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A podcast exploring the life arcs of smart, creative, driven people who helped Elon Musk and SpaceX revolutionize the space industry. How did they get there? What was it like? What world are they creating now?
Hi. I'm Jeff Ward, and this is the It's Not Rocket Science podcast where I chat with people who did their time at SpaceX and moved on to other interesting things. I imagine you've stood outside on a scorching day at a bar or an amusement park under one of those mist coolers that sprays water on you to cool you down. But I bet you never imagined building one twenty meters tall and using it to turn desert into farmland. But that's exactly the idea that occurred to my next guest. To get us started, why don't you say who you are and the cool thing about you?
Paul:Yeah. My name is Paul Mahacek. Currently, am the CEO and co founder of Atmos cooling. We take seawater or saline water, and we accelerate the evaporation. We we supercharge natural atmospheric cooling, and we're trying to re green coastal deserts.
Jeff:So does that mean you're someplace hot right now?
Paul:I am. I'm I'm calling from Abu Dhabi right now. I've been in The UAE off and on for about the past year and a half or so.
Jeff:Well, thanks for staying up late and joining me for what's easily my longest distance interview. The first thing we need to do is hear about your time at SpaceX, and I don't think you and I ever overlapped there. This is the first time I'm meeting you.
Paul:We we didn't actually overlap while I was an active employee, but we did actually overlap in another way because my first interfacing with SpaceX actually started back in 2008, not as an employee, but on the customer side. I was actually supporting ground ops for one of the rideshare payloads on Falcon one flight three. So I was actually on Bodulen for the launch of, flight three there. It was absolutely incredible to see what was going on there. We got to go out to Mec.
Paul:We got to go, you know, see the rocket ready before, integration. And that was for me when I when I really knew that SpaceX was kinda something different. It was young folks out there just like making stuff happen.
Jeff:What were you doing out there?
Paul:The graduate lab that I worked in, we were extreme environments. We called it surf, turf and above the earth. So part of that was supporting NASA missions, which was Nano Sail D, payload on Falcon one Flight three. But we also did SURF, so I did a lot of autonomous surface vessels, underwater ROVs, AUVs, that type of work, especially supporting Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. There was a follow on experiment from that that was starting up over in the Mediterranean at a laboratory in Villefranche Sur Mer.
Paul:And as I was starting up, I joined the project as a project engineer, got to spend three years over there, became a chief science diver in addition to doing engineering work.
Jeff:Were you a diver before you went to France?
Paul:I was. That was part of grad school that was helping to pay the rent for the money that I didn't actually spend in the dive shop itself to buy gear. That was kind of helping to pay rent during grad school was being a deckhand, a little bit of sales, jack of all trades in the dive shop. This has kind of been the cornerstone of my career is very much field engineering. Even at SpaceX, I spent maybe 50% of the time on the road, either Houston supporting comms interface with NASA for ISS qualification, out in Ohio, TVAC taking Dragon through there, or out of The Cape doing integration.
Jeff:And I could see from your pictures on social media that somewhere in there you spent time in Antarctica.
Paul:So this was a marine project in Antarctica, which is quite rare. I was supporting a project called ANDrill. This is an Antarctic drilling project, not an oil drilling, but a geological drilling where we're taking core samples, but we're doing it on the Ross Ice Shelf. And as that Ross Ice Shelf moves about one meter per day, it means that going through the ice shelf and then through about a kilometer of water and trying to pull sediment cores becomes very difficult as that drill string starts to bend.
Jeff:Right.
Paul:So this robot we we built was designed to go through one of the hot water drill holes, go down, disconnect the drill string. You could pull it back up and reconnect it at a more more, straight orientation and to keep drilling farther back into history. So, what we're trying to identify is what were those layers made up from the sediment coming out of the atmosphere when there was or was not ice sheet over the Ross Sea.
Jeff:And what was your role in that project?
Paul:Engineering side of the robot and then field support on the actual deployment. So it was four or five months before the deployment to build three of the ROVs and then three months down in the ice.
Jeff:How did that environment for the ROVs compare to what you ended up doing at SpaceX?
