Making Solar Cells From Lunar Regolith

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Look, we made lunar solar cells. Not from actual lunar regalith, obviously, and not from fully refined regalith feed stock yet, but from the kind of boring basic materials the moon actually gives us. Silicon, aluminum, oxides, glass forming stuff. Nothing exotic, nothing magic, just old, well understood solar cell physics derived from a lunar bill of materials. Lunar solar cell manufacturing is not magic despite corporate marketing's best efforts to make it feel that way. Strip away the branding and the core idea is much more grounded. Materials, heat, vacuum, deposition, contacts, and patience. So, who needs a blue alchemist when we have a friendly neighborhood scientist with lasers, vacuum chambers, and just enough questionable judgment to try making lunar solar cells in a garage? In a minute, I'm going to talk to Robert, the person who actually made these cells.

[00:00:51]And we're also going to talk with Sam from Rotoforge, who helped image them with a scanning electron microscope. But first, I want to explain why this little garage made cell matters. So, to start, the case for solar cells on the moon and in space is not just to power a mass driver and some rovers. Sure, they can do that, but they're also going to be what we launch with the mass driver.

[00:01:14]That which we use the rovers to make.

[00:01:17]They are part of the product and the method, the beginning and the end. The case for solar cells made from lunar reglith is the case for space itself, energy and vacuum, which are two sides of the same coin. Standard of living is ultimately rooted in energy consumption.

[00:01:33]Every major difference between modern and medieval life is downstream of energy. Heat, light, cooling, mobility, clean water, computation, communications, medicine, material processing, and industrial output. That is why energy use and human development track each other so closely especially once you count the energy footprint of offshore industry. Science produces information. Industry is applied information. If either our power constrained, humanity will become progress constrained. When I say this, we cannot just think in terms of household appliances and car trips. We have to think in terms of particle accelerators, giant vacuum systems, massive computation, advanced material processing, extreme cryogenics, heavy manufacturing and other frontier scale tools. Imagine what happens when AI aided quantum materials research gains access to spacecale energy levels.

[00:02:27]Yesterday's luxury becomes today's standard. Cars used to be luxuries.

[00:02:32]Computers used to be luxuries. Sugar used to be a luxury. Meat used to be a luxury. The pattern is always the same.

[00:02:39]When technology and energy expand, the expensive and exceptional gradually become normal. The Department of Energy's quantum materials and experimental tools programs are explicitly built around the need for more powerful instruments and excess scale computation to understand and design advanced materials. A single AI focused data center can draw around 100 megawatts on the order of 100,000 households. CERN's proposed future circular collider would use about 1.1 to 1.8 terowatt hours of electricity per year. That does not prove every bottleneck in science is just a power bill. But it does show that the frontier increasingly lives inside machines whose scale is measured in megawatt, terowatt hours, cryogenics, vacuum, and compute.

[00:03:25]But the frontier is not only exotic machines at the edge of science. It is also the ordinary industrial machinery we take for granted scaled beyond today's limits. Electric arc furnaces for steel, high temperature kils for cement clinkers, massive desalination plants that could turn coastal deserts into irrigated land, and all the boring but civilization defining infrastructure that quietly determines what kind of world we can afford to build. Abundant energy does not just mean bigger particle accelerators and AI data centers. It means making the baseline machinery of civilization cheaper, cleaner, and larger than Earth's resource and environmental constraints currently allow. When the instruments of discovery start looking like cityscale infrastructure, abundant energy stops being a convenience and starts becoming one of the rate limiters of progress.

[00:04:17]Civilization starts bickering about distribution when growth slows. When the frontier stalls, politics turn inward and the bloat of bureaucracy starts to increase. Space is the ultimate frontier because it offers endless energy and free vacuum that doesn't come at the expense of the environment or even earthly real estate. The sphere around the sun at Earth distance is about 281 quadrillion km and could deliver about 38.3 billion pawatts using just 10% efficient cells made from lunar regalith and launched using a mass driver. There is not enough uranium on Earth for a fision to even come close to scaling that much. Known recoverable uranium resources are about 7.9 million tons.

[00:05:02]And even all the uranium dissolved in Earth's oceans only adds up to a bit over 4 billion tons. Even in a very generous breeder reactor case where we fision all of that, it would only amount to about 332 septillion jewels total. By contrast, our 10% efficient solar sphere at Earth's distance from the sun could deliver about 1.21 decilion jewels per year, about 3.6 million times more energy every single year. The only thing that could come even close to scaling with space-based solar power is fusion, but I won't hold my breath for that. And obviously, I'm not proposing we need to build a Dyson sphere in order to have cheaper cars.

[00:05:46]The point is the ceiling. Unlike fossil or efficient fuels, the upper limit here is not resource scarcity. It is engineering. And unlike a single giant reactor, solar infrastructure is modular. Every extra panel is useful.

[00:06:00]Every square kilmter adds capacity. On Earth, that kind of area becomes a land use problem very quickly. In space, empty area is the only thing we have in obscene abundance. Well, that and vacuum. This is why people are talking about data centers in space. The next age is computationheavy and computation is physical infrastructure with huge energy demand. But data centers, power systems, and industry need mass. Mass is expensive to get to orbit. The moon is mass already in orbit. Mass that can be used to build the hardware that uses the energy to generate the information and products that break the ceiling. that usher in an age where civilization gains room to grow again. So that's why solar cells from Regalith are necessary.

[00:06:53]This video is sponsored by Mundow.

[00:06:54]Mundow is a global community that funds real space projects, research, education, hardware, and early prototypes. They've supported over 80 space related efforts so far, including helping keep NASA's rodent research 20 experiment on the ISS from being cancelled. to scholarships for analog astronauts and training hardware at Space Camp USA. They've even helped send two people to space. This year, they're running quarterly community seed rounds.

[00:07:18]Teams apply, the community reviews the proposals, and members vote on which projects get funded. Their newly approved quarter 2 projects include amateur rocketry teams in Colombia, a deployable video payload for a sounding rocket, a space founders club and hackathon in Brazil, and a space documentary and content creation project. They've also raised over $170,000 to help send Frank White, author of The Overview Effect, to space, which is exactly the kind of ambitious thing I like seeing from a community that is actually trying to make space culture happen. They do use blockchain, but mainly as a transparent governance tool, so proposals, voting, and funding decisions are open and trackable instead of being decided behind closed doors.

[00:08:00]Citizens can also use the Mundow dashboard to claim quests, earn voting power, and submit independent contributions. So, if you're working on something that advances the space sector, research, software, education, hardware, writing, a video, whatever, you can submit it and potentially earn rewards. Mundow distributes around $2,000 every 3 months to citizens for contributions. I became a Mundow citizen myself. So, if you want to join me and build alongside a community of more than 200 citizens from across more than 35 countries, check it out using my link in the description. Citizenship comes with governance rights, a space jobs board, marketplace discounts, and ways to earn rewards by contributing. And depending on the season, there are also opportunities like zerog flights, launch events, and human spaceflight experiences. If you want to support real space research and help build a more accessible future in space, consider becoming a Munda citizen. And thanks again to Mundow for sponsoring this video. So, we want to make solar cells from Regalith to save the world as we know it. But lunar manufacturing should be built around the materials the moon actually gives you in bulk. Since silicon and aluminum make up about 20% and 7% of the moon respectively, this strongly favors siliconbased solar cells, especially in the early growth phase. Later, a mature lunar industry can optimize for higher performance materials and more specialized designs.

