using the carb our carbon nanotubes. K. So I'm assuming later we'll go over the challenges. So Yeah. Are we ready for the next point? Yeah. Okay. Go ahead.

Sure. Yep. So this was regarding what the carbon nanotubes are, what what do they do, and how how are they doing that? So carbon nanotubes, as you rightly pointed out, are incredibly small cubes. They're about 200,000 times smaller than a hair strand, and, they exhibit an incredibly high strength. They're a 100 times stronger than steel. The single walled carbon nanotubes in particular are incredibly strong. They have a tensile strength that goes up to a 130 gigapascals. Like, what is it?

Gig giga what? A 130 what? Gigapascals. Okay. What is that? I know it's just a measure of strength, but I don't I've never heard that. So, the the GPA, just it's a the tensile strength, it's measured in gigapascals. I'm trying to get my I'm trying to get my mind around what that means. Because if I told you Okay. That it was 400,000 light bulbs, you'd say, I get it. 400,000 light bulbs, but I don't have a reference point to what this means.

Okay. So it's the amount of, stress that you need to apply. So okay. So a a good way of imagining this is the amount of force required to, say, rip out a nanotube, by itself is going to be about, when I say a 100 times higher. Now the strength that's required for, like, say, good steels is about 1 gigapascal. And So good steel is 1 good good steel, like metal steel is 1 gigapaxle. And you're saying this is Yeah. A 130 gigapaxles. Yes. Okay. I mean, how do you Yep.

Is there anything else on the planet that we would know that has that type of, tensile strength? So diamonds, diamond like fibers are supposed to have such strength. There being a material of science fiction, and graphene sheets the strength between individual carbon atoms, it exhibits similar strengths. So it's it's a property that comes with carbon atoms, and the carbon bonds.

Okay. So the if if for me to reference to think that we're talking about something as strong as a diamond that we're not possible, and we're talking graphene, so this this material is, in human terms, is more or less unbreakable. Yep. Okay. Yep. It's more in digital tubes. Yep. Okay. So and and in the carbon nanotubes, what I decided to pursue was, was the single walled carbon nanotubes.

1, because they were more difficult to make than anything, and the second being that, it's just a nice challenge when you're trying to make something that everyone says is incredibly difficult. And what was also exciting about single word annotates is that their properties are repeatable. So if I were to provide an annotate today and say, okay, this is having these properties, David, then tomorrow, if I give you the same nanotubes, they're gonna behave exactly the same way.

And that's a property that's extremely difficult to obtain with multi wall nanotubes. So that was what made me sway towards a single wall nanotubes. So what these also have in place is they're able to withstand temperatures. They can withstand about 3,500 degrees Celsius, in zones without oxygen. And by using special coatings, they can withstand the same temperatures in an oxygen atmosphere too.

So which means you can have spacecraft that can do reentries at very high temperatures without any problem. And the one other advantage that they have is an incredibly high thermal conductivity. So the thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes is about 2,000 watt per meter Kelvin. Copper is about 350 watt per meter Kelvin. So you get and you can also, like, when this is along one direction of the nanotubes, along the axis. But along the radius, the thermal conductivity is incredibly small.

It's just, it gets to as low as, like, 0.25 watt per meter Kelvin. So in one direction, you have an incredibly good insulator. In the other direction, you have an excellent conductor that's way better than copper in conducting heat, and it can withstand incredibly high temperatures without problems. And we also found some other really interesting properties with the nanotubes.

Now, researchers have been that have been using our material have been telling us that these are the ideal material for photonic circuits of all things, and they've also shown a lot of promise as semiconducting materials. They've been used in a few electronic devices too, and we also found that they exhibit properties of water transportation in which you can put molecules of water inside them and water just travels rapidly.

And this property is something that's also very interesting because you have a material that's a very good semiconductor that's also a water transporter that seems to have the ability to hold water inside it. Now when you combine these two properties, you're looking at a system that could potentially be used for breaking down water. Like, as you know, like, water has a low energy to break down. Like, the electron volts required is just about 1.2 to 1.4.

That's also happens to be the pan gap on most devices, but just because water is transparent, it get it does not get broken down by by normal light. But if you have a way to stop light in its path and you provide the band gap, you have an instantaneous decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. So then that's where this property comes back into play as, like, a potential long term solution for orbital space depots. And so these are some of it's just a sampling of properties.

So you have something that's incredibly strong, while being incredibly light, is radiation resistant, and carbon atoms have that one really good ability. That's why you use graphite in all nuclear reactors because of the ability to withstand so much radiation. They never don't Wait. Wait. Mhmm. Yeah. It's like it rolls off your tongue. So Mhmm. We are using graphite Mhmm. To shield nuclear reactors. Is that what you because you're just saying shielding How are we using it? It?

Okay. So they used to construct the chambers to withstand the high temperatures in the nuclear reactor to to absorb the heat. The shielding is never done by carbon. The shielding is done with lead Okay. For the nuclear reactors. So on the high temperature regions, for the heating and for the construction of the rest of the nuclear reactor, that's where carbon is used. You you had you had jumped from radiation resistant, and then you said, and that is why I think that's what you said.

And that is why they're used for nuclear reactors. But you are really talking about the ability to withstand high temperature. That's right. Able to withstand high temperatures and not degrading under radiation. So metals, when they are present in a high radiation environment, they become brittle, and graphite does not suffer such a problem. So carbon does not suffer such a problem, and that's the advantage. They do not become brittle under intense radiation.

So if we are in space and or when we are in space and we are looking for radiation shielding, we you you can use a sandwich of a the carbon, the the, graphite graphene graphite to create the shield, but then we would use an additional substance to be able to mitigate the radiation. Or Yep. Or is the radiation not high enough like a nuclear reactor where there's enough of a, shielding that comes from the actual product itself anyway?

So there are events in space that generate a lot of radiation and lot of charged energized particulates such as solar flares or, like, say, neutron star, like, anything, it's being towards us. So or the cosmic rays that are continuously bombarding. So there is presence of radiation, and there will be events that will generate a huge amount of radiation.

And on a long term duration, having a material that does not degrade with radiation is always, like, the best option that we can have because you can be sure that your vehicle can withstand any kind of reentry getting into another planet's atmosphere without, you know, becoming brittle and just, like, flicking off. So, I'm I'm I know this is basic basic. My I I went to calc 3. I did physics, but I didn't hit the levels you are at.

When a, radiation through, for example, the International space station or any vehicle is a particle that can go right through the wall, almost as if the wall is invisible, pass through your body Mhmm. And pass out the other side. You don't feel it. You don't see it. It just goes through you. Mhmm. When Mhmm. If we're using a substance such as a metal in space or some type of composite, does that and it becomes brittle as you're saying.

Does the carb does this product the way you're talking about structuring it, will it give any increase in radiation protection? I do understand that it gives the ability not to, degrade. But is there any bump? Is it a 1% bump, a 2% bump? Does it stop any of those or any type of radiation from entering into a vessel? Nope. It would not stop any of the radiation.

And in the context of the space station, it's actually protected by the Earth's magnetic field because it's still inside the low earth orbit. So that's an advantage that it's having. But once we leave, the low earth orbit and get out of there, that's where we face more problems with radiation, especially from the solar flares and stuff. But this this material is not going to protect us from the radiation.

We will need to have additional shieldings or even water large quantities of water could be used as as a way to slow down a lot of the high energy particulates. Like, a 2 meter layer of water is what could be the best protection against a high energy, emission. So I'm just playing with you here in terms of thinking, and I didn't realize it. I didn't realize that the International Space Station I don't use abbreviations because it's easier for people listening or hearing to know.

In the International Space Station, because we're in low earth orbit, what ends up happening is we are protected enough that humans are safe even though there is some shielding. But if we get beyond medium earth orbit or to high earth orbit, that that starts to change.

And in essence, if we could get, when we get rockets to, let's call it, high earth orbit or beyond, and we could then fill the rocket with water so we don't have to get it out of the gravity well, all that water, this shielding, we can then fill the rocket with a substance and then go on our merry way. Does that make sense? Yep. Yep. And if we had regular rockets that could keep launching, we could have, like, huge lead shieldings that could definitely definitely protect us. Okay. Okay. Got it.

Just playing a little bit in my own head. Alright. So we're you're talking about the the chambers, the high temperature, the the strength. Okay. So where do we go from here? Alright. So now so here, we have a material that's made of carbon that seems to exhibit or have properties that let it operate under all kinds of extreme conditions that one would expect to see if we are regularly accessing space returning from other planetary journeys.

So you have something that can withstand that can take off from the planet, allow us to build vehicles that are just one single vehicles that can take off from the ground, and then able to return to the atmosphere without burning up because of the ability to withstand high temperatures. And the other really nice thing is that even under high temperatures, these carbon structures, they do not lose their strength. They, in fact, retain and sometimes actually have a higher strength.

There's, like, a region where the carbon structures are much stronger at, like, 2,000 degrees than they are at room temperatures, and that's an insane ability to have that you have something that can be extremely strong at incredibly high temperatures. You have high thermal conductivity, so you can, like, move away heat. You have the ability to also use these materials to break down water to be able to use that as fuel. And so there's and all of these properties are present in just one material.

Like, if I had to, like, point out, like, which is the ideal space material, then here it is. Now so why does a material like this play an important role? Like, why why do we need a new material? So why why couldn't we progress further from existing ones? I feel like at this question. So what's interesting is, like, when we look at exploration, like, as we humans have gone out from the places where we have lived and gone out to explore newer places, the trigger for them has been multiple.

It's always either been the climate that pushed us outside. So there's a really nice book called, origins, how the earth has shaped life on earth that talks about these events. And say, when Columbus left, to across the Atlantic, it was because he had access to new technology, newer ships that could navigate the seas longer, and he could rely on them for his journeys.

And similarly, these carbon nanotubes now finally enable us to build ships that could potentially get out of the planet and come back in as a single vehicle instead of having multiple stages on top of them. And that is definitely going to be the trigger point that's gonna change how we evolve into the spacefaring species. Okay. Got it. New tech, lighter, multiple properties, and that's gonna be our building block. Why hasn't it? I mean, this is all sounds great.

And I know this challenges part, but I'm why hasn't it been used by others? Why isn't this more ubiquitously, this product out there being used on more space tech? Yep. That that's an excellent question, and and that's exactly the same question that set me off on the field for carbon nanotubes. So I I took up an engineering, degree in electronics because they said that's the closest that existed nanotech back then.

And then I decided to study nanotechnology with all of my independent studies being about carbon nanotubes. So I was sure that I wanted to have a degree that's a nanotech. And I used to ask I asked the exact same question. Okay. So if you have an incredible material, if it's supposed to be this future of space, then why doesn't it why isn't it there? Like, there's not a single product around me that's making use of carbon nanotubes, and this was, 16 years ago.

And so what what is missing and what can I do to make that happen? And the more I spoke to researchers, the more I spoke to end users, what I understood was that carbon nanotubes are incredible. But for that incredible properties to exist, we need an ability to produce these nanotubes repeatedly and to produce all of them of the exact same size. So what the challenge that is there here is, now each nanotube is about 200,000 times smaller than a hair strand.

And to put that in a different perspective, the diameter of each carbon nanotube is about 0.8 nanometers or about 8 atoms across. So I'm referring to single walled carbon nanotubes because those are the only nanotubes whose properties are repeatable and predictable.

So as we produce larger and larger tubes, their properties more start resembling carbon fibers to a larger extent than as a unique molecule that exhibits all of these unique properties of strength, radiation resistance, high temperature, conductivity, and electronic properties. So now the ones that are useful for actually being able to leverage these properties, they've been incredibly hard to produce, incredibly hard to, to use mostly because they were difficult to put inside solutions.