Paul:It's a little bit easier to do the underwater only because we can retrieve generally, but once it's kind of out of reach, you can't really repair. You gotta make sure you have the fault tolerance. So on the avionic side, making sure that those critical components will will get you back home. And that that's kind of been that that through line for for most of the stuff that I've done is extreme environments. So whether it's under the water or out in space, there's a lot of overlap.
Jeff:What was it that got you into that line of work originally? What was the education or the hobby that pointed you in the direction of robotics?
Paul:I think I was, I might've been born an engineer, but really it was my dad. He was an industrial arts teacher and was very, very active with four H program for the county. So having a lot of those aside from the livestock and the home economics, there's a lot of engineering things that are coming up now. So whether it was woodworking, electronics, small engines, all those things together really, you know, kind of shaped where I was gonna go with my life and helped me pick out engineering very early.
Jeff:What did you do in four H? What was your thing?
Paul:I did all those things that I called out everything from sewing, photography, we raised sheep, we had sugar beets or different crops that we kind of went through. I grew up on a small farm, but small engines and woodworking. And then as I got older, the things that four H really focuses on there is converting to leadership. Right. So as younger members, you learn the skills.
Paul:And then as the older members, convert that over to leadership and sharing that knowledge back and continuing to learn through that teaching cycle.
Jeff:So I'm sure most of us think of four h as being agricultural, but for you, it took you on a path to engineering, which took you to Kwajalein, to Antarctica, to Southern France. How did it eventually take you to SpaceX?
Paul:So I had been in France about three years and absolutely fantastic there. I kind of had the opportunity to stick around, but but unfortunately with US sized student loans, a lot of times foreign paychecks don't quite cover it. So I had to come back and find something new. And I had some folks that I knew that came out of the same graduate program that were there and said, Hey, you'd be a good fit. This is the kind of team we're hiring.
Paul:And went through the process. I looked at quite a few other companies, but that was absolutely the first choice because having seen them before, having that interface, I knew they were gonna do crazy big things.
Jeff:What was it like trying to get hired at SpaceX?
Paul:It was a very rigorous process. The only thing that's unique maybe about other ones is this is right about the time that Elon stopped doing personal interviews. So I still went through about five or six rounds. I think my first call was actually while I was still in France. I think I was applying over at Google X at the same time and I had that interview first.
Paul:And I'm actually glad that I did because the X project was extremely rigorous as well and kind of helped me get back in that interview mode. And so that kind of lined me up to be on interview point, if you will. Did a lot of phone calls, came in, did a presentation. I was able to actually present the work that I did in France, which was very, very avionics heavy, if you will. It was central nodes, it was lots of sensors.
Paul:There were RIOs, remote IO boxes, communication links, all these kinds of different protocols that we had set up. And I had done a lot of that by myself while I was there. We didn't have a lot when you're working in science research, you don't generally have a a big budget to have a big team, so you wear a lot of the hats.
Jeff:Given Paul's experience with everything from sheep farming to Antarctic ice core drilling, it's no surprise that at SpaceX, he got thrown in at the deep end.
Paul:So actually, started with the the cargo Dragon, started up, started to learn the project. And as soon as we got the the contract for Crew Dragon, I jumped over onto that and was slated for demo one. So Avionics Systems on demo one for Crew Dragon was was my baby.
Jeff:When I found out Paul was a responsible engineer for Dragon, I wanted to check-in on one of the more challenging projects of my tenure at SpaceX Avionics, the Dragon COTS UHF communications unit, affectionately or not known as Cuckoo. Were you a Cuckoo user?
Paul:So Cuckoo was the version that was over on Cargo on Dragon One. And we did have a little bit of time where I had to interface with that. And I did do RF sims and trials and qualifications out in Houston for the new one. And I had a little bit of maintenance we did on the old one while we were out there at the Houston site. Stories I heard from folks that were much more involved were not always pleasant, think, of the the upkeep and and some of that.
Jeff:It was a learning experience. Yeah. I think that's the way I
Paul:would put it.
Jeff:Technically, Cuckoo was just a control panel, but it was the first human rated hardware we'd built at SpaceX. It rode up on the space shuttle and lived on the International Space Station. During the first on orbit checkouts, it didn't perform correctly, and eventually, a frustrated astronaut just pulled the power plug and plugged it back in to make the thing work. Certainly, that was one of my most exciting moments at SpaceX. What was your quintessential SpaceX moment that encapsulated SpaceX for you?