[00:09:24]But at the beginning, the point is material utilization. If the moon gives you mountains of silicon, aluminum, oxygen, and glassy oxides, you do not leave that dumb material sitting there while you chase some perfect exotic photovoltaic. You turn it into something useful. Even mediocre panels make electricity and electrons do not care how elegant the supply chain was. There are three options in the silicon family.

[00:09:49]Monochristine, polyrystalline, and amorphous. Most solar panels you see around these days are made of monochrystalline and they are typically 20 to 25% efficient. Polychrystalline is around 13 to 18% efficient and amorphice is between 5 to 10% efficient. On Earth monochristine is attractive because it gives you the best efficiency per square meter. On the moon the limiting factor is not roof space. It is the tech tree we have to build out and how much refined material, manufacturing effort and energy you have to pour into every watt. That is why absorber layer thickness matters as a rough surrogate for cost because every extra micron of refined silicon is more material you have to extract, purify, process, deposit, and handle. On Earth, people optimize dollars per watt. On the moon, we'll probably want to optimize for refined material per watt, at least at first. Amorphous silicon is an older and very familiar technology that has been used for decades. And you've probably seen amorphous solar cells on calculators and other small low power devices. The main thing to understand is that amorphous solar cells can be made very thin. Typical absorber layers are only a few hundred nanome thick. This is because amorphous thin film cells are made by depositing very thin silicon layers directly onto a substrate in processes like plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition. You are not starting with a big chunk of crystal and carving it down. You are laying down only a thin active layer where you need it. The creation of monochrystalline panels on the other hand requires the growth of a single crystal bool usually by the chcroski process and then that inga is sliced into wafers using diamond wires.

[00:11:31]In my original solar cell video on this channel, I quoted an older NASA comparison that mentioned monochrystalline requires 200 times more material than amorphice. So about two times the efficiency for about 200 times the material cost. And that is generally still true for commercial industry with average wafer thickness still around 150 microns. But there's also been some significant lab research into making crystalline thinner since then. One recent result demonstrated a 28 micron crystalline solar cell at just over 20% efficiency. But given that amorphous cells are usually around 0.3 microns, that's still 93 times thicker than amorphous, an improvement over the standard 200 figure, but still a bad deal. 93 times the material cost for only about two times the efficiency.

[00:12:20]Polychrystalline is the middle ground as it can be made thin easier than monochrystalline and as its name implies, it offers more crystalline behavior than amorphice without the full single crystal perfection burden. But it still does not beat Amorphice on the core ISRU material efficiency argument.

[00:12:37]Regardless of what type we use though, with no weather, no seasons, and no zoning laws, we can pace solar cells across the lunar plains, rovers laying down fields of black glass turning dead dust into industrial power. But every industrial age starts with somebody in a workshop making the first ugly version.

[00:12:56]In this case, that somebody is Robert.

[00:13:00]But first, real quick before we start the interview, I want to give you all some bearings because I realized we didn't really explain the specifics of what Robert actually did. Basically, Robert made a ton of different solar cell recipes. Some were strictly ISRU and others were mostly ISRU with some imports assumed like zinc and copper and of course phosphorus and boron would probably be imported in all cases. But so little goes so far when we are talking about atomic percentages. A single kilogram of dopants would be enough for multi-square kilometer areas of then film solar cells. Robert did such a good job and this was a two years long project. So there are honestly too many individual cells to go over in depth maybe for a future paper. But for this video, the general overview is that we tried combinations of N type and ptype behavior from both oxide layers and reduced metal layers on silicon, aluminina, silica, and even metal iron substrates. Some were doped, some were undoped. The more interesting but less performing versions were the oxidebased ones. And the ones we sent to SAM for SEM imaging were oxide based with no doping. For the doped versions, phosphorus was added using phosphoric acid and we used laser and dusion processing. For the ptype, boron was added from hexagonal boron nitrate, mostly by laser doping the substrate before deposition. Though in many cases, we simply just used pre-bought wafers that were grown with boron in them since that's easier and that's something we'll likely want to do on the moon as well, though probably not at the very beginning. Most of the samples showed some photovoltaic response which shows the basic junction concepts do work. The biggest problems are conductivity, electron transport, and voltage drop under load. Especially because these are small test devices and not fully optimized for current collection. Though the oxidebased samples were actually very robust and still held a response even after damage. So for fear of burying the lead, the main conclusion up front is that based on this work, we believe a titanium dioxide hetererojunction combined with either amorphous silicon, zinc oxide, or aluminum doped zinc oxide looks like the best path forward. These are not commercial grade cells, but the project is still valuable because it identified the most promising material combinations and clarified the main engineering problems that still need to be resolved.

[00:15:24]But most importantly, it shows that this can be done. The one thing this project did not prove can be done, however, is rescuing my audio. Despite setting up my nice studio microphone, routing everything correctly, and going through the whole ritual of pretending to be a competent media professional, I apparently failed to click the one button that actually switches the input over. So, my parts of the interview were recorded on the default laptop microphone, which came with a complimentary, lovely little background hum. This is how you know this channel will never be bought out by private equity because I couldn't sell it if I tried. Fortunately, it's just on my side of the conversation, and I did my best to clean it up. But if the audio suddenly sounds worse whenever I start talking, that's just the sound of me heroically sabotaging Robert and Sam's retention with a single unchecked button. Hey guys, thanks for joining me today. Robert, you made the cells. And Sam, you very generously donated your time and expertise to image them with your scanning electron microscope, which I also want to talk about in a minute.

[00:16:23]But first, Sam, I should probably mention who you are because you and Michael also have your own YouTube channel, the Roto Forge project, where you're developing a 3D printer that uses a friction wheel to melt metal, I believe, which is frankly like the most metal material science friction induced fever dream out there. I highly recommend people check it out. Uh, y'all have made some really cool progress.

[00:16:44]Could you quickly tell people what you're doing over there so we can hear it from the goat himself?

[00:16:49]>> Oh yeah. So what we're doing is we are primarily trying to take advantage of the fact that you can shear metals or you can apply an excessive amount of work to them in order to plasticize them. So rather than say a full melt process where to sort of make them viscous enough that you can print them that you have to go to full melt, with this you can sort of stay in a sort of liquidous solidish area. you don't have to deal with the same problems of oxidation and you can get sort of forge-l like quality out of metals directionally as you print them. And we want to try and take advantage of those sorts of processes to use and try to print metals to print ceramics to print sort of exotic materials. The sky's is the limit right now. We're just working on getting the system up and running with most aluminums. So that's kind of where we are right now.

[00:17:34]>> You mentioned like forge quality. So I guess what are there any explicit advantages of the friction printing over like metal like I guess like laser powder bed or even like cold spray things like that?

[00:17:44]>> Yeah, it's going to depend on primarily what you want. But a lot of like added friction roll bonding and other processes because you are putting in energy as you're working the grains. You are essentially warm working or warm forging it as you print it. So, while you might not have the fine detail resolution as something like metal SLS or anything like that or any of those like related processes, you can get something that is a lot stronger per sort of unit mass than what you would get out of other powder processes. Plus, you can get just higher part densities and stuff.