So when you have nanotubes, they're they can withstand these temperatures, so which means they must be extremely inert. So when you have a a very inert material, it's hard to work with that such an inert material. It's hard to put it inside a solution. It's hard to coat it on surfaces. It's hard to bond them together. And another challenge that existed was how do you interconnect nanotubes.

Like, when I produce a single nanotube, it and when you produce billions of tubes, they just look like a black fluffy powder. It it just looks like ash that's extremely black in color that's just waiting to fly off. Like, like, just one context is, like, a a one gram of carbon nanotubes that we make. They occupy a volume of about 300 milliliters. So and that's, like, that's a lot of volume and a fluffy powdery material.

So how do you convert that into a solid block that can actually be used for building stuff? So these were the challenges. First of which was, how do you produce a material of such a small dimension? How do you produce that repeatedly? And how do you use that to make something useful out of it? And so people have been producing milligrams of this stuff in laboratories for the longest of times. So this this is I'm gonna I'm gonna this I Sure.

I worked with the company Nanoblocks, and they used to create they created, a Russian technology. They took a carbon, molecule, put it into a chamber, exploded it twice, and the result was a, a material, a a nano block. Then what happened was they would the challenge was and the companies I was working with, they were having trouble getting it to a consistent 5 nanometers, and that was one of the challenge.

It'd be 30, it'd be 25. But this product, which sounds different, I'd like to know the differences, is this product was then put into a paint slurry, and it would make the paint have a resistance like, you could it would last longer and not scrape as much. You could put it on spray down to a carpet for coating where people walk so it would not wear as fast. You could put it into plastics for keyboards so the letters wouldn't wear off the same way.

Is how different is Nanoblocks to Nanotubes and and the utilization? Okay. So, I I do not know much about I haven't heard of Nanoblocks before. So I need to just see the structure and I could lay comments, but there there have been structures called diamond like carbons that are used for the high abrasive properties they're able to withstand wear and tear. They're also used inside automobile engines to an extent. So these kinds of structures do exist.

The major difference with nanotubes is that they're hollow structure, their ability to have one single tube, and the ability to produce those tubes at a size that's almost about 6 to 7 times smaller than blocks you're describing. Okay. But to have the tubular structure throughout and with all the carbon atoms being joined, you know, almost exactly the same way with each other. Say it mean the same orientation?

Yes. Okay. So one way we can imagine things is, so when we produce the single walled carbon nanotubes, we find that they exhibit both properties of conductors. So they are incredibly good conductors of electricity too. So we call them metallic carbon nanotubes. Now and we also have another form of carbon nanotubes that we call as semiconducting carbon nanotubes, mostly because they have a band gap. And what's interesting is, how these properties are produced.

Like, how do you produce a metallic nanotube, something so tiny, and how do you make it a 1000 times more connected than copper is? And the answer is that when, when when we spoke a little while earlier about Graphene and about folding Graphene sheets Yeah. Imagine you have a chicken mesh wire and imagine folding the chicken mesh wire. You have several different ways of folding that wire.

Now in a certain orientation, you will find that, if you were to just take one access or or draw a line on the surface of the chicken mesh wire to see where how it's folded, you would find that it's either the lines look like they are in a zigzag motion or they look like they're like seats of a sofa where you have a flat line and the and rough, and then it comes back up. So it's, like, looks like arms and stuff. So you call them armchairs and chiral tubes.

So each way of folding produces a different kind of a carbon nanotube, and each of the folding either leads to a metallic nanotube or a semiconductor nanotube. So you have, to have control over the property of the tube at such a small scale to be able to, like, get that into such a single individual property, and that has been a major major challenge.

Like, on how do we produce something so incredibly small to to precision when we want to correct, like, we want to ensure that the orientation also remains the same, ideally remain the same. And how do we ensure that it's produced, repeatedly too? It's it's one challenge to produce the material once, but how do we do it every single time and again and again? So this has been the biggest roadblock to nanotubes being adopted in applications and products.

So a lot of the researchers I spoke with always just tell me that, see, like, hey, like, nanotubes are great. Like, I've worked with them. I've made this application. It all worked great when I got this batch of nanotubes. The next batch I got, I just couldn't do anything with it. No matter what I did, it just wouldn't work, and it's because the composition changed.

You had, like, different amounts of of the carbon atoms of the kind that I needed were not there, so I this couldn't make the application out of it. So this was the big challenge that existed that prevented nanotech applications from coming to the market. So despite several research papers, despite several announcements saying that we have an incredible feature that's been found, without the kind of nanotubes required to leverage that feature, there's no point in getting your product to market.

This was the challenge. Okay. So, I know this is a little digression again. I've read about nanotechnology creation and terms such as top down, bottom up development. Not a full explanation because it's probably a whole course in this. How do you manufacture something at this scale? Sure. That's a great question. Like, yes. We we so, on a generic terms, we have 2 ways. 1 is the, as you said, the top down approach in which we take a piece of material.

Let's say Wait. Wait. So to be clear, please describe top down and bottom up. Sure. Yep. So in a top down approach, we we take a larger chunk of a material, and then we start removing matter from that until we are left with a very tiny piece that's in the nano regime. It's less than a 100 nanometers in size. So that's one way of fabricating.

For example, if we needed to produce graphene, the the way it was produced when the author first described it and won an Nobel Prize was that they used Scotch tape on a graphite block to pull out, sheets of, graphene. Like, they they just pull out with the scotch tape, and they're able to observe it under a microscope, and they realized that they were able to produce just a single sheet, of carbon atoms.

And so there, you took a large solid block, and from there, you directly went into producing a nano sized object. That's a top down approach. In a bottom up approach, what we try to do is to assemble atoms, one atom at a time, like, put them together in a way that we design the system to operate at. So you're effectively joining a bunch of atoms like legal blocks to build the final structure that you want.

So that's the bottom of approach, which is way more challenging because now you're looking at ripping out individual items and reassembling them in the structure that is needed to exhibit the properties that have already been calculated beforehand. Okay. And, I know you're not using scotch or are you using scotch tape? Because you're probably using a lot of it. When you say you're removing it, so is it a is it a highly energy intensive?

Is it a highly, is it a long term process to get to multiple, iterations of the same action over and over and over again to create enough to create the 300 ml. Okay. So the approach I take is actually a bottom up approach. So the top down approach is good for producing, like, single sheets of graphene. That's I see that as a limitation of graphene. So when people promise graphene to be useful in structural applications, so what they really mean is a single layer of graphene that's doing that.

And as you rightly pointed out, you, like, hid, hit the nail instantly. When you're trying to produce a single sheet by using these kinds of techniques, it's gonna take forever to produce anything meaningful that can be useful in a structure.

So a lot of times these days when people talk about Graphene being used, it's really something called a few layered graphene or a multilayered graphene, which, to a purist is, like, something really bad because it's not really the stuff that's exhibiting the properties here. It's like showing something and doing something else with graphene. Now with nanotubes, I can actually describe how we make the nanotubes, in my lab in in a startup, and, that could, like, lay more context about things.

So we, so the first step I did was to try to figure out how people have been trying to make Nanotubes before us, and what people have done is, like, one method that is often used is called a template process. You can imagine it to be like agriculture. So imagine planting seeds and then growing the plants and then pulling them up. Similarly, we plant seeds of catalyst particles, usually, like, a d block element like iron or cobalt and molybdenum too.

And these are first planted inside soil that's sim that's made of alumina wherein we make holes inside alumina by placing them inside an acid, structure because that's natural reaction.

By controlling time, we can control the size of the holes formed, and then you put the b block elements inside these holes, then pass the carbon containing gas such as methane or carbon monoxide, and the carbon atoms start decomposing from into these templates that are present in the holes and start growing up as tubes. And then in the next process, you take chop off all the tubes, and then you try you you can't really reuse those templates anymore because there's carbon present inside it.

So you have to just put in a new base and restart the whole process again. This is a batch process for making single walled nanotubes. It's also been used for making multi walled tubes, and the challenge was to produce the holds of exactly the same type again and again. That's been quite a challenge. Like, because the time dependent process, it's really difficult to produce the exact same holes, and you have impurities forming.

Even though their proportion is lesser, you still have impurities forming, and that's one headache. And the scalability of this, method is limited because you're always having to have the templates to be put inside to grow the tubes. So what I chose was, my cofounder for his PhD. He had worked on a very interesting process called the HIPCO process. HIPCO stands for high pressure carbon monoxide, and that's the process, methodology that we use in our lab.

So what HIPCO does is it use it carries out the entire reaction of producing a carbon atom cube in a gas phase. So we inject iron particles into reactor. These iron particles are in the form of a metal carbonate, and we give them a temperature ramp up. So it goes from room temperature to a 1,000 degrees in a couple of microseconds.

It's just so much energy dumped into these iron particles that they're ripped out, and they form single atoms of iron, we give them a small amount of time to re agglomerate. We want them to form a tiny cluster of a precisely defined size every single time. And we've been able to develop those systems to do that, and that's one of the innovations that Nopo has done. So we we produce a very small cluster that's it that's nanometer across.

And on this cluster, this happens at a temperature of a 1000 degrees, and we maintain extremely high gas pressures. We go up to a 100 atmospheres of pressure. That's equivalent to having a kilometer of water on top of our heads. That's the amount of pressure into the system. Under these conditions, the carbon atoms, they're highly reactive and we pass in carbon monoxide gas into the system. So boronoxide gets ripped out into single carbon atoms.

So c o becomes c and c o 2, and these carbon atoms start sitting on the iron particles and they start growing in a spiral manner. So it's like the the iron particle starts pulling off the carbon atoms, which start joining at the back end of the iron particle in a spiral fashion, and it starts building out the tubular structure. And we give enough time for the tubular structure to form, and that's annealed within the reactor.

So we we give another 1,000 degree temperature ramp up to just let the carbon atoms settle inside the structures to clean up all the gaps and stuff and then take it out of the reactor. So the beauty of the process is that it has to undergo several transformations when you have incredibly high temperatures, high pressures, operating in a continuous loop. And on a weekly basis, we currently send in about, a 1000000 liters of gas into the reactors for a million of them. A 1000000?

Yep. Yep. And we use a recycle mode because the yield that's produced like, even though I send in so much of gas, the amount of gas that's actually converted into nanotubes is incredibly small. So the yield is, like, 0.0001%, but it produces nanotubes of an incredibly high quality and of a very, very high consistency. We've been able to produce nanotubes of the exact same dimensions for about 5 years in a row, and nobody ever did that.

And last year, like, our nanotubes were ranked as the number one in quality on the planet. This was at a conference called the nanotube conference, and there was a crowning achievement for us that we we're able to produce a material that everyone thought is incredibly hard to produce repeatedly, and we've demonstrated that not just 1 or 2 fluke runs, but, like, with multiple years and or multiple reactors just to show that we understand how to do that and we can reproduce that again and again.

Cool. So yep. Okay. So Finally, the material's there. So are we is is there more to the what, or are we now to the how? So we're now to the how. Okay. So explain to me how. How is this gonna happen? Yep. So the as I was, saying, the first major challenge was about producing the carbon nanotubes themselves, and this is the challenge that we have now solved finally, that we have a way of producing nanotubes in a manner that's repeatable, that's, that could be cost effective.

Even now, we're able to like, we made sure that the the base raw material costs are incredibly low even though the tech costs were high, but it scales down rapidly, in cost. And the next thing was okay. So now you have an incredible material. Now how do we get it to people's hands? And what we found was, okay, the best way of doing that is to actually show people on how to use nanotubes. Now we know that I wanna build a spacecraft, but that spacecraft is not there today right now.

So but with such an incredible material, with such incredible properties, there are a lot of problems on earth that we can solve right now. And so we thought, okay. So now that there is a material, people have been talking about applications, and we have a way of realizing all of them. We started reaching out to people and telling them, like, hey. You know what? This material exists. And we can solve this problem for you, and this is how we can do that.

