I'm a little shorter than a lot of the people up here.

So I'm Diana Little from Enuma Aerospace and we're building partial vacuum lift for sustainable

aviation.

In 1663, 360 years ago, before helium or hydrogen were even discovered, Francisco Lana de Terzi

theorized that vacuum, being lighter than air, could lift a ship into the sky.

A drawing of his concept is at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Dulles, Virginia,

and I was delighted to see it in 2020 in person.

In 1710, Gottfried Liebnitz, one of the inventors of calculus, was taken with that concept and

used his new math to write a proof, which proved it would not work.

So the idea was essentially abandoned.

And more recently in 2015, Akhmeteli and Gavrin once again proved that a thin shell, homogenous

structure of material, spherical structure, would not be able to resist the buckling forces

when enough vacuum was pulled to overcome the weight of the sphere.

Science fiction writers have not given up, though.

One can find vacuum airships in the writings of Neil Stevenson, Ian Banks, and Kim Stanley

Robinson, to name just a few, and they happen to be some of my favorite authors.

Just recently, I heard Kim Stanley Robinson on a podcast, Futureverse, and he was asked

about the current airship renaissance, what we're doing here.

And he said, well, I love it.

I want to ride in one.

I hope they prosper.

So there we go.

In 2019, he wrote a novel, The Ministry for the Future, and in there, airships are everywhere.

They are absolutely ubiquitous.

Using airplanes for all but the most critical needs.

And the reason for that is because carbon emissions of airplanes have become so untenable

that environmental terrorists have started to shoot them down.

One reason that science fiction writers return to the vacuum airship is that it helps make

airships more practical so they can be ubiquitous in the story.

As we all know here but don't like to admit, helium is expensive, non-renewable, tied to

the natural gas industry, logistically insecure, and notoriously leaky.

Hydrogen is arguably worse.

Both also make airships difficult to land and handle on the ground, and we really need

that zero static lift feature to safely and easily handle cargo and passengers.

You have all done incredible work in mitigating these issues, but what if you didn't have

to?

Enuma Aerospace has patented an innovative geodesic tensegrity structure built of carbon

fiber and enveloped in a multi-layer membrane.

The partial vacuum lift, we call PVL cell, is evacuated to at least 70% to generate lift.

At 85%, the lift capacity is equivalent to that of helium.

This invention will eliminate the need for any gases.

It will simplify airship ballasting and ground operations by behaving like a submarine in

an ocean of air, letting air in to descend, pulling deeper vacuum for buoyancy.

It will allow a vehicle to stay aloft indefinitely as any slow leaks or atmospheric pressure

changes can be addressed by running the onboard vacuum pump.

It will allow for more efficient navigation with its increased control of elevation.

And it works.

It is not a thin, homogenous shell.

It's built of a material up to 10 times stronger, 5 times lighter than steel, which is carbon

fiber.