[00:18:13]>> That's awesome.

[00:18:13]>> I believe a lot of aerospace manufacturing uses stir welding to get pieces together. Actually, if I'm not mistaken, the the stirs are stronger than the actual metal itself.

[00:18:22]>> Yeah, they can be. The joint can be often times stronger than the part itself.

[00:18:25]>> It's amazing.

[00:18:26]>> Wow.

[00:18:27]Yeah, that's so cool. But I mean, we should probably do some sort of future channel collaboration or something soon because I could totally see yall sprinter being used to make parts in space from metal feed stock refined by Robert. So, it's really cool stuff and I'm excited and thankful you could be a part of the solar cell stuff as well.

[00:18:42]So, all right, Robert, you made some solar cells using materials and processes friendly to the moon. I guess to start, what materials did you use and how close do you think they are to real lunar feed socks?

[00:18:54]Well, um, basically, uh, we're taking multiple approaches. We've used, uh, a lot of the main substrates that you would be able to get that are lunar stock materials. Some some of our oxide substrates, they're they're basically there is some amount of these materials in in the lunar surface. And due to there already being an oxide, it it's a much easier process. We also explored some monochrystalline processes, some other thin foam processes, processes where we did deposition on multiple substrates, all kinds of stuff. main focus is going to be in the future researching around silicone and titanium dioxide hydro junctions. After a lot of the research that we did uh we found that that that is probably going to be the most promising but there are other oxide formulas that are a lot easier to use and we we explored a lot of those.

[00:19:40]Uh some of the some of the more interesting stuff has been oxide layered over uh substrates like aluminum and silicone dioxide glass itself in extremely thin amounts that require very minimal amount of these materials. So you do get a lot of surface area you get a lot of photovatic behavior that you can convert into electricity compared to the chopsky process or or very complex you know semiconductor doping and such.

[00:20:06]So what was the actual process of like you're making thin film solar cells.

[00:20:10]What I guess equipment are you using to do that? You're using sputtering it on using in a vacuum chamber or is this chemical processy?

[00:20:18]>> Yeah. So we looked at several processes.

[00:20:20]We looked at using monochrystalline substrates. We've used RF sputtering with both oxide and semiconductor and conductive materials. We've used hydrogen annealing under vacuum conditions uh which requires a tube furnace. There's a bunch of equipment behind me that that we use, but uh a lot of it actually uh centers around laser because it is just when you're thinking about lunar economy, right? You you have to to take kind of like your starting material with you. And when it comes to lasers, you're able to like not only like be able to print your substrates and such, but you're able to enhance doping if you have to if that's a choice. Um and you have a lot of options. So laser is kind of like a a um a a a very useful tool in in the lunar economy. And so we try to see where we can use that, where we don't need it. Um and we had a lot we have a lot of results. I'm not going to say that like I've made something that's comparable to commercial in any way, but I have proven that there is a field in this that that probably needs to be researched further.

[00:21:21]We take our earthbased processes for granted and we really kind of limit ourselves to what's kind of commercially available and what we can you know what what's biggest bang for buck commercially so on and so forth to what we use but when it comes to photo photoaltics there's a lot of options and uh moon provides a lot of those options uh and it doesn't require a lot of imports of technologies in fact there's actually formulas that don't require any of these imports or technologies uh and we explored some of these formulas um with some success And that's where Sam comes into play here. He's really done a great job on being able to show me the morphology, the the crystalology, the what I'm doing at an atomic level, which is amazing, by the way, to have that resource. Uh, and with that, we're going to be making future cells that are going to be aluminous substrates with basically uh titanium and silicone heterogunctions on them. And these are going to require very little material.

[00:22:17]And these are a very good lunar pathway forward. This is just the beginning of this research. So, um there's there's a lot of hurdles that need to be overcome.

[00:22:26]And when you make something that kind of works, one thing, but to make something that works like close to a theoretical efficiency, it requires a lot of sight prep, cleaning, surface prep, like everything you can possibly imagine. Uh you know, you you learn along the way.

[00:22:40]>> So, you were using RF sputtering, right?

[00:22:42]Which is different from like traditional sputtering, which is DC. And this allows you, could you talk through a little bit about what RF sputtering is and how it's different? And this from my understanding allows you to basically deposit non-conductive things like oxides in a similar way that you would like a traditional metal.

[00:23:00]>> Yes. So when when you talk about uh sputtering uh it's a general term for deposition that where you use basically a radio frequency and uh an arrangement of magnets called the magnetron to basically electrically excite a target material that then bombards a substrate material with ions and those ions are filled with the material that are are from the target. Now the difference between RF and DC sputtering is that RF sputtering just uses radio frequency. It requires a little bit more hardware matching networks and such, but uh DC sputtering works really great for uh throughput. Like if you wanted something that is, you know, RF sputtering is like kind of like the snail in the race when it comes to sputtering. And if you had conductive metals, then DC sputtering is like kind of like your rabbit in the race when it comes to thin films.

[00:23:45]There's also evaporation processes as well, but those are limited to materials that you can get to evaporate and also the film, you know, quality and such. So yeah, we used RF sputtering, we used uh plasma etching, we've used um pretty much every gone through basically every standard that you can that's short of like fluoride, you know, containing gases.

[00:24:05]>> Did you do any hydrogen passivation or anything similar?

[00:24:09]>> Yeah, we tried uh so at the time uh I was making these um I thought it might have been it was an experiment. I'm still kind of yeah it's inconclusive but uh what I did is I had some titanium dihydride and I just put in an upstream boat and I put in the tube furnace under vacuum heated it up released the hydrogen saw the pressure go up and uh you know pulled it out uh we did inings that between 650 and 200° you know you definitely see a difference in the tent dihydride afterwards and the future stuff we we have a hydrogen system for this this was in the beginning you know I've been doing this work for almost like 2 years now and it's really progressed. You know, you you start with something and then you realize you need a lot more equipment for this and and so on and so forth. It kind of snowballs.

[00:24:54]But when it comes to the actual equipment, deposition equipment, uh there's not just the RF sputtering that creates these thin films, but it's the annealing that gets them to actually form uniform thin layers, stops recombination, prevents a lot of the oxide crusting and such. It really it's kind of like a production line that you have to think about in the lunar environment. The these things kind of come for free, right? You have like 200 degrees coming out uh from the sun. You have um vacuum, you you have the lunar oxides there. You just need to get the equipment that you need to do the deposition and the kneeling pretty much to get a functional photovoltaic. And the equipment that can do the deposition kneeling is the same equipment that can actually do the um substrate manufacturing um it can do the substrate cutting and everything. So basically with three-step process where you have three machines that you definitely want on the moon and that's going to be an RF power supply for many reasons not just sputtering but you know a good source of RF power supplies. uh you're going to you're going to need a laser. And then you're going to need some type of a a furnace or an needling for any of the centering or um especially if you're thinking about like landing pads and stuff like that where you really need to have a substrate that's going to be able to handle the pressures and and it's consistent throughout, you're going to need some type of a furnace setup. And it makes sense that, you know, we're doing all this stuff in the lab using like electricity, but these all these processes, they can be very very low on energy if you consider that you have the sun and you don't have anything impeding it. So your production days are not limited to rain or um you know a bad day. Uh they're they're limited to the lunar day and night depending on where you are. You know you can go really far with some of that stuff. So a lot of this stuff starts like you know in the garage ends up in the lab then goes to the moon. But you know it's it takes more than just one or two people to do it. And you know, anybody interested in these fields who thinks that they can't, you know, do this stuff that they there's there's something blocking them, just just try try to think that there have been so many incredible inventions that have made such a huge difference in the world by people who have just tinkered in the garage.