And we started that by demonstrating real world solutions to people. So one such solution was actually water filtration because in the Indian context, water has become a major problem, especially the state I come from, when, like, severe droughts followed by bad water management practices has degraded the environment drastically.

And while looking at that, we realized that our nanotubes are actually a magical solution even for for it's like any problem you showcase, nanotubes have a way of solving it in ways that's unimaginable for any other material. There were a few research articles that came out that suggested that nanotubes could actually be incredibly good water filters and that they could outperform reverse osmosis membranes by a factor of 100 to 1000.

And and the most important requirement to achieve this property was that the tubes had to have a very specific size. So So these were works that were published by both MIT and Lawrence Livermore National Lab from Berkeley. So they said that the size of about 0.8 nanometers was calculated to be the best for purifying water through membranes that actually function a 100 times better than even natural membranes.

So and it turns out that the tubes that we make, the mean diameter of them is 0.8 nanometers. So we thought, okay. So this seems straightforward. So the challenge here is people don't have this nano nanotubes in large quantities and we produce them in such large quantities. So let's make water filter and see how it works. And we've been able to prototype them and we've been able to demonstrate filters that are already performing at 10 times the performance of an arrow membrane.

Now this is something that's insanely good because there's RO membrane technology development took quite a few decades, and the increments in improvement have only been a few percentage. And then you have something here that's already on top of that. What's the what's the name of the membrane again? I didn't catch it. The reverse osmosis membrane. RO membrane. Osmosis. Okay. Yes. You said it very fast. Sure, sir. Oh, no problem. I'm trying to figure it out. Okay. Sure. Go ahead.

So now you have, so reverse osmosis membranes are quite popular in India right now because they're useful for removing salt, by using a high pressure instead of distillation. They're, like, much better than that. But, our membranes, reverse aspenous membranes are also waste a lot of water. Like, to purify every liter, we have to throw away 2 liters of water. And in a drought infected place, like, throwing so much water is not worthwhile at all. And the nanotube membrane solved that problem.

They and we did the costing for them and looked at, okay, how do we use that in a real world? Like, say, a company using our own membranes, how could they improve their profitability by using these? And we found that, actually, they would require only 1 tenth of the membranes they currently use. It could be enormously profitable for them to just have these nanotubes to be used in the way that we have showcased how to do that. So that was one problem that it solved.

And, we also received a request for, like, designing something that could be a super black coating for use on a future spacecraft from India, and we helped develop that. Like, the best thing was since we had our own nanotubes, it only took us 24 hours to showcase the first prototype of this black coating that could absorb a lot of light. And this, agency that was working on this, for a long time, they couldn't build that.

And we were able to do it, like, within 24 hours, we could show a demonstration, then we worked with them, and we finally space qualified the material along with their support. And later, there's another problem that popped up. It was, like, a work that we're doing, that we're doing as part of a program with Lockheed. We are trying to use the nanotubes, as a way of protecting aircraft against lightning.

And that's a very exciting application, and there again, the nanotubes and our ability to produce consistent nanotubes has played a major role. And so it's like we're able to find problems and we're able to say, okay. So there's this problem, no existing solution. Nanotubes can be the solution. This is how it can be used, and this is how it works, and here we are to help you solve that problem. So that's how we've been approaching it.

And so even though, like, we we haven't gotten to building our spacecraft yet, we realized that with the magical material we have created, we can solve so many problems on the ground, which otherwise do not have a solution. And at the same time, we're always conscious and cognizant that, okay, so the reason we exist is because we wanted to realize these space futures. And so we work with a lot of the academics who are, like, in turn working on space programs.

So we're trying to get these water filters to be tested on the mhmm. Two questions. One question, one comment, or 2 questions. The first one is, can you break down the organic carbon nanotube if you don't want it anymore? Is there a material? Is there a a process to take something that's created and destroy it and use it again? Or, what do you what is the waste product? Yep. So carbon nanotubes are incredibly easy to destroy.

All you have to do is, heat them with oxygen and it turns into carbon dioxide. And the carbon dioxide can be converted back into carbon monoxide, and then we can reuse that to produce the nanotubes again. So it's a recyclable it's a recyclable product? Yep. Okay. It is. And it it's, like life is all carbon, so it just comes back and goes back into being carbon. And I and I thought that was the case, and that's the way I've described this product to other people is that it's an organic.

It can be reutilized, restructured, reformed, and and I think I said it in the video, Macadonia, as I said, if you're on Mars, you can't go to the filter store down the street. There is none. Mhmm. So by having an organic product, you could reuse, recreate whenever is necessary because you're you're working with carbon, with carbon atoms. So, okay, that's the the first one.

When you are the Macadonia or other things that we've spoken about, when I share with you that the fact that project Moon Hut is about accelerating innovations that can turn around and be used back on earth. And when you hear that in the construct of the foundation, does it make a lot of sense to you that you are the epitome of a space person, a where where more moon, but you're a space person, and you desire to solve a challenge for space.

And as a result of that, thinking in paradigm shifting ways, understanding you have to worry about radiation or the conductivity, all of the factors we've spoken about, and that they're being used on earth. Does it really make sense when you hear the foundation's directives? Yep. It does. To me, it's like, okay. It's it's like a natural extension. It's like a natural description of what we're doing, not even an extension. Because we started with the main goal of, like, okay.

Get to Mars. And then now what we're doing is disrupting every sector. And when I watch any science fiction TV, like, stay expands and I look at their screens and everything, I'll be like, okay. So there's only one way of building those screens. So that's with carbon nanotubes, and this is how we do it. And then it's like, okay. Can we have a smaller program to build those things? And, yes, we can do that.

And the only critical thing that's not there for people to build it is nanotubes, and I have so much of it. So it's just super exciting because now we can redefine the future. We can build it the way we want it, and it's all derived from this one desire and that's driven by space. And so that's super exciting that we can change so many things on the on earth right now, and those changes again fund more progress towards getting us into space while making lives here so much more better.

It's I I feel honored or amazed that I, not that I discovered you as a person, but that we we ran into each other, and that I was in the right place at the right time to hear what you had to say. And the Project Moon Hut initiative, the foundation, and what we're working on, it was almost as if you landed in front of me, and if I didn't see it, I was an idiot. But I saw it, and it's been 4 years before brought you on to the program and done because we had to get to certain phases.

But your you exemplify the exact same construct that was created in 2014 when I sat with Bruce Pittman in Mhmm. Silicon Valley to describe how we can achieve space become part of this Mearth construct, moon and earth, and yet at the same time solve climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion, social displacement, political unrest, and exponential impact category that we have.

So it's it's phenomenal to hear the journey and and how you've been able to to take the, this nanotube technology. Any Thank you, David. Any I know you're not a a futurist, so I'm telling you to put on your your space cap. Mhmm. How do you see it panning out with nanotubes? Timeline, price, whatever. Sure. Definitely. So I see a very exciting future coming up, right right around the corner. So mainly, this is going to be a future that's driven by the availability of nanotubes.

So the problem of producing something of a very high consistency and quality has been solved. The scale up problem, we have solved that by by bringing onboard an expert, the guy who helps scale up the PlayStation processor. So he's, like, helping and guiding us towards, like, establishing a consistent operational process for producing more of these nanotubes for more applications. But the future I see is nanotubes redefining certain areas of our lives, starting with electronics.

So I already told about water, how we are redefining, how we filter water, and produce, like, higher quality water for more people, which otherwise isn't accessible, and also at a lower cost than it exists today. And electronics, I see these nanotubes enabling transparent electronics, transparent devices, and and transistors. I also see nanotubes as the material that could give a good fight towards rare earth materials.

Like, right now, rare earths are mined out of forest after destroying a lot of regions. But when you have the ability to create a material with the properties you want and especially the exotic properties that are otherwise inaccessible, and this is completely man made, then you don't need to destroy the forest to produce that.

And that's one huge thing that nanotubes will change, and nanotubes have been proposed by several researchers as a replacement for some of the exotic rare earths, which otherwise would destroy several rainforests and exotic habitats, funny ones. And the next thing is when it comes to the materials required for space, because that's always been an important thing for us. So we've figured out how to actually make nanotubes into a solid structure.

So that's a research program that's going on right now. So we found that we have materials called carbon carbon, which is nano carbon fibers embedded inside carbon structures, which exhibit incredibly high strengths. These structures have been known for a long time, but it also turns out that when you need to have a very high strength for these structures, people actually load them up with iron particles and then grow tubular structures inside them.

And when we analyze those images that people had produced, they look exactly like carbon nanotubes. So our hypothesis is that if we are able to embed nanotubes inside these structures, then we should be able to produce similar high strength structures. So that's another area of interest. Some people have tried that, but the methods for doing them are hard and they're getting there slowly. So if I get you right if I get you right, it's almost similar to with concrete adding fiberglass.

Yes. With the concrete being carbon and fiberglass being carbon. Right. So just to for for those who are listening in and breaking out of this for a moment, when you want to create cement, 1, improved tensile strength of cement or for colder weather, there's all different conditions. Sometimes fiberglass is put inside the cement mixture, and it gives it a a strengthening material that helps the concrete to be able to withstand other types of, extreme conditions.

So you're we're talking the same thing here too. Yep. And, so with one of the interactions I had with the British, Interplanetary Space Society, so what the guys had to say was, like, it's a great nanotubes individually are incredibly strong, but when we just put them together, they don't exhibit the same high strength because you're just, like, laying up a bunch of cubes and expecting them to join each other.

But we need to actively have interconnections, and that's when we'll have, like, this really strong material. And these carbon carbon structures are exactly that, like, interconnected carbon nanotubes forming one uniform long structure. So that has the incredibly high strength. So that's our next challenge on okay. So it was like, we didn't have nanotubes. Now we have the best nanotubes on the in the world, and now we're using them to create these structures.

And so that's the next exciting thing we are doing. And and over the next 3 to 4 years, we expect, like, to make a huge amount of progress on this and being able to finally showcase to the world, like, what have I been promising for the longest time that none of the deals are gonna be the building blocks. I'll be able to hold it up to the world. Well, I've been I've been a fan of yours from the beginning, so I I I don't know if that counts.

That and that and a few rupees, and you'll be able to buy something. But fantastic. I I I love the journey. I love what you've done, and this is very helpful to understanding even just the overall construct of new material sciences that are necessary for space exploration that are happening either by visibility, they there's not much visibility, there's not enough capital being input.

Yet, if we want to be an I'll talk moon and Earth, of continually flying back and forth from the moon, so that we have the space economy that is created, the the faster we can create raw new materials, the faster we can redesign, reconstruct, vehicles, vessels, rovers, whatever. The the cost will drop significantly, and we can achieve that space economy. And that will change or help to create the age of infinite. I don't know if I said that well, but hopefully, I did.

So I wanna thank you, Gadhar Gadhar, for taking the time and being on the program. I thank you very, very, very much. Thank you, David. It was really nice talking to you. I wanna take a thank all of you out there who are also listening, taking the time to spend the time to find out more about how we can accelerate the Earth and space based ecosystem with the age of infinite.

And I do hope you've learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others that you can take what you've learned and apply at some place, today or in the future. And, again, the Project Moon Hunt Foundation is we're looking to, help to establish that box of the roof and the door on the moon, the moon hot, and it's through the acceleration and development of that Earth and space based ecosystem, which is exactly what we talked about today.

And then using that paradigm shifting and those innovations and turn them back on earth just as we've heard today so that we can improve life on earth for all species. And so I is there one best way that individuals can connect with you if they wish to? Yes. So I I would, I'm accessible on my email or on LinkedIn. Email, would be [email protected]. So it's spelled gadhadarn0p0@ what was the no. Sorry. I'll say that again. It's g a d h a d a r Yep. At the rate n o p o dot I n. Okay.

