Robin Langtry

It’s hard to believe we filmed The Sun in Our Hands only a year ago. I want to thank the folks at Spiral for helping us capture those moments: They say the best teams are formed through adversity. The people of Avalanche have a ton of grit and heart, and that comes across in the film. We came out the other side so much stronger as a team—and the breakthroughs have been coming fast and furious ever since. The film follows our team as we solved a plasma instability in our fusion machine using rotational shear and achieved our final Series A plasma-density milestone. Next up, in December 2025, we demonstrated—definitively and for the first time using Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES)—a pure-hydrogen plasma free from sputtered impurities in a rotating centrifugal mirror-like plasma. This was something a highly credentialed fusion scientist said would take us years. We did it in months. In 2026, we then spun up that pure-hydrogen plasma so fast that we measured ion temperatures above 1 keV—a major milestone in fusion that we announced in June. I believe magnetic-mirror fusion, using rotating plasmas driven by extreme high voltages, is going to be the highest-performing and lowest-cost form of continuous energy—better than fission ... and any other form of fusion. Now we have to demonstrate it. What does that look like in the near term? Expect to see us announce ever-higher plasma temperatures and, ultimately, fusion triple products: temperature × density × confinement time as we iterate on our current fusion machines and start operations on our next generation of fusion machine. A fusion triple product of 10¹⁹ keV·s/m³ in our high-voltage mirror plasma is one of our next major milestones. Demonstrating this would mean that, in a very short time and in a super capital efficient manner, we have achieved parity with the tokamaks and stellarators that form the physics basis for many of the other leading approaches to magnetic-confinement fusion. Beyond that is the race to Q > 1 net fusion energy—at a triple product on the order of 10²¹ keV·s/m³—and then the commercialization of fusion energy. The race is most definitely on. Let’s ride.

Insightful article by GeekWire on the future in comment below. Avalanche Energy (Compact Fusion for Space & Defense), Starcloud (Space Datacenters) and Stoke Space (rapid reusable launch w/ an architecture better than SpaceX) all have >$1T ambitions and we all chose Washington state for very specific reasons to incubate our companies. As long as WA state can keep it's favorable talent/regulatory/business/tax environment the future is going to be very bright post peak Boeing/MSFT/Amazon ...