Technology readiness level

Now, how does three Canadian space divisions see this vehicle meeting operational requirements?

So we are at very early stages of TRL development.

Part of the launch the North process was small amount.

Well, I mean, it's close to $9 million of funding for different companies to help them accelerate through their capital, uh, I'm trying to find the right words.

We're trying to move them through the development phase faster than they would if they didn't have an extra $9 million to do that.

There is not a winner or a loser at this point.

There are three companies that were... a high enough TRL and a high enough sort of strategic return for this country for us to champion three of those capabilities.

They were all very different and a board of very talented and highly educated people, you know, rocket scientists, that's my favorite part of that, looked at some of the strategic lens of not only the capability of the lift vehicle itself, but also what are these companies introducing to the Canadian market, to the workforce, to the ecosystem.

But nonetheless, all of the same types of things that we are now looking for from an energy perspective and openly from a security perspective, rare earths, a lot of the different critical minerals, are things that they've got a long and deep history in terms of how do you process those.

One of the unique things about Savannah River National Laboratory, which really was one of the things that drew me to that laboratory, particularly in the critical mineral space, is is that as you look across the portfolio of national laboratories and the type of work that they do, it's very common to find a lot of work being done in the labs that is in sort of the earlier TRL space, so characterizing different types of feedstocks, understanding the geologic processes, developing technologies from a conceptual phase up to kind of a mid-technology readiness level.

That's where a lot of the labs really, that's kind of their sweet spot.

But from an industry perspective, I spent a lot of time working with the national labs when I was at Rio Tinto.

And that's where I saw the opportunity for Savannah River National Laboratory, because if you look across the spectrum, they are the most applied laboratory.

Actually, DOE has kind of the rainbow of national labs, as we all refer to it.

And it starts at the TRL zero and it goes over to TRL nine.

And the lab at the end of the scale is Savannah River National Lab.

Like, how do you incorporate all these things? These are answers that have been developed now, really.

To me, it's always like this, you know, in agriculture, there's this thing called TRLs, which are technology readiness level.

So any product intervention that we're trying to develop as applied research, it kind of goes these little houses of how ready it is to be used.

And the use of the homeopathic remedies are advancing that.

Nobody understands this.

So now we are starting to explain to them that TRL is the way to value businesses.

last round of sky route before the launch was at 1.1 billion now they are raising money at 4 supposedly at 4.6 billion so just one launch is an activity same in semiconductor you have the tape out your thing changes So as a whole nation we are having to learn that.

Our auditors don't know and I don't blame them.

So that's our responsibility now with all the funds that we are now raising, saying that build right.

designed right right so you when you go there when you have a big customer so that you can trust is a two-way street while we certainly are asking enterprises to bet on us i am now also saying because we control the startups and we can help mentor them how would you build right how do you get certification how do you get data privacy for you to play in europe so that's the other part of the story that we're continuing to push so if you're asking why it's not happening it's both of these things

yeah so As Nat says to continue on some of this answer, we have to take it to a higher TRL level so that they start believing in us because they don't want to take any risk.

They are right.

I think it's a good point Kendi makes because a quantum computer is one thing but quantum sensing is something that exists now and those things are starting to come out of the lab and those could have really profound effects in the way sensors or what sensors can do and how they can detect things that weren't detected or weren't being able to previously be detected.

And that does segue nicely into the question you've mentioned coming out of the lab, advancing up TRLs, for example.

You've got defense leaders going, okay, that's great, but what should they be looking for to indicate that these technologies are becoming operationally relevant? They're out of the lab.

Now they're happening so that they can either be ready to defend against them or apply them.

We want to go to

TRL4, which is a lab-scale prototype of this.

So to get there, what we need to do is computational fluid dynamics modeling, like what's called a hydrocode, that can test different use cases and scenarios of what know what would an underwater explosion look like based on different size munitions different depths different pressures that kind of thing different currents and how big does the blanket need to be what does it need to be made out of or how many layers do we need in order to really withstand that blast pressure How much air do we need to bring into the system? So the modeling will help us hone in kind of like what does our design need to look like exactly? How heavy do the magnets need to be? What kind of like strength do they need to have to hold everything together? So the modeling helps us do that.

And then we build... kind of units of the prototype and we unit test each one.