[00:27:01]>> And you you tested regarding doping, and hopefully I'm not getting too far ahead of myself here, but so we're we're doping just to get our bases, silica dioxide with phosphorus, right? and then the other side aluminum.

[00:27:13]>> So with doping, there's laser doping and there's diffusion doping. And they have their their ups and downs for both. With laser, you can do manufacturing of semiconductors, transistors, stuff like that because you can control where the doping goes. And with diffusion doping, it's better for solar because you're doping the entire region and you want a uniform dope. But it's not the only option. Lasers do the same thing. And it's just a matter of tuning, not not overdoping, not underdoping uh for substrates. But with the oxide, we were basically relying on the semiconducting material of the oxides themselves to do the photovotayic work. And then on the uh silicone substrates, we're relying on doping of the substrates and then the materials that make those contact junctions in between to to deliver the uh electrons where they need to go.

[00:27:57]>> So oxides don't need to be doped at all.

[00:27:59]They just they work.

[00:28:00]>> No, they're there. So there if you if you go to the periodic table, there are nype uh semiconductors and ptype semiconductors. And you know they're like if you look at aluminum tantanium can be both N and P if it's dope there's zinc oxide these are N and P type copper oxide these are N and PT type semiconductors and they do the same work but with different band gaps uh that like the silicone uh junctions do uh so uh there there's a lot of uh different materials that you can use to make these some of the first solar cells I believe were copper oxide if I'm not mistaken and they they had like efficiency of like one one or one or 2% and still like today like in third world countries they still use a lot of those because they're so easy to print and manufacture. We tried metal substrates, glass substrates, aluminum substrates, mono crystalline substrates and um amorphous substrates. Favorite ones are the oxides because they they literally require very little in the way of manufacturing. And so uh the sack that that I actually sent out to to Sam over here, they were a copper oxide. So copper oxide layer for you know electron transport. Tentanium has a basically it acts as a selective transport layer where it's done like basically very very thin where it's like 5 to 10 nanometers whereas your copper oxide is is is probably you know several tens of nanometers or more and basically then we have zinc oxide on top of that right and then and we had silicone on top of that. Now you have your P and N type semiconductors. And what we did is we masked off both sides so that we can access one side of the photovoltaics and the other side of the and because I with my inherent geniusness decided to probe these with a regular probe which I knew better. I ended up destroying a lot of them. Unfortunately, >> we were simulating micrometeorite impacts. Right.

[00:29:40]>> Yeah. If I have to be honest, there's got to be some, you know, I had some I had XYZ Access like manipulator that like got crushed in a move a long time ago and uh I've really kind of been bitter about it. So, I thought that maybe I could try it with some brand new probes thinking that like, okay, if I just, you know, but after you poke one hole through them, you're like, okay, well, now I'm going to test, you know, now I got to test it, you know. And to be honest with you, all it did was really just decrease that they still worked. Like that's the amazing thing.

[00:30:10]Like they still showed voltage and you know I I'm still like trying to determine why they're still showing voltage because uh I I I know I shorted some of these contacts, right? But the other thing about these materials is the these are all same materials that we we like typically use in batteries and such like that. So So there's there's a balance of like photovoltaics or did you just create a whole bunch of like shorts and junctions? Now you have some type of like you know maybe you're creating a photovoltaics response to the probes.

[00:30:36]All the future stuff is going to be absolutely probed, documented, and and well done. The thing about the first experimental process is mostly about tuning the equipment so that we can get a good process out of it.

[00:30:47]>> And then if I could jump back real quick to the laser versus diffusion, which so you have the laser process, you take your silicon, you put it into phosphoric acid. And so the laser basically is pushing the phosphor, it breaks it from the actual acid and it pushes it into the silicon.

[00:31:05]>> Yes. So the way diffusion works is basically at higher temperatures things become a more excited state right like if you think of gas you know uh water for instance like when it's a vapor it's in a more excited state than when it's frozen right or liquid and so you diffusion works on the same principles right so phosphoric acid contains phosphor phosphorus right and what you want to do is get these atoms like just below the surface right so that you have this you have an end type wafer and you have a ptype now you're doping it as a type. And so with that you have now you have a semiconducting capability, right?

[00:31:40]So you take a laser with the phosphoric acid and since since it's a liquid the laser hits the silicone substrate and creates a lot of heat and in that heat it drives in the phosphor atoms and because it's a liquid there's not it it just basically there's no it's not really making a gas. you do this at like very low energies for lasers where if you normally do like diffusion doping and stuff, you're actually turning it into like a gas basically phase and and so this kind of eliminates that. But uh both phases work by atom diffusion meaning that like at at higher temperatures the the the molecular structure of things they they expand allows areas where these atoms can go in and once they do go in they be they and the subject cools down they become part of that that crystal lattice basically and then you have an area that's that's doped and with with lasers you can do if you have an end type semiconductor you have a P and NP region or you can do you know multiple regions and make an actual you know microchip or transistor whatever.

[00:32:40]>> Did you notice a difference? And cuz you did both of them. Was one better or worse than the other?

[00:32:45]>> Oh, yeah. They're they're they're definitely one's better for a certain process, one's better for another process. So, for laser, my experience, diffusion works pretty good if you just use, you know, regular heat over time.

[00:32:56]Uh, and I'm sure Sam can add a lot to this. He he's the material scientist here. the exact method that you use for doping and exactly like how far your doped ions are going to go into your lattice exactly what you can expect for the change in actual like carrier density that you'll get inside of the surface is going to depend a lot on how you do it. I would have to pull it up but for like phosphorus doping because you're talking about phosphorus doping using phosphoric acid on silicon right is primarily >> yeah I I don't know the exact number for the penetration but it is in the order of nanometers so >> yeah usually like between like five and 20 instrom depending on good doping and then obviously like a couple nanometers for something that's heavily doped that that was my my knowledge but you know >> yeah and just one big thing like the performance of all of these cells.

[00:33:43]They're going to really depend on like the exact, you know, band positions are going to depend a lot on exactly like what the fmy state is at that surface, what the quality of the interface is like, what the surface quality is like.

[00:33:53]So, there's a lot of factors that are going to actually go into affecting how these cells perform on top of just what they're made of and what the actual band gaps in them are. Yeah, the manufacturing process is uh one that is very complex that and that we're we're exploring novel pathways to it, but in the end um you know it it it's still science that needs to be discovered when it comes to a lot of the stuff. But yeah, the band gaps of of the materials and how the interface is combined, how clean is the equipment, how uh deep are the vacuums, what kind of processes are you using, those are very very important. And I found that with RF sputtering, you can basically control these things at very very fine levels.