Paul:The day we landed f nine, it was palpable. The walls were vibrating inside the building at Hawthorne. You've seen the reels of it crashing, crashing, crashing over again. I don't know if anybody expected it to happen that day, but it was that first attempt back on land. And to see it standing up there and to know what we were gonna do to understand how much bigger it was gonna get was pretty crazy.
Paul:But for my own project, I think the day we got demo one up and to see people go back into space from American soil after so long, That was the one I was maybe the most personally proud of.
Jeff:Where were you during the launch of Demo one?
Paul:I was out of The Cape for that one. So I was out there for that. It was right up until the last we were, we had issue tickets that we were closing out, you know, I think maybe even an hour before launch, we're just wrapping everything up, you know, every single, t to dot and I to cross that we could. I was also really lucky my dad was able to to join me out there, so I got him out on the causeway to watch. And it was the first time he'd been up close to see a rocket launch, and, that's a pretty special moment for me.
Jeff:Where were you for the first crude launch? I know I was sitting here during COVID lockdown with tears streaming down my face.
Paul:I think that was actually right after I had left the company. I know where I was. I was in Redwood City and I was a video call with about 20 or 30 other former SpaceX folks. We did a group chat and watched that one go. That's exactly where I was.
Paul:But I'll be honest at this point, it's it's it's become to the point which we all hope that space is getting boring.
Jeff:I guess that 400 plus Falcon nine launches and landings is getting a bit boring, but I would say that Starship flight four was about as exciting as it gets. Elon seems set to keep space interesting. Did you interact with Elon much when you were at SpaceX?
Paul:He didn't know my name, but, you know, I knew who he was if that no. I didn't say
Jeff:much. Yeah.
Paul:Sure. We we had a couple. I'm not sure which ones I can I can say or not? You can figure out what you wanna edit out. I had a couple couple couple really interesting direct interactions with them because of part of avionics and owning the system side.
Paul:We also had checkouts on the aesthetic as well. So the interior lights was a big one where he wanted to come in and see what was going on there. There was a point at which I was trying to get him to do a quick sign off on the displays and the spotlights and all the ring lights. And it was just he and I there in the buck was this demonstrator capsule that we built together for all the interior and the aesthetic. Getting into those seats is not easy.
Paul:You've gotta do this pushup, kinda like you're getting out of a pool, you flip around, but then you need to tuck your head in a weird way to not whack in the back of it into the display. And I kind of give him a little heads up on that, and he looks at me like the, I know what I'm doing. This is my spaceship kind of thing. He, of course, proceeded to to whack his head into the back of that. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm the only one here.
Paul:Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay. He was perfectly fine, of course.
Jeff:So if it wasn't because you knocked out Ironman, how did he decide to move on from SpaceX and what you were gonna do next?
Paul:So agriculture had always kind of been a been a big deal for me. It was actually, Doug Bernhauer had started a project on the roof looking at recreating Martian atmosphere to do greenhouses on Mars.
Jeff:When I hear Mars greenhouse, I always think of 2,002 and the first time I ever heard of or spoke to Elon Musk. He wanted my company in England to build a satellite that would take a greenhouse to Mars. Frustration over finding a launch for that meme project led to the founding of SpaceX. It wasn't a
Paul:project that really got a a lot of support or funding at SpaceX, but it kinda sprung that back in my mind. And at that point, I was actually presented with another opportunity to join a company called One Point One, which is a brand new startup doing indoor farming. This was a fully automated system seed through harvest and I had made a transition over to that, had a really amazing time there. We brought two production facilities online, had about 40 folks, in engineering they got to work with there.
Jeff:What was the read across between your avionics work and that?
Paul:Very, very similar. In the same way that extreme environments, you need lots and lots of instrumentation. These indoor farms, you needed lots of controls, instrumentation. We had a lot of the same components. We had valve boards, we had, high speed instrumentation for sensing, we had, you know, automated system, we had, error detection loops, everything that was kind of going on, not nearly the same caliber as what you'd need for putting people into space, but you still need that high reliability if you wanna try to eliminate labor cost.
Jeff:Here in Denver, when you say indoor farming, we immediately think of cannabis. What were you guys growing?