And if you're looking to connect with me, it's david at projectmoonhut.org. You can connect with us at at project moon hut on Twitter or at goldsmith. LinkedIn and Facebook, we're on both of them. Thank you all for taking the time today to listen in. And with that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite podcast series.

We're not about to enter into what so called the 4th industrial revolution where we're going to be connected to devices and and that, I mean, if that's it, if that's our future, then we're not heading in the right direction. What we believe here is that if we do things right, if we are ahead of the curve, if we're thinking differently, we could enter in what into what's called the age of infinite, infinite possibilities, infinite resources.

And through our podcast, we wish to show you new ways of redefining a new future. Now our podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, h u t, through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem. Then to use those endeavors, that paradigm shift thinking, those innovations, and turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

Today, we're gonna be exploring an amazing topic. It is nanotubes, art of space as silicon is to electronics. And we have with us Gadhaddar Reddy. How are you, Gadhaddar? I've been good, David. How are you? I'm doing great. I love that you've been good. That's a good sign. Gadhaddar has a degree in electronics and masters in molecular sciences and nanotechnology. He's done the normal type amazing things, been to Singularity University. He's, gotten a scholar. He's a Schevening Scholar at Oxford.

But more importantly is a story that I'd like to share with you so that you get a framework for why he's on this program. I'm the head judge at the Global Technology Symposium in Palo Alto and San Francisco area, the the valley. And 1 year several years ago, there was a presentation that was offered by Ghadadar about the technology that could be used as a on on Mars to give clean, fresh water to people on Mars. And it and it was an amazing presentation in terms of where he was going.

He's probably going to go over many of that information the those that construct today. But one of the things I realized sitting in the audience is he has one major issue. With all the tech, everything he's built that he solved, he or we as humans are not on Mars. It doesn't have a market. He has a product without a market. And often, innovations that are created for space are not the winner.

Sometimes they somebody else's, air filtration system or somebody else's, component for a a rocket is used over yours. And that's the game. Yet in there, there are might be 8 other competitors. They don't just fold up, collapse, and disappear. What they do is they take their innovations and turn them back on earth and use them in different ways. I saw Gad Hadar's technology as a means to change how we live on earth. We didn't talk much about it.

And just last night, I was reading an article about a new motor company a car company, and several of the engineers are former space, engineers working on a car. And so we will find that if we accelerate the Earth and space based ecosystem, that many of the ideas will never make it into space. And I do hope that Godard's ideas make it into space and get where he wants to go. But on the flip side, these type of innovations change how we live on earth.

That said, I know that's longer than we normally do it on the program, but it was a it's apropos to what we're talking about when we talk about the foundation, Prajman Hutt Foundation, and he's a perfect guest. So, Godhard, do you have an outline for us? Yes. Indeed, David. Have an outline for today. How many points are we gonna be covering? So we're gonna have 3 main points, and I'm gonna answer 3 simple questions about why nanotubes are displaced as silicon is to electronics. Wait. Wait. Why?

Wait. Wait. The first one is what? Why nanotubes? Is why. Yep. The second is what. 3rd is how. So it's why is there anything after that? Why nanotubes are or just why? Yep. It's, it's it's why nanotubes, why are nanotubes required? Okay. And why are they the fundamental building blocks for a space pairing humanity? And what are carbon nanotubes? Okay. And how are we building nanotubes and creating this new future for ourselves?

Okay. I didn't think that the why, what, how was enough to work off an outline. So let's start with your first point, why are nanotubes required and teach me. And let's let's hear what, why nanotubes are to space the silicon is to electronics. Sure. So, I'll, I'll start with a brief context of for the question why, David, because that's been something that's been very close. It started off as a personal goal and something that set off as a journey to find out, like, the reality of the universe.

So that's how my journey started with getting into carbon nanotubes. And so it started with debates with my grandfather when I was a kid, and these debates centered about the question of why we exist. Like, what's why do humans exist? What's the meaning of life? And I was in my 3rd or 4th grade when these debates happened, and he used to tell me, an old Indian philosophy that said, okay. Everything in the world is just an illusion.

It's a Maya, and you can't really change anything because nothing is real in the first place. So you have to just accept things as they are and leave them. And I'd be like, okay. That doesn't sound like the kind of life I want to live. I wanna make things happen. And, you know, I wanna make things happen. I want to, like, touch things with my hands, and that's more exciting, and this is, like, so ridiculous.

And he'd give examples of saints who would question and who'd argue, and then he'd be like so there was he'd give an example of one saint that my family follows, and this guy had a disciple who used to be very argumentative. And his guru one day apparently touched him. He got electrified, and then then he's, like, he got enlightened. And I would sit there and ask him, like, no. Maybe he was just wearing silk robes, and he got charged up, and he just released a bunch of electrons.

And that's what happened there. So you're an engine you were an engineer from birth? Yeah. I I like to find an explanation of why it is like that and try to prove it myself. And if it is then it's, like, okay. It makes sense. If it if it can't prove it, then, okay, there's no point in believing that. It doesn't make any sense. So that that's why even now, like, when I talk to people and some people are, like, okay. We had this thing in ancient times. We were, like, so big and all that.

I'll be like, okay. Fine. Like, what are we doing? Did that lead to now? And it's like, no. It's like, okay. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't matter anymore. So that would be me. I'd like I'd just like to see things in a practical way and to understand them and be able to replicate that in a in an experiment so that I can actually feel that.

And, so this as this journey progressed and we were asking these questions, at the same time, I I was, like, trying to understand, like, how we humans exist. Like, are we connected to each other? If so, like, how is that happening? And I used to try like, once I ran out of asking questions to grandpa and I couldn't find proper answers, I turned towards books to read more to learn about, like, what people have been saying.

And one book that fascinated me a lot was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The book's interesting because it's just a collection of anecdotes of a bunch of people who made big changes to the world we live in. And the common thread, the message that I got from the book was that, that every human, like, if we set an end goal and if we follow through on the end goal and if we are, like, persistent about it, then we can make anything happen.

And at the same time, another philosophical understanding. So, like, a a lot of things I say are, like, kind of nonlinear in a sense that things happen at different time frames, but I'm, like, putting them all in as linear fashion. So what I, realized was, like, we're all, like, particles in a vessel, like, pollen grain that's having Brownian motion. And if we reach the end of the vessel, that's when we get the enlightenment.

We, like, become super calm and we can observe everything and we lost all the energy and stuff. But while we're in the middle of it, we just keep moving in random directions. So if you choose one direction, going that direction, we reach the end of the ball. We hit it, lose the energy, and we get to that perfect calm state. And And so that kinda became the philosophy of life. And I was like, okay.

So I need to be focusing on one goal, choose anything that's there in the world, pursue that completely, do not get deviated, and as we go keep going in that direction, we'll reach the end.

And the other philosophy that developed was that all of us humans are interconnected, and so if all of us are interconnected, then for me to realize something to get on this pathway, it has to be something that's a massive and audacious goal that's impossible to do as an intuition for which a lot of strangers have to come together.

So I thought, okay, if I'm gonna pursue such an audacious goal in life, then I'd be able to meet all these, insane people which can otherwise not happen unless we're all interconnected. And that, if that event happens, then that means that that philosophy of life is true, that everything in the universe is interconnected and there's nothing that's discreet and by itself. This is this was the basic philosophical underlining behind everything I've been trying to do in my life.

And the goal I set for myself on making this was that I wanted to be the first human on Mars. That's the goal I set for myself. And then it was, like, okay. So now you have an end goal, an end in sight, and now how do we work things backwards? So okay. So if you have to get to Mars, we need to have a lot of spacecraft. The spacecraft have to be regularly accessing, going up there, launching payloads, or building stuff.

And for that to happen, we need to have rockets that are not the rockets of today. We cannot have rockets that are multiple stages where you throw away half with SpaceX at first time, still that. Otherwise, you throw away the entire vehicle every time we launch payloads. But we need something that can be a single vehicle that can go up there and come back just like us driving a car or a truck with just fuel being reloaded every time.

And then, okay, to build such a ship, these are called as the single stage to orbit rockets. What's the challenge? What's what's preventing us from doing that? And that question brought it back to materials. It said, okay. We don't have a lightweight, strong enough material that could be used to build a rocket that could actually function like an automobile, where you just refuel it, it delivers payloads and comes back down to earth. And so this is how carbon nanotubes came into the picture.

I used to attend a lot of summer schools, and from the summer schools, I realized that every summer school in the 2,005 time frame, every Astronomy Magazine used to scream that, okay, carbon nanotubes are the future. They're the way for us to get to space. And then when I put everything together, I realized, okay, the way these are going to do that is by having a lightweight, extremely strong material that is, like, is perfectly designed, for space.

And so that's how the why of this journey started. So, a few questions very quickly. 1, and I don't normally ask this question, how old are you? Because I wanna get a timeline for my understanding of your educational positioning where we are in the world. So how old are you? I'm 33 now. Okay. So at 33, you live through the space shuttle. Mhmm. And before I get to next question, what was your thought of the space shuttle construct?

Okay. So space shuttle, the objective was great, but the execution was horrible because, the system ended up becoming so it it wanted to be everything I wanted a rocket to be, but it ended up being something that nobody wanted it to be.

It was mostly a lot of politics going in, decisions made that were not rational, made for reasons that had nothing to do with science or technology, and it just became ended up becoming something that that just led money and was also extremely difficult to handle and maintain.

So So you were you were happy of the when you heard about the fact that they were building it, but when you learn more about the individuals and the politics involved and then the actual final product, it was not it didn't fit the needs that you had, but it was in the right direction. Yeah. The philosophy was correct, but the execution was horribly out of place. Okay. So then, the next one was and it was earlier on. I'd like to keep on going because I just wanna ask.

Did your grandfather come from a, a faith based belief in the meaning of life is and were you or why you misexist, and did you subjugate yourself from that thinking? Or, I mean, I'm trying to get a sense of your grandfather's answer and what made you tick. What made that not work for you?

Okay. So he was an, he he, was a self professed atheist, and he used to follow, like, one particular guru, like, in India called it Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and his teaching so what this guru did was, like, a small anecdote just throws a lot of light about him. So he used to, he used to be a Hindu priest, at a temple, and he used to worship the goddess there. And one day, he got enlightened.

Like, he felt like the whole world is connected, and he got into that phase where, like, he could just sense that, okay, all of us are not discreet and stuff. And then he decided, okay, so I've gotten into this state from worshiping this goddess. Now would I get to that same state if I worship Jesus? And he took up Christianity, followed that, and then he got to the same state, and then he took up Islam.

He followed everything according to the scriptures, and then he got to the same state, and he just went by different religions and and the and the state was the same. And then he came up with this philosophy that, okay, so god is like an ocean and all the religions are just reverse joining the same ocean. So it doesn't matter which path you take, you're gonna end up in the same place at all times. So it used to be the philosophy, and he used to be a self read, guy.

Like, so he he used to, like, he he self taught himself. He used to learn about relativity and stuff like that. He picked up as a kid, like, by reading about people talking about things. So that's, how his philosophical bent had been. But, as you know, like, in India, like, it's like when you have the elders, the elders are like, okay. Whatever I say is, like, the right thing, and everything else is, like, false and all that, and I I just don't like that.

I I like to question things, to know them, feel them for myself, and only can accept anything. Okay. It was just that I when you were saying it, I felt like I brushed over something because you were sitting in a cultural position going back 30 years ago where it was more difficult than it is today to question, and you made that question that, something inside of you saw science and that made the jump. So it's just it's more of a personal thing that I wanted to know.

It helps me to understand how you had to make a a big jump. Did your and, would not don't wanna, spend too much time on this. Your father, your family, how did they feel when you went the science way? So, I, so I sometimes still have friction with my dad. My dad keeps telling me, like, okay. You need to sit in front of a god, worship, and everything will be fine. Like, all your narratives will come out really well if you just believe in god.