[00:34:33]And what that gives you is a good amount of feed stock to work with. You're really stretching your budget. If you can deposit make a solar cell that's literally 50 nmters thick, then you've created, you know, a lot more solar cell for your model.

[00:34:47]>> And what about for the P type, right?

[00:34:50]that's not phosphorus, which is the element P, but that's what you put in the N type or the uh what what are you doping the other side with? Is it It's not boron. Was it aluminum?

[00:35:02]>> So bor So boron and phosphorus are the typical ones and they're they're N&P type. So phosphorus is N type and boron is typically P type. Most substrates and forgive me cuz like like you said this is always something people get mixed up but most substrates crystal that that are silicon are are pype they're they're grown where the way the crystal is grown itself the atoms are diffused in the growth itself. So the entire wafer itself usually has pype then there's other types of ptype where they do the doping house and so so on and so forth.

[00:35:33]depends a lot on the material whether it's silicone or if it's silicon carbide or if it's and there's different materials that have different dopings like magnesium is a doping for lithium nobate and so on and so forth.

[00:35:44]>> So did you how did you dope the other side yourself? Did you buy pre-doped I guess silicon that had boron in it or did you how did that work?

[00:35:54]>> Yeah. So when it comes to ptype semiconductors it's easier to just buy them. We do have the option to to do boron doping, but it's very difficult to get it deep enough in the substrate and then have the other semiconductor on top. So, it makes more sense to have the substrates manufactured with that in it already. And so, we we just buy the substrates already made that way. We basically bought ptype semiconductor wafers, nype semiconductor wafers. We tried n type metal oxides as well as doping the silicone with phosphorus to make it pype and p junctions. And uh we found basically that there's two methods to do that. Um, it involves a lot of masking, doping, and laser. If you're going to use a laser, then that's that's a lot of um it takes that's that's a lot of tuning cuz no matter how you look at it, your substrate's always different when you put it under the laser. There's always something. So, it's best to like have a part of that substrate, you tune the laser on, and then you work the rest of the substrate basically. Yeah, it it it's when it comes to doping, uh, we use for the tube furnace, we use the, um, uh, diffusion method where we use phosphoric acid. lie it on top of the uh substrate and we would put it in the tube furnace under vacuum. I'm sorry, not under vacuum, under wet wet we call it wet hydrogen, but it's basically it's it's it's like uh I'm sorry, not wet hydrogen, it's water vapor. We use water vapor. So, the way I was doing it is I have an electrolyer here and I was just burning the hydrogen oxygen to get the water vapor in front of the tube. But, you know, everybody's got their method.

[00:37:16]That's that's actually this thing right here.

[00:37:20]Um but uh you know yeah when it comes to hydrogen sources you want them either combusted or you want them pure. So you know uh if you want pure water it's best to make it from hydrogen oxygen.

[00:37:30]>> So let's take just one example. So we're walking through how we go from the actual materials and so you buy uh silicon that is undoped and then you buy silicon that is doped and these come as like wafer crystals and one has boron in it and the other is undoped. And then you're taking them and you're let's go the laser route and you're putting it in the acid. You're hitting it with a laser and now you have a N and a P type and then you take them to your vacuum chamber and you RF sputter onto them or you deposit a thin film of what like what is the next step? Aluminum, titanium oxide.

[00:38:06]>> When when you do the after you do the the doping, if you do laser doping, then you can control the area that you want doped. So you make the contact side of the the uh the cell basically the back side of of the wafer, right? And so now you have you're going to build your stack up from the wafer. So for silicone um uh basically you have your substrate.

[00:38:25]So the next step is now you need to get the active areas. What is the next step?

[00:38:29]Okay. So I laser dot it. Then I stick it in the sputtering after I mask it. I mask it. Okay. So then deposit. Okay.

[00:38:35]Yeah. So I deposit the back contact and then I take it back under the laser or I remove the mask depending on which method. You know mask works way better.

[00:38:44]Um and then so I will layer a layer of aluminum. um or tentanium depending on the substrate, right? Like if it's silicone dioxide compared to to silicone. If it's silicone and you just want a silicone NP junction, then you just need to create like contact points that are for the top and the bottom of the wafer, right? Like when when you talk about buying silicone wafers, it's almost cheating because this is not something that's going to work on the moon really well. Uh unless you bring the entire silicone wafer manufacturing process with you. So there's a lot of different ways that we did this, right?

[00:39:15]We we tried different metals. We tried aluminum. We tried titanium aluminum. We tried oxide aluminum combinations. We tried oxide copper combinations. We tried even a tungsten combination. But the main issue you you have when you try to do just a wafer type thing like that is that you want a really deep doping in it and you want mainly a grid along the top to be able to move those electrons.

[00:39:38]And so that requires a whole another process of masking. And then you lift the mask and then you do some more deposition. Whether you want like a clear ca if you want a case then you use oxygen and silicone dioxide silicone metal or I would use oxygen silicone metal. You use silicone dioxide even with RF sputtering you can sputter silicone dioxide. Um and so you create these layers uh whether it's encapsulation whether it's the um uh um electrodes whether it's the uh back contacts whether it's a clear front contact. There there's a lot of different formulations of this uh we've tried had some success with some stuff but uh main mainly the most successful stuff has been clear they call them top contact oxides right where you the whole the oxide layer is basically doing the heavy work for you. You do lose efficiencies and you do take away from efficiencies in any part of the process that you try to adjust but you trying to come up with something that is going to be like realistic for like the first you know lunar cells that are going to be built out of lunar material. you kind of want to have something that's going to, you know, be somewhat simple. The the contacts are actually the oxides themselves. So, the substrate is is actually aluminum oxide. There's copper oxide acts as a a ptype semiconductor and then you have tentanium dioxide to keep basically things like separated kind of like a sandwich if you think about how you're layering this. And then you have your zinc oxide or your aluminum zinc oxide. And you know, if you think of aluminum zinc oxide, it's basically aluminum oxide doped with zinc. So, oxide. So they're it's still they're all oxides. And then you have a silicone dioxide cap. And so that substrate right there can be completely manufactured on the moon without any reduction of metals. And you're using >> it needed copper. Does it need copper?

[00:41:20]>> That that one requires copper oxide, but there is tantanium oxide. Uh >> is that a standin for copper? Because we don't really have much copper on the moon.

[00:41:28]>> No, there's not a lot of copper on the moon, but the amount that you would need, you're you're correct. So but the amount that you would need is very is very little. Um, you can substitute some of these like copper with titanium and and phosphorus, right? And you can substitute a lot of these, but the main reason that you might want to explore the oxide route is because they're really robust. Like they they they tend to take damage a lot well where just silicone substrates and you can use silicone and oxide substrates together, which is which I tried. But the difference is is one's really sensitive, the other is kind of robust. One is really highly efficient, the other's not so efficient, but really easy to make.

[00:42:03]So there's no free ride in this but these materials are are basically mostly what the main components of this like the substrates itself the um the tentanium the main components are basically in situ already there and and all the components are really there if you look at like some of the Apollo data um and it's and I and I hated having to choose between two oxides that weren't very available but there are oxides that don't semiconduct at all and so you want to choose which ones you're going to get you know you don't want to make something that's really really really bad and you put a lot of work into it, there's a medium ground. And so the question becomes throughput over efficiency. So it's a balance between everything. And I'm not claiming I'm an expert in this field in any way. This is just a project that shows the viability of this.

