Proto Ventures fellow Theo Mouratidis was awarded the Activate fellowship to launch a new propulsion startup Hyperion Transport Systems.
By Jennifer Bonniwell | Proto Ventures News
When Theo Mouratidis graduated from MIT in 2016, he was passionate about working on the next generation of in-space propulsion systems.
“Since I was 4 years old, I had a passion for anything aerospace related and spent much of my time looking up at the stars and building Lego rockets,” Mouratidis said.
However, the path was not initially clear. “I left space propulsion because I didn’t see where the next big breakthrough would be,” Mouratidis said.
He became interested in nuclear fusion and was recruited to work on magnet technology at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Mouratidis has spent the past eight years developing tech for the world’s first commercial fusion power plant. Through this work, he recognized there was potential to apply his work to his old interest: space propulsion.
“After working in fusion, I realized I could apply some of these technologies to propulsion to bring the transformative benefits I wanted to see,” Mouratidis said.
Now done with his PhD, Mouratidis is finally returning to the stars. His new startup is leveraging fusion research to develop new satellite propulsion systems.
In July, Mouratidis was awarded the Activate fellowship to launch a new propulsion startup Hyperion Transport Systems, a collaboration with Proto Ventures—MIT’s venture studio. Hyperion is one of five clean energy team projects selected by Proto Ventures in March to develop into spinoffs.
Mouratidis’ new venture is developing novel electric thrusters for satellites with higher fuel efficiency than conventionally used devices, increasing maneuverability and mission capability while reducing required propellant for a wide range of spacecraft, from small telecommunications satellites to larger crewed missions. With the number of satellites in orbit expected to grow exponentially in the coming decade, maneuverability is critical to avoiding collisions, space debris, or worse, a chain reaction of cascading collisions, a nightmare scenario commonly known as the Kessler syndrome. To solve this, Hyperion’s thruster uses novel magnet technology developed by the PSFC that also makes it possible to build a more compact fusion power plant. Ultimately Mouratidis expects that his company’s propulsion technology will enable more ambitious space missions.
“I was trained to tackle tough technology problems. This propulsion challenge is one that I’ve been passionate about for a long time. It’s one of the most exciting things that I’ve ever embarked on,” Mouratidis said. “I realized very quickly that this would be transformative, that applying fusion research to space propulsion could result in the kind of performance increases that are so large that they could really transform the space economy.”
The Venture Studio
Proto Ventures has played a catalytic role in Mouratidis’ new venture. Mouratidis joined Proto Ventures as a fellow in fall 2023 as part of a partnership between Proto Ventures and PSFC. As MIT’s in-house venture studio, Proto Ventures curates ideas from within MIT’s ecosystem of labs and shepherds them to market. The PSFC wanted to be more intentional about venture creation – identifying promising research earlier so more big ideas make it to market.
Mouratidis and Proto Ventures venture builder David Cohen-Tanugi shared an interest in developing fusion and clean energy tech into new ventures that could have a big impact. In particular, the pair focused on turning Mouratidis’ satellite thruster idea into a company.
“It would have been really difficult to turn our invention into a real venture without Proto Ventures,” Mouratidis said. “Transitioning from a lab prototype to a startup is hard, even at a place like MIT.”
Over the past year, Mouratidis has met weekly with Cohen-Tanugi. Mouratidis estimates he’s cut many months off the time it would normally have taken to develop a strategy for commercializing the tech.
“David has really come to know my technology and me personally. He’s been able to use his own experience as a startup founder to help us build a timeline of technical and venture-building milestones that we can follow to spin out of MIT, raise money at the right time, and hopefully build a great company,” Mouratidis said.
Cohen-Tanugi understands the challenges. He holds a PhD from MIT’s Department of Materials Science & Engineering and has more than a decade of experience in technology development and commercialization.
“Translating research is hard. Lots of tech ends up on the lab room floor and never ends up in the real world and never has an impact,” Cohen-Tanugi said. “Novel space transportation concepts are exactly the kind of projects that can and should spin out from MIT labs. Proto Ventures can make that more likely by helping identify these ideas and supporting researchers who want to develop them.”
From Shared Passion to Co-Founders
Mouratidis was actively seeking the next challenge in spring 2023 when he had a coffee in Kendall Square’s Vester Cafe with his now co-founder Sam Austin, where they discussed their shared passion for space propulsion. They quickly realized the synergy of their collaboration.
Austin is a fifth-year PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), where he is building numerical models of plasma discharges for aircraft lightning protection research. In his first year of graduate school, he started working in the Space Propulsion Lab, the same lab that Mouratidis worked in during his master’s degree. In fact, they worked on the same research project separated by a few years without knowing their paths would cross later.
Austin has also spent several years in the aerospace industry, working on rocket engines during internships at SpaceX. Together, Mouratidis and Austin realized they could draw on their expertise spanning academia and industry to solve a pressing need for transportation solutions in the space economy.
Fusion for Power Plants
Mouratidis earned his bachelor’s degree from MIT in physics and aerospace engineering. Beginning his graduate studies in AeroAstro, he was interested in advanced rocket propulsion technology but struggled to find funding. Ultimately, Dennis Whyte, then-director of the PSFC, convinced Mouratidis to focus on fusion.
Joining Whyte and the PSFC, Mouratidis focused on a magnet design that allowed superconductors to be joined. For his PhD, Mouratidis sought to create joints that could be taken apart and reassembled while still retaining the electrical characteristics of a continuous coil. This was a major breakthrough in the assembly and maintenance of superconducting magnets.
“I really enjoyed exploring many different technical aspects of the demountable joint challenge, from the electrical joint performance to fundamental insights in growth kinetics during soldering and thermal degradation of superconductors” Mouratidis said.
“I felt like it would be incomplete to just do the engineering of the joint or analyze its macroscopic performance” he said. “I believed strongly in using fundamental principles to explore areas that were outside of my traditional wheelhouse, but critical to fully defining the joint.”
The Summit
Since the pandemic, Mouratidis has taken up mountaineering and is preparing for his next challenge in South America. He has always been athletic – he played soccer during high school, then rowed in Australia and briefly at MIT before starting competitive powerlifting.
In talking about why he likes to climb, he is hard pressed to call it fun but says he likes the challenge of it. His strategy to progressing in the sport is to continue increasing either altitude or technical difficulty on successive mountain objectives.
In fact, he says, it is a lot like starting a company.
“It looks glamorous from a distance, but there are a lot of stressful moments that make you want to turn around,” he said. “It’s pretty miserable on the way up, but summitting is this beautiful moment that few people get to experience.”