I'll be like, no. I just can't believe just because you're telling me a tomb unless I experience it. So it keeps happening, and then I think they've now kind of given up and said, okay. Let me do whatever he wants. Okay. Not one of the 21. I I I wanted to add some texture to my understanding of what was going on. Okay. So we've covered the why you got to this point. You saw the nanotubes. You how did you run into you were take doing courses. You were learning.

You were What made nanotubes stand out for you at this point? Sure. That's a great question, David. So, because of this interest in space, I was telling myself, okay, I need to get a marathon. So it was all and there had been one incident where I you I had attended a program in Southern India in a observatory called Vainu Bapu, which happens to be one of the largest vista optical observatories. And I got to see the Milky Way in all its glory, and I was just super fascinated. Why?

It was just so beautiful, and I I knew that there's nothing else that's an alternate for me. And I've been taking up more and more summer school. So at one point, I took up a class where I was in the 9th grade. Everyone in the program were in the 4 year bachelor degrees, and they were, like, the 2nd and third year of their bachelor degrees, and I was the youngest kid in the lot. And By a lot. Teaching about the point. Yeah. You were talking we're talking 17, 18, 19 year olds, and you are 14? 13?

Okay. Yep. So and I was enjoying myself because we were talking gravity. They were teaching they're teaching about why the sun exists, like, what's the chemistry behind the sun. And then we started talking about, like, the step equations to explain how long a photon takes. Like, the professor asked a question, like, okay. How long does a photon take to start from the sun's center to get to the earth? And I was like, okay. It's a general knowledge question. It just take minutes.

And he's like, no. Like, you need to do the math. And he's like, you need to calculate the density function and then look at the step function for random path moment. And it's a couple of 1000000 years for the photon to just get to the surface traveling that dense of a matter. And it was just fascinating. Wow. It takes millions of years, and you can actually calculate those millions of years. And then once it gets to the surface, it just really just zooms in at 8 minutes.

And that had a deep impact, and then quantum physics that was used for explaining all these, explaining why the stars exist, was also incredibly attractive for this reason. That you could use a theory of atoms to connect, and describe how a planet or a star is going to live through its life, and you can tell about the universe in, like, down to picoseconds and with very high when you can narrate that whole story.

And at the same time, while, as I was learning more about quantum physics and was also seeing things about carbon nanotubes, From a cursory glance, what I could gather was that, like, the carbon nanotubes are part of this field of technology called nanotechnology, and the core physics defining nanotechnology is quantum physics.

So here was a field of engineering, nanotech that would allow me to work with atoms, build things, and work with the exact same theories that are used for, you know, describing how a star works and why it exists in the 1st place. And that was just super fascinating. It's like, wow. Like, the best of both worlds. I get it to create stuff that would take me back to the stars, and I get to work and to play with the same physics that does both. And so it was like a no brainer for me. I'm laughing.

I'm trying to think of what I was doing when I was 14. So, that brought so the that's the the at that point, you probably did learn or were exposed to the strength, the weight, the or the structures built in nanotubes, or is that just the start right there you learned about it and said I wanna pursue this even further? Yep. It was the latter. It was more like, okay. So there is a material that everyone's talking about. Everyone stated it's a fascinating material that can get us to space.

And, I was I was just, like, stuck with that fascination. And over time, I understood that the and what I knew at that point was nanotubes are the strongest material that humans have ever known, and it's also formed, the reason for that strength happens to be the way carbon atoms are arranged. So from a nature perspective, we know that that's probably the strongest arrangement of carbon atoms that can exist, and that that was the only fact that I knew about them.

And I think the number and and tell me if I'm wrong. I think it's a nanotube, which is, and it's some unless you're thinking in these dimensions, it's very difficult. But a nanotube is a a tube the size of a nanometer or smaller than a, a 100 nanometers, something sort of the call qualifies. You can tell me if I'm wrong. But it's a 100 times stronger than a piece of steel. Something like that. Is that correct? Yep. Okay. That's correct. That's correct.

So if you so so to to think about it, you've got this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny tube that if you wanted to break it with your hands and was blown up to size, it it it's just massively strong. And do do they Exactly. Do they occur in nature naturally? Yep. There's actually, a very nice backstory to the nanotube discovery. I can tell you about this.

So the Yeah. I'm I'm before we get into how it can be used in the space, I think understanding nanotubes for me would help me to be able to dimensionalize what you're talking about. Sure. So nanotubes, they all belong to a family of materials called fullerenes. And fullerenes were discovered by professor Croto Smalley. Like, they won a Nobel Prize for that. My cofounder worked with, professor Smalley. Like, he was his PhD student.

Now so there there's an interesting story behind the discovery of fullerenes. Now fullerenes are exciting molecules that, with 68 atoms of carbon being one of the popular molecules, but they can have many other sized carbon atoms. Now, the first time they were observed was actually in starlight. Crota had been observing spectrum, from stars and then he saw a a weird spectra from a a a distant, starlight, which seemed to be a variety of carbon that hadn't been recognized.

Because until then, carbon knew carbon had only a few allotropes like coal, carbon black, and stuff, diamonds, and suddenly there was something new. And he could figure out how it could be or what structure it had. So one fine day in a conference, he happened to bump into Richard Smalley from Rice University, and doctor Smalley happened to have one of the world's most powerful lasers.

And as you know, like, with any man with a powerful weapon, all we can do is, like, fire it at everything and see what happens. And Smalley used to do exactly that. Okay. So he used to just so he used so I'm betting I'm betting there are women too who do it, but, yes, men like to shoot at things just to see what happens. Yes. Yeah. So since Smalley started doing that, and Kurto was like, okay. You know what? Why don't you also fire some some stuff at the carbon and see what happens?

Because we I'm looking at the starlight. It doesn't make any sense. And so he said, okay. Fine. And then they did that, and they were able to reproduce the same carbon by firing the lasers at a graphite piece. And that was the discovery of, carbon fillings, that there was a new form of carbon that could exist. And that set off this field that okay. So you have a deep connection to starlight, from the discovery. And one one time in college, I was, like, I was in a library.

I have this habit of just reading random books. And that particular day, I a book on geology happened to land in my lap, and I was just reading the geology book. And it turns out that one of the mass extinctions on earth that happened about a 150000000 years ago was due to an asteroid, that collided. That was a carbon containing asteroid, or a meteor, rock that hit us.

It it was cause of a massive extinction event, and the evidence for that extinction event is a thin layer of fullerenes all across the planet. Really? So we yep. So one so one of the ways we know that the mass extinction event happened is because we can find these and I'm going to ask you because I'm filarenes. Is it p h? Is it Yeah. O how do you spell it? It's f u l l e r e n e. E n e. Okay. Filarenes.

So because you because we can identify around the crater or in proximity, we know that the impact was so great that it caused these filerines to be created. Yep. And and there are, also this event happened about 250,000,000 years ago, so this is one of the evidence for that. So when when we talk about mass extinction, we always talk about the crater, but there's actually secondary there's actually secondary evidence that it happened because of the filerines. Yep. That's right.

And and this was a a very, like, this event, it wiped out 90% of marine life and 70% of land life on earth. It was a massive event. The 70% of, marine. I'm gonna take it percent of land? Sure. 90% of marine. I mean, I I said 90% of marine, 70% of land. Yeah. I'm That's on my on my notes. Sometimes I'm writing, talking, thinking. I'm gonna take a jump. Just maybe you can help me Mhmm. Is Graphene as compared to graphite.

The graphene product is a similar structure design with this I mean, you know, I'm assuming you know what graphene is. Yes. Yep. How different is that in the in the construct of graphite and filerines? Sure. So, graphite is made up of multiple sheets of carbon, and each of these individual sheets are referred to as Graphene. That that's that's the nomenclature for that. Oh, okay. Nanotubes yep.

With nanotubes, the way one one of the ways for imagining them is to imagine the single sheet of graphene and then folding it over itself to form a tube. So that single folded tube is called a single walled carbon nanotube. And Okay. When we roll it up, as a sheet, like, when we have multiple roles, we we call it it it has multiple roles. So it's called a multi walled carbon nanotube. So it's more like a Russian doll.

What do you what would be the purpose of doing a multi role versus a single role concerning how strong it is already? Sure. So this is where nanotubes get really interesting. Like, even though we call them nanotubes, there actually are several different molecules that are present inside them. The multi walled carbon nanotubes are actually relatively easier to produce. They're more, like, derivatives from carbon fiber as we make carbon fibers more and more finer.

Yeah. We end up with these multi walled nanotubes. Now these are what are predominantly used in the world today. So pre multi walled nanotubes have been used for quite some time on car bumpers to reinforce them, and the funny fact is that multi wall nanotubes have been in use since 1983, while the invention of carbon nanotubes is dated to 1991, to Japanese professor. So there was an American company called Hyperion Catalysis that still exists that made these materials as filler for car bumpers.

That's so almost every car bumper in the world has multi walled nanotubes from that, from that clock. Now the multi walled tubes, they mostly are, are used as a filler material. They are also supposed to be good at strength because if one tube breaks, you have another tube inside them. But they also suffer from problems that are okay. If you have multiple tubes, you don't really know which tube is actually strengthening a particular material.

And, also, it's only the outer tube that's participating in any kind of reinforcement. The inner tubes are just occupying volume. And another interesting difference that exists between these two kinds is these single walled tubes, they exhibit some incredibly interesting, optical and electrical properties that have no parallel with multi wall tubes.

You can actually get semiconducting properties from the single wall carbon nanotubes, and the single walls are also extremely difficult to manufacture. Thank you. So, I I cut you off and let I guess we're moving to number 2, building blocks for space faring humanity. Unless we're if there's anything else you wanted to add, but I think you covered, you said you were done with the nanotubes required, or do you have anything more for the why?

So, yeah, on the why, there were, like, there there was 2 additional points that I wanted to just, like, put in place. Okay. So one was how we know why, like, so this end goal of wanting to get to Mars, that was the driving force behind wanting to create nanotubes. And over time, it morphed into an even larger, desire to let anyone want to get to space in a much much safer way.

And this problem of wanting to get to space in a vehicle that's extremely safe for people to use, So to create that, we need a material that's extremely strong, a material that's light in weight, a material that can withstand a lot of radiation, and that can be a basic building block for these spacecraft. So we need something light, strong that can that resists a lot of heat, and the this was there was a search for this material.

And, also, for regular access to space, I was narrating about how we need to have vehicles that can get into orbit in a single deep and come back down without losing any mass, to burning up in atmosphere. And we also need the ability to be able to refuel, in space, like using a common liquid such as water, which is essential for everything, and convert and being able to have the ability to convert the water into hydrogen and oxygen.

So these are the two main things that we need to be able to have the kind of spacecraft that can enable regular access and enable us to explore beyond the planet. So, one is the the rocket that's a single stage to orbit vehicle and an ability to refuel. So these were two main requirements. Okay. So that would so get to our number 1. Is is there a second point then? You said the first point was this, getting to Mars you need it. What was your second point then? So the, okay.

The the second point was, it it was, the same one. It was just about getting to Mars and getting everyone to be able to get to Mars and the tools required and the systems required to be in place for achieving that. So the 2 things that Right now, when rockets are being manufactured, and I think there's about a 150 space launch companies today, how many of them are using the this technology, nanotube technology, to be able to build lightweight product? Okay. There's none right now.

Okay. Yep. And, I'll be getting to the challenges that existed and how we have solved them. And there's one company that's exploring their usage in California, again, to build, systems to get us to Mars, on using the carbon nanotubes on some of the composite structures. They just started with the engines, and the structural parts will be using the carb our carbon nanotubes. K. So I'm assuming later we'll go over the challenges. So Yeah. Are we ready for the next point? Yeah. Okay. Go ahead.