[00:42:48]>> And then so we made all these awesome cells. Just real quick, we didn't test efficiency, right? I mean, we test I can say we tested them, but when I start talking about efficiency, everybody's gonna ask me about UV IV curves and and >> all the you know, I'd rather show something because, you know, when you make something and you're like, "Oh, I could do way better." But like, you know, that's going to be like in a month or something and and we don't have the time for that.

[00:43:09]>> Yeah. The next step would be, I think, if you wanted to test the actual performance of these cells and the performance of just generally any of them that you would make would be to probably start getting things like, you know, quantum efficiency, quantum yield, start looking at, you know, carrier diffusion lengths and stuff. Start actually trying to like get down to the nitty-gritty of how well do these how well do these uh junctions perform, >> right? My my whole goal was to get one that performs good to begin with and then go from there. So, we made all these cells and then we sent them to Sam to get them stemmed. Scanning electron microscoped. Don't ever want to plot at once.

[00:43:42]>> Oh, brother.

[00:43:44]>> Sam, could you uh sort of Well, I guess Robert, let me ask you, what did the images reveal that you couldn't see otherwise? First of all, this is stuff that you can't see with a microscope if you try. Like um and and when we're talking about layers that are thousands of times thinner than, you know, a piece of paper, tens of thousands, you're talking about nanometers, you're talking the wavelength of light that you need to look at it with, you are able to see and it needs to be able to absorb that light. So there's a huge amount of science behind that. And what we learned basically is that recombination can be avoided if substrates are chosen. And and basically one other thing that we learned is that at least I learned um is that encapsulation is actually possible.

[00:44:29]So you can change transition from like basically a semiconducting material like silicone to silicone dioxide gradually just by introducing oxygen through the process. Uh which we have plenty of on the moon. uh and um actually get a good I I think this is what made them like still kind of work after like what looks like you know a shotgun blast of my probing and I say work with the the lightest I mean they're they're showing the same voltage but the amperage drops off obviously every short that there is in any system or anything like that I'm not saying that they're robust but what they do allow is that like the next cell's line to them will not be effective because the larger areas that carry these electrons are the surface areas are are much larger and since obviously penetration and recombination through penetration didn't seem to affect them that much it gives us a lot of freedom in how we anneal these in the future. Uh Sam, could you tell us a bit about the actual process and challenges involved in imaging these? I mean, they're they're not conductive, right?

[00:45:27]So, I guess most people some people will probably know what how scanning electron microscopes work, but even fewer will have like actually used these. So, could you kind of give us the basics and then how this was different?

[00:45:40]>> So, for these samples, we were kind of in luck. I actually had some uh sample stubs that were made to hold these. So, we're good. We didn't have to machine anything late to try to make it work.

[00:45:49]But, yeah. So, one of the big challenges with these samples was primarily we're trying to look edge on at something that's very thin. Films were great. They were just sort of they were starting to get the kind of the limit of the resolution of what I could be able to see. So, what I did, I sputtered them first, covered them with, you know, platinum long conductive layer, large conductive layer, just trying to get electrons out to prevent space charging.

[00:46:07]And then ended up trying to basically, you know, maybe wasn't best for the source, but turning up the uh beam volt turning up the uh column voltage as much as it would allow. basically just trying to get sort of a little bit more uh resolution out of it than I would be able to get on, you know, thin film. And the sample prep for this was relatively simple. I would take the samples that uh Robert had sent fringe to them and then used like because I was sort of bending them outwards, I was able to get a decently clean edge. And then I would take that, mount that on the stub, and then sputter the entire stub with platinum and then load that into the cell. So, uh yeah. So the SEM itself uh it's not like a standard like optical light microscope or anything. We're not looking at like the defraction of light through a series or stack of lenses.

[00:46:51]Instead we are uh measuring the just electrons out of a surface after impinging other electrons on them. So basically we have a column we have an electron source. Those electrons are getting sent through a series of electron lenses. Those are impinging upon the surface. And it's essentially kind of like you can think of it almost like an old tube TV how you basically do like a line raster scan. one line at a time. We're essentially doing the same thing with the electron beam. We're sort of rastering across the surface and then using either the charge that we detect or the current we detect or using the scattered electrons from the electron hitting the surface and picking those up. We are using those to rebuild an image sort of rebuild an image point by point of the actual surface symbol. And you can actually see variations in electron density as sort of contrast.

[00:47:37]It'll give that to you as kind of like a faux gray scale. You can also see just differences in the generally conductivity and stuff as well. So you'll see like one spot that's relatively conductive will be quite bright. One spot that's relatively non-conductive will be quite dim or it might be the other way depending upon your uh you know settings. But yeah, generally you can look through the image, you can kind of pick those regions out. I think in some of the stacks I in some of the images I took of them, you can see you have like the aluminina in particular. Once you sputter it all with platinum, it's all fairly conductive. So you can see a lot of the grain structure on it. But before then, it was almost like completely white. like it was so like there was so much space charge building up that you just couldn't see anything around there.

[00:48:13]You couldn't see the film or anything.

[00:48:14]>> Sorry. Sorry if it's uh such a basic question, but it's so you need something conductive so it carries away the electrons. Um right. And then so you you're sputtering platinum on there, very thin film, but how does the platinum sort of not I guess block the actual thing itself?

[00:48:32]Because it's such a thin film.

[00:48:34]>> Yeah, it's it's such a thin film. Yeah, it's such a thin film, like a few nanometers, that you're you're going to see whatever's underneath it. Now, if you sputtered just tons and tons and tons of platinum on there, you might start like physically blocking the electrons from interacting down there and you might not see that. But yeah, with very thin films of platinum or just like a light dusting of it, that's usually enough. One thing you like you don't have to use that you can some SCMs, the one I was using included, have compensation for space charging. They just might lower the resolution in that area or it might mean you have to work at like slightly lower vacuum. Some really nice ones that I don't have access to, they'll use like a small like ion beam or they use like a small like plasma over the surface to sort of help hoover up some of the charging. So, that'll work too. Yeah, there's plenty there's plenty of ways to deal with it.

[00:49:16]And the simplest one is just make it conductive, grab it as best you can.

[00:49:20]>> And then did you use carbon at all or just platinum?

[00:49:23]>> No, I just used just platinum. So, if you look at some of the EEDX images, you might see that there is carbon on there.

[00:49:29]That's just that's from the environment.

[00:49:31]That's from handling. I didn't apply any. That is something you can do if you want to make your sample more conductive. You can use like a a graphite slurry or something.

[00:49:39]>> Okay. Yeah, I saw a lot of carbon, so I I thought maybe that's what you did, but I wasn't sure.

[00:49:43]>> No. Uh no, generally, so unless you use like unless you go through the process and you use like either a solvent series or like RCA cleaned or something, you're not going to get all the carbon off of it. And even once you do, I mean, I still you still have to pick it up out of the beaker and then transfer it to something. So, there's going to be a little bit from like the air and stuff getting on there. But no, I didn't take those precautions with these samples.