Paul:Yeah, that's a really good question about indoor farming. I think there's still a lot of questions about what it's viable for. And we know that saffron or cannabis or microgreens or biopharmaceuticals, these are the kinds of things that indoor farming is still really, really good for. And we were a bit agnostic to that. We did have another brand that we spun off called Willow doing very high end produce, but the intent is still the technology sales and the farm sales for people to then grow whatever you'd like to grow.
Paul:So if you'd like to grow cannabis with it, that is something that that technology can do.
Jeff:The indoor farming is a critical technology for Mars as well. So it's probably something that gathers a lot of interest from the Mars colonization community and any kind of deep space exploration community.
Paul:Absolutely. And you have to have, you know, the absolute highest performance. That was something we talked about. Our technology was a aeroponics based one. So this is where we're actually spraying a mist of water with that nutrient built into it.
Paul:And it's the most water efficient way to grow those plants. You get the most oxygen to the roots. Photosynthesis is completely unlimited there. You can really crank those plants up to 11. And if we're gonna grow things in space, doesn't rely on gravity for that.
Paul:You can recreate whatever environments you need. I think this is one of the best ways to do it, but it's also the most finicky. It's a bit like a Ferrari. You're gonna have the highest performance, but you're also gonna have a lot of downtime in the shop. So it's critical that you've really tuned that system for fly through capabilities.
Paul:If you need to swap over to pumps, detecting clogs and systems, those are the same kind of errors that you can see and you need to make sure that you can quickly recover.
Jeff:How does the indoor farming relate to the new company you founded?
Paul:The work that we're doing now is a direct response to indoor farming. There's still this goal for indoor farming to, have a much wider array of crops that you can support, but it's probably never going to be the protein and carbohydrates that we need to feed our planet. So when we talk about those nutrients, you still are gonna need outdoor environments. You need potatoes and onions and corn and wheat. Those are all the kinds of things that we're trying to hit at Atmos cooling.
Paul:So what we did is we looked at indoor farming and the biggest benefits that you have in indoor farming is not the LEDs because the sun does a much better job of providing photons. It's not the nutrients because we know that we can get precision ag and deliver nutrients. The biggest benefit of indoor farming really is that controlled environment agriculture, CEA, as it's referred to. And that's what allows those plants to go through photosynthesis at that optimal rate.
Jeff:Because it's not rocket science, I had to go look up VPD or vapor pressure deficit. In summary, it's the difference between the amount of moisture in the air and the maximum amount of moisture that the air can hold at that temperature. VPD is critical for plant growth. Plants in dry air transpire too fast and plants in wet air transpire too slowly. There's an optimum VPD that promotes optimum yield.
Jeff:Back to Paul.
Paul:So because the the VPD, that that combination of temperature and humidity, is not ideal range, Those plants will bring water up. They will sweat it out through transpiration, bringing nutrients up, and it comes out through their stoma. In indoor farming, generally, if you don't have enough dehumidification, your VPD is too low. There's too much humidity in the air Those plants aren't going through transpiration. In outdoor farming, in really productive regions, the Amazon Rainforest, you're going have this medium range where you've got a lot of humidity in there, you've got good heat.
Paul:So those plants are still going to go through that process. In semi arid, arid, hyper arid regions, the vapor pressure deficit is too high. The plants are going through that transpiration so fast they say, Wait, stop. I need to hold on some of this water. I'm going to close-up those stoma, and it actually stunts their growth.
Paul:So rather than being able to take advantage of that heat, the photosynthetically active radiation that's coming down through photons, they basically stop their growth. So in those regions, we start from there where it's always too dry, too high of a VPD, and if you just need to add water, there's not enough fresh water, so we do this with seawater. We can also use the saline brine coming from desalinization, and we accelerate that evaporation into the air at large scale. So the smallest projects we'll do is maybe 10 hectares, but we wanna scale up big to 10,000 hectares to much larger scale projects where we're creating these cooled and humidified microclimates that are really ideal for whatever crops you wanna grow.
Jeff:So if I replay what you said to make sure that I understood it, the process of growth on these plants is highly dependent on temperature and humidity as well as nutrients.
Paul:Absolutely.
Jeff:And what you guys are doing is you guys are modifying the humidity to match the temperature but you also simultaneously depress the temperature a bit because that goes together with the evaporation.