Sure. Yep. So this was regarding what the carbon nanotubes are, what what do they do, and how how are they doing that? So carbon nanotubes, as you rightly pointed out, are incredibly small cubes. They're about 200,000 times smaller than a hair strand, and, they exhibit an incredibly high strength. They're a 100 times stronger than steel. The single walled carbon nanotubes in particular are incredibly strong. They have a tensile strength that goes up to a 130 gigapascals. Like, what is it?

Gig giga what? A 130 what? Gigapascals. Okay. What is that? I know it's just a measure of strength, but I don't I've never heard that. So, the the GPA, just it's a the tensile strength, it's measured in gigapascals. I'm trying to get my I'm trying to get my mind around what that means. Because if I told you Okay. That it was 400,000 light bulbs, you'd say, I get it. 400,000 light bulbs, but I don't have a reference point to what this means.

Okay. So it's the amount of, stress that you need to apply. So okay. So a a good way of imagining this is the amount of force required to, say, rip out a nanotube, by itself is going to be about, when I say a 100 times higher. Now the strength that's required for, like, say, good steels is about 1 gigapascal. And So good steel is 1 good good steel, like metal steel is 1 gigapaxle. And you're saying this is Yeah. A 130 gigapaxles. Yes. Okay. I mean, how do you Yep.

Is there anything else on the planet that we would know that has that type of, tensile strength? So diamonds, diamond like fibers are supposed to have such strength. There being a material of science fiction, and graphene sheets the strength between individual carbon atoms, it exhibits similar strengths. So it's it's a property that comes with carbon atoms, and the carbon bonds.

Okay. So the if if for me to reference to think that we're talking about something as strong as a diamond that we're not possible, and we're talking graphene, so this this material is, in human terms, is more or less unbreakable. Yep. Okay. Yep. It's more in digital tubes. Yep. Okay. So and and in the carbon nanotubes, what I decided to pursue was, was the single walled carbon nanotubes.

1, because they were more difficult to make than anything, and the second being that, it's just a nice challenge when you're trying to make something that everyone says is incredibly difficult. And what was also exciting about single word annotates is that their properties are repeatable. So if I were to provide an annotate today and say, okay, this is having these properties, David, then tomorrow, if I give you the same nanotubes, they're gonna behave exactly the same way.

And that's a property that's extremely difficult to obtain with multi wall nanotubes. So that was what made me sway towards a single wall nanotubes. So what these also have in place is they're able to withstand temperatures. They can withstand about 3,500 degrees Celsius, in zones without oxygen. And by using special coatings, they can withstand the same temperatures in an oxygen atmosphere too.

So which means you can have spacecraft that can do reentries at very high temperatures without any problem. And the one other advantage that they have is an incredibly high thermal conductivity. So the thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes is about 2,000 watt per meter Kelvin. Copper is about 350 watt per meter Kelvin. So you get and you can also, like, when this is along one direction of the nanotubes, along the axis. But along the radius, the thermal conductivity is incredibly small.

It's just, it gets to as low as, like, 0.25 watt per meter Kelvin. So in one direction, you have an incredibly good insulator. In the other direction, you have an excellent conductor that's way better than copper in conducting heat, and it can withstand incredibly high temperatures without problems. And we also found some other really interesting properties with the nanotubes.

Now, researchers have been that have been using our material have been telling us that these are the ideal material for photonic circuits of all things, and they've also shown a lot of promise as semiconducting materials. They've been used in a few electronic devices too, and we also found that they exhibit properties of water transportation in which you can put molecules of water inside them and water just travels rapidly.

And this property is something that's also very interesting because you have a material that's a very good semiconductor that's also a water transporter that seems to have the ability to hold water inside it. Now when you combine these two properties, you're looking at a system that could potentially be used for breaking down water. Like, as you know, like, water has a low energy to break down. Like, the electron volts required is just about 1.2 to 1.4.

That's also happens to be the pan gap on most devices, but just because water is transparent, it get it does not get broken down by by normal light. But if you have a way to stop light in its path and you provide the band gap, you have an instantaneous decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. So then that's where this property comes back into play as, like, a potential long term solution for orbital space depots. And so these are some of it's just a sampling of properties.

So you have something that's incredibly strong, while being incredibly light, is radiation resistant, and carbon atoms have that one really good ability. That's why you use graphite in all nuclear reactors because of the ability to withstand so much radiation. They never don't Wait. Wait. Mhmm. Yeah. It's like it rolls off your tongue. So Mhmm. We are using graphite Mhmm. To shield nuclear reactors. Is that what you because you're just saying shielding How are we using it? It?

Okay. So they used to construct the chambers to withstand the high temperatures in the nuclear reactor to to absorb the heat. The shielding is never done by carbon. The shielding is done with lead Okay. For the nuclear reactors. So on the high temperature regions, for the heating and for the construction of the rest of the nuclear reactor, that's where carbon is used. You you had you had jumped from radiation resistant, and then you said, and that is why I think that's what you said.

And that is why they're used for nuclear reactors. But you are really talking about the ability to withstand high temperature. That's right. Able to withstand high temperatures and not degrading under radiation. So metals, when they are present in a high radiation environment, they become brittle, and graphite does not suffer such a problem. So carbon does not suffer such a problem, and that's the advantage. They do not become brittle under intense radiation.

So if we are in space and or when we are in space and we are looking for radiation shielding, we you you can use a sandwich of a the carbon, the the, graphite graphene graphite to create the shield, but then we would use an additional substance to be able to mitigate the radiation. Or Yep. Or is the radiation not high enough like a nuclear reactor where there's enough of a, shielding that comes from the actual product itself anyway?

So there are events in space that generate a lot of radiation and lot of charged energized particulates such as solar flares or, like, say, neutron star, like, anything, it's being towards us. So or the cosmic rays that are continuously bombarding. So there is presence of radiation, and there will be events that will generate a huge amount of radiation.

And on a long term duration, having a material that does not degrade with radiation is always, like, the best option that we can have because you can be sure that your vehicle can withstand any kind of reentry getting into another planet's atmosphere without, you know, becoming brittle and just, like, flicking off. So, I'm I'm I know this is basic basic. My I I went to calc 3. I did physics, but I didn't hit the levels you are at.

When a, radiation through, for example, the International space station or any vehicle is a particle that can go right through the wall, almost as if the wall is invisible, pass through your body Mhmm. And pass out the other side. You don't feel it. You don't see it. It just goes through you. Mhmm. When Mhmm. If we're using a substance such as a metal in space or some type of composite, does that and it becomes brittle as you're saying.

Does the carb does this product the way you're talking about structuring it, will it give any increase in radiation protection? I do understand that it gives the ability not to, degrade. But is there any bump? Is it a 1% bump, a 2% bump? Does it stop any of those or any type of radiation from entering into a vessel? Nope. It would not stop any of the radiation.

And in the context of the space station, it's actually protected by the Earth's magnetic field because it's still inside the low earth orbit. So that's an advantage that it's having. But once we leave, the low earth orbit and get out of there, that's where we face more problems with radiation, especially from the solar flares and stuff. But this this material is not going to protect us from the radiation.

We will need to have additional shieldings or even water large quantities of water could be used as as a way to slow down a lot of the high energy particulates. Like, a 2 meter layer of water is what could be the best protection against a high energy, emission. So I'm just playing with you here in terms of thinking, and I didn't realize it. I didn't realize that the International Space Station I don't use abbreviations because it's easier for people listening or hearing to know.

In the International Space Station, because we're in low earth orbit, what ends up happening is we are protected enough that humans are safe even though there is some shielding. But if we get beyond medium earth orbit or to high earth orbit, that that starts to change.

And in essence, if we could get, when we get rockets to, let's call it, high earth orbit or beyond, and we could then fill the rocket with water so we don't have to get it out of the gravity well, all that water, this shielding, we can then fill the rocket with a substance and then go on our merry way. Does that make sense? Yep. Yep. And if we had regular rockets that could keep launching, we could have, like, huge lead shieldings that could definitely definitely protect us. Okay. Okay. Got it.

Just playing a little bit in my own head. Alright. So we're you're talking about the the chambers, the high temperature, the the strength. Okay. So where do we go from here? Alright. So now so here, we have a material that's made of carbon that seems to exhibit or have properties that let it operate under all kinds of extreme conditions that one would expect to see if we are regularly accessing space returning from other planetary journeys.

So you have something that can withstand that can take off from the planet, allow us to build vehicles that are just one single vehicles that can take off from the ground, and then able to return to the atmosphere without burning up because of the ability to withstand high temperatures. And the other really nice thing is that even under high temperatures, these carbon structures, they do not lose their strength. They, in fact, retain and sometimes actually have a higher strength.

There's, like, a region where the carbon structures are much stronger at, like, 2,000 degrees than they are at room temperatures, and that's an insane ability to have that you have something that can be extremely strong at incredibly high temperatures. You have high thermal conductivity, so you can, like, move away heat. You have the ability to also use these materials to break down water to be able to use that as fuel. And so there's and all of these properties are present in just one material.

Like, if I had to, like, point out, like, which is the ideal space material, then here it is. Now so why does a material like this play an important role? Like, why why do we need a new material? So why why couldn't we progress further from existing ones? I feel like at this question. So what's interesting is, like, when we look at exploration, like, as we humans have gone out from the places where we have lived and gone out to explore newer places, the trigger for them has been multiple.

It's always either been the climate that pushed us outside. So there's a really nice book called, origins, how the earth has shaped life on earth that talks about these events. And say, when Columbus left, to across the Atlantic, it was because he had access to new technology, newer ships that could navigate the seas longer, and he could rely on them for his journeys.

And similarly, these carbon nanotubes now finally enable us to build ships that could potentially get out of the planet and come back in as a single vehicle instead of having multiple stages on top of them. And that is definitely going to be the trigger point that's gonna change how we evolve into the spacefaring species. Okay. Got it. New tech, lighter, multiple properties, and that's gonna be our building block. Why hasn't it? I mean, this is all sounds great.

And I know this challenges part, but I'm why hasn't it been used by others? Why isn't this more ubiquitously, this product out there being used on more space tech? Yep. That that's an excellent question, and and that's exactly the same question that set me off on the field for carbon nanotubes. So I I took up an engineering, degree in electronics because they said that's the closest that existed nanotech back then.

And then I decided to study nanotechnology with all of my independent studies being about carbon nanotubes. So I was sure that I wanted to have a degree that's a nanotech. And I used to ask I asked the exact same question. Okay. So if you have an incredible material, if it's supposed to be this future of space, then why doesn't it why isn't it there? Like, there's not a single product around me that's making use of carbon nanotubes, and this was, 16 years ago.

And so what what is missing and what can I do to make that happen? And the more I spoke to researchers, the more I spoke to end users, what I understood was that carbon nanotubes are incredible. But for that incredible properties to exist, we need an ability to produce these nanotubes repeatedly and to produce all of them of the exact same size. So what the challenge that is there here is, now each nanotube is about 200,000 times smaller than a hair strand.

And to put that in a different perspective, the diameter of each carbon nanotube is about 0.8 nanometers or about 8 atoms across. So I'm referring to single walled carbon nanotubes because those are the only nanotubes whose properties are repeatable and predictable.

So as we produce larger and larger tubes, their properties more start resembling carbon fibers to a larger extent than as a unique molecule that exhibits all of these unique properties of strength, radiation resistance, high temperature, conductivity, and electronic properties. So now the ones that are useful for actually being able to leverage these properties, they've been incredibly hard to produce, incredibly hard to, to use mostly because they were difficult to put inside solutions.

So when you have nanotubes, they're they can withstand these temperatures, so which means they must be extremely inert. So when you have a a very inert material, it's hard to work with that such an inert material. It's hard to put it inside a solution. It's hard to coat it on surfaces. It's hard to bond them together. And another challenge that existed was how do you interconnect nanotubes.