[00:50:03]So, there's going to be just kind of carbon everywhere.

[00:50:06]>> Makes sense. And was there anything specific about the cells you noticed that kind of stood out and wasn't obvious beforehand?

[00:50:14]>> Uh, yeah. Something that's kind of noticed. So, when you look at the actual film itself, the surface kind of looks continuous. Uh but whenever you uh look at it on the SEM, you can see that there's kind of like uh the sort of cracks that are almost on the surface or like the surface is the surface has some texture to it or almost like has franges or pin holes in it and that's that's common within films especially ones that have like a little bit of residual stress in them or ones that werenealed.

[00:50:38]There'll be some phase change and then you can typically have some volume change or volume something like that. Uh and you'll see film cracking. But no, it was really cool to be able to actually see that myself. I don't really read much about that. Yeah, that was it was really impressive, especially just because it is such a thin film that you're getting from the side. It's really incredible the precision I guess required in that. Yeah. So, thank you so much for doing that.

[00:50:57]>> Yeah, >> I gave you the world's most difficult samples to possibly image that anybody could possibly image.

[00:51:03]>> Oh, no. No. I I I >> wasn't thinking about it when it come to came to the nonconductivity of of uh and and you have to imagine he's looking at something that you know when you talk about an nanometer you know it's like tens and and 20s of atoms depending on you know but you're talking about such small detail that you know it's amazing that we can even see that at any level let alone you know what we learn from it.

[00:51:25]>> Yeah. Uh if uh if we do another round or if we look at more, I'd like to try and and push our resolution more to actually see some gradients or some difference between some of the layers in some of the EDX, you can almost just like just barely see some like difference in like elemental density throughout the image.

[00:51:41]And that's about all I was able to squeeze out of that. So, uh yeah, when when you talk about nanometers, can I can I get a few more nanometers, please?

[00:51:48]>> Everybody wants just a couple nanometers more.

[00:51:51]>> Look at the two nanometer chip process, right? So, I guess Robert, what was the hardest part of the whole process? Or I guess let me ask you this, which the audience is going to want to know. We didn't test these for like efficiency or like curves and whatnot just because that requires further equipment. Maybe we'll make a follow-up video, but there is voltage and there's a strong voltage, strong, you know, there's significant.

[00:52:12]Let's go with that.

[00:52:14]>> Whatever the band gap is of that material, it's pretty close to it. I mean, uh, so >> so, so you think they're I guess if you had to guess at an efficiency, what would you guess for?

[00:52:25]>> I guess you made several cells, so it's not all going to be the same. But >> the theoretical efficiencies of these are like between, you know, they range uh depending on which oxides you're talking about. Uh, some of the ones I did were between theoretically between 10 and 12%. Some of the oxide ones are like in the lower percentages, you know, a couple of percent. I would say that I had a couple tests that were successful that that showed something like close to like a portion of a percent, but mostly you get fooled because you know, oh yeah, I got great voltage and then but you have this small tiny little cell and now you got to squeeze some amperage out of it and everything that you're using to test it like draws something.

[00:53:00]everything. Your probes have an effect on it depending on what material the probes are made out of and and you know basic testing showed a couple worked.

[00:53:07]But the and and and actually some semiconducting stuff where you know like basic transistors and such which is also easy to produce in uh you know in a lunar environment if if you have some of the substrates showed you know that we're on to something. I don't want to claim any anything because that's you know I don't want to make any false claims. What I will do is on the future stuff definitely have absolutely the proper equipment to do this to do testing to do uh you know curve testing and tracing and all that stuff and I will have better samples to give Sam instead of you know my worst samples.

[00:53:39]However, you know it's a game of cat and mouse. You try you get something good.

[00:53:42]You're like okay you're on to something.

[00:53:44]You work through the the reasons why that's and then and then you know you move on and on. And when it comes to building a solar cell you have to imagine that every time you do deposition you have to pump down. you have to, you know, every time you anneal that's like a day of like standing in front of the furnace, not that it takes a day, but that, you know, it's got to cool down for a day, you know. Um, and so, you know, the processes are I wouldn't say at a snail's pace, but they're at a human pace. And it's the amount of throughput like one researcher can can possibly do in the field. There are people way smarter than me who have way better equipment and and most of them are not willing to put like, you know, lunar simulant or anything made of it uh in their vacuum chambers. there are people who might be after some of the stuff that I'm hoping and you know with interest in it uh especially with interest in the moon being shifted from Mars it's become kind of a priority and what I've kind of shown is that like you know it doesn't take you know a $40 million contract to do some of this research you know I I do this off of my own pocket and budget you know there's no nobody pays for it so I am limited on some of that stuff but when it comes to the amount of you know other people that have this kind of light technology to have the you know want and ability to do this. I I highly suggest that you know please either you know try to get in contact you know with the end or you know continue your work as you are because it's it's important space is not easy but when you take the things that you you know when you take things for granted because we're biologics that have evolved to our environment and we we go outside that environment and technology is the driving force behind that then we're really not limited to anything but technology and technology evolves because of research and development. So, anybody that's, you know, doing this kind of work, I I I thank you. I thank Sam. I thank Ian. You guys are a huge inspiration behind a lot of this. If it wasn't for the Anthro Futures channel, I probably would nobody would see any of this work and it would just be something I'm doing in my garage for fun. But it has evolved into something where like, should we actually look into this seriously? And the answer is probably. It makes sense.

[00:55:43]>> Yeah. What is the next step? And what do you think as far as equipment besides I guess just testing it and doing that kind of quantification validation stuff?

[00:55:52]>> Well, I think the next logical step is to find a process that's going to be the best option for wherever we land. Like in fact, the data that comes back from Artemis is going to be so important because well like it might just change the entire direction of what we choose to use, right? But with our general knowledge, I think that like turning this into a one process like something that can be relatively low in mass and and that can you know because these are all known processes right it's not hard to to to make something that you know you can send to the moon and so I guess maybe designing that prototype after validation of research and development would be the next step and then if that looks really good under simulation and everything then maybe possibly like you know looking into some type of NASA you know contracts or funding, but really, you know, I don't want anything to hold this research up. So, I've been doing this, you know, regardless at my own expense, and so is Sam putting in our time, and that's where the big research happens. If you have a passion for something, that's what gets things done.

[00:56:50]>> Yeah, for sure. And I obviously can't thank y'all enough. But I'm sure a lot of people probably the top comment is going to be, "How in the hell did you get so much awesome equipment, Robert, in your garage?"

[00:57:00]>> Well, um, a lot of due diligence. eBay is a really good place for used hardware. Basically, if you're good with electronics, like I'm I'm an electrical engineer. I basically buy stuff and repair it myself. When it comes to vacuum systems, you'd be surprised on how like little something is wrong with a system when they throw it out. And then there's also a lot of auctions and stuff like that that you can you can get a lot of this stuff at. However, when it comes to the small components and stuff like you know, bellow hoses, turbo pumps, stuff like that, they're always expensive. They're phenomenally expensive. So, learning how to repair the equipment is a skill in itself that like is invaluable for any technician.