Paul:Not exactly, so it's not matching the humidity to the temperature but it's actually, it's actively decreasing the temperature because this is evaporative cooling. So this is the latent heat of evaporation where for every gram of water you evaporate into a cubic meter of air, you'll decrease that temperature by about two and a half degrees Celsius. So this is the same thing sitting out on a patio bar during the summer and they turn those misters on and everybody feels a little bit cooler. So it's that same exact process, but that's a freshwater process and we have a seawater based process. So it's not fine mist, but much larger droplets.
Paul:So we aren't, crystallizing, and and having the the salts precipitate out of solution. We keep those in solution, but evaporate off about 30 to 50% of every drop of water.
Jeff:And what happens to the residual water that has the salt in it?
Paul:It's all in an upwind area. So we look at the past thirty to forty years of weather data, and that's how we identify how to build the system, where it needs to get installed. And then it's this, you know, kind of keep out zone where those droplets will fall down into a brine recovery. We recirculate that until it reaches a maximum salinity. And then we can take that brine off to some of our brine valorization partners.
Paul:It's folks that are pulling magnesium out, pulling out potassium, or using those salts in other processes.
Jeff:It sounds like harnessing some basic physics to really benefit huge areas of potentially arable land.
Paul:That's what we've been trying to pitch. This really is basic physics. It's a little bit high-tech on the instrumentation side. For the algorithm, obviously we put a lot of work into that. But when it comes down to it, this is something that's very scalable.
Paul:The vast majority of the hardware is pumps and pylons, and no matter what region we go into, those can look very different. Here in The UAE, we use stage truss. So these are aluminum, structures for the towers and they're 20 meters tall when we install them. But in other locations in Western Or Southern Australia, may be telephone poles. In Northern Mexico, it may be antenna towers.
Paul:So it's kind of whatever that local region works in their supply chain.
Jeff:And what scale are you guys at right now?
Paul:This one is 20 meters tall and about 35 meters wide, which is about 10 times too narrow for really what our minimum viable is. So we need to be at that 300 to 500 meters is kind of that minimum viable for a for a commercial project.
Jeff:How did you raise money for the pilot projects?
Paul:We incubated in Marble is a Deep Tech Climate studio based out of Paris. We did a pre seed and a pre seed extension back in the fall of twenty twenty three. We did a paid pilot with a customer in Morocco last year. We have our second field site coming online now, but it's very much a first of a kind, a folk project as we talk about in climate. Generally much harder to get traction.
Paul:You really have to prove out in the field to get customers lined up. And VC, they have a hard time sometimes getting behind these types of projects. We broke ground on our second field site last August and we've been operating it for a few months now. So crank it along, yeah.
Jeff:How did your project end up in The UAE?
Paul:We're very international. My co founder is from France. He is the one that started the technology. And he actually had a really fantastic connection to Abu Dhabi investment office. And that gentleman Herve Bonton, he was very adamant that Abu Dhabi is the right place for us to be because all three markets exist here.
Paul:The financing, the drive, the desire for food security are all very important here. This is the right place for us to start. And I do agree. It's been very difficult though at the same time, because trying to start a new company, moving into a new country where customs are different, where the way business is done is different, the way technical things get done is very different. There's not a similar culture of having a Home Depot around.
Paul:At previous companies and even at SpaceX, there were been cases where I know in the early days, we're gonna go over to the Lowe's, to the Home Depot, get some stuff. But those are the kind of things that make startups move fast. So we've kind of adapted, we've learned how to navigate those supply chains. We had some really great help from local entities here. The Climate VC Network is very strong, but not necessarily huge.
Jeff:It does sound like you're making enough progress to make you feel good about your transition from space to the climate sector.
Paul:I was very glad that I got to contribute to the legacy that is space, but I really see climate is the best thing that we can hand down to fit future generations as a more stable climate, ensuring that the opportunities that I had to, you know, growing up in a with clean air and fresh water, that as many people in the future have that same opportunity. You know, climate is very hot right now if we look at things that are getting backed. But a lot of people focusing on mitigation, where you're actively pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and then sequestering it durably. We consider ourselves a little bit more on the adaptation side. So we know that we missed 1.5 degrees C.