Like, when I produce a single nanotube, it and when you produce billions of tubes, they just look like a black fluffy powder. It it just looks like ash that's extremely black in color that's just waiting to fly off. Like, like, just one context is, like, a a one gram of carbon nanotubes that we make. They occupy a volume of about 300 milliliters. So and that's, like, that's a lot of volume and a fluffy powdery material.

So how do you convert that into a solid block that can actually be used for building stuff? So these were the challenges. First of which was, how do you produce a material of such a small dimension? How do you produce that repeatedly? And how do you use that to make something useful out of it? And so people have been producing milligrams of this stuff in laboratories for the longest of times. So this this is I'm gonna I'm gonna this I Sure.

I worked with the company Nanoblocks, and they used to create they created, a Russian technology. They took a carbon, molecule, put it into a chamber, exploded it twice, and the result was a, a material, a a nano block. Then what happened was they would the challenge was and the companies I was working with, they were having trouble getting it to a consistent 5 nanometers, and that was one of the challenge.

It'd be 30, it'd be 25. But this product, which sounds different, I'd like to know the differences, is this product was then put into a paint slurry, and it would make the paint have a resistance like, you could it would last longer and not scrape as much. You could put it on spray down to a carpet for coating where people walk so it would not wear as fast. You could put it into plastics for keyboards so the letters wouldn't wear off the same way.

Is how different is Nanoblocks to Nanotubes and and the utilization? Okay. So, I I do not know much about I haven't heard of Nanoblocks before. So I need to just see the structure and I could lay comments, but there there have been structures called diamond like carbons that are used for the high abrasive properties they're able to withstand wear and tear. They're also used inside automobile engines to an extent. So these kinds of structures do exist.

The major difference with nanotubes is that they're hollow structure, their ability to have one single tube, and the ability to produce those tubes at a size that's almost about 6 to 7 times smaller than blocks you're describing. Okay. But to have the tubular structure throughout and with all the carbon atoms being joined, you know, almost exactly the same way with each other. Say it mean the same orientation?

Yes. Okay. So one way we can imagine things is, so when we produce the single walled carbon nanotubes, we find that they exhibit both properties of conductors. So they are incredibly good conductors of electricity too. So we call them metallic carbon nanotubes. Now and we also have another form of carbon nanotubes that we call as semiconducting carbon nanotubes, mostly because they have a band gap. And what's interesting is, how these properties are produced.

Like, how do you produce a metallic nanotube, something so tiny, and how do you make it a 1000 times more connected than copper is? And the answer is that when, when when we spoke a little while earlier about Graphene and about folding Graphene sheets Yeah. Imagine you have a chicken mesh wire and imagine folding the chicken mesh wire. You have several different ways of folding that wire.

Now in a certain orientation, you will find that, if you were to just take one access or or draw a line on the surface of the chicken mesh wire to see where how it's folded, you would find that it's either the lines look like they are in a zigzag motion or they look like they're like seats of a sofa where you have a flat line and the and rough, and then it comes back up. So it's, like, looks like arms and stuff. So you call them armchairs and chiral tubes.

So each way of folding produces a different kind of a carbon nanotube, and each of the folding either leads to a metallic nanotube or a semiconductor nanotube. So you have, to have control over the property of the tube at such a small scale to be able to, like, get that into such a single individual property, and that has been a major major challenge.

Like, on how do we produce something so incredibly small to to precision when we want to correct, like, we want to ensure that the orientation also remains the same, ideally remain the same. And how do we ensure that it's produced, repeatedly too? It's it's one challenge to produce the material once, but how do we do it every single time and again and again? So this has been the biggest roadblock to nanotubes being adopted in applications and products.

So a lot of the researchers I spoke with always just tell me that, see, like, hey, like, nanotubes are great. Like, I've worked with them. I've made this application. It all worked great when I got this batch of nanotubes. The next batch I got, I just couldn't do anything with it. No matter what I did, it just wouldn't work, and it's because the composition changed.

You had, like, different amounts of of the carbon atoms of the kind that I needed were not there, so I this couldn't make the application out of it. So this was the big challenge that existed that prevented nanotech applications from coming to the market. So despite several research papers, despite several announcements saying that we have an incredible feature that's been found, without the kind of nanotubes required to leverage that feature, there's no point in getting your product to market.

This was the challenge. Okay. So, I know this is a little digression again. I've read about nanotechnology creation and terms such as top down, bottom up development. Not a full explanation because it's probably a whole course in this. How do you manufacture something at this scale? Sure. That's a great question. Like, yes. We we so, on a generic terms, we have 2 ways. 1 is the, as you said, the top down approach in which we take a piece of material.

Let's say Wait. Wait. So to be clear, please describe top down and bottom up. Sure. Yep. So in a top down approach, we we take a larger chunk of a material, and then we start removing matter from that until we are left with a very tiny piece that's in the nano regime. It's less than a 100 nanometers in size. So that's one way of fabricating.

For example, if we needed to produce graphene, the the way it was produced when the author first described it and won an Nobel Prize was that they used Scotch tape on a graphite block to pull out, sheets of, graphene. Like, they they just pull out with the scotch tape, and they're able to observe it under a microscope, and they realized that they were able to produce just a single sheet, of carbon atoms.

And so there, you took a large solid block, and from there, you directly went into producing a nano sized object. That's a top down approach. In a bottom up approach, what we try to do is to assemble atoms, one atom at a time, like, put them together in a way that we design the system to operate at. So you're effectively joining a bunch of atoms like legal blocks to build the final structure that you want.

So that's the bottom of approach, which is way more challenging because now you're looking at ripping out individual items and reassembling them in the structure that is needed to exhibit the properties that have already been calculated beforehand. Okay. And, I know you're not using scotch or are you using scotch tape? Because you're probably using a lot of it. When you say you're removing it, so is it a is it a highly energy intensive?

Is it a highly, is it a long term process to get to multiple, iterations of the same action over and over and over again to create enough to create the 300 ml. Okay. So the approach I take is actually a bottom up approach. So the top down approach is good for producing, like, single sheets of graphene. That's I see that as a limitation of graphene. So when people promise graphene to be useful in structural applications, so what they really mean is a single layer of graphene that's doing that.

And as you rightly pointed out, you, like, hid, hit the nail instantly. When you're trying to produce a single sheet by using these kinds of techniques, it's gonna take forever to produce anything meaningful that can be useful in a structure.

So a lot of times these days when people talk about Graphene being used, it's really something called a few layered graphene or a multilayered graphene, which, to a purist is, like, something really bad because it's not really the stuff that's exhibiting the properties here. It's like showing something and doing something else with graphene. Now with nanotubes, I can actually describe how we make the nanotubes, in my lab in in a startup, and, that could, like, lay more context about things.

So we, so the first step I did was to try to figure out how people have been trying to make Nanotubes before us, and what people have done is, like, one method that is often used is called a template process. You can imagine it to be like agriculture. So imagine planting seeds and then growing the plants and then pulling them up. Similarly, we plant seeds of catalyst particles, usually, like, a d block element like iron or cobalt and molybdenum too.

And these are first planted inside soil that's sim that's made of alumina wherein we make holes inside alumina by placing them inside an acid, structure because that's natural reaction.

By controlling time, we can control the size of the holes formed, and then you put the b block elements inside these holes, then pass the carbon containing gas such as methane or carbon monoxide, and the carbon atoms start decomposing from into these templates that are present in the holes and start growing up as tubes. And then in the next process, you take chop off all the tubes, and then you try you you can't really reuse those templates anymore because there's carbon present inside it.

So you have to just put in a new base and restart the whole process again. This is a batch process for making single walled nanotubes. It's also been used for making multi walled tubes, and the challenge was to produce the holds of exactly the same type again and again. That's been quite a challenge. Like, because the time dependent process, it's really difficult to produce the exact same holes, and you have impurities forming.

Even though their proportion is lesser, you still have impurities forming, and that's one headache. And the scalability of this, method is limited because you're always having to have the templates to be put inside to grow the tubes. So what I chose was, my cofounder for his PhD. He had worked on a very interesting process called the HIPCO process. HIPCO stands for high pressure carbon monoxide, and that's the process, methodology that we use in our lab.

So what HIPCO does is it use it carries out the entire reaction of producing a carbon atom cube in a gas phase. So we inject iron particles into reactor. These iron particles are in the form of a metal carbonate, and we give them a temperature ramp up. So it goes from room temperature to a 1,000 degrees in a couple of microseconds.

It's just so much energy dumped into these iron particles that they're ripped out, and they form single atoms of iron, we give them a small amount of time to re agglomerate. We want them to form a tiny cluster of a precisely defined size every single time. And we've been able to develop those systems to do that, and that's one of the innovations that Nopo has done. So we we produce a very small cluster that's it that's nanometer across.

And on this cluster, this happens at a temperature of a 1000 degrees, and we maintain extremely high gas pressures. We go up to a 100 atmospheres of pressure. That's equivalent to having a kilometer of water on top of our heads. That's the amount of pressure into the system. Under these conditions, the carbon atoms, they're highly reactive and we pass in carbon monoxide gas into the system. So boronoxide gets ripped out into single carbon atoms.

So c o becomes c and c o 2, and these carbon atoms start sitting on the iron particles and they start growing in a spiral manner. So it's like the the iron particle starts pulling off the carbon atoms, which start joining at the back end of the iron particle in a spiral fashion, and it starts building out the tubular structure. And we give enough time for the tubular structure to form, and that's annealed within the reactor.

So we we give another 1,000 degree temperature ramp up to just let the carbon atoms settle inside the structures to clean up all the gaps and stuff and then take it out of the reactor. So the beauty of the process is that it has to undergo several transformations when you have incredibly high temperatures, high pressures, operating in a continuous loop. And on a weekly basis, we currently send in about, a 1000000 liters of gas into the reactors for a million of them. A 1000000?

Yep. Yep. And we use a recycle mode because the yield that's produced like, even though I send in so much of gas, the amount of gas that's actually converted into nanotubes is incredibly small. So the yield is, like, 0.0001%, but it produces nanotubes of an incredibly high quality and of a very, very high consistency. We've been able to produce nanotubes of the exact same dimensions for about 5 years in a row, and nobody ever did that.

And last year, like, our nanotubes were ranked as the number one in quality on the planet. This was at a conference called the nanotube conference, and there was a crowning achievement for us that we we're able to produce a material that everyone thought is incredibly hard to produce repeatedly, and we've demonstrated that not just 1 or 2 fluke runs, but, like, with multiple years and or multiple reactors just to show that we understand how to do that and we can reproduce that again and again.

Cool. So yep. Okay. So Finally, the material's there. So are we is is there more to the what, or are we now to the how? So we're now to the how. Okay. So explain to me how. How is this gonna happen? Yep. So the as I was, saying, the first major challenge was about producing the carbon nanotubes themselves, and this is the challenge that we have now solved finally, that we have a way of producing nanotubes in a manner that's repeatable, that's, that could be cost effective.

Even now, we're able to like, we made sure that the the base raw material costs are incredibly low even though the tech costs were high, but it scales down rapidly, in cost. And the next thing was okay. So now you have an incredible material. Now how do we get it to people's hands? And what we found was, okay, the best way of doing that is to actually show people on how to use nanotubes. Now we know that I wanna build a spacecraft, but that spacecraft is not there today right now.

So but with such an incredible material, with such incredible properties, there are a lot of problems on earth that we can solve right now. And so we thought, okay. So now that there is a material, people have been talking about applications, and we have a way of realizing all of them. We started reaching out to people and telling them, like, hey. You know what? This material exists. And we can solve this problem for you, and this is how we can do that.

And we started that by demonstrating real world solutions to people. So one such solution was actually water filtration because in the Indian context, water has become a major problem, especially the state I come from, when, like, severe droughts followed by bad water management practices has degraded the environment drastically.