[00:57:33]And if I I I highly recommend that if you are into like you know uh technology in any sense that you try to familiarize yourself with um you know uh system engineering vacuum engineering material science is a huge huge thing. I wish I had a lot more knowledge on material science than I do and and I think it's something that you can never learn enough of. Um, and you gain skills that not only are going to help you throughout your life, but like, you know, that that you're you enjoy doing, you know, to take something like maybe say methane and hydrogen and turn it into something useful like a diamond and then use that nitrogen as a vacancy or something like that is an incredible, you know, thing that even saying it sounds not real, but to try to do it yourself and get it and actually have like, you know, that that's a driving force that money can't buy. So, if you have a passion, please follow it.

[00:58:23]>> Yeah. You told me about uh you bought something. I think it was like your control system or something that was very inexpensive cuz it was broken and then you figured out that the problem with it was there was just some metal shavings in there that you just pulled out and it >> Well, I wish it was that easy. You're talking this one behind me.

[00:58:40]>> I'm not sure. It It was a while ago, but >> yeah, this one behind me cuz there's there's an RF unit back there as well.

[00:58:46]When I first got it, yeah, there was like I got it up and running, right? I I pulled my turbo off the other unit and I got it up and running and and yeah, it was so there was two board failures.

[00:58:54]Basically, some components that failed because the person who manufactured the case for this didn't vacuum out the uh spiral sprawls from the CNC and and they just were everywhere in the machine. So, I shorted a few components out that I had to replace. Really easy to do.

[00:59:11]However, the there there was a little bit more trickiness to that because there was a lot of vacuum hoses and stuff that had to be replaced. Um um the components were pretty easy and I got lucky with but some of these systems there's like things you just can't replace. But with simpler stuff like the stuff that I have it's all fixable. When you talk about like newer technologies that have like softwares and programs that you can't access basically without like you know um authorization then then you deal with that. But if you look at like equipment from like the '90s 2000s stuff like that you can find it pretty cheap and you can you know you'd be surprised most of it's actually shipping. Most companies don't even want it if it doesn't work. they just want to get rid of it and they don't want to pay to get rid of it.

[00:59:49]>> So I guess just to close out uh for young I usually like to ask about advice to students and young people and for young people who want to work on these kinds of things. What do you think they should really study? I usually tell people that understanding vacuum systems is useful almost anywhere. Obviously the space research, but also semiconductor industry, lots of industries, vacuum chambers, pumps, materials, heat contamination, process controls, and how they actually work. These kinds of things. Um, and I feel like it's it's only growing the amount of applications that it has. Does that sound right to you? And I guess what else would you add as just general advice? I I recommend that if you're if you do get into this field that you you know make some connections with people because there are other people who are interested in the same stuff and and it really the collaboration effort really makes things actually evolve from every you know words are words actions they really mean something. It takes a lot for one person to take it all on himself and having you know the support and and the the you know collaboration environment really really works out well. So, I' I'd recommend, you know, if if you are looking for collaboration, Discord is a pretty good place for it. And the Roto Forge project has a great Discord, by the way, full of some incredibly smart people. In fact, they embarrassed me cuz they're so smart. The thing is, it's not expensive to do if you, you know, if you're patient and and and you focus like, you know, you have a project, right? Each one of these machines is came from a different project, but they also all like kind of blend together.

[01:01:16]Um, and so I would say the most important part of like modern technology is understanding, you know, uh, the vacuum systems themselves. If you can just understand how vacuum systems work cuz they're not they're I could spend an entire series on vacuum systems, but they're not as simple as hooking a vacuum pump up to something. You know even you know an electron something as complex as electron microscope requires uh you know massive pumping systems and they have to operate in certain manners that you know they will destroy themselves if you don't. that that kind of uh um skill set is is actually just as easy to learn as like any other machining or tooling and probably just as easy if not easier than most of the like you know programming stuff you can possibly learn in school and such that where you're going to be spending a lot of time on something that you don't know is going to evolve past like 20 years or 10 years or whatever you're you know when you talk about systems engineering and system manufacturing it's so important >> like you said with the regarding advice to students and whatnot kind networking is very important. I just wanted to throw it back in there because I did want to ask Sam if you had any thoughts on that. Advice for students.

[01:02:23]>> Uh yeah, advice for students would generally be I guess two things. One, network is absolutely as much as you can. That's something that's generally going to take you quite far collaborating with other people and just whenever you want to do something that requires a lot of things you don't know, chances are that there's somebody else who does know. And the best thing you can do is go find them and then bother them and then go just be like, "Hey, I need help on this thing. I need to know this thing. Can you help?" And no, offer something of your own. Offer, you know, share your knowledge. Knowledge is best shared. And just try and do as much as you can to network with other people.

[01:02:57]Contribute to other projects and start building your own projects and such.

[01:03:01]Find something that you're passionate about and just start going after it.

[01:03:04]Also, like when it comes to a certain field, I mean, I'm a chemist by training. I'm biased. Learn chemistry.

[01:03:09]But no, I do think that yeah, just generally material science and whatever you can do to gain an understanding of the world around you and what the topic of your chosen interest is is going to take you far.

[01:03:21]>> Physics is a is a is a pretty good field to study if if you have the opportunity.

[01:03:25]>> Hell yeah. Networking, chemistry, physics, talking to people makes sense.

[01:03:29]So what did you learn from doing this that papers alone might not have told you?

[01:03:34]>> Well, hands-on experience is always different than what you can read from papers. It's really you learn basically that this kind of stuff is not easy and when you use your hands-on experience everything is a gain right like you maybe you figure out that this is a problem but you figure out why it's a problem and you either solve for it or you use that problem to your next advantage in some other field right in some other experiment some other way you learn so much hands-on work that you're forced to learn right like if you have no option but to you know figure out how you know u components on a board are going to operate under certain conditions, then you you figure it out and you know, it's it's it's a lot of hands-on experience. It's always fun to to talk and dream and stuff, and it's great to have th those those goals, but the the real like knowledge begins when you start using your hands. That that's when things become rewarding to to the person who's doing them. Would you rather sit in an office all day or would you rather be doing something with your hands that is making something physical and tangible? And whether it's profitable or not, at the end of the day, you've made something. It's not just a thought. That's that's kind of where the experience you learn throughout the process is, you can't learn in in any other way. It's just impossible. And that's that's also where collaboration comes in in handy because there are other people who have done it like Sam said and and and these people have the experience that you gain from it and the knowledge builds from there.

[01:04:59]So yeah, there's a lot that I learned from these processes. One is anything that says like, you know, straightforward. You read it and they're like, "Oh, this is going to be easy."

[01:05:07]Absolutely. You're going to find out that like there's nothing easy in these processes.

[01:05:11]>> It's the one that worked.

[01:05:12]>> Yeah. Exactly. I mean, if you're going to Yeah. It's like throwing a bunch of dirt at the wall and seeing what sticks.

[01:05:17]You got to do a lot of that. When you find that the mud sticks better than, you know, sand, you start making sculptures with it and next thing you know, you're asking yourself, "Why did I ever throw sand?" But you but you learn from it.

[01:05:27]>> So, well, I guess that's all I have.

[01:05:29]Thank you guys very much both for devoting your time and expertise and equipment and for being here today. I really appreciate it and I think you know the community appreciates it. So hopefully we'll have uh follow-up updates maybe several months from now and yeah. Oh, thank you.