Paul:We've got to come up with new ways to grow our crops, to create energy and to live in our cities. Those are the three markets. We've really only talked about agriculture so far, but we do have two other markets that we go after. One being urban cooling, where we reduce the energy needed to operate air conditioners. And then the other one is for industrial to utility scale solar farms.
Paul:We reduce the temperature of those solar panels because they have a negative thermal coefficient.
Jeff:I do look forward to seeing an agricultural scale climate modification project. Do these kind of tech projects give you confidence that we're gonna be able to move quickly enough to avoid the worst consequences of climate change?
Paul:I think that's a fantastic question. I don't know that I have the answer to can we react fast enough? Because we should have reacted decades ago. I think the aspects that I'm hopeful about is seeing young people now coming out of college, the vast majority are choosing climate as where they want to work. And I think the important thing to remember if climate is where you want to be working, don't have to be directly working on climate because there's lots of secondary things that need to be developed in order for this to happen.
Paul:Climate companies need marketing, they need finance, they need all these other elements. So there are very, very easy ways for no matter what industry you're in to work on climate and to have that be a part of what your career path is.
Jeff:And your part of your hopefulness would be based on the fact that a lot of people are choosing to get into that.
Paul:Absolutely, yeah. I think, I don't know if there's any one technology that we can point at, but that's also the really nice thing that I've seen from working in climate. It's not cutthroat in the same way. Are kind of trying to compete for the same money in some cases, whether you're selling carbon credits or trying to get money from a VC that focuses on climate. But at the end of the day, the reason that we're doing this is to make the earth a better place.
Paul:I think if the pure rationale was to go make money, you'd probably do something else. So this is let's make some money, and we need to do that in order for this to scale up and be sustainable financially. But really, let's help each other out as much as we can. So I think that's one of the the other things that that brings a lot of hope, very positive, communities.
Jeff:So maybe we're past the peak of climate denial?
Paul:I I don't know many people that I encounter on a regular basis that that haven't come to realize that things are happening. People can be very strong willed at the same point. So, you know, decades from now, maybe there's still people that are sitting there with their eyes covered and their ears closed. But I think the vast majority of people in government, people in technology, people that can make these impacts recognize that there are things that we need to do. Every country needs to make the best decisions for their people to understand what needs to happen.
Paul:So food security is really big. And it may mean that people need to use resources that they have in order to ensure that first. And then we can talk about the global things to come after that.
Jeff:Paul, I know you got a company to run, and I don't wanna take up any more of your time. I appreciate you telling us your story and giving us some perspective on the climate technology sector. But before we finish, I wanna ask one last question about SpaceX. One of the premises of this podcast is that SpaceX is a golden ticket for its alumni. And, originally, I took that literally.
Jeff:I assumed that what people got out of SpaceX was the financial means to become entrepreneurs or do whatever else it was they wanted to do. Was that the case for you?
Paul:It's definitely not that because I have cashed in very few shares. I'm still holding out for that one and hoping we can go to the moon with this. It's confidence and experience. When you do something this crazy, when you put people back into space, you realize that most other problems aren't that challenging and you can figure it out how to make that happen. I'll say one of the other things that I honestly really struggled with, especially at SpaceX, I know it happens to a lot of folks is the imposter syndrome, thinking that you're not fit to be, you're not worthy, you're not skilled enough to be in this role.
Paul:And so you work harder and harder in order to make that happen. It happens to a lot of folks, especially in engineering, a lot of young folks who don't have the experience and think that they're they're, you know, not gonna make it or don't understand why they've been given this job. That was something I kinda bring into the the company following on at 1.1 was mentorship to a lot of these younger engineers and and trying to help them out a little bit. You know, you're just gonna go do it. You're gonna figure this out.
Paul:It's gonna be okay.
Jeff:That feels like a great place to leave it. You're gonna do it, and it's gonna be okay. Thanks a lot for giving us the time.
Paul:Absolutely. This is a pleasure. Appreciate you having me.
Jeff:So that's it. The sixth episode of It's Not Rocket Science. I hope you enjoyed it. Check out the website and see more about Atmos cooling and Paul's other projects. Also, check out the earlier episodes if you hadn't had an opportunity to do that, and subscribe so that you'll know what's coming up next.
Jeff:Thanks for listening.