And while looking at that, we realized that our nanotubes are actually a magical solution even for for it's like any problem you showcase, nanotubes have a way of solving it in ways that's unimaginable for any other material. There were a few research articles that came out that suggested that nanotubes could actually be incredibly good water filters and that they could outperform reverse osmosis membranes by a factor of 100 to 1000.

And and the most important requirement to achieve this property was that the tubes had to have a very specific size. So So these were works that were published by both MIT and Lawrence Livermore National Lab from Berkeley. So they said that the size of about 0.8 nanometers was calculated to be the best for purifying water through membranes that actually function a 100 times better than even natural membranes.

So and it turns out that the tubes that we make, the mean diameter of them is 0.8 nanometers. So we thought, okay. So this seems straightforward. So the challenge here is people don't have this nano nanotubes in large quantities and we produce them in such large quantities. So let's make water filter and see how it works. And we've been able to prototype them and we've been able to demonstrate filters that are already performing at 10 times the performance of an arrow membrane.

Now this is something that's insanely good because there's RO membrane technology development took quite a few decades, and the increments in improvement have only been a few percentage. And then you have something here that's already on top of that. What's the what's the name of the membrane again? I didn't catch it. The reverse osmosis membrane. RO membrane. Osmosis. Okay. Yes. You said it very fast. Sure, sir. Oh, no problem. I'm trying to figure it out. Okay. Sure. Go ahead.

So now you have, so reverse osmosis membranes are quite popular in India right now because they're useful for removing salt, by using a high pressure instead of distillation. They're, like, much better than that. But, our membranes, reverse aspenous membranes are also waste a lot of water. Like, to purify every liter, we have to throw away 2 liters of water. And in a drought infected place, like, throwing so much water is not worthwhile at all. And the nanotube membrane solved that problem.

They and we did the costing for them and looked at, okay, how do we use that in a real world? Like, say, a company using our own membranes, how could they improve their profitability by using these? And we found that, actually, they would require only 1 tenth of the membranes they currently use. It could be enormously profitable for them to just have these nanotubes to be used in the way that we have showcased how to do that. So that was one problem that it solved.

And, we also received a request for, like, designing something that could be a super black coating for use on a future spacecraft from India, and we helped develop that. Like, the best thing was since we had our own nanotubes, it only took us 24 hours to showcase the first prototype of this black coating that could absorb a lot of light. And this, agency that was working on this, for a long time, they couldn't build that.

And we were able to do it, like, within 24 hours, we could show a demonstration, then we worked with them, and we finally space qualified the material along with their support. And later, there's another problem that popped up. It was, like, a work that we're doing, that we're doing as part of a program with Lockheed. We are trying to use the nanotubes, as a way of protecting aircraft against lightning.

And that's a very exciting application, and there again, the nanotubes and our ability to produce consistent nanotubes has played a major role. And so it's like we're able to find problems and we're able to say, okay. So there's this problem, no existing solution. Nanotubes can be the solution. This is how it can be used, and this is how it works, and here we are to help you solve that problem. So that's how we've been approaching it.

And so even though, like, we we haven't gotten to building our spacecraft yet, we realized that with the magical material we have created, we can solve so many problems on the ground, which otherwise do not have a solution. And at the same time, we're always conscious and cognizant that, okay, so the reason we exist is because we wanted to realize these space futures. And so we work with a lot of the academics who are, like, in turn working on space programs.

So we're trying to get these water filters to be tested on the mhmm. Two questions. One question, one comment, or 2 questions. The first one is, can you break down the organic carbon nanotube if you don't want it anymore? Is there a material? Is there a a process to take something that's created and destroy it and use it again? Or, what do you what is the waste product? Yep. So carbon nanotubes are incredibly easy to destroy.

All you have to do is, heat them with oxygen and it turns into carbon dioxide. And the carbon dioxide can be converted back into carbon monoxide, and then we can reuse that to produce the nanotubes again. So it's a recyclable it's a recyclable product? Yep. Okay. It is. And it it's, like life is all carbon, so it just comes back and goes back into being carbon. And I and I thought that was the case, and that's the way I've described this product to other people is that it's an organic.

It can be reutilized, restructured, reformed, and and I think I said it in the video, Macadonia, as I said, if you're on Mars, you can't go to the filter store down the street. There is none. Mhmm. So by having an organic product, you could reuse, recreate whenever is necessary because you're you're working with carbon, with carbon atoms. So, okay, that's the the first one.

When you are the Macadonia or other things that we've spoken about, when I share with you that the fact that project Moon Hut is about accelerating innovations that can turn around and be used back on earth. And when you hear that in the construct of the foundation, does it make a lot of sense to you that you are the epitome of a space person, a where where more moon, but you're a space person, and you desire to solve a challenge for space.

And as a result of that, thinking in paradigm shifting ways, understanding you have to worry about radiation or the conductivity, all of the factors we've spoken about, and that they're being used on earth. Does it really make sense when you hear the foundation's directives? Yep. It does. To me, it's like, okay. It's it's like a natural extension. It's like a natural description of what we're doing, not even an extension. Because we started with the main goal of, like, okay.

Get to Mars. And then now what we're doing is disrupting every sector. And when I watch any science fiction TV, like, stay expands and I look at their screens and everything, I'll be like, okay. So there's only one way of building those screens. So that's with carbon nanotubes, and this is how we do it. And then it's like, okay. Can we have a smaller program to build those things? And, yes, we can do that.

And the only critical thing that's not there for people to build it is nanotubes, and I have so much of it. So it's just super exciting because now we can redefine the future. We can build it the way we want it, and it's all derived from this one desire and that's driven by space. And so that's super exciting that we can change so many things on the on earth right now, and those changes again fund more progress towards getting us into space while making lives here so much more better.

It's I I feel honored or amazed that I, not that I discovered you as a person, but that we we ran into each other, and that I was in the right place at the right time to hear what you had to say. And the Project Moon Hut initiative, the foundation, and what we're working on, it was almost as if you landed in front of me, and if I didn't see it, I was an idiot. But I saw it, and it's been 4 years before brought you on to the program and done because we had to get to certain phases.

But your you exemplify the exact same construct that was created in 2014 when I sat with Bruce Pittman in Mhmm. Silicon Valley to describe how we can achieve space become part of this Mearth construct, moon and earth, and yet at the same time solve climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion, social displacement, political unrest, and exponential impact category that we have.

So it's it's phenomenal to hear the journey and and how you've been able to to take the, this nanotube technology. Any Thank you, David. Any I know you're not a a futurist, so I'm telling you to put on your your space cap. Mhmm. How do you see it panning out with nanotubes? Timeline, price, whatever. Sure. Definitely. So I see a very exciting future coming up, right right around the corner. So mainly, this is going to be a future that's driven by the availability of nanotubes.

So the problem of producing something of a very high consistency and quality has been solved. The scale up problem, we have solved that by by bringing onboard an expert, the guy who helps scale up the PlayStation processor. So he's, like, helping and guiding us towards, like, establishing a consistent operational process for producing more of these nanotubes for more applications. But the future I see is nanotubes redefining certain areas of our lives, starting with electronics.

So I already told about water, how we are redefining, how we filter water, and produce, like, higher quality water for more people, which otherwise isn't accessible, and also at a lower cost than it exists today. And electronics, I see these nanotubes enabling transparent electronics, transparent devices, and and transistors. I also see nanotubes as the material that could give a good fight towards rare earth materials.

Like, right now, rare earths are mined out of forest after destroying a lot of regions. But when you have the ability to create a material with the properties you want and especially the exotic properties that are otherwise inaccessible, and this is completely man made, then you don't need to destroy the forest to produce that.

And that's one huge thing that nanotubes will change, and nanotubes have been proposed by several researchers as a replacement for some of the exotic rare earths, which otherwise would destroy several rainforests and exotic habitats, funny ones. And the next thing is when it comes to the materials required for space, because that's always been an important thing for us. So we've figured out how to actually make nanotubes into a solid structure.

So that's a research program that's going on right now. So we found that we have materials called carbon carbon, which is nano carbon fibers embedded inside carbon structures, which exhibit incredibly high strengths. These structures have been known for a long time, but it also turns out that when you need to have a very high strength for these structures, people actually load them up with iron particles and then grow tubular structures inside them.

And when we analyze those images that people had produced, they look exactly like carbon nanotubes. So our hypothesis is that if we are able to embed nanotubes inside these structures, then we should be able to produce similar high strength structures. So that's another area of interest. Some people have tried that, but the methods for doing them are hard and they're getting there slowly. So if I get you right if I get you right, it's almost similar to with concrete adding fiberglass.

Yes. With the concrete being carbon and fiberglass being carbon. Right. So just to for for those who are listening in and breaking out of this for a moment, when you want to create cement, 1, improved tensile strength of cement or for colder weather, there's all different conditions. Sometimes fiberglass is put inside the cement mixture, and it gives it a a strengthening material that helps the concrete to be able to withstand other types of, extreme conditions.

So you're we're talking the same thing here too. Yep. And, so with one of the interactions I had with the British, Interplanetary Space Society, so what the guys had to say was, like, it's a great nanotubes individually are incredibly strong, but when we just put them together, they don't exhibit the same high strength because you're just, like, laying up a bunch of cubes and expecting them to join each other.

But we need to actively have interconnections, and that's when we'll have, like, this really strong material. And these carbon carbon structures are exactly that, like, interconnected carbon nanotubes forming one uniform long structure. So that has the incredibly high strength. So that's our next challenge on okay. So it was like, we didn't have nanotubes. Now we have the best nanotubes on the in the world, and now we're using them to create these structures.

And so that's the next exciting thing we are doing. And and over the next 3 to 4 years, we expect, like, to make a huge amount of progress on this and being able to finally showcase to the world, like, what have I been promising for the longest time that none of the deals are gonna be the building blocks. I'll be able to hold it up to the world. Well, I've been I've been a fan of yours from the beginning, so I I I don't know if that counts.

That and that and a few rupees, and you'll be able to buy something. But fantastic. I I I love the journey. I love what you've done, and this is very helpful to understanding even just the overall construct of new material sciences that are necessary for space exploration that are happening either by visibility, they there's not much visibility, there's not enough capital being input.

Yet, if we want to be an I'll talk moon and Earth, of continually flying back and forth from the moon, so that we have the space economy that is created, the the faster we can create raw new materials, the faster we can redesign, reconstruct, vehicles, vessels, rovers, whatever. The the cost will drop significantly, and we can achieve that space economy. And that will change or help to create the age of infinite. I don't know if I said that well, but hopefully, I did.

So I wanna thank you, Gadhar Gadhar, for taking the time and being on the program. I thank you very, very, very much. Thank you, David. It was really nice talking to you. I wanna take a thank all of you out there who are also listening, taking the time to spend the time to find out more about how we can accelerate the Earth and space based ecosystem with the age of infinite.

And I do hope you've learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others that you can take what you've learned and apply at some place, today or in the future. And, again, the Project Moon Hunt Foundation is we're looking to, help to establish that box of the roof and the door on the moon, the moon hot, and it's through the acceleration and development of that Earth and space based ecosystem, which is exactly what we talked about today.

And then using that paradigm shifting and those innovations and turn them back on earth just as we've heard today so that we can improve life on earth for all species. And so I is there one best way that individuals can connect with you if they wish to? Yes. So I I would, I'm accessible on my email or on LinkedIn. Email, would be [email protected]. So it's spelled gadhadarn0p0@ what was the no. Sorry. I'll say that again. It's g a d h a d a r Yep. At the rate n o p o dot I n. Okay.

And if you're looking to connect with me, it's david at projectmoonhut.org. You can connect with us at at project moon hut on Twitter or at goldsmith. LinkedIn and Facebook, we're on both of them. Thank you all for taking the time today to listen in. And with that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.