Former NASA Ames Employee Wants Energy to Bloom Throughout the World

K.R. Sridhar used to spend his time as a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., looking at the sky and dreaming of ways to sustain life on Mars. Now, CEO of Bloom Energy, Sridhar heads a company that just unveiled new technology that could make energy cleaner, cheaper, more reliable and accessible to everyone in the world.

The journey from NASA to Bloom Energy started with Sridhar and a small team of university researchers working to build a fuel cell powered module to go to Mars. When their NASA project ended, the team left academic life, opened a research and development office in NASA Research Park, and began working to commercialize the fuel cell technology with a new company, ION America, which became Bloom Energy.


"NASA is a tremendous environment for encouraging innovation - it's all about solving problems that are seemingly unsolvable. After realizing that we could make oxygen on Mars, making electrons on Earth seemed far less daunting. We're grateful to NASA for giving us a challenge with serendipitous impact for mankind," said Sridhar.

Invented over a century ago, fuel cells have been used in practically every NASA mission since the 1960s. However, they have not gained widespread acceptance because of their inherently high cost. Traditional fuel cell technology used precious metals but this technology uses sand. Sand is inexpensive, which Sridhar asserts makes the Bloom Energy technology affordable and easy to mass produce.

As more people consume more energy, Sridhar became aware that the world was heading in the wrong direction. “We would be handing our children and their children a broken planet," ventured Sridhar. “I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines and do nothing." Sridhar believed that conservation alone was not enough and that there was a “calling to our generation to find a different way to create energy."

"To make clean reliable energy affordable for everyone in the world," is the mission of Bloom Energy. "One in three humans lives without power," Sridhar asserted. "Energy demand exceeds supply. Global population is growing quickly." Keeping these three facts in mind, Sridhar is working to bring energy to parts of the world that don’t have power.

A Stellar, Metal-Free Way to Make Carbon Nanotubes

Nanotubes can grow on graphite (top) in an unruly mass (middle) according to "space's recipe." The overlapping segments on a single nanotube (bottom) are a telltale sign of the cup-stacked structure. (Image on bottom reproduced from Astrophysical Journal Letters.)

Space apparently has its own recipe for making carbon nanotubes, one of the most intriguing contributions of nanotechnology here on Earth, and metals are conspicuously missing from the list of ingredients.

The finding is the surprising by-product of lab experiments designed by Joseph Nuth at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. and his colleagues to address the astronomical question of how carbon gets recycled in the regions of space that spawn stars and planets. The work also could help researchers understand puzzling observations about some supernovas.

In a recent paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters, Nuth’s team describes the modest chemical reaction. Unlike current methods for producing carbon nanotubes—tiny yet strong structures with a range of applications in electronics and, ultimately, perhaps even medicine—the new approach does not need the aid of a metal catalyst. "Instead, nanotubes were produced when graphite dust particles were exposed to a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gases," explains Nuth.

"I am amazed at the implications of this paper, not only for astrophysics but also for materials science," says Dick Zare, the chair of the chemistry department at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. "Could Nature know a new chemistry for making carbon nanotubes that we have yet to discover?"

One indication of that possibility came in 2008, when the long, thin carbon structures known as graphite whiskers—essentially, bigger cousins of carbon nanotubes—were identified in three meteorites. That finding offered the tantalizing prospect that a haze of graphite whiskers in space could explain why some supernovas appear dimmer, and therefore farther away, than they should be, according to current models. Yet, "very little is known about graphite whisker formation, and so it is difficult to adequately interpret their discovery," says Marc Fries of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The Puffin: A Passion for Personal Flight

Meet the Puffin. It's an airplane concept conjured up by the mind of aerospace engineer Mark Moore. The unusual looking, vertical take-off and landing tailsitter is only an idea, but you'd never know that from the attention the Puffin has gotten on the Internet.

Moore came up with the design for the electric powered, 12-foot (3.7 m) long, 14.5-foot (4.4 m) wingspan personal air vehicle as part of the coursework for his doctoral degree. Then Langley's creativity and innovation and revolutionary technical challenges funds paid for much of the research. How the Puffin rocketed from esoteric erudition to web sensation is a classic case study in the power of the viral nature of the web.

"The animation of the Puffin on YouTube has gotten more 648,000 hits in a week," said Moore. "Until the concept was mentioned in the media Jan. 19, the video had only been clicked on a couple of thousand times since it was uploaded to the NASAPAV channel last November."

It all started with an email from a reporter who was pursuing a story on electric aircraft propulsion for "a couple of websites associated with space.com." As the former manager of the former Vehicle System program's Personal Air Vehicle sector. Moore is a nationally recognized expert on that and other small aircraft systems.

NASA, GM Take Giant Leap in Robotic Technology

Robonaut is evolving.

NASA and General Motors are working together to accelerate development of the next generation of robots and related technologies for use in the automotive and aerospace industries.

Engineers and scientists from NASA and GM worked together through a Space Act Agreement at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston to build a new humanoid robot capable of working side by side with people. Using leading edge control, sensor and vision technologies, future robots could assist astronauts during hazardous space missions and help GM build safer cars and plants.

The two organizations, with the help of engineers from Oceaneering Space Systems of Houston, developed and built the next iteration of Robonaut. Robonaut 2, or R2, is a faster, more dexterous and more technologically advanced robot. This new generation robot can use its hands to do work beyond the scope of prior humanoid machines. R2 can work safely alongside people, a necessity both on Earth and in space.

"This cutting-edge robotics technology holds great promise, not only for NASA, but also for the nation," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "I'm very excited about the new opportunities for human and robotic exploration these versatile robots provide across a wide